Celebrities do it. “The son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour defiled the Cenotaph before joining the baying mob surrounding Prince Charles and Camilla.” Gilmour was a student at Cambridge. “The son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour did not realise he was swinging from the Cenotaph because he had grown up in the countryside without access to television, a court has been told.”  Don’t people know it’s trendy to be rebellious? Who knows about what the Cenotaph is except the members of those dreadful clubs that the poor old pensioners belong to and stand for Last Post on Armistice Day?

So when a flash mob of youths ransacked a 7-11 in Baltimore and beat up the manager who tried to stop them, at least you can say ‘they did it for grape flavor, or raspberry’ slurpees. They did for a couple of Mars bars on the shelves. The poor at least retain the humanity of some semblance between act and need.

What happened at the store is the latest example of large groups of young people creating havoc in downtown Baltimore.

On St. Patrick’s Day, police broke up several fights and disturbances as crowds of teens gathered in the Inner Harbor.

That same night, another group beat and robbed a tourist. Cameras have spotted large groups of teens roaming streets in November and caught big fights on July 4, all of it upsetting to downtown workers.

But pure idealists would never loot anything for money. That would be philistine. The acceptable motive is to wreck and burn stuff for fun. To terrify people in a self-righteous, unadulturated display of cruel power. Watch the activist youth celebrate May Day in San Francisco.  In some ways, they are way, way below the crowd that hit the 7-11.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bob Marley said, ‘you can’t blame the youth’. Cause they know the Big Secret. Bill Clinton did inhale.  And Barack Obama thanked his drug dealer, not his mom when he graduated from high school. No you can’t blame the youth.

So You can’t blame the youth of today
You can’t fool the youth
You can’t blame the youth
You can’t fool the youth
All these great men were doing
Robbing, raping, kidnapping and killing
So-called great men were doing
Robbing, raping, kidnapping …

But What was hidden from the wise and prudent
Is now revealed to the babes and the sucklings
What was hidden from the wise and prudent
Now revealed to the babes and sucking
Lord call upon the youth
Cause he know the youth is strong
Jah Jah call upon the youths
Cause he know the youth is strong

What could go wrong? Well Jah Jah know that Beelzebub literally means the “lord of the flies”. “Jewish scholars have interpreted the title of ‘Lord of Flies’ as the Hebrew way of calling Ba’al a pile of dung and comparing Ba’al followers to flies.” The historical role of the youth has been as fodder for old and evil causes. Someone supplies the s**t and the flies follow.

Youth is not always idealistic, but as Bob Marley observed, “youth is strong”. We ought never forget that the average age of SS Regimental Commanders was 32 and their battalion commanders averaged age 30.  What fun they had. No you can’t blame the youth.

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But nothing illustrates the level to which Spain sunk more than news that it’s Eurovision song contestant has been asked to intentionally lose because the country can’t afford to host the next event if she wins.

Bosses of Spanish public television have told Pastora Soler ‘to throw’ her entry as the Government battle to cut national debt and bring public spending under control. The 33-year-old singer said directors of state-run broadcaster TVE called her in to say: ‘Please don’t win. We don’t want to pay for it in 2013.’

Who can say which is sadder? The arrival of the day you can’t afford to win or the fact that winning means you spend more than losing? Well choose your wild. The BBC reports that one of Spain’s biggest banks has had it’s shares suspended from trading — at its own request. That’s because it needs 15 billion Euros, slightly more than Catalonia or it goes bust. The reason? Spain has a housing bubble and many of the bank’s assets are worthless. But then nobody even knows how deep the hole is. The AP reports that they’re still trying to figure it out.

“I don’t know if the figures will be greater or smaller than those being talked about because I am not responsible for the information that is coming out,” said Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria at a weekly government press conference.

Hopes that Spain’s travel industry could extract it from the mire took a hit with news that “as many as 30 of Spain’s 47 state-run airports are to be partially shut in an attempt to reduce costs. Some have no scheduled flights yet are fully staffed and operational in what has come to symbolise the reckless public spending projects that have left Spain crippled with debt…”

David Hall at the Wall Street Journal says he is reliably informed that governments and companies are preparing for a “nightmare scenario”. Even keeping the supermarkets open won’t be easy.

Contingency planning is ramping up on the corporate side, too. One European supermarket group has been looking closely at its suppliers’ financing requirements. “The key thing for them is how their working capital cycle is funded and whether they can get access to the banks that they normally would use, which may themselves be in a liquidity squeeze,” a treasury official at the company tells CFO European Briefing. “Our job is to ensure the channels of liquidity are open. If we can keep that going, a lot of the disruption can be minimized relatively quickly.”

Nobody is going to be singing a happy tune on the other side of the Atlantic either. Detroit is literally turning off the lights. With 40% of its street lights already out, the city government “will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.” As it is, they will need to have to borrow money to even scale back. Mayor Bing plans to “create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.”

