Demeter
Demeter's JournalGentlepeople, Start Your Weekend! April 19-21, 2013
We come to praise Jonathan Winters, comedian, who left us sadder and poorer with his passing from this life on Thursday, April 11th. With all the ding-donging that was going around with the death of the Wicked Witch Baroness Thatcher, he slipped away rather quietly. Well, now it's time to make a joyful noise for the foolishness he brought to our delight.
Wm. Gilbert had some points to make about comedy. From his operetta, Yeomen of the Guard:
If you listen to popular rumour;
From the morn to the night he's so joyous and bright,
And he bubbles with wit and good humour!
He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse;
Yet though people forgive his transgression,
There are one or two rules that all family fools
Must observe, if they love their profession.
There are one or two rules,
Half-a-dozen, maybe,
That all family fools,
Of whatever degree,
Must observe if they love their profession.
If you wish to succeed as a jester, you'll need
To consider each person's auricular:
What is all right for B would quite scandalize C
(For C is so very particular);
And D may be dull, and E's very thick skull
Is as empty of brains as a ladle;
While F is F sharp, and will cry with a carp,
That he's known your best joke from his cradle!
When your humour they flout,
You can't let yourself go;
And it does put you out
When a person says, 'Oh!
I have known that old joke from my cradle!'
If your master is surly, from getting up early
(And tempers are short in the morning),
An inopportune joke is enough to provoke
Him to give you, at once, a month's warning.
Then if you refrain, he is at you again,
For he likes to get value for money:
He'll ask then and there, with an insolent stare,
'If you know that you're paid to be funny?'
It adds to the tasks
Of a merryman's place,
When your principal asks,
With a scowl on his face,
If you know that you're paid to be funny?
Comes a Bishop, maybe, or a solemn D.D. -
Oh, beware of his anger provoking!
Better not pull his hair - don't stick pins in his chair;
He don't understand practical joking.
If the jests that you crack have an orthodox smack,
You may get a bland smile from these sages;
But should they, by chance, be imported from France,
Half-a-crown is stopped out of your wages!
It's a general rule,
Though your zeal it may quench,
If the family fool
Tells a joke that's too French,
Half-a-crown is stopped out of his wages!
Though your head it may rack with a bilious attack,
And your senses with toothache you're losing,
Don't be mopy and flat - they don't fine you for that
If you're properly quaint and amusing!
Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day,
And took with her your trifle of money;
Bless your heart, they don't mind - they're exceedingly kind -
They don't blame you - as long as you're funny!
It's a comfort to feel
If your partner should flit,
Though you suffer a deal,
They don't mind it a bit -
They don't blame you - so long as you're funny!
It's a tall order to live up to, so let's get cracking! After all, we have the global economy, that long-running series of slapstick and slamming, to poke fun at!
Extreme Drought to Extreme Flood: Weather Whiplash Hits the Midwest
Source: Weather Underground
It seems like just a few months ago barges were scraping bottom on the Mississippi River, and the Army Corps of Engineers was blowing up rocks on the bottom of the river to allow shipping to continue. Wait, it was just a few months ago--less than four months ago! Water levels on the Mississippi River at St. Louis bottomed out at -4.57' on January 1 of 2013, the 9th lowest water level since record keeping began in 1861, and just 1.6' above the all-time low-water record set in 1940 (after the great Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s.)
But according to National Weather Service, the exceptional April rains and snows over the Upper Mississippi River watershed will drive the river by Tuesday to a height 45 feet higher than on January 1. The latest forecast calls for the river to hit 39.4' on Tuesday, which would be the 8th greatest flood in history at St. Louis, where flood records date back to 1861. Damaging major flooding is expected along a 250-mile stretch of the Mississippi from Quincy, Illinois to Thebes, Illinois next week. At the Alton, Illinois gauge, upstream from St.Louis, a flood height of 34' is expected on Tuesday. This would be the 6th highest flood in Alton since 1844, and damages to commercial property in the town of Alton occur at this water level. In addition, record flooding is expected on at least five rivers in Illinois and Michigan over the next few days.
