Remora

"Thus the word of the LORD came to me:

Son of man, you live in the midst of a rebellious house; they have eyes to see but
do not see, and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious house." -- Ezekiel

My ears heard Colin Powell make a long speech to the UN and basically re-iterate the Bush administration's position, exemplifying it with some examples culled from military telecommunications that mean very little. Actually, they mean more than the administration may want them to mean. If the Iraqi military is calling each other up saying hey, haul those nerve gas cannisters that we are going to use on the Kurds over to site 7, you would think the U.S. would have a much easier time making its case, at least in as far as the surreption and clanculation of the famed Weapons of Mass Destruction are concerned.

However, LI's ears aren't Vernon Loeb's, the Washington Post's excitable National Security correspondant. In his online Q and A after the speech, Loeb seemed to forget, for a moment, that he is not (officially) employed as a propagandist for the Bush administration. Here's what he had to say about the pesky naysayers of pacifistic nostrums:

Wheaton, Md.: Is the issue with the world community really about evidence? It seems pretty clear that those nations, such as France, will never support the U.S. effort. Why waste any more time trying to convince them?

[V.L.] No, I think presenting evidence is very important, and I think Powell was quite eloquent in bolstering his case using evidence that this is not some academic exercise for the United States, but a very visceral one, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I think Powell's remarks will have a persuasive effect on many around the world, and while they may not convince the French government, I bet France will not exercise its Security Council veto to nix a second U.N. resolution authorizing war, if it comes to that."

But, of course, Mr. Loeb is, primarily, a journalist -- a hardheaded kind of guy who'd never shill for his country:

Vernon Loeb: I found Powell's case quite persuasive, partly because he made repeated reference to information developed by other countries and by U.N. inspectors. I mean, nothing he said struck me as particularly far-fetched. As a journalist, I try to be skeptical about everything I hear from the U.S. government, but in this case, Powell's case passed the test. As for U.S. Special Forces, they are in Iraq already, and they will play a very important part in any war, attacking important weapons sites and leadership targets, among many others things."

Well, the convinced will hear what convinces them. LI, convinced that the war in the offing is a big mistake, did not hear what would convince us that we were wrong -- i.e., that Iraq is planning to attack a specific target. In fact, the schizophrenic position of this administration is quite clear about this. We must attack Iraq right now because they are so weak (that is, they are less of a danger to their neighbors than they were before the Gulf War) in order to prevent them from someday getting strong. Since any nation with the potential resources of Iraq has the potential for getting strong, this argument goes without saying. The problem is with the assumption behind it, which is grossly insane. Nor did we hear anything that would make us think that weapons inspectors aren't efficient -- the kind of chaotic removal of weapons, if Powell is right, that has been happening in Iraq is itself disruptive to any well planned use of the weapons. We did, however, have a feeling that the U.N. will not be doing this with another country for a long time. The next Iraq will have no advantage in disarming itself and revealing its every defense secret to a country that then uses this information to attack it. We are watching a unique moment in history -- oh boy.

Remora

Cupidity on a scale unexampled...

Last week, with little fanfare, FERC released information conclusively showing that Reliant closed down electric generating plants in order to create artificial energy shortages, and thus raise prices, in California in the great energy heist of 2000.

Jason Leonard of Counterpunch has a nice, detailed article about this. Here's the smoking gun graf -- of course. You can't have a scandal without a smoking gun, anymore:

"This latest smoking gun in the ongoing investigation into California's energy crisis, a transcript of a conversation between a trader and a power plant operator at Houston-based Reliant Energy in which the two discuss shutting down some of the company's power plants in California between June 20 and 22, 2000 to create an artificial shortage so the price of power would skyrocket, was released by the FERC Friday. The tactic worked. It caused power prices to reach "unjust and unreasonable" levels in California, which under the Federal Power Act is illegal.

We "started out Monday losing $3 million... So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million," the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.

As we pointed out yesterday, Adam Smith shrewdly advanced the proposition that a government of traders is a government with an incentive to work against the interests of the governed. This plays itself out in the punishment of Reliant the fine against them, as Leonard puts it (reaching for the cliche) is a slap on the wrist.

"Reliant cut a deal with FERC, agreeing to refund California $13.8 million to settle the issue and will not be penalized under federal laws."

