I just did some back of envelope rough estimate calculations to get a sense of how much CO2 emissions each of us is in some sense "entitled" to.

With some admittedly highly suspect rules of thumb, I came up with an equivalent of an annual driving distance of 11,500 miles, ie. that is assuming that all you did was drive (no heating or cooling your home, no air travel, or train travel, no cooking o

f meals, no electric lights.)

I started with the assumption that all human beings should be individually entitled to an equal share of CO2 emissions. Also based on a rather optimistic estimate of 50 miles per gallon. This is so rough that I may have lost a factor of 10 somewhere, but this is a kind of tangible estimate that I have not seen before.

Based on the following data/assumption/estimates:

30 gigatons of CO2 emissions in 2011 
3 pounds CO2 emissions per pound of gasoline
6 billion people
5 tons per person per year
2.5 tons target (assuming 50% reduction target)
.8 tons of gasoline (to produce the .8 tons)
1600 pounds
7 pounds per gallon
230 gallons
11,500 miles (at 50 miles per gallon)

Dave Snodgrass

My friend Dave Snodgrass has graciously consented to have me publish his poem about the Golden Plowman.

Dave was a huge presence in the Cleveland performance poetry scene when I first became involved with it back in the very late '90s.  For his own reasons, he has removed himself from it, much to the community's impoverishment.

I don't think Dave ever made much effort to publish his poems, seeing them as more oral/aural and performance events.  But he is/was a wonderful writer.

Hope you enjoy this.

A Hymn of Praise to the Golden Plowman

by Dave Snodgrass

There ain't no life, 'cept the one life you get;

That's what you think about when you sit way up high and it sure ain't July

It resembles December, when the gods have a temper

and your prayers are as empty as your pockets.

Let me be more specific:

The closest approximation to a drunken elephant ballerina on roller skates

in this man's workin' world

is a fully-loaded flatbed on a highway incline

at the point at which H₂O becomes H₂OOOOOOOOOOOO shit!

Let me tell you from experience:

With ten tons of tool-steel in a top-heavy truck, it's terrifyingly tough,

to tip-toe through the two-lanes with tenderness and tenacity, it tends

to make a man count his sins …

just in case.

For further illustration, an episode:

Halfway home to work I was,

on a December evening when it seemed that Apollo's chariot blew a spoke;

and I'm steering between the flakes...

White above, white to each side,

fightin' twenty thousand pounds of feisty, frisky ferrite,

strapped to the back of a six-wheel toboggan,

momentum my master, inertia my icon,

and Slippery Rock ain't my college, but I'm takin' a schoolin' nonetheless...

I'm like a rat ridin' a rhino

over streets that would skid a spike-foot snowmobile like soap in a shower-stall,

And, just as I'm about to lose it entirely,

go ass-under-tailpipe into an unscheduled and unavoidable road-side rest stop,

wait …..............

In the rearview mirror, a flashing light,

a keel of steel, a wake of white, and Salvation,

like I'd ordered it from a good-luck menu …

The Golden Plowman, and his Yellow-Queen Limousine,

comin' to chop a foot off the top, and give the rest a hefty dose

of the salt of the earth,

I drop down two gears, tip my hat as he passes,

and slide in ten Toyota-lengths back for respect;

Respect, because he (or she, who can say) is my king, my savior, and my best

friend,

and I will follow him everywhere.

I will buy every coffee, fix every tire,

suck-siphon every spare drop of diesel from these tanks, because without him,

it'd just be me, and my air brakes,

Those Westinghouse wonders that only work three ways:

Every which way,

Get-the-hell-out-of-my-way,

And no way at all;

No more jokes about ODOT being the Ohio Department of Taking our Time,

No more cussin' the extra lane-closures,

I'll buy him a brand-new shovel to lean on nine months out the year if he wants,

Hell,

I'll leave a box of fresh donuts on every orange barrel

from Willoughby to Westlake, and Maumee to Marietta,

for he gives me the road, to have and to hold,

'til dock do I park.

No, there ain't no life, 'cept the one life you got,

and the Golden Plowman helps you keep it

when no one can even get out their own front door

So, Respect,

to the drivers of ODOT, and their Yellow-Queen Limousines.

May the roads rise well to meet you,

until the plows come home.

