Oh, my great teacher, what a light you did shine upon us! You taught us curiosity tempered by discipline, adventurousness tempered by modesty, and kindness tempered by humility. How you would do good with one hand and not let your other hand know it. How you felt our problems and our joys even more than we did. How you liked structurally sound yet simple things, whether your algorithms, your sentence structure, your steel chair, your pencils, your bowties, your old green Volvo, or even your yucca plant. Even close to death, you never tired working, once again teaching us by your wondrous example, which none of us will ever be able to match. How dare the soils of the earth be so arrogant to think they might contain all that remains of your greatness? Oh, gentle, meek, but deservedly proud, Columbia Lion, may the light from your intellect roar amongst Columbians and the world for eternity!
They "hate America" because their convoluted, paranoid, lazy, conspiratorial, parasitic, third-world thinking refuses to believe our society is really as free, honest, trust-based and productive as we say it is, so they therefore sink to the level of believing we stole all our riches from them to excuse their jealous rage. All these guerrilla terrorist groups were empowered by their being "non-aligned" arbitrageurs of Cold War hostilities, who thought they should play one big power against the other. Only when the average citisen of a country decides the transparent legitimate legal order matters do such purveyors of "private ordering" go on the run, as happened when Italians and Germans put behind them the old ideas which had allowed the formation of Nazism, and therefore made it possible to shut down the Bader Meinhof, Red Brigades and even, largely, the Mafia. Japan and Russia, today, are indecisively on the brink of breaking into the realm of such transparent society; Much of the world is not, and that includes many of our smaller, superficially stable allies which many of our military and diplomats find "quaint" postings and therefore do not seek to change. Brutal conflict sociopathically desensitises people (as boot camp during Vietnam was intentionally designed to do because military psychologists thought previous generations of American soldiers were too soft; and as Smyrna caused the Greek Civil War to be incomprehensibly savage) and this is why many of the "international brigades" of the previous century migrated from country to country and cause to cause, wreaking havoc on behalf of the various totalitarians (it is not coincidence that totalitarians always seem to come to power largely due to the help of such non-native bandits), including the Zapatistas, Bolsheviks, Kemalists, Nazis, Ba'athists and so on. That bin Laden's al Qaeda organisation is inevitably linked to Palestinian Hamas, the Chechens (aka the "Russian Mafia"), Albanian heroin, Chinese Uyghurs, Irish IRA (which turns to breaking limbs of fellow Catholics as a form of "discipline" when it gets tired of killing Brits), Puerto Rican FALN and Colombian cocaine FARC should not surprise us. Do not be surprised if Timothy McVeigh joined them in their decrepit hangouts or if they joined him in his. The Chechens and Uyghurs have done their best to stunt efforts at political and economic reform in Russia and China because it is not ethnicity which threatens their terrorist way of life, but the transparency of advanced society; Every attempt to make Ulster, Indo-Pak or Israeli-Palestinian peace seems doomed to be sabotaged by them because peace would end their savage lifestyle. It is very clear that no other founder of a major faith carried a sword (indeed Muhammad hijacked caravans), so it is not unreasonable that we ask Islam to reform its most noxious tenets: After the second world war, the Shinto religion of Japan eliminated many of its own militaristic elements; Pope John (whose body was recently exhumed uncorrupted) was so shaken by the Nazi evil of his predecessor Pius that he ushered in massive reforms (the "rejornamento" of the Vatican Council) during his short tenure. Belittling unborn human life for the sake of abortionist convenience is one more form of this brutal desensitisation but their kind of brutal sociopathy is precisely the disease capital punishment was designed to cure: Sociopathy begets sociopathy and killing it off, rather than attempting utopian bans on it in our schools, is the only way to control it; St Vladmir was once advised that saving his own soul by banning capital punishment violated his holy oath to protect the lives and souls of his subjects, whose own souls would be damned if they had to resort to killing the killers on their own. That we had sociopaths named Andrew Jackson, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton as USA presidents did not help our situation, and the current bunch of Prozac-addict desensitons is only warping our response. We must also stop being hypocrits about how illegal drugs in the USA feed these terrorist organisations; instead of a failed prohibition of supply, we should limit demand by holding the users of drugs extraordinarily responsible for the consequences of their usage; Executing a drunk driver or a drug-crazed thief seems shriekingly unpalatable to those who have guilty consciences about not having paid enough attention to raise their children correctly and yet this is the crux of a responsibility-based transparent society. At the same time, as we further open up our societies for globalisation, we must guard the borders of such globalisation, because many countries whose citisens benefit from globalisation neither understand not desire the new rules: If a country's citisens seek refuge in the globalised world, they still send money to their families back home, and so the hostile anti-globalist state still benefits; Therefore, we must ban its former subjects even from seeking refuge here, because as cruel as it seems, they must find it necessary to take matters into their own hands and change their homelands rather than find themselves here with confused, frightened, mixed loyalties and perhaps eventually hostilities towards our society. Fighting these terroropaths is much like fighting common household pests or viruses, which requires techniques akin to traps, pesticides, quarantines and constant vigilance.
Subject: Re: Most Disgusting Subway Station in New York From: cpnbludd@pipeline.com (Cap'n Bludd) Date: 1996/12/02 Message-Id: [32a35131.415043@news.pipeline.com] Newsgroups: nyc.transit vjp2@dorsai.org (Vasos Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier Samani Marions Panyaught NYC-11357-3436-287-USA) wrote: *+-Let's see.. *+-1984: Clouds of flees came at me when I stepped on a peeling *+- floor tile inside the #1..(5pm) *+-1985: I've been urinated on by a hobo on the gratings above 33&Park..(7am) *+-1986: I've slipped on human excrement on 116 & Bwy..(5pm) *+-1986: #6 Fulton St 7am - Sudden b[r]aking causes standee next to me to *+- reach for ceiling, causing snowfall of peeling paint.. *+-1987: Briefcase open, reading on the #7 under the river. Close briefcase, *+- see wet spot. Look above for leak (from river?). See jeans of *+- chap standing in front of me all urinated.. (6am) *+-1990: After Pinky Rinky Dinky stopped rounding up the hobos: *+- countless spitooning hobos trying to put their *+- vile hands on our faces.. (cause me to take up BIG cigars).. *+-1993: I got spit in the back by one on 42nd in front of Grand *+- Central in 10/93 at 3pm.. *+-----> It's not the subways that need repairs.. it's the riders.. --- Boy, does this guy have bad luck or what? cpnbludd@pipeline.com capnbludd@aol.com http//www.pipeline.com/~cpnbludd
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 11:21:56 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: [2.2.16.19961219112154.22df0948@mail.bnl.gov]
To: Vasos Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier
Samani Marions Panyaught NYC-11357-3436-287-USA [vjp2@dorsai.dorsai.org]
From: Leon Petrakis [petrakis@bnl.gov]
Subject: Re: A new historical novel on growing up in Nazi-occupied Greece
MANY THANKS FOR TAKING TIME TO WRITE, AND ESPECIALLY FOR SHARING YOUR
FAMILY'S TRAGIC ENCOUNTERS DURING THOSE HORRIBLE YEARS (WHICH I HOPE WE WILL
NOT FORGET). YES I DID "LIVE" THROUGH THOSE YEARS. I HAVE MET HARRY MARK
PETRAKIS, BUT I AM NOT RELATED TO HIM.I AM A SCIENTIST BY TRAINING, WORKING
OVER THE YRS ON PROBLEMS AT THE INTERFACE OF ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT. I
AM SENIOR SCIENTIST HERE AND DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN-EMERITUS. AGAIN, FOR
WRITING. LP
At 01:42 PM 12/18/96 -0500, you wrote:
*+- Dr Petrakis,
*+- I read with interest about your newly self-published novel
*+-on greek life in WW2.
*+- Did you live then? The 1940s stole my parents youth, and in
*+-some way, my own as well. Was it really the Nazis and Reds, or was it
*+-something wierd and wicked deep inside the character of the Greeks?
*+-Stories in my family abound - from the wickedness of allies and
*+-friends to the kindness of enemies. My mom's dad was killed by reds
*+-for being yank, but red friends sent word many times to save my
*+-family. Reds bought pardons later while their victims went ignored
*+-("You have relatives in America, your seven orphans don't need
*+-help"). Nazis looted my mom's parents' home and killed her cousin
*+-merely for being a young bank VP, but what of the soldier who let my
*+-dad's brother leave the Crete POW camp to see his dying son, or the
*+-German officer who offered to prosecute the looters? The irony that as
*+-the Australian Jewish soldier my granpa hid was writing about my
*+-granpa in newpapers, the reds were killing and torturing my granpa. My
*+-mom's cousin still holds on to things his Jewish playmates asked him
*+-to hold, still expecting them to someday return. My mom's cousin whose
*+-mother was held hostage by reds so he would fight on their side - who
*+-stood up to die in battle rather than fight his country - and his
*+-siblings being taken north for fifteen years in an effort to prove
*+-that "Macedonians were Slavs". Or the German colleague of my dad's
*+-who became Orthodox and moved to Greece only to be drafted by the
*+-Nazis. The Nazi officer who kicked my father down the steps of
*+-parliament in order to find where my dad was hiding his boss' Jewish
*+-friend. Ultimately, that period made my parents so sensitive to human
*+-suffering, yet sometimes too timid to really live.
*+- Are you related to Harry Mark Petrakis, the Pulitzer-winning
*+-GrAm Chicago novelist who wrote in the 1950s about GrAm life? What do
*+-you do at Brookhaven?
[VJP2 afterthought: to have really understood the pain humanity
inflicted on itself in the 1940s is to comprehend that if, as extremists
suggest was possible, they also successfully obliterated the planet, it would
have been a comparatively humane climax. The very essence of humanity was
nearly exterminated to instead fulfil some empty human-concocted ideas.]
