The Kingdom, debt, and Paul Ryan

We received several political emails from Perry (him from the Kingdom). In the first email, he writes:

Perry

On the VP Ryan front: He has our vote.

In the second, he writes:

The US problem is debt. We are floating in debt and O'b [Obama] is simply not willing to address the problem.

And in the third, he writes...

...let's interrupt briefly here, and go to a source that has shown it ability to bring a syllogism home, to quote a source correctly, and to win the Nobel price in economics, and this source writes in its latest post:

Let’s look at what Ryan's budget actually proposes (as opposed to vaguely promises) in its first decade.

VP hopeful Ryan

First, there are a set of tax cuts for higher income brackets and corporations. The Tax Policy Center estimates the cost of these tax cuts, relative to current policy, at $4.3 trillion

From dawn to dust

 From dawn to dust,

 It's such a lust,

A letter to my lawyer

Here's an unedited email I sent to my lawyer earlier today:

...thanks...I'll react tomorrow...It would be EXTREMELY HELPFUL IF YOU COULD, IN FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS, CONFIRM THE RECEIPT OF AN EMAIL MESSAGE WHEN ASKED TO DO SO...

...CONCERNING SOME OF YOUR COMMUNICATIONS, I HAVE THE FEELING TO BE CONFRONTED WITH REALLY OLD-SCHOOL FRENCH BUREAUCRACY...OLD-SCHOOL ALSO IN THE SENSE THAT THE UNDERLYING ADMINISTRATION DOES NOT WORK...DATA HAVE BEEN COMMUNICATED TO YOUR OFFICE, AND ARE SUBSEQUENTLY LOST, HASTY PHONE CALLS ARE THEN MADE THAT WOULDN'T BE NECESSARY IF YOUR ADMINISTRATION WOULD BE UP TO DATE, PHONE CALLS THAT COST TIME AND MONEY, POSSIBLY OUR MONEY....AND THERE ARE OTHER PROBLEMS .... NOT GOOD...OLD-SCHOOL FRENCH BUREAUCRACY...MAIN REASON WHY FRANCE IS DOING SO POORLY THESE DAYS IN COMPARISON TO PLACES WHERE LAWYERS (and others) ACTUALLY *DO* RESPOND TO EMAILS PROMPTLY AND *ARE* ABLE TO CONFIRM THE RECEIPT OF EMAILS WHEN ASKED TO DO SO...IT'S A MATTER OF PRODUCTIVITY...

I have been a professional bureaucratologist for an important part of my career (Link:

Google.Scholar.Masuch

) and from my perspective, I can tell you, you should REALLY, REALLY, reorganize in a thorough and strict way the communication flow in your office, starting from scratch, even if it means that heads rollllll---

Kind Regards, Michael Masuch

PS (Sept 7, 2012): I'm studying the way people get fired these days, and there are cases where people got fired for using to much upper case in their emails. Seriously.

Olympics (Urban Dictionary, July 25, 2012)

Word of the day

Olympics: Loose assemblage of activities undertaken quadrennially by over-ripped folk with an odd view of life and difficulty prioritising. Small trinkets on coloured ribbons and needlessly ostentatious flower arrangements are commonly given to several of the better entrants as stirring tunes play. Flags and advertising signage tend to be prominently displayed and portly men in suits shuffle about needlessly.

We couldn't agree more.

Tell me why America is the greatest country in the world

This is how Aaron Sorkin's HBO series Sixty Minutes opens, folks:

Prometheus --- film review (spoiler alerrrt)

This multiplex in Pathong's biggest mall is real nice, the shiniest black marble greets the lone visitor, and it's being polished a-more as we a-wait the beginning of the movie. We did MIB 3, and may elaborate on it later. Now we are doing Prometheus, the latest film by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator...). The movie program of this multiplex is somewhat meager, three or four movies are running now, and the humongous auditorium n° 5 is empty. We brought warm clothes to weather the air conditioning. An utterly empty auditorium, it's always impressive, especially to retired university professors, as it brings their worst nightmares to life.

OK, Prometheus. We vaguely recall having read a review in the NYT, not a bad review, right? SciFi, somebody's having visited Planet Earth 35,000 years ago, left some traces, and modern science has discovered where they came from. We're on our way. A motley crew. They've been hired on the fly by Charlize Theron, whose nose is so straight she must have had a facial. Also aboard is David, the humanoid (robot). He's so much smarter than than the rest that one wonders why anybody bothered to send authentic humans at all---except that the uppity assistant who pointed this out at the script conference got fired on the spot, perhaps because David looks too much like Lawrence of Arabia, or, more precisely, like Peter O'Toole, and he also speaks like a British actor from fifty years ago.

Sushi Express

So Chang discovers this outlet, right in the heart of JongCeylon, Patong's largest mall. And it's a buffet, which means you can eat as much as you like. For 300 bath (10 US$). Or perhaps, more precisely: eat as much as you can, because that's the idea of buffets, isn't it. And if we can mangle our philosophical thoughts at this point, if maximizing quantity and utility converge buffet-wise, we are dealing with a case resistant to Hegel's conversion law ("Quantität schlägt in Qualität um"), which, by implication, also weakens Karl Marx's case (if only Alexis Tsipras, the new, young, handsome, charismatic, Greek leader would know, it might save the Euro).