Maj Ragain

My friend the poet Maj Ragain has been a huge influence on poetry here in Northeast Ohio. It occurred to me the other day that he is under-represented online. So I asked him if I might publish one of his works here, and he graciously consented.

This is an old favorite.

Grab a Giblet/InaMae Bagwell

by Maj Ragain

In Olney, Illinois, the hillbilly ghetto, about a four block square, is named Goosenibble. Everybody in town knows the name; nobody knows where it came from. Except that the area, just south of the B&O tracks, has always had to do with poultry. The Kralis chicken processing plant was there for years, up through the late '70's, shipping noodles and broth to Campbell's. The plant moved to Arkansas, and Goosenibble slid a little closer to the edge. Most folks went to work down on Boone Street. That's where the unemployment office is. Say where you workin'? Down on Boone Street. For 26 weeks or so. Sign up every two weeks. Money comes in the mail.

But now there is hope in Goosenibble. A new turkey processing plant is open this week in the old Kralis building. And everybody knows turkeys are a step up from chickens. Truckers will haul thousands of turkeys into town, whole cities of Thanksgiving stacked crate on crate. The local poultry joke is that when they get someone new on the killing line, the old timers, washed in the blood themselves, pull this one: Now, the best way to make money here is to work fast so when the plucker gets done and hands you the turkey, you take your bare hand and shove it in the turkey's behind. It won't feel like it'll go, but keep tryin'. Run it all the way through 'til you get ahold of his neck, then jerk him wrong side out. Just dump the guts in the bucket and hand the turkey on down the line. Used to be a one-armed man here named Clint who could make a hundred dollars a day just like that, piecework, and never drew his knife. The whole plant would shut down to watch that green boy do his first turkey.

These aren't your Honeysuckle, all breastmeat, primetime turkeys, with the built in little red flag that pops up when they're done in the oven, not the one the rosy cheeked, smiling grandma serves at the Thanksgiving groaning board. These are what they call spent turkeys, too old to lay, too tough to bake, too gone to celebrate with. These are the ones you find in your bowl of soup, the noodle, the dumpling, the meltdown they call broth. This is where the turkey stops.

I did know a woman who worked at the Kralis plant. She'd walk up the tracks, two blocks, to the South End Tavern and drink Black Velvet. Usually she woudn't wash up either, wore her blue rubber boots and hard hat and long green killing coat. She was six feet tall, skinny enough to walk on air, ski footed, a voice that clanged. InaMae. One word. InaMae Bagwell. If I were making this up, I'd go ahead and say that she wrote poems in chicken blood on the restroom walls and that she carried a coatpocket full of chicken hearts and dropped them in the drinks of the unbelieving. But I am trying to tell the truth here.

She had an old man, a real old guy who rode a bicycle with a rusted wire basket. He leaned it against the front of the South End Tavern. He couldn't get his InaMae to come home after work. Every night, he'd have to go to the bar and haul her skinny butt home. It was a scene nobody liked. One night, he'd had enough. He drug her out of there and because InaMae was too drunk to go any further, he left her on the back steps of his house. He went and got a shovel and a fifty pound bag of Sakrete concrete mix. He dug a hole, stuck her feet in up to her knees, mixed the Sakrete with water and poured it in. He went to bed with a satisfied mind, the concrete was setting hard and InaMae was passed out, a prisoner of sweet love.

When he checked on InaMae an hour later, she was gone. He tracked her as far as the South End Tavern, peered through the front window and there she was, wearing twenty pound concrete boots and trying to dance with a glass of Black Velvet.

He didn't even bother to go in. The war was over for him. I heard that he passed away a year or so later. I haven't seen InaMae in a while. If she is still in this world, she'll be working at the turkey plant in Goosenibble. On the line.

Next time some smart guy pulls my sleeve to tell me that Love is two solitudes protecting, touching and greeting each other, that Love is the drama of completion, I'm gonna nod and say you got that right, brother. I'm not gonna try to tell him about InaMae Bagwell, spent turkeys, concrete and how hard it is to hold onto a woman.

(This poem was published in the "Fresh Oil, Loose Gravel", by Maj Ragain, Burning Press 1996.)

Hitting the Hegel on the Nagel

I vaguely recall reading somewhere in Hegel "There is no freedom from law, only freedom through law."

I can't find any sources for this, but it sounds very Hegeley. (I know Hegelian would be more orthodox, but I'm aiming for a little more intimacy.)

