[down on the farm] and all that

About bloody time.

[liberty] precious commodity increasingly rationed

There are those who smile at this statue being represented as an icon of personal freedom. That's for you to decide.

I think it was my old mate Simeon Strunsky, in 1944, who said:

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly...

... and this can be taken for various dialectics as well, for example the Hegelian, which is nearly always misrepresented, as stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus ...

... a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis which contradicts or negates the thesis, the tension between the two resolved by a synthesis.

This, in turn, also gives rise to an interpretation which some are wont to call the Hegelian dialectic, which states that governments and virtually any higher body who want to bring in some policy do so via a threefold progression:

1. create a crisis;
2. people demand a solution;
3. government propose a solution which includes the policy they wanted in the first place.

In turn, this idea can be refined to read this way:

1. think of a policy you want, e.g. ID cards and the restriction of personal freedom;
2. go to a group of people designated as the baddies, known for going off the deep end easily and stir them up on their home patch;
3. when they commit atrocities, which somehow they most surprisingly get past your defences to do:
4. wait for the community reaction;
5. draft general draconian laws to counter the perceived threat;
6. thereby put in place that which you wanted in 1. above.

Governments are only the outward manifestation of the people of power behind them. Many of these people take the point of view expressed by Hegel himself, this time correctly quoted from 1830:

Only in the state does man have a rational existence ... Man owes his entire existence to the state and has his being within it alone.

Needless to say I reject this utterly or if not utterly, in large part. Such a philosophy gives rise to tyranny and the constant attempt to reduce the common man to a serf and a malleable serf and that is what we're seeing right now.

Whether you are a businessman just needing the right to trade freely or you are an individual just needing the right to express your opinion without being vilified by powerful lobbies or incarcerated by the state, the desire is the same:

Liberty.

[interim report] die is cast

There are two issues - what the heck I was going to do if I was to be turfed out of the country by the new law and how to stay alive with at least one meal a day for the next few months.

The first has been resolved in principle through a very kind offer from one of our bloggers and that will be publicized as soon as it can be brought to fruition. This blogger and I will make a joint report to our regular readers as and when it happens next week.

There is still a battle going on this week at this end to try to get immigration to reverse it's stand.

The second, the financial side - I have a stay of execution for now but it looks uneasy. Having had June/July taken away [my main earners] plus not being eligible for my holiday pay now, with this neat little new regulation in place, I have to be working and earning.

Three bloggers have suggested I put up Paypal on this site but I've resisted that, reasoning that if I go into hiatus, no one is going to donate to a dead cause. It's more appropriate to assure close people here that any largesse on their part is a loan I'll repay as soon as I'm earning in a new place.

So there's enough to leave here but not enough to go on after that and it might be necessary to do something through this page for a short period until the first pay comes in. Also, the longer I survive, the greater the chance of unlocking the frozen funds back home and that would solve all problems.

So I'm loathe to ask for now as any incoming money is a debt I'll have to repay later. Those kind bloggers who offered - be careful as I might ask for your help next week in a new place. I'd like to openly say here [and will e-mail you personally later] that your kindness has been touching and somehow I think this thing will be traversed though hardly resolved.

May I keep those offers as a rain check please?

I tell you one thing - if I do get set up again, you're going to be invited as an honoured guest as soon as I'm able.

[thought for the day] monday evening

“It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.

"So it is."

"And freezing."

"Is it?"

"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.”

[defence of the realm] two stories

First one from Australia:

One of Australia's national heroes is Simpson with his donkey.

Ninety-three years ago today, Private Simpson was killed ferrying wounded soldiers to safety from the front line at Gallipoli, under enemy fire. [He was] fatally wounded in the chest by Turkish gunfire on the morning of May 19, 1915, and was buried at 6.30 that evening at Hell Spit, on the southern end of Anzac Cove.

His commanding officer at the time, Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Sutton, recommended him for the country's highest military award. The day after Simpson's death, Colonel John Monash, then the commander of the Australian Imperial Force's 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, sent a submission to Australian and New Zealand Divisional Headquarters.

So what's the problem? Give him the VC. Not so fast says the Labor government's tribunal. Hero or no hero, he lacks the correct documentation. He:

"must be supported by signed statements of at least three eyewitnesses of the act for which the award is recommended. These statements should be on oath."

Oh that's easy. Let's dig up the remains of three ANZACs from 1915, get them along to the tribunal and they can swear an affidavit to the effect that Australia's national hero is actually Australia's national hero.


Second one from the U.K.

Last year the head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, warned that a lack of public appreciation for Britain's military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan was in danger of "sapping" the willingness of troops to serve on dangerous operations.

Now:

Gordon Brown is said to have accepted "virtually all" of the suggestions in the National Recognition of the Armed Forces review, led by Quentin Davies, the former Tory MP who defected to Labour last summer and was asked by the Prime Minister to look into ways of restoring the public image of the military.