A crest 1.5' above the all-time record has already occurred on the Des Plaines River in Chicago. This river has invasive Asian Carp that could make their way into Lake Michigan if a 13-mile barrier along the river fails during an extreme flood. Fortunately, NPR in Michigan is reporting today that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews stationed along the 13-mile Asian carp barrier have seen no evidence of the fish breaching the structure, and it would have taken a flood much larger than today's record flood to breach the structure.
A crest on the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan nearly 4' above the previous record (period of record: at least 113 years) is expected this weekend. At this flood level, major flooding of residential areas is expected, though the flood wall protecting downtown Grand Rapids will keep the commercial center of the city from flooding.
Read more: http://classic.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2389
It never rains but it pours!
The C.I.A.’s Angry Birds By MAUREEN DOWD MUST READ
When she gets her big Mo going, Dowd is something special!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/opinion/the-cias-angry-birds.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
Over the winter, I heard military commanders and White House officials murmur in hushed tones about how they would have to figure out a legal and moral framework for the flying killer robots executing targets around the globe. They were starting to realize that, while the American public approves of remotely killing terrorists, it is a drain on the democratic soul to zap people with no due process and little regard for the loss of innocents. But they never got around to it, leaving Rand Paul to take the moral high ground.
After two bloody, money-sucking, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea of a weapon for war that precluded having anyone actually go to war was too captivating. Our sophisticated, sleek, smart, detached president was ensorcelled by our sophisticated, sleek, smart, detached war machine. In an interview with Jon Stewart last year, President Obama allowed that he was in the grip of a powerful infatuation. “One of the things that we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place,” he said, “and we need Congressional help to do that to make sure that not only am I reined in, but any president is reined in.” 
WELL, IT WAS A COMEDY SHOW HE WS ON
America’s secret drone program, continually lowering the bar for lethal action, turns the president, the C.I.A. director and counterterrorism advisers into a star chamber running a war beyond war zones that employs a scalpel rather than a hammer, as the new Langley chief, John Brennan, puts it. But as The Times’s Mark Mazzetti notes in his new book, “The Way of the Knife,” “the analogy suggests that this new kind of war is without costs or blunders — a surgery without complications. This isn’t the case.” Mazzetti raises the issue of whether the C.I.A. — which once sold golf shirts with Predator logos in its gift shop — became “so enamored of its killer drones that it wasn’t pushing its analysts to ask a basic question: To what extent might the drone strikes be creating more terrorists than they are actually killing?” Mazzetti writes that Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, watched one of the first drone strikes via satellite at Langley a few weeks after 9/11. As he saw a Mitsubishi truck in Afghanistan being blown up, Dearlove smiled wryly. “It almost isn’t sporting, is it?” the Brit asked.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld and his hawkish inner circle were disgusted that the C.I.A. dismissed their spurious claims of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, so they set up their own C.I.A. at the Pentagon. Soldiers became spies. Meanwhile, the C.I.A. was setting up its own Pentagon at Langley, running the ever-expanding paramilitary drone operation. Spies became soldiers. Mazzetti writes that after 9/11, the C.I.A. director morphed into “a military commander running a clandestine, global war with a skeleton staff and very little oversight.” Why did the C.I.A., as Gen. James Cartwright asked when he was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, need to build “a second Air Force”? Leon Panetta made the C.I.A. far more militarized and then went to the Pentagon. When an actual military commander, David Petraeus, became head spook in 2011, he embraced the drone program, pushed to expand the fleet and conducted the first robo-targeted killing of an American citizen. “A spy agency that on September 11, 2001, had been decried as bumbling and risk-averse had, under the watchful eye of four successive C.I.A. directors, gone on a killing spree,” Mazzetti writes. The C.I.A. now has a drone base in Saudi Arabia, and both the Pentagon and the spy agency are running parallel drone wars in Yemen, each fighting for resources. And the Pentagon continues its foray into human spying. As W. George Jameson, a lawyer who spent 33 years at the C.I.A., lamented: “Everything is backwards. You’ve got an intelligence agency fighting a war and a military organization trying to gather on-the-ground intelligence.”
