Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe

2/27/09 (Bloomberg) -- When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had been torched.

“They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine was completely destroyed.”

The 34-year-old’s experience isn’t unique in the German capital. At least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30 percent of the total for 2008. The latest to go up in flames was a Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a public car park.

[...]

Three Philly shots

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Dear Mr. President, With All Due Respect ....

Mish, February 26, 2009:


Dear Mr. President, I read your New Era $3.6 Trillion Budget Proposal. I also listened to your speech Tuesday night. You made a great campaign speech. However, the campaign is over. You won. And the reason you won is you offered hope as well as a promise of change.

With all due respect Mr. President, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are offering the same policies as President Bush and Secretary Paulson. Those policies are to bail out banks regardless of cost to taxpayers. Mr. President, it's hard enough to overlook Geithner's tax indiscretions. Mr. President, it is harder still. if not impossible, to ignore the fact that neither Geithner nor Bernanke saw this coming. Yet amazingly they are both cock sure of the solution. Even more amazing is the fact that solution changes every day.

With all due respect Mr. President, Geithner and Bernanke are a huge part of the problem, and no part of the solution and the sooner you realize that the better off this nation will be.

With all due respect Mr. President, your budget proposal is the same big government spending as we saw under President Bush. The only difference is you promised more spending and bigger government, while President Bush promised less government and less spending and failed to deliver on either count.

With all due respect Mr. President, it is impossible to spend one's way out of a problem, when the problem is reckless spending.

[...]


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Peter Schiff Reacts to Obama's State of the Union Address, 2/24/09

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Violence between repo men, car owners on the rise

AP, 2/27/09:

HALSELL, Ala. – Alone in his mobile home off a winding dirt road, Jimmy Tanks heard a commotion at 2:30 a.m. just outside his bedroom window: Somebody was messing with his car.

The 67-year-old railroad retiree grabbed a gun, walked out the back door and confronted not a thief but a repo man and two helpers trying to tow off the Chrysler Sebring. Shots were fired, and Tanks wound up dead, a bullet in his chest.

The man who came to repossess the car, Kenneth Alvin Smith, is awaiting trial on a murder charge in a state considered a Wild West territory even by the standards of an industry that's largely unregulated nationally. Since Tanks' death last June, two other repo men from the same company Smith worked for were shot, one fatally.

[...]

American nightmare

VIJAY PRASHAD in Frontline, India's National Magazine:


In January, the U.S. economy lost almost 600,000 jobs across all major industry sectors.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

– Yip Harburg, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” (1931).

ON February 6, 2009, the United States government’s Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) released its monthly “Employment Situation Summary”. The first paragraph of the report contained startling data. In January 2009, the U.S. economy lost almost 600,000 jobs (the highest figure in 34 years). The official unemployment rate rose from 7.2 per cent to 7.6 per cent (the highest in 16 years). Since December 2007, which the BLS identified as the start of the current recession, the U.S. economy has lost 3.6 million jobs (2.8 million lost since September 2008). In the quiet, measured language of this data-collection agency, “in January, job losses were large and widespread across nearly all major industry sectors”. The scale of the number is unimaginable.

[...]




.........................................................
Most Americans don't realize that government statistics for unemployment and inflation, etc., are fake. I've had arguments with seemingly smart people about this. We are a conned people. From the article above, Vijay Prashad points out:


Those who watch the way the government collects the numbers are wary of this data. Government figures are only so good as the methodology used by its agencies. In 1995, the Clinton administration convened the Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index. Bill Clinton appointed Michael Boskin, the former head of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, to head the commission. The Boskin Commission’s report (1996) recommended that the BLS revise its method for sampling. As a result of this report, the BLS conducted a form of statistical pruning, cutting its household sampling size from 60,000 to 50,000. An important aspect of this cut was the reduction of households from inner cities, which have a disproportionate number of non-white residents and also of impoverished families. Further, the BLS began to exclude “discouraged workers” from its calculation of unemployment.

With Boskin’s new method, the poverty rate fell, as did the unemployment rate, and it was notable that (without the inner-city data) suddenly blacks enjoyed better economic health than before. This fabulous world renewed enthusiasm for the American Dream even as the reality hidden in segregated slums was quite different.