He proposes a bank holiday to recognize the military. Good stuff, you say. Sorry to be mealy-mouthed about it but can you see the photo opportunities for Brown as he puts his hand on his heart and makes a speech about how much he has supported the military in Iraq and how he is all for them?

[most influential] post war era

It's a simple enough question but almost impossible to answer - which individual has had the most influence on humanity worldwide since WW2, such that if they had not been around, human history would have had a significantly different outcome?

[interim report] end of sunday

It's time for another interim report but I don't really know what to tell you this time.

I'm right in the middle of it all at this very moment, there is most certainly light ahead but as my friend said today - I'm walking through a minefield which could blow up at any second.

One way or the other the saga ends on May 31st.

Today my two closest people here spent time with me and we looked at the ramifications of each course of action, how far we could rely on each possibility and looking at the short, medium and long term.

We analysed the situation generally in this country and what looked likely to happen.

Out of it all, apart from coffee overload, came a pretty clear idea of the course to take. Fortunate indeed if you have friends like these and like those who have been communicating by e-mail.

I'd like to thank you also for your well wishes in comments. In terms of this blog, there will necessarily be a hiatus around May 29th but if all goes well, it will be back again, maybe within a few weeks. Either way I'll get a message to you about what I'm up to.

With details still up in the air it's best not to say any more at this point.

[which firearm] is it a no-brainer?

You're on the run from baddies, you stumble upon a munitions room and these four below are your only choices - which do you choose and why?

The magazines for the Beretta 92FS chambered in 9mm are able to be utilized by the Cx4 (also chambered in 9mm). This aids in a smaller loadout.

The Five-seveN® comes standard with 20-round magazine, fires the 5.7x28mm SS190 Ball round which reliably penetrates Kevlar helmets and vests as well as CRISAT protection and has extremely low recoil impulse results in virtually no muzzle climb, thereby facilitating fast and controllable follow-up shots.

The 1911 remains popular because it’s an efficient tool. In more than 30 years of experience, I’ve met more competent, serious gunmen who carry 1911’s than those who pack any other handgun. They are professionals – policemen, government agents and others who carry handguns daily because the know their live may depend on it…

It is one of the few submachine guns that can consistently provide stopping power against armored targets, and has a significantly longer range than submachine guns using the 9 mm Luger Parabellum cartridge. Additionally, the UMP9 is almost 0.45 kg lighter than the 9 mm MP5.

[thought for the day] saturday evening

Methinks 'twould be wise to heed the writing on the wall.

[light blogging] and the case of the disappearing breakfast

Mine is meatier

Light blogging this morning, not for any "problematic" reasons but because I have five clients today - work goes on, even if other things don't. :)

Plan to blog later.

Of greater concern is that I lost my breakfast. True. I made it all right - just a sort of soupy thing with mince, buckwheat, cabbage and peppers in a tomato-ey sauce but it's tasty and I didn't want to lose it.

Went to the living room - nope, not there. Not in the kitchen, not in the hallway. Ah, I was absent minded, I thought - it'll be in the loo. Nope, not there.

Hmmm. I'll tell you if I ever find it. Plus the toast just burnt writing this and it's sitting there on the board now, black and fuming. I apologized to it.

Now where is that soupy thing?

[thought for the day] friday evening

Tomorrow is a new day.

[systemic failure] trumps all

There are analogies everywhere.

Captain Blackadder is unprincipled, intelligent, scathing and lives on his ability to get out of scrapes. Just how he ends up in a WW1 trench at the Somme, ready to go over the top on the order from above is largely due to systemic failure and the dislocation of people who might have helped him, being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being maddeningly unaware of the real situation and how little time is left.

No one is specifically down on Blackadder but as he discovers - every avenue he tries, every string he pulls, every favour he calls in - they all come to nothing. For example, having already dismissively discussed the old chestnut of sticking two pencils up his nose, putting underpants on his head and saying 'Wibble', as a means of escaping the front line on the grounds of insanity - he has a much better plan.

The general owes him a favour. This is his very last chance and he manages to get a call put through from the front line where he is. Naturally the general is not impressed and says they're now all square - here's some advice on how to escape - stick two pencils up your nose, put underpants on your head and say 'Wibble'.

With his last chance gone, he resigns himself to his fate.

Similarly with Hillary, whom this blog has mercilessly berated - now today I feel some sympathy for her. Even with a few victories under her belt, including the last triumph, nevertheless the die has been cast and she is being dragged inexorably to the due date of the convention where she just does not have the capacity to reverse the result, barring a miracle, despite substantial support from certain well placed sections of the community.

That was me today. My main support could not move without a report from the man who had promised him that he'd help - this was two weeks ago in a total time frame of four weeks. Still today the report had not come through so MMS phoned him, puzzled. Oh the man hadn't understood he was meant to help - he only thought he was finding things out in general.