A sunny morning, with promises of Spring at Last!
Grieg was enamored of the poetry of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje (1818-1870) and began to study a volume of his works in 1877. The composer was always moved by the subjects of love, nature, and loss. Vinje's transcendent ability to express powerful emotions in these realms greatly inspired him. This song's text conveys the feelings of a dying man who sadly ponders that this spring will be his last. Many consider this masterful song among the very finest Grieg ever wrote. At about five minutes, it is one of the composer's longer songs. But it is also substantial in scope, and its thematic wares contain a rare depth of expression, its piano writing a subtle, gentle beauty. The main theme is lovely and forlorn as it soars so gently and sadly. The mood grows more tense as the song proceeds, and then a ravishing variant of the theme is heard about midway through. A reprise of sorts follows, and then the song ends sadly, the piano's lovely music seeming to slowly fade like the dying man in the text. Once again, one hears passages here in which Grieg augurs Rachmaninov's melancholy but beautiful lyricism.
~ Robert Cummings, Rovi http://www.answers.com/topic/v-ren-last-spring-song-for-voice-piano-op-33-2
Song : Soprano Bodil Arnesen,Norway
Official Homepage : http://www.bodilarnesen.com
Music : E.Grieg
Lyric : A.O.Vinje
Video : Bodil Arnesen
"Videoremix" AliceBorolin http://www.soria-moria.biz
......
Enno ein Gong fekk eg Vetren å sjå for Våren å røma;
Heggen med Tre som der blomar var på, eg atter såg bløma.
Enno ein Gong fekk eg Isen å sjå frå Landet å fljota,
Snjoen å bråna og Fossen i Å å fyssa og brjota.
Graset det grøne eg enno ein Gong fekk skoda med Blomar;
enno eg høyrde at Vårfuglen song mot Sol og mot Sumar.
Eingong eg sjølv i den vårlege Eim, som mettar mit Auga,
eingong eg der vil meg finna ein Heim og symjande lauga.
Alt det, som Våren imøte meg bar og Blomen, eg plukka,
Federnes Ånder eg trudde det var, som dansa og sukka.
Derfor eg fann millom Bjørkar og Bar i Våren ei Gåta;
derfor det Ljod i den Fløyta eg skar, meg tyktes å gråta.
In English :
Yet once again cruel winter I've seen to springtime surrender;
Buds springing forth on each flower and tree proclaim nature's splendor.
Once more the earth 'neath the sun's warming rays; the ice-sheet is smashing;
Rivers are flowing to sparkling azure bays, and waterfalls crashing.
See, in the meadows the flowers bloom again, awakening from slumber;
Hear, from the tree-tops the songbirds in the glen are singing of summer.
Yet once again o'er the fast-leafing trees the sunbeams are dancing,
Butterflies waft in the undulant breeze, their hues so entrancing.
All springtime's joys that I saw once again are soon gone forever;
Therefore I ask from a heart suffused with pain: shall I see them never?
So be it then; ah, the memories that teem, all sorrow must banish;
Joy has been mine past my spirits fondest dreams, and all. all must vanish.
One day I surely must go to that place of glory unending,
There in the homeland of beauty and grace my longing transcending.
All of springs bounty so richly bestowed, each radiant flower,
Souls of our fathers come down from their abode to share earths sweet hour!
Hear how the wind in the tree-tops above is moaning and crying;
Hear! From each willow and each gray mourning dove: a sound as of sighing.
Translation by William H. Halverson
Weekend Economists Sink the "Iron Lady" April 13-14, 2013
?w=470
Margaret Thatcher, Baroness, first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. Predictions are she will be the last female PM, as well. The "Iron Lady" is so reviled by the 99% of the UK (and abroad) that her death sent the little ditty "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" to the top of the charts in Britain:
http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/world/ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead-bbc-faces-dilemma-as-anti-thatcher-song-tops-charts#ixzz2QLHUZxAd
The BBC is in a bind after opponents of Margaret Thatcher pushed the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" to the top of the British charts in a posthumous protest over her divisive policies.
