^∞Fouroboros

[Update: Doh! Wrote this last night, posted this AM, before seeing: Nader to Jump in ... Memo to me: You know better. No betting on sanity returning to washed up do-gooders prone to kamikaze behaviour.]

Will Should Ralph Run?

Going out on a limb here: No. Still No.

Why? His tough-love object lesson of 2000 has not worked in exactly the way he thought. First, there's 9-11. Democrats have been dazed and supine, yes. But....

• $200 million-plus in fundraising
• not a single veto
• Secret Energy Plans
• Clean Skies
• Anti-science
• Invasions
• Occupations
• Intel manipulation and mishandling
• Patriot Acts
• Deficits of astronomic proportions, with the half-life of Plutonium

Bush's "yang" has far exceeded Nader's hypothetical "yin" and guess what Americans are saying: Dude, where's the Jobs? Or, "Shut up, I'm watching Joe Average." Short of tackling the American electorate and force feeding them spinach, what would Ralph's next prescriptive be? More object lessons that don't take? Abdication to a conservative mindset that only thrives in an environment with planes flying into buildings?

Maybe he will say, "Another Presidential run!" But here's the side effect of that medicine: George Bush will be a lame duck with a Republican Majority. A very peevish Republican Majority. That makes him an un-lame duck. You might say this confluence of attitude and rare circumstance makes him an avian predator at the top of the food chain. If Bush wins, Nader running or not, Bush takes that as affirmation of his self-perceived wisdom and leadership. Now, since the odds tell us another major terror attack is a case of when, not if, where does this comedy of errors called an administration take us if it occurs on their watch?

Republicans of late have tended to govern according to their character, not the national one, so I would say it takes us to Patriot Act III³: More centralization of control, or rather, the facsimile of control. The defacto nationalization of certain industries, if not, possibly in fact. This includes aggregation of communications data a la the system sweeps currently used by the National Security Agency's listening apparatus. Total Information Awareness becomes a necessary evil, demanded by "the urgency of the times." Transportation becomes the "weak link" in the nation's security. General Motors' "OnStar" Global Positioning technology becomes licensed and mandated for all vehicles certified for use in the US. Bundled with this technology will be transponders, similar to those used now in aviation. Resident in each vehicle, they will be "pingable" by law enforcement, perhaps just lamely sitting by the side of the road, transmitting the registration and background data of the owner and insured drivers, offering a gateway to accessing all information about the household to wwhich the vehicle belongs. Place of work, place of residence, patterns of travel cross-checked against a financial digital trail of spending wil create a behavior matrix against which your location will be checked. Out of position? Red flag. "What's your business here?"

Since, in times of war, environmental considerations can be easily portrayed as misplaced altruism, corporate regulations will be spun as antithetical to the greater "war effort". Restrictions will be supended if benefits to production can be proven. They can and will be proven, obviously.

Manpower takes on a new importance when battlements represent the face of your determination. Mandatory national service becomes the law. Deferments only on provable religious grounds will be allowed. Approved political and business employment becomes an acceptable means of alternate national service.

In the fight, religion becomes the aid and the enemy. Sanctioned definitions of good and evil are expanded to include "positive" and "negative" influences on national character and character building. These "Uninversal constants" are subject to periodic review and amendment. Religious education becomes paramount in schools because of the lack of "ethical standards" in teaching up to this point. As a virtuous tool, religion must also be refined so as to distill its most useful and beneficial elements and to ensure its quality delivery. To further assure efficiency and minimize misinterpretation, testing becomes the norm, both to teach, and to be a 'qualified" member of approved religious sub-groups.

Finally, in the War on Terror, content becomes key. Integrated communcation strategies, executed through all media channels become the accepted norm. Diversity of viewpoints are fine for select, internal policy and strategic debates, but cumbersome and counterproductive for mobilizing and energizing heterogenous groups of people. Simplicity is efficiency. Clarity is compelling. Repetition is affirmation. "Discontent" must be licensed and approved.