Our point, yesterday, was that while the United States itself might not have a primary interest in spending 100 billion dollars to accrue the oilfields and reserves of Iraq, its actions could well be drvien by the mindset of oilmen who arise from a culture in which that interest is lively. As we know, the foundation of Bush's personal fortune was laid in Bahrain, the small Gulf principality with which Harken cut a suspiciously profitable deal in 1990. To say this is not to say that the Blood for Oil equation is a sufficient account of the Iraq crisis -- really, there are other factors here than the culture from which Cheney and Bush have sprung -- but it is to say that there exists a bias here critically skewing the way this administration is moving towards war. This war resembles, in its causes, the Boer War, which was also driven by a combination of greed and jingoism. The greed part of the equation is continuous between domestic and foreign policy, and has a similar form: the sinister contiguity of the Bush "emergency energy policy," designed by the lugubrious Cheney in secret council with his energy pals, and the brownouts in California, is reproduced in the plan to target Iraq, which we've been assured was initiated in the aftermath of 9/11 even though there was no link between Iraq and 9/11 -- or, at least, less of a link than between, say, Saudi Arabia and 9/11. Again, we have Cheney as the hawk, again we have distorted information driving the operation, again we have a president reluctantly taking action he manifestly wants to take.

I'm listening to Powell give his speech to the U.N., and I'm amazed by the quality of it. That Powell denounces Iraq for chemical warfare that the U.S. tacitly condoned, and that Western companies, in the eighties, profited from is deeply cynical move. And I'm thinking of the last paragraph of this story about the timing of the war in the NYT:


"Waiting months, however, seems unlikely, and from a strictly military standpoint inadvisable. The Bush administration has yet to lay out all of the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs or its links to terrorists but it has already laid the groundwork for an early war. The military preparations have a momentum and dynamic of their own. The administration will not want to keep the military in idle for long so the diplomats will also not have long. The forces are getting in place. The gun is cocked. Nobody can tell the future, but the forecast is for war."

Remora

It was Napoleon who made the phrase "nation of shopkeepers" famous. As it happened, he was quoting Adam Smith -- who coined the phrase in the chapter that considers the motives animating the building of empires. The passage is arresting:


"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. Such statesmen, and such statesmen only, are capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in employing the blood and treasure of their fellow-citizens to found and maintain such an empire. Say to a shopkeeper, "Buy me a good estate, and I shall always buy my clothes at your shop, even though I should pay somewhat dearer than what I can have them for at other shops"; and you will not find him very forward to embrace your proposal. But should any other person buy you such an estate, the shopkeeper would be much obliged to your benefactor if he would enjoin you to buy all your clothes at his shop. England purchased for some of her subjects, who found themselves uneasy at home, a great estate in a distant country."

LI has been thinking about this passage in relation to the question of Blood for Oil. In the mainstream press, the issue of Iraqi oil is delicately circumvented with the assurance that the Bush administration would, in pursuing its war, spend more money than the oil is worth. However, as Smith points out, the point of the imperial project, from the viewpoint of the shopkeeper, is to unload the unavoidable costs of conquest on the imperial power while enjoying the fruits of those conquests. The war against Iraq might not be a project fit for a nation of oilmen, but it is extremely fit for a nations whose government is influenced by oilmen.

US policy towards the Middle East cannot and should not avoid the issue of oil. That the U.S. should be spending billions trying to find alternatives to Middle Eastern oil is one part of the political equation; that it should be trying to maintain such relationships with oil producing countries as to mitigate disturbances in the supply of oil is the other side of the equation. We were reading a book on America's imperial power by Raymond Aron, the French gaullist, the other day and were struck by how clearly Aron saw this issue. We were also struck by Aron's remembrance of the U.S. role in the Suez crisis (which was almost twenty years past when the book came out in 1974) -- you remember, the objection lodged by Eisenhower against the attack on Egypt coordinated by a coalition of France, Britain and Israel. That objection was a brilliant stroke on Eisenhower's part. For decades, the U.S. was able to support Israel and Saudi Arabia simultaneously. Aron thought that the Suez incident precipitated the French distrust of American intentions that resulted in De Gaulle's rupture with NATO. Interestingly, the US commentators on the French objection of Bush's war all assume that the French will simply adhere to the fait accompli of an invasion, without pondering the advantages France could reap by not doing that. The advantages would be along lines similar to those that accrued to the U.S. after 1956: the oil producing nations would be able to turn to France/Europe to mitigate the unilateral weight of the U.S. The French, we are assured, would lose out on Iraq's oil wealth. But that of course assumes that 1., the post Saddam government would be pro-American into the foreseeable future, and 2., that the Persian Gulf states would be unappreciative of France's bucking the American initiative.