CNBC is worried that investors are running out of ‘safe havens’ to put their money. “Much has been made recently of how gold no longer offers its traditional buffer against financial turmoil, with the yellow metal in a sharp pullback since early March. But some strategists are beginning to worry that other places where investors are stowing their money — high-grade bonds, Treasurys and defensive stocks in particular — also could be losing their protective shields.” All the more reason, said President Obama, to give him another term in which to clean up all the “wild debts” caused by Republicans. Populations on both sides of the Atlantic can be sure they are now in good hands.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Too bad though about Eurovision. It’s a sad day when our collective ability to celebrate and sing is dampened by the harsh reality of unpaid bills. But it’s only temporary, just you wait and see. True music never complains.

George Michael, aha
Michael Jackson, hi hi
Elton John, yeah yeah
Boris Becker, uh uh
Pavarotti, oh oh
Haiduc non so che fare a diventare cosi

When will you and I, be a star
Glamour parties, a new car
London, Rome, Paris, there’re calling me
Lights, camera, action now you’re on TV

Questo va fuori a tutti i dj’s
This one goes out to all the dj’s
Tu balla e balla tu balla con noi
Balla qui con me il ritmo veloce

David Beckham, yeah yeah
Dolly Buster, oh oh
Robbie Williams, aha
Britney Spears, ooops
Elvis Presley, yeah yeah
Haiduc non so che fare a diventare cosi

When will you and I, be a star
Glamour parties, a new car
London, Rome, Paris, there’re calling me
Lights, camera, action now you’re on TV

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Hugo Chavez, facing the prospect of personal extinction, temporarily forgot his Marxism and begged Jesus to grant him life. Richard “the Iceman” Kuklinski, who worked as a hitman for the Mafia and killed and sometimes tortured people for fun, also got the urge to confess in face of a terminal illness.  Recently, a man confessed to murdering six-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 after learning that he was dying from cancer.

Pedro Hernandez, 51, confessed to police that he lured Patz to his death with the promise of a soda. He took police back to the basement of a Manhattan boedga and showed them where he claimed he strangled Patz …

Kelly said detectives were drawn to Hernandez in recent days because Hernandez had told family members and friends as early as 1981 that he had “done a bad thing and killed a child in New York.” …

Hernandez was taken into custody at his residence in Maple Shade, N.J., on Wednesday morning where he lives with his wife and daughter. The apartment is rented by his wife, Rosemary Hernandez, who let her husband move in after he told her that he was dying of cancer.

Listverse has a catalog of deathbed confessions that range from admissions of undetected murder to plagiarization to the theft of a Stradivarius. One man, Christian Spurling, confessed that he had faked a photo “considered to be the best evidence of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.”

“Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” The WSJ writes, “something concrete finally came out of a eurocrat summit. The Germans said no.” And no means nein.

There have been two main responses to the crisis: austerity, and kicking cans down roads. Austerity, in case you haven’t noticed, is so last year. It’s out. Which means that unless something else is found, some other comprehensive plan, the other main response, can kicking, is going to run out of road.

Just about everybody backed the idea of eurobonds, except for the Germans, and since they’re the ones with all the money, they’re kind of the only ones whose vote counts anyway. So, it’s time to go to plan B. Only there’s no Plan B, and there’s no time, either.

Maybe a new approach will be found and the whole enterprise will draw back from the brink. It is equally likely that “there’s no plan.” This is how catastrophes happen. The Titanic was unsinkable. No lifeboats were necessary. Everything was too big to fail. Hence the words “Nearer my God, to Thee” once again found utterance.

In comments in the previous thread I wrote that nobody can quite believe it when they’ve reached the end of the road. After the President’s political support began to collapse the question should have been, what’s the Plan B? Not for the President, but for everybody. Or is that a question so long unasked that Washington has stopped thinking it?

The next month will be extraordinarily critical. Both Romney and Obama still act as if they were in control, that this campaign will be with variations, just another campaign. But I think the discontinuity that has apparently hit Obama is a real one. Things are changing in ways that both defy his paradigm and outpace his ability to react. The mistake would be to imagine that the discontinuity will only affect Obama.

To me the real question is: what institution or leaders will take the initiative if a number of really challenging crises arrive simultaneously. As one commenter said, a solution to a shipboard emergency predicated on the existence of the ship doesn’t work when the ship itself is imperiled. The question reduces to what is capable of thinking outside the box if the box itself is taped shut?

The biggest weakness of the Obama political position is that it has abandoned the center in favor of the margins. His divide and conquer strategy required it. Yet in so doing he abandoned the center which in a crisis is the high ground. It’s where you can act with broad tacit support. The really scary thing about a crisis is that it will require reversing the plotted course to create two or more or multiple nations. The Big Tent goes down in a high wind.