An interesting sentiment whatever the origin.

Rhyme as Metaphor

Galton marks.
Print dust.
Chalk dust of 10 million algebra classes.
White cliffs of Dover.
The late cretaceous.
Crispy critters.
Critical theory.
Critical mass.
Mass defect.
Lie detector.
She was watching the detectives.
All along the watchtower.
Jimi Dylan.
Dill pickles.
Don Rickles.
Hammers and Sickles.
Armand Hammer.
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
Anvil breaking a hammer.
Her water broke.
Broker than the 10 commandments.
Stock broker.
Hammer lock.
Lock box.
Boxers of briefs?
Amicus brief.
Brevity is the soul of witlessness.
Witless protection program.
Protection racket.
Racketeering prosecution.
Elocution lessons.
Execution by electrocution.
The body electric.
Eclectic.
Elenctic.
Enclitic.
Analytic.
Anadiplosis.
Anna Karenina.
Caryatid.
Cary Nation.
Cary Buck.
Buck v. Bell.
The Bell Curve.
“You can ring my bell.”
The chimes of freedom flashin’.
Flash mob.
Flash in the pan.
Pangloss.
Glossal stop.
Full stop.
Fullback.
Full frontal.
Weather front.
Weather underground.
Worm food.
Crude oil.
Crudite.
Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Twenty questions.
Questionable call.
Call of the wild.
Idlewild.
American Idlewild.
Ugly American Gladiator’s aviators.
Quadrumanous gladhanding Gladstone.
Casting the first hand that Rockefellers the cradle.
Diego Rivera hangin’ round Orson’s inkwell.
All’s well that ends wealthier than Orwellian.
There is no wealth but a life sentenced to death taxes to please love and be wise-ass.
Mandatory health insurance agent 007.
I double-owe my soul to the company’s double-blind double crossing double-indemnity enmity.
Now-and-thenmity
The committee to re-elect the president really creeps me out.
While my guitar gently weeps its willowy brook trout.
Moldy bathroom tile grout and shower-curtain grommet rust.
Chrono-synclastic trust-fundibulum.
Somnambulant funambulist’s ambulance’s mirrorshrift.
Queer theory getting queerer and queerer theory and practice on a blind date.
Date rape.
1492.
Scene of the crime.
The myth of fingerprints.
Galton marks.

An Uncountable Infinity of Orgasms

My chapbook "An Uncountable Infinity of Orgasms" was published a few days ago by NightBallet press.

Many thanks for the diligent efforts of my publisher, Dianne Borsenik.

NightBallet is one of the few places you can get a copy, they are located here

Following post

The following post is just a bunch of links to Google image pages for different kinds of flowers referenced in a poem by Philip Levine, "Keats in California". You might want to read this in one tab, and then go to the flower links in another.

Levine flowers

Flowers
Wisteria, plum trees, almond blossoms, iris, rose, tulip, poppy hillside, lupine, gorse, wild mustard

Annual Vietnam

At its peak it was an annual Vietnam in America: 50,000 dead. In a year.

And on an exponential growth curve. I think the hardest thing to recover now is that sense of the exponential growth. One had reason to be frightened over where this thing was heading.

There are people in their twenties now who have no idea.

And everyone who got it died, and died quickly, and nothing seemed to help. Nothing. There was one poison (and yes I'm talking about AIDs) AZT, that seemed to slow the descent ever so little, rather like holding an umbrella when you've fallen off a cliff. And that was it.

And then somewhere in the mid-90s, protease inhibitors came along. In a two year period, the number of deaths was cut in half. The epidemic ceased. The disease stopped being an instant death sentence.

This came about six months too late for Robert.

My partner's brother, the nearest person to me to ever have or die from the disease.

Two things seem worth holding onto at this remove: how suddenly the fatalism of the situation vanished, and how suddenly the euphoria over its vanishing vanished as well. And a third thing: how the happy ending is less than perfectly happy.

Even though it had really only entered mass consciousness in the early 1980s, AIDs had taken on the aspect of permanence we associate with cancer, or Alzheimer's. How swiftly learned helplessness is learned! Which is what impelled me to write this: to capture how suddenly the unchangeable, can change, and how quickly people accept something as unchangeable.