You have 1 hour 15 minutes for eating more than you like; a wall clock watches with red digital display over the proceedings, an ambulance is waiting outside.

I'll come with you (breaking news alert)

Not the girl

It's a shower first, lightning strikes, the power is cut. Rain continues, and Michael refuses to go out, instead he ponders whether he will be able to read his Kindle in the light of a single kandle. Chang, hungry, is finally forced by his appetites to leave the premises in search for take-out food. And he comes back and tells the following story:

I walk past this girl, perhaps for the third time now, and she is selling something, and always waving and smiling. I reply in some way. She asks "you are staying nearby?"

-"Yes."

-"How long are you staying?"

-"One month."

The girl grabs my arm and says: "I am coming with you."

We are not making this up. 

Tunk-Ka Café

Our longest-lasting controversy is about the river-side café, and while I sing about its charms, such as the chilled, oaky, buttery chardonnay served with chicken breast and sauce hollandaise, or the light wood paneling, or the shady riverside terrace with its muted, yet clipped conversations about Muffy who failed to make partner with Allen & Overy, or the color coding of the awnings, always dark green, preferably in the hex value #00693E (Dartmouth Green), brèf, while I am singing about the river-side café, Chang is dreaming of food markets, this Asian contraption that encumbers the innocent hungry-man between various food stalls where everything is cheap, and abundant, and smelly, and sticky, and eaten with chop sticks.

We are on our first excursion across Phuket now, and the understanding has been that we would end up in a food market, but the first food market didn't pass Chang's muster even though it was located in the Korean neighborhood of Phuket Town, because the Thai girl behind the Korean garlands didn't speak a word of Korean, and so we are driving on, and it is already past 12am, the time when Chang is overwhelmed by hunger and everything stops until he finds a place to restore himself. He suggests we turn right, but I continue straight, and we are mysteriously led up a hill when signs appear which speak of the Tunk-ka Café. The road ends in a parking lot, and everything is coded in dark-green, including the lush, tropical forest, and Chang wants to flee, but is overwhelmed by hunger now, and we, who haven't been to a riverside café in eons, we end up in the first HILL-TOP café of our life, by sheer serendipity.



The Tunk-ka Café. We have to descend a long staircase. Chang is scared. Have a look at the menu first, he cries, but the prices are reasonable, to his disappointment.

Touring Phuket

So we finally rent a car, and the next morning it is cloudy, rainy, but we don't care, and travel south.  A view from the first viewpoint informs about the western coast of Phuket south of Patong, the hedonistic center of the island:

The bay of Patong is to the north (next to the high-rise), south of it the bay of Kolon, and finally Kata. As we continue south, we reach a small, nameless beach almost on the tip of the island (Chang in the lower right corner)...

Neckermann Bumms Bomber (Learning Thai (2))

Let's get this out of the way first. Remember the 2 k-sounds from our last post? Here are a few more:

Got it?

Well,  back in the late seventies, my then-colleague Han felt the urge to take the Neckermann Bumms Bomber (his words, you'll figure this out yourself) to Bangkok (กรุงเทพมหานคร). Han had been a seminarist (studying for priest) until the Marxist wave struck the Netherlands and he took up residence in Amsterdam's red light district, where he would spend the evening checking whether he still had the 25 guilders in his pockets to pay one of the neighboring ladies of the night for the standard job (he told me). Arriving in Thailand, he met a girl, fell in love, bought a home, and learned Thai, while keeping a part time appointment at the University of Amsterdam. Thai learning is difficult, he explained with starry eyes, citing the fact that the language has innumerable consonants, among which 5 different k-sounds (there you have it; the table mentions six, but two are obsolete).

And when back in Amsterdam, Han became a pillar of the relationship community, with which I mean to say that he was hired to save gay couples, in particular those comprising a Dutch person and an imported Thai boy. Relationships, Han explained, depend on communication (this was before everybody subscribed to the Harvard Business Review), and the non-existing Thai of the Dutch and the poor English of the Thai boy would inevitably lead to a downward relationship spiral that only Han could stop by intervening as a Thai/Dutch interpreter and helping the couple to regain a new level of understanding. I don't know whether Han kept any statistics. Rumor has it he's now divorced.

Learning Thai

We've arrived safely in Thailand, but are now holed up in the bedroom, since Chang (ช้าง) ("elephant") canceled the a/c in the living room. So, we have no choice but to learn Thai (ภาษาไทย). It will be quite a slog. But the beginning is easy, as it thematizes the chicken-egg problem.


ก ไก  ko (as in) kai" (chicken) and we are pronouncing the  ก  as "k," whereas
ข ไข "kho  (as in) khai" (egg) and we are pronouncing the  ข breezely as "kh."

Cheers:

Hold your bladder, hold your bladder, there is a small problem. Our "ko" (ก), it's some sort of "g" on another web site dedicated to Thai learning.

Stay tuned.

Breaking news alert: Zurich Airport (4)

What's this?

Yes, it's the consequence of our Priority Pass, the black card that granted us access to the Swiss VIP lounge of the airport, where life is eternal and all drinks are free (mental note: need to write an essay with the title "Airport Lounge und Paradies"), whence an attempt to mix a Bloody Mary early in the morning, a mix with mixed results, since the Worcestershire bottle emptied itself like a drunken sailor into our glass. We'll drink it anyhow. Cheers. Chang frowns.