The venture capital industry was started by Harvard B-school's General Doriot when he started American Research & Development in 1946 which funded Digital Equipment Corporation or DEC in 1957. Venture funds are formed from investments from insurance companies, endowments, pension funds and other institutional sources - as well as a small but significant fraction from wealthy individuals. Venture funds have long lives and are unique in that they expect very few of their investments to really succeed, but that the extraordinary success of that fraction of investments to more than cover the failure of the other investments to grow. Venture capital ran in long cycles (depending on IPO and/or merger booms as a harvest or exit strategy to free up funds for new investments) until Peter Grace promoted the 1978 cut in capital gains tax which led to a prolonged boom in venture capital until 1987, when the populist elimination of the capital gains exemption caused the market crash and most venture capital to flow risk-aversely into LBOs and most startups to depend on "angel" (3F: friends family & fools; tax writeoff) capital instead. As the baby boomer pension funds began to skyrocket (expected to switch duration matching to bonds in 2015), institutional investors began requiring money managers to take on larger and larger amounts of money simply because the institutional investors could better manage fewer managers. The result has been that venture funds themselves seek out "first movers" and give them larger amounts of money (in effect the same fund does several rounds) and therefore avoid making small investments. But seed capital was always a fraction (5-15%) of the total venture capital available and most ventures need several subsequent "rounds" of financing. And it is also true that (less identifiable) startup funds make smaller investments than successful funds, because they have less money and because experienced managers wish to avoid repeating their painful learning experiences and wish to capitalise on their success instead. There is also a distinction between many supposed venture funds being run by risk averse financial analysts, as opposed to individuals who are in essence management consultants compensated with long-range equity, with the latter being exemplified by Doriot student Steve Lazarus of ARCH ventures. Universities such as MIT, RPI and Utah have also sought to invest a part of their own endowment in their own ventures, while universities like the UC system, Stanford and Columbia tend to be averse to this because their licencing program is so successful instead. Is the real decision of VC vs IPO vs JV really one due to business conditions - the eco/reg/tax/demographic environment, such as capital-gains-preference risk-averseness found in 1978-86, the baby-boomer pension boom (expected to switch to bonds in 2015), the move away from Glass-Steagall towards universal banking..? [KKR was established by major banks to circumvent Glass-Steagall.] The model of equity investment with strategic alliances comes from the Germanic model of universal banking, where you practically marry your banker and the Japanese incestuous cross-shareholdings - but will we be seeing more of this as we see Glass-Steagall being eliminated? In the 1970s we kept hearing oil reserves were going to run out but then we realised oil companies weren't including expected future finds in their books to avoid their being taxed - I wonder if those predicting a dearth of new drug discoveries haven't been misled by similar conservative predictions inspired by the ghosts of health reform. In some cases a blockbuster drug already existed somewhere (either as a market failure or as unfeasible) and a new use was discovered.
[Manhattan_East 13Oct82 v20#35 Gary Stevens] ..Over a tasty dish of swordfish at well-patronized JOE'S PIER 52 (now in the Sheraton Centre), I found myself in conversation with a waiter named John who has been serving seafood specialties at JOE KIPNESS' place for 12 years. The gent is Greek, so did I talk about the catch of the day? No, the chat went in the direction of Aristophanes, who wrote satirical comedies hundreds of years B.C...
Here is a sampling of the topics, books and authors that might be
required for a basic undergraduate education: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Vergil, Augustine,
Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Austen, Woolf, Torah,
Gospel, Koran, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, LaoTzu, LotusSutra,
Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, SmithAdam, Kant, Marx,
Darwin, Nietzsche, duBois, Freud, deBeauvoir; ART: Parthenon,
AmiensGothicCathedral, Raphael, Michelangelo, Brugel, Rembrandt, Bernini,
Goya, Monet, Picaso, WrightFrnakLloyd, leCorbusier; MUSIC: desPrezJosquin,
Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi , Wagner,
Schoenberg, Stravisky.
Other Books Vasos Thinks You Should Read (in addition to those
summarised or excerpted on this web site): Bickel, Morality of Consent, Yale,
1975; Surely You Are Joking Mr Feynman; Mundell, Dollar and Policy Mix,
Princeton, 1971...
When Vasos had just turned fourteen, his uncles had a bus company in Athens which availed itself of the Helsinki Accords by being one of the first Greek tour firms back into Bulgaria (given new instabilities in Greek politics it was even prudent to do so). Lazily sitting in the back of the bus, sometimes helping out his family, he was playing with all sorts of normal Yankee nerdling gadgets like a movie camera and stuff designed to broadcast portable cassette sound into a radio. He even filmed some (gasp!) tanks. So, a year later, his uncle's bus gets stopped and asked about "some American" (Vasos was the only passenger without a Greek passport) taking pictures of their military installations. (Wierdo constipated soviets were known to take years reviewing surveilance tapes - so it became apparent when we found out they were monitoring Glen Cove microwave phonecalls.) This is how Vasos became WANTED BY THE BULGARIAN KGB - at fourteen!
Hippies, wishing to show their spite for USA industry turned to small new-age peacenik cars from Japan, the kind no one in his right mind in the USA would buy at the time. They gave the Japanese their first opening. Japanese "quality" is pretentious up-front quality, for the first few months. In Japan, if you sold something that broke at first, your face, if not your head, was lost. In the USA, one was used to getting an ornery horse and breaking it in. But USA cars last twenty years (my family has owned a couple that long) - the big USA-made cars have long-term quality. The smaller cars were largely imports, or made from imported parts. Moreover, local mechanics uncapable of handling the more advanced computer technology found in USA cars purposely badmouth the USA cars to compensate for their own ignorance. A lot of USA academics seeking higher salaries within the protection of academia but fearful of the real world work environment have vidictively turned against those who refused to hire their warped minds with bizzare theories (based on almost no statistical significnce) like "participative management" in the higher-paying jobs of business schools. At least when business schools paid the same salaries as other parts of the universities, you only got faculty who liked business. The reason we keep having fads in management methods is because this is the way leftists in the academic and publishing worlds have chose to piecemeal sneak their socialist agendas onto the corporate world, which being such a soulless dinosaur, seems to occasionally comply with their assaults. John Kenneth Galbraith and his ilk felt that ever-larger firms were the path to socialism, and GM (Alfred Sloan) & GE (Charles Steinmetz) followed, as we now have "supply-chain management" as the dying death gasp of the socialist conglomerate. Another story is instructive. I had an HP2621a terminal on my desk for fifteen years. It followed the rule of fan-out-of-five I learned in my EE courses. I had a modem, and two printers simultaneously y-connectored to it, using only RS232 pins 2,3,8&20. The minute I bought a Japanese made EPSON HX20 PC, I had to add a switch box because they saved money by skimping on the fan-out. They cut quality to the levels most people would not notice, rather than actually have high US-style quality. [1995+2001]
Columbia's main focus is research, not teaching, but you DO learn: Often
you learn most from your classmates; because of competition; You could have
the same textbook and professor in another university, but you learn more at
Columbia because you know your classmates are going to study more, spend more
time in the library or the lab, learning something more interesting. In the
end, the best thing a college teaches you is how to teach yourself and how to
reason critically; Real genius isn't like an ordinary savant who becomes an
expert in one field then spends the rest of life with brain switched off, but
instead can become an expert in any field very quickly. Ironically, Columbia
was also a university where the deans felt more of an obligation to connect
with and be accessible to the parents more than any university my friends
attended: many of my professors and deans had kids my age; indeed many times
those kids were also my classmates. My first semester, I felt I had been so
cheated by all the watered-down courses I had in high school, I felt like an
insatiable tiger let loose at a slaughterhouse; at the same time, they never
let us off easy: if we had AP credit, they made us take tougher courses
instead of just giving us credit, their attitude was we were better so we had
to become even better. We were often told getting in was the only hard part
about Harvard, but staying in was the hard part about Columbia; it was part
of New York, the city that never sleeps. Yet Columbia is the smallest of all
the Ivies because real estate is so expensive here: And we are said to be the
least politically correct, but we were also the least cohesive, at least
after the 1968 riots, when the university spent over a decade badly in debt
and every department was its own feudal domain; During those difficult times,
I still had access to the best traditions of Columbia through some of the
professors, particularly my mentor, whose obituary quoted me saying he taught
us "curiosity tempered by discipline, adventurousness tempered by modesty,
and kindness tempered by humility". We used to joke that after standing in
line at Columbia, you learned how to navigate just about any bureaucracy in
the future; but I found that the Columbia bureacracy often made some
incredibly sound decisions: I often went back to see how they bought some
equipment or incentivised some contractor; I also cannot live without my
Alumni Library Reading Card! But at the same time Columbia has so demanding,
and often needlessly overreacted, we often felt so unsure of ourselves once
we left: so much that one professor told us that we should try to remember
how we acted when we were kids and really wanted something, in order to
revive our more natural and long-suppressed instincts; and they also told us
our first two years on the job would be spent recovering our self-confidence.
They also told us once that the reason we learned about art, music,
philosophy and literature was that we would become so hooked on expensive
avocations we would be motivated to earn extraordinary money just to afford
them! Every boss I ever worked for turned out to have some connection to
Columbia, despite my sometimes not finding this out until long after I was
hired; Attending Columbia makes the world a very small place: I never stop
marvelling the places where I've been tapped on the shoulder and told someone
remembered me from Columbia; you can't escape!
[14JUL01 roughly what I tell folks who ask about my Columbia experience]
Vasos can speak Greek so well and he can READ it. With spellckeck,
he even looks like he went to school there. How come he speaks English and
French without an accent? When did he first arrive in the USA? Oh, about
1885! Huh? Then why does he have such a difficult name, especially the
first name. Well, Vasos is short for Vasilios and his parents gave him that
name as an "international" name (not too common outside old Athens) because
they weren't all too sure where they would end up. And they used to use
"Pann" as a surname a lot in the 1960s until checks and credit cards made it
necessary to use the "real" longer version. His parents may have spoken with
an accent, but they didn't think with an accent. In fact, when reading Henry
James on American women ("it was the very essence of her position not to be
theatened", highly civilized without losing "the value of the puritan
residium") Vasos realised that his late mom was raised to be very American
because her dad and grandfathers had both been to America. Vasos learned to
read and write three languages in first grade: English, Greek and French.