The most relevant analogy in my own life at the moment is my father's confrontation with Alzheimer's. I am like a lot of people I think in gradually resigning myself to the irreversible course of his disease.

But there is nothing to prevent the next protease inhibitor (or the next Salk vaccine, or the next penicillin) from arriving, miraculously, tomorrow.

It is very easy to mistake the unprecedented for the impossible.

My point is David Hume incarnate.

But we would be far more proficient in anticipating the remarkable were we to linger on the history of the remarkable. The sheer joy of the Salk vaccine, how seldom we recall it: the joy of parents, the purposeful columns of exuberant school children awaiting salvation in a sugar cube.

Nearly everyone old enough to remember Nixon has had abundant opportunity for the concrete of their cynicism over the war on cancer to solidify. Appropriate to the metaphor of war, vastly inappropriate and expensive weaponry has achieved only the most illusory of progress, while an aristocracy of vampires has entrenched the existing order. We resign ourselves to what 'must' be. But we cannot know that things cannot be otherwise.

Which brings us to the reality of happy endings: for more than a decade after the discovery of the remarkable healing powers of penicillin, it was hugely expensive and so, hard to come by. After decades of widespread use, it has lost much of its effectiveness.

With protease inhibitors it has been much the same, as vast numbers of people with AIDs in lesser- developed countries are unable to afford them.

We do well to remember both that the impossible is often possible, and that it is always short of Utopia.

Thank a LIBERAL philosopher

"Christians" like those of the Westboro Baptist Church should recognize they are allowed to spew their hateful anti-gay rhetoric only because some 18th century liberal philosophers of the enlightenment first recognized that freedom of speech was a freedom worth having.

LIBERAL philosophers.

Permanent Magic

Almost
gone the days of your childhood,
almost gone,
the wonder-eyed youth,
when each minute reveals permanent
magic, and nothing but fails
to improve.

The stardust that blesses your slumber,
and guards against waxing concern,
runs low as the days start to number,
filled with lessons you'd sooner unlearn.

Rushmore, Reagan, and Mary Shelley

They want to put Ronald Reagan on Mount
Rushmore. Ronald
Reagan
on Mount Rushmore.
Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore?
I mean, isn't that like
just exactly the opposite of what
Mount Rushmore is there for? I mean,
isn't Mount Rushmore supposed to be reserved
for the Greatest (think here of Muhammad
Ali) the Greatest of presidents?

People like George Washington, the father of our
country, and Abraham
Lincoln, the freer of the slaves, and Thomas
Jefferson the father of our Independence
declaration, and Theodore Roosevelt, the father of the,
the father of the,
OK well,
so I'm not so sure what he's even doing up there, but Ronald

Reagan? Ronald Reagan?
Why do you want to honor the guy who sent Donald Rumsfeld to make
nice nice with Saddam Hussein? Why do you
want to honor the guy who created Al
Qaeda by getting the CIA to train
Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in
Pesha-war to go fight a terrorist war in
Afghanistan? Twenty years later
and we're still cleaning up the big old messes he left us,
the two Great Frankenstein's
monsters he created in
Saddam and Osama.

Which is not to mention the people hacked
to bits in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua,
the thousands and thousands of people raped,
beaten, tortured, dismembered and mutilated
all with the training, assistance, and "material support"
of the Boland-Amendment-violating CIA. Or the way he
dismantled the constitution so he could sell
missiles to the terrorists in Iran, or the way he
helped Nicaraguan terrorists to smuggle
cocaine into the US --- like starting a crack
epidemic was some kind of urban
enterprise zone for South Central LA. He was
so horrible, so-o horrible, why would anyone want to
honor him? Why would anyone want to put him right
there
up beside Washington,
and Jefferson,
and Lincoln and Roosevelt?
And that's when it hit me.

Didn't Washington send out what he
himself called "scalping parties" during the French
and Indian War back when he was still fighting
for the King of England? Didn't he
deploy them with explicit
orders to kill
civilians? Wasn't the father of our
country really the founding father
of American terrorism?
Didn't he steal colossal
tracts of land from native Americans,
and foster a climate of genocide against them?
Didn't he own a lot of slaves and so,
wasn't Abraham Lincoln really
at war against him?