People are atavistic in a crisis. They want a Winston Churchill not a crank; they will run to the plaza when they are afraid. They won’t flee to nightclubs with dim lights. The center is where people go in a storm. In the event of a really rapid series of changes — a collapse in his support, the implosion of the banking system, a major terrorist incident — the President is in a poor position to govern. In fact he’s done precious little governance.

Oh yes he has the Constitutional power, but he’s relied for so long on the Narrative that he’s undermined the principal source of his own power to do something at a time when he may need it most. The attachment to country, the binding force of the American identity, a faith in the future. All these outdated biases are the very things which he has done the most to destroy and yet will need the most.

In a crisis you will follow who you trust, not the Narrative. And I think the Narrative is about to die or take sick. Power based upon the Narrative — the bullyboy pulpit of the media — is going to vanish in the face of any crisis which discredits it. So, as one cannot count on the ship when it hits the iceberg, so too should one be wary of relying on the Narrative when the Narrative shows signs of failing.

Therefore the significance of the President’s bad week is not fully reflected in the polls. The polls only answer the conventional question. They do not answer the questions which have yet to be asked. And the question, I think is what happens when you have nothing left but the memory of who you are? When Chris Matthews and the New York Times are in Deck D underwater?

But lest anyone break out the champagne, it is well to remember that in a crisis a divided nation is weak; the ideal situation is one where both a President and challenger are near enough to the center to draw together their ends of the tails. When you make a country bimodal to gain power there’s a price to be paid. Ambition is paid for in national survivability.

We talk about preparing for a discontinuity by buying food, fuel and supplies. But the greatest preparation is anticipatory networking among the nation’s leadership cadre. If the leaders can’t think ahead then all is lost. And in that respect, both sides are still not getting it. Nobody is really thinking ahead. Everyone still believes the Titanic is unsinkable. I hope it is, but as the EU is showing everyone, nothing is guaranteed any more, and not because of the Tea Party. The world is changing and the weathers are strange.

Nothing is too big to fail.

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
And it makes me wonder

Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know
The piper’s calling you to join him
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold

And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll.

And She's Buying a Stairway To Heaven

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The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99

Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5

“Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” The WSJ writes, “something concrete finally came out of a eurocrat summit. The Germans said no.” And no means nein.

There have been two main responses to the crisis: austerity, and kicking cans down roads. Austerity, in case you haven’t noticed, is so last year. It’s out. Which means that unless something else is found, some other comprehensive plan, the other main response, can kicking, is going to run out of road.

Just about everybody backed the idea of eurobonds, except for the Germans, and since they’re the ones with all the money, they’re kind of the only ones whose vote counts anyway. So, it’s time to go to plan B. Only there’s no Plan B, and there’s no time, either.

Maybe a new approach will be found and the whole enterprise will draw back from the brink. It is equally likely that “there’s no plan.” This is how catastrophes happen. The Titanic was unsinkable. No lifeboats are necessary. Everything was too big to fail. Hence the words “Nearer my God, to Thee” once again found utterance.

In comments in the previous thread I wrote that nobody can quite believe it when they’ve reached the end of the road. After the President’s political support began to collapse the question should have been, what’s the Plan B? Not for the President, but for everybody.  Or is that a question so long unasked that Washington has stopped thinking it?

The next month will be extraordinarily critical. Both Romney and Obama still act as if they were in control, that this campaign will be with variations, just another campaign. But I think the discontinuity that has apparently hit Obama is a real one. Things are changing in ways that both defy his paradigm and outpace his ability to react. The mistake would be to imagine that the discontinuity will only affect Obama.

To me the real question is: what institution or leaders will take the initiative if a number of really challenging crises arrive simultaneously. As one commenter said, a solution to a shipboard emergency predicated on the existence of the ship doesn’t work when the ship itself is imperiled. The question reduces to what is capable of thinking outside the box if the box itself is taped shut?

The biggest weakness of the Obama political position is that it has abandoned the center in favor of the margins. His divide and conquer strategy required it. Yet in so doing he abandoned the center which in a crisis is the high ground. It’s where you can act with broad tacit support. The really scary thing about a crisis is that it will require reversing the plotted course to create two or more or multiple nations. The Big Tent goes down in a high wind.

People are atavistic in a crisis. They want a Winston Churchill not a crank; they will run to the plaza when they are afraid. They won’t flee to nightclubs with dim lights. The center is where people go in a storm. In the event of a really rapid series of changes — a collapse in his support, the implosion of the banking system, a major terrorist incident — the President is in a poor position to govern. In fact he’s done precious little governance.

Oh yes he has the Constitutional power, but he’s relied for so long on the Narrative that he’s undermined the principal source of his own power to do something at a time when he may need it most. The attachment to country, the binding force of the American identity, a faith in the future. All these outdated biases are the very things which he has done the most to destroy and yet will need the most.