When he was twelve, he was corresponding with relatives in other continents
in four different languages. Unlike most "Greek-Americans", he doesn't see
one "ethnicity" as excluding another in a zero-sum game. Others are 80%
American and 20% Greek or 20% American and 80% Greek, but Vasos is 95%
American and 75% Greek. Vasos rarely fits anyone's stereotypes.
Graduate programs look down at students who don't take a hairshirt approach and then encourage these students to protest every little government cut. At the same time, universities resist any commercial discipline in their work habits precisely because if these students got wif of how much their professors were making from consulting and licensing, they would rebel. This is why universities want systems based on grants, licensing and consulting and not on venturing and collaboration - as someone in the 1970s once said about India "It's not that capitalism doesn't exist, but you have to buy capitalism, which you can't do if you are poor." A culture of paranoia predominates in the post-Manhattan-Project scientific world where no researcher shares even the slightest data or information with his colleagues or institution. A student would learn more from working in an identical project in industry than for a professor or by taking a course in the subject - because faculty are so paranoid and possessive about their knowledge. Ultimately, the grubmint deserves responsibility because its system of grants helped create this racketeering monstrosity. And this is the incubator which keeps leftism festering even as communism throughout the world has collapsed. For example, every so often the NSF and its cousins announce that we are in a dangerous shortage of PhDs and the spigot of graduate students reopens to slave in the labs only to be dropped at will for not groveling sufficiently. Moreover, professors detest American-born graduate students because American students actually expect professors to answer their questions and curiosities, while foreign students behave like frightened rabbits, who laugh at "Americans". The result is that American students feel an inferiority about being American and become transformed into lifelong America-haters. Isn't it ironic that a university whose faculty berate American industry for short-termism demand annualised returns from its miniscule endowed internal venture fund and yet this same university is one of the nation's leading receipients of licensing revenues. Isn't it ironic that the universities who do the very best in the nation with regards to licencing revenes (but maintian Vietnam-era bans on faculty "commercialism") are the same universities whose presidents resigned nearly a decade ago due to federal grant irregularities? What is especially pernicious about these grants addicts is that they turn to international agencies and eventually foreign governments, rather than private industry, to support their habit. The solution would be to follow 1987 Reagan proposals for privatising the NIH and combine them with the blueprints for the Bobby Inman Sematech research consortium and have privatised formerly-government foundations become research consortia that allows firms to collaborate in funding research and buying results.
Like most northern Greeks, Kastorians leave their shoes at the door (most Yanks will say "like the Japanese" - I reply "..and a lot of Northern Greeks, Slavic Orthodox and Arab Orthodox..") and don't generally wear their shoes at home. (We've done all my life.) So anyway, this guy walks over to speak to someone and his dog walks along. Leaves his shoes outside and goes in. Comes out, no shoes, no dog. The shoes looked out of place to the pooch, so he carried them back home - which was a mile away! The guy called home (what happened in the old days?) and someone brought his shoes. A different pair. Because the dog accidentally dropped one shoe along the way.
To speak like a New Yorker, replace all "r" and "l" with "w", then replace all "th" with "d", then (as if masochistically trying to make yourself dyslexic) transpose all diphthongal consonants. To speak like a US "Dixie" southeasterner (or ebola-onics), replace all vowells with "uh" or "ah" (as if you're under the influence of Jack Daniels or marijuana), replace all verbs with "I be -ing". Unix is like a hybrid of English and Welsh without vowels. [this was from mneme@dorsai.org]. To speak Spanglish, replace all "-ly" with "-mente", all "wh" with "qu", all "th" with "l", all "-ty" with "-dad".
Europe:Asia:: Austria:Manchuria:: Croats:Uyghurs:: England:Japan:: France:Indochina:: Germany:Mongolia:: Greece:India:: Hungary:Burma:: Ireland:Tibet:: Slovakia:Cambodia:: Croatia:Thailand:: Italy:China:: Netherlands:Indonesia:: Poland:Korea:: Russia:Siberia:: Scandinavia:Polynesia:: Spain:Phillipines:: Switzerland:Nepal:: Teutons:Mongols
Paranoia consists of people having an inferiority complex, being
unusually perceptive and vigilant, suspicious, racist, sneaky, blaming others
sfor their own faults, vengeful, and unusually concerned with fidelity. They
can be "cured" by making them relax, seek criticism, be more tolerant and see
unulterior motives for accidental coincidences. Their writing is small and
narrow, with unusually tight knoting of o and a, tapered, and right slanting.
Paranoid individuals often excuse their own immoral acts on the grounds that
everyone else is much worse and their own personal purpose for acting
immorally actually has a moral cause. Paranoid individuals are not only
paralysed by conspiracy theories, they also sometimes use them to advance
their goals or to excuse their own moral or intellectual failings. Those who
believe conspiracy theories tend to give up on normal democratic and
participatory processes because the conspiracy theories have convinced them
that this is futile. Therefore, conspiracy theories tend to cause
head-in-the-sand approaches, such as that seen by ROCOR and the Serbs in
recent global events. Richard Nixon, Saddam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler,
however, are/were paranoid individuals who used their paranoia to divide and
manipulate others. In Europe, I have seen believers in conspiracy theories
blame the Jews and masonry for their woes, while in the USA, the Trilaterals,
CFR and international bankers are blamed, yet in Japan, it is the UFOs; I
shall never forget when a reasonably educated Japanese insisted on showing me
a video that "proved" JFK was assassinated by his own chauffer under UFO
orders.
A friend of mine was sitting at a financial conference in the late 1980s where a German CEO was presenting and was taken aback when a brash American analyst asked "What about cash flow?" and he replied "Yesh, vee hev it da kesh fluwo, vai iz id yiur biznish?" Yes, even the number two or three economy is not nearly as transparent as the USA economy. Then we have Maslow telling us about hierarchy of needs and we have seen how economies surpassing $300/capita GNP start to provoke democratic aspirations. So we have to understand that the transparency and integrity of the USA economy is related to its success, and if we want other countries to be like us, we have to encourage their commercial success instead of use counterproductive embargoes. Not that there aren't sections of the USA which genuinely still belong in the third world. Clearly it was trade with the west which helped communism collapse in central Europe. Of course, we have to credit the final abandonment of hipocrisy in Latin America by the genuinely decent Reagan and Carter presidencies (who no longer tolerated dictatorships) as well, because it took away any excuse for communists to hide behind. But let's face it, embargoes don't work. Bob Dole may have wanted embargoes in the 1990s, but it was he who opposed embargoes in the late 1970s because he was supporting Kansas wheat farmers.
With rather sophomoric arrogance, I used to think a book named "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was rather sleazy or manipulative, so I was in my thirties until someone I really respected convinced me to actually open the book and read it. That's when I realised that the author was a friend of Nicholas Murray Butler, who at the time was president of my alma mater, Columbia University, and that Carnegie extracted the practical lessons of the then-newly-devised Columbia "Contemporary Civilisation" great books program (which Columbia - and eventually other universities - used to assimilate the offspring of varied Ellis Island immigrants into USA leaders). Ok, Carnegie eliminated all the theory and history behind such lessons - and all that background makes it a lot easier to adopt those lessons to a greater variety of situations as well as allow you to see some of the perpetually recurring fallacies of human reasoning - but the people who would read such a book either would never read the original works or would need a reassurinmg overview. Nonetheless, the book is hardly manipulative, and indeed if properly heeded, should turn a lot of ambitious manipulators into individuals who have a lot more respect for their fellow man.
Bonuses are an ego trap - you are told that of course, YOU are so terrific YOU will get the maximum bonus - no one believes they deserve anything less than the maximum. You can be terrific for ages but if you have one bad quarter, you are fired. Figure out your net salary, taking away all the things you are expected to spend on as a result of your new job. Avoid headhunters like the plague, instead of making you a valuable niche player, they commoditise you and eventually drive your income down in the long run Six months after a new building is finished or offices get renovated, you can bet there will be massive layoffs, because the bravado of building new offices spilled over into a lot of careless spending. Nepotism pays off on Wall Street, because the game is one of diplomacy and connections, and who you can bring to the table. Narcisism predominates, because of those in the majority who fake nepotistic connections. However, the guys who last the longest, the Warren Buffets and the Ben Rosens (BTW, both Columbia MBAs) are quiet and unassuming, because they persevere and manage to be totally uninfluenced by the narcisistic mirage. [2000]
Cato's Stephen More reminds us: In the 1980s, after Reagan cut taxes, federal revenues grew faster than during the 1990s with two of the largest tax hikes in American history. Real federal receipts climbed from 1982 to 1989 by 24 percent. But overall federal revenue growth from 1990 through 1997 (as currently forecast by the Congressional Budget office) will be only 18.5 percent. In the eight years after Reagan tax cuts the economy grew by nearly 4 percent per year. In the 1990s with two Herculean tax hikes the economy has limped forward at less than 2 percent annual growth. In the 1990s only the rich have gotten richer. In the 1980s the average household gained $4,000 in income. In the 1990s we've lost half of that. For more information, see Robert Mundell, The Dollar & the Policy Mix, 1971, Priceton Essays in Intl Finance, whose prescription for dealing with oil supply shocks involved tax cuts, budget cuts and tight money. Mundell is widely attributed with founding "supply-side" economics, even by Laffer in the foreword to Laffer's 1984 Intl Economics textbook. [1997]
(Sung to tune of "Oh, my darling Clementine")
Oh, the Lizard, in the Gizzard, Of the Buzzard as he fly,
And he drop us such a Blizzard from Up High up in the sky,
Oh, the Yearning, Oh, the Burning, as you drink that Turpentine,
That you drink to clear your Mind, when your wife be Clementine!