This view seems to have no supporters, or even thinkers, in the U.S. More typical -- in fact, almost uniform -- is the view of Chris Suellentrop at Slate, who after giving the reasons for France's recalcitrance -- it all has to due with wounded pride, which is a not so subtle way of dividing the case between the belligerents and their opponents as a case of passion (that womanly emotion) on the one side, and reason (represented by, I suppose, Cheney) on the other side. After exploring this worn topic, Suellentrop concludes:

"Which is why, in the end, France will go along with the Bush administration on Iraq. If France vetoes a Security Council resolution, and the Bush administration goes to war anyway, France will have been proved powerless. But if it accedes to the war after demanding more evidence, it will be able to claim that it influenced American policy�whether it's true or not. Germany will likely stand on principle and oppose the war. But France would never do such a thing. As a U.N. diplomat said last week, "It matters to matter for France."

Our assurance that the World will line up behind Bush depends on Bush's successful conclusion of a war that will be successful if the World lines up behind Bush. Otherwise, America occupies Iraq alone, and the mess will be to the advantage of any nation bold enough to play the game among the Arab states.

Remora
Deficits and us

LI is not a deficit hawk. We felt that the budget surplus under Clinton was a mark of shame, rather than a badge of honor -- it represents the lost opportunity of finally implementing a true national health care system, which in the end would be a much more valuable asset to this country than paying down on the national debt. Our idea is that the question of the deficit has to start with the premise that all deficits are not equal. One has to judge a deficit on the basis of where the money has gone, and where it will go. The supply siders have formed a meretricious cult around a fundamental truth: a budget is part of an ongoing process. It is embedded in a history. Deficits now may make way for surpluses later. Why? Because the money borrowed was spent wisely. What is wise spending? Spending that benefits the general welfare in health, education, science, infrastructure, etc. What is unwise spending? Spending that leads to death, or increases inequality, or is so excessive in one department that other necessary departments are squeezed to accomodate it. The idea that deficits should be judged wholly on whether they squeeze credit for private enterprise is probably deficient both on the evidence and on its motivated neglect of what state spending does. It is accounting that only concentrates on expenditure. It is, in other words, religion rather than rationality.

Judging, then, by our criteria, we find the Bush maladministration of the budget one of the most shocking large facts of the age. And the bodyguard of lies that have surrounded the looting of the Treasury are so blatant, and so unexamined, that we have to go all the way back to... well, the days of the New Economy, when Enron was Fortune's most innovative company in the U.S.A.

So, a little history.
Last year, in July, the Bush administration floated the news story that the surplus of 2001 was being reversed, slightly.


"The Bush administration expects the federal government to post a deficit of $165 billion this fiscal year, a 56 percent increase over earlier projections due in part to a surprise downturn in tax revenue caused by the stock market sell-off, officials said."

Now, when earlier projections are that much off, what you want is a new model. Did the 165 billion dollar deficit, in fact, eventuate? According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the budget deficit for 2002 was probably about 16 billion over that.

Excluding the surpluses in Social Security, the budget is in deficit by $181 billion in the current fiscal year, 2002; such deficits are projected to continue for the following seven years, with surpluses not reappearing outside Social Security until 2010. The cumulative non-Social Security deficit over the period 2002-2011 is projected to total $700 billion. This outlook is a remarkable change from the projection CBO made only one year ago, when it projected surpluses outside of Social Security totaling $3.1 trillion over the ten-year period 2002-2011.

Just two weeks ago, the Bush backgrounders were telling the press to expect a budget deficit of around 200 billion for 2003. Now the budget has been officially presented. Guess what? Just as, last year, the real budget deficit was grossly larger than the one projected by the government, so, too, the new projection is about 50% bigger than it was just two weeks ago. My my, how an AOL-like sum of money can just pass through your fingers!