Statistician John Williams (whose newsletter is available at www.shadowstats.com) reanalyses the government numbers using the pre-Clinton era methodology. He finds that the current unemployment rate hovers between 13.5 per cent and 18 per cent(using two different data sets and formulae). As Williams lifts the statistical camouflage off the faked numbers, the situation seems more drastic.




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Daisy Fried

and her daughter, Maisie:




Daisy lives about six blocks from me. I've known Daisy since around 1992. She was one of the first people to interview me, and when my first book, Fake House, came out in 2000, she reviewed it. Today, I was on my way to have dinner with Kenneth Goldsmith, whom I'd never met, Jena Osman and a few other folks. At Kenny's reading, I sat next to Samuel Delany, who said he used to be a regular at the Westbury, a really skanky restaurant. Afterwards, I had two beers with Frank Sherlock, and also saw Ryan Eckes.

Ron Paul on the foreign policy of the U.S.

2/12/09:

A planet at the brink?

Michael T Klare in Asia Times, 2/26/09:

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Barack Obama has referred to as a "lost decade", the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

[...]

15th street station

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Turkish politician defies law with Kurdish speech

A.P., 2/24/09:

ISTANBUL – A politician stirred the debate about minority rights in Turkey when he spoke Kurdish in Parliament on Tuesday, violating laws that bar the language in official settings.

State-run television immediately cut off the live broadcast of legislator Ahmet Turk as he spoke in his native tongue, ostensibly to celebrate UNESCO world languages week. But his real aim was to challenge the long-standing Turkish policy toward its restive Kurdish population, a suppression of rights that only began to ease in recent years.

"Kurds have long been oppressed because they did not know any other language," Turk said. "I promised myself that I would speak in my mother tongue at an official meeting one day."

Kurdish lawmakers gave Turk, their leader, a standing ovation.

[...]

STATEMENT OF JOEL KOVEL REGARDING HIS TERMINATION BY BARD COLLEGE

Very disturbing charges against a great school where I've taught four of the last five summers:



Introduction

In January, 1988, I was appointed to the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies at Bard College. As this was a Presidential appointment outside the tenure system, I have served under a series of contracts. The last of these was half-time (one semester on, one off, with half salary and full benefits year-round), effective from July 1, 2004, to June 30, 2009. On February 7 I received a letter from Michèle Dominy, Dean of the College, informing me that my contract would not be renewed this July 1 and that I would be moved to emeritus status as of that day. She wrote that this decision was made by President Botstein, Executive Vice-President Papadimitriou and herself, in consultation with members of the Faculty Senate.

This document argues that this termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism. There is of course much more to my years at Bard than this, including another controversial subject, my work on ecosocialism (/The Enemy of Nature/). However, the evidence shows a pattern of conflict over Zionism only too reminiscent of innumerable instances in this country in which critics of Israel have been made to pay, often with their careers, for speaking out. In this instance the process culminated in a deeply flawed evaluation process which was used to justify my termination from the faculty.


A brief chronology

• 2002. This was the first year I spoke out nationally about Zionism. In October, my article, “Zionism’s Bad Conscience,” appeared in /Tikkun/.

Three or four weeks later, I was called into President Leon Botstein’s office, to be told my Hiss Chair was being taken away. Botstein said that he had nothing to do with the decision, then gratuitously added that it had not been made because of what I had just published about Zionism, and hastened to tell me that his views were diametrically opposed to mine.

• 2003. In January I published a second article in /Tikkun/, “’Left-Anti-Semitism’ and the Special Status of Israel,” which argued for a One-State solution to the dilemmas posed by Zionism. A few weeks later, I received a phone call at home from Dean Dominy, who suggested, on behalf of Executive Vice-President Dimitri Papadimitriou, that perhaps it was time for me to retire from Bard. I declined. The result of this was an evaluation of my work and the inception, in 2004, of the current half-time contract as “Distinguished Professor.”

• 2006. I finished a draft of /Overcoming Zionism/. In January, while I was on a Fellowship in South Africa, President Botstein conducted a concert on campus of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, which he has directed since 2003. In a stunning departure from traditional concert practice, this began with the playing of the national anthems of the United States and Israel, after each of which the audience rose. Except for a handful of protestors, the event went unnoticed. I regarded it, however, as paradigmatic of the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, one that has conduced to war in Iraq and massive human rights violations in Israel/Palestine. In December, I organized a public lecture at Bard (with Mazin Qumsiyeh) to call attention to this problem. Only one faculty person attended; the rest were students and community people; and the issue was never taken up on campus.