Theory of right & left side of the brain and subconscious and
conscious learning could have been deduced from Edmunde Burke's comments on
tradition being the subconscious memory of society or the Orthodox insistance
(as explained by Khomyakov) on BOTH Tradition (which the papacy retains
alone) and the Scripture (which the protestants retain alone). The third
dimension to that Khomyakovian Geometry is the Mysticism of the Jews, which
we also retain as well. There is a lot of osmotic learning (both via
Tradition and Mysticism) going on that the SinoGermanic method of linearised
fanatical hyperspecialisation (vs the AngloHellenistic tradition of the
Generalist) ignores and trivialises. The AngloHellenistic and Byzantine (and
Hindu) cultures are far superior at cross-fertilising fields of knowledge
precisely because they are unwilling to abandon this interconnectedness of
things. But the SinoGermanic model is much better at perfecting existing
innovations. We all know that an idiot savant is someone, usually with a
brain injury, that excels in one area but is totally unable to function in
most other areas. Well, ordinary people get skilled in one area and then stop
learning - they become automatons or "ordinary savants". Real genius
("perpetucognitive supersavantoid") is characterised by the ability to switch
areas of expertise at the drop of a hat. That's because ordinary people are
"cognitive" (ie, actually use their brain) only about an hour a week, whereas
genius uses their brains ten hours a day. To understand what this means, note
the Harvard experiment where students were given pop quizes, but at different
times (ie beginning, middle or end of lecture). The students who had the
quizes at the end of their lectures were more attentive DURING the lecture,
whereas those having the quiz at the beginning paid more attention (ie,
switched on their "cognitive" mode) to rereading their notes instead of
learning it the first time. Well, the Orthodox mind is faced with the
admonition of St Dionysios Ariopayitis that the ultimate knowledge is
admission of total ignorance, and yet the interpretation of St Basil that the
New Testament is the Commandment to Become GOD; what better perpetucognitive
stimulus towards endless educational striving?
CompuServe Issues 223084 S2/Political Issues 14-Jan-92 19:08:21
Sb: My JFK Theory Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430
In the winter'91 (Kissinger-Brzezinski) National_Interest, Bob Novak
discusses Harvard historian Michael Beschloss' Kennedy_&_Khruschev (Harper,
91), calling JFK "vain, shallow, disorganized,
petty, un[d]ic[s]iplined, deceitful
and frivolous" - showing how soviets were surprised to see Kennedy
rhetorically raise them to superpower level (when they weren't) and that the
defensive, naive Kennedy overreacted to typical soviet theatrics. Some of
JFKs admirers, however, would like to see him return with pointy ears off
some AWACS seagull along with Elvis - just so he can empower their freelove,
freemoney, freedrugs, geopagan, coercive utopian agenda along with ludicrous
concepts like UNIX and the metric system. I was only two years old when JFK
was shot, and believe me, I knew no one who grieved him - indeed I was later
part of the momentous Reaganist revival of the anarchic tradition of the
American Revolution - that caused communism to crumble merely by denying the
existence of JFKs phobic notions of soviet grandeur.
Why was MicroSoft so successful? In short, they always LEARNED from
their mistakes. When the first personal computers came out in the mid-1970s,
Gates and Allen saw them in a magasine at Harvard and realised these machines
would need software. So they approached the manufacturer who said whoever
produced a BASIC language first would get their approval. Gates (actually not
really much of a programmer - the thing he learned best at Harvard was how to
play poker - and his poker style bluffs in business were indeed monumental)
devised using students and free computer resources at Harvard. But they were
immediately victims of software piracy. So when IBM Boca wanted a PC
operating system and the popular Digital Research CPM folks were too
difficult, Gates found a system made by Seattle Sytems and repackaged it to
IBM. This time Gates LEARNED his lesson about pirates and got hardware
manufacturers to include MSDOS with their systems, so he got paid up
front. When IBM wanted to make a deal on OS/2, Gates learned his lessons on
IBM's old tricks and out-IBM-ed IBM by keeping Interface Manager (aka
Windows) on the back burner until IBM's MicroChannel bus stumbled. Then,
learning from Lotus' apeing VisiCalc (but with bigger budgets and more aware
of customer befuddlement - just like IBM overtook RCA with the 360), he aped
everyone, and came out with Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Internet
Explorer.
So, how would one EMULATE this? Find a cut-rate poor-man's product
(microcomputer) that imitates one only used by the big boys (mainframe). Then
find a way to make that product much more useful - by fixing it's biggest
flaw (lack of software). (Think that's impossible? You can find an old
public-domain drug with a major side-effect and find a way to fix the side
effect. Mike Jaharis' Kos Pharmaceuticals did that for cholesterol.) Then you
turn around and sell one of these fixes (MSDOS) to the firm most theatened by
your innovation (IBM). But be sure to sell your innovation to their
competitors as well, and don't do any selling yourself - get them to do it
for you. Then, when it comes time for the next major variation, you keep
your options open and continue to develop a competing product (Windows) to
the one you are contracting to develop (OS/2). Then you find widely-imitated
trends that depend on your innovations (application software) and you use
their fundamental dependence on your innovation to their disadvantage. (Like
maybe Roche letting folks make tests with its PCR then in a few years Roche
making those tests themselves.)
Threaten the big guy, then partner with them, then beat them at their
own game! 14JAN2K
Mind you, I believe MicroSoft (with its upgrade treadmill) is now
behaving the same obnoxious way Lotus did ten years ago when MicroSoft
started eating their lunch. And when MS went ahead with Windows, it was IBM
and Unix which loomed large as monopolistic threats to the rest of
us. 08JUL01
Howard Friedman, who graduated chemistry from Brooklyn College and worked at the FDA before joining my high school, said he invented the word GONZO while hanging out with friends of his at the Village Voice in the early 1970s. He defined the term as someone who starts painting a floor from the door inwards towards a corner that has neither door nor window. I'm told he now chairs the science department of an exclusive private school in Connecticut. I had my phototypesetting engineer uncle print a new element "Gonzonium" which we pasted on the elements chart. We later also added Bootigunkonium, because Mr Friedman attended Thomas E Bootie High School in Brooklyn. (I had already been admitted to college, so I as fearless.)
Message-Id: [199612121210.AA05231@dorsai.dorsai.org]
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 07:10:18 -0500
Reply-To: repub-d@u.washington.edu
From: Vasos Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier
Samani Marions Panyaught NYC-11357-3436-287-USA [vjp2@amanda.dorsai.org]
To: "New Republican Discussion List" [repub-d@u.washington.edu]
Subject: Albright, Brzezinski & Kissinger
Once Nixon asked for a list of ethnic groups in the USSR and
blew up when the list excluded one obvious group: the Russians! Reagan
also made a point of distinguishing between soviets and Russians. Big
difference. Divide & conquer. It's easier to win if you define you[r]
enemy as a couple of thousand soviets instead of a quarter [b]illion
Russians.
Nowadays, it seems politcally correct to have another form of
racism. Those who once decried our "inordinate fear of communism" seem
to passionately despise the people who rejected communism, as if they
are the most incorrigible savages in humanity - you see in the minds
of the bolshevoids, those who had communism and rejected it are even
more benighted than those who oppose it but never experienced it!
I say this because none of the three foreign-born
superscholars of foreign policy mentioned in the header were ever
really anti-communist, but rather based their views on an unAmerican
racist hatred for Russians. By contrast, before communism, the USA and
Russia viewed each other as fellow frontier nations, as nations of
universal, multi-ethnic citisenship. (eg While Walesa had been quite
restrained, most Polish nationalists forget it was the Jagiellian
LitwoPolish Empire that began the squabbles by supporting the muslim
Tatars.) Catherine the Great refused a British request to help
suppress the colonists. The Russian navy prevented the British and
French aiding the Confederacy. Russia's first modern legislature,
while not as old as the British, and perhaps the French, certainly
dates to the same period as Germany's and Japan's. Still, much-older
Russian Assemblies of the Land borrowed the same Byzantine Senate
structure that Baldwin's returning "crusaders" used in the Magna Carta.
