Lacustra

Ploua, ploua intr-una de cateva zile. Al saselea tur de inundatii. Curat potop!
Te duce gandul la "Lacustra" lui Bacovia.

Sarmisegetuza

Sarmisegetuza (Attila-Sarmisegetuza) on the way.

Impossible headlines for America (Part four): China Pays For Reconstruction Of New Orleans

The US likely accounted for something like $650-660 billion of the $690 billion total current account deficit run up by deficit countries (in 2004).
China's reserves end 2004 were up to $609.9 billion: close to 40% of China's GDP.
This year the U.S. deficit will top $800 billion (that was the estimate before Katrina).

The people in charge in America call themselves conservatives.

Impossible headlines for America (Part three): Bush Lowers The Exxon Tax

In 2004, the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, showed the best profit ever registered by a corporation.
The oil industry's profits were running at annual rate of $62.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005, several months before the most recent run-up in prices. This compares to an average of just $24.3 billion (in 2005 dollars) over the last five years. Exxon Mobil, will likely have over $10 billion in profits this quarter.
Isn't that the miracle of the market forces + hard work + innovation (oil = progress)?

The Austrian government threatened OMV (biggest Austrian oil company) with punitive taxes, because the price of gasoline at the pump stayed high even after world oil prices went lower (the OMV price promptly dropped the next day).
It's not likely we'll see such gestures from the White House. Not at $5, nor at $10 per gallon of gasoline.

Impossible headlines for America (Part two): The Government Calling On Oil Giants to Lower Prices, Stop Profiteering

It happened recently in several countries in Europe. Could never happen in the States.
Not while oil-fuhrers govern.

U.S. General Strike

One cannot imagine such a headline: U.S. General Strike.
You have them in other developed countries.
Could not happen in the U.S. Why?

Also: What would it take for the whole of the U.S. to go on strike?

I wish I could still have one big extended family like I had when I was a kid.

Concert

Am vazut aseara un concert in care Maria Raducanu acompania. Imi place stilul ei de voce.
Era la "La scena" pe Calea Calarasilor. Grozav loc!

Nukes

Sir Edward Gray, the British foreign secretary, said in 1914: ''The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetimes.'' The Big War (1914-1945) had started.

These days I am reading in Reuters (September 10):
"The U.S. Defense Department has written a draft revision of its nuclear operations doctrine ["Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations"] that outlines the use of nuclear weapons to pre-empt an enemy's attack with weapons of mass destruction..."
Nukes could be used under various circumstances: "in the face of an enemy's imminent biological weapons attack..."; "on enemy installations containing weapons of mass destruction..."; "to counter potentially overwhelming conventional forces, for rapid and favorable war termination on U.S. terms" to demonstrate U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter enemy use of weapons of mass destruction" ...

Is the Bush Administration selling the Big War of the 21'st century? They are talking about Nuclear Bombing!
Are the lamps going out over America (and the rest of the world)?

The bunker president

Evan Thomas from Newsweek - How Bush Blew It:

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news?... The bad news on... Aug. 30... was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation.... The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss... the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed....

President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad. The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers... thought the president needed to see.... Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be--how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century--is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that... ranks as a national disgrace....

It is not clear what President Bush does read or watch.... Bush... equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him.... Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around.... When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.... On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news....

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented.... But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.... The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain.... A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster....

The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand." Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge.... Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."... There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

By the predawn hours [of Tuesday, eighteen hours after it had happened], most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time.... To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately.... Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."...

At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there.... On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation.... Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics....

By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it.... By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters?-but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area....

The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters?-FEMA?-was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told news-week. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration.... [Albaugh's] college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."...

The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange....

Making history through bankruptcy

Bush 2 promised he will run the country like a CEO. So far he is keeping his promise. The giant stakeholders - his loyal entourage - have profited (9/11, wars, Katrina, energy crisis - all good for business).
Given his track record with destroying one company after another, America is heading in Enron's or Worldcom's direction.

Then what?
The ordinary chap (call him 'average investor'?) is left with a claim on something worth ten times less, plus some debts (enough for 20-30 years).
How about the mamoths/ executives? They'll be going to prison, to Bahamas, or to Crawford, Texas?

