Everybody Talks About the Weather.

Jaco Pastorius, not yet dead, spins in his grave

...But, as Mark Twain pointed out (or maybe it was Will Rogers - at this point, who really gives a shit) - no one does anything about it.  Back in those days, doing something about the weather was, in actual fact, mostly limited to praying or cursing.  There is mounting evidence that even now that we can do something about the weather, we seem to be sticking with praying and cursing.

But this isn't about climate change because... as Bob Dylan pointed out (or maybe it was Justin Bieber) you don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing.  

A very wealthy, powerful guy I was talking to the other day lamented (using what I could have sworn was an intonation pattern he must have picked up from somewhere other than his native speech pattern) that "[class] warfare is such an ugly thing."  I didn't point out to him - mostly because I have trouble enough getting him to talk to me as it is, without making him irritated and uncomfortable - that the folks on the other side of those battle lines (numerous though unarmed as they are...) genrally see terror and humiliation where he sees 'ugliness'.

Why on earth would a guy having trouble feeding himself engage in 'warfare' with his betters?  Perhaps it's because... he doesn't have enough to eat?  But the rich guy and I were talking about the dearly departed Hugo Chavez and Venezuela's displaced ruling class.  The Latin American intelligentsia are engaged in some pretty keen handwringing about Chavez' brutalization of the economy (many of them speaking from cubicles in American right-wing think tanks) and seem to be pretty anxious to set things right, macroeconomic-wise, in the old country. 

Somehow when a nation 'squanders' its wealth in 'giveaway' programs to the poor, the ultimate result is seen to be less virtuous than when it 'quantitatively eases' its way out of the excesses of what Matt Taibbi has described as the 'Vampire Squid' set.

What has all this got to do with the weather?

You figure it out - you're a smart guy.