And didn't Jefferson, wasn't he not only
the owner of slaves but a slave
raper?
Didn't he rape Sally Hemings?
I mean, seeing as he owned her,
seeing as she was a piece of his property,
she didn't really have any right to say no,
and so isn't it rape where the
thing you are
fucking does not give
her consent because she has no consent
to give?

And as for Lincoln, didn't he
start the bloodiest war in American history,
didn't he shut down the press and, sans
habeas corpus jail his
own people for voicing dissent? And didn't he
support slavery if it preserved the union?
Didn't he continue
slavery, in the very text of the Emancipation Proclamation,
didn't he continue slavery in the four so-called
border states, the slave states that never joined
the Confederacy? Which then leaves

TR. The
star of San Juan Hill, back in a war we
started,
for empire. The man who continued
the slaughter in the Philippines: 200,000 dead in a war of
imperial conquest. 200,000 dead in a racist war for white
supremacy.

And so looking at Mount Rushmore with its
quartet of murdering, raping, conniving, torturing,
genocidal terrorists and thinking about the real
Ronald Reagan, I came to realize
he belongs there just fine. It's just
we need to change the way we
see the place, from a place of heroes,
to a place of demons; maybe by changing
the name from Mount Rushmore
to Mount Frankenstein. Mount Rushmore to Mount
Axis of Evil.

Consolations for a Cleveland Winter

What would I do with all that
prodigal sunshine,
day after changeless day, and the way it
bleaches unliving colors
to pastel? Far better to
dwell here,
in wired concrete igloos,
parked in the arctic precincts of a
supposedly temperate
climate, where the dense gray
perpetuity of cloud
supersedes shade and curtain, where
no luminous nuisance trespasses in the sky,
opacifying the lenses of your eye with the
glare of film noir third degrees.
Where you can sleep for weeks without missing a single
shadow. How reassuring,
not to have to worry about the cat
exploding in the unvented four-door.

And then, there are the economic benefits;
the costly, sloppy stickiness of the
sunscreen you won't be needing,
the money unspent on the darklensed
fashionstatements you won't sit on
entering the car, the superfluity of
bikini waxes beneath layer upon layer of
goose down, wool, velcro, Gortex and Thinsulate.
None of the wastefulness of frozen-drink
parasols: instead, the allegory of marshmallows
melting in hot cocoa, the music of
whistled steam gossiping about the impending
arrival of scalded pots of tea.

Who would knowingly trade the
palping rapture of cashmere
coiled in gentle neck-snug, for the
goo gunk of tropical crotchfunk, and
swampheated
pitstench? And then there’s the boon
to marital fidelity, the erotic temptations
of fishnet nymphettes
preempted: the very thought of provocative textiles
foreclosed by the horripilant chill-threat of
bristle-hair gooseflesh. No apocalyptic water bugs
skittering eerily from
unknown places, just a preternatural
feeling of brotherhood
for the lonely burdens of prehistoric
glaciers, and sympathy for the fate of naked
graveyard statuary.

Far better to start each morning with the discourse of
shovel's-edge rasping flagstone or blacktop, even
the cranky percussion of twostroke engines chuting
geysers of crystal into driveway-lining
ridges of freeze-dried sky-squeeze.
Listening to the sizzle-hiss of woodfire, its
narrative about the liberation of stored
sunshine, how preferable this to the trademarked
thrash-ratchet of idling middle-aged stockbrokers.

Needless to say,
mountainside fiberglass waterslides
rank a very distant second to
the doorstep thrill-ride of each morning,
as, improvising your way along the
newly arrived canyons of spontaneous
car-devouring roadcrumble, you
fishtail through slushstreeted
rush-hours. And there can simply be
no moral comparison between the
generosity of the snowplow rock-salt
that leaves the entire northeast
corner of the state saltier
than a frozen-margarita rim,
and the isolating managedcare selfishness
of tinted-power-windows and factory-air.

There is nothing in the radiant scorch
of hot sun on tanned skin
to make you desire anything
but escape; nothing that
remotely begins to compare with the way that,
numbing your extremities, a Cleveland winter
lectures about how you have stopped
feeling, and long
to feel
again.

Tomahawks

(Generally speaking, cliches are to be avoided like the ... H1N1.
But especially when you mean something as a song, they're actually better than originality. I hear the following as a song, and to hear my own dubious attempts to capture this, you can check out Chomsky in Chains, the podcast.)


