WB: Cheaper By the Dozen – Moon of Alabama

April 28, 2006

WB: Cheaper By the Dozen

Billmon:

But there are two sides to every gestalt, and you can also argue that America’s ability to dump $800+ billion into a hole in the desert without suffering a hasty financial and economic collapse (or even the kind of inflation seen during the Vietnam War) shows how enormously strong, and prosperous, the empire really is.

Cheaper By the Dozen

Posted by b on April 28, 2006 at 19:32 UTC | Permalink

Comments

“or even the kind of inflation seen during the Vietnam War”
I beg to differ, Billmon. The Gulf of Tonkin “incident” was in 1964. The CPI started to rise a bit just then but exploded after a faint trackback only in 1972/73, when the retreat was nearly finished.
The bill usually comes only AFTER the meal has been eaten.
For this particular historic U.S. foolishness we are just confronting the main course. Like in Real Men Go to Tehran.

Posted by: b | Apr 28 2006 19:46 utc | 1

Erily, verily, I say unto thee, the menu is not the meal. The word umbrella will not keep you dry. A model is only useful insofar as it is isomorphic to reality and epistemology…lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 28 2006 22:03 utc | 2

your dimona link seems to be working uncle. freaky.

Posted by: annie | Apr 28 2006 22:23 utc | 3

A little bird in the US military explained to me Halliburton-KBR had received from his commander a no-bid construction contract for a project his own estimators said should have cost only half what Halliburton billed them.
He shrugged, and said that nothing worked in the new building when they took it over. Halliburton had to be called back, on a time-and-materials change order mind you (!), to repair their own errors, which cost the US taxpayer an additional doubling of the orginal cost, or a 400% usury.
Now, I find this hard to believe, until I read the ticker tape on our new Iraq embassy, which was advertised to cost $300M, still the most expensive embassy ever built, then was no-bid through a Kuwait shell company to Halliburton (Cheney’s boss) for $600M, and is already at $1200M and only 1/3rd finished, for a total ‘cost-growth’, as they like to say, of 1200%.
Now, I found this hard to believe until I read the actuals from Katrina, and you can go on and on, DHS/DOD has lost $1000B that they can’t even account for, and now are shooting for an annual budget of that same amount, once they pad their employee base into FEMA2/DHS/DOD.
One trillion dollars a year, for what? Domestic Crowd Control, and Neo World Domination. Great. Exactly what the tin-hats predicted years ago.
Where is Ari Fleischer when you need him? Oh, that’s right. He’s an AIPIC lobbyist in DC now, same as he was when he worked inside the WH.
Mission Accomplished.

Posted by: Tellard Antipa | Apr 29 2006 7:53 utc | 4

Annie, if you can read a science fiction novel I recommend “The Shockwave Rider” by John Brunner. I think you’d like it.
It is often available in the local sci-fi shops as a paperback, at least I hope so, for about 4 bucks or so.
It’s from 1983 or 1984, but the whole denouement, (a french word meaning climax or solution) is that all the secret information in the computerized society is revealed as the hero uses his [sic] special authority and network privilege to release the data incriminating anyone with gains beyond their means.
I thought it was a really great book. Here’s a link to Abe Books, there is a copy in Sumas WA for $1, shipping is about four bucks: Abe Books.
I wrote a review of this book on Slashdot, if you care to look at jonku review of Shockwave Rider by John Brunner.

Posted by: jonku | Apr 29 2006 9:28 utc | 5

Oops. These decades. The novel “The Shockwave Rider” was published by 1975, I think even earlier.
Google found this quote from the end of the novel:

“1. That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must.
2. That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.”

I never met the guy, but there is a well-celebrated group of science fiction novelists of the 1970s including Brunner, Thomas Disch and Samuel R. Delaney whose published philosophy I found to be a fair trade for formal education. It seems so even today.

Posted by: jonku | Apr 29 2006 9:44 utc | 6

clearly a fiasco of world historical proportions
Billmon has not lost the snark, thank god.
Saw Alex Gibney’s Enron documentary last night. Liked the bit where the relationship between the Bush family and Kenneth Lay was described as “professional courtesy” between varieties of deadly poisonous snakes.
Rotten in Denmark is right.

Posted by: Dismal Science | Apr 29 2006 13:08 utc | 7

DS–
Not sure your comment is entirely fair.
After all, there has ever been a State of Denmark so putrid as this…

Posted by: RossK | Apr 29 2006 15:17 utc | 8

thanks for the heads up jonku. i rarely read scifi but just picked up a copy of the man in the high castle, i’ll check out your suggestion

Posted by: annie | Apr 29 2006 19:05 utc | 9

The Man In The High Castle is vintage Philip K. Dick — an obvious influence on another great SF writer, William Gibson.
The Japanese, winners along with Germany of WW II, are collecting American kitsch items, shades of eBay!
If you get along with Uncle Phil’s writing, be sure to check out his masterpiece, A Mirror Darkly. This late novel about a disintegrating man who lives with drug users so he can report on them as a drug enforcement agent is an amazingly funny indictment of the joys and destruction of drug use, and the cycle of drug production and use within society. Of course he has to use the drug as well, knowing that it will eventually destroy his mind.
At the end the burned out once-G-man ends up working in the fields of a government-run institutional farm, cultivating the plants used to create the drug, “Substance D(eath)”, that ruined his mind.
Phil Dick dedicates the novel to a list of friends who are dead or mind-fucked as a result of drug use. His own drug of choice was amphetamines.
This book was rumored to become a movie at one point. A classic scene of decay shows the roommates trying to figure out why they call it a ten-speed bicycle, when if you count the gears there are only two in the front and five in the back, so there can only be seven speeds!
Another hilarious aspect of the book is that the protagonist has to give a surveillance report regularly to the Feds down at the police station, wearing his invisibility suit that mimics all the surroundings on its surface, ending up looking like a “vague blur.”
He even has to report on himself so as to not draw suspicion. His fragmented mind divorces itself from himself when doing so — if you can imagine the irony, humor and pathos of this whole paranoid scene you might not even have to read the book.
Like Martin Amis, Philip Dick is a black humorist of the first water.
Hope you enjoy “The Man” — please let us know!

Posted by: jonku | Apr 29 2006 19:46 utc | 10

Sorry, I was trying to push PK Dick’s novel, A Scanner Darkly … it’s not called A Mirror. Oops. Anyway, happy reading.

Posted by: jonku | Apr 30 2006 0:09 utc | 11

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