Zurich Airport (3)

So, we are in Kloten, home of the airport (this must be the first time in creative writing that somebody attributed a "home" to an airport), and we are strolling through the lazy afternoon, and the weather improves.

We are not alone, a creek strolls through the lazy downtown setting, too.

What's wrong. What's this? In Switzerland. Something in the water, that doesn't belong there? No, it doesn't.


It's an Irish licence plate, and a fancy one at that, "en guerre" (at war). Euromess in Switzerland? What else.

Fortunately, a sense of order is quickly restored further downstream, at least in a geo-topological way:

Never leave home without it

But we do, we do. (Question: " Why do you need a camara, isn't your cell-phone enough?" Answer: "I don't know how to use my cell-phone"). For example last Tuesday, we had this appointment with our lawyer in Cannes, on the Rue d'Alsace, only a few steps from the Palais du Festival, and it's the day of the opening of the Film Festival.  And we leave the lawyer's premises, and the sun shines, and we step into a street scene with two cameras (plus camera men), overhead microphones of the phallic kind, and goons, five goons, and in the middle of it all a woman in her late 50's, dressed up as femme du midi (blond, whitish clothes, bosom, gold), and she looks miserable, miserable, while the cameras zoom, and a male voice is calling --- we forgot her name, actually --- lets make it Muriel. We've never heard of Muriel, but the male voice apparently has, and the cameras are zooming, and Muriel (she answers to that name, so much is clear) looks misreable, misrable, misable, misbel, mis...it's beyond description, her whole body tumbling forward, the face facing the gutter, the rimples (that's the word, isn't it, the spell checker acts up) dancing on her forehead.  The voice ("Muriel") belongs to a stalker --- she must be famous --- who is kept at arms length by yet another goon, who is, in fact, spreading his arms so as to keep the stalker away from Muriel without causing any collateral damage. "Muriel, Muriel." We have no proof, we have no proof, but a scene like that, you can't make it up.

Zurich Airport

A friend sends this picture:

Huh? Well, we arrive at the airport, and the place appears to be dominated by wall-high billboards for brothels (eg. Club Aphrodisiac, "all drinks for free"); it's in this spirit that we reply: "If you like anal, use the rear entrance."

Find a caption

An open letter to the bureaucracies of the world (Susan)

Dear Mr Minister,

I'm in the process of renewing my passport, and still cannot believe this. How is it that K-Mart has my address and telephone number, and knows that I bought a television set and golf clubs and condoms from them back in 1997, and yet the Federal Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date ?

For Christ sakes, do you guys do this by hand ?

My birth date you have in my Medicare information, and it is on all the income tax forms I've filed for the past 40 years.

It is also on my driver's licence, on the last eight passports I've ever had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I've had to fill out before being allowed off planes over the past 30 years.

It's also on all those insufferable census forms that I've filled out every 5 years since 1966.

Also... would somebody please take note, once and for all, that my mother's name is Audrey, my father's name is Jack, and I'd be absolutely f...... astounded if that ever changed between now and when I drop dead !!!

SHIT! What do you people do with all this information we keep having to provide?

I apologize, Mr. Minister. But I'm really pissed off this morning.

Between you and me, I've had enough of all this bullshit!

You send the application to my house, then you ask me for my f...... address!

What the hell is going on with your mob? Have you got a gang of mindless
Neanderthal arseholes working there!

And another thing, look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden?

I can't even grow a beard for God's sakes. I just want to go to New Zealand and see my new granddaughter. (Yes, my son interbred with a Kiwi girl). And would someone please tell me, why would you give a shit whether or not I plan on visiting a farm in the next 15 days? In the unlikely event, I ever got the urge to do something weird to a sheep or a horse, believe you me, I'd sure as hell not want to tell anyone!

Well, I have to go now, 'cause I have to go to the other side of f....... Sydney, and get another f...... copy of my birth certificate - and to part with another $80 for the privilege of accessing MY OWN INFORMATION!

Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot, to assist in the issuance of a new passport on the same day?

Noooo! That'd be too f...... easy and makes far too much sense.

You would much prefer to have us running all over the bloody place like chickens with our f...... heads cut off, and then having to find some 'high-society' wanker to confirm that it's really me in the goddamn photo! You know the photo.... the one where we're not allowed to smile?...you f...... morons.

Signed - An Irate Australian Citizen.

P.S. Remember what I said above about the picture, and getting someone in 'high-society' to confirm that it's me? Well, my family has been in this country since before 1820! In 1856, one of my forefathers took up arms with Peter Lalor. (You do remember the Eureka Stockade!)

I have also served in both the CMF and regular Army for something over 30 years (I went to Vietnam in 1967), and still have high security clearances. I'm also a personal friend of the president of the RSL... Lt General Peter Cosgrove sends me a Christmas card each year.

However, your rules require that I have to get someone 'important' to verify who I am; you know...someone like my doctor - WHO WAS BORN AND RAISED IN F...... PAKISTAN!...a country where they either assassinate or hang their ex-Prime Ministers - and are suspended from the Commonwealth and United Nations for not having the "right sort of government".


You are all pen-pushing paper-shuffling f...... idiots!

On the cover of the Rolling Stones --- no, wrong, the New Yorker

You get it? It's about Seamus, Romney's wonderdog, the dog that was driven by the future President on the top of the family car to Canada (a country with universal health care). After that, Seamus ran away. Want to know more about Seamus? Click here.