• 2007. /Overcoming Zionism/ was now on the market, arguing for a One-State solution (and sharply criticizing, among others, Martin Peretz for a scurrilous op-ed piece against Rachel Corrie in the /Los Angeles Times/. Peretz is an official in AIPAC’s foreign policy think-tank, and at the time a Bard Trustee—though this latter fact was not pointed out in the book). In August, /Overcoming Zionism/ was attacked by a watchdog Zionist group, StandWithUs/Michigan, which succeeded in pressuring the book’s United States distributor, the University of Michigan Press, to remove it from circulation. An extraordinary outpouring of support (650 letters to U of M) succeeded in reversing this frank episode of book-burning. I was disturbed, however, by the fact that, with the exception of two non-tenure track faculty, there was no support from Bard in response to this egregious violation of the speech rights of a professor. When I asked President Botstein in an email why this was so, he replied that he felt I was doing quite well at taking care of myself. This was irrelevant to the obligation of a college to protect its faculty from violation of their rights of free expression—all the more so, a college such as Bard with a carefully honed reputation as a bastion of academic freedom, and which indeed defines such freedom in its Faculty Handbook as a "right . . . to search for truth and understanding without interference and to disseminate his [sic] findings without intimidation."

• 2008. Despite some reservations by the faculty, I was able to teach a course on Zionism. In my view, and that of most of the students, it was carried off successfully. Concurrently with this, another evaluation of my work at Bard was underway. Unlike previous evaluations, in 1996 and 2003, this was unenthusiastic. It was cited by Dean Dominy as instrumental in the decision to let me go.


Irregularities in the Evaluation Process

The evaluation committee included Professor Bruce Chilton, along with Professors Mark Lambert and Kyle Gann. Professor Chilton is a member of the Social Studies division, a distinguished theologian, and the campus’ Protestant chaplain. He is also active in Zionist circles, as chair of the Episcopal–Jewish Relations Committee in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and a member of the Executive Committee of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. In this capacity he campaigns vigorously against Protestant efforts to promote divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel. Professor Chilton is particularly antagonistic to the Palestinian liberation theology movement, Sabeel, and its leader, Rev. Naim Ateek, also an Episcopal. This places him on the other side of the divide from myself, who attended a Sabeel Conference in Birmingham, MI, in October, 2008, as an invited speaker, where I met Rev. Ateek, and expressed admiration for his position. It should also be observed that Professor Chilton was active this past January in supporting Israeli aggression in Gaza. He may be heard on a national radio program on WABC, “Religion on the Line,” (January 11, 2009) arguing from the Doctrine of Just War and claiming that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel for human rights violations—this despite the fact that large numbers of Jews have been in the forefront of protesting Israeli crimes in Gaza.

Of course, Professor Chilton has the right to his opinion as an academic and a citizen. Nonetheless, the presence of such a voice on the committee whose conclusion was instrumental in the decision to remove me from the Bard faculty is highly dubious. Most definitely, Professor Chilton should have recused himself from this position. His failure to do so, combined with the fact that the decision as a whole was made in context of adversity between myself and the Bard administration, renders the process of my termination invalid as an instance of what the College’s Faculty Handbook calls a procedure “designed to evaluate each faculty member fairly and in good faith.” I still strove to make my future at Bard the subject of reasonable negotiation. However, my efforts in this direction were rudely denied by Dean Dominy’s curt and dismissive letter (at the urging, according to her, of Vice-President Papadimitriou), which plainly asserted that there was nothing to talk over and that I was being handed a /fait accompli/. In view of this I considered myself left with no other option than the release of this document.