1980 presidential primary candidate George Bush told public
television of how Carter ordered Iranian troops to remain in their
barracks so the Ayatollahs could take over. Former Carter
Undersecretary Warden Quiltstuffer went to Greece this past summer and
predicted the return of the leftist Quackandreou. Quiltstuffer has
also engineered the leftist victories in Japan and Canada and went to
call for Russian extremist parties to be relegalised just before
Zirinofsky's success. Given that he serves a draftdodging US president
who made a student pilgrimage to [prototypal Whitewater mafioso]
Breznev, we ought to be very worried now that he tinkers with
still-red China. Moreover, he had achieved GATT and NAFTA only by
turning them into the subsidy-mills that Reagan and Bush fought so
hard to prevent. [1994]
I really have to take exception to those who wish to portray Reagan as an ordinary man. He started reading at the age of three. For two brothers, sons of a drunk, to both graduate college in those days was another indication of unusual intelligence. It is a mistake to read Reagan's humility as a mark of ordinariness. The professors who left the greatest mark both on their own fields and in my own life shared Reagan's unusual humility, kindness and sensitivity to both human feelings and truth in general. In fact, my bioengineering mentor, the professor who co-edited my field's handbook also shared a February birthmonth with Reagan, Washington, Lincoln and even Dan Quayle. (Not astrology here, but I tend to think that February being the coldest month provides these people with constantly improving weather, hence an incredible optimism.) An ordinary man is not one who fought off both communism and the mafia from one of the nation's most influencial labor unions - and who later used the negotiating skills so learned to negotiate communism itself to an intellectually vulnerable nakedness - achieving humanity's greatest period of democratic advancement with minimal - indeed, almost no - bloodshed. And lastly, I have to say something about Peggy Noonan, whose comments started this idea of Reagan's ordinariness. The only time I ever met Noonan was in the fall of 1990, when those in my company who idolised her were sorely disappointed to meet an unusually pompous fart - Nonnan spent the entire evening posed an angle that would allow her to be better photographed should the opportunity arise, even by accident. I never before or later met someone who read an entire speech, and did an entire question/anser session posed at a 45 degree angle just in case a photographer was there! [1998]
Coming from the physical and natural sciences, it became obvious that social science is biased is because it can be manipulated. Malcolm Muggeridge said social sciences have been replaced by natural (and we might today extend, engineering) sciences as true quests for truth. Some are frightened by the power of their discoveries and so wish to mask it. Others consciously or subconsciously blind themselves to their findings and force them to conform to various ideologies. And of course, others see the potential for profit from their findings and so mask and package them to do this. Not that this isn't creeping into other sciences. A lot of engineering professors don't teach advanced techniques correctly in class, and only let the cat out of the bag if you do a dissertation with them (and many times not even then - they prefer to write a section of their student's dissertation themselves than to allow the student to learn the new technique). A lot of financial mathematics papers have intentional errors to trip up competitiors. [1999]
Studies show you can eat up up to a third of your profits with transaction costs (there are other costs besides fees - such as lost opportunity costs, market moving costs and so on - for example you never trade the stock at the price you thought you were getting). You don't get rich by finagling stocks from day to day, you get rich via asset accumulation. My strategy is when the market is low, put money into a dividend re-investing general fund with a twenty-year history - when the market is high, resist all temptations and forget you even own it (don't put anything in or take anything out). Use electronic banking to hide some money from your spending fancies every week and then invest that when the market is low. Resist the macho temptation to make the big kill. Find something else to do while your eggs are incubating because if you start playing with them, they might break. I know alot of the algorithms used to pick stocks (factor models, APT, stochastic optimisation) but to be honest, I wouldn't put my cash on them. If you can sock five years income into a fund that provides for both growth and income, use the proceeds to pay your monthly bills and then you can use your paycheck for long term investing. Now, also be careful what happens when the baby boomers start retiring and taking money out of the market, what fund managers call the "duration flip" (2005-2025). [1999]
CompuServe Issues 223412 S2/Political Issues 15-Jan-92 07:24:24
Sb: Subway Hobo AIDS Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430
Tell Kimberly Burgales. Subway hobos don't just politely sit down
with their hands crossed - they love to stick their hands in your face, rub
their clothes on you, yell, spit all over and jump up and down. Given that
nine tenths of hobos [Bassuk Rubin Lauriat Am J Psy Dec'84] suffer some
personality disorder (the majority also involving drugs and alcohol) - one
suspects that the reason the Camelot geopagans care so much for hobos is that
they are former comrades in arms.
Habeas para delictis, del credere, estoppel certiorari? Nolo contendre, in absentis cerebrum, loco locutum, mutatis mutandis, with penalty fee complex irreprehensible, with octuple interests! The vicar of snicker was a vicarious tortfeasor, named Balthaghaster Festuniarty, whose pecuniary encumbrance on suretyship was hidden in a covenant to the grantee of privity to the locus of penitance!
By the mere act of using our program you hereby implicitly but completely acknowledge that should you ever violate any of our copyrights or perceived claims thereof, you understand and agree to be totally bound by the terms and conditions stipulated herein as the complete and exclusive agreement of remedies which supersedes any proposal or prior agreement, oral or written, or any other communication or inference between us relating to this copyright and any licensure thereof. Full and complete remedies shall constitute to full submittance to undertake studies of the effect of your full and total dishabilement in arctic climates (including but not limited to studies inside active volcanic eruptions) within a thousand paces of the north pole, without holding us, the claimant to the violated copyright, liable in any way for any consequences of your dishabilement or climatic exposures. Moreover in appreciation of the privilege of participating in said arctic dishabilement studies, consideration of being accepted to compete, you do hereby acknowledge that because of your participating in, traveling to, and returning from such studies, you may suffer bodily injury or death, and loss of property, and you do hereby for yourself, for your heirs, parents, guardians, executors, personal representatives and assigns, release, acquit, waive, forever discharge, hold harmless and agree to indemnify the claimant to violated copyrights and anyone undertaking the arctic dishabilement studies and any other persons or organizations connected with the same of and from any and all liability, claims, demands, costs, damages, actions, causes of action, or suits of any nature or kind whatsoever that you, your heirs, parents, guardians, executors, personal representative, assigns or administrators may now or hereafter have or claim to have, on account of or arising out of personal injuries, death, or damage to your person or property or loss of time, loss of service, or for expenses incurred, occurring to me because of or in any way related to your training for, your traveling to, your participating at and your returning from said studies or through the use of any and all facilities connected therewith. Further, you hereby grant permission in case of injury to be denied any medical, resuscitory, cannibalistic or crematory treatment you do hereby for yourself, your heirs, parents, guardians, executors, assigns and administrators, release, acquit, waive and forever discharge the claimant to the violated copyright and anyone undertaking the arctic dishabilement studies of and from any and all liability, actions, claims, demands or suits whatsoever which you may now or hereafter have or claim to have, on account of any injury sustained and suffered by you in connection with said medical, resuscitory, cannibalistic or crematory assistance and treatment. You agree to accept any and all financial obligations incurred as a result of any medical, resuscitory, cannibalistic or crematory assistance, treatment and related expenses, provided in connection with any injuries which you may receive in the arctic dishabilement studies.
CompuServe Issues 228443 S2/Political Issues 25-Jan-92 00:31:32 Sb: #228390-#American in Decline Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 "Debt is a problem only if the funds have been spent on consumption or ineffective capital which has failed to generate useful output.. The United States is a case in point. It ran a current account defecit for 300 years, from the first English settlement in 1607 until World War I, and was a net debtor throughout the period. This created no problems. WWe were opening a new continent.. profitability of putting new physical capital in place in the US was high. Investors shared this high return.." p5 July 1985 Treasury News "Basic Determinants of Capital Formation and Financing of Industrial Development" Stephen J Entin, Depy Ast Secy Eco Policy, Treasury.
CompuServe Issues 248802 S2/Political Issues 01-Mar-92 18:10:19 Sb: #248381-Reaganomics + DeficitFm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 First Reagan did in fact cut the rate of growth of spending, and the tax cuts did produce revenue growth (check the Economist for the late 80s). If you compare to Carter, trends improved. But accumulation of defecit, and interest, continued. Carter himself agreed with NATO on a defence buildup much greater than ever occured under Reagan. You might notice how Reagan and Bush arrived at the no-new-tax pledge: In 1982 it was agreed to raise taxes and cut spending (the largest ever peacetime tax increase until Bush') - but the Democrats never delivered on the spending cuts - don't you remember all the howls how Reagan supposedly caused homelessness (and not the deinstitutionalisation of the late seventies) and how bureaucrats manipulated RIF orders so that it would seem, as Tip O'Neil said, we were "thowing out the baby with the bathwater". Carter tried to end the defecit his last year in office, even trying to stop Saturday mail delivery, but his own party destroyed him. Two thirds of the effective (including off-budget) defecit is in Socialist inSecurity and Medimare, and Bush' IRA/IMA/IEA proposals try to deal with this. Moreover, the sum of the trade and budget defecits may be better sustained by nations with greater savings - hence the current attempt to cut gains taxes to increase savings.
CompuServe FLEFO 98429 S7/East Asian 06-Feb-92 06:17:10 Sb: #98146-Japan/Canada Axis Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 Incidentally, I hope someone looked at the productivity numbers. Japanese workers - certainly THEY are NOT lazy - are 31% less productive than Americans, so certainly, on average, Americans are NOT lazy, either. We both have our problems: lazy Detroit auto workers and NYC municiapl workers matched to lazy Japanese distribution system workers. With all the talk of sincerity and relationships, Japanese treating contracts as "symbolic" rather than binding, resmbles that of the economically undeveloped soviet union - contracts are essential for a free market. I don't think it is wise to take sides or make generalisations: I had a professor in conflict management who helped found Keio's MBA, and she told us unifying issues increases conflict while making them more specific diminishes conflict. A recent article here has shown that some Japanese-name vehicles are the only ones made-in-USA. A lot of Japanese problems are "anal-retentive" or "obsessive-compulsive" and go back to how teachers send home students who have not vacated themselves -- this explains the wasteful and unprooductive and inefficient procrastination and artificiality and formality. The only real anti-Japanese forces in the USA are the radical leftist labor unions - and it is no surprise they have found support in the extreme leftists French socialist government.
CompuServe FLEFO 98681 S7/East Asian 08-Feb-92 20:08:09 Sb: #98493-Japan/Canada Axis Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 In the 1970s Japan's productivity rose faster, not any more. It's slowed down. If you take the Japan Productivity Center numbers published by JETRO its 75% ours, but some recent purchasing power parity numbers indicate more like 69%. It seems to confirm suspicions that when a country is moving close to the USA, it slows down. Britain and France are now the only ones with faster growing productivity than the USA. Also, all these numbers, even the trade defecit, ignore services. Howdo you measure teh consulting services of a professor "on vacation" ? It is quite likely that if we measure goods plus services, no one beats the USA in anythings.
CompuServe FLEFO 98682 S7/East Asian 08-Feb-92 20:11:29 Sb: #98519-Japan/Canada Axis Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 If Henry Kravis had chosen GM instead of Nabisco Brands for divestiture, history would have been a lot different. However, GM was needed for defence - in breaking down the soviets - so restructuring was likely to always be blocked... hopefully not any more. Did you guys hear GM actually refused to make right-drive cars for Japan and still complained the apanese weren't buying?!
CompuServe FLEFO 98686 S7/East Asian 08-Feb-92 20:25:25 Sb: #98615-Japan/Canada Axis Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 I'm a little skeptical about the bottom-line appearance of Japanese dedication to work. Has any yankette executive mentioned how she had to bite a Japanese hand in her dress at Ropongi or a subway? Haven't we heard about all the marvelous Japanese hangover remedies? I think the Japanese have a more pretensious, attitude about work that makes them seem more efficient, but in the end, they are much more hampered by all this procrastination in the name of consensus - much like we were in the 1950s - and Japan is now going through a period much like our own 1960s and 1970s - and most Japanese youth are rebelling.