In a crisis you will follow who you trust, not the Narrative. And I think the Narrative is about to die or take sick. Power based upon the Narrative — the bullyboy pulpit of the media — is going to vanish in the face of any crisis which discredits it. So, as one cannot count on the ship when it hits the iceberg, so too should one be wary of relying on the Narrative when the Narrative shows signs of failing.

Therefore the significance of the President’s bad week is not fully reflected in the polls. The polls only answer the conventional question. They do not answer the questions which have yet to be asked. And the question, I think is what happens when you have nothing left but the memory of who you are? When Chris Matthews and the New York Times are in Deck D underwater?

But lest anyone break out the champagne, it is well to remember that in a crisis a divided nation is weak; the ideal situation is one where both a President and challenger are near enough to the center to draw together their ends of the tails. When you make a country bimodal to gain power there’s a price to be paid. Ambition is paid for in national survivability.

We talk about preparing for a discontinuity by buying food, fuel and supplies. But the greatest preparation is anticipatory networking among the nation’s leadership cadre. If the leaders can’t think ahead then all is lost. And in that respect, both sides are still not getting it. Nobody is really thinking ahead. Everyone still believes the Titanic is unsinkable. I hope it is, but as the EU is showing everyone, nothing is guaranteed any more, and not because of the Tea Party. The world is changing and the weathers are strange.

Nothing is too big to fail.

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
And it makes me wonder

Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know
The piper’s calling you to join him
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold

And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll.

And She's Buying a Stairway To Heaven

How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99

Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5

In Arkansas, the latest results, with about a quarter of precincts reporting, shows Obama beating Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe by a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent …

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Obama is actually losing full counties to “Uncommitted.” Actually, Obama lost more than 40 counties across the state to Uncommitted…. It literally means that people are actively voting for nobody.

Mr. Nobody was having a pretty good night with Colin Powell too. The AP says “Former Secretary of State Colin Powell declined Tuesday to renew the presidential endorsement he gave Barack Obama four years ago, saying he wasn’t ready “to throw my weight behind someone” at this time.”

It’s almost like people are going out of their way to make sure they meet nobody but nobodies. Barney Frank “says President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are welcome at his July wedding, provided they leave their Secret Service detail at home.” The red carpet, the sirens, the men in black. That’s kind of lost its appeal.

“I don’t want to be accused of having shut down the entire region for a five mile radius on a holiday weekend,” he said. “I don’t want my guests going through a magnetometer.”

National Public Radio wonders where all the enthusiasm has gone. Remember the pledge to absolutely destroy Scott Walker in Wisconsin for attempting to dismantle public sector unions? The Avengers have taken a holiday. Today the cry is “where’s The DNC In Wisconsin?” because the Hulk ain’t showing.

Political analysts on the right and the left agree that the Wisconsin recall race between Republican Governor Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Tom Barrett is … is second only to the presidential race in importance …

While unions have been delivering resources for grassroots mobilization, there has not been an equivalent level of engagement by national Democratic Party operatives. Callers to Ed Schultz’s national radio show, a broadcast center of the discussion about the state-based struggles by unions and defenders of public services and public education, were furious with the DNC.

They aren’t just griping, however.

Brookfield, Wisconsin, activist Mary Magnuson went to MoveOn.org’s member-driven petition site — www.SignOn.org — with a note that read: “As a Wisconsin progressive working day and night for the recall of Scott Walker, I’m shocked: The Democratic National Committee still isn’t giving financial support to the recall fight in Wisconsin.

Maybe there’s no money because the President can hardly raise enough money for his own campaign. New York Times says that “President Obama’s once-commanding fund-raising advantage is declining as major Republican donors rally for Mitt Romney, conservative “super PACs” far outpace their liberal counterparts and tax-exempt issue-advocacy groups swarm the political landscape.” That explains the Republican surge of cash, but where are the Democrats? Well if the President can’t fund himself there is not much hope that there will be any left over for the Democrats in Wisconsin.

But maybe it’s not Mitt Romney who is taking President Obama to the woodshed. After all if John Wolfe and Uncommitted can muster a 40%+ showing against an incumbent in his own party, primary then Romney’s current lead is not much more impressive than the simple dumb luck of standing there and watching the President self-destruct. Remarking on the debacle which saw his own spokesman trashing his campaign points, Chris Matthews said that “a couple more Sundays like this by the way we’re going, the President won’t make it past August.”

The problem is the President’s record which makes it hard, but not impossible to promote him. One common technique for selling a bad product is adopting an approach that essentially offers them something else. “According to Wharton marketing professor Stephen Hoch, when a product or service becomes a tough sell, it’s because customers have obvious objections to it. The goal, therefore, should be ‘to frame an offer to get rid of the objection.’” Sell the sizzle when you can’t sell the sausage.