On the responsibililty of intellectuals

Bard has effectively crafted for itself an image as a bastion of progressive thought. Its efforts were crowned with being anointed in 2005 by the /Princeton Review /as the second-most progressive college in the United States, the journal adding that Bard "puts the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts.'" But “liberal” thought evidently has its limits; and my work against Zionism has encountered these. A fundamental principle of mine is that the educator must criticize the injustices of the world, whether or not this involves him or her in conflict with the powers that be. The systematic failure of the academy to do so plays no small role in the perpetuation of injustice and state violence. In no sphere of political action does this principle apply more vigorously than with the question of Zionism; and in no country is this issue more strategically important than in the United States, given the fact that United States support is necessary for Israel’s behavior. The worse this behavior, the more strenuous must be the suppression of criticism. I take the view, then, that Israeli human rights abuses are deeply engrained in a culture of impunity granted chiefly, though not exclusively, in the United States—which culture arises from suppression of debate and open inquiry within those institutions, such as colleges, whose social role it is to enlighten the public. Therefore, if the world stands outraged at Israeli aggression in Gaza, it should also be outraged at institutions in the United States that grant Israel impunity. In my view, Bard College is one such institution. It has suppressed critical engagement with Israel and Zionism, and therefore has enabled abuses such as have occurred and are occurring in Gaza. This notion is of course, not just descriptive of a place like Bard. It is also the context within which the critic of such a place and the Zionist ideology it enables becomes marginalized, and then removed.



For further information: www.codz.org; Joel Kovel, “Overcoming
Impunity,” /The Link/ Jan-March 2009 (www.ameu.org).

To write the Bard administration:
President Leon Botstein: president@bard.edu
Executive Vice-President Dimitri Papadimitriou: dpapadimitrou@bard.edu


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Audio file of Dmitry Orlov,

speaking in Marin County, CA, 2/12/09.




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Not Your Average Latte

In a worsening economy, more people will turn to sex to make money. From the Boston Globe, 2/22/09:


I'm considering relocating to Vassalboro, Maine, a small place that appears to be open-minded enough to make Sesame Street look like Tehran. Up in Vassalboro, it seems, a chap named Donald Crabtree has been planning to open a topless coffee shop. (It takes sure hands to be a Vassalboro barista, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.) At least according to the account in this newspaper last month, few people there seem to mind. The local planning board essentially threw up its hands and said, "OK, you got us there." Other townspeople are just happy that somebody's offering people jobs. And Crabtree himself has put together an admirably modern and diverse business plan. For example, customers can choose if they would like to be served by a topless man or a topless woman. It appears as though Crabtree has pretty much covered -- as it were -- every contingency. In talking about his great notion, Crabtree told the Globe's Brian MacQuarrie that "everything is failing, but nudity is not a dying business."


..................................
There's at least one precedence for this, a Fort Lauderdale business that only lasted for a few months in 1990:










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Racialism

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[For The Lower Half]

Jared Diamond: How Nations Collapse,

from an interview on 2/13/09:

Gun battle in Reynosa, Mexico,

just across the river from Texas, 2/17/09. To combat drug traffickers, Mexico has 45,000 soldiers along its border with the United States, more than the U.S. has in Afghanistan. You don't need Spanish to understand what's happening in this news clip:

Grocery Stores Begin to Close in California

Back in Philly...

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St. Paul images

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Quick notes on St. Paul

Just landed. Had a greasy New York strip at Mickey's Diner for $11. On my left at the counter, a white, middle aged guy in a blue uniform, pushing 300 pounds. On my right, a black, 30-ish lady nudging 240. She was wearing blue jeans, a black blouse, black knit cap and a streaky orange scarf. Very talkative, she asked the peppery haired cook/waitress, "Seen any good movie lately?"

"No, been taking care of my daughter."

"Read any good book?"

"No, just taking care of my baby."

"You can take care of a baby and read!"

The 300-pounder wanted another iced tea, no sugar. When he called the cook/waitress "gorgeous" or "beautiful," she would answer with a touch of irritation, "OK, gorgeous (or beautiful)."

A skinny, 35-ish white guy walked in, sat next to the black lady, greeted her. They talked about how the cashier never missed a day, not even when her mother died. "I've been coming here for three years and I always see her," the black lady testified. "She never misses a day."

"But you've got to pace yourself," skinny man said. "At work, I'd take my breaks when I need one, whether they like it or not!"

"I hear you."

"I mean, we don't have no scheduled breaks, so I just take one when I need one."

"If you work eight hours, you need a couple of breaks, at least."

"That's right. I mean, we ain't slaves! They want us to be slaves, but we ain't slaves!"

The head cook came out, did something sneaky behind the counter next to the cook/waitress. "What are you doing?! Stop! You're crazy!" she laughed.

When I worked at McDonald's as a teenager, I'd go into the freezer with this 25-ish, rather plain married woman. She was frisky and funky and her mouth was fresh. I thought it was cool even after a friend asked, "Why are you doing that? I don't get it."

