Schleck has to attack, he knows that is his chance. Can Evans hold on?

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

For me, personally, this is not how it works. I can still continuously read something, for many hours. It has just become hard to do that while I am online.

I've never had a busier time here

... and yet I need to spend several hours tonight driving to Normandy and back to swap cars. As some of you know, we found our car with broken windows on the day of going on holiday, and the family ended up leaving using our neighbors' car. Now the car has been repaired, but the neighbors need to leave before the family comes back (and before I can go over there for a week-end),thus the need for a quick swap. You'll be happy that I've at least been able to find people to carry on the way and back, so at least I'm not driving alone.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Russian aggression towards Georgia fits the pattern of Germany's prewar tactics

From Prof Richard Pipes.

Sir, Peter J. Rooney (Letters, July 17) urges us to abandon the "insignificant statelet" of "tiny Georgia" to Russian aggression because its defence may lead to a military confrontation with Russia. This advice reminds me of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's willingness in the autumn of 1938 to sacrifice "tiny" Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany because it was a "quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing".

As it soon turned out, Germany's aggression against Czechoslovakia was a prelude to her invasion of Poland, which unleashed the second world war. Aggressive large powers tend to begin their expansion with "insignificant statelets" in order to test the world's reaction before going after bigger fish. I think Russia's behaviour toward Georgia fits this pattern. It should not be ignored.

Richard Pipes,
Cambridge, MA 02138, US

Hat tip to SRB.


"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

I will still call my reps from time to time and ask why they voted for indefensible bills and against good ones, but if they tell me lies about how they were protecting me, I will routinely say, "But since everyone already knows that's a lie, what's the real reason?"

In fact, I think we should have a postcard campaign in which we write to our reps and say something similar. "Dear ___ ____, When I called your office and asked why you supported the FISA bill, I was told that we need it to protect us and the new version protects our civil liberties. Since everyone knows that this is a lie, please tell me the real reason you supported it." (Copy it to your nearest local and national papers.) They won't answer, but they should be told they're not fooling anyone

Written on Sunday July 20

   The comprehensive bankruptcy of the United States, at every level, in all corners, atop each hill and mole-hill, and down not a few rat-holes, is preceding like some kind of hideous multi-media, inter-dimensional cosmic grand opera as produced and directed by the Devil. Every week, some bizarre new subplot is introduced by the stage managers, each turn and twist geared to produce maximum pain and carnage in the US economy, as if to foreclose any possibility of redemption on the way down. Well, the absence of hope is, after all, the essential nature of Hell (setting aside, for the moment, J.P. Sartre's quaint notion that Hell is other people).

what made him exclude himself?

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

The howler of the week was the Securities and Exchange Commission's edict that Wall Street sportsters would be prohibited from trafficking in so-called "naked short" sales against a cherry-picked bunch of 19 banks and financial companies for the next two weeks. A cute trick, naked shorting is done by pretending to borrow a bunch of stocks, pretending to sell them high just before the share-price falls, pretending to buy them back at a lower price when the share price has fallen, and then pretending to return exactly the same number of lower-priced shares to the lender, pocketing the difference. Real shorting is cute enough, and involves "clearing" the sales -- i.e. proving that real stocks were really lent and really returned. Shorting is helped along by generating rumors that a given company is in trouble, thus nudging share prices down. This works really well when a company already is known to be struggling, as many now are. In fact, it usually works best when a struggle turns into a feeding-frenzy -- as when a bleeding mullet attracts the swarming sharks. When this scam is run using odd-lots of millions and tens-of-millions of shares sharked up at many dollars each, the profits to be made in this sport is obviously huge.
     With naked shorting, however, the stocks being shorted are basically non-existent, imaginary, made-up, fictional, registered only as pixels in a program. It's a racket, pure and simple, run by both the supposed borrower of the stocks and the supposed lender and, more to the point, was wholly and absolutely against the law before the SEC declared a selective holiday from it last week. So, what the SEC action really demonstrates is the utter lawlessness reigning on Wall Street, and the SEC's singular unfitness as an enforcer of the laws, not to mention the criminal irresponsibility of the clearing authorities who only pretend to go through the motions of certifying the sales. What's more, the companies cherry-picked for immunity against shorting were some of the very companies believed to be most active in profiting off naked short sales against other companies.
     Thus, the credibility of all the authorities in American finance, including the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Paulson, the head of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Bernanke, the director of the SEC, Mr. Cox, takes on the aroma of week-old dead carp, while the affairs of American banking and business as a general proposition look to the rest of the world like a simple looting operation, reflecting poorly on the paper certificates that we use as "money" in the land of the free.

better stop now... there's more there...

"These days, there's nothing more ridiculous than the truth." Leonard Pitts Jr

'As the Bush administration proposes backstopping mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a $300 billion line of credit and Congress contemplates another economic stimulus, the question is who will bail out the government?

"People seem to think the government has money," said former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. "The government doesn't have any money."

A rare consensus has developed across the political spectrum that the government's own fiscal affairs are precarious, with an astonishing $53 trillion in long-term liabilities, according to the Government Accountability Office.

To put that number in human terms, the debt has reached $455,000 per U.S. household. As that debt grows, the United States increasingly relies on foreigners, including China and Middle East oil producers, for financing.

"The factors that contributed to our mortgage-based subprime crisis exist with regard to our federal government's finances," said Walker, now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a group established to raise alarms about the nation's budget. "The difference is that the magnitude of the federal government's financial situation is at least 25 times greater."

--

So what we have is again a pay-it-backward loan against our future, and again, a
huge transfer of public-wealth-to-private-coffers, after all, the gravey train of
public-to-private grift hasn't stopped since Dick Cheney started his 'little war'.

But back to the 'anchor'...

With mortgages now guaranteed by a Federal government borrowing against our future,
if indeed Congress is so prurient as to gift our blood to the vampiroyals of usury,
can you imagine the looming food-energy-housing neutron bomb that it will create?

bernard's burning out...

send him some love

"These days, there's nothing more ridiculous than the truth." Leonard Pitts Jr

Lovely city, I hear tell.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?