If that doesn’t work, there’s always the hard close. Insist on your candidate by working on guilt, greed or credulity. Whatever you do, don’t stop until you are actually and almost physically thrown out.

If you have determined that you have nothing to lose and have preferably consulted with either your sales manager or a tenured, successful sales professional, it’s time to get into the “hard close” state of mind. Before the first word comes out of your mouth, you need to decide that you will not stop closing until you are either asked to leave, your prospect becomes visibly angry or you hear at least 5 customer declinations. Most rookie sales professionals and unsuccessful reps stop closing after the first “no” they hear from their customers. The fact is that most sales require getting past 3 “no’s, and several take a few more. Though there is no golden rule, stopping your closing attempts after 5 “no’s” is a good rule of thumb. Any more and you risk not only getting the customer very angry but also having them harm your reputation in their networking circles. Try to remember the saying, “Drive to five, then drive away.”

And they won’t stop. Not while there’s a channel or ad space they can fill. In politics as in nowhere else, running a Gentleman John McCain campaign gets you nowhere. And for those who wondered where the title of the post comes in …

Click here to view the embedded video.

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In Arkansas, the latest results, with about a quarter of precincts reporting, shows Obama beating Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe by a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent …

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Obama is actually losing full counties to “Uncommitted.” Actually, Obama lost more than 40 counties across the state to Uncommitted…. It literally means that people are actively voting for nobody.

Mr. Nobody was having a pretty good night with Colin Powell too. The AP says “Former Secretary of State Colin Powell declined Tuesday to renew the presidential endorsement he gave Barack Obama four years ago, saying he wasn’t ready “to throw my weight behind someone” at this time.”

It’s almost like people are going out of their way to make sure they meet nobody but nobodies. Barney Frank “says President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are welcome at his July wedding, provided they leave their Secret Service detail at home.”  The red carpet, the sirens, the men in black. That’s kind of lost its appeal.

“I don’t want to be accused of having shut down the entire region for a five mile radius on a holiday weekend,” he said. “I don’t want my guests going through a magnetometer.”

National Public Radio wonders where all the enthusiasm has gone. Remember the pledge to absolutely destroy Scott Walker in Wisconsin for attempting to dismantle public sector unions? The Avengers have taken a holiday. Today the cry is “where’s The DNC In Wisconsin?” because the Hulk ain’t showing.

Political analysts on the right and the left agree that the Wisconsin recall race between Republican Governor Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Tom Barrett is …  is second only to the presidential race in importance …

While unions have been delivering resources for grassroots mobilization, there has not been an equivalent level of engagement by national Democratic Party operatives. Callers to Ed Schultz’s national radio show, a broadcast center of the discussion about the state-based struggles by unions and defenders of public services and public education, were furious with the DNC.

They aren’t just griping, however.

Brookfield, Wisconsin, activist Mary Magnuson went to MoveOn.org’s member-driven petition site — www.SignOn.org — with a note that read: “As a Wisconsin progressive working day and night for the recall of Scott Walker, I’m shocked: The Democratic National Committee still isn’t giving financial support to the recall fight in Wisconsin.

Maybe there’s no money because the President can hardly raise enough money for his own campaign. New York Times says that “President Obama’s once-commanding fund-raising advantage is declining as major Republican donors rally for Mitt Romney, conservative “super PACs” far outpace their liberal counterparts and tax-exempt issue-advocacy groups swarm the political landscape.” That explains the Republican surge of cash, but where are the Democrats? Well if the President can’t fund himself there is not much hope that there will be any left over for the Democrats in Wisconsin.

But maybe it’s not Mitt Romney who is taking President Obama to the woodshed.  After all if John Wolfe and Uncommitted can muster a 40%+ showing against an incumbent in his own party, primary then Romney’s current lead is not much more impressive than the simple dumb luck of standing there and watching the President self-destruct. Remarking on the debacle which saw his own spokesman trashing his campaign points, Chris Matthews said that “a couple more Sundays like this by the way we’re going, the President won’t make it past August.”

The problem is the President’s record which makes it hard, but not impossible to promote him.  One common technique for selling a bad product is adopting an approach that essentially offers them something else. “According to Wharton marketing professor Stephen Hoch, when a product or service becomes a tough sell, it’s because customers have obvious objections to it. The goal, therefore, should be ‘to frame an offer to get rid of the objection.’” Sell the sizzle when you can’t sell the sausage.

If that doesn’t work, there’s always the hard close. Insist on your candidate by working on guilt, greed or credulity. Whatever you do, don’t stop until you are actually and almost physically thrown out.