Mad scramble, phone calls left, right and centre at the highest echelons - all willing to help but alas, system wise, now too late. Direct line to the one man in the country who really does have the power to help. Away on holidays and had extended them to the end of next week. So powerful people willing to do what they could but the other end of it just not in town.

And even if it does, by some miracle, produce an eleventh hour extension of time past the end of May, which technically it now can't, requiring representations to Moscow which take up to a month - even if that did happen, it would buy another week or two.

Cut to the Higham story. He came over here years ago and unwisely risked all on one throw for one particular lady. Someone in Germany thought it the most romantic story she'd heard [more exciting than the book actually puts it]. Heady days with huge risks, all depending on remaining here and looking as if it would be successful. Life on the edge and intoxicating.

It wasn't successful though but Higham still found himself in a position where he could survive, he increased his business round town and as long as he remained local, there was more than sufficient coming in to have a quite reasonable life, depending entirely on word of mouth connections. Everyone gave him to understand that this was their desire too - that he remain - so foolishly he sold up overseas, no family now alive and consolidated here.

In short, there was absolutely nowhere out there to go but multiple choices within this town. This year, as a result of various setbacks and with his partners all doing stints overseas for a number of reasons, the margins were very fine, coming into the summer. But that hardly mattered as he was in a secure position in an inexpensive country and June/July are the traditional months where the finance rolls in.

This flat for example - his as long as he remains but the moment he goes, all equity gone - nothing leaves the country with him except his pack.

That's why suddenly today he saw the end. Booted out ten days from now, cut off from his local supply lines, no access for legal reasons to his western money, nowhere to go out there, having consolidated everything here, end of this blog, end of these friendships, end of local friendships - a new life on the run. Exciting for a 30 year old except that he's not 30 anymore.

And there it is. One can only laugh and with one overriding nightly theme - that Higham has a date with an airport twelve days from now [eleven days tomorrow] and nowhere beyond that in any sustainable way.

Not entirely true of course. Certain blogfriends [three of them] have made kind offers and they would be lovely but the operative word is "sustainable" and to return to first person, singular, I can't drop myself on someone else for more than a few days simply because I was foolish enough not to provide myself with an escape route.

Sleep now.

[church rises] tourism in a drought area

Reuters reports:

Perhaps the most striking image of Spain's drought, so severe it has forced Barcelona to ship in water, has been that of the underwater church which emerged from a drying dam.

For most of the past four decades, all that has been visible of the village of Sant Roma has been the belltower of its stone church, peeping above the water beside forested hills from a valley flooded in the 1960s to provide water for the Catalonia region.

This year, receding waters have exposed the 11th-century church completely, attracting crowds of tourists who stand gazing around it on the dusty bed of the reservoir.

Like it. Like it very much. Might pop over for one of the services. Would they be praying for rain?

[friday caption time] would like to have one of these

[facebook] the social network war

Facebook has banned Google's Friend Connect access to the Facebook API, saying:

We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

Oh, that's a good one. As Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch says:

Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn't involve openness or portability of data, it seems ...

Arrington adds, tongue in cheek:

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google's Friend Connect.

This is how it has been described:

Facebook announced its Facebook Connect, what it calls the "next iteration of Facebook Platform," which allowed third-party developers to develop social applications for the site. When it is rolled out ---also "in the coming weeks"-- participating sites will be able to share Facebook users' friends lists, their "real identities," photos, and videos.

There's a fine line between being supercautious and paranoid but this blog feels there are legitimate issues. Daviswiki gives a run down on some of the privacy issues ...

Facebook is commonly referred to as Stalkerbook, due to its many features that allows you to track people in your network, especially when you are friends with those people.

And Ian Parker said:

Just remember who funded the building of Facebook and why it is there.

It was funded by DARPA's Information Awareness Office, and is there to collect information about you and build a profile on you.

Thats why they don't like pseudonyms.

In an article on the organization some time back, Ian Grey commented:

I've deactivated. I did [this] after reading your first post and a bit of surfing about the dodgy stuff. This is when I realised I couldn't actually unsubscribe! I'm Still in LinkedLn and MySpace though.

Longrider summed up my thoughts when he commented:

As mentioned on your other post, I have never signed up to this "service" - nor have I signed up to MySpace. Nor will I ever. It's easy enough, should one try, to find out my real identity, but I reserve the right to publish under a pseudonym. And, frankly, any organisation (remember Blogburst?) that claims rights to my material can take a walk.

Given this organization's antecedents, given that it is an information gathering and disbursing machine to "trusted third parties", given that there is no unsubscribe function and given the really intrusive nature of the questioning they do on you, in a jaunty style of language, e.g. "what's the story here', it seems most unwise to allow any but the most perfunctory details to go to them.

At best you're going to be spammed. At worst, you are on a giant database to be used at their discretion. At least it is to be hoped that they're not incompetent, like these people:

Even if we ignore/excuse the massive amounts of lost data already by this government as institutional failings of the system and processes of the Civil Service rather than government ministers, these last two cannot be explained away like that.