In her NYT column, Gail Collins remarks that "Neil Swidey, the Boston Globe reporter who first broke the Seamus story in 2007, wrote recently that he had been avoiding a return to the topic for fear that some day the dog would wind up in the lead of his obituary." Haha (means: "lol").

Raisa

So let’s get this straight. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has not been riding this horse, or so his speaker affirmed yesterday. But today, at the EURO summit about the End of the World, Cameron gives another press conference to rectify his overworked speaker and to confirm that he, in fact, did ride said horse, whose name is, or more precisely was Raisa.

David Cameron, British Prime Minister

Raisa, the horse

Yes, really?

Well he got the horse from Charlie Brooks. And "Charlie is a friend since 30 years," "more than 30 years." And "Charlie is a good friend," and furthermore a "neighbor in the constituency," they "live only a few miles apart". Aahpaaht. But he hasn't "been riding the horse since the elections of 2010." Before the elections, however, yes he did go riding with Charlie. Charlie "has a number of different horses" (who hasn't), and one of them is, or was, Raisa, a former police horse, which he did ride, and "we are all very sorry to hear" "that Raisa is no longer with us," and he doesn't think "he'll be getting back into the saddle anytime soon," because his life "as a prime minister is so busy."

Aus aktuellem Anlass

It's all in the mind

Yes, it is what you think it is: click for a larger image.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Freedom Fries second anniversary

"The conference room is still occupied by these bloggers."

Find a caption

"Mon amour" -- Goats on the loose

We are on our morning walk, striding past Alain's house, as he stops us and asks for help. "Les chèvres." As you possibly know, Le Trayas employs goats to control the brush growth around the hill to protect us from forest fires. And the goats are on the loose again. During previous outings (using openings that wild boars had helpfully created in the fences), they had already devastated well-tended gardens, and climbed on neighbors' roofs, dislocating roof tiles and provoking costly leaks.

Fences have been mended, and electric fencing put into place two rows deep, but the goats have learned to jump over said fencing now to seek out the greener pastures on the other side.

Alain packs me into his car. We cannot see through the icy windshield. Alain divines us up the hill to meet the goats, but we survive. The goats are on the road, one step away from the no-longer-so-well-tended gardens of our neighbors. Alain brings out a plastic box with goat feed that he shakes rhythmically to attract their attention. The animals are unimpressed.

Goats, Alain. Note the snowy top of the Pic d'Aurelle (323 m) in the background. The yellow shadow is a blossoming Mimosa

The goats are everywhere, in particular in Josie's garden, grazing on the terraced meadows below her infinity pool. Max (Annie's husband --- Annie, our neighbor, the famous cook) and I are charged to chase the goats back to where they belong, wherever that may be.

Josie's infinity pool	Josie's villa
Josie	Max

Josie is famous for her crie de coeur, "mon amour, mon amour," which she extends to her husband Gianni when he is in sight, but Gianni is not in sight, so Josie restricts herself to friendly gestures gracefully delivered from her balcony.

We learn that the idea is to lure the goats back into their shed and lock them up there until le bureau can reach a decision on their uncertain future. This is easier said than done. Some give-and-take ensues, involving Jojo, (le réproducteur) the only male element of the herd and a necessary condition for the numerous offspring that causes the herd to seek more food on the greener side of the fence. Jojo is stubborn ("balls").

Jojo, réproducteur	goats, unwilling to enter shed
kerfuffle, involving Alain and goats	Pasha

The goats are quite unwilling to enter the shed, seeking all sorts of flimsy excuses despite our well-meaning efforts. Finally, Pasha, the wonderdog, arrives on Annie's leach. The goats are quite impressed by Pasha and do what he wants. A happy ending ensues.

Max, rasender reporter, Alain, Annie (note the leach, Pasha in off), picture taken by Josie

Language lives

Erin McKean invited submissions of neologisms in her last column in the IHT. We reply:

Dear Erin,

in your IHT column, you invited the submission of neologisms. Here's a list I *thought* to have come up with during the last two years:

Trump House (play on White House)
to birther (raising the issue of Obama's birth)
public parts (opposite of "private parts")
de-seat (getting up, in analogy to de-plane)
kay (as in: 100k)
thanky
murderee
palinized
rational exuberance
period porn
beltway addicts
palin' around
to unanswer (a question)

http://morefreedomfries.blogspot.com/

Now, before I wrote (composed, haha) this email, I checked the originality of my inventions via Google, and found out that all --- except for the last two ("palin' around" is of course a play on Sarah Palin's expression "[Obama] pallin around with terrorists") --- had already been invented elsewhere before. But still.

One last remark: the prefix negation "un" is getting a lot of mileage recently. To unanswer here is meant to duck a question in a fuzzy way, like in: "The way Barack un-answers things."

Kind Regards, Michael M.