"Do you know what's on Oprah today? It's supposed to be a good show. Someone's supposed to be on, but I can't remember who it is. I guess it can't be that good if I can't remember."

"It's not that octuplet mother, is it?"

"No, no, no, I hope not! I'm sick of hearing about her."

"So am I."

"You know, I'm sick of working all the time to pay for these freeloaders. I'm sick of it. You know, all of these young girls having babies!"

When I walked to the cash register to pay, the cashier asked, "How are you, my friend?" I'd rather she called me "gorgeous" or "beautiful," but these things take time, I understand.



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Two Elections

William S. Lind at LewRockwell, 2/18/09:


In many Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, the story line depends on some sort of magic elixir or potion. Similarly, the advocates for Brave New World tell us the comic opera called "democracy" flows from the magic of elections. Just hold elections and presto!, wars vanish. Regrettably, BNW’s music is not nearly so entertaining as that of Sir Arthur Sullivan, while its plot is even more absurd than most of Gilbert’s.

Two recent elections point to a grimmer reality. The first was in Iraq, for provincial councils. In Iraq as in most of the world, the question is neither whether elections were held nor who won. The question on which social order depends is who accepts the results of an election. If elections are to substitute for war, not only the winners but also the losers must accept their outcome. Losers must give up power, patronage, one of the very few local sources of money (often lots of it), and possibly physical security as well, hoping for better luck next time, if there is a next time.

I suspect the odds of that happening in Iraq are small. The Washington Post recently quoted one U.S. officer who served as an adviser to Iraqi army units saying of Iraqi commanders, "When you got to know them and they’d be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous."

That quote was in a piece by Tom Ricks, the Post’s long-time defense correspondent, in the Sunday February 15 "Outlook" section. Ricks goes on to say,

I don’t think the Iraq war is over yet, and I worry that there is more to come than any of us suspect…

Many of those closest to the situation in Iraq expect a full-blown civil war to break out there in the coming years. "I don’t think the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet," one colonel told me.

[...]

Crashing Dubai

An American 'foreign legion' emerges

William Astore in Asia Times, 2/18/09:


A leaner, meaner, higher tech force - that was what president George W Bush and his secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld promised to transform the American military into. Instead, they came close to turning it into a foreign legion. Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks.

Now would be a good time for President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to begin to reclaim that military for its proper purpose: to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, the US's troops are fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan.

[...]



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Boomerang Effect

In light of Chris Hedges' excellent piece about the likelihood of “violent extremism” resulting from the economic meltdown, and the increasing rate of suicide among American troops, this 12/6/2006 article by William S. Lind is even more pertinent:


Last week, one of my students, a Marine captain, asked whether I had heard a news report about an "IED-like device" supposedly found near Cincinnati, and if I thought we would soon start seeing IEDs here in the U.S. I replied that I had not heard the news story, but as to whether we would see IEDs here at home, the answer is yes.

One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.

I know this thought – not to speak of the reality when it happens – will be shocking to some readers. To anyone who really understands Fourth Generation war, it should not be. Fourth Generation war does not merely work on the will of a state’s political leaders, as some theorists have said. It does something far more powerful. It pulls an opposing state apart at the moral level.

We saw this phenomenon in the effect the defeat in Afghanistan had on the Soviet Union. Just as that defeat led to the disintegration of the USSR, so defeat in the current Afghan war will bring the disintegration of NATO. We are seeing 4GW pull Israel apart today, to the point where a leaden blanket of Kulturpessimismus now oppresses that country.

We will see the same thing here, powerfully I think, as a result of our defeat in Iraq. It will manifest itself in many ways, and one of those ways will be the progression of inner-city and gang crime into something close to warfare, including war against the state.

Police will not be surprised by this prediction. I have talked with cops about Fourth Generation war, and they "get it" much better than do American soldiers and Marines. Many have told me that they already recognize elements of war in what they are encountering, especially in inner cities. Cops have been killed while just sitting in their cruisers, because they represent the authority of the state. How big a step is it for those cruisers to get hit with IEDs instead of pistol shots?

The Bush administration, as usual, has it exactly backwards. The danger is not that the "terrorists" we are fighting in Iraq will come here if we pull out there. Rather, American involvement in 4GW in Iraq will create "terrorism" here from among the people we have sent to fight the war there.

