"The Very Last Thing You Will Ever See" -Beth Bonanno photograph of John Bonanno in character as Frater S.V.S.

Random Scribbles
(Or, Am I Now Channeling Larry King?)

The principal job of any intelligence agency is not to gather intelligence. It is rather to make everyone too ignorant and too stupid to ask the right questions and to foment the disturbances that make it too difficult and too painful to be intelligent. It must create muddy water.
The NFL draft should be replaced by an auction system. Each team would have a fixed amount with which too bid for all the players who make themselves eligible. The money spent would go into a pot which is then used to pay the initial one year contract of the players reflecting the amount bid. (Pay beyond that point could not be negotiated until the first season was complete. Unbid upon players become free agents.) I think it would be much more exciting, require more skill, and provide more interest than the boring thing they do now.
I would like to write a book listing all the popular dances of the last hundred years. Included in this encyclopedia would be descriptions of the dance, the localities in which the dance originated, photographs, and lore.
I need to write a long article about Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum). I admire its tenaciousness.
Where have all the whippersnappers gone?
Corporate capitalism's goal is to create a virtual state of anarchy for itself so that its most powerful entities can roam the earth unchallenged. Corporate capitalism works to create exactly the opposite environment for individuals who are not in their club: repressive laws by many layers of authority, and assorted modes of taxation by those layers, confusion and fear of the policing entities that enforce those practices.
The greatest parasites on society have convinced themselves that they are the driving engines of it, and in so doing, have convinced those on whom they feed that the weakness they feel is their own fault or the fault of innocent scapegoats.
How long has it been since you were as happy as a shithouse spider?
Any magickal system, impeccably performed, is effective.
Are people whose names indicate a quality, e.g. 'Goode' or 'Goodman' any better than those whose names indicate something else, Mr. Wolfe?
If you have a large fixed interest debt, then big time inflation is good for you. You get to pay off all those dollars with much cheaper ones. You can be assured that as long as the banks are controlling the government (Hello Mr. Geithner, Mr. Paulson , Mr. Bernanke etc.) pay will fall, credit will be tight (unless you are a favored bank), and, inflation will be moderate. But, they can only keep the plates spinning for so long.
How can stock prices stay so (relatively) high? Is TARP money being used to prop up the market? It wouldn't take much in the low volume game we see on Wall Street now.
Prediction: By next year the UN will begin to take over countries designated "failed states".

"Half An Hour"-C.P. Cavafy

I never had you, nor will I ever have you
I suppose. A few words, an approach
as in the bar yesterday, and nothing more.
It is, undeniably, a pity. But we who serve Art
sometimes with intensity of mind, and of course only
for a short while, we create pleasure
which almost seems real.
So in the bar the day before yesterday -- the merciful alcohol
was also helping much --
I had a perfectly erotic half-hour.
And it seems to me that you understood,
and stayed somewhat longer on purpose.
This was very necessary. Because
for all the imagination and the wizard alcohol,
I needed to see your lips as well,
I needed to have your body close.