CompuServe FLEFO 98713 S7/East Asian 08-Feb-92 23:34:15
Sb: #98564-Japan/Canada Axis Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430
Productivity numbers: Dogramaci, Productivity_Analysis [ISBN
0-89838-039-1, 1981, p.4, this was my text in grad school hence betrays my
age! 1967-78: USA annual growth 2.6%, Japan 10%], JETRO, Business Facts &
Figures [1991, p.128, 1980-89 J 3.8% US 3.9%]. Also check out Wall St
Journal, 12SEP91, which cites the 31% PPP surpassing by the USA - I also saw
this in a recent printed-in-Japan English-language magazine, I believe called
Japanese_Commerce_&_Industry. Also check out Industry_Wk 01JUL91. As for
the comparative rates of growth, I think it was in mid-January, 92 in the
London _Economist_ (You can get it on CompuServe via "GO IQUEST").
(By the way, when I was at the Federal Reserve, we used to rely heavily on
census CENDATA, and this is now also here on CompuServe, via "GO CENDATA")
Peace and friendship based on illusory nicerites is just a cease-fire where all the causes of conflict will become pent-up all over again, only to explode into another conflict. First, to get them out of the way, let me begin with my negative views on Turkey. I think Islam is more an ideology than a religion and I believe Muhammad was the only founder of a major religion to carry a sword and that his primary occupation was to rob caravans. I am reminded that Fidel Castro spposedly once said of all religions he would prefer Islam because only Islam had sex in heaven. I honestly would hold no negativity whatsoever against a Turk who was not muslim. Islam had pledged the taking of Constantinople long before the Turks entered the scene. I do believe very strongly in the Orthodox Church, but not in the extremist "traditionalist", phyletistic or "ecumenist" wings. Many believe that many religiously unjustified yet neurotic habits that have entered Orthodoxy come from muslim occupation. I think Kemal Attaturk belongs in the same trash heap of history as his cotemporary totalitarians, Zapata, Stalin, Hitler and the Ba'athists. I am also no fan of the pornocommunist neopagan leanings of the current Greek regime. However, I did not let my views of their belief system prevent me from having many Turkish friends, or for that matter, communist friends. It is possible for a person to be mostly good in spite of a mistaken belief system. In 1948 many times communist family friends saved members of my family from communist atrocities, while my family also later saw many wealthy perpetrators of communist atrocities bribe their way back into nationalist society. Indeed, I can only point out to one case in my university days where I walked away with a negative impression of any Turkish person. I am told this would not be the case if I met the unassimilated gastarbeiten in Germany, but I have no personal experience. I have great respect for the late Turgut Ozal - and I believe honest people like him can bring peace. Once I had neighbors in which the wife was Greek born in Greece and the husband Turkish born in Turkey. Two years ago, I was greatly shaken when a classmate (an a leader in my field) suddenly passed away - and his being Turkish did not diminish this. Having been in many good schools and occupations, I was fortunate to meet many members of prominent Turkish families. Moreover, if we look at Germany and France, as traditional enemies, they have not fought since the second world war, not because of NATO, but because of their economic cointegration in what we now know as the EU. Greece and Turkey have also not fought any mainland conflict since the population transfers of the 1920s, a strategy successfuly emulated by Germany-Poland at Oder-Niesse. Indeed, the population transfers between Greece and Bulgaria have prevented the current "Macedonia" conflict from being anything beyond rhetorical. Cyprus was a special case because the Cypriots had their own ideas (justified or not, but nonetheless complicating the equation), as did the Brits. Ozal was furious when Denktash declared independence without notice. Makarios negated the Acheson plebescite because he had leftist "non-aligned" ambitions. Democracy brings not only rights but also responsibilities, and so those who voted for Panandreou, Makarios, Ecevit and Dukakis cannot escape the consequences of their actions. The Ecumenical Patriarch today wishes to see Turkey join the EU so that the Greeks of Turkey would be guaranteed their rights by Brussels instead of Ankara. But so do the secular Turks (many of them actually of Greek ancestry) who want Greek and Jewish and Syriac communities in Turkey to show to the world that Turkey is indeed pluralistic. I also know quite well that sixty thousand (almost exclusively male Uyghur) horsemen may have imposed their will and even language upon what we know as Turkey, but most of the inhabitants of Micrasia are neither Greek nor Turk, but the original hybrid of European and Semitic peoples that were once known as Anatolians, Trojans, Hittites, Phrygrians, and Armenians. I do believe that both Metaxas and Kemal were right to attempt to forge a unified nation from the fragments of refugees and dialects they found, much as I believe in the assimilative "US English" movement. I do fear, however, that if Turkey joined the EU, the muslim extremists to the east might indeed break away. And I am more afraid of a poor and ayatollah-torn Turkey much more than a propserous and westernised one. I know full well that Khomeni and Saddam covered their evil deeds by throwing their dynamite-stuffed babies at each other for eight years. I also worryingly see USA universities filled with prosperous Turks today much as I saw properous Iranians flee here in the years prior to the fall of the Shah.
CompuServe FLEFO 101012 S7/East Asian 28-Feb-92 23:03:30 Sb: Miyazawa Misinterpreted Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 The bigge[s]t practitioners of short termism are institutional investors, including pension funds of many of the unions that pretend to argue against short termism (Peter Drucker called it "pension fund ssocialism"). It's also true that our tax structure encourages shortermism. The cure would be to abolish mortgage and corporate interest deductability as well as dividend double taxation and long term capital gains tax. I understand Germany still has no long term gains tax and Japan only got one in 1989. I recently read about an American who wrote Japan's post war tax laws along basically Mundellian supply-sider lines - and that the structure still stands..???..anyone recall his name .. wasn't he also Ike's budget director? [Joseph M. Dodge 53-54 US Budg Dir 52-53 Conslt to Scy St on Jpn Econ]
Billvus Jethroson Flintstone beds dinosaur Flowers and lives to tax the sax and pet his Socks. The Tax-Me Billvo Doll never fights like a mannequin. Yamerkins voted fuh a chu'u'a'a'enge.. ..of undawear.. Jennifer's, Paula's, Monica's.. done all the dirty work myself.. except Yellary's.. Vince Froster did her.. so we changed him.. Envriro Gyro's not to eat, Allbutt Bore thinks it's really neat, made with beattle juice instead of meat, makes you puke right on your feet.
Rueben Hurricane Carter: "If you don't love yourself you don't know how to love anyone else because you gotta know what love is." My parents basically always said something like that, but somehow my modern mind saw that as selfish and felt uncomfortable with it. And all those things about respecting ourselves as temples of GOD seem to support it. But there was a Russian philosopher of the 1800s (in Schmemann's Ult_Questions) who asked what if one loses his soul to save the soul of many more others. Is this latter idea more of the problematic 1960s "situation ethics", which even a registered Democrat like Alex Bickel (famed Yale constitutional scholar whose mother-in-law was my parents' tenant) blamed, because of the Warren Court, as the way Nixonian actions around Watergate were self-justified. Machiavelli may be interpreted as having said that a good Prince should be good most of the time precisely so he can get away with being mean and brutal when necessary - and even before him, the clergy told St Vladimir that his abolishing capital punishment may be correct personally as a Christian, but what type of Christian ignores his responsibility as a Monarch in order to protect his own soul. Remember that those great political scientists Popper and Berlin told us the greatest atrocities of the 1900s were not the result of nationalism, but because of the attempts to supress nationalism. Communism and Nazism and all their sibling totalitarianisms (Zapatism, Ba'athism, Kemalism..) were evil precisely because they put ideas above people, so ideologues became so enraged at human nature itself and became misanthropes because the people they were supposedly trying to improve for the sake of some theoretical ideal were standing in the way. Remember the risks of The Ladder (Climacus), where, the closer to GOD you have climbed, the more the evil one prizes winning you over. If you are so willing to give up your soul to save the souls of others, then you have crossed the line, and the evil one now has won you over, so your henceforth evil may undo the salvations you just bargained for. To say that you are so trivial as to be unimportant to the big plan is the first step, just as psychiatric depression is often the door which unlocks the evils that were up to now hiding as mere personaility type idiosynchrasies, but through the turbulence of evil become personality disorders and neuroses. For human calculation is so transcended and irrelevant in the holy dimensions, that the fraction becomes the whole and the whole becomes the fraction, just as even time can be transcended and treated as if temporally distinct events suddenly become simultaneous and multidirectionally interdependent. This is why former Abp Iakovos (Faith_for_a_Lifetime p169+) advised against ideology as a primary motivator "be suspicious of trendy issues.. focus on immediate issues". I would argue ideology, indeed, any human thinking, is only a heuristic rule of thumb, no matter how well crafted. But perhaps my major flaw is that I am looking with scientific eyes at something that can never be understood scientifically?
CompuServe Issues 225877 S2/Political Issues 20-Jan-92 14:51:28 Sb: #225064-Racism & Protectionism Fm: Vasos Panagiotopoulos 76530,1430 Let's get back to protectionism, which is the left's form of accepted racism. My great grandparents were sent back from Castle Garden (before Ellis Island was built) because racist labor unions had agitated against those dark skinned Greeks and Italians. My granpa came back and lived in CInncinnati a decade illegally before going back - for this the Greek reds killed him as an American and buried him in the Grave of the Thousand on Mt. Olympus. The same labor unions waged a bloody Stalinist campaign in small American towns in the thirties with the advice and consent of Stalin-pal FDR - and they succeeded in denying many people the right to work. These now Brezhnevite labor unions are corrupt and lazy and even hungrier - and they have denied the entire American Northeast the right to participate in the Reagan Revolution. They get stupendous wages for inefficient car workers. They overstuff urban payrolls with do-nothings, who turn around and campaign for the people that govern them. They use unions to deny competitive bidding in construction so that it takes a billion dollars to dig an unfinished mile-long underwater subway line. Maybe the new Japanese prime minister can frighten us into a little perestroika of our own? The thought of Mario Cuomo and his shop stewards ending up the way of Ceasescu and his Secutitate is tempting.. but I'll resist it.
