alpha stew

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Even the Lord can’t monopolize schadenfreude, at least. I may be a mouse in a hole, but I’m a grinning mouse, watching the moronic inferno explode.

The latest sad news is from the Alpha male club. You’ve seen the Alpha males, haven’t you? You spot them by the grins. They have those bloodstreaked chins. They have that assurance. They have the lines. They have it all lined up. They have it all on the line. American Psycho is screening in the frontal lobe region 24/7. At the moment, though, there is a break in the Alpha male network. Everything isn’t lined up. Everyone seems to have been lined up, but not as eaters – no, as the eaten. It was Alpha stew all the time.

"Mother," said the little boy, "how angry you look. Yes, give me an apple."
Then it seemed to her as if she had to persuade him. "Come with me," she said, opening the lid of the chest. "Take out an apple for yourself." And while the little boy was leaning over, the Evil One prompted her, and crash! she slammed down the lid, and his head flew off, falling among the red apples.

When I was in Mexico, a friend of mine told me about her vacation at a resort in the Dominican Republic. It was a sinister sounding resort, to my ears. It was entirely given over to the super-rich, and well guarded. There was everything inside the gates you would want, except – well, Dominicans. Everyone rode about on golf carts. This particular resort catered to the Venezuelan rich. Many were the stories of the evil Chavez. And the golf carts went to the store, or to the restaurant, or to the sauna, or to the golf course.

Then fear overcame her, and she thought, "Maybe I can get out of this." So she went upstairs to her room to her chest of drawers, and took a white scarf out of the top drawer, and set the head on the neck again, tying the scarf around it so that nothing could be seen. Then she set him on a chair in front of the door and put the apple in his hand.
After this Marlene came into the kitchen to her mother, who was standing by the fire with a pot of hot water before her which she was stirring around and around.
"Mother," said Marlene, "brother is sitting at the door, and he looks totally white and has an apple in his hand. I asked him to give me the apple, but he did not answer me, and I was very frightened."
"Go back to him," said her mother, "and if he will not answer you, then box his ears."
So Marlene went to him and said, "Brother, give me the apple." But he was silent, so she gave him one on the ear, and his head fell off. Marlene was terrified, and began crying and screaming, and ran to her mother, and said, "Oh, mother, I have knocked my brother's head off," and she cried and cried and could not be comforted.
"Marlene," said the mother, "what have you done? Be quiet and don't let anyone know about it. It cannot be helped now. We will cook him into stew."

I wonder now how many of those people are looking at each other in fear and trepidation as the news comes out about the Stanford fund fraud.

“My sources in Venezuela tell me that Stanford Financial, the finance firm in the crosshairs of the SEC, has big connections with Venezuela. In fact, this morning regulators say Venezuelan exposure totals $2.5 billion.
A very senior executive in the country tells me R. Allen Stanford used to send a private jet to pick up his biggest Venezuelan clients and bring them to swanky parties he held.
Back in 2005, despite a wave of corporate nationalizations under Socialist President Hugo, Stanford Financial Group opened a dozen branches in Venezuela. You can see the article here from the NY Times.
You have to wonder, why? Perhaps to legitimize the company to wealthy clients with big pockets and who were working on ways to hide their money from socialist president Hugo Chavez?”

You have to wonder why. We all have to wonder why. In the Boy Scout Guide book to the Zona, rule number one is: if you run up against something you don’t understand, you’ve just seen the system.
Rule number two is: don’t let the system see you.

“As for the thousands of small depositors who had their money in bank accounts in Stanford in Venezuela--they may actually be OK.
The capital controls put in place by Chavez would mean any deposits Stanford took in, couldn’t be taken out of the country. It’s a frustration for many American corporations doing business there—they can’t repatriate profits.
That is unless Stanford had some kind of deal with the Venezuelan government. The tentacles of this alleged case of fraud could be long and run very far south.”

The irony office is now open. We are waiting for your call.

Music for today's news is here.