If you have determined that you have nothing to lose and have preferably consulted with either your sales manager or a tenured, successful sales professional, it’s time to get into the “hard close” state of mind. Before the first word comes out of your mouth, you need to decide that you will not stop closing until you are either asked to leave, your prospect becomes visibly angry or you hear at least 5 customer declinations. Most rookie sales professionals and unsuccessful reps stop closing after the first “no” they hear from their customers. The fact is that most sales require getting past 3 “no’s, and several take a few more. Though there is no golden rule, stopping your closing attempts after 5 “no’s” is a good rule of thumb. Any more and you risk not only getting the customer very angry but also having them harm your reputation in their networking circles. Try to remember the saying, “Drive to five, then drive away.”

And they won’t stop. Not while there’s a channel or ad space they can fill.  In politics as in nowhere else, running a Gentleman John McCain campaign gets you nowhere.

How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99

Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5

The risk of capital flight is key. “We are most worried about deposit risk for the periphery, and we see plenty that can be done to alleviate these risks–crucially if there is the political willingness. For instance, allowing banks to access the EFSF/ESM [the European Financial Stability Facility and European Stability Mechanism, the euro zone's temporary and permanent rescue funds, respectively] directly. We have not thought that this was politically feasible but clearly there is a pain threshold that makes politicians take risks.” Alternatively, a euro-wide deposit insurance program would be a good idea, RBS says.

But  the predictions are contingent. There is if and there is maybe. The biggest if is whether politicians will do the right thing. Why would anyone think they will? The most likely outcome is for politicians to behave exactly as they have before.

Jack Ewing at the New York Times  gamely essays a primer explaining the crisis to its readers. He tries to explain why little Greece is causing so much trouble:

Q: What’s all this talk about ‘‘contagion’’? Why is the global economy threatened by a small country like Greece, or a few troubled Spanish banks?

A: If Greece leaves the euro, anyone who is owed money by the Greek government or private individuals there can probably forget about being paid in full. In fact, that has already happened to a lot of Greece’s creditors in the debt restructuring completed in March.

The next time, if it comes, a lot of the people getting hurt would be European taxpayers, because most of the government debt is owned by the European Central Bank or the European Union. The investment bank UBS estimates the total cost at 225 billion euros, or $286.5 billion.

Commercial banks that have extended loans to Greek clients would also suffer. And some could fail, destabilizing the European financial system, which is already vulnerable enough. Likewise, the failure of several banks in Spain or elsewhere could stick those banks’ creditors with losses, perhaps causing more failures, as the problems cascaded through the system.

The problem isn’t that a small part of the system is rotten. The difficulty is that the whole system is so ramshackle that a threat to the smallest part of the system threatens the whole shebang. The uncertainty over how far things may cascade through the system is exacerbated precisely by this fragility. Nobody knows exactly what to expect because all of the accounting and still less of its policy framework of this statue of clay can be taken at face value. The reason there are so many unknowns is because so much has been misrepresented or hidden. For example CNBC reports the existence “secret fund” to prop up Greece.

There has been no official announcement. No terms or conditions have been disclosed. But Greece’s banking system is being propped up by an estimated €100 billion or so of emergency liquidity provided by the country’s central bank — approved secretly by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. If Greece were to leave the eurozone, the immediate cause might be an ECB decision to pull the plug.

How on earth can a hundred billion euro fund be kept secret? Simple. Don’t tell anyone about it. Jean-Claude Juncker President of the Euro Group, which exercises political control over the euro currency may be immortalized for the juxtaposition of two memorable phrases, neither of which was intended to be heard in conjunction with the other.

“I don’t envisage, not even for one second, Greece leaving. This is nonsense, this is propaganda.” – Jean-Claude Juncker, Chairman EuroGroup FinMin Committee.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.’’ – Jean-Claude Juncker, Same guy.

Which of these utterances is truth? Perhaps both of them. The thing about trading in falsehoods, myth, narratives and talking points is that they finally corrupt the institutions that rely on them.  The stage is reached nobody knows what it is true or false. It is perhaps instructive to remember that the Greek crisis began with a lie. In 2004 Greece admitted that it lied about its budget to get into the Euro. Then after bingeing on the Olympic Games the Greek government promised to go straight.

It lied. But so did everyone else.  Spiegel writes that “since its inception, the euro zone has been built on lies”. Even after the lies were serially exposed the politicians added even more to the tally to buy time. Spiegel writes:

Initially, it was supposed to cost €110 billion ($130 billion). That’s how expensive the first EU bailout package for Greece was. Soon, it was expanded via a comprehensive rescue fund that helped out Portugal and Ireland. Then came a second bailout package for Greece, followed by an even more comprehensive rescue fund for the rest.

In late September 2011, representatives in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, had not yet voted on this expanded package — which would put Germany alone on the hook for €211 billion — but it was already clear to them that even that wouldn’t be enough. But nobody could say that out loud, and especially not Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, because they obviously didn’t want to endanger the government’s majority in parliament — and, thereby, its own ability to govern.