Been a war every day of my forty-four years.
Been a war every day of my life.
Been a war to show everyone killing is wrong.
Been a war to prove killing is right.
Been a war to keep dangerous secrets.
Been a war to make some secrets known.
Been a war of defensive invasions,
in the name of protecting our homes.
In the name of protecting our homes.

Been a war to make everyone sober.
Been a war to get everyone high.
But the truth is that war is a banker,
selling peace for a lucrative lie,
trading peace with a lucrative lie,
while the Tomahawks litter the sky

And I been wondering why-hy,
murder's wrong but murderers rule,
spend one day honoring Martin,
three-hundred-SIXty-four like he was a fool,
and I been wondering why, why, why,
peace is always being denied,
peace is a classified secret,
but we treat war like it’s our national pride.

Been a war while the guns have been firing.
Been a war while the guns have grown cold.
Been a war for the wealthy and greedy,
to take the whole world for their own.
Been a war for the lies that they're screaming.
Been a war to cut out the truth's tongue.
Been a war to profit the rich and the old,
fought by the poor and the young,
lose their lives for a lucrative lie,
while the Tomahawks litter the sky

And I been wondering why-hy,
murder's wrong but murderers rule,
spend one day honoring Martin,
three-hundred-SIXty-four like he was a fool,
and I been wondering why, why, why,
peace is always being denied,
peace is a classified secret,
but we treat war like it’s our national pride.
And I been wondering why.

New Year's Day on Mars

When, in the year 1000,
the year 1000 was celebrated,
it marked only a century or two
of reckoning dates from the birth of Yeshu
(the Aramaic correlate of the Greek 'Jesus'.)
Technically,
it was not the year 1000 of course
since Fibonacci had not yet (until 1202)
introduced the Arabic numerals into Europe
(which he at least, having studied in Tunis had
the good grace
to call
the 'Hindu' numerals.)

It was the year 'M'
that being in Roman numerals
the symbol for 1000,
the Latin for 1000 being 'mille'
from which
the English
'mile', 'million', and 'millenium'.

Although it was a Roman
numeral, and the Aramaic speaking Yeshu a
Palestinian subject of the Romans,
that Roman numeral was not the Roman year, which,
reckoned A.U.C.
(anno urbis conditae, from the founding of the city)
was 752 at Christ's birth
(ignoring an apparent four year error),
and so the year M would have been
1752 according to the
Romans,
whose numerals,
designated it.


On a recent trip to Thailand
(which they,
ungenerous to English sensibilities
insist on calling Muang Thai),
I discovered that the Thais,
having generously adopted a twelve month
solar calendar beginning on our January first,
still date their calendar to the birth of the Buddha
(the number of their year being 543
greater than ours ( and dare I mention
the twenty years
gone missing
from the Indian
tradition?))

The Muslims,
by many accounts the most numerous
religious group in the world,
start their calendar with the flight (hegira)
of their great prophet Muhammed
from their most holy city, Mecca,
in fear of his life (not,
of Jews, Christians, Romans, or Persians but
of fellow Arabs from the same clan),
about our year 622
(with the exception that the Muslim calendar
gains a year
on the Gregorian
once every 22 1/2 years.)

Jews in the East had
for many centuries
used the Seleucid calendar
that began in 312 B.C. when,
in the ninth century,
European Jews began dating
'anno mundi',
to the beginning of the world,
or 3761 B.C. in Gregorian terms.


What was God thinking when,
in his infinite wisdom,
he decided
to make the period
of the earth's revolution
a non-integer multiple
of its rotation?
Perhaps he meant it
as a WPA for astronomers.

It was left to the infallible
Gregory XIII (although this does beg
the question about Gregory's XII and XI)
acting on discrepancies found
800 years earlier by the Venerable Bede,
to set things straight
by declaring
the day after October 4, 1582,
to be October 15, 1582.

Poof.
Ten days,
up in smoke.
Amazing the things
you can make happen,
if you happen to be Pope.

But perhaps this too is a bit
simplistic, since Protestants,
being what they are,
protested
against a Pope's having the gall
to be accurate.
And so whereas
the appropriate days disappeared
in Spain and France,
they took two years to vanish
in Luthered lands.

The British government,
being what it is,
cherished recalcitrance
until, in 1752,
September 2nd was followed by
September 14th,
throwing in the change of New Year's Day
from March 25th back to January 1st.