23 Lomax Mordeley Court, Giles Arkes Lake, NY 13989
For Immediate Release
Contact: Vraugham Phachaeuer (212) 288-9970
Giles Arkes Lake- In surprising newly discovered local dambursts were discovered important new demographic shifts that grealy impact our fleeing society as lakes of disenchantment provide their ultimate causality. Entire zipcodes vanish from the map as if their existance was momentary or even imaginary, making even the most accurate polling look specious. The impact upon the community is incredible as voting patterns shift to meet the challenge. Automation alone will be insuffient as new satellite tracking systems must be implemented with utmost imaginativeness and creativity. I am here and for all the cowmoonittie, not just any civic politician but integrally involved in the civic life of all for all and for your good, here for the cowmoonittie not just a politician but integrally involved perpetually here for the cowmoonittie not just integrally involved but in the civic life not of cowmoonittie for all here unquestioningly here for the cowmoonittie whose defect I rectify here for the cowmoonittie not just the politician but an involved, glorified civic divinity oblong clever just guardian prudently assertive for the earth a good donor manifestation unconfusingly teach all parks bulbs quilled for your good! Meticulously casually quilled all and for your good I am here for the cowmoonittie not just any politician but integrally inspiration generously devotedly distinctly but empower the bare squeamish cupboard.
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 15:16:17 -0500
From: Vasos Panagiotopoulos +1-917-287-8087 Bioengineer-Financier
Samani Marions Panyaught NYC-11357-3436-287-USA [vjp2]
Message-Id: [199702262016.AA17664@dorsai.dorsai.org]
To: elite@prysm.net, repub-d@u.washington.edu, REPUB-L@VM.MARIST.EDU,
RUSHTALK@ATHENA.CSDCO.COM, conservative@dragon.com
Subject: Another list oldie intro
As retaliation for Crimea, the Turks ethnically cleansed
Macedonia, hence in 1885, along with his father and future
father-in-law, five-year-old stow-away Peter Dimitriou Bluhos arrived
in Castle Garden, NYC, but was soon sent "back". He snuck back in, in
1910, via Cuba, to work illegally in a paper factory in Cincinatti, but
left to fight for Smyrna, only to be killed by Greek reds in 1949 at
the Mt Olympus Tomb of the Thousand, for "being Yank". Twelve years
later, I, his first granchild, was the first member of my family to be
born in the USA. How do you grow up with a LEGACY LIKE THAT? You end
up going around tenth grade, convinced by your liberal teachers you
were a fascist, much to your parents' horror, until a distant relative,
who was part of the Greek junta but wounded at el Alamein tells you
"We were never fascists. We fought the fascists."
Well, as a freshman at Columbia, in 1979, at the time of Three
Mile Island, I had to walk over demonstrators to get to classes. That
week, a bunch of us in honors chemistry seminar got together and made
some history, asking the university to activate the reactor and
calling ourselves SCARE (Student Coalition Against Revolutionay
Effort.. now it's "Scholarly" instead).
With my dad waiting tables for two shifts and myself working
thirty hours a week in research, I found it cheaper to finish at
nineteen. Except, I nearly flunked out my last year, because political
fever caught me again. You see, we called it the "Carter Weimar" and
started the "Reagan Revolution". Two years later, I headed the
Columbia GOP and got to meet such current luminaries as Jack Abramoff,
Grover Norquist, the late Jay Young (whose funeral is today), Amy
Moritz, Steve Baldwin and Ralph Reed. I also met a lot of
unscrupulous folks whose ambition exceded their falsely-professed
ideology and had to unfortunately battle them in the countless purges
that I thought only occured in YOUTH politics; unfortunately, when
adults do it, they might be quieter, but they are also a lot
dumber. Having then just studied Conflict Management under a former
colleague of George Schulz, I got to fly around to campuses all over
NY State to fight fires. (I also got to grow up with my folks' tenant
being the mother-in-law of Bork mentor Alex Bickel, and took courses
with Zbigniew Brzezinski and supply-side founder Robert Mundell.)
Then after all that schooling (8yrs worth in five), I joined a
campaign to fill Feraro's seat with a conservative, Serf Maltese,
while I worked at a financial math software startup. Moving on to the
Federal Reserve as a quant, I got Hatched, but soon tired of all the
lazy bureaucrats and left, just before the 1987 crash, to start my own
consultancy. I now set up biotek firms, and eventually got dragged
back into local politics (when I woke up to find a bulldozer on my
lawn), until I now, too, just ended up on the Queens GOP board. The
day of Giuliani's election, the car, that was driving around Steve
Weiner and me to chase down voter fraud, got its window smashed in
front of a welfare project.
With current events in Bosnia and Russia, I find myself,
suddenly a lot less sure what I believe. I feel my fellow
conservatives have betrayed my Orthodox faith to support the pending
new Papal majority. Finding that my old Life Chain friends spent a New
Years in Sarajevo left me curious if supporting them wouldn't
eventually cut my own throat. At the same time, the
duQuackey-Quackandreou ethnocentrists have taken over my faith and
make me feel no longer at home even there. I have a curious longing
for the days when only intelligent revolutionaries were religious and
conservative - instead of everyone unconsciously joining with
brainless automaton kneejerk false demagogic fervor replete with
cryptoracist schizoparanoid conspiracy theories; I'm lost, confused
and angry - except there seems to no longer be a movement of kindred
spirits. The anger that used to focus on liberals is now aimed at
myself, eating me up inside.
You'll find some of my articles on Health Deform, Education,
Urban Policy, et al, on my web page under "articles". Back in 1990,
some other (econ) articles of mine used to appear in the sister paper
of the Washington Times, the now-defunct NYC Tribune. You'll even find
my politcal campaign experience summarised in a RefCard on
campaigning.
US%Ancestry: Germanic 30 Celtic 20 Mediterranean 12 Slavic 5
Asian 6 Amerind/Hisp 15 African 12
US%Faiths: Baptist 20 Orthodox 2 Anglican 3 Muslim 4 Jewish 3
Lutheran 8 Methodist 10 Pentecostal 3 Presb/Refm 3 Vaticanist 44.
(Also NYTimes Almanac 2000 p417 says Vat 38% Bapt 17%.. based on nccusa.org)
Greek Orth US (k) Avg Ann 77-93: Baptisms 10 Wedd/Gr 2 Wedd/Mx
3 Chrism 1 Funrl 4 Divrc/Gr .4 Divrc/Mx .3. By diocese (Baptisms,
funerals): NY(1540,763), NJ(1063,458), Chgo(838,425), Atla(740,175),
Detr(573,304), SF(924,377), Pgh(532,281), Bost(942,595); Dividing
difference (Bapt-Funrl) by Grk Pop gro=.6% or USA Pop gro=1% should
approx population.
Orth Chr Laity 1993 Proj Orth Renewal pp20-21 ISBN 0-937032-95-6
1'genrn 200k immigr, 2' 350k 3' 250k 4' 100k Tot 900k.. 1975 Gallup .031 Gr
Orth (Reinken). 670k 1990 550k (Kosmin). Archd 130k fam, 400k indiv. 2/3 Gr
ethn Orth, OCA 24.5kfam* 400.130=75k=150*500parish
Hartford Seminary HIRR OCA 115k GOA 440k AOCA 84k
1990 US Census C90STF3C1 NY-NNJ-LI-CT MSACMSA=5602: LANGUAGE
SPOKEN AT HOME Speak only English:12,062,150 Greek: 107,612 First
ancestry: Greek 168,688 Second ancestry: Greek: 22,933 Single
ancestry: Greek: 135,206
1990 US Census C90STF3C1 Nationwide Greek: LANGUAGE SPOKEN AT HOME
388,260 First ancestry reported 921,782 Second ancestry reported
188,591 Single ancestry reported 632,540
GSS RELIGKID Protestant 813 Catholic 395 Jewish 29 Orthodox 8 (ie 0.6%)
Moslem 3 Other 21 No religion 46 Don't know 24 No answer 20
550 parishes x 500 members or 200 families make quarter
million, but in 1992 half the parishes had under 75 families and a
total of 86,000 contributing members. OCA has 26,000 supporting
members. There are no more than half a million Orthodox in the USA:
250,000 Greek, 75,000 Russian, 150,000 Antiochian and 2,000 converts.
(Written in Spring 1998 and Fall 1997)
Two years ago BoNY's Bannon showed NYC Beta Sigma Gamma (MBA
honors fraternity) a cartoon of Clinton bragging about creating so
many new jobs, and the waiter serving him water saying "Yeah, and I
have three of them." (Meaning part-time.) Recently when I was told my
native Long Island has more that regained the defence conversion lost
jobs, I asked about the Grumman engineers and was told they either
became programmers (glorified clerical workers, if you ask me), worked
at Home Depot, took early rerirement or left the region. Yes, we live
in deflationary times. Hopefully this deflation is fragmented across
segments of society (as in 1880s) and will not hit us in an aggregated
global wave (as in 1930s, thanks to protectionism). What should we
expect when all this real estate (not to mention production) that was
taken out of the market by communism is now returned, boosting supply,
hence pressuring prices downwards? How much of the Asian crisis is due
to the bolshevisation of Hong Kong and how much is due to western
socialists explaining their dislike of markets through a fantasaical
insistence that Asians somehow follow different semi-socialist market
realities?
In the meanwhile, as debt tax deductions were removed by
1986's tax reform, we have desubsidised debt (as well as removed the
regulatory pressures which kept energy expensive), hence lowered
pressure on interest rates, cheapening and reducing the federal
deficit, allowing us to break the spiral of its continuous growth. But
credit has also cheapened as the aging of the industrial world has
increased the supply of investable funds. But this aging has also
brought us a dangerous potential source of a revived inflation, namely
the labor shortage. Would the return of a capital gains tax break
provide a Mundellian offset to the supply shock of such a labor
shortage? Would we be able to maintain the discipline to keep our
budgets in surplus as well as reduce taxes and keep money tight enough
to provide the balanced growth specified by Mundell in his 1971
Princeton International Finance essay Dollar&Policy Mix.