Needless to say, Ralph wouldn't like these things. But Ralph Nader's "Discontent license" application will be lost in the machine. So Ralph is screwed. As are we all. Why? Because Ralph wanted to make a point that imperfect is the same as inconsequential. In this, Ralph breaks bread with Grover Norquist in his petulance and egomania. In his anger at Mars, he destroys Venus. Only in Ralph's bathtub, Democracy and Democrats will have been euthenized. A uniquely American totalitarianism would be rosy-cheeked and entering puberty.

Ralph, just say No. I'm counting on you, Bud.

Conceit. But from whence?

In the post below this one, Pat Buchanan eviscerates Neoconservative arrogance, gainsaying and fumbling, noting "...they are the “neo-Jacobins” [what's a Jacobin?] of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit." He quotes Claes Ryn [HTML of PDF]

Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony....

Oh yeah?

When I read neocon flamers like Kristol the elder, or Leo Strauss, or Perle and Frum, the keening pseudo-American warrior-speak and testosterone spiced superficialities masquerading as grown-up policy mystify me to a certain degree.

Then, I hit myself in the head with a brick, and all is clear again.

Okay, it's a small brick. And sometimes hitting someone else with it does the trick.

Bear with me, there is a point to the example: How do some see so readily what's written on the wall, and others are numbed or blind to the signs? More specifically, and even more bizarrely, how do some see signs that are not there? Perhaps it's not simple conceit, but a pathological narcissism fed by deceit. Can our current mess find a parallel in medicine?

The child is a victim of maltreatment in which an adult falsifies physical and/or psychological signs and/or symptoms in the child causing this child to be regarded as ill or impaired. The perpetrator, who is usually a parent or caregiver intentionally falsifies history, signs, or symptoms in the child to meet their own self-serving psychological needs. Other members of the family may support and participate in the perception. [Definition under consideration by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.]

Eerie. Substitute country or countrymen for child in that definition and see how it reads. Switch policymaker or guardian of public trust for caregiver or parent. The above definition in this case describes a curious, yet not altogether rare affliction with a name only three decades old: Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Marc D. Feldman, M.D. : Kathleen Bush and Yvonne Eldridge had a lot in common. First, both cared for children with remarkably complex medical problems: Jennifer Bush suffered from constant intestinal problems, and Eldridge's two foster daughters experienced a host of ailments that left them weak and emaciated. Second, both Bush and Eldridge spent most of their time escorting their sickly girls from doctor to doctor: Jennifer was eventually hospitalized 200 times, and all three children had to undergo surgery to place feeding tubes into their stomachs. And third, both parents received the highest praise for their exemplary devotion to their little charges: Bush was lauded by Hillary Clinton at a 1994 White House rally, while Eldridge was named national "Mother of the Year" in 1988 by Nancy Reagan.

[ . . . ]

The term "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" (MSBP) was coined around twenty years ago, and hundreds of reports have appeared since then. In most cases, a mother either claims that her child is sick, or she goes even further to actually make the child sick. This "devoted" parent then continually presents the child for medical treatment, all the while denying any knowledge of the origin of the problem--namely, herself. As a result, MSBP victims may undergo extraordinary numbers of lab tests, medication trials, and even surgical procedures that aren't really needed. For example, by the age of eight, Jennifer Bush had had more than 40 operations, including the removal of much of her intestines. Other children have scarcely experienced a day of their young lives without being brought to the doctor's office or confined to the hospital. In the vast majority of cases, the perpetrator is the mother and the victim an infant or toddler.

