Martin Wisse – Page 532

The ruling class enjoying itself

Published on October 17, 2008

Barack and John, supposedly in mortal combat for the presidency, having a good time together. Some would call it a thriumph for the idea of democracy as fair play, but you can guess my attitude from the title. It’s just slightly sickening to see them clowning around while there’s so much at stake. Certaintly doesn’t improve my opinion of Obama, too much of a centrist stoge anyway.

But at least abortion is safe with him, there will be slightly less pressure to punish the poor for their poverty, perhaps even some modest measures to easen the burden of the working classes and of course no half senile, rage addict with his fingers on the button and an Alaskan ignoramus waiting in the wings.

Dear Wouter

Published on October 14, 2008

Dear Wouter, what do you think? 350.000 euro is not too much to ask, is it?

Well done. The plan you and Jan Peter cooked up with your colleagues this weekend worked a treat. Sure, it cost a bob or two, almost 250 billion euro by my account (17 billion to buy up Fortis & ABN/AMRO, 20 billion to safe guard saving accounts and now some 200 billion to make the banks lend each other money again), but it worked. The stock market recovered beautifully, with the Amsterdam stock exchange having its second best day ever yesterday.

Which brings me to the reason I’m writing you this letter. You see, it’s not just the stock market or the bankers that have lost their confidence in the Dutch economy. Yes, it’s true, even I have become gunshy due to the credit crisis. I was planning to build an extenstion to our kitchen while we were remodeling it, but these plans unfortunately already had to be dropped. I couldn’t raise the credit to do everything we wanted to do, nor did I want to run the risk of getting stuck with bad debts, especially now the interest is getting so high on them.

Therefore I would like to use your help in this crisis of confidence. Because you’ve done such a marvelous job for people who need much more than me, I’m sure you can also fulfill my modest request. What I’m asking for is almost a rounding error compared to the huge sums of money you’ve already given away to people who’ve done much less to stimulate the economy than I have done. All I need is a straight forward cash injection of 100,000 euros, plus a guarantee for another 250,000, just in case my mortgage supplier gets shirty.

Be honest: who’s more deserving of your support? The losers in the banks and credit companies who caused this crisis in the first place by wasting billions buying dodgy merkin mortgages, not to mention tens of millions on their hot shot stock brokers who told them these were good ideas? Or me and others like me, who’ve been working hard to keep the economy growing by working hard and doing our best to inject cash into the market through kitchen remodelings or by spending it on essential investments like that big plasma television screen I saw in the shopping centre the other day.

Yours sincerily,

Martin Wisse

P.S. In return for your support I’m of course more than willing to make a pledge not to ask for a salary higher than that your pal Balkenende, as you’ve also asked of all your public sector executives. Is the board in charge of your new state banks Fortis and ABN/AMRO also prepared to pledge this?

The Dead go Unburied! Where’s the outrage?

Published on October 13, 2008

Says The Mail on Sunday:

With undertakers unable to extend credit, some poor families are having to wait more than two months before receiving government help paying for funerals, the weekly tabloid said.

Bereaved families can apply to the Department for Work and Pensions if they can prove they are receiving state benefit payments and cannot afford to foot the bill.

Around 27,000 people per year receive cash for funerals from the DWP’s Social Fund, totalling 46 million pounds (78 million dollars, 58 million euros).

Where’s the outrage over this national disgrace? Where is the indignation about Britain having become such a third world nation it cannot even afford timely funerals for its decenthardworkingfamilies? The tabloids are quick to predict doom and gloom whenever a strike does even so much as mildly inconvience a sub-editor, with warnings about a return to the “Winter of discontent” when “the dead were left unburied”, but this time? Not so much. You’d think waiting times of more than two months rate more than just a small article in the Mail on sunday when the largely fictitious accounts of the late seventies are still trotted out as dire warnings thirty years later, but nary a peep.

But then this doesn’t concern the comfortable middle classes, as they all have decent insurance for this. And if it doesn’t happen to the middle classes, it doesn’t exist. People who are so irresponsible as to work a job on which they can’t even afford their own funeral have only themselves to blame. They should’ve become ~~merchant bankers~~ erm ~~stock broker~~ erm strike>estate agent never mind…

But still, 46 million pounds to pay for 27,000 funerals? That’s some 1700 pounds per funeral. Not exactly cheap, is it?

What We Say Goes — Noam Chomsky

Published on October 12, 2008

Cover of What We Say Goes

What We Say Goes
Noam Chomsky
223 pages including index
published in 2007

Noam Chomsky has been one of the most consistent critics of American hegemony and empire of the past four decades, maintaining a prodigious rate of output over the years as one of the few socalled public intellectuals who does not see his role as parroting received wisdom. His books, articles and interviews have always managed to explain in clear, understandable language how America and its ruling class keeps its power both domestically and abroad and particularly how it dictactes the boundaries of acceptable discourse. A measure of his importance as a critic of American power can be found in the vehemence of the criticism aimed at him by both conservative and liberal commentators. Despite their differences, both groups believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that America has a right, or even a duty to shape the rest of the world according to its own desires. What Chomsky has done for so long has been to show the reality behind “defending democracy” and “humanitarian intervention” and neither liberals nor conservatives like this.

What We Say Goes is his latest book, a collection of interviews he gave to David Barsamian about “U.S. power in a changing world”. It’s fair to say that there are few surprises here for those who’ve read his previous books, with the interview format used here precluding much indepth analysis. However, if you look at this book as an introduction to Chomsky and his concerns, What We Say Goes works fine. It’s short and to the point and as per usual Chomsky manages to cut to the heart of things quickly. He talks about all his usual obsessions — the way in which democracy and human rights are used against official enemies, the role of the US in the Middle East and South America, the role of the socalled free press in determining the boundaries of criticism allowed — and ties them together, with the interview format helping in keeping things rolling along.

A new ICE age

Published on October 10, 2008

Old spaceships don’t die, they just get parked in very long stable orbits to fade away, but sometimes what’s assumed to be dead is still there ready to serve us again, as seems to be the case with the International Cometary Explorer:

ISEE-3 was originally launched on August 12, 1978, as the International Sun-Earth Explorer to a halo orbit about one of the Earth-Moon libration points to study Earth’s magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Then, in 1983, it employed several lunar gravity assist flybys to send it on a new journey, for which it was rechristened the International Cometary Explorer, through the tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner. ICE approached within 7,800 kilometers of the comet on September 11, 1985. In 1986, it turned its instruments toward Halley’s comet, participating in the international observation campaign, and becoming the first spacecraft to investigate two comets.

[…]

ICE is actually on a return trip to Earth now; it’s in an orbit similar to, but slightly faster than, Earth’s, so measured relative to us, it’s taking a long, slow trip around the Sun. It will return to our neighborhood on August 10, 2014, targeted to return to the Moon, which is what originally launched it on this journey. A lunar flyby can recapture it back into Earth orbit, after which, Farquhar said, they are thinking of parking it in its original halo orbit again, from which they could launch it back out to explore more cometary targets.

So it returns home on my birthday, which is nice. There’s so much interesting stuff going unexplored in our solar system for lack of spacecraft, so it’s great to see a new purpose for an old soldier like this.

Found via Sore Eyes.