Speaking Of Knocking

Can't You Hear Me Knockin' - Stones

Have Mercy

Waiting For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago - ZZ Top

Drive Me Home, Baby

Radar Love - Golden Earring

Waitin'

I'm Just Waiting On A Friend -  Stones

Go Back Where Ya Been

I Hear You Knockin' - Dave Edmonds

What A Wicked Thing To Do

Wicked Game - Chris Isaak



The world was on fire and no one could save me but you.
It's strange what desire will make foolish people do.
I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you.
And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you.

No, I don't want to fall in love 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
No, I don't want to fall in love 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
With you 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)

What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way.
What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you.
What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way.
What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you and,

I want to fall in love 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
No, I want to fall in love 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
With you.

The world was on fire and no one could save me but you.
It's strange what desire will make foolish people do.
I never dreamed that I'd love somebody like you.
And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you,

No, I want to fall in love 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
No, I want to fall in love 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
With you 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
No, I... 
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
(This world is only gonna break your heart)

Nobody loves no one.

You'll Be A Woman Soon

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon - Urge Overkill

Today's Quote

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

--Thomas Paine

The KrugMan Speaks

There are plenty of smart guys who talk in high-blown language because they're kinda desperate to make sure everybody thinks they're as smart as they need everybody to think they are.

But the really smart guys are the ones who can take the densest, most impenetrable content and turn it into words that fit nicely into just about anybody's brain - anybody who's willing to do his part in actually learning one or two things anyway.  You can't expect it to be spoon-fed to ya - because it does, after all, take some effort on the part of the listener.

(Always remember: for every problem that's gnarly and complicated and difficult, there's a solution that's simple and elegant and fucking wrong - are ya paying attention here, wingnuts?)

Paul Krugman:

The dollar is, first of all, a vehicle currency (mainly in the interbank market) thanks to thick markets: if a bank wants to convert bolivars into zlotys, it will generally trade the bolivars for dollars, then the dollars for zlotys, rather than try to find someone wanting to make the reverse trade. It is the currency many though by no means all international transactions are invoiced in. And to some extent people hold dollars or dollar-denominated assets because the dollar is more liquid than other currencies.

Meanwhile, governments trying to prop their currencies up or hold them down often do so with trades against the dollar, even if they’re trying to affect some other exchange rate, again because of those thick markets. Some countries peg to the dollar, although not too many these days. And governments hold dollar-denominated reserves.

I won't pretend I understand the whole thing, but if I take the gist, then I have to look at the wild-eyed panic of "conservatives" running around screeching about the Debt and the Deficit and Fiat Currency and Hyper-Inflation etc, and I just have to wonder what purpose it serves for them to kick up such a fuss.  It's never really about what they say it's about, so what's it about?

Today's Pix

Coining A New Term

To co-opt Mr Clemens - There are lies, damned lies, and TeaParty Rhetoric.



So, lemme see.  We can add Job Killing to Death Panels; Abortion Surtax; Healthcare Rationing; Government Takeover; blahblah blahblah blahblah.

The GOP is just straight-up lying.  And they can lie all they want because they know there's a constituency out here just waiting to lap up whatever falls outa their asses.  Which is why I've decided to start referring to the Tea Party in a way that more accurately reflects their actual function: Toilet Paper Republicans.

Seriously tho', what does it take to get some of these people deprogrammed?

A Word From Professor Cole

Juan Cole (aka the smartest guy in any room when it comes to talking about the gigundous cluster fuck polite people call The Middle East):

Why the US needs Electric Cars: Saudi Arabia threatens Pivot away from US
Posted on 10/23/2013 by Juan Cole

The royal family of Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy with no constitution and no elected legislature, is in a snit about US foreign policy. King Abdullah doesn’t like even the mild American criticism of the Sunni Bahrain monarchy’s brutal crackdown on the majority Shiite community in that country. He is furious that President Obama went with the Russian plan to sequester Syria’s chemical weapons rather than bombing Damascus. He is petrified of a breakthrough in American and Iranian relations that might permit Iran to keep its nuclear enrichment program and allow Tehran to retain a nuclear breakout capacity, which would deter any outside overthrow of the Iranian regime. Those are the stated discontents leaked by Saudi uber-hawk Bandar Bin Sultan.

Behind the scenes, another Saudi concern is that the US likes democracy too much. Washington ultimately backed the Arab upheavals that led to the fall of presidents for life in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Saudi Arabia hated this outbreak of popular politics and parliamentary competition. It connived with Egypt’s generals to roll back gains in Egypt in favor of more authoritarian rule. It has just cut off Yemen because the post-Saleh situation there isn’t developing its way. Only in Syria do the Saudis want regime change, and there it is because they want to weaken Iran and depose a Shiite ruling clique in favor of a fundamentalist Sunni one.

Today's Toons

That's Pretty Fucked Up, Right There

And the binary thinking "on the right" means that if you're talking about Wealth Inequality, then what you're really after is to upset the natural order of things and to turn USAmerica Incorporated into a Bolshevik nightmare and make Jesus cry.  Cuz everybody knows Capitalism is god's way of separating the good smart people from the poor stupid people.

Uh - no, actually.  We're talking about not returning to the glory days of the 18th century, when the king could do no wrong; when the noble class owned everything and collected rent from anybody who worked for a living, and "justice" was all about the aristocracy keeping the commoners in line by meting out punishment that included branding, whipping and partial hanging.

In this country today, tell me how it's fair and equitable to fill the prisons to overflowing with people making minimum wage while the real crooks on Wall Street and the Rentiers in the executives suites can buy their way out of any jam at all because they have the money and the connections.

Today's Quotes

"Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould, Evolutionary Biologist

"That evolution is a theory in the proper scientific sense means that there is both a fact of evolution to be explained and a well-supported mechanistic framework to account for it."
-Richard Lenski, Biologist

"One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun."
-Richard Dawkins, Biologist

"Today, nearly all biologists acknowledge that evolution is a fact. The term theory is no longer appropriate except when referring to the various models that attempt to explain how life evolves... it is important to understand that the current questions about how life evolves in no way implies any disagreement over the fact of evolution."
-Neil Campbell, Biologist

"The basic theory of evolution has been confirmed so completely that most modern biologists consider evolution simply a fact. How else except by the word evolution can we designate the sequence of faunas and floras in precisely dated geological strata? And evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation."
-Ernst Mayr, Biologist