"WASHINGTON -- Due in large part to his proposed $670 billion tax-cut plan, President Bush's fiscal year 2004 budget will post a record deficit of $307 billion on spending of $2.23 trillion, according to budget documents distributed Monday. In addition, the budget makes no provision for the cost of fighting a war against Iraq. However, in his budget message, Mr. Bush argued the deficit wasn't all that large. "Compared to the overall federal budget and the $10.5 trillion national economy, our budget gap is small by historical standards," Mr. Bush said in his budget message."

Not putting in the cost of the war in Iraq was a bit of imbecile brilliance that is sure not to attract attack from the belligerent press. Don't look for the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal to editiorialize about the fiction of ignoring a figure that is potentially half the size of the budget deficit. Alas, we suspect that the Dems will simply take the Hoover route and attack the deficit itself. That you run a deficit in a recession is ... well, what you do. That you spend money in such a way that you eventually make it back, in increased tax revenue, to pay for State services, is the key, here. The Great Giveaway will simply dissipate wealth among the most profligant, shift equity investment to companies that will have to borrow to increase capital expenditure, and operate as a salve to the massively bad investments of the dishonest upper ten percentile. This is Moral Hazard writ large.

Remora

Yesterday, LI went with a friend car-buying. The friend thought she�d like to buy a car from a dealer in Georgetown; or at least check out his lot. He told us, casually, that he�d come in at eight, and on the way in had seen the Shuttle break up in the sky.

That is all we can contribute about the sad news � a bystander of a bystander�s account. We hope this doesn�t interrupt the shuttle for too long � and we wonder how the three crew members up there on the shuttle are going to get home.

We suggest an article from, of all places, the Cato Institute today. The libertarian think tank is better known for coming up with hairbrained schemes to privatize social security than for its dovishness. But there is a considerable tradition on the American right that suspects that the impulse driving imperialism is a kissing cousin to the impulse driving big government elsewhere. This ties in with a Burkean suspicion of all schemes to better mankind that impose an order of ideas from above. Russell Kirk, America�s premiere Burkean, was, in his time, an anti-imperialist. And so, apparently, is Gene Healy, senior editor of the Institute, whose anti-war plea looks like � well, like LI could have signed it. As LI has done in several posts, Healy works out the worst case scenarios for the war itself. He doesn�t believe that these worst case scenarios will be realized. He believes, as we do, that Saddam Hussein will be defeated with a minimum of American (as opposed to expendable Iraqi) casualties. And he thinks that we are then in for it:

�In the best-case scenario, Hussein doesn't pass WMD off to terrorists and he never gets to launch the Scuds. Shortly after the air war begins, he's deposed by a Republican Guard coup. We take Baghdad without a single U.S. battlefield casualty. Triumphalism is in the air, and the chorus of self-congratulatory "I-told-you-so's" rings out in op-ed pages and TV talk shows across the land.
But our troubles are just beginning.

Welcome to the Occupation �

Healy�s concern about the Occupation is a little different from ours. His concern is that it would fuel Osama bin Laden-ites. He has a few pity observations about that:

"Indeed, it's hard to think of a foreign policy initiative that could do more to empower Al Qaeda than invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. To see why this is so, it's necessary to examine what motivates Bin Laden's murderous band. Some commentators on the Right have offered a theory of "why they fight" that amounts to "they hate us just because we're beautiful." The cover of the first post-September-11th edition of National Review declared that Al Qaeda attacked us "because we are rich, and powerful, and good." On July 4, 2002, libertarian Brink Lindsey, on his popular weblog brinklindsey.com, titled an entry "Why They Hate Us," and quoted the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal�"

Those who have made a career of studying Al Qaeda do not agree that the primary motivation behind the Bin Ladenists' anti-American jihad is hatred of the West's political and cultural freedom. Peter Bergen, Bin Laden's biographer, and one of the few Westerners to have interviewed him, writes in his book Holy War, Inc. that:

"In all the tens of thousands of words that bin Laden has uttered on the public record there are some significant omissions: he does not rail against the pernicious effects of Hollywood movies, or against Madonna's midriff, or against the pornography protected by the U.S. Constitution. Nor does he inveigh against the drug and alcohol culture of the West, or its tolerance for homosexuals...."