[...]



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City Hall stop

on the Broad Street line:













































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An evening in Easton, PA

Home of Larry Holmes and Crayola. The locals dig Juliana’s, but the veal saltimbocca I had was sweetened with sugar and drenched in an oil not convincingly olive, much less virgin. I was flanked by my friend, Jeff, and Daniella, a Lafayette College student from Moldova. After ordering gnocchi, she challenged my description of them as potato dumplings, “You’re thinking of ravioli. I know. I lived in Italy for two years.”

“Maybe they make them differently in South Philly,’ I offered, “because a friend of mine is a gnocchi freak, and each time she made them, they were these little potato dumplings.”

“You’re thinking of ravioli!”

Immigrants will modify old dishes or invent new ones. There is no egg foo young in China, chicken tikka massala in India, and bologna is called mortadella in Bologna, Italy. I turned to Freddie, who’s half Italian. “Yo, Freddie, how did your mom make gnocchi?”

“I don’t even know what they are,” he shrugged.

From Daniella, I did learn that Moldovans are ethnically Romanian and speak that language, and that the Russians in her country still feel superior to the "natives." Although many have lived in Moldova for three generations, they refuse to speak Romanian. “Imagine a meeting of ten people with everyone speaking Russian, to accommodate the one ethnic Russian who won't speak Romanian.”

The waitress brought out a plate of little potato dumplings, smothered with too much sauce, or gravy, as it’s called in South Philly. Daniella could only put half away, but never offered me one for forensic purposes. It may look and even feel like a dumpling, but until you have a thoughtful and impartial nibble, you just don’t know for sure.

I had a long day and was spaced out when Jeff told a story of how, as a boy, he heated Crisco to pour on a sleeping man’s face. His original idea was to stab this dude, also in the face. Jeff already had a knife in his hand but couldn’t go through with that downward motion. I had no idea what the context was, but did gather that Jeff's nemesis had a gun.

Later, Jeff tilted his bald dome towards me, “Check out this scar, man. That’s where he stabbed me.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but did manage to toss out this inanity, “So what did you say, I owe you one?!”

Everyone laughed. We were on our second carafe of a pretty fair red.

On the drive up from Philly, we passed the Beth Sholom Synagogue, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and another with a huge sign planted on its lawn, "WE SUPPORT ISRAEL'S SECURITY AND ITS RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF."

“So what did you say, I owe you one?!”

After I posted the above, Jeff called to fill me in on the Crisco incident: He, his sister and his mom were living with her boyfriend when he threw her over the railing, down a flight of stairs. Although it was her house, she decided to abandon it and move away, with her kids. A week after their escape, he tracked them down. When Jeff and his sister came home, the door to their apartment had been knocked from its hinges, the place was trashed and the man was sleeping on the couch, with a gun and a bottle of Thunderbird on the floor. Knowing his mom would show up soon, Jeff panicked and thought of the burning oil solution. He was about twelve.

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Bad News From America’s Top Spy

Chris Hedges in Truth Dig, Feb 16, 2009:


We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. You wouldn’t know this from the Obama administration, which seems hellbent on draining the blood out of the body politic and transfusing it into the corpse of our financial system. But by the time Barack Obama is done all we will be left with is a corpse—a corpse and no blood. And then what? We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

[...]

Busking at Suburban Station

I saw four musicians today. When I used this station regularly 12 years ago, I rarely saw one.











.

Quite by chance,

I found these images on the web, showing a Vietnamese-American returning to Vietnam. I could decipher them without captions. First, his face is better built, more calcium-fortified, squarer, with a clearer jawline, than the locals. He's also paler, wearing a "real" Nike T-shirt, and his legs have more hair, especially on the thighs. Taller and straighter, his body language is more expansive and confident. To the locals, these attributes tesfify to the superiority of the American diet and even culture. He's still visibly Vietnamese, but more impressive, his bodily bulk traceable to the growth hormone in his beef, the transfat in his freedom fries and fried chicken, and the corn syrup in just about everything else he's ingested, but they don't know that. He won't last a minute in the field, and will suffer cancer or a stroke before they will, but in the meantime, his teeth look great. (Unlike mine, by the way, since I was born in Vietnam, and grew up poor here.) They marvel at this ubervietnamensch, and pamper him as if he's fine china.