Thunderdragon then goes on to explain.

[thought for the day] thursday evening

Possibly not the most intelligent decision, beneath a conceivably descending scimitar, to indulge in Leonard Cohen:

As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked -
Do not choose a coward's explanation
That hides behind the cause and the effect

Ha, ha, how did he know that? So, in lieu of an operational net connection, whisky and Cohen is a heady brew:

I was pretty good at taking out the garbage
Pretty good at holding up the wall
I'm sorry for my crimes against the moonlight
I didn't think the moon would mind at all

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I’m very sorry, baby, doesn’t look like me at all

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet.

I wish you all good evening and see you come the day.

:)

[interim report] indecisive signs

This post is specifically for the friends who have shown a kind interest in my situation of the past three weeks and its denouement today.

The news is that there's no actual news but most definitely some signs. Three or four of us are reviewing those signs right now, trying to see if they indicate anything. Various representations were made on my behalf and I have no way of knowing how they went.

However, this morning I was asked to submit all my documents [passport etc.]. That's all. This is being viewed by some positively but it could equally mean that they want one final look before definitively saying no. I'm being advised not to think this way.

The other move is that the Min will be in town tomorrow and wants to see me at 2. That also could be a good or a bad sign. So the fact that the authorities have been so swift - they promised to give an answer some time today or after today and asked for the docs first thing this morning - well best to just wait until tomorrow and put it out of mind in the meantime.

Another problem which has cropped up is that there is something wrong with my internet connection. Either it is the provider or it is what the Mac says - a problem of the port connection. Hope it's the former but it means I get internet for a few minutes only.

Therefore this has been pretyped and posted quickly. I'll try to come back with a thought for the day later but apologize that I haven't been able to check any mail today.

Plus we've had no hot water in our house for a week and no one knows when it will come back but the good news is that the lift has started working again. Lovely cool 8 degrees today with hail and 25 knot winds.

More later if the internet works.

[thought for the day] wednesday evening

At 50, everyone has the face he [or she] deserves.

[George Orwell]

[blàr chùil lodair)] let's reenact it, shall we?

The Quiet Man does some interesting things and one of them is:

I've just been to see a re-enactment of the Battle of Olney Bridge, a battle in the English Civil War.

Well that's lovely, TAOQM but that got me thinking - if you, dear reader, were to re-enact a classic battle, which one would it be? For me it would be Culloden, not through any dislike for the Scots, mind but because I once saw Billy Connolly re-enact the Highland Charge all by himself and thought that was worthy of an accolade.


Overview of the battle

The weather was very poor with a gale driving sleety rain into the faces of the Jacobites. The Duke's forces arrived around mid day and initially deployed in three lines. Upon observing the ground and rebel dispositions, the Duke thinned his army to two lines.

It began with an artillery barrage and the Jacobites were under heavy fire. Although the marshy terrain minimized casualties, the morale of the Jacobites began to suffer. Several clan leaders, angry at the lack of action, pressured Charles to issue the order to charge.

They did eventually do this and even reached British forces and then in a total of about 60 minutes the Duke was victorious.


The Highland Charge

One of the most fearsome aspects of the Scots was this all out charge and:

The government troops had finally worked out bayonet tactics to challenge the dreaded Highland charge, [supposedly learnt from the Blackwatch, the original Highland Regiment in the British Army], and broadsword. The Jacobites lost momentum, wavered, then fled.

It was done this way - as a row of Scots would reach the government troops, each of the loyalists would thrust his shield out front to counter his immediate man but would jab 45 degrees to the right, behind the shield into the Scot diagonally opposite.

It was surprisingly effective.

So what's your battle you're thinking of re-enacting?

[travel] five to try before you die

The danger, coming up to a possibly enforced overseas trip in peak travel season on no money, [just don't want to contemplate that prospect today], is not to be negative.

So when I read this piece on cliched holidays:

Finally, you round a corner, fight off a few more touts in your crap Italian, and there it is: the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Oh, and a large grassy area... Filled with about 10,000 of your closest friends... Each taking their own "hilarious" shot of their Contiki tour buddy pretending to prop up the falling tower.

... after shuddering a little, it seemed best to go the opposite way - go positive. Here are five travel things, IMHO, it's probably essential to do at least once before you get old:

1. Tick off some of the essential places - London, Paris, New York, Rome and their environs;

2. Safari of some kind either in Africa, the north of Australia, the Gobi, wherever;

3. Some sort of spiritual journey - either to the land of your forefathers or to the Holy Land - some sort of pilgrimage in the Chaucer tradition;

4. Some activity based trip, e.g. skiing in Kitzbuhel, hunting in Namibia, whatever;

5. The grand tour or luxury cruise - saved up for, transported to far off lands, all facilities laid on. Just the once, mind. Mine was the Grand Tour of Europe.

One we particularly enjoyed, sharing driving duties, was to hire an open-topped Megane and tear all over Tenerife, particularly at the peak, way above the clouds. That took some beating.

