or if I want to be all formal & stuff...

ماذا؟

London seems colourless compared to Paris.

I'd like to say thanks to LEP for organinng the evening meal on Friday. Sorry I couldn't make Pere Lachaise cemetary but the description on the website of the location for the brewpub we were visiting was somwewhat cartographically challenged.

also thanks to Geezer for allowing us to invade his boat on Sunday.

Also to Jerome for so generously paying for saturday's meals.

and to everyone who came (and wanted to come - you were missed) for making it such a wonderful pleasure filled weekend.

keep to the Fen Causeway

I was going to ask him to identify the grave from these details:

"Mon mari disait souvent, en plaisantant, qu'il voulait voir écrit sur sa tombe, comme épitaphe: "Enfin seul!". Mais, je pense qu'il aurait été content d'êre entouré de grandes légendes comme Appollinaire et Paul Eluard, deux de ses poètes préférés, les peintres Théodore Gericault et Eugène Delacroix, l'humoriste Pierre Desproges, les compositeurs Frédéric Chopin et Luigi Cherubini, et les chanteurs Piaf and Gilbert Becaud, ce dernier étant un de ses amis d'enfance", indique le communiqué de presse, reprenant les mots de sa veuve.

I'll have to search for another.

Hey, Grandma Moses started late!

Until the End is establish arguing Means is a waste of time.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

you are the media you consume.

ASMC by other names is a very real, very potent political identity. The Game operators in both the political parties know this, respect this, and kowtow to it. Note how the term "the middle class" is a shared word field for politicians of every stripe now. The ASMC is a self-conscious, self-replicating, active political identity. That is why it is the center of gravity for political maneuvering inside the US.

For the time being, the ASMC is content to support and idealize the state and its actions - including war. But their real interest is in survival-with-privilege. The ASMC sees no acceptable alternative to its status quo, and it is a class of people who have been disciplined to suppress their imaginations for everything except fantasy and entertainment commodities. The ASMC is also smart enough to know, in their secret private spaces, that they have lost the ability to survive without their global life-support-system. They literally do not know how to subsist. That anxiety suffuses them; and canny political operators know how to massage that anxiety into fear.

The ASMC is also quite intelligent enough to know that we need war to ensure oil. No reason to raise the topic in polite company, but they know it... we know it. The Masters of the Lie are salving our psyches with carbon-trading schemes, hybrid cars, and ethanol - believed mostly by people who call themselves liberal. Most of us, including the ASMC, have at least a sense that the truth is more cruel. Coal we have right here in the US, so we can shit all over West Virginia with impunity... prerogative of the state, you see. But oil! We can't keep the cars rolling or agribusiness booming without that. We are so dependent that if we run short of oil, we can run short of food. The ASMC... is right. We can't preserve our current way of life without an Energy War.

The zeitgeist is flying miles above the heads of Barack Obama or any other political leader. The reason the topic has to come up as "Obama" anything is there was a cult of personality that developed, and a lot of people hung their hearts on "change" they didn't ever, really understand.

Now something called Obama is the issue we have to understand to understand the war.

Moral War

Standards are like paths picked through fields of equanimity, worn into hard wide roads over time, used always because of collective habit, expectation, and convenience. The pleasures and perils of picking one's own path through the field are soon forgotten; the logic or illogic of the course of the road is soon rationalized by the mere fact of the road.

-Patricia Williams

miaow

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

In the decade since his retirement there have been several guys who could have stopped him: Kobe, Shaq, LeBron, probably even Wade. Back in the early to late 90s guys like Payton, Ewing, Barkley (toward the end of his productive career), and Malone (a pushover) weren't going to stop him.

you are the media you consume.