The web of deceit the caregiver spins can be buttressed by medical signs and symptoms that mislead the most skillful of physicians. Their acting skills can match those of a veteran performer. For instance, the MSBP perpetrator might induce "apnea" (a cessation of breathing) by suffocating her child to the point of unconsciousness, then frantically display the limp child to the hospital or clinic staff as the tears roll down her cheeks. She may secretly place a drop of blood in the child's urine specimen, then appear aghast at lab results that alarm the unsuspecting physicians and nurses. Behind closed doors, she may scrub the child's skin with oven cleaner to cause a baffling blistering rash that lasts for months. Since it may take many years of illness for doctors finally to arrive at the truth, it should not be surprising that this form of child abuse has a mortality rate of nine percent.

Hey, I'm no psychiatrist. I just look for patterns and cycles in order to better do what I do for a living. In doing so I also discover quite often that very smart people miss very simple things due to innattention or attribution to coincidence. Or often, to an assumption that there must be some logical plan or explanation at work, somehow, somewhere. They think somebody else has it covered, or there would have been a fuss made about it--by somebody else. The Shuttles Challenger and Atlantis blew up for this reason. Companies go belly up for this reason. And yes, children die and grownups follow through on suicide for this reason.

And everybody says, "I had no idea."

As you can tell, I don't buy that, whether the danger is to the life of a child, or to a nation's conscience. I doubt you do either. Once, an accident. Twice, a coincidence. Three times, a pattern.

...and to the Republic Retribution for which it stands...

Love him or hate him, Pat Buchanan is neither thick-headed, nor does he suffer from moral inconsistency. He may be a grump, but he's an American Grump. On the other hand, I have no clue what country it is, exactly, that Neocons think they're from.

The American Conservative

No End to War -- The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”

The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.

An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” “What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained” now menaces “our survival as a nation.”

[snip]

To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”

In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.

In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.

[snip]

Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors insist she was.

[snip]

Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?

Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not.”

Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. “No war in ‘04” is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.

[snip]

Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.

If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.

[snip]

In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they are the “neo-Jacobins” of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.

Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint.

[snip]

But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.

With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.

And this one they’ve got right.

You go, Pat. 5 by 5.

Are you sitting down? Not drinking milk or anything, right? Okay, read this:

Toronto Star

'Heads should roll' over Iraq
Adviser wants U.S. intelligence chiefs to quit
Cites faulty conclusions on Saddam's weapons

WASHINGTON—Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed mass-killing weapons.... "I think, of course, heads should roll," [Perle] said. "When you discover that you have an organization that doesn't get it right time after time, you change the organization, including the people.

Yes

...you change the organization, including the people. We call them elections.

It must be truly fascinating to live in a world where things fall up.

Media : Sun ; Anger : Heat ; Dean : Icarus ; Tiger : Tail

WaPo BURLINGTON, Vt., Feb. 18 -- Howard Dean formally abandoned his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination Wednesday but vowed that his organization is "not going away" and would continue to seek change in the Democratic Party and the nation with the aim of defeating President Bush in the November election.

Oh yeah, I forgot . . . Idea : Execution ; Hope : Prudence

Let's hope Dean games out the next stage more wisely by understanding, and then balancing the righteous and powerful drivers underlaying his appeal: Go here to play around with what you might think that mix is.

BankOne^® + Citi^® = (Bank .0005^® * Bank .0032^® * 14,241 TiniBanks^®) - humans + More crappy service charges³

Seems that after a bit of a lull in the financial services M&A hunt, things are heating up for regionals in response to the newly humongoid BankOne/JP/Chase and BoA/Fleet consolidations in process. Forbes has a nice bit on some of the action in mid-Ohio and the middle Atlantic, handicapping prospects of merely hulking players like Suntrust in Atlanta, Iron City's PNC and Detroit's Comerica. (Curious who the nation's top 20 banks are? Go here. But be quick, it'll be stale by next Wednesday.)

I love these stories if only to see people torturing sports analogies or using terms like "accretive" with a straight face...