Some other ideas were advanced here.

Our Richard Nixon

Martin Kelly writes:

At times, Simon Heffer is a very nasty and aggressive journalist whose efforts invite easy ridicule.

His hatchet job on Boris Johnson immediately prior to to the London mayoral election conveniently omitted to mention his own role in fomenting one of the greatest crises of Johnson's career, and how Johnson's actions might have shielded him from his due measure of public opprobium.

Yet, in yet another of his tedious attacks on David Cameron's apparent lack of ideological purity - the intensity and regularity of these attacks make one wonder whether Heffer is either an obsessive or just another petty authoritarian who'd have gone far on the Committee of Public Safety, one of life's natural park-keepers - Heffer stumbles across a possible key to unlocking public understanding of Gordon Brown.

With a typical lack of charity, he describes Brown as being, "a terminally wounded, uncharismatic introvert with a selection box of personality defects and you start to see the answer. " Indeed - he's from the same mental mould as Richard Nixon.

One doubts whether he cries in front of a portrait of Nye Bevan in the same way Nixon cried in front of Lincoln's; but just about everything else is there. Pity Heffer couldn't make the connection.

[pretty woman] and the world of asset stripping

If you're not in the world of business, it might puzzle you how the world economy has got to where it is. This article traces the beginnings of Sears through to its current sorry state and in so doing, affords us an insight into the mindset of modern business.

May I humbly suggest, regular readers, that even if this is not your cup of tea, it will reward your patience to read it through because it's not just about finance - it's about people as well:


As the United States spread west to the Pacific coast on its manifest destiny after the Civil War, it was the general store that civilized it. With so many small Western towns popping into existence in the late 19th century, the general stores were able to act as local monopolies, charging monopoly prices.

In 1888, Richard W Sears came upon the idea of selling his wares directly to the public through printed mailers, using the new technology of the railroads to circumvent the established distribution networks of the general stores, in much the same way as Amazon.com [today].

Sears, along with his partner Alvah Roebuck, soon developed a reputation for quality merchandise at reasonable prices [and] it was natural for Sears, Roebuck to shift its focus from mail order to actual retail stores. In 1925, Sears opened its first retail outlet, [and] by the end of the Roaring Twenties the company was opening a new retail outlet in an American city every two days

Looking ahead and projecting the tremendous outpouring of American population from the cities to the still nascent suburbs, the company started an ambitious expansion plan that placed hundreds of new Sears stores right alongside the new Interstate highways It also branched out beyond America's borders.

These were the halcyon days of homogenized American suburban middle-class conformity, when Sears was the number one retailer [leading to] the Sears Tower in Chicago in 1974.

But, as the children of the baby boom grew and moved out [they] demanded more personalized consumer choices.

The "me" generation of the 1970s [now] put their money first at Kmart, later at Wal-Mart; those that were willing to pay up for more trendy fashions did so at more upscale clothiers Macy's and Nordstrom's. Similar market segmentations occurred with the company's once-lucrative appliance businesses.

By 1991 Wal-Mart replaced Sears as America's leading retailer and has never looked back since. Sears, its stores consistently seen as stodgy and old fashioned, its "all for one and one for all" marketing philosophy seen as out of step with the times, lacking in "pop", settled into a graceful, steady decline.

That was the condition of the company in 2004, when it had the misfortune to catch the attention of modern turbo-finance capitalism.

Some people, when they see some poor unfortunate lying on the ground, help the person to their feet. Not modern turbo-finance; it saw Sears lying in the gutter, decided like a vampire that there was no reason why the very lifeblood should not be drained from it.

Edward S "Eddie" Lampert, a 42-year-old former Goldman Sachs bond trader, through his ESL hedge fund, established a 53% majority controlling interest in Kmart, which, in the futile attempt of trying to compete with the larger and more efficient Wal-Mart had bankrupted itself. Lampert closed stores and slashed jobs, restoring the company to operating profitability.

By 2004, Kmart's regular stream of income reached $3 billion [but] Lampert had no intention of plowing this sum back into the company, to modernize its dowdy stores, or, more importantly, its creaky supply and distribution system. He was going to use Kmart's cash stream to [help become] a younger, and richer version of Warren Buffett.

By early 2005, Lampert's ESL hedge fund was folding both Sears and Kmart into a single corporate entity, to be called Sears Holdings.

Overnight, Lampert became one of the titans of American retailing [and] in running perhaps the most fabled, trusted name in American commerce, Lampert gave every indication that he cared very little about the enterprise that others before him had labored over a century to build.

A fictional predator

Same-store, year-over-year sales, the key metric for retail success, have spiraled down month after month, quarter after quarter, even though the first years of Lampert's reign were a time of significant US economic growth.

Retail advertising budgets have been slashed. Funding for maintenance, upkeep and renovation for the stores have been cut way back; at many shopping centers, the Sears store is becoming more the mall eyesore than its anchor.