Sunday night bedstory

Captcha from Gabrielle de Vietri on Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Lol

Italian for beginners

The washed-up scriptwriter sends this clip, and asks the question ""fact or fiction?":



And here's the transcript:

—De Falco: "This is De Falco speaking from Livorno. Am I speaking with the commander?"
—Schettino: "Yes. Good evening, Cmdr. De Falco."
—De Falco: "Please tell me your name."
—Schettino: "I'm Cmdr. Schettino, commander"
—De Falco: "Schettino? Listen Schettino. There are people trapped on board. Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There is a pilot ladder. You will climb that ladder and go on board. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I'm recording this conversation, Cmdr. Schettino..."
—Schettino: "Commander, let me tell you one thing..."
—De Falco: "Speak up! Put your hand in front of the microphone and speak more loudly, is that clear?"
—Schettino: "In this moment, the boat is tipping..."
—De Falco: "I understand that, listen, there are people that are coming down the pilot ladder of the prow. You go up that pilot ladder, get on that ship and tell me how many people are still on board. And what they need. Is that clear? You need to tell me if there are children, women or people in need of assistance. And tell me the exact number of each of these categories. Is that clear? Listen Schettino, that you saved yourself from the sea, but I am going to...really do something bad to you...I am going to make you pay for this. Go on board, (expletive)!"
—Schettino: "Commander, please..."
—De Falco: "No, please. You now get up and go on board. They are telling me that on board there are still..."
—Schettino: "I am here with the rescue boats, I am here, I am not going anywhere, I am here..."
—De Falco: "What are you doing, commander?"
—Schettino: "I am here to coordinate the rescue..."
—De Falco: "What are you coordinating there? Go on board! Coordinate the rescue from aboard the ship. Are you refusing?"
—Schettino: "No, I am not refusing."
—De Falco: "Are you refusing to go aboard commander? Can you tell me the reason why you are not going?"
—Schettino: "I am not going because the other lifeboat is stopped."
—De Falco: "You go aboard. It is an order. Don't make any more excuses. You have declared 'abandon ship.' Now I am in charge. You go on board! Is that clear? Do you hear me? Go, and call me when you are aboard. My air rescue crew is there."
—Schettino: "Where are your rescuers?"
—De Falco: "My air rescue is on the prow. Go. There are already bodies, Schettino."
—Schettino: "How many bodies are there?"
—De Falco: "I don't know. I have heard of one. You are the one who has to tell me how many there are. Christ."
—Schettino: "But do you realize it is dark and here we can't see anything..."
—De Falco: "And so what? You want go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home? Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now!"
—Schettino: "...I am with my second in command."
—De Falco: "So both of you go up then ... You and your second go on board now. Is that clear?"
—Schettino: "Commander, I want to go on board, but it is simply that the other boat here ... there are other rescuers. It has stopped and is waiting..."
—De Falco: "It has been an hour that you have been telling me the same thing. Now, go on board. Go on board! And then tell me immediately how many people there are there."
—Schettino: "OK, commander"
—De Falco: "Go, immediately!"

Update (Telegraph):

In a pre-planned stunt advertised on Facebook, captain of The Concordia, Francesco Schettino, sailed perilously close to the coast of Giglio so that the ship's head waiter could salute his family on land.

Minutes before the cruise ship hit the rocks, the waiter's sister Patrizia Tievoli had posted on Facebook that: 'In a short period of time the Concordia ship will pass very close. A big greeting to my brother who finally get to have a holiday on landing in Savona.'

Pure speculation, or Troops of Truth (2) (reposted)

Remember our not-so-prescient words from a recent post:

"And the press of the Free World is eating this up as if it were Yorkshire pudding."

Our words, or something else, triggered Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the NYT, to wonder publicly whether the press should try to sort out the truth, for a change.

And he gives an example:

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Yes man, great. Politics went off the cliff because politicians could be sure that the press would eat their Yorkshire pudding all the time, reporting anything with hands-off  neutrality, then seeking middle ground somewhere between facts and absurdity. This should stop. Yes, press of the Free World, this should stop, so stop this and join the depleted ranks of the Troops of Truth, of which this blog is a shining example (spell checker still does not know the word "blog"). And whenever Romney and his ilk say something, check first whether there is some factual basis to it. Like in: "I want to be your President because I know how to strap my dog to the roof of my car when I go on family vacation to Canada, and the dog's name is/was Blondi." This statement is well-anchored in facts, and it can pass your editorial muster without any additional comments, even if he got the name wrong, since the real name of his dog was Seamus, there is no need for editorial commenting, since the dog's name is auxiliary to the fact of dog-strapping (flatus vocis)...



...even though it was the name of Hitler's dog. Halt, hold on, which government agency did I intend to shut down, no, that wasn't Romney (Romney didn't even get it for a slpit second, as he was suggesting, helpfully: "The EPA?"), we get confused here, perhaps ... Anyhow, this post is already too long, so we stop now.

PS: 80% of the Republican attacks on Obama are just insinuations. "Obama want to bring the US under UN goverment," "Obama wants to introduce European-style socialism," (no socialism here, by the way) etc. Did you realize that? Just insinuations. Perry, where are you when we need you?

Pure speculation (Swiss for beginners)

Philipp Hildebrand, the CEO of the Swiss National Bank,  had traded on the foreign exchange markets a few days before his bank had forced a peg of the Swiss Frank with the EUR that would guarantee an enormous profit to himself personally. No, wrong. It turns out, it was only his wife Kashya  --- nice name, boobs, attractive, a former model perhaps, no, just a former foreign exchange (FOREX) trader, running an art gallery now, Kashya, who knew nothing of her husband's plans to peg the Swiss Frank to the EUR at 1.20, and who, by exchanging enormous amounts of Swiss Franc at the right time, would make an enormous trading profit. Note that we don't use the word "speculation", the word "speculation" has been defenestrated, even here in France it's "trading" now (imagine the French pronunciation), since "speculation" triggers the wrong instincts --- instincts that were already abrogated by Queen Victoria, her of the Victorian age, the woman who famously informed her cabinet that a "wife knows everything her husband knows." So it was only Kashya, and it was only a matter of convenience that she did use her husband's account since the poor thing did not have a trading account in her own name, but it's clear that it was her, and not Hildebrand, who did the trade, since she, as a FOREX trader, knows the future.