Welcome to no-fault government

"The Bush administration has now presided over three national debacles: 9/11; the $6.5-billion-monthly, unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and now, strike three, New Orleans.

Yet the White House claims the right and duty to bring good government to benighted foreign nations. Nation-building begins at home."

"The 9/11 attacks plunged normally decent, humane America into a period of temporary madness. Beating war drums allowed the White House to usurp national power, paralyzing the other two arms of government, Congress and the courts. America's democratic system stopped working.

Anyone who opposed the war or criticized its promoter, Bush, was branded a traitor. Mainstream media became a mouthpiece for the White House and war party. The Orwellian Patriot Act was enacted to curtail liberties and free speech.

National war fever and the lust for revenge that followed the 9/11 attacks allowed a small group of closet totalitarians, a cabal of neoconservatives and end-of-world religious fanatics to assume a dominant role in the Bush administration. They hijacked its foreign policy, and steadily pushed the U.S. into war."
(Eric Margolis -Toronto Sun)

Fighting terrorism

Shepsietirschwell on The Smirking Chimp:

Yesterday I saw a teeshirt I thought was funny, and again, profound. Perhaps you have seen this picture (one of those archival photos, I believe). There is a line of four, young Native American fighters standing shoulder to shoulder. They each have a rifle (or some other weapon). The caption on the shirt reads: "Homeland Security." Under the picture it says: "Fighting terrorism since 1492."

The golden age of Sex

Women in their fourties are having better sex than ever?
So it seems (at least in Britain):

77% enjoy sex more than when they were younger

45% want more sex than ever before

66% feel more confident about their bodies

82% say sex is as important as it was in their 20s

69% feel more adventurous in bed

Cannabis drug could be new obesity treatment

Professor Roger Pertwee, a neuropharmacologist at Aberdeen University, said it was well known that cannabis stimulated the appetite, but not widely known that the plant also contained substances that produced the opposite effect.

"We've discovered to our surprise that cannabis, as well as containing a drug that boosts appetite, contains a drug which has a blocking effect," he said.

Embarrassed Merkel admits plagiarising Reagan

"Despite some similarities in her policy proposals, she has studiously avoided being compared with the American right, fully aware that Mr Reagan and his Republican successors, with the exception of George Bush Snr, have been extremely unpopular figures in Germany".

Not good for her.

Focus: When the levees broke, the waters rose and Bush's credibility sank with New Orleans

Excellent analysis! I don't know about Giuliani.
One quote:

I received an e-mail from a Republican Las Vegas police officer trained in emergency management: ?Some people say that you can?t hold the president responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, ?I want you to make sure this never happens again?, it was not meant to be specific to ?no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss?. It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we?d save the ones we could . . . Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different??

Conu Alecu

A murit Alexandru Paleologu.

Washing Away

Louisiana cronicles of deaths foretold.

Taxa unica

O taxa unica de 25% a devenit subiect principal in campanie electorala din Germania. Surprinzator.
In Romania taxa unica de 16% pare sa fi scos o parte din economia subterana la suprafata.

Louisiana's National Guard

"About 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard is now serving in Iraq, where four out of every 10 soldiers are guardsmen. Recruiting for the Guard is also down significantly because people are afraid of being sent to Iraq if they join, leaving the Guard even more short-handed" (Molly Irvins).

Imagine you're in Louisiana's National Guard but you're stuck in the desert of Irak where lots of people hate you, reject your help or would gladly kill or maim you.
Back home it's your family, your friends - under the waters. They really need you. They are drowning.
Why the bloody hell they call it National Guard?

Radu Anton Roman

Am vazut pe TVR Cultural o reluare a unei emisiuni a lui Patapievici care-l avea invitat pe Radu Anton Roman (care a murit acum cateva zile). Vorbea despre lumea romaneasca culturala si gastronomica care deocamdata nu are identitate. Cum ar trebui scoasa la suprafata (asumata) aceasta identitate.
Sau despre birturile si ospatariile din Bucurestiul interbelic.
Erau grozave emisiunile lui Radu Anton Roman. Datorita lui imi doresc sa invat cindva sa prepar cateva mancaruri in stil traditional romanesc.

Ziua Mamei

Mama Mexicana

Mama Mexicana
Posted by: zolmat11 on Buzznet