WARNING: unedited rambling rant-ish post ahead....
There was a very sad afternoon for my twin and I when we were kids when we spent a while at one of the more significant crossroads of the Trail of Tears thinking about what our forbears had done to the Native American population. Gaza brings up similar feelings for me -- there're just as many Arabs selling out other Arabs as there were Native Americans doing the same back then, and, just like then, the only rational conclusion for the native population involved is "game over, dude".
Peace talks so far speak of a "two state solution" and not only do not countenance any return of palestinian properties taken (these seizures are mostly known, right down to the street addresses), but also of no right to participate in any meaningful way in the Israeli population -- as the local Jews say "or else we'd be a minority in our own country". This's slightly different than our history here, when, even though our idea of America was a country of, by and for white people, there was plenty of land for everyone. Like the situation with Israel, though, the native population had already occupied the best land, so clearly that had to change. Palestinian Arabs are now squished into cantons, ghettos or reservations (depending on whose rhetoric you favor) that make the idea of a single continuous, autonomous and sovereign state as laughable as the pretext of Native American reservations' sovereignty that the government maintains today (Native Americans on "their" land can barely spit without BIA's approval).
The Native Palestinians are a conquered and defeated people existing solely where the Israelis chose to crowd them, with water rights solely when they don't contravene the interests of the steadily increasing numbers of incoming Zionists. The Fatah and Hamas organizations are flag-wavers on a sinking ship and the other regional Arab states who continue to throw the Palestinians under the proverbial bus so as to distract their own populations from their local tyrannies are well aware of this fact and are perfectly happy to see Palestinians slaughtered 10-to-1 (8.5 years of rocket attacks have killed 28 Jewish Israelis (the Israelis that Israelis care about), making the death toll from the current operation about 10-1 -- thus easily satisfying Blair's Law of Insurrection). Thus there's no hope of other Arab states coming to the Philistines' rescue to overthrow Israel (nor would Western "consciences" countenance an undoing of their solution to Hitler's "solution").
Israelis will never allow the Palestinians to co-habitate with them for fear of losing racial hegemony (the clear game-plan to satisfy "Never Again" being to maintain a country just for them plus just enough defanged second-class Arabs as are needed to clean their commodes), nor can any viable nation be pieced together from disconnected regions whose occupants enjoy no right of travel between them. The big question is: when are the Palestinians going to realize that the game is up, that resistance at this point is utterly futile, and that their only hope is to seek extradition to other countries where they can be taken advantage of in a new Arab version of the Grapes of Wrath?
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Friday, December 19, 2008
Nuff Said: FedEx
Damn. I'm impressed. Never heard of that in my life. Wow.
I'm impressed. Damn. Way to do it right....
Damn.
I'm impressed. Damn. Way to do it right....
Damn.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Lucky Bastards, All
Never say never, and never imagine that the "correct" course of behavior is always the one that will be rewarded.
For example: the upcoming resets in ARMs that everyone's been worried about, given the banking sector? No problem -- there's such a misery of doom & gloom and the flight-to-safety has been so strong, that for the moment, most folks with adjustable mortgages are about to get a discount, while those of us who 'did the right thing' and locked in "low" interest rates while Bernanke was inflating the money supply will continue to pay out through the schnozola.
So, independent of anything that the cretins in Washington D.C. would bring you, the natural business cycle's current supply of deflation is bringing mortgage relief to all the nation's household-roulette players, and of course, to my twin, the lucky bastard....
---
I almost wonder if this was the real reason for Bernanke's cranking the rate so low and turning the printing presses up to 11. Of course, anyone with savings will pay for it in the end, but since the net aggregate savings rate in the U.S. has been negative for many years, this'll likely mean that we're screwing over the Chinese and the Germans.
Bastards... Humbug, I say unto Thee! (c:
For example: the upcoming resets in ARMs that everyone's been worried about, given the banking sector? No problem -- there's such a misery of doom & gloom and the flight-to-safety has been so strong, that for the moment, most folks with adjustable mortgages are about to get a discount, while those of us who 'did the right thing' and locked in "low" interest rates while Bernanke was inflating the money supply will continue to pay out through the schnozola.
So, independent of anything that the cretins in Washington D.C. would bring you, the natural business cycle's current supply of deflation is bringing mortgage relief to all the nation's household-roulette players, and of course, to my twin, the lucky bastard....
---
I almost wonder if this was the real reason for Bernanke's cranking the rate so low and turning the printing presses up to 11. Of course, anyone with savings will pay for it in the end, but since the net aggregate savings rate in the U.S. has been negative for many years, this'll likely mean that we're screwing over the Chinese and the Germans.
Bastards... Humbug, I say unto Thee! (c:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Spin the Black Circle
I'm not generally a fan of flash games, as, in general, I'm vastly too time-constrained to be able to play games -- I know that makes me sound like a stick in the mud, but ten hour days at work plus 3-4 hours commuting plus 8 hours sleep leaves precious little time for everything else, and this means that weekends are busy from the week's stuff piling up to be dispatched.
That said, I have to recommend a game I stumbled across while waiting for some code to build: Spin the Black Circle. It's addictive the way that video games used to be. Apparently, they still make them like they used to....
That said, I have to recommend a game I stumbled across while waiting for some code to build: Spin the Black Circle. It's addictive the way that video games used to be. Apparently, they still make them like they used to....
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
And now for something completely different
UPDATE: Ok, cute impaired people, if that doesn't make your right-brains work, then how about these flying foxes that were separated from their mother after a big storm in Aussie-land?
Monday, December 01, 2008
FICO shoe to drop
As this link is stating, the big banks, facing the long-anticipated credit-card bust looming over them, are likely to severely cut available credit lines. Rightly so, given that in a financial panic those most likely to use credit are the least likely to be able to repay. But this will actually have a double-whammy on credit, since part of everyone's FICO score is the percentage of personal credit already used. Once credit lines are slashed, every holder of one of those lines of credit will get a commensurately lower FICO score, and, thus will not be able to borrow as cheaply as before.
Whether banks give a broad-based haircut to credit-lines, or base them on current credit utilization will remain to be seen.
Whether banks give a broad-based haircut to credit-lines, or base them on current credit utilization will remain to be seen.
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