Kashya and Philipp Hildebrand, note the plant in the background

And the press of the Free World is eating this up as if it were Yorkshire pudding.

Imagine you're writing a movie script. What's next?

A missing email perchance, that one particular email mysteriously absent from the records that the Swiss National Bank supplied to some thorough investigator who had been instituted to go to the bottom of this and who went there, and could not see anything wrong since the missing email was missing? Or was it somebody else, a highly-payed person (he/she) from a worldwide accountant firm with an interminable name? Like PriceWaterhouseCoopers? Yes, that's it, PwC. PwC, which failed to spot an accounting error of 54.5 billion EUR in the accounts of the Deutsche Hypobank only 6 weeks ago?  The largest accounting error in the history of the planet? That's the ticket if we need somebody to go Santorum.

And now what? Somebody's dropping a glass, it shatters, and Colombo has a heureka moment? Somebody's whispering in the dark? Somebody's impersonating the dog that didn't bark in the dark?

We don't know. What we do know, however, is that the missing email resurfaces, reappears as mysteriously as the account of Hildebrand's trading account itself had resurfaced (which it should not have, since there's the Swiss banking secret, and furthermore, it was sheer coincidence that Hildebrand's wife did trade in her favor on the FOREX market etc etc, it's so unfair).

Queen Victoria

Now, it is now that the script writer reaches the delicate point where he has to go into the finer points of the matter, for which he has the internet here.

You get the gist. Everything is OK. Hildebrand's story is consistent. There's just one minor problem. There was another email, or phone call, or whatever, from Hildebrand, to his bank, to the effect that the last trade was OK (it will never happen again, but the last trade was OK), and that it was OK to "augment" this trade (so as to enlarge the position that led to the profit).

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, some wit once observed, but that's the best we can do. Hildebrand stepped down yesterday. Life's unfair.

 Relax. Here's a picture from a better Swiss scene:

View of the Valais (Wallis) valley, Switzerland, 2012

Ronald Searle died

Circus cat, secretly rehearsing Hamlet

Update: He lived nearby, actually, in Draguignan (north of St. Tropez), where the headquarters of the French Artillery are located, the final stop of the local choochoo-train that also stops in Le Trayas

Fundamentalism in trouble (Dirk)

And while we are at it, lets reminisce: We are driving across the US, as usual, have spent the previous night in a hotel in Wyoming where the Gideon Bible is an accessory to every night table, have read the Genesis chapter, have crossed into the God-fearing state of South Dakota, and are driving past a evangelical billboard saying: "Noah planned ahead.." (the import being that you should plan ahead, too, etc). Well, no, Noah did not plan ahead. He was ordered by God to build the arc.

One of the tricks of today's American fundamentalists is their illiteracy; they have, in fact, not read the Bible.

And now for our final, and definitive Christmas post (Jacki)

(We performed it on Christmas eve 1985 during our visiting stint at the Rockefeller College, SUNY, Albany to rave reviews from a disoriented faculty)

Find a caption

Ordinateur (French for beginners) (Vincent)

The "urban word" of today, Computer, is defined as a "machine for downloading porn."

And, by sheer coincidence, Vincent sends this:

Une enseignante francophone expliquait à sa classe que dans la langue française, les noms, contrairement à l'anglais, sont désignés au masculin et au féminin. Par exemple : maison est féminin.. une maison ; crayon par contre, est masculin...un crayon.

Un élève demanda à l'enseignante de quel genre est donc le nom ordinateur [computer].

Au lieu de donner la réponse, l'enseignante a séparé la classe en deux groupes, garçons et filles, leur demandant de décider d'eux-mêmes si ordinateur est masculin ou féminin. Elle a demandé à chaque groupe de donner quatre bonnes raisons pour appuyer sa recommandation.

Les garçons ont décidé à l'unanimité que "ordinateur" est effectivement du genre féminin (une ordinateur) parce que:

1. Personne d'autre que son créateur ne comprend sa logique intérieure;
2. Le langage de base que les ordinateurs utilisent avec d'autres ordinateurs est incompréhensible pour quiconque;
3. Même la plus petite erreur est conservée en mémoire à long terme pour être ramenée à la surface plus tard;
4. Aussitôt que vous utilisez régulièrement une ordinateur, vous vous exposez à dépenser la moitié de votre chèque de paie pour acheter des accessoires pour elle.

Le groupe de filles, toutefois, a conclu que l'ordinateur est de genre masculin parce que:

1. Afin d'accomplir quoi que ce soit avec lui, tu dois l'allumer;
2. Il est bourré de matériel de base, mais ne peut penser par lui même;
3. Il est censé régler beaucoup de problèmes, mais la moitié du temps, c'est lui le problème;
4. Aussitôt que tu en utilises un régulièrement, tu te rends compte que si tu avais attendu un peu, tu aurais obtenu un meilleur modèle.