North Fork and Greenpoint, however, have thrown a curveball to the merger plate to create a highly accretive deal. The companies are planning to unify their boards, upper management and back-ends but keep both brands--North Fork will continue to focus on small to midsize businesses and Greenpoint will keep its eye on consumers and mortgages. They will be closing 15 out of the combined 270 branches while changing the brand of about 30.

In other words, it's a "smart" deal because a certain lesser number people are going to be issued bigger shovels to swing. It remains to be seen whether "Unify the boards" will find it's way onto WordSpy.com as a synonym for "outplace" or "retired in place". As an aside, I spent some of the last decade toiling for BankOne and the erstwhile Crestar, now Suntrust. For BankOne, the agency had a virtual swat team of transition marketing specialists to keep up with The Big House's voracious march across the Heartland. An acquisition was announced and we were there with friendly "don't worry, this is gonna be great for you" ads packaged and ready to go. The push obviously required a bit of hand-holding and the usual finding of a local, visible goodwill cause, if there wasn't one already, to paste the benevolent happy face on. It's amazing how many bits of stock advernutia you have to churn out and warehouse, ready for stuff like high school football brochures or county fair kissing booths. But every once in a while, you got to do something fun like a life-size backlight diorama for, say, the AmericaWest Center:

I'm just sayin....

American Film Institute’s Top 50 Heroes

1. Atticus Finch in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
2. Indiana Jones in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
3. James Bond in DR. NO
4. Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA
5. Will Kane in HIGH NOON

...like I was sayin' then...

1-20-04 Dean: Well that was ugly

Not the numbers, the speech. The numbers would have been fixable.

[snip]

Edwards by comparison seemed like RFK, or Clinton. Kerry seemed like Kerry, after a B12 shot, but still Kerry.

Youth, poise, message, modulated populist passion mixed with calming bedside manner . . . I'm just sayin', that's all.

6.5 on the Richter Scale. Epicenter: 2.3 km below Bush Country.

US Congress - Kentucky - 6th - Districtwide
(100 % of precincts reporting)

candidate______votes______% votes
Kerr-R . . . . . . . 65,776 . . . . . 42.9
Chandler-D . . . 84,549 . . . . . 55.2
Gailey-L . . . . . . . 2,957 . . . . . .1.9

CBS : In the nation's first federal election of 2004, Chandler became the first Democrat since 1991 to win a Republican-held seat in a special election. The win leaves Republicans with a 228-205 majority in the House, with one vacancy and one independent.

Some Democrats claimed the race in Bluegrass country, home to horse and tobacco farms, had national implications.

No. Ya think?

Onward ho.

Calling Lou Dobbs! Talking point for you, Dude...

Lotsa commenting and posting on outsourcing here lately. Good topic. Jobs are under pressure. All that retraining talk of the late 80s and 90s had rust-belters becoming computer nerds or CSRs and telemarketers only to now find that they've become geeks with student loans facing a dismal job market, again. You can't blame peope for thinking they got sold a pig in the poke by myopic, say-anything-to-get-past-this-situation business people and politicians. But one thing I haven't noticed being raised are the higher level implications of decoupling domestic jobs from corporate health.

C-Level executives are in danger of losing some vital artillery: Politically, companies and industries have used the "apple pie" fig-leaf of job creation to wheedle policy makers into tax cuts, tariff gymnastics, subsidies and free range on a lot of issues like the environment, copyright, safety regs, zoning etc. Viewed this way, Outsourcing has the potential to create the Grange Wars all over again. Don't laugh. If CEOs can only winge and moan about balance sheet health and the abstract need for their companies to survive, yet offer no domestic employment growth benefit to prove their American commitment and cement their standing in society, they're going to get a very rude shock in the next 10 years.

Welcome to the future, Masters of the Universe.


Yes, here at Fouroboros Worldwide we work on how to negate this Hobson's Choice, but hey, we believe in getting paid for our sweat too, eh? (Well, at least until certain Scroogy individuals around here can be convinced to cut loose with some of the good stuff.)