On top of that, the European Central Bank (ECB) is buying up sovereign bonds of debt-ridden euro-zone countries. At first, it was Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Then, beginning in the summer of 2011, it bought bonds from Italy and Spain. It now has a grand total of over €195 billion of bonds on its books. If things should go south, Germany will also ultimately be responsible for 27 percent of that figure, corresponding to Germany’s share of the ECB’s capital.

The argument is always that it’s all about winning time. Time that would allow the financial markets to settle down. Time that would let the debt-ridden PIIGS states (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) implement stringent cost-cutting measures. Time that would make it possible for the euro zone to reform its institutions and rules — and perhaps even let Greece default without having the entire euro immediately implode.

And now with the rejection of “austerity” those “stringent cost-cutting measures” are dead, replaced by the new narrative that the only way forward is Obama-like growth policies. Do they really believe it’s going to work? Or is it just another lie? The logical conclusion of Juncker’s dictum is that the bigger the hole, the bigger the lie.

We often think that politicians know when they are misleading the public and when they are not. But there’s one other possibility. They don’t know themselves what the truth is any more.  They are like a bunch of pirates who, after making the master mariner walk the plank realize they can’t read the “books of navvigashun” for the life of them. They are irretrievably lost and the only thing the pirate chieftains can do is pretend to pore over them.

The situation may be reaching the point where it has become counterproductive to listen to “the leaders” who have neither the knowledge nor skill to think or do anything definite.  Perhaps recovery — when it comes — will be the result of people just doing stuff. Creating new businesses, innovating or just adapting to changed circumstances without much reference to the Big Leaders who will continue to pretend to know everything when they know nothing. Maybe the end of Peak Government has already started. The “leaders” will pronounce more and more, and they will matter less and less.

It used to be said that generals with uniforms like doormen and countries with currencies in bombastic and fanciful colors were to be ignored. Perhaps the corollary to Juncker’s dictum is “the more they swore, the less I believed”.

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This book relates a journalist’s worst nightmare: of getting deeply involved in a “big story” based on information from a single source who turns out to be a world-class liar. During the 1992 Presidential campaign Singer wrote a story for the New Yorker about the allegations by Brett Kimberlin, a former marijuana dealer then in prison for a series of bombings, that he had once sold marijuana to Vice President Dan Quayle.  (The cartoonist Garry Trudeau was another journalist who pushed this story hard.) After signing a book contract to expand the story, Singer invested more and more time,and became frustrated by holes, inconsistencies and dead ends in Kimberlin’s tale. …

After Garry Trudeau in “Doonesbury,” the New Yorker’s Mark Singer was possibly the most prominent journalist to sympathetically report allegations that convict Brett Kimberlin had sold marijuana to Dan Quayle when the Vice-President was a law student. … Now free, the former dope smuggler helps ship commodities to Ukraine; but when Kimberlin (with Singer in tow) had a chance to meet Quayle at a book signing, he refused to confront him. Quayle, it now seems, deserves apologies. 50,000 first printing.

Dan Quayle’s reputation is restored, right? Probably not. If he’s remembered at all it will be as the only man who ever lived that was more stupid than George W. Bush. But Kimberlin kept going. Today he is suing everyone, but most especially bloggers, though he will sue anyone at a pinch. Patterico’s Pontifications notes the incredible extent of Kimberlin’s legal action.

Convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin has filed over 100 lawsuits, including a lawsuit for insufficiently provocative porn and a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons for not allowing him to have an electric guitar in prison. Blogger Aaron Walker recently revealed how Kimberlin made false statements as part of an effort to have Walker prosecuted for an assault Walker says never happened. Charges against Walker were dropped after a video was located showing that Kimberlin’s account was false in important respects.

How does he get away with it? By getting away with it. The only recorded instance in which Bill Ayers expressed admiration for America was when he realized that he could escape punishment more easily than he thought. “Guilty as sin, free as a bird, it’s a great country”.

Blogger Robert Stacy McCain may have accidentally found stumbled onto part of the reason for impunity. McCain is in hiding after becoming the latest target of Kimberlin. McCain had discovered that Kimberlin is associated with Democratic Party operatives and wrote about it.

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION. Convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin on Monday continued his effort to silence those who write about his criminal past by contacting my wife’s employer, claiming that I was “harassing” him. The resulting security concern required immediate relocation if I was to be able to continue writing about the case of Kimberlin, a violent felon, perjurer and admitted tax cheat who is employed as the director of a 501(c)3 non-profit that has collected $1.8 million in contributions since 2005 …

Kimberlin is a known associate of Neal Rauhauser, a Democrat campaign consultant who has described himself as a computer “hacker.” Kimberlin, director of the tax-exempt Justice Through Music Project, is also involved in another tax-exempt group, Velvet Revolution, which has gained national attention by demanding criminal prosecution of high-profile figures including Republican strategist Karl Rove, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue, and the late Internet news entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. Kimberlin’s name also surfaced last year in connection with the so-called “Anonymous” international hacker conspiracy.