Les filles ont gagné !

The view from Chang's bed this morning

A Christmas Carol (Jacki)

A married couple has been out Christmas shopping at the mall most of the afternoon, when she suddenly realizes that her husband has “disappeared.”

Disoriented, she calls her husband’s cell and asks “where the hell are you ?”
“Darling, remember that jewelry shop where you saw the diamond necklace and totally fell in love with it; and remember that I didn’t have the money at the time and said ‘Baby it’ll be yours one day.”

Somewhat embarrassed and with a blushing smile, she replies “Yes. I remember that my love.”
“Well, I’m in the bar next to that store.”

Ditto (Siggi, Dirk)

Dirk sends this...



...and writes: "This has been around for a while but still. As the story goes, the guy that owns this house lives north of Cincinnati, Ohio .. Police were constantly being called for traffic jams and accidents in the neighborhood so they asked him to shut it down during certain hours. Instead he started charging by car load to pay off duty police to be there."

And while we are at it:

Swedish for beginners: Occupy Thanksgiving (reposted)

Why banks have become dysfunctional

James Saft, the Reuters' columnist, has a piece in the IHT about a talk by Andrew Haldane, the executive director for financial stability of the Bank of England. Once in a while, somebody writes a few lines we ("we") really should read, and here they are:

The purchaser of a portfolio of global banking stocks in the early 1990s is today sitting on a real loss. So who exactly is it extracting value from today's banks? The answer is twofold: shorter-term investors and bank management. Because banks have, over the past two centuries, migrated to a limited liability, shareholder-owned model, there is a natural tendency for owners to make riskier loans and trades and to increase the bank's assets.

Andrew Haldane

A bigger, riskier balance sheet with more leverage produces terribly volatile results, with many good-size profits mixed in with the occasional catastrophic loss. But with limited liability, executives and shareholders can simply walk away from the smoking wreckage, having pocketed the gains when times were good.

Bank of England

Banks then have a built-in incentive always to increase leverage, and the tyranny of quarterly earnings places huge pressure on them to enlarge their asset books, even if there is no one creditworthy left to lend to.
That was one of the main causes of the subprime episode. Faced with the prospect of not increasing earnings, banks simply began to manufacture borrowers where none really should have existed.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that debt is tax-deductible while equity is not, giving banks even more incentive to borrow. While the typical leverage of an American or British bank in 1900 was five or six times equity, that figure peaked at about 30 times before the crisis, and is higher still now for many euro zone banks.
Bank bondholders have been unwilling to play their role as vigilantes, in part because they quite rightly expect to be bailed out by governments if banks go to the wall.
In the past 30 years, many banks have moved to measure their performance -and set their bonuses -on the basis of a measure called return on equity, which measures profit compared with equity. What return on equity does not adjust for, of course, is risk, and it looks as if return-on-equity targets in a leverage driven business have produced a lot of risk in the form of extreme bank earnings volatility, and badly compensated volatility at that.

PS: Conspiracy, conspiracy. If you search for James Saft on IHT's web site, it comes back with " 'James Saft' did not match any documents under Past 30 Days." If you search for the column's title "Why banks take such huge risks," it comes back with all sorts of articles (about Berlusconi, among others), but not with Saft's column. However, if your search for the same title on Google, it comes back with a mirror site of the column as first result. (Lol)

We missed rapture day

Rapture had been scheduled for May 21, and was then rescheduled for Oct 21 (an error in the calculations). Yesterday, folks. And we missed it.

 

An alternative explanations is, of course, that we all got raptured yesterday (or at least everybody we know), and are now in heaven. You decide.

History of the world: Apple Computers (7)

Click here for earlier acts.

Interlude.

History of the world: Apple Computers

Act II. Somewhere in 1978 or 79, the Amsterdam department store De Bijenkorff opened a new sales corner on its 4th floor, mysteriously named "huiscomputers" and it featured a new product, the Apple II home computer. At that time most people, including myself, would conceive of computers as "electronic brains" (Germans called them "Elektronengehirne," before they called them "computers," before they called them "Rechner,") all built by IBM, all infinitely expensive, large, and remote.

Act I. My first contact with computer had been in 1972, when I took an algebra class at the Free University of Berlin and we were tasked to program matrix inversions and some such in Algol68, the programming language du jour. This was done by (1) punching Hollerith cards in the right places, on special machines located in the university's computing center, then (2) placing the cards in the intray located in the hallway outside the main operating room where the computer was located (there was only one), (3) waiting for an operator to appear to empty the intray (he would open a wing door, and allow you a glimpse at the electronic brain, humming and chugging along in fluorescent light, tape decks clicking back and forth), (4) then waiting another hour or so for the operator to reappear with the "output," --- folded stacks of paper in a very large format, the name of the "job" (no pun intended) printed in very large letters on the first page. If your stack was very thin (as it usually was) this could mean only one thing: something had gone wrong. You would (5) try to find the error, or try to find some help to find the error, correct it, (6) resubmit your job, and repeat the process ad infinitum. Usually, it would take only a few days  until a program of a few lines code would finally run properly.

Act II, cont'd. So far so good. Back to the department store. What could you do with a home computer, I asked the sales person. Well, he said, you could store cooking recipes and call them up as appropriate. I didn't buy one.

