Reminder- call Dad

Mine liked the occasional Black Label, hers any Irish potcheen

Jack picked the Carafe on the table, Jenny, many Platters clean

Google's morning gimmick- 'Reminder- call Dad!'

& this drunk, that bulimic- not rueful, now, Sad.

End Child Poverty Now!

This is a guest post, by frequent commentator on this blog, Shree Sanjay K.

End Child Poverty now, by telling my Dad to raise my pocket money already. Sodomy just aint as remunerative as everybody makes out. When I grow up I want to become an astronaut and have a big rocket and go explore Uranus rather than the other way round- which frankly is getting kinda old.

You can read my translation of Ghalib in the comments section of the previous post.

Ghalib's ghazal 182.

taġhāful-dost hūñ merā dimāġh-e ʿajz ʿālī hai
agar pahlū tihī kīje to jā merī bhī ḳhālī hai

rahā ābād ʿālam ahl-e himmat ke nah hone se

bhare haiñ jis qadar jām-o-subū mai-ḳhānah ḳhālī hai

I'm the Abraham of Eternity's abscission, Exalted Ali of Submission's vision
Overlooked, I befriend misprision- Harold Bloom's in Karl Barth's revision

Ach! what so populates the world is the utter absence of men

This Tavern too were empty, filled a glass to my 'when!'

 

South Park is dying. If I really love it, I'll let it go.

Honestly, I hadn't heard anything. No rumors of trouble with Studio bosses or artistic differences or some Yoko fucking Ono. South Park is dying. Today's Tween wave thing was the beginning of the long goodbye. Apparently they're contractually obligated to produce 7 more episodes. After that- nothing.

I know I'm supposed to be growing up along with Stan and Kyle and Mr. Marsh and his wife who have come to the final parting of ways. I know, I too should now be able to see that South Park, qua South Park, is just another turd in the microwave and that this has always been its teaching.
Once I see that, I too will be free. Perhaps that's why I've never been in love. Never known I've been in love. Because only now do I understand I didn't just love South Park- I lurved it. It took my virginity. I gave it my whole heart. But, like all composite things, it too must perish. But not before leaving me with this final Erigenian teaching that love- this unexpected gift so close to the end of the middle of my life, or the beginning of its end- love too is shite, for all things that are are shite. And somehow that makes everything okay.

South Park is dying. If I really love it, I'll let it go.

Hail to thee, Democracy!- a poem on the Arab Spring.

Hail to thee, Democracy!  thou Egyptian Helen restored!

& blessed be our T.V, of besieged Trojans bored

Pour, Saqi, pour, Liberty's wine and sing

As Siren, Sphinx, or Sahara drunk on our Arab Spring.

All Beauty burns with one grim, guttering, plume.

All Beauty burns with one grim, guttering, plume

& Being yearns in Becoming's uttering gloom

& Day is fain & vain Darkness bridal

My cock to suck when young and idle

Preference diversity and Optimal currency areas

Does preference diversity impact on Optimal currency area demarcation? My feeling is that back when I was at School in the early 80's the answer most people would have given was no.
People thought labor and capital mobility sufficient to constrain preference diversity to that which could drive gains from trade but not vitiate it or render the working of fiscal automatic stabilizers (like Social Security) perverse and incentive incompatible in their working.
Now, post Greece, Portugal, Spain etc. the question must be readdressed.  What if a small moral hazard gets amplified such that you get a new population mix with sharper preference diversity? Then you could get a dependency culture- islands of work supporting hinterlands of leisure preference. This may still be politically acceptable if people value having a menu of life-style choices. However language and other barriers may militate against this. Still, provided assets in work-shy or dependent areas depreciate relative to assets in the islands of productivity, presumably a condition for the optimal currency area is met.
What if those assets instead of depreciating have their price either artificially inflated or stabilized by a Financial system run amok or, in its after-math, a Central Bank intervention?
It appears to me that a way to approach questions of this kind is by reversing the chain of causation and asking what sort of entities are conducive to optimal preference diversity. How and why, over their life-cycle might those entities generate perverse preference diversity matrices. What checks on this generate- for example India's political instrumentalization of a standardized poverty for reasons of internal cohesion- and how those checks can be disabled. These are the sort of questions that might profitably be posed.

