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Rumsfeld on business: You just wait and see!

Talking point: Riefenstahl=Moore

Some London restaurant recommendations

Rumsfeld on business

Satire

Donald Rumsfeld, addressing a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Generals, admirals, good morning.

I’ve called this meeting to discuss some pressing business.

We have to wrap up our successful deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan in short order.  We’re getting raked over the coals even as we’re winning hearts and minds.

You’re all aware that the President campaigned for office based in part on his success running several businesses.  And of course, Dick Cheney and I are also successful businessmen.  So in spite of your continued whining about our, quote, meddling, we do know best and we will instill some best business practices here.  And I don’t mean nation building.  You know what the President and I think about that – it’s just not a core competency for us.  Nor a priority.

The 87 billion bucks – the shareholders are balking, to be frank.  And they lack the balls to hang in for even the unilateral, multi-year deployments we’ve started, much less the others we’re eyeing.  If they had the mental capacity to understand that things really are going exactly as we had planned, they would be thanking us, but since the press de-embedded in May, we’ve had some trouble getting out our message.

We need, therefore, to rethink our plan.  Not the ends – those are the same today as they were on 9/11.  The means.  I know you guys are not successful businessmen, as I am, but try to follow.

What does a successful businessman today do when he needs something big and messy done?  Does he hire thousands?  No.  What then?  Anyone?

Outsource!

We’re going to outsource!  You have heard of outsourcing, right?  Successful companies outsource all sorts of crap they can’t or don’t want to deal with.  Obviously, we’re already outsourcing logistics to KBR, Iraq reconstruction to Bechtel.  General Myers, correct me on the slim chance I’m wrong but we have prisoners sewing fatigues, right?  Right, so what’s the obvious next step?

Our men and women are complaining about the desert heat, our funds are running a bit low, that bastard Chalabi is turning on us, and as if all that weren’t enough, we’re taking not-so-friendly fire from the ranks and the Democrats on hazardous duty pay and vets’ benefits. Those ninnies at the U.N. sure aren’t going to come in and mop up, not without extorting some ridiculous mea culpa from us – and for what – because we were right and they were wrong and we weren’t too shy to point that out?

Anyway, I digress.  China.  Vietnam.  Both of them are eager for jobs, right?  Smart CEOs know that.  They want the jobs and they work cheap. We’ve got some mopping up work to do, and not just in the war on terror.  Ashcroft tells me that drugs are still afoot too.  And evil of course.

So we outsource ground war, peacekeeping, and nation building.  We pay China and Vietnam about a quarter of what we’re paying our guys, they pay their guys a quarter of that and everybody’s happy.  And hey, the People's Liberation Army gets some of that “travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them” action.  They’re not getting that in some podunk peasant pisshole in Ping Pong Province or wherever. Well, the “kill them” part maybe.  Ha-ha.  Better yet, we don’t shell out for hazardous duty pay and the VA guys don’t have to worry about their post-war health care.  I keep reading this bullshit about these depleted uranium shells.  Problem solved, see?  And best of all, our soldiers come home, if we execute rapidly, well before the election. They can keep an eye on the homeland from home, making Ridge happy too.

Sounds good, right?  What about the potential downside risks?

Number one – are they reliable?  Hey, Americans buy plenty of Chinese stuff at Wal-Mart so they can’t be all that bad.  Heck, we’re buying plenty of Chinese stuff here in the DoD.  Flags.  Then, those commie cadres are pretty good at intel ops, something I can’t say for those Langley losers.  And are they fierce?  One word.  Vietcong.  Not that they beat us – the hippies did that – but those VCs were tough. 

Two – command and oversight.  First, we make sure our terms of service with the Chinese and Vietnamese are airtight.  Next, we obviously have to maintain the command structure ourselves.  Then, we get some of those pen and mic jockeys from the Times or Fox to stick their noses in every corner and report back to us whenever there’s even the whiff of fault in execution.  That’s what they do to us already, right?  We just make it a bit more lucrative for them.  For obvious reasons, these would have to be cash transactions so that those guys can maintain their objectivity.  This’ll cost a pittance. 

But I do have to level with you.  As CEOs know, there is some administrative cost associated with outsourcing that we’ll need to deduct from the savings.  So let’s say we’re saving 50 percent, as an estimate.

Three – what about WMD, Saddam, Osama, etcetera?  We’ll keep a small force in each country and if anything turns up, we get the Chinese to hand them over to us, no news reports.  Then we go to the press once we have Saddam, Osama, whatever, in hand.  If the Chinese leak – CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox, Chinese TV, whatever – if they leak, we deduct 5 billion per episode.  Again, this’d need to be a side agreement.

Men … this is what those of us who have met a payroll call a win-win.

Will it really work?  There’s no doubt.  I can categorically state that not a single job outsourced to China by the private sector has ever come back for lack of performance.

Want more?  OK.  Figure we save 40 billion, after overhead.  Rove and the President can use that 40 billion to justify another big tax cut with some of that fuzzy math of theirs.  Now we’re talking win-win-win.

