Have Your People Call Our People

In case there are any movie producers reading; We have an idea for a movie:

The worlds economist all seem like stuffy, know-it-all, math-nerds, but secretly they are locked in an eternal struggle against each other. They all carry cool swords under their tweed jackets and are always having kick ass kung fu battles (no wire work please, we have standards) in parking garages, abandon warehouses, and during office hours. Plus they can only die if you cut off their head.

While the rest of the world is going about it's business the worlds economist are quietly beheading each other in really cool swordfights. But there is more than just tenure or grant money at stake; the legends tell of a time when the last two economist will meet in an epic battle that will decide whether mankind will prosper together as Keynesians or have to spend eternity drinking Ronald Reagan's bong water

That time is now! The film opens in present day Princeton, New Jersey where the evil Dr. Laffer is hunting our scruffy, bearded, underdog hero The Krugman. Aided by various evil cults, the evil Dr. Laffer has slain all of the once proud tribe of Keynesians economist and now only the "The Krugman" stands between us and an eternity of rancid bong water...

Anyway. They fight and the winner gets a blowjob, or published, or whatever it is that economist like. We admit the endings week right now, but we're working on it. The important thing is it's a totally new idea and it will seriously rock on the big screen! If you've got $180 million then have your people call our people. We'll do lunch.

P.S. Does anyone know if economist do their own stunts?

The New Weasel Driven Economy

Via Brad DeLong aka the other economist I found this article.

And it's got great news! According to the article we are currently transitioning into an economy driven entirely by Weasels! What are the hallmarks of a Weasel driven economy? We'll get to that later. Right now we want to talk about jobs and we want to talk about jobs because Monday yours is going overseas!

Why? Short answer: Weasels.

Longer answer: You have to read the article. That or trust us not to quote it completely out of context. Ha ha ha. No seriously you can trust us. The article says that :

...not just manufacturing jobs but a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services [will be] safe

If your a janitor, a crane operator, a divorce attorney, or a prostitute congratulations you're still going to have a job on Monday. All the rest of you should start hating the foreigner now because when the weekends over their going to steal your job.

"But why!?!" You ask. "Why are those greedy foreigner going to steal my job?"

Short Answer: Again Weasels.

Longer answer :

nothing short of a radical reordering of our economy will suffice if we're to save our beleaguered middle-class majority. Every other advanced economy -- certainly, those of the Europeans and the Japanese -- has a conscious strategy to keep its most highly skilled jobs at home. We have none; American capitalism, dominated by our financial sector, is uniquely wedded to disaggregating companies, thwarting unionization campaigns and offshoring work in a ceaseless campaign to impress investors that it has found the cheapest labor imaginable.

Or, to put it in plainer English, our economy is being driven by a bunch of greedy, short sighted weasels.

What can you do to save your job from the new Weasel driven economy? The article has 3 suggestions:

• We need to entice industry to invest at home by having the government and our public- and union-controlled pension funds upgrade the infrastructure and invest in energy efficiency and worker training.


• We need to unionize and upgrade the skills of the nearly 50 million private-sector workers in health care, transportation, construction, retail, restaurants and the like whose jobs can't be shipped abroad.


• And, if America is to survive American capitalism in the age of globalization, we need to alter the composition of our corporate boards so that employee and public representatives can limit the offshoring of our economy.

We suggest you also buy a rocket-launcher.

Perfect

Over at HumidCedar's, courtesy of Notorious MJT We are discussing perfect albums.

I personally was remiss for not including Jackson Brown's "Running On Empty" in my comments on the subject.

I scenes A Disturbance In the Force.

The Notorious MJT has, at long last, entered the bloggoshear and he has come on a mission. Apparently that mission involves breathing new life into dead corpse of all those late night conversations you and your friends used to have back in collage. You know, the ones that always began with "Dude! Did you ever think about ..." and always ended with everyone agreeing that "Dude! You are so full of shit!"

As Notorious explains (referencing his most recent post here) :

I'm interested in the underlying nature of [the subject of the day]... it’s base elements... and how to evaluate things through the more purified lens of that understanding.

So sort of an alchemical analysis of reality. I think. But the important part is that he's promised not to post any pictures of kittens and that is a good a start as any blogs has ever had.

So while Notorious is busy firing his crucibles, zeroing in his scales, and setting up his pipets for that first big blog post on "Methodologies for the Titration of Reality in Order to Determine the Exact Molar Concentration of Existential Angst There In" we would like to say welcome.

We would also like to say that we never got XTC. Maybe Nototious will explain it to us.