My literary apprenticeship.

The following was submitted in support of my application for a place on a Creative Writing Program. Your task is to assign it a grade.

When did I become a writer? It wasn't when I learned my A B D (we were too poor to afford C) in a small one-room school in Chennai- or Madras as it was then called because we were too poor to afford that ostentatious initial letter C though some Anti-Brahmin agitators were already making the brave but fool-hardy attempt to *all our *ity *hennai as a stop-gap till the new D.M.K government raised suffi*ient funds to pay for the importation of a C to replace the asterisk.
Nor was it- I'm still talking about how I became a writer- when we moved to Iraq, a country where the letter C is entirely absent. There's a 'Ch' in Persian and all sorts of 'k' sounds in Arabic, but no C.

Actually, this post has nothing to do with the letter C. I really don't know what might have given you that impression or why you are now so insistently harping upon it.  The salient point here is that I'm trying, in the most economical and aethetically pleasing manner possible, to convey to you a history of privation and Third Worldliness so as to present my struggles towards Scription in a sympathetic light.

Anyway, to get back to the theme of this post- vide licet my literary apprenticeship- I will now introduce what Collingwood terms a distinction without a difference which, for that reason, belongs to second-order, hence philosophical, discourse properly so called.  Well, I would have just now introduced that distinction without a difference to you except it's like probably popped off to the loo or gotten lucky with a gate-crasher or something while we were talking.

Personally, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Baba Ramdev, corruption, and the drain theory of poverty.

Why are some people rich and other people poor? Drain theory has the answer. Rich people get up in the middle of the night and break into the homes of poor people and drain away their wealth.
A famous example of this was the East India Company. When it was set up, England was very poor and India extremely rich. All this changed when John Company arrived in Calcutta. Every night, wicked English colonialists would break into the homes of Indian people and drain their wealth. Kumarappa was a great Indian economist who got quite upset about this. Mahatma Gandhi, with money from Dalmia, launched a Salt agitation which in some occult manner signaled his disapproval of the British habit of draining Indian wealth. Unfortunately, the dainty British Queen- Lord Mountbatten, as she liked to be called- took offense at Gandhi's oblique comments re. her tendency to get up in the middle of the night and go drain wealth from sundry Indians sleeping in their hovels. That's why the British pulled out of India, claiming they had to go home to change for gym or that they had an over-due library book or something.

With the departure of the British, India became very rich. However some poverty remained visible. Why? How?  The answer has been found by great geniuses like Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev.  Corruption is the cause of poverty because it is a type of wealth draining.
The correct way to tackle the problem of poverty is by going on a fast-unto-death for a day or two. However, you must make sure that your fast is not supported by the R.S.S. If it is, the Govt will beat you due to you are indulging in what's called 'Communalism'- which FYI, boys and girls, is a very bad thing- unless represented by Shaheed Osama bin Laden in which case it is perfectly Secular and Socialist and Scientific- all of which are very very good things.

The question now facing us is how can we get rid of corruption? Anytime someone starts a fast-unto-death those pesky RSS guys might decide to support it- in which case it turns into something very evil and bad called 'Communalism'. What, then is the alternative?
The answer is- instead of tackling corruption we must address the problem of poverty. C.C TV, infra red monitors and state of the art, armor plated bank vaults must be installed in every jhuggi, jhompdi or other sort of hovel in India. When the rich people come out of their mansions to drain India's wealth, they should be caught in hi-tech titanium nets solar powered by 'Out of control' intelligent nano-bots in an environmentally sustainable manner benchmarked for Total Quality Management within a Gender and Development paradigm stressing transparency and subsidiarity. By the miracle of for-profit Micro Finance, the whole thing can be done just by lending a little old lady in India $0.27.
Could someone tell those lazy buggers at the Post Office to get off their keysters and kindly send me my Magsaysay 'Right Livelihood' award already?