As for investing the capital to maintain healthy levels of inventory in both stores, so that customers don't find empty shelves when coming in to look for a product and then turn around and never come back, well, that's not all that important anymore, either.

You might think that [there would be] approbation and sanction from Wall Street.

Not true. During the first two years of the Lampert reign, the stock market adored Sears Holdings, up 15% in 2005, 47% in 2006. Had the stock market entered a dimension where bad corporate practices were now good, and incompetent management now adored?

In reality, what has been happening [is] that the operating expenses for both entities have been cut to the bone, in order to free up the billions that Lampert would use for hedge fund speculation at ESL, to generate large returns for the shareholders and keep Sears and Kmart alive long enough to bleed them dry.

Those were the days when the funds had discovered a very simple way to make absolute scads of money [but] things sure changed in 2007. Many of the hedge fund strategies [like] huge heavily leveraged bets on subprime mortgage paper, came up lemons last year. Sears Holdings' profits fell 99% from the third quarter of 2006 to the same period of 2007. The stock is down 50% from its high in April of 2007, as opposed to a less than 5% decline by the RTH retail index.

Lampert's ESL bought an $800 million stake last year in Citigroup, just before the subprime storm made landfall and now the stock went from $51 to $24. Herb Greenberg of the Moneywatch named Lampert as the worst chief executive officer of 2007; considering last year's competition, quite the distinction.

The sorry saga of Sears illustrates just how far distorted American ethics and values have become from exposure to the great credit and money carnival of the past few years. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," Karl Marx wrote in 1848.

In this case, nobody thought twice, nobody blinked an eye, when Wall Street took a truly unique American institution, Sears, and turned it from a fine, respected American society matron into a common streetwalker reduced to pimping through the night for Eddie Lampert.

Kevin Phillips notes that "By 2004-6, financial services represented 20 to 21 percent of gross domestic product, manufacturing just 12 to 13 percent."

Somewhere along the line, America got the idea that the buck generated from financial services was equivalent, or even superior to the same buck made actually making and sustaining something - such as the great brand Sears once was.

America's ... dream of endless wealth created through little or no actual work, [has met] reality. Very few observers think that Sears can survive much longer, still under withering competitive pressure from Wal-Mart and being bled to death by the likes of Lampert.

The old world charm of shopping where the prices were reasonable and the quality guaranteed - all that seems to have fallen to modern practice. From American diners to chains like Sears - do people really, truly, want to see all that swept away?

Does anyone care any more? Is this the sort of person we now revere?

A few words about Eddy Lampert from Time

No one has more faith in Eddie than Eddie. Which may explain why he's so comfortable leading Wall Street in the new world of high finance, one in which hedge funds like his and giant buyout firms are going toe-to-toe in the arena known as private equity. Lampert is part of the new breed of hedgies who have gone from passive investing to actively buying and managing firms to seek outsize returns.

Here we have a fundamental divide - the modern person concerned only with the online bargain and the catalogue, seeing nothing lost in the scramble for the dollar, living for efficiency and maximization of profit at all costs, the days of plastic and the chip, as against the person operating at a different level who appreciates quality of service, the friendly bank manager's one to one relationship, the passbook, the pleasure of shopping in a historic department store where the pride of the staff is plain to see and the presence of human values instead of pitiless self-interest.

I'm not naive enough to think that there was ever a halcyon era or that Sears were not motivated by profit but I'd argue it was not from profit alone - there was a certain pride in creating something from nothing and then maintaining it - the lure of the name or the plain common sense in shopping there.

Surely there is still a place in the commercial world for old-fashioned values; surely it can even make sound business snese. I'm given to understand that accountants interpret it as goodwill.

Eddie

[thought for the day] tuesday evening

There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.

[Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson]




Absolutely no invisible text this time - damn - you caught me.

[making ends meet] the bottom line

Wasn't his wife's enough for him?

[chicken little ] meet dr pangloss

It's everywhere - Citygroup writedowns and now:

France's biggest retail bank, Credit Agricole, is contemplating asking shareholders for 5.9bn euros (£4.7bn; $9.1bn) to help its financial position.

The move comes after more write-downs at its Calyon investment banking unit as a result of the credit squeeze.

Meanwhile, the country's second-largest bank, Societe Generale, said its own write-downs had led to a 23% fall in profits in the first quarter of 2008.

"The fact that they need another six billion euros of capital is worrying and I'm staying cautious (on the stock)," one Paris dealer said.

So how should we react? Sackerson quotes Michael Shedlock:

"The worst of the crisis in Wall Street is over," Buffett said today on Bloomberg Television.

Warren Buffett's mistake is not comprehending the magnitude of the derivatives mess, the magnitude of the fallout of the housing bust, and the magnitude of the fallout of a global credit boom now going bust. The economic reality is that this is closer to 1929 as opposed to 1987.

Don Boudreaux though quotes David Harsanyi who feels the important thing is:

Seeing past the Chicken Littles

Sackerson comments:

Well, many Chicken Littles make a Chicken Big, and she's coming home to roost.