The question arises as to whether a prolonged period of
deflationary increases in productivity will lead to labor unrest, as
in Bismark's Germany, the times of the French Revolution, the times of
the Bolshevik Revolution, the times of the Ayatollahs and the times of
William Jennings Bryant. Would such unrest lead us back to more New
Deal style socialism or would we be able to disintermediate its
effects through such things as a privatisation of social security and
a desubsidisation (whether subsidisation was through tax breaks,
grants or federal insurance schemes) of health care and education
(especially catastrophic health care and higher education)? Will we be
able to reform, defragment, and modernise our financial (banking,
securities and insurance) system in time (perhaps allowing for
deregulation of all finance except that pertaining to health,
education and housing)?
At the same time, we have lost the ability to control the
money supply as new instruments and electronic money have allowed
Wenninger and Partland to argue M1 and M2 are no longer
measurable. Now, through vendacards and other electronic money, we are
returning to interest pegging, which was shown as destabilising by
rational expectations. It is argued that Greenspan doesn't really peg
interest rates when he sets the discount rate, rather excercisies his
sole remaining instrument, the bully pulpit, from where he semaphors
us with either discount rate setting or talk of "rational exuberance".
Greenspan is remarkable - the man is the model - he digests raw data,
picking at individual, disagreggated numbers to arrive at his
intuitive conclusions - will we be able to maintain his policies in
the unfortunate event he left us?
Greenspan is Geoffrey Moore's student. Geoffrey Moore and
Milton Friedman were both Arthur Burns students. Arthur Burns was the
Fed chair Carter dumped in order to get G William Miller to inflate us
to insanity. That whole school is heavily influenced by the German
hyperinflation experience earlier this century. Greenspan is clearly
the closest thing to a gold standard we could have under the current
system. What happened in some part in 1987 is that Greenspan looked
at a lot more data than Volker was looking at and hit the brakes
(although the market itself was also reacting to Smoot-Gephardt-301
and most importantly, the end of capital gains preference). About
1986, Milton Friedman had come out with an article in Journal of
Political Economy (macroeconomics used to be called political economy
before Keynes) about the cost of holding currency. The buzz was then
that he was gonna become a gold standard supporter. About that time,
Manly Johnson had gotten the Fed to look at yield curve slope and
ALCAP instead of M1. (ALCAP was a commodity basket of Aluminum Copper
and Ammonium Phosphate, meant to have the net effect of a gold
standard without all the supposed negatives.) In 3/95 I met a chap
named Heinnemann who insists on measuring what he calls M0, or tight
money, which is demand deposits plus currency abroad - well, that
sounds great, and it's certainly a great heuristic for customers of
his who don't have huge market-moving accounts like the grubmint does
- but what happens when your account iss so big it has highly nonlinear
effects and approximations don't cut it? Also, a bit earlier, we had
the Plaza Accords. About a week later I was at the NY Academy of
Sciences listening to my favorite econs prof, supply-side founder
Robert Mundell (the preface to Laffer's 1984 Intl Eco text clearly
attributes this to him) sparring with Princeton's Peter Kenan and
LBJ's Roosa, and the general feeling was then that the Plaza Accords
were a precursor to a new Mundellian Bretton Woods. But that was an
INTERNATIONAL gold standard - one in which national currencies got
devalued based on their gold reserves in the sub-basement vault of the
NY Fed. (C. Lowell Harriss wrote a book on banking or international
banking in the 50s or 60s which gave a very clear description of the
gold transfer mechanics.) The bottom line is "gold standard" means
many thing to many people and the trouble is in agreeing on what it
means. There is also the very serious question that, since gold has
now become a commodity used in electronics manufacturing, it may have
fundamentally changed its economic behavior. What we seem to be
approaching now (if deflation doesn't wreck it) is a return to
private, commodity-based currency, in the form of magnetic
venda-cards, which is what the system was in the 1870s and which is
even more "right wing" than "gold standard". The big question in my
mind, as I was schooled in rational expectations, which said
interest-pegging was destabilising, is why we now basically peg the
discount rate. My suspicion is that the instability isn't very
relevant at low interest rates, but if interest rates start going up,
it will destabilise again.
(A Spoof on Balkan Foodstuffs in Martha Stewart Style) Enough with Martha Stewart becoming Jewish. Let us meet her Balkan sister-in-law, Balka Stewart. Baklava. It is unknown if this name is intentionally a pun on the Greek word for idiot "vlaka" or the Turkish word for mountain "balkan". Needless to say, it is very flakey and nutty. The Arab version is also much smaller and drier. Greeks are known to apply more beet-sugar syrup by volume than actual pastry, some claiming it is an act of stinginess, others assuring the excess sugar ends the constipation provoked by over-roasted Turk birik coffee. If the streudel is shredded into a spaghetti-like form (or perhaps like shredded wheat) and pistachios are added, the treat is called kandayifi or kenaf. Greeks abroad have been known to make variations like Baklava Croissant, which is basically a lot of walnuts and almonds inside the croissant. Turks and Arabs make related, round sweets like these sold as "nightingales" or "bird nests". Kokoretsi. It is unknown if this combination of innards is tastier with or without the automotive fingernail grime of the truckdriver who reassembled it after having collected it from roadkill. If it is continuously reroasted in excess lards and associated grilldrip, however, you will not taste the difference. Related innard concoctions are called spleenandero (spleentestines). When combined with oatmeal and gravies it is called (Scottish) haggis. It is to ingest these "gizzard blizzard" delicacies that pine resin left over from turpentine production is set aside to make retsina wine. Turk birik coffee. Coffee which has been repeatedly rebrewed and reroasted to make sure it doesn't leave your system until you have availed yourself of every last violence-provoking stimulation from its constituent cafeine. Drunk as a thick paste that makes eggnog look watery, in a thimble-sized cup called a filjan, intended to allow these thick-fingered barbarians the pretense of refined delicateness. Tsatsiki (Cacik). A combination of yogurt, cucumbers and garlic meant to be a substitute for alcohol for genuinely practising muslims. The essence of this "white sauce" (real origin of "hit the sauce") is the overdose of garlic, meant to counteract the high-cholesterol, high-salt diet frequent in the regions, but the blood-pressure lowering effects are hardly noticed after they have put even the mildest ingestor into trancelike, paranoid, smelly stupor. Spanakopita. This struedel made from goat cheese and unwashed spinach is even more crunchy if the lad you paid to bicycle this huge pie to the village oven dropped it near some hazardous construction site to make the bottom sparkle with sand and debris. Variations include tiropita (only cheese), galaktobureko (farina custard), melintzanopita (eggplant - tastes like meat), vlitopita (various greens high in ochridotoxins known to produce the high rate of Balkan urinary cancers). The original form is the burek (aka pirogi), the Turkish finger-sized version of the Chinese eggroll, filled with goat cheese and unusually gastrostimulant garnishes several times stronger than dill, mint (diosmo) or parsely. These gastrostimulant garnishes, if ingested by the unconstipated gourmet, could lead to diverticulitis. Grape or cabbage leaves covering various combinations of meat and rice are called dolma and yuvarlaki (the latter akin to Chinese dumplings or Irish potstickers or Jewish Kreplakh or Russian Pirogi). Greeks who have adopted education-despising, papal ways in the west are derrogated as "dolma - Greek leaves on the outside and papal meathead on the inside". Fasol. Not to be confused with American chili. Turks, Greeks and Slavs all call their beans fasol. It is a soup made of white beans and tomatoes and various chopped vegetables and is a staple dish for basic protein and starch. When homecooked in small quantities, it is usually way too sour. Only navy chefs prepare large enough quantities to extract enough starch to emulsify away the acids and oils. Olive oil is also a staple source of lipids, with the saying "I'll squeeze you into oil" used to describe a bearhug because those olives usually get the enough laughs out of failed attempts to squeeze them (hey, their seed didn't survive on the Acropolis since antiquity for nothing). A Greek medical professor at Harvard has postulated olive oil makes for unusually low rates of Balkan breast cancers. Shishkebob. Originally made by invading Turk horsemen (only men came so, lacking women, they needed amusement) from impaled humans "shished" (silenced) after rebellions when the victim's head stopped bobbing. (Dionysios Solomos is said to have written the Greek national anthem while impaled.) In order to export it to the west, to keep hapless raki-racked (ouzo makes you ouzie, but raki puts you on the racks - both distilled from fermenting a thick syrup left over from grapes crushed for wine) Turk gastarbeiten employed, beef and lamb was supposedly used instead of human meat, and it was placed on very long toothpicks instead of swords. To keep from offending toothless westerners, the Turks applied sufficient quantities of acetic acid (aka vineagar) to soften the horsemeat that pretends to be otherwise. Very often the horse meat comes from the original horses the Turk's ancestors rode into Asia Minor a millenium ago (yes, they were THAT tough - and they had to do something with those horses after they discovered the utility of dervish janissarism). When this meat is ground and combined with gastrostimulant (admonished above) garnishes like dill, mint or parsely, and then fried, it is called kefte. When it is made of mixed origin and mixed in fibrous strands, it is called cevaps. Galina will tell us about hyacinth lentil soup (Imagine the laugh of an American kid when a parent announced in Palace Greek that "fakas" were served!) whose pulp was used to make parchment for Byzantine manuscripts and served to Plutarch and Melas Zomas by Dnieper Sophists. (I'm sure I got that wrong, but who really cares, this is supposed to be a joke.)
So.. what do all these fried flaking petunia bladders and hard boiled frog manure have to do with the smell of Rumplestilskin's toenails, anyway? Close your mouth or a donkey will eat your tonsils!