The online campaign to drive the "Wizard of Oz" song to the No. 1 spot on the U.K. singles chart was launched by Thatcher critics shortly after the former prime minister died Monday of a stroke at age 87.
As of Friday, the song was No. 1 on British iTunes.
Still, many people say the campaign - which aims to see the song played this weekend on the BBC's Official Chart Show - is in bad taste. Some have called on the BBC to promise it won't broadcast the song.
John Whittingdale, a lawmaker from Thatcher's Conservative party, told the Daily Mail tabloid that many would find the ditty "deeply insensitive."
"This is an attempt to manipulate the charts by people trying to make a political point," he said.
In a statement, the BBC said it had not yet decided on whether it would feature the song on its show - which normally plays all the week's best-selling hits.
"The Official Chart Show on Sunday is a historical and factual account of what the British public has been buying and we will make a decision about playing it when the final chart positions are clear," the taxpayer-funded BBC said.
Not all Tories agreed that the song should be yanked.
"No song should be banned by the BBC unless its lyrics are pre-watershed," said former Conservative lawmaker Louise Mensch, referring to British restrictions on adult content.
Mensch, a prominent Conservative voice on Twitter, said in a message posted to the site that Thatcher, famously known as "the Iron Lady," would not have wanted it any other way.
"Thatcher stood for freedom," she wrote.
And besides, she's still dead. Regardless of its tastefulness, the Baroness won. She trashed the Brits and their economy. As I was driving home very late last night (long story see below) the BBC had a mealy-mouthed economist talking about how Mrs. Thatcher didn't cause Britain's economic problems, which were part of a global trend...
Perhaps not. But I always thought that the purpose of society was to mitigate and compensate for global trends to reduce suffering, not grinding one's stylish pumps into the down-trodden public's face.
And for curiosity's sake, what started that world-wide decline? Deregulation in Britain and the US, union-busting, tax cuts....all the neoliberal crap that Saints Maggie and Ronnie imposed upon the West against our wills. And as for that radio contest:
Ben Cooper says the decision is a "compromise" but not a "fudge"...The BBC has defended its decision not to play in full on Radio 1's Official Chart Show a song at the centre of an anti-Baroness Thatcher campaign.
A five second clip of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead will be played in a news item on Sunday's show. BBC Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said the move over the Wizard of Oz film track had been a difficult compromise. He said he had to balance respect for someone who had just died with issues around freedom of speech.
Sales of the song, from the 1939 musical starring Judy Garland, have soared since former Prime Minister Lady Thatcher's death on Monday, aged 87.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Cooper said: "You have a track which I believe is disrespectful. It is not a political track, it is a personal attack on an individual who has just died. But on the other hand, if I ban the track then you have arguments about censorship and freedom of speech. I also took into account the very difficult scenario of the fact there's a grieving family involved here who have yet to bury a loved one. So those sort of elements were in my thinking to come up with this decision that I would play not the track in full, but a clip of the track within a journalistic environment."
The single is set to take the number three spot in Sunday's countdown, according to the Official Charts Company.
Meanwhile, a serving police officer who posted offensive messages on Twitter following Lady Thatcher's death has resigned. Sgt Jeremy Scott, of the Metropolitan Police, is reported to have written that he hoped her death was "painful and degrading". Scotland Yard said Sgt Scott's resignation was accepted with immediate effect. The Met's Commander Allan Gibson added: "This officer's behaviour was completely unacceptable and it is right that he has resigned."
In his BBC blog, Mr Cooper explained that - as controller of Radio 1 - there were times when "you find yourself caught between a rock and a hard place". And the corporation released a statement, saying: "The BBC finds this campaign distasteful, but does not believe the record should be banned. "On Sunday, the Radio 1 Chart Show will contain a news item explaining why the song is in the charts, during which a short clip will be played, as it has been in some of our news programmes." BBC director general Tony Hall said: "I understand the concerns about this campaign. I personally believe it is distasteful and inappropriate. However, I do believe it would be wrong to ban the song outright as free speech is an important principle and a ban would only give it more publicity."
The original song was performed in the Wizard of Oz by characters celebrating the demise of a much-hated witch.
Rival campaigns are under way to get a song considered to be more favourable to Lady Thatcher into this week's countdown as well.
Like what?
Rules mean nothing
they've destroyed all the rules. Soon, the Law of the Jungle will prevail. What are they gonna do, throw worthless pieces of paper at the mobs? When all their hangers-on desert them, there will be no security, no safety, no escape.
It sucks to be stupidly greedy. It's a death sentence that wipes out entire families.
They may be "clever" short-term, but not long-term
and nobody is "clever" enough to repeal natural law.
The 1% has been kicking this can down the road for several decades, depending on when you start counting. What cannot continue, will not. And this is one thing (a big con game/ ponzi) that cannot continue.
And the people with paper assets (and that's the 1%, with a little bit in the rest of the population) are going to become paupers. They will lose their wealth on paper, their cushy jobs and golden parachutes, their stocks and bonds and tax loopholes.
As the chaos continues, they will lose a whole lot more, and they will not be prepared to deal with it, having lost the basic survival skills over several generations.
They will be lucky to stay alive, frankly, because they will have mortally wounded so many people, that "natural" selection will occur.
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse DAVID GRAEBER MUST READ!
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide#.UV706VJxLI8.twitterWhat is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille. At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.
Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt, just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the “world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,” which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as for Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political liberation, whose most lasting legacy will likely be the birth of modern feminism.
Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: that it’s necessary to lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.
Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. The world revolution of 1968, in contrast—whether it took the form it did in China, of a revolt by students and young cadres supporting Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution; or in Berkeley and New York, where it marked an alliance of students, dropouts, and cultural rebels; or even in Paris, where it was an alliance of students and workers—was a rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, or anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing of not just political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem....
What Cannot Continue, Will Not Continue
QED: Vietnam War, Corporate Domination of the World, Imperialism, etc.
If it isn't life-affirming and equality-spreading, it will fail; guaranteed.
And all that we have learned from the 60's has not gone away...our grandchildren are listening avidly. And they are going to synthesize their present and our past, to make a future worth having.
Weekend Economists Give Two Thumbs Up for Roger April 5-7, 2013
Ebert, who had battled cancer in recent years, died Thursday in Chicago, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He had undergone several surgeries to remove cancerous tumors from his thyroid and salivary glands, ultimately losing his jaw to the disease, and was hospitalized in December for a broken leg. While his cancer diagnosis and the resulting treatments forced him to pull back from criticism in 2006, he remained active as a writer and maintained a powerful presence on social media sites that included his award-winning blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal. Earlier this week he had announced that he would be stepping back from writing reviews. In May 2008, he had returned to writing movie reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times but essentially said goodbye to the TV show that made him famous. Cancer had robbed him of his voice, and Ebert refused to face another surgery that could restore it.
As the longtime and prolific critic for the Sun-Times, he wrote reviews while co-hosting -- originally with Gene Siskel of the rival Chicago Tribune -- a popular nationally syndicated TV show that, in the 1980s, was known as “At the Movies.”
Ebert was the first movie critic to win journalism's most prestigious award, collecting his Pulitzer in 1975, but he had the greatest impact through his TV forum, which began that same year on Chicago public television.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-roger-ebert-dead-20130404,0,2960510.story
Already volumes have been written in tribute to Roger Ebert, and as I have no knowledge of ever reading or seeing his reviews (when your life is confined to the PG world, a lot passes you by), I am counting on loyal readers of this thread to fill in my ignorance with their well-earned competence.
And while we are at it, we can review the economic fantasies of present-day story-tellers!
Have at it, Weekenders!
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