I scenes A Disturbance In the Force.

The Notorious MJT has, at long last, entered the bloggoshear and he has come on a mission. Apparently that mission involves breathing new life into dead corpse of all those late night conversations you and your friends used to have back in collage. You know, the ones that always began with "Dude! Did you ever think about ..." and always ended with everyone agreeing that "Dude! You are so full of shit!"

As Notorious explains (referencing his most recent post here) :

I'm interested in the underlying nature of [the subject of the day]... it’s base elements... and how to evaluate things through the more purified lens of that understanding.

So sort of an alchemical analysis of reality. I think. But the important part is that he's promised not to post any pictures of kittens and that is a good a start as any blogs has ever had.

So while Notorious is busy firing his crucibles, zeroing in his scales, and setting up his pipets for that first big blog post on "Methodologies for the Titration of Reality in Order to Determine the Exact Molar Concentration of Existential Angst There In" we would like to say welcome.

We would also like to say that we never got XTC. Maybe Nototious will explain it to us.

The Poorman's Kittens Can Suck It

Cute my ass. I'll Show you cute. Behold the Grand Tyrant of All Cuteness - Chato the Wounder Chin .



Yes, my dog is wearing a sweater. It was chilly and he's a big Jimmy Carter fan.





Crazybear and Chato take a nap.

Also: We bought a house.

It even came with a stove:

Tarsius is Bored

Tarsius sent HumidCedar and I an email yesterday pointing out that neither of us have posted anything of substance in a long ass time.

While I take issue with the implied accusation that I have ever posted anything of substance on this blog, I am sympathetic to the plight of Tarsius and his fellow non bloggers who need something to entertain them while they are at work.

I would have posted something sooner but after my last post I was censured by the international blogging commission for "crimes against Yeats" and ordered to stop blogging until I had read another poem.

While I did agree with commission's finding that my last post sucked [ed. Or "blew chunks" as the Swedish delegate contended], their demand that I go read another whole poem seems a bit extreme. Reading poems is hard work after all. Many of them are quite long, most tend to be obtuse, and quite frankly a lot of them just sucks ass.

I realize I trod out the "The Second Coming" a lot but it's not as if I don't have an excuse - what with the batshit crazy republicans running my country and all. Finding a pity, short, appropriately apocalyptic replacement poem is real work.

To add insult to injury, the real abuser of Yeats work, the woman who elevated it to an art form remains as free as ever. I don't believe that any of my writing has ever come anywhere near the levels of Yeats abuse that Ms Didion's does. Just look at the table of contents for "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" :

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion

1. Falcons Never Listen.
2. Help! I'm Trapped In the Widening Gyre and I Think I'm Gonna Hurl.
3. Somebody Better Throw the Ceremony of Innocence a Life Preserver Because It Went Swimming Right After Lunch Instead of Waiting 20 Minutes Like Its Mom Said It Should.
4. Oh Dear, The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed and I Had Oysters For Lunch ... Does Anyone Have Some Pepto?
5. Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the Cheap: Following the Antichrist's footsteps On $40 a Day or less.
6. Your Troubled Sight : Spiritus Mundi, What You Need to Know About This Silent Epidemic.
7. Indignant Desert Birds Craped on My New Mercedes.

After all that did someone pull Ms. Didion over and tell her to go find another poem to pick on?

No they didn't.

Did Didion even have a good excuse for hauling out a Yeats reference every other sentence? Had her country been taken over by batshit crazy republicans?

In a word "No".

Didion was writing if the idyllic time of 1967. Now sure there was some shit going down in '67. A war for one thing and some civil rights stuff, all of which I realize sounds pretty crazy and intense when it's 2:00 am, you're drunk, and you're watching the history channel. But I'm not trying to claim there was no such thing as Batshit crazy back in 1967, just that it was a strictly bipartisan kind of batshit crazy. With all due respect to Ms. Didion 'bipartisan batshit crazy' plus 'the Manson Family' does not make for a "Oh crap there's a pale horse in the front yard again" kind of year.

Yet Ms.Didion continues to get away with the marathon 'things fall apart - oh lordy - the center cannot hold' metaphor to end all things fall apart - oh lordy - the center cannot hold' metaphors (in dead tree form no less) and no one even bothers to say "Bitch Please!"

I on the other hand am still stuck reading poetry.

Now will someone please tell me what the hell Madame Sosostris's cold has to do with anything... I would really like to get back to blogging.

Oh and before I forget:

Ms. Didion. Bitch Please!