Kimberlin probably realized what every person of a certain character long ago found out: that the best way to stay in circulation is to make yourself useful to powerful people. In that way, while they may eventually ditch you, you’ll have a longer run than otherwise.

William “Boss” Tweed of Tammany Hall knew how to associate with men of enterprise and daring. His motto was “as long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?” Admittedly he had a point. But you need people to help you control the narrative. That’s where the Occupy Boys, the Anti-Racist Action Groups and lawyers are for. As long as you have them working the magic you are probably going to keep counting the votes.

Which is why story leads like “Democrats are dreading a Wisconsin wipeout” by Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post are so startling. The question is not: ‘how do they get away with it’ but why do tried and tested methods start failing suddenly? How come it stops working? The answer in the case of Boss Tweed is instructive: he began to fall when he ran New York into the ground.

Tweed’s shenanigans “provoked an international crisis of confidence in New York City’s finances, and, in particular, in its ability to repay its debts. European investors were heavily positioned in the city’s bonds and were already nervous about its management – only the reputations of the underwriters were preventing a run on the city’s securities. New York’s financial and business community knew that if the city’s credit was to collapse, it could potentially bring down every bank in the city with it.”

When Tweed started to become bad for everyone’s business he found his friends dwindling in number. He crossed an invisible but definite frontier. Kimberlin can probably keep going until he reaches a point, maybe on the 201st or 402nd lawsuit, when he becomes more trouble than he is worth; then the influential backers will find it more beneficial to sell him out to win public acclaim than to keep backing his plays.

Why do people like Tweed or their lesser copies never notice that they’ve gone too far? One reason is that they constantly believe that they haven’t gone far enough. Ezra Klein, surveying the Occupy Wall Street actions in late 2011, believed they were at a “tipping point”. They were they faltering because they were not pure enough.

Right now, the protests are at a tipping point. … What these Democrats and liberal-activist groups are looking for is something similar to what conservatives found in the tea party: an opportunity to recharge and rebrand. Governance exhausts a movement. The compromises sap it of its purity; the institutional ties rob it of its authenticity; and in times when the American people are unhappy, the consequences undermine its agenda …

an enormous amount of the energy there is going into sustaining the community at Zucotti Park, which now has to manage food, sanitation, a newspaper (The Occupied Wall Street Journal), marches, a library, a decision-making process, a lost-and-found, and more.

America didn’t need another ordinary political group, one tied down by mundane concerns like picking up the trash and earning a living. And maybe Occupy would provide the pure bracing air of unalloyed militancy to see how far down that road you can go. Klein would watch and if they failed, well too bad.

That is the sad fate of men and movements ‘of character’. As long as they keep winning, there will be people to support them — from a distance. Once they falter out comes the hand washbasin. Robert Stacy McCain will come home when Kimberlin comes to the end of his rampage.

And then nobody will know him. Nobody ever does.

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in the first days of his presidency, Mr. Obama asked Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer with deep knowledge of the region, to lead a rapid review. At the time, the president was still speaking in campaign mode. He talked about remaking “an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs” in Afghanistan and a “civilian surge” to match the military effort. But he said little about the Riedel team’s central insight: that Pakistan posed a far greater threat.

“If we were honest with ourselves, we would call this problem ‘Pak/Af,’ not ‘Af/Pak,’ ” Mr. Riedel said shortly after turning in his report. But the White House would not dare admit that publicly — even that rhetorical reversal would further alienate the Pakistanis …

Mr. Obama concluded that the Pentagon had not internalized that the goal was not to defeat the Taliban …

his goals now focus largely on finishing off Al Qaeda and keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from going astray. Left unclear is how America will respond if a Taliban resurgence takes over wide swathes of the country America invaded in 2001 and plans to largely depart 13 years later.

Sanger’s book blurb describes it as “a fascinating, unflinching account of these complex years, in which the president and his administration have found themselves struggling to stay ahead in a world where power is diffuse and America’s ability to exert control grows ever more elusive.” A less charitable observer might conclude it was the story of how the President deliberately fought the wrong war with the wrong enemy while belatedly promising to fight the right foe at some future unspecified date and perhaps yield up all the gains from fighting the wrong foe in the first place.

The line “Mr. Obama concluded that the Pentagon had not internalized that the goal was not to defeat the Taliban” seems to speak volumes. But evolution is a wonderful thing, implying progress from a primitive and ineffective concept to a much more nuanced and enlightened view. So surely there must be a silver lining to this tale.

Maybe there is. As President Karzai put it, “thanks for your taxpayer’s money”.

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