Are you a Chicken Little or a Dr Pangloss?

[beer safe] buckle up now campaign

People are asking a lot of questions about this:

The man was pulled over on the Ross Highway, south of Alice Springs, about 3.30pm on Friday, when officers on patrol noticed the vehicle was unregistered and uninsured.

But what they found inside the car shocked them. Four adults occupied the car with two in the front and two in the rear seats.

[A] carton of beer was buckled safely in the rear centre seat between two adults, while the five-year-old boy crouched on the floor.

Here are some of the questions:

1. Was it XXXX or VB in the car?

2. Is Alice really going dry and where will people get their beer from?

3. Why was the slab unopened and buckled in? Why wasn't anyone drinking at the time?

4. Was the boy mistreated or was he hiding from the heat down there?

Personally, my drop of choice is lower right.

[google rankings] something strange here

JMB wrote of google page ranking and I'm more than grateful to google but I did a bit of a check:

URL: http://michellemalkin.com/
PageRank: 7/10

URL: http://www.order-order.com/
PageRank: 6/10

URL: http://iaindale.blogspot.com/
PageRank: 6/10

URL: http://devilskitchen.me.uk/
PageRank: 6/10

URL: http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/
PageRank: 5/10

Right, so these weren't the only people I checked and I was shocked. Firstly, look at the ones above me here - Michelle Malkin for a start, Fox on Sunday, known America wide, 220 000 hits a day - only 7/10?

The Britbloggers here - multiple times my visitors and known throughout the country. 6?

Next I went to another major UK blogger up with them in terms of stats and I'm not showing him as he came out the same as me and he'd be horrified - he's a huge UK blogger.

Then I went to some lesser bloggers and was shocked to see them also on 5. One of my best blogfriends from BP whom everyone visits on 0/10!! What? Or another major American blogger with "Comments 153" on one post alone - rated as 5/10. I shake my head.

Let alone people on 5 who really shouldn't be there while some others with top blogs are on 4 or 3.

How are the rankings calculated? I'm not actually arguing with the google machine as I'm sure it comes out as this score. Is it on photos or diversity of posts or what? If on photos, then someone showing a lot of totty would probably have a high ranking supposedly.

Or perhaps the bloggers who deal in politics don't get many google referrals due to the temporary nature of politics.

And while we're at it - a personal message for John Hirst:

Thanks, young man - you've made a grown man cry today. That's friendship for you. [Actually I didn't cry - bit of editorial licence there - but I did have a coffee!! Yes, that's the main thing.]

[presidency] just asking, that's all

Nothing really new except that it's interesting why she is continuing so tirelessly. I see two scenarios:

1. She just can't face that the numbers are against her and she's in debt;

2. She might be looking beyond an Obama defeat in November and contemplating running for the nomination in 2012.

Perhaps this latter is the real thing. On the McCain front, Ron Paul is planning to ambush McCain at the GOP convention and after the way he's been shut out by GOP and media alike, especially Fox, one wonders about it.

He seems like a man with nothing to lose and he's more than likely to tell some home truths. Much of what he's been saying is the truth though he shoots wide now and then - everyone knows but doesn't want to know.

You have to smile at what he wants - back to the gold standard, no Federal Reserve, small government and out of Iraq. On the first three - what chance against Morgan and the rest of them? The game's already locked up.

And his ambushing of the Nevada convention where they flooded the place with Paul supporters so that the GOP planned another convention somewhere else secret so that Paul supporters would not get to hear of it - talk about corruption in politics. Ha ha.

What a weird situation - if Paul was nominated he'd trounce Obama or Clinton, picking up disgruntled white democrats as well as real conservatives but the GOP would disown him and the Democrats would never forgive him.

Is he more than nuisance value now? Will people listen? Judge the two men for yourself in this head-to-head:

[indiana jones] latest could well be a dud

The latest offering in the relaunched Indiana Jones franchise may be a turkey:

A harshly critical review of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull appeared on aintitcoolnews.com last week from a poster who identified himself as "ShogunMaster." Rife with details from the film, the review said, "This is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading." The problem, said ShogunMaster, was the lack of tension.

"During the whole of the movie there was not a single moment that I thought our hero Mr Jones … was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it."

The man who posted as ShogunMaster said he is a cinema executive who saw the film at an exhibitors' screening.

I wonder if it is one adventure too far and immediately Arnie springs to mind in his third Terminator. While I personally liked that offering and thought that the John Connors and Kate Brewster characters were great and while Arnie held up his end and while Kristanna Lokan was a honey - still people didn't like it and it bombed.

When to stop? Perhaps we should ask Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger that.

[blog crawl] 2nd round for your delectation

Well, the last Blog Crawl seemed to go down pretty well so let's try it again.