Act III. We're now at Dartmouth College, NH, and the day is Jan 16, 1984. In  between, I had become interested in a computer simulations,  and was visiting there Dartmouth's Research Policy Center, run by Dennis Meadows of The Limits to Growth fame (the book) to learn more about his approach, called "System Dynamics." To repeat, the day is Jan 16, a Monday, and we all must go and have a look at the new Apple computer, the Macintosh. So we cross the icy, snowy campus, and arrive in a dedicated room of the computing center, where a passionate lady demonstrates to us what a rectangular box, white, with a small screen, and a funny device, called "mouse," linked to the computer could achieve together. There was also a small matrix printer with ugly output. But, but, you could create sketches on the Macintosh screen by moving the mouse across the table, and then print them on the printer. Also, you could use different fonts, when printing a text. This led to typographic orgies of the worst kind for months on end (don't ask).


Act IV.  A year and a half later. I'm returning to Dartmouth College on a regular basis for various projects, and spend a lot of time with Perry LaPotin, the polymath grad student, who has become an invaluable part of the Cold Region Research Lab of the Corps of Engineers, conveniently located next to the college. Perry was already writing programs for the Macintosh. There was only one small problem. You could not write Macintosh programs on the Macintosh, since its memory was too small. Apple had built another machine, the Lisa, sold only to professionals, whose memory was large enough, since it had a hard disk (HARD DISK). The hard disk was really large, 10 megabytes, but the was a little glitch in the hard disk space management. Lisa didn't always know when the hard disk capacity was exhausted, which led to hard disk malfunction, which then Perry had to repair by using a mix of erratic reset activity (the escape button, yes), brawn, and black arts. He spent roughly half of his working day resetting the hard disk. I still see him sitting there, patiently kicking our Lisa back to work. When we would finally go home, belatedly, exhausted, we turned our attention to the regrettable downward tendency of the Apple Computer stock price. Apple was already on its way out, since the Macintosh was fairly useless.

Act V. Now comes the part that is omitted in all the obituaries. A few weeks later, still 1985. The Apple laser printer appears on the market. And it prints like a professional printer, plug and play, 50 different fonts, some very convincing ones. Your manuscript looks just great, your letter looks just great, your writ, opinion, table of content, graphics (Graphics) they all look great. It looks almost as if you can stop arguing, just putting your breath-taking graphics of the front page of your important contribution (the PC-world of MS-DOS, might, just might be able to connect to some laser printer and print something in Courier font until the next software glitch puts an end to such pretentiousness) but we, with our Apple laser printer, we rool (we meant "rule," but rool is even better) we rule the world. My research grant applications are looking so much better than those of the competition, I'm collecting one grant after the other, until I get a Pioneer Grant from the Dutch goverment that allows me to start my own research institute, the Applied Logic Laboratory. I'm still convinced that my success in those years hinged on the flawless Macintosh laser print of my submission, and in particular on the flawless laserprinted  tables of content done by the best text processor of those days, Wordperfect. For example, the committee for the Pioneer grant met only once, with forty longish application to evaluate, and only one grant to award. You an bet that they started reading the stuff when stepping on the train for their meeting in The Hague (much Dutch work gets done on trains, as Paul Krugman), and they had barely time to read the tables of content. Mine was the best.

Anyhow, the laser printer constituted a quantum leap, and many people understood, got their Macintosh laser act together, bought the stuff. and saved the company.

Stay tuned.


Act VI.  It's three years later 1988, and I'm back in Amsterdam. The Macintosh II appears on the market, the first bona fide machine with a color screen. Somebody wrote a program that would generate Mandelbrot's fractals in real time and the annual Dutch software exhibition features nothing but magic lanterns that move according to the incorruptible logic of Mandelbrot's algorithm.

A typical Mandelbrot image (Helix 2)

Interlude (short). We're also getting a research contract with IBM, since IBM has now a Unix machine, a mini computer, half way between a PC and a small mainframe (for insiders only: think VAX). We would get the computer for free (listprice perhaps 100 kay, regardless of the currency), work with it, and produce a report. Nerd alert: IBM has a Unix machine. Not Unix of course (nor Linux, which didn't exist in those days), but some Unix dialect that is supposedly compatible with standards Unix (of course it isn't). A small step for mankind, but a big step for IBM.

Now, in order to use the machine, we had to connect it to our network. And it's an ethernet-(work). "Is your new machine ethernet-compatible," we ask IBM. "We are the best," the man in the blue suits sing in unison while pummeling their breasts (there was a dress code at IBM in those days, blue suits, white shirt, tie), "so our machine is ethernet compatible."

So we connect the IBM machine (something with lot's of "8" in the name) to our Ethernet. Nothing happens, of course. We call IBM. "It's your fault," the men in the blue suits sing over the telephone while pummeling their breast, have you though of switching your network on?" This goes back and forth for a few month. "Have you thought of this, have you thought of that?" Yes, we have. One fine day, A delegation from IBM descends from heaven in the spaceships that Emmerich's Independence Day made so famous. Several people. They switch on the machine, they think of this and of that, but nothing happens. This takes the whole day. Finally, finally, they have the answer. "Yes, they say, it's obvious, you are using the latest Ethernet version, and our machine is not yet compatible with your version. It's your fault."

I'm not making this up.



Act VII. My research center (initially cursed with the hopeless name CCSOM) is growing, and we need more computers