Recent cosmological data suggest
that the universe is
3 thousand million years newer
than previously thought,
perhaps
only 10 thousand million years old.

2000 approaches though 1000 never happened.
It reminds of the singer Prince ---
'Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999'.

Why not?

It is.

2010 Terror for Christmas

(Since the true spirit of Christmas is rabid consumption, I tend to think of the holiday starting on Black Friday, and extending to the 25th. Also, the "terror alert" level seems to rise around now, for some, strange, reason. That said, this is dedicated to Jdimytai Damour, the man trampled to death in 2008, in a Wal-Mart Black Friday sale stampede.)

Well the terror alert had been raised to high,
so our F-15's were patrolling the sky.
Keeping us safe, keeping us free,
protecting the homeland security.
Every day of the week, every week of the year,
we're armed to the teeth so we got nothing to fear---
except maybe,
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

The kids were asleep all snug in their beds,
while visions of Predators shot through their heads.
They were slaughtering badguys like you wouldn't believe,
with their Hellfire missiles there on Christmas Eve.
They were pint-sized heroes in an army of one,
and for Jesus's birthday all they wanted was guns;
guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.
Guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.

Well the terrorists are always around,
so you better never lower your guard.
So while we celebrate the baby Jesus,
you know they're trying extra hard.

It was just after midnight and NORAD radar
showed that something big was coming in fast.
There was no time to think, and no time to argue,
act now or it might just be your last.
And they mighta thought twice,
and they mighta thought better,
but the terror was already so high,
well that was the night that the US Air Force
blew Santa Claus outta the sky.
We blew Santa Claus outta the sky.

And it was raining bits of blown up reindeer
for hours and hours on end,
and none of our jets,
and none of our missiles
could put Santa back together again.
And though fear and hate,
may keep you safe,
from everything the enemy sends,
the problem with answering fear with guns,
is that you're gonna end up killing your friends.
The trouble with answering fear with guns,
is that you always end destroying your friends.
With nothing to fear,
and nothing to love,
except maybe
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

Fix the Roof

The other day my friend DJ observed that in general it was not a good idea to run a deficit, and he felt like the federal government really needed to cut spending. I fumbled through a response which mentioned the words “Paul Krugman”, but I felt hopelessly inarticulate.

I have reflected on this a fair amount since then, and have tried to formulate what it is I think I have garnered from repeated consideration of Krugman’s work, and the most apt summary I’ve been able to come up with is what follows.

My wife is the executor of her recently deceased father’s estate. It is not a large estate, and was fairly low on cash at the time of my father-in-law’s demise. The principle asset is the family home.

Now suppose the roof started leaking. It would make a great deal of sense for the estate to borrow money in order to fix the roof. Not fixing the roof would cause irreparable damage to the house, and the house could not otherwise be sold because it could not pass inspection.

The point here is that the value of a productive asset stands to be destroyed unless money can be borrowed to shore up its value.

In this case it would be idiotic not to borrow the money.

Viewing this as allegory, the house is the American economy. The leaking roof is the Great Recession. Borrowing money to fix the roof is federally funded economic stimulus. The value that stands to be destroyed is the wasted productive lives of unemployed human beings like you and me.

Every allegory simplifies, and every simplification is an oversimplification.

One concern is whether or not the estate can find a lender. In this case, the allegory tells us that lenders are abundant and willing to lend at interest rates so low that they are without historical precedent.

Another concern suggests that the money has already been borrowed and has failed to repair the roof. Here the allegory tells us that not enough money was borrowed to fix the roof, but only to put a stop-gap patch on the roof. The patch is already showing signs of imminent failure.

If we fix the roof, the patch will prove to have been worth it.

If we don’t, the trillion dollar patch will prove a worthless boondoggle. The decision is in the balance, as are the productive lives of unemployed human being who in their humanity, if not in their employment status, are just like you and me.

Now, frankly, I have somewhere very close to zero credentials as a professional economist: I try to make sense of the few economists I trust, and make no effort whatsoever to credit economists in the employ of corporations who are legally obliged to lie when lying is profitable. It seems to me there are all sorts of factors that neither I nor the most recognized economic theorists can justly consider.

Yet, the decision is up to us.

Just remember, this is the family home.

Power Makes Stupid

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