The idea this time is to replace the initials with the actual words from the linked post. Let's try

Sometimes I like to msuh and sometimes I lrsomsr. To overcome this gfpbboc, sometimes I dboaes but I find tftdwywapmwi.

Fsrtacmu:

Better than all of these is to do absolutely nothing. Aycdwyltatbbymsp ...

Tnnttmftvi; idiaaps.

Answers

meander slowly up hills, love revamping some of my stalwart recipes, general feebleness punctuated by bouts of cruelty, drink beer on an empty stomach, total freedom to do whatever you want always paralyzes me with inaction, For some reason this cracks me up, Apparently you can do what you like to alleviate the boredom but you must stay prone... There's no need to thank me for this valuable information; I'm doing it as a public service.

[heraldry] quiz with a difference

Well, it had to come - I've been pfaffing round with this heraldry thing and you know know I do quizzes. So ... match the coat of arms and clues with the character. Simple. :)

Black and white is perhaps appropriate for a mathematician and all round clever clogs. He caused me enormous grief in geometry lessons at school and you can keep your calculus, thank you very much.

Another mathematician - though what a dolphin has to do with maths escapes me. Another all round clever clogs too but this time in the new world Boston boy.

A close look at the crest and helm should give its owner away immediately. Perhaps he should have included a pair of crutches in the design.

I really like this one and it's surely appropriate for the Rideau Hall incumbent.

It's a moot point whether it'll be his father or him. Hope he's recovered from the skull injury.











Answers

Rene Descartes, Ben Franklin, Paul McCartney, Michaella Jean, Prince William

[new mac] using it, it watches me

Oh I just love this one about a burglary of an apartment in New York, including a Mac owned by an Apple employee:

While police in White Plains, N.Y., were coming up empty with their investigation, Duplaga learned that her computer was being used on the Internet and turned on the Back to My Mac feature installed on her Mac from another Mac, according to the report.

The feature allowed Duplaga to see immediately how the computer was being used at the time, as well as operate it remotely. Recalling that she had a camera installed on the computer, the fast-thinking Duplaga snapped images of one of the burglary suspects before he realized what was happening, according to the Times.

Duplaga showed the image to friends who recognized the suspect as someone who attended a party at the apartment.

The longer I use my Mac, admittedly a 17" Tiger, the better it gets. For goodness sake, it even self-repairs. Together with the camera feature, Little Snitch and other goodies, it is constantly updating and the system is so easy to use.

The downside is that one needs to switch off voice control when there's a lady in your arms because sometimes the sounds are picked up by the green flashing receptor and tend to turn on a film or dance music or whatever.

Once the computer even took a snap unasked for. Need to adjust the controls methinks.

[strange] the adventure of the high diving scissors

Just had a more than strange experience.

We all misplace things and under pressure of time the brain does weird things. You know it - you could have sworn you'd done this or that when you hadn't, as subsequent events proved.


An example

Years ago, in Melbourne, I went to buy a fishtank in a street called Chapel Street. Parking the Honda hatchback just down from the shop, I had my things on the passenger seat as the tray near the window is useless when the car is moving.

As I often did, I took the bag and packets and all, went round to the hatch and deposited them in the "boot" under the cover, closed the hatch and went into the shop. Found a tank I liked and went back out to the hatch to get my credit card.

It wasn't there - neither in the bag or in any other place in the boot. Dismantled the boot, took everything out, searched near the spare wheel and so on.

Nope.

OK - closed the hatch, went back to the front and looked everywhere on the passenger side, on my side, under the seat, down the sides etc.

Nothing ... and so on ... and so on ...

Tried to think out some of the stupid things I'd done in the past to see if they'd shed a light on it.

No.

Went back to the driver's seat to collapse for a few minutes, glanced over and there it was - sitting on the tray nearest the window, the one I never used.


Today

Well, this starts months ago.

Lost a pair of black handled scissors at that time - simply couldn't see them anywhere in the kitchen where they live and assumed I'd taken them through to the other room. Drew a blank and wasn't particularly concerned - I had another pair.

Time passed, the cleaning girls hadn't seemed to have found them and I'd forgotten about the incident. Twenty minutes ago now I was in the kitchen getting coffee when I heard a slide down the side of the benchtop unit, glanced across and was stopped in my tracks.

Now this gets complicated.

On the bench, at that end, I have an open mug with tablets in foil for headaches, stomach or whatever. Above is the end of the shelving unit on the wall.

Sitting bolt upright in the mug were the missing scissors.

Had the scissors been perched on the shelving unit, fallen off, hit the side, done a reverse pike and softly landed in the thin china mug, moving the tablets aside and creating a space to reside?

And why now? There'd been no disturbance, no vibration. Plus those scissors could not have been up on the shlving unit as they'd last been used for cutting paper.

Also, the sound I'd heard was something going down the side of the bench unit, not from above.

I've just looked now and something had indeed slipped down - a tablet packet which had been sitting 10cm from the mug, which itself hasn't moved from its place.

Hmmm. Now that is more than weird.