In Healy�s view, Osama�s pre-occupation is with local issues, not the debilitating effect of the Jerry Springer show on the American worship of Allah. This makes such sense that it sounds like it couldn�t be true � it is too far outside of the narcissistic circle of American concerns to think that our concerns aren�t their concerns.

Healy sums up his arguments like this:

�What's utterly unreasonable is to assume, as the administration and its fellow travelers seem to, that the number of recruits to Al Qaeda's murderous jihad is relatively fixed, and will not increase dramatically if the U.S. begins a policy of conquering and occupying Middle Eastern Muslim countries with the avowed purpose of making them secular and free.�

LI agrees with Healy that the probable result of occupying Iraq would be to increase bin Laden�s forces. The more violent result that we fear, however, is that occupying Iraq would inject American soldiers into a bloody civil war, in which not only Iraqi groups would be involved, but also proxies for the powers around Iraq. And that American withdrawal � which will occur if the casualties mount too high, a result easy to obtain by suicide bomber, as recent Israeli history will attest � will hasten a collapse that will inevitably bring the Americans back. In other words, chronic, sporadic violence for years on end, with the brunt of the casualties being borne by the supposedly �liberated� Iraqis.

Remora
Prediction fiction

The NYT reports official preliminary figures show fourth quarter growth at 0.7%. Further in the story we come to these two grafs:

Most economists had predicted a weak figure for the fourth quarter, and none interviewed yesterday said they planned to change their forecasts. Though they expect growth to improve slightly this year, it might not be enough to create jobs until the spring or summer.

Many companies hesitate even to bet on a midyear recovery, said Carl T. Camden, president and chief operating officer of Kelly Services, a leading provider of temporary workers. His clients "talk about things turning around in the third quarter," he said, "and then they realize that's the same speech they gave last year"

So, is that what "most economists" had predicted? Wow, somehow we bet those predictions were revised about two weeks ago. Long range, that isn't what most economists were predicting at all. When Business Week did its annual half year business conditions survey in July, 2002, the picture was a lot rosier:


"BusinessWeek's midyear survey of business economists shows that, on average, the forecasters expect real gross domestic product to grow at a healthy, if unspectacular, 3% annual rate during the second and third quarters, with the pace picking up to 3.5% in the first half of 2003 (table)."

Is LI nitpicking? No. The importance of this is that those messages, percolating out into the national subconscious, set the stage for Bush's push-over midterm election. After all, what is there to worry about when the forecasters are showing a pickup? That, in fact, we got a downturn is now going to be written away as, somehow, a bad call. Well, we would like to point out the ideological biases of the bad callers. The professional Pollyannas -- people like James Suriowiecki of New Yorker and the ever erroneous James Glassman of the Washington Post -- have been assuring us that the CEOs are too worried for their own good -- the recovery is just around the corner. Their reasons aren't found in the economy itself, but in a particular, libertarian philosophy -- the same one underlying Bush's Great Giveaway.

In July, while economists were not -- not is the operative word -- within ballpark range of the end of the year's GDP figures, Mr. Surioweicki published a defense of the New Economy paradigm in Wired. It is a rather funny document.. As with all defenders of discredited doctrines, the first order of business is to redefine the semantics of the doctrine to make it work. So, here is how Suriowiecki goes about it:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.07/Myth_pr.html

"Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, insists that the US can look forward only to "very subdued growth" until it works off "the bubble-induced excesses of the late 1990s."


Don't count on it. In fact, the overall shallowness of the recession and strong productivity growth during the downturn show that the skeptics are wrong. Call it the myth of the myth of the new economy. The naysayers ignore the economic fundamentals that drove the boom, emphasizing instead the over-the-top rhetorical flourishes - and outrageous stock prices - that accompanied it. Because wild-eyed optimists once said technology would change everything, it must have changed nothing. But if it's 2002 and you're still saying that things aren't fundamentally different than they were a decade ago, you're living in a dream world at least as fantastic as anything a new economy fanatic could conjure. I

n reality, 1995 marked the beginning of a long-lived shift in US economic performance. Productivity growth accelerated due to what economists call secular, rather than cyclical, factors. That is, the pace of productivity growth didn't start rising in 1995 because the business cycle had turned upward. It started rising because crucial aspects of the economy had changed. As a result, today's economy can expand much faster than previously thought possible. Between 1972 and 1995, productivity rose a paltry 1.4 percent a year. Between 1995 and 2000, it rose 2.5 percent a year - an increase of 79 percent. "There has absolutely been a sizable change in the secular growth rate of both labor productivity and total factor productivity," says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. Many of the truisms of the boom, it turns out, were true.