And you’ll get some practical outsourcing experience for when you go to work for Lockheed or Raytheon.  Win-win-win-win, gentlemen.

And when this works out, as I can assure you that it will, we can contract out to the Chinese for some work in Colombia and maybe Thailand to keep Ashcroft from feeling left out, or perhaps a few assignments in African trouble spots to keep Powell in line.  Later, we can have a look at how we can do Navy and Air Force deployments. Gentlemen, the possibilities are endless, the skies are bright, and it’s all at half-price.

Are there any questions?  No, of course there wouldn’t be.  This is proven and foolproof.  General Myers, report to me by Tuesday how the Army and the Marines are going to hand off by next Labor Day.

Thank you.

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Talking point: Riefenstahl=Moore

Not too long ago, Melanie Morgan, a talk show host from KSFO was dispatched to argue
on a local TV program that Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11" should be neither viewed by citizens nor shown by cinemas, all the while insisting vehemently that this wasn't "censorship" since only the government can censor. In the constitutional sense, yes, she's
correct. In the common sense, no.

As in all performances of this overexposed kabuki, she said, in order, that 1) the film was full of inaccuracies, 2) she hadn't seen the film, 3) she would not be seeing the film, and 4) the film was full of inaccuracies and therefore should be ignored by all, just as she's doing.

She soon got around to the latest conservative talking point, namely that Michael Moore
is the equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker. Obviously this is the même du mois,as heard on Rush, et al. Before Rush came up with this trope, it's likely that 90% of the
other talkmeisters now using this comparison believed that "Triumph Of The Will" was a self-improvement program.

Where to start? Riefenstahl worked on behalf of the powerful Nazis, who were on their way to committing genocide against minorities. Moore's work attacks corporations and the Bushes. So in Riefenstahl=Moore, Bush and General Motors are the Jews in Germany in
1934? So powerless? This is a favorite of the powerful when their opponents pick up a pen, a microphone, a camera, some legislation, or a court decision - to claim "discrimination", as if a gnat could effectively discriminate against a jumbo jet.

Riefenstahl made films of fascists luxuriating in their single-minded, unquestioning fealty to a man and to twisted ideals they considered to be moral compass bearings; their
"dittoheadism" if you will. Are the Riefenstahl=Moore proponents claiming that Moore's film depicts fascists? Would that be the Saudi royal family or the Bush family? Both?

Next, Melanie Morgan claimed that a documentary, in order to qualify for the appelation, must present both sides (or presumably, make a fair effort to do so). Even if you accept
this dodgy, self-serving redefinition (for reference, the first sentence of Riefenstahl's obit in the NY Times calls her a documentarian), some questions arise. Would "Roger and Me" have been the greatest documentary of all time if only Moore had been successful in reaching Roger Smith to get Smith's side of the story to balance those of his laid off employees? Does the fact that the Bush family has all the access they could want to the media and yet GWB chooses to testify about 9/11 only in private and only under the condition that his people get to vet the notes taken indicate to any sensible person that GWB really wants very badly to get his side of the story out there in the open?

Now, the best part of this Riefenstahl=Moore argument. What did Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" present? Unnarrated, little edited footage of actual (albeit staged) horrifying events - Nazis on parade. So from the equivalency asserted, should we conclude that Moore's film is horrifying because it too shows fascists flexing their frightened manhood as a prelude to wiping away opposition to their self-serving laws and policies? Is this the lesson we should note?

In short, watch closely with shock and awe, or disgust and anger, as the counterfactual and counterintuitive arguments ooze out. Like so many Big Lies. Göring would have admired it.

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London restaurants

While there are many wonderful, modestly priced, homey, tasty, and genuine curry houses and other South Asian restaurants, an absolute must not miss restaurant is La Porte Des Indes. Near Marble Arch, this place is over the top in food quality, décor, ambiance, service, staff costumes, and alas, prices.  It’s located in an Edwardian dance hall.  Naveena and Gabe agree that it is among the best Indian dining experiences we’ve ever had.  Here is their home page.

Another place we recomend is The Engineer, a so called gastro pub.  That is, it’s casual but the cooking is high caliber.  It’s up Primrose Hill from Camden Locks and (not especially) near the Chalk Farm tube.  The back patio is fine, as in FINE, in summer.

Similar to this pub, and indeed, just down the street, is The Landsdowne.

Out of the way, sort of in the Docklands but sort of on the edge of the East End still is The Wapping Project, though perhaps informally known as Wapping Food.  It is a restaurant built in an old hydraulic power station, and some of the old machinery is still there for ambiance.  It’s near the Thames in an eerily quiet neighborhood and the food and drinks are very good and potent, respectively.

And of course, the Harrods Food Court offers a greater variety of good food than you can shake a cricket bat at.  They recently opened a Krispy Kreme concession but don’t let that deter you from visiting to try out their excellent produce, deli, bakery, well … just about anything you can think of in a full-service food shop (with full-service prices).

http://www.london-eating.co.uk has many more recommendations for places to eat.

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