Toadfish Monastery

John Frusciante - The Afterglow

Yeah, the problem is economics and finance, played for political reasons, soon becomes a zero-sum game.  You can only gain power at the disadvantage of others, and vice-versa.  If I become more powerful, and you stay the same, then what actually happens is that you've become less powerful, in relative terms, to me, even though from an "objective" viewpoint you may still be very powerful or rich or whatever.

Ah, game theory, your sociopathic prescriptions never fail to illustrate the worst in humanity.

Also, as Scriblerus mentions, they're not very smart, normally.  While they may be geniuses at getting production up, or creating new ways of packaging debt to sell onto other banks, or buying and bullying politicians into more deregulation, they're not big picture people, and they're often reacting to events they have little control over.  If anyone has read any of the books by Nassim Taleb about luck. randomness and the markets, they may know that many of those who work in the financial services have an amazingly narrow and short-sighted viewpoint, and yet believe themselves to be near omniscient geniuses, instead of lucky schmucks who have not (yet) got their comeuppance.

This is an excellent and highly informative article by one of my favourite American journalists, and I highly recommend anyone interested in the ongoing economic crisis should read it.  Matt Taibbi explains the political consequences of the crisis in bleak and easily understood terms:

QuoteThe reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

Full article at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print  Its fairly long, but worth it.

I know history, facts and other sundry topics are not Fox's forte...but have they ever heard of two little skirmishes called Paschendale and Vimy Ridge?  They were just two tiny, insignificant little battles in some minor border clash called WWI.  One is referred to as "the blackest day in the history of the German Army" (in reference to the Australian and Canadian troops who stomped 6 seperate German divisions) and killed so many at Vimy Ridge even the Germans didn't bother to count the bodies.

Besides, how many Fox anchors have fought in a war anyway?  Not including the paid Pentagon propagandists pretending to be independent analysts, and Oliver North aside?

Disbanding the army was a massive mistake, possibly the largest.  It essentially created the Sunni insurgency.  The second largest was disbanding the Ba'ath party.  Yes, the upper level members did need to be caught and stuck in a cell, but the fact is, in a one party state, all the clever and knowledgeable officials are going to be a member of...well, even Bush should have been able to figure that one out.

The mercenaries should have been told to stay in the Green Zone from the start.  People thought they were CIA...or Mossad.  It created a very bad impression, especially with their lax ROE.

More troops, full stop.

Different rules for how to interact with locals.  US and British troops distrusted locals from the start, they didn't engage with them and in many cases did not even speak the language.  No-one's going to risk their necks for people they don't care about.

Infrastructure repair being outsourced.  This was compounded by the insurgency, but bringing in outside companies to do the work gave more targets to the insurgents and helped increase the Iraqi unemployment problem.

Focus should have been placed on phase 4 of operations, that is the post-war reconstruction period.  Saddam's armed forces were a paper tiger and everyone knew it.  More so, experience in other modern war zones (Bosnia, Chechnya etc) has repeatedly suggested that the real fight starts once the official troops fade away.  In Chechnya, the rebels allowed the Russians to seize the towns, then turned them into shooting galleries once the occupation had started and their guard was down.  But of course, the Russian army was crewed by misfits, idiots and corrupt ex-Soviet generals and that would never happen to a real modern army, surely?

And of course, the obvious solution beyond all that is don't invade places unless its necessary.  Not only is that a far more ethically suitable approach, it also means you'll be doing a lot more to make sure you win when you do go to war.  Wars of choice are stupid wars, because they arise out of the luxury of options and thus are not treated as seriously by the political leadership of the time.

I can't recall a single black and white dream.

Then again, I cant remember what I dreamt last night either, so that doesn't really mean anything.  If I ever get the hang of this lucid dreaming business, I'll see what I can do.

Hi everyone.

So, uh, I really kind of suck at introducing myself, so I'll keep it short and sweet.  I'm 23, live in the UK, a currently unemployed international politics grad and I like stuff.  Lots of stuff. I've looked around yesterday and today ad I'm sure we'll all get on like a house on fire.  Screaming, emergency phone calls, damaged buildings, explosions...

Also, blame Scriblerus for my presence here.