Now, what those stats aren't telling you is that they are calculated with the assumption that productivity has to be defined differently -- an assumption that kicked in during the late 90s. That assumption is being tested now. Like a lot of the accounting techniques of the 90s, it isn't looking very good.

Further, the New Economy model implied that this new boom in productivity would create a recession proof economy. That is what the New Economy was all about, in spite of Suriowiecki's smoke screen. And it wasn't just about that for bored pundits -- these were the assumptions that underlay AOL buying Time Warner. Hmm, I wonder how that worked out? And I wonder why Suriowiecki's model sorta forgets the slump in equity value that shows no sign of reversing itself right now. In fact, many of the truisms of the boom turned out to apply to the boom, and the boom only. One of the truisms of the post-boom, though, is certainly true for Suriewiecki -- bs in, bs out. Here, for instance, is the dance he does using the cooked productivity figures:

"Note that information technology's benefits increase over time. If you study the relationship of IT spending to productivity over a single year, you'll find that computers deliver benefits roughly equal to their costs."

That is a perfect New Economy sentence. The metric that you use to measure a firm's performance is no longer anything so plebian as profit and loss. Oh no. It is a 'benefit." And oh, this wonderous benefit -- this rise in productivity due to measuring productivity in a new way that i"incorporates" IT -- why, lo and behold, it equals the cost over a single year. This was the kind of thinking that boosted Yahoo stock to what was it, $300 per share? in 2000.

Behind Suriowiecki's nuttiness is one major fact about the current economy: we are being held up not by IT, but by people buying cars and houses. That's it, folks. There's no magic in the figures. The dream world inhabited by Suriowiecki's skeptics seems to be panning out as the real world, brother. Cooked productivity figures don't compare with 0% financing and the incessant barrage of mortgage offers even LI, who doesn't have a pot to piss in, gets regularly every morning in our email.

Alas, Surowiecki's kind of thinking will be used to justify the disastrous divident tax cut. The pied pipers are still out there, boys and girls.

Notes.

We received a nice email from a friend in NY re the previous post. Here it is:

"hi Roger - kind of a sweet post today, if I don't say so myself ....and, ah, evocative; in the sense that your introflashback brought me back to a memory of a moment in Austin in '91: I was sitting in the bar at the union (what the hell was it called?) drinking a beer and "protesting" the gulf war in the same way that all my "political" activity transpired (well, to be sure, very much as I did pretty much everything back then): sitting in a dark room on a sunny day, talking, drinking coffee, smoking, drinking beer, smoking, talking, drinking wine, talking, smoking..... when you happened in and we discussed having the same shameful, horrifying, stultifyingly humiliating realization the night before: that we agreed with Ross Perot - the war is not about oil. Well, were just about to go back to war and it still aint about oil. Trouble is, GW Dauphin and the rest of the cast of characters from '91 might think that it is (well, probably not Colin Powell, he's too focused on the exit strategy to ponder the whys and wherefores). We'll end up just as angry and sad and dumbfounded about the war as we were in '91, and the bullets will fly and the bombs will do what they do, and I will find a dark room on a sunny day and have a beer, alone and silent."

Speaking of exit strategies:
Today, of course, is the day the phone company decided to strike against Limited Inc, depriving us of phone service unless they receive some more of the ready... and of course LI isn't sure there's any ready in the bank. Not to worry, we will be posting from libraries and the like, if we have to... we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the hills, we will fight in the divorce courts...

The latter is where we will be appearing tomorrow. A friend is divorcing a man who is convinced that LI has carnally known this friend. The man has been dragging said friend -- his ex-wife -- through the nightmare of the legal system in order to extract buckets of the ready. The man seems convinced that the courts are going to reward him for his varied virtues, in spite of the fact that the numbers say otherwise. And that the court will punish LI for our many vices. Drama, that is what we live for on this site, don't you know. Here it is. No wonder lately we are reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot.