LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for September, 2007
Support Kucinich’s Cheney Impeachment petition…
Recognizing the gravity of the increasingly loud drumbeats for more war coming from the Vice President’s office, this week Dennis Kucinich [MP3 Audio Clip] said he was seriously considering forcing the House of Representatives to take up the issue of impeachment by bringing it as a privileged resolution.Each and every member of the House must be called to account at this moment in American political history, by the demands of you, their constituents, whether they will stand up for the Constitution and stop Dick Cheney’s delusional march to Iran . . . or not. The one click form below will send your personal message to all your government representatives selected below, with the subject “Support H. Res 333 To Impeach Cheney” At the same time you can send your personal comments only as a letter to the editor of your nearest local daily newspaper if you like.
Arthur Conan Doyle on wartime atrocities
In a best-seller he wrote about the British war on the Boer settlers in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, Conan Doyle excoriates Breaker Morant, the renegade Englishman who made a name breaking in horses in Australia, before volunteering to fight for the imperial army, and then becoming implicated in 20 murders of Afrikaner and Africans in the Northern Transvaal, one of a missionary. He was court-martialed and executed.
Incidentally, at the time of the atrocities, 1901, the war had entered the guerrilla stage and Lord Kitchener had formed a special fighting unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers. Plus ca change etc…“There is one incident, however, in connection with the war in this region which one would wish to pass over in silence if such a course were permissible… (A)n irregular corps… (with its) wild duties, its mixed composition, and its isolated situation must have all militated against discipline and restraint, and it appears to have degenerated into a band not unlike those Southern “bush-whackers” in the American (civil) war to whom the Federals showed little mercy. They had given short shrift to the Boer prisoners who had fallen into their hands, the excuse offered for their barbarous conduct being that an officer who had served in the corps had himself been murdered by the Boers. Such a reason, even if it were true, could of course offer no justification for indiscriminate revenge… This stern measure (the execution of Handcock and Morant) shows more clearly than volumes of argument could do how high was the standard of discipline of the British army, and how heavy was the punishment, and how vain all excuses, where it had been infringed. In the face of this actual outrage and its prompt punishment how absurd becomes that crusade against imaginary outrages preached by an ignorant press abroad, and by renegade Englishmen at home. ” (p. 521).
In Australia, many see Morant as a folk hero and as a scape-goat for Kitchener:
“there is now persuasive evidence from several sources to show that the Kitchener ‘no prisoners’ order did indeed exist, that it was widely known among both the British and Australian troops and carried out by many disparate units…….Bleszynski, like Witton, Denton and Beresford, believes that Morant and Handcock were given a show trial, branded as murderous renegades and then executed as a matter of political expediency. He argues that this was done mainly to appease the Boer government and help secure a peace treaty, but also to prevent the British public from learning that, however unpalatable their actions, Morant and his men had in fact been carrying out a standing ‘no prisoners’ order that had been issued by the British commander-in-chief himself.”
Staff Sergeant Dale Beatty
Staff Sergeant Dale Beatty suffered wounds in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom II and both of his legs were amputated below the knee. He spends his time at the Walter Reed Army medical center with a crafts kit sent by strangers to take his mind off the pain.
Sergeant Beatty looks all of 19 in his picture. It’s nice he gets a crafts kit and a Christmas card. And of course, he’ll have his Purple Heart to remind him he did his duty honorably as he saw it. We judge heroism by honorable intentions and acts of courage.
Staff Sergeant Dale Beatty would probably call his civilian commanders honorable and courageous too, with the eyes of innocence. And with the trust of the young for the old.
To mislead the innocence and trust of the sons of your own country — what could be a better definition of treachery?
Iran war mongering: Fallon sounds the gong….
From MSNBC:
“BAGHDAD - The commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East does not believe current tensions with Iran will lead to war and urges for greater emphasis on dialogue and diplomacy.“This constant drum beat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Adm. William Fallon said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television, which made a partial transcript available Sunday”
From Wiki:“During his tenure as head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Fallon took a conciliatory approach towards China, a position that drew the ire of hardliners including Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz.
His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal, Navy Commendation Medal, and various unit and campaign decorations…”
“Fallon, a world history buff, told The Washington Post through a spokesman that he recently finished reading the book “No God but God,” by Iranian author Reza Aslan, an advocate of ending religious conflicts between East and West. Fallon had served in the Middle East before, on a joint task force in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and he recently traveled to Iraq to meet with some of the thousands of U.S. troops deployed there from the Pacific Command.”
OK….there’s the gong for recess and here come the big boys to tell the kiddies to stop throwing sand in each others’ faces, make nice, and get something to eat….Now, where are the rest of the adults?
MindBody: The Stock-chart Sutra
Update:
I rethought what I wrote about dogmatic belief not being conducive to morals. I think that was an exaggeration of my position and I corrected it:
1. Mentalism (everything is driven by the mind)
2. Correspondence (things are fractal)
3. Vibration (everything is a packet of energy)
4. Polarity (everything oscillates between two opposites)
5. Rhythm (everything has a pulse or cyclical aspect)
6. Causation (all effects have causes)
7. Gender (everything has a negative/passive and positive/active/ aspect)(I can hear the yowls about sexism/misogyny/mentalism/fraud already but they move me not a whit… nor, I should add, rereading this, are they true. You could, for example, see the active-passive polarity as part of any interaction — not just of a relationship between a man and a woman, but of any exchange. You could also hold quite “progressive” positions, on some social issues - as I do - without necessarily being bound to hold them either, and accept these principles as analytical tools).
According to many esoteric traditions, the seven principles are fundamental principles of the organization of the world around us. This would be anathema or obscurantism to many social scientists — and surely, there is a lot of pre-scientific mythologizing, woolly-headed fluff, wishful thinking, Panglossian smugness etc., etc., in what is called New Age thinking….which is really age-old and better called neo-Hindu or neo-Buddhist (available in the west also as the wisdom or esoteric tradition of Christianity and Judaism).
(For instance, I think the first principle - mentalism - isn’t properly defined and devalues the body/materiality).
But when people argue that religious teaching is largely pre-scientific and that its most valuable component is its ethical teaching, I dissent. Ethics is not dependent on religion. And may often be hampered by it. Some of what we take to be the result of religious values may be at least as much the humanizing effects of the sciences and the arts - especially literature - on culture. I take the minority view that the most valuable part of religion, hidden in mythology and symbolism, lies in its empirical observations and even in its “pseudo-scientific” descriptions…
The teachings in the Gospel, for instance, are most interesting to me as “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive” — they are very useful assessments of the world around us. (Of course, I’m in sympathy with the prescriptions, too, in a general way. I’d just hate to be the final arbiter of how and where they should be applied to anyone but myself).
Now, that descriptive component of religious thought is precisely what critics of the New Age do not understand and which New Agers (and I confess to being in sympathy with them) do. The New Age probably will teach you nothing exceptionally useful about ethics and might even tend to corrupt anyone who didn’t already have clear values - because it’s essentially a set of tools – that works.
Still, anyone who doesn’t grasp the extent of the cultural renaissance arising from the interaction between Western science and Eastern religion and the numbers of advances in science and medicine that come out of that interaction, is ignorant of one of the most important currents — perhaps ,the most important — of the last century and a half.Time for the social sciences to come to grips with all this.
And they are. Even if it hasn’t filtered into punditry. But in academics, there is plenty going on in a number of fields, from the life sciences to the organizational sciences that take the new (it’s not that new, except to die-hard positivists and materialists) approach.
Update:
I was thinking about stock-charts, for instance, which fascinate me as very beautiful examples of the intersection of emotions and numbers. The typical chart exhibits all the seven Hermetic principles (the choice of the number seven, is fraught with metaphysical and symbolic significance, even though from our standpoint today it might be considered arbitrary…. more on that at another time).
The stock chart is driven by fundamental or technical values ascribed to the underlying stock by the investors — as well as by their irrational moods (the former being active and the latter more passive); it oscillates between resistance and support at a variable rate (the beta); it’s traded at varying levels of intensity and energy (trading volume); it exhibits fractal patterns (compare intraday and weekly/monthly patterns); and it exhibits greater and lesser cycles (eg. Elliot Waves).
You’d only expect it of any human activity, but it’s still food for thought..and makes me regret not knowing more statistics.
Rage against the war-machine….
“Freedom” ~ Alice Cooper
“We the people of the United States
In order to form a more perfect union
Stop pretending that you’ve never been bad
You’re never wrong and you’ve never been dirty
You’re such a saint, that ain’t the way we see you
You want to rule us with an iron hand
You change the lyrics and become Big Brother
This ain’t Russia, you ain’t my Dad or Mother
(They never knew anyway)
‘Cuz I never walk away from what I know is right
But I’m gonna turn my back on you….Freedom, we’re gonna ring the bell
Freedom to rock, freedom to talk
Freedom -
Raise your fist and yell!”
Tell it,
Burying your head in the sand hoping your life won’t be confiscated for the greater good is insane- it’s already on the chopping block with taxation at over 40%. Announcements over public address systems to be on “orange alert,” whatever that is, is insanity. Perpetual war in hopes of finding peace is insanity. Bloated government is insanity. Bleating like sheep at the ballot box in hopes of changing things is insanity.
If you can’t think of what to yell – experiment. Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up! For starters, take yourself out into the middle of the street, take a deep breath and scream, “NOOOO!” Would I tell you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, dear reader? NO, I WOULDN’T. Take a page from Network and try screaming out your window, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore! See if it makes you feel crazier or more sane than ever. Do you want to live or do you want to keep dying, slowly, one bitch-ass, bullshit law at a time?!
What’s that, you say? Your neighbors will think you’re crazy? Sorry, they are not thinking about you that much. To keep taking it up the tailpipe like they do is what’s crazy. To keep voting for more of the goddamn same is what’s crazy. Maybe they’re just waiting for someone else to rage at the machine first. Revolution was an outrageous notion too. Aren’t you glad it happened? Let that teenage energy buried inside you out of prison. Someone has to be first. Get up off of that thing! Don’t expect someone else to do this. You have to show the world that it is not crazy to object to tyranny. Putting human beings in cages or killing them en masse, now that is crazy!
Don’t make me come over there and get all up in your face, damn it! You’ll be sorry. Do you really want a visit from the
Retta Fontana, at Strike the Root.
The Boss turns his back on the Mob…
“Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake
The last to die for a mistake
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break
Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake.”
The mistake is the Iraq war and the singer is
Bruce Springsteen on his new album, Magic, available on the net already and just in the stores.“We don’t measure the blood we’ve drawn anymore,”
“We just stack the bodies outside the door.”
Demo-crass-y: questioning the tyranny of the majority…
“China’s threat to sell its US Treasuries - if actually carried out - will be triggered by the US Congress. This fall, the US Congress will vote on a bill that would impose a 20% across-the-board tariff on all Chinese goods imported into the US. The supporters of the bill describe its passage as “veto-proof” - that they now possess enough votes to override a presidential veto.
This possibility calls again into question the very efficacy of democracy, to wit., the belief that the collective will of the people is preferable to the capricious stupidity of a king or queen or any other selected or self-appointed tyrant, or indeed, virtually any government official…..”
Ah yes. Precisely the theme of “Mobs.”
And one no one likes to hear. Masses of ignorant, ill-informed, or passion-driven people are not exactly the ones we should be listening to. Not, of course, that the majority ever wanted to get into this war in the first place. They didn’t. Our elected oligarchs did that. But they can always count on enough mass hysteria to let them get away with it.
Of course, criticizing “the people” is out of the question these days. That would make you, what, an elitist? Well — I am an elitist. When I study something I don’t go to someone just as ignorant as me, I go to some one who knows better. When I want financial advice, I go to people who know how to make money and have more of it than me. Everything revolves around that sort of hierarchy - and acceptance of it. So, this constant talk of egalitarianism moves me about as much as “self-esteem” babble unaccompanied by any effort to improve. People who make better decisions, contribute more, and work harder ought to do better. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when rewards don’t match the value added and are a result of the system being rigged.
So, when the demagogues jump into protectionism (just as they did with Smoot-Hawley) what is likely to happen?
“China is longer dependent on America to buy its goods. The Eurozone now shares the distinction of being China’s largest market. Additionally, when and if the US Congress votes to impose 20% tariffs on Chinese goods, the damage to China’s economy will be significant.
China will retaliate; and, dumping $1.33 trillion of US Treasuries on the open market will be an all too easy and accessible option. It would destroy the US dollar and deal the US economy a body blow from which it would take years to recover….”
and more fun stuff here.
Frankly, I would rather live under a despot who left me alone most of the time than under an endlessly meddling democracy.
Breaking up is hard..er…easy…to do
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Joe Biden has something to gloat about at Wednesday night’s New Hampshire presidential debate.
The Deleware Democrat’s amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill calling for a fundamental change of policy in Iraq passed the Senate overwhelmingly Wednesday, 75-23.
The non-binding resolution is based on Biden’s long-talked about plan to divide Iraq into three regions based on its ethnic makeup — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd….”
Comment:
The British empire went in and made a fake state out of three rival groups in the Middle East. Now the US empire goes in and breaks that all up. Iraqis, of course, had nothing to do with it either time. They didn’t like it then, and they won’t like it now.
As an admirer of small states (the smaller the better), I am all for breaking up multiethnic empires, along whatever lines people want. Only, I would rather it happened voluntarily and peacefully and not through civil war — as in the former Yugoslavia — or through implosion - as in the ex- USSR. Peacefully, let them all break up — including India.
So, the question I want to put to Biden is only this. When is he going to start working on breaking up the United States?
Then we’d go back to being what we were supposed to be – a federation of states….
Global Games: James Kunstler on the need for change…
“We have to make other arrangements for living. We have to behave differently in the Western World, but particularly in North America. We’re going to have to do farming differently; we’re going to have to do commerce and trade differently; we’re going to have to do schooling differently; we’re going to have to learn to make some things in our own countries again….”
More by James Kunstler at the Rude Awakening.
Comment:
Exurbanization — the trek to small towns and rural areas, enabled by the Internet - is one development along these lines. I think others include the rise of what Daniel Pink calls the free agent nation — people opting for working for themselves, instead of for others; for self-sufficiency over consumerism; for certain forms of survivalism.
I am not overly pessimistic about recession. I guess, like many people in the middle class, who saw a dramatic decline in living standards in the last few years, I have got used to adjusting to things. And I have found that “doing without” is not only not scary - it’s positively liberating…and creative. Nothing like learning how to forage for fenders at Junk Yard Dog or do cordon bleu cooking on a ramen noodles budget.
One of the arguments we (Bonner and I) make in “Mobs” is that people don’t really need a lot of the stuff they think they do. It’s all relative. A lot of it is simply status. We make quite a thesis of that and it’s something I fervently believe. Take college education. Having waded through a few degrees myself, I can assure you that most of that knowledge - all, I would say — can be got much cheaper and faster in other ways. Hanging out with intelligent people and working with other people have useful aspects to them, for sure, but on the whole, unless you are in some of the sciences , engineering, or medicine, the negatives exceed the positives.
Somethings get ruined - perhaps permanently - by education. Intuition, street smarts, independent thinking. Then you get a nation that will let any expert tell them anything. Just what’s led us into the financial and military mess we are in now.
Get the book. Not just because it will help me eat (that too). But it really does put the picture together - financial and socio-economic. Don’t fall for the guff. We are not that helpless. We don’t need politicians and pundits to run our lives….
A ratio of 2,801:1+ million
Anyone who says that 9-11 justified the war in Iraq is saying, in effect, that the deaths of 2,801 people (let’s round it up to 3000) justifies the killing of over a million (and here we are ignoring the deaths of US and Iraqi military and Afghan civilians and military). Let’s round that down to 1 million. That’s 3000 to 1 million or 3 to 1000 or 1 to about 333.
What that means is that for each American life, we think killing 333 foreign lives is justified.
Try to translate that into private life. Imagine that you come home and find that someone has killed your son or wife. Imagine that you then feel justified in going into a neighborhood (sort of) close to where your suspected murderer lives and blowing up all the homes there and killing several hundred people.
What do you think the reaction of other people, let alone the government, would be? Wouldn’t you be considered insane? Wouldn’t you quickly be arrested, hauled off to a maximum security jail (with bail set as high as possible) and put on a 24-hour watch?
By contrast, in the world of states, the avenger is allowed to justify himself in public places, create alliances with other neighborhood thugs, threaten new neighborhoods, arm himself to the teeth, threaten even his own family members and feel highly virtuous — even pious — while doing so.
Is there anything more telling about the fundamental immorality, and even lunacy, of the state system? No use just blaming the US government. You can be pretty sure that there are dozens of other governments all over this planet, which in the same place, would do the same…. or worse.Which leads us to the inescapable conclusion - the state system is a grossly immoral conspiracy against all decency and humanity.
Another child-sex sting….
“Atchison was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after arriving for a meeting with someone authorities say Atchison thought was the mother of a 5-year-old girl with whom he allegedly arranged to have sex. The woman was actually a Macomb County sheriff’s detective participating in an Internet sex sting operation.
Atchison was charged with three felonies, the most serious of which is crossing state lines with intent to have sex with someone under 12. Conviction carries a minimum 30-year prison sentence and a maximum of life….”
Apparently, there is quite a bit of this stuff going on.
GOP City Council chairman, John Bryan, committed suicide around 2 weeks ago, on being the target of investigation for sexually molesting his 12 and 15 year old adopted daughters. (formerly his foster children). Apparently, he also molested a former babysitter when she was a minor…”
Comment:
No doubt this is a frightening story for parents. But, here at The MindBody Politic, my interest confines itself sternly to the less sensational questions that need asking:
1. What are the dangers of sting operations like this one in terms of entrapment? What are the political rewards that might entice overambitious cops to cross the line and create crimes that would otherwise not have happened?
2. What other ways could child-sex crimes be tackled without using the Internet to lure people?
3. In consideration of the life-long impact on the wife and children of the suspect, was it necessary to reveal his identity, especially before his guilt has been proved in court?
4, What bearing do such operations have on requests for greater control over the Internet by the government?
I am sure these will be seen as very trivial issues next to the nature of the alleged crime. And perhaps there is some validity to that position. But, to my mind, it’s precisely where the perps are unlikely to get sympathy from any quarter that such questions should be raised…
Other interesting points:
1. Partisanship rears its head even on this, at the Democratic Underground, with a jab at “family-values” Republicans…
2. Another undercover child sex sting in Florida unearthed 28 suspects, including three who worked for Disney.. Here’s a Maryland case involving a Homeland Security official. I noted comments from bloggers suggesting that the seeming high incidence of child sex suspects/perps among people in positions of authority in the community might be one reason these cases aren’t prosecuted as they should be.
3. The suspect in this case worked on asset forfeiture in civil and criminal cases in the US Attorney’s office, and had been on a committee to pick the police chief in Gulf Breeze, FLA, according to this report.
And another point:
Over in my native country, India, a well-known guru has been suspected for many years of being a serial pedophile, especially targeting adolescent males under cover of religious intitiation. Many of them are foreigners looking for religious experiences. The rumors have swirled for decades and several journalists and credible witnesses have come forward. In fact, the US State Dept. even has a warning out about him. Yet, I found out recently that the matter has never been investigated formally — and this after at least 25 years of rumors!
This doesn’t mean that I think everything this guru does is fraudulent. He certainly does an enormous amount of charity work. He also seems to have some genuine paranormal powers, along with conjuring and hypnotic abilities, that he uses to good effect on his audience.
And of course, adolescent males above the age of puberty are not five year old children.
But none of that should make him immune from investigation, if the allegations in the reports warrant them…
Still, witness accounts and testimony about a suspects unprovoked actions are different from a sting operation.
Marc Faber: beat inflation with gold (outside the US) and rural real estate
“His [Marc Faber's] thesis is simple. As the Fed reneges on its traditional duty of domestic price stability, Faber reckons the US central bank is becoming ever more a standard bearer for Wall Street and for key indices such as the Dow and the S&P500.
If they ever look like falling, the Fed will simply accelerate the operations of the printing presses. When too much money is chasing too few assets, prices rise. However, in real terms, there is little point in buying US assets, points out Faber, who estimates that in Euro terms US growth has been anaemic, if not negative, since the late 1990s. “Investors have to look for assets which cannot multiply as fast as the pace at which the Fed prints money,” he says.
Consequently, gold is a great bet, along with other precious metals. Faber recommends actually holding physical gold in gold-friendly countries such as Hong Kong, India and Switzerland. He counsels against holding gold in the US for fear that it might be nationalised by the government. He is still bullish on other commodities in the face of global shortages and booming Asian economies. He’s also bullish, as it were, on war. “Rising commodity prices often trigger wars – which in turn cause commodity prices to go ballistic.”
One thing seemed to be clear from Faber’s speech. If things continue along the current trajectory, the argument that Western financial and information technology expertise is a substitute for Asian R&D, a high savings rate and engineering expertise will have been comprehensively discredited….”
My Comment:
Faber is a leading financial guru, but I would say this is advice for people who know what they are doing…
You can lose money trading in and out of gold even in a gold bull market if you don’t.
It’s also worth noting that many people (and I take their side) think gold will go down before it goes up and that over the next year, if (and this is a big if, of course), the Fed does not embark on a reckless rate cutting course, gold will probably go down as a commodity in a general deflation, before eventually rising as big-time inflation sets in. But that’s simply one estimate.
Jim Rogers elsewhere suggests selling dollars and bonds immediately and getting into agricultural commodities (except wheat), Chinese renminbi and even Japanese yen. Again, I don’t know what time- frame is meant in that advice.
The long and short of it is that the government is fleecing middle- class (and lower middle-class) savers to service the improvident rich.
That is the official hall mark of a third-world country (and I should know, shouldn’t I?).
Of course, the average broker, banker, and stock tout will tell you differently. But ask yourself, who do you think knows better? The world’s leading investment experts or salesmen in the financial industry, who probably haven’t paid off their homes yet and may be writhing under as much debt as the poorest sub-prime holder?
MindBody: Parallel Universe proof?
“The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.
In Everett’s “many worlds” universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe.
A motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. Yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.
It is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful by many experts. But the new research from Oxford shows that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly - and suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was on the right track….”
More here.
Now how long have science fiction writers, poets, mystics, yogis, and even ordinary self-aware people been suggesting this? For aeons.
More here at the Telegraph.
Of course, we await further proof and analysis of this story.
If only it would get through to people that if we spent more time importing the implications of science into moribund fossilized social/political theory, our current murderous, crime-spawning, corporate- state system would be long dead — gone the way of every other bad idea… and maybe with it, total war and our insane weapons arsenals…
Econ-job: Bill Anderson on recession and the Golden Calf of Keynsianism
“One of the continuing debates throughout modern economic history (modern meaning the past 300 years or so) has been that of the relationship between production and consumption, the source of what we call Say’s Law. [Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406): "When tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase, because the low taxes bring satisfaction. When cultural enterprises grow, the number of individual imposts and asssessments mounts. In consequence, the tax revenue, which is the sum total of (the individual assessments), increases].
This is what separated Say and his allies from Thomas Malthus and the Classical economists from Marx and his followers. The debate went on into the 20th Century, with the Austrians taking one side, and the Keynesians the other.
The basics of the debate are this: One side (Say and those who followed him) says that consumption and production are directly related, and that consumption flows from production, or “supply creates its own demand.” The source of one’s consumption, they argue, is one’s production. On larger scales, economies that produce much also are going to be societies that engage in the most consumption of goods…..”
More on why the party really is over, from a look at the historical evidence, presented at the Mises site by Bill Anderson.
And at the art houses, according to Rick Ackerman,
the festivities are also slowing down:
“Ms. Sharp may be right about the emetic effect a shakeout would have on all of the second-rate stuff being snapped up these days by collectors with bigger money and pretensions than taste. However, we think she may be grossly underestimating how very bloated prices are for Picassos and Warhols. Indeed, at $50 million to $70 million a pop, the best works have quite a bit of room to fall, especially if the global financial bubble pops. Will the owners of such works feel as passionate about them if they decline in value by 50 percent or more? We may get a hint in the coming weeks, since an unusual number of works are headed to auction. Our guess is that if prices merely fail to rise, let alone drop, the smell of fear will become as pungent in the art world as it already is in the bond houses…..”
And, finally, we know it’s closing time from the writing on the wall…er…house...at Bloomberg.
“Sales of previously owned U.S. homes fell in August to a five-year low, extending a slump that threatens to stall economic growth.
Purchases declined 4.3 percent, less than forecast, to an annual rate of 5.5 million, the National Association of Realtors said in Washington. Sales dropped 13 percent compared with a year earlier and median home prices rose 0.2 percent to $224,500.”
Predictably, the dollar slumped toward 78 on the index.
Econ-job: planning your finances will get harder…
“There are two fundamental problems with long-term financial planning under the regime of irredeemable currency. First, and most obvious, it is impossible to forecast the future purchasing power of money. Irredeemable currencies don’t float, they sink. At what rate, though, is unknowable. Second, and less well understood, is the systemic reliance on intermediaries. Hold financial assets, for instance, and you are beholden to the leveraged broker or dealer with which you have an account. Eliminating risk means eliminating the middleman, but this has become increasingly impractical by design. An individual’s future financial well-being depends to a large extent on dealing with these two problems successfully….”
More by Stephen La Chance.
And here is Jim Rogers on where you need to be — in agricultural commodities (except for wheat)
Propaganda State: Iran no threat to Israel says Ahmadinejad (Updated, 9/25)
Update: While everyone is in an uproar about Admadinejad’s Israel remark, did you know that in 2001, Richard Perle, a prominent Iraq war hawk, talked openly and repeatedly about wiping out terrorist states (by which he meant Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran) — without censure. Can the Iranian PM’s remarks - however you construe them - have been a response?
Update:
Here’s a great piece by a Columbia University student about the Iranian PM’s visit. An excerpt:
“Meanwhile, outside the auditorium, protesters were cordoned off in “free-speech zones,” which looked more like corrals enclosed by police barricades. The protesters – being of all ideological stripes, from Orthodox Jews to anti-war protesters – fought at least as much with each other as against Ahmadinejad. Especially unpopular with the Hillel protesters was a sign held by members of the anti-war coalition that stated that Iran has the highest Jewish population in the Middle East and that Jews have representation in parliament and are allowed to worship freely. The feminists were united in dislike of the sign mentioning that 60% of Iran’s college students are female and – unlike in our beloved ally Saudi Arabia – women are allowed to drive and otherwise move about without a male family member as chaperone. There’s no pleasing some people…”
More by A.C. Bowen.
“Iran will not attack any country,” Ahmadinejad told The Associated Press. Iran has always maintained a defensive policy, not an offensive one, he said, and has “never sought to expand its territory.”From an AP report on Ahmadinejad’s much criticized speech at Columbia University, for which President Bollinger deserves kudos.
Update:
Well - I take back the sentence above, having read now that Bollinger in his introduction tried to skewer Ahmadinejad, before he even began. Presumably to make himself right with donors.
(Buchanan says Ahmadinejad should take Bollinger on the road with him — he was that bad).
Where is everyone’s backbone? Aren’t universities about going against the crowd? Thinking for yourself? Or what are they for?
By the way, the two students (Democrat and and also Republican) on this evening’s Hardball, who represented the student reaction to the speech compared quite favorably to the various pundits we heard from earlier, who were simply scandalized that Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at all (gasp! give me the smelling salts)…followed, of course, by the usual reductio ad hitlerum, that always goes down well with historically-challenged audiences. As Murray Sabin points out in USA Today, even if Ahmadinejad really does believe anti-Semitic propaganda about the Holocaust, he would be no worse than many a pol who believes other - less inflammatory- forms of propaganda.
Another point. This refers to the Iranian PM’s remark about Iran not having homosexuals, which people construed as either a flat-out denial of reality or a hint at the fate awaiting gays in Iran. My understanding of him was quite different. I took the remark to mean that the category of homosexuals (i.e. as a category of people and not simply a set of behaviors) did not exist in Iran.
That would be a misunderstanding very similar to the one over Ahmadinejad’s remark about wiping away Israel, which was taken in the US to mean the physical destruction of the Jewish people, but seems much more likely to have meant the ending of the regime there. In this speech, the Iranian leader said clearly that the Holocaust did occur in Europe, but pointed out also that the Palestinians were not the ones who committed it.
In any case, what this shows is that language is very important and one of the problems we have today seems to be that people are not actually listening to each other but are projecting their own beliefs onto what they hear. I am sure it is happening on Iran’s side too.
What occurs to me is that the American audience took the words in both cases in a very concrete, literal manner, while the Iranian seems to have meant them in a more abstract, conceptual way. Something to do with the two cultures and languages, perhaps?
Another important point that Ahmadinejad made was that the MEK (mujahadeen-i-khalk) insurgents from Iraq are infiltering Iran. Now, the MEK is the leftist cult/terrorist group (according to the State Dept) which Ledeen and Co. have been sponsoring, and which has been provoking retaliatory Iranian support of the Shia in Iraq. Ahmadinejad also pointed out that the US used chemical weapons against the Iranians in the Iraq-Iran war (when we armed both sides), overthrew Iran’s democratically elected PM, Mossadegh, and installed the widely unpopular Shah on the Peacock throne, from where he terrorized the country for years with his repressive CIA-trained torture-happy Savak police.
As Buchanan says - there is an Iranian case against the US, and there is a US case against Iran.
But what we have in common is that neither of our two countries wants war.
And that’s a good enough reason to talk.
Buchanan is often mistaken and sometimes too strident. But when he talks, it’s as if you’re hearing English spoken for the first time, instead of the obtuse PC-varnished pablum that comes out of our forked-tongued politicians.
(Re-reading this, I think I am too harsh. Politicians speak that way because the system compels them to. If they are too much in the center in the primaries, they lose their base; too partisan later on and they lose the breadth of appeal they want. Besides, I do have ungrudging admiration for HRC’s ability to survive so many personal attacks - even though I don’t much agree with her positions on most things.)
To wit., Ms. Clinton manages to describe her government mandate health- care plan as a “sharing of responsibility.”When you hear politicians say, “share,” “care,” “accountable” and “responsible” — you know a tax , penalty, or regulation can’t be far behind.
Meanwhile, here’s an account of Scott Pelley’s questioning of Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes:
“But Pelley did not question him so much as make a series of highly dubious war-fueling statements as fact. And far more revealing than Pelley’s tone were the premises of his “questions” — ones which blindly assumed every accusation of the Bush administration towards Iran to be true — such as these:
PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans. AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?
PELLEY: Well, sir, you’re the head of government of an Islamist state that the United States government says is a major exporter of terrorism around the world. . . .
PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans, as if to be mocking the American people.
AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?
PELLEY: Well, the American nation . . .
PELLEY: Mr. President, you say that the two nations are very close to one another, but it is an established fact now that Iranian bombs and Iranian know-how are killing Americans in Iraq. You have American blood on your hands. Why?
AHMADINEJAD: Well, this is what the American officials are saying. . . .
PELLEY: Mr. President, American men and women are being killed by your weapons in Iraq. You know this.
AHMADINEJAD: No, no, no.
PELLEY: Why are those weapons there?
AHMADINEJAD: Who’s saying that?
PELLEY: The American Army has captured Iranian missiles in Iraq. The critical elements of the explosively formed penetrator bombs that are killing so many people are coming from Iran. There’s no doubt about that anymore. The denials are no longer credible, sir. . . .
AHMADINEJAD: Very good. If I may. Are you an American politician? Am I to look at you as an American politician or a reporter? . . . .
PELLEY: Mr. President, you must have rejoiced more than anyone when Saddam Hussein fell. You owe President Bush. This is one of the best things that’s ever happened to your country.
Scott Pelley wants Ahmadinejad to know that — like all of us — he “owes President Bush.” Almost every word out of Pelley’s mouth was a faithful recitation of the accusations made by the Bush White House. Ahmadinejad obviously does not watch much American news because he seemed genuinely surprised that someone he thought was a reporter was doing nothing other than reciting the script of the government….”
more by Glenn Greenwald, via Crimes and Corruptions of the New World Order.
New studies: high IQ correlated with Ron Paul voting…
Well - not really, but apparently, geeks support Paul.
“As campaign finance records show and the blogosphere has noted, a substantial base of support for Paul comes from professionals in the technology community.
“People in the technology industry tend to be more educated, and more intelligent,” said Jeffrey Schwartz, a Paul supporter who organized the fundraiser through Meetup. Schwartz is a psychiatrist and a long-time libertarian….”
says this Wired piece.
The explanation, it says, is that tech-oriented people tend to want detailed, rational explanations, not emotional sound-bytes. In other words, there is less of the “mob” in the minds of the technology and science crowd…
Marcel Marceau dies…
“In 1944, Marceau’s father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Later, he reflected on his father’s death: “Yes, I cried for him.”
But he also thought of all the others killed: “Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug,” he told reporters in 2000. “That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another.”
Econ-job: Ursa Major or the Big Bear…
“Das is pretty droll for a math whiz, but his message is dead serious. He thinks we’re on the verge of a bear market of epic proportions….”
More by Jon Markman at The Street.
Financial Follies: the Greenspan lobby……
“Finally, let’s put the cherry on the cake. Indeed, there is a most disturbing piece in former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s recent Memoirs (The Age of Turbulence) and in the explanations he gave in interviews granted to promote his book, and it is his confession that while he was acting chairman of the Fed he actively lobbied Vice President Dick Cheney for a U.S. attack on Iraq. If this was the case, it was most inappropriate for a central banker to act this way, especially when he had other things to do than lobbying in favor of an illegal war. Does it mean that Mr. Greenspan was an active member of the pro-Israel Lobby within the U.S. government and joined the Wolfowitz-Feith-Abrams-Perle-Kissinger cabal? It would seem to me that such behavior would call for an investigation.
Indeed, to what extent was the pro-Israel Lobby responsible for the Iraq war and the deficits it generated? Already, polls indicate that forty percent of American voters believe the pro-Israel Lobby has been a key factor in going to war in Iraq and that it is now very active in promoting a new war against Iran. This figure is bound to rise as more and more people confront the facts behind this most disastrous and ill-conceived war. Indeed, how many wars can this lobby be allowed to engineer before being stopped? And, to what extent can the current financial turmoil in U.S. and world markets be traced back to the influence of this most corrosive lobby?”
More by Rodrigue Tremblay at The New American Empire.
Comment:
Tremblay’s argument is simply an extension of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis about the influence of the Israeli lobby, which has come in from criticism both from the right and left - at best, as an overbroad generalization, at worst, as a form of not-so-covert anti-semitism.
The latter charge, in my opinion, is only reflexive ad hominem. But the other is more plausible.
It is not clear to me how Israel actually benefited from the Iraq war. In fact, it seems to have substantially lost - Iran is a good deal more influential and powerful in the neighborhood and civil war and terrorism has made the whole region more dangerous. As for “creative destruction” in the Middle East, it might seem like a good thing for someone in the US, but no Israeli could possibly find it an advantage.
Financiers, bankers, and defense contractors have always profited from war.
That AIPAC and the rest are powerful is not arguable. But it’s perfectly legitimate for any group to organize and promote its interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt do concede themselves. And there is no reason that a state should not have allies or special alliances, based on any number of factors — shared geo-political interests, cultural or historic ties, military alliances… That has always been a feature of the state system. There is a strong tie between the US and the UK, but no one especially complains about a British lobby (maybe they do and I haven’t heard…).
And I don’t recall anyone complaining about Brzezinski - a Pole in origin - influencing US policy in an excessively anti-Russian manner, or about the “Pakistani lobby” influencing policy against India. Or the old China lobby of the interwar years.
So - Greenspan as an active part of an Israeli lobby part doesn’t quite fly, to my mind. But Greenspan as part of a Wall Street-Treasury-Big Media (remember that fawning Time magazine cover “The Committee to Save the World”?) crony system does…..
That makes Greenspan’s comments blaming “oil” for the Iraq war very interesting. Of course, the war was not pushed for by oil interests, contrary to the usual left-socialist critique. The oil interests in the Bush I administration (Baker, for eg.) were notably against destabilizing the region. There was simply nothing to be gained by it, says this oil industry consultant, as well as this energy security researcher, in terms of improved access that the US did not already have. Oil companies probably make less of a profit and at greater risk to themselves than many other companies - especially defense contractors, and certainly, the financial industry.
[Revision: On rereading this, I think I am committing a logical fallacy here. It's perfectly possible that oil industry experts thought that the oil business as a whole would be destabilized, while the Bush team (with a high number of officials with vested interests in oil) felt that their particular oil companies could seize post-war control, and gain profits that would make the war-time disruption worth it to them. In other words, direct oil profits for those companies could have been a motive too. That would not take away from the criticism of the banks, of course. But Greenspan's remarks would then be more in the way of finger- pointing between two sets of elites each with their motivations for war and each with responsibility for it - but one tied to the Republicans and one tied more to the Democrats].
So, the attempt to put the blame on “oil” seems to me to be an attempt by Greenspan to deflect attention from the financialization of the economy during his watch at the Fed, when the banking system was consolidated in an unprecedented manner (through Glass-Steagall pushed through by people like Robert Rubin, part of that famous committee on the Time cover, and through “Financial Modernization” legislation actively sponsored by Senator Gramm and Greenspan, which effectively led to the Enron fiasco). At the same time, the revolving door between the US government and banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs became even more extensive.
The war was less about oil than about which currency pays for oil, and thus, for everything else — it was about the future of the dollar as a reserve currency.
Greenspan effectively scammed dollar-holders all over the world by shucking off US debt onto them (including the bail -out of the big banks in the various debt crises in the 1990s in Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, etc. etc., as well as the costs of war and occupation in the Middle East), while also diluting the value of that debt. Then, with the establishment of a military presence in the Middle East, the US gets to sabre-rattle at any country (read, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and by extension, other countries with close ties/oil agreements with that region) that might be considering moving its reserve currency out of dollars into euros (that was what Saddam was planning to do, by the way, on the eve of the war).
Not so much access to oil, but control over others’ access to and payment for oil.
Why is that an important distinction? Because if big oil needs war to extend its markets that seems to subtantiate the left critique of capitalism, per se. But if big oil itself is not the problem but rather the government-corporate complex that manages the financial system and adjudicates where and how the rewards flow, then the problem is not capitalism as such, but the corporate-state and the financial managers of the global managed (i.e. collectivized) economy.
Our of deference to our left-libertarian allies in the antiwar movement, I will not call that socialism (which, in its anarchist version, right libertarians cannot philosophically object to).
I will call that global collectivism.
Taken together with the unprecedented erosion of civil liberties in the US, the stranglehold of propaganda over big media, and the network of police agencies and states involved in the war on the terror, this financial system could (given a few developments) provide the underpinning for a totalitarian state. (Even as it is now, it certainly doesn’t represent individualism or free markets).
I am quite optimistic that such a totalitarian system will not ultimately arise, simply because of the existence and strengthening of so many other centers of power in the world financial markets. On the other hand, the jockeying for power between them all is likely to create shocks of an unpredictable kind…
Police State Chronicles: He’s making a list, He’s checking it twice…
He’s gonna find out
who’s naughty or nice….“The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,” said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said, “may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent.
Gilmore’s file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book “Drugs and Your Rights.” “My first reaction was I kind of expected it,” Gilmore said. “My second reaction was, that’s illegal.”
And more:
“James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison’s brother, obtained government records that contained another sister’s phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact. “So my sister’s phone number ends up being in a government database,” he said. “This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth.”
And:
“The Automated Targeting System,” Hasbrouck alleged, “is the largest system of government dossiers of individual Americans’ personal activities that the government has ever created.
“He said that travel records are among the most potentially invasive of records because they can suggest links: They show who a traveler sat next to, where they stayed, when they left. “It’s that lifetime log of everywhere you go that can be correlated with other people’s movements that’s most dangerous,” he said. “If you sat next to someone once, that’s a coincidence. If you sat next to them twice, that’s a relationship…….
Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about “politically charged” opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, “they had them printed out on the table in front of me.”
That’s from a Washington Post piece on the scrutiny of travelers.
Also see this:* A 40-year-old public defender surfing the Web on a library computer in Santa Fe, N.M., finds himself surrounded by four local police officers, then handcuffed and detained by Secret Service agents after someone apparently overhears a political debate in which he suggests that “Bush is out of control.” Andrew O’Connor’s experience in February, during which he was questioned about whether he was a threat to the president, led to legislative hearings in New Mexico over the Patriot Act and government secrecy.”
So, there’s your big cuddly Santa Claus state at work, waiting to come down your chimney, any day now, with more goodies. Can’t wait…..
“He sees you when you’re sleeping,
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake!Tom Friedman does Iraq….
An old video of the columnist surfaced on Crooks And Liars
provoking this comment of appreciation:
“On the other side however, he was somewhat refreshingly honest in saying that we started a war in Iraq (as opposed to other MidEast countries) simply “Because we could”. He didn’t try to obscure the reasons with WMD/Democracy/AQI/OverThereNotOverHere/etc. He just kind of confirms the most cynical reasons for starting a war of choice: 1. to “carry a big stick”, 2. to break a bubble of mideastern perception of the US, 3. Becuase we could. I wish the other “pundits” were this honest….”
Zorba: Neither good nor bad….
“We must both have been hungry because we constantly led the conversation round to food. — “What is your favorite dish, grandad?” — “All of them, my son. It’s a great sin to say this is good and that is bad.” — “Why? Can’t we make a choice?” — “No, of course we can’t.” — “Why not?” — “Because there are people who are hungry.” I was silent, ashamed. My heart had never been able to reach that height of nobility and compassion.”
That’s from one of my favorite films, Zorba the Greek.
Here’s Anthony Quinn as Zorba and Alan Bates as his English visitor, on the island of Crete, comforting the ageing courtesan, Mme. Hortense (Leila Kedrova in a great performance). As she recalls to them her triumphs as a dancer in her youth, she’s ridiculous, pathetic, cringe-making and noble all in turn.
And then there’s Irene Pappas, whom someone once said was too ferociously beautiful for Hollywood stardom, as the widow who is stoned by the village, as punishment for her dalliance with the Englishman, his first adventure away from his books, no doubt…
He, of course, can go back to them afterward. She loses her life…..
Financial Follies: The irresponsible Fed…
“The decision by the US Fed to reduce its bank lending rate - ostensibly to counteract a reduction in the producer price index - was probably a seminal development in the history of the world’s economy. If the end result is that this rate reduction gives rise to a continuing fall of the US Dollar index, then inflation within the USA will likely rise strongly, and volumes of transactions will likely fall.
Paradoxically, the cut in interest rates seems likely to have the opposite effect of its stated intent. It seems more likely to give rise to an acceleration of the arrival of recessionary conditions - having bought sufficient time to allow maintenance of the status quo until after the US Presidential Elections….”
More by Brian Bloom.
Suhayl Saadi on fiction, silence, and smashing glass….
An essay on the politics of fiction:
“In the context of the publicity surrounding the forthcoming novel, Londonstani, which like my recent novel, Psychoraag (Black and White Publishing, 2004), appears to play with demotic, my best wishes go out to the author, good on him. I have only been able to read the first chapter, which appeared in Prospect magazine. The following critique is reserved for the transnational publishing industry and mainstream, England-based print media, neither of which entities would touch Psychoraag in terms of publication, reviews, interviews, invitations to literary festivals - so that in the two-and-a-half years since Psychoraag has been published, in these terms there has been almost zilch. In this piece, I’m not going to discuss the overtly political stuff (such as D-Notices, planted journalists, etc.) which applies more to news and political features reportage, investigative journalism and other areas of non-fiction. I am concerned here with fiction, and in particular, what is known as literary fiction.
I should say that I am very lucky to be based in Scotland - a country which has produced many wonderful writers of fiction, including, in recent years, Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, J.K. Rowling, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, Alexander McCall Smith, Iain Banks, Ian Rankin and many more (the list grows longer very year). This corpus of work represents some of the most exciting, commercially successful and ground-breaking writing of the past three decades in the Anglophone world. Coda: Scotland is not a literary backwater.
Psychoraag has just won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in California, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (the oldest literary prize in the UK) and has been nominated by librarians for this year’s (Dublin-based) IMPAC Prize. Psychoraag has received good reviews in Scotland, South Asia, various web-based magazines and in the British Asian media, is being translated by the Paris-based publisher, Editions Métailié into French and is being made into a Royal National Institute for the Blind ‘talking book’ - so it can’t be total rubbish. When my first novel, The Snake (Creation Books) came out in 1997, under the pseudonym, ‘Melanie Desmoulins’, to my knowledge it was the first ever novel written by a black Scottish person to have been published and Psychoraag was definitely the first published novel by an Asian Scot. Psychoraag was compared with the work of both Rushdie and Irvine Welsh [1].
One prominent and respected Scottish academic, himself a novelist, recently wrote that Psychoraag is “the most important and innovative Glasgow novel since [James Kelman’s seminal novel, published in 1984] The Busconductor Hines” [2]. In 2005, along with works by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Adam Smith and Jackie Kay, Psychoraag was listed as one of the ‘100 Best Ever Scottish Books’ as compiled by the Scottish Book Trust and the List magazine (the Scottish equivalent of Time Out). It is a primary text in the study of Scottish Literature at university undergraduate level and my work is also taught in Scottish secondary schools in conjunction with BBC Scottish TV Education. Another prominent contemporary Scottish writer described my work thus: “From his earliest writings, [Saadi] was an important and unique voice. Quite apart from being one of the breakthrough Scots-Asian (if that term means anything) voices, his work was always refined, sure, and deeply erudite. It speaks not just for one community - Scottish, Asian, Glaswegian - but, as all great writing should, for the human condition. What it is to be alive, now, in this complex world. All the various histories, mythologies and circumstances that shape us” [3]. And there’s much more of this….”
More at “Psychoraag: the Gods at the Door,” Spike Magazine.
It’s an interesting and wide-ranging essay and its topic is one any writer, whether first world, third world (or underworld) will take something from.
It’s not a comfortable topic though..
Although I’ve had similar thoughts myself, I’m not sure whether there is any use in pursuing them or even drawing large conclusions from them. Yes, the book world is overwhelmingly biased — in many ways, class, race, language. Think about the enormous advantage an English speaking writer enjoys. Vernacular writers can’t reach that kind of audience. But what should we do about it? Start writing in the vernacular in sympathy? Or just not take the pecking order so seriously? I am for the latter.
Play the game — if you want to — but realize it is a game.Of course, that happens to suit my temperament. I realize that many writers thrive on the literary circuit.
To me, the quiet life seems the one to envy.
Cicero on what the body politic needs…
“The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.”
-CiceroPat Buchanan - shows himself a statesman
Pat Buchanan just showed why he’s head and shoulders above the establishment right in foreign policy. He said, Ahmadinejad should be allowed to place a wreath at the WTC .
There speaks the voice of reason, instead of another pandering politician. Ahmadinejad’s alleged remark about wiping out Israel was, in the first place, misrepresented in the US press. He said something rather different. Now he’s making friendlier moves - such as, showing sympathy to the Holocaust, and now, showing that he considered 9-11 a terrible act.
Buchanan pointed out, rightly, that Reagan would have accepted the rapprochement. He recalled Nixon sitting down with Chairman Mao, who surely was a monster. He pointed out that even President Bush accepted Libya’s overture.
Here is another earlier piece on the same subject by Buchanan.
A V Tech victim’s sister writes in…..
Well - I was just feeling that maybe it’s not worth informing people — better just tell them what they want to hear, however wrong, but then I got this note, which made me feel that maybe the trashing you get for taking on controversial issues is sometimes worth it…
KS
Hi Lila,
I have been reading articles and analysis given by you on VTech. Its very detailed.
Well, about myself, I am Minal Panchal’s elder sister. She was one of 32 in the VTech incident. It gets difficult to cope with such a loss. I am very disappointed with the college admin, with police, with the governer kaine, with the panel report and mainly president steger. I dont know what to do or what can be done about the sheer injustice.
I dont even know whom to talk to or write to. I am writing to you since you are very just and I felt you may understand what I am writing.
Something about Minal, She was 26 yr old. She came here to study architechture. And Prof Libruscue was her fav. prof. She was in his class - 204 when the incident took place. And iroicaly, she was one of the last victims. She was the only person apart from prof killed in that room. All this makes me so angry and sad. Only if the response was even 2 min faster, she wouldve been alive. This is what a value of a minute is for me with respect to this case.
One gets used to the absence and move on with life but the void is still there and shows up at most unlikely time leaves to shaken.
Instinct has asked me to write to you. I dont know the reason.
Thanks for listening at the least,
KSTheocracies and a-theocracies….
“My own first awareness of – and personal contact with – the Anti-Religious Left occurred when I, as a libertarian, spoke at a meeting of Long Island Secular Humanists (LISH) in February of 2000. My talk was entitled “Theocracy in America: The Second Coming of the Christian Right,” and it dealt with the details of the truly abominable Christian Reconstructionists, who openly preach death by stoning for a multitude of Old Testament sins. It was very well received, and afterwards I enjoyed speaking with many of the attendees. They put me on the list to receive their newsletter/journal, which I often found engaging. I liked its definition of secular humanism (”the philosophy of life guided by reason and science, freed from religious and secular dogmas”) and especially its commitment to First Amendment principles.
But then I got the March 2004 issue. The French government had just prohibited public-school students from wearing anything “religious,” so the Question of the Month was: “Do you agree with France’s ban on religious garb or symbols in their Public Schools?” This was the first time I encountered something that I thought was beyond debate for this publication. I considered it as far-out as Amnesty International asking its American members whether they “agree” with torture in Pakistan. Even its language is Orwellian: Talk of banning “religious symbols” in the public schools of the West has always referred to symbols placed by the school – not worn by students, which had never before been an issue. The whole point of not having those symbols is that they, like a teacher-led prayer, might violate the religious convictions of students, who are themselves free to express those convictions. What was going on here?”
More at Lew Rockwell.
Don’t tase me bro, details
Video footage:
1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaiWCS10C5s&mode=related&search=
2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlnIkhYCS4w
3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ndctwAJmU
Courtesy of Rude Pundit at Democratic Underground.
I do not know where the early reporters got 19 and 9 cops from. Looks more like 5-6 here.
Martin Luther on why some battles are more important than others….
“Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Martin Luther
Wanted: Alan-on for people who enable credit binging….
And then wash their hands off the matter when the drunk
needs hospitalization:
Former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, aka “the Maestro” tells all from his debt-bed…..but all too late:
“• Fingers complex credit instruments and the ratings agencies that recommended them as among the main culprits for the mayhem.
• Admits he may have cut interest rates too low.
• Forecasts the dollar will continue to decline because of the size of America’s current account deficit.
• Defends himself for commenting on the economy on numerous occasions since stepping down at the Fed.
Mr Greenspan argues that inflation has been under control for the past decade and a half because of the rise of countries such as China, which have pumped cheap imports into the West. However, he warns that this effect will soon peter out.
“Markets are going to start turning round and inflationary pressures are going to start to build.”
More at the Daily Telegraph.
On a more positive note, vote for those who actually stood for free market principles at the Free Market Hall of Fame.
“Where members of the freedom movement will have the opportunity to vote on individuals contributing most to the success and advancement of free markets and free people around the globe. The categories will include the following:
1. Academic economists
2. Journalists and writers
3. Business leaders
4. Legislators and government officials
5. Think tanksMore at the freedomfest site.
Liberty is not libertinism…
“Just because we think it immoral and socially destructive to use violence against someone doing something peaceful doesn’t mean we have to approve what he does. Drinking three bottles of whiskey a day is legal now. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Is this really that hard to understand?Yes, we oppose aggression – that is the baseline of civil conduct. This is the baseline of civil morality. And aggression is not a very good solution to social problems, however real. It is not that drug abuse, marital cheating and broken families are not real social problems. It is simply that threatening to lock people in cages or to steal more of their hard-earned money is even worse. We consider such immoral coercion against peaceful people, however misguided or short of divine they might be, to be out of the question. Virtue without free will is impossible – another truth that statist conservatives and leftists will obscure even at the cost of believing extreme contradictions.
What kind of contradictions? The belief that killing an innocent person is wrong but the state can kill a million in a war and at most be considered mistaken. The belief that stealing is wrong but taxation is not. The belief that it is more acceptable to lock a frail teenager in a cage where he might be raped and beaten, rather than let him learn, through experience and family guidance, the perils of drug abuse. The belief that the youth must be protected from the sin of drinking until they are 21, unless they are on a military base and working as a hired killer for the state. The belief that without a $3-trillion-dollar organization of pillaging, killing, prevarication and ubiquitous corruption, we would have no moral example to look up to….”
More by Anthony Gregory.
Don’t tase me, bro….
“Videos of the Monday night incident show officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.University spokesman Steve Orlando said Meyer was asked to leave the microphone after his allotted time was up. Meyer can be seen refusing to walk away and getting upset that the microphone was cut off.As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., can be heard saying, “That’s all right, let me answer his question.”Audience members applaud, and Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting.As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student’s “very important question,” Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, “Don’t Tase me, bro,” just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, “What did I do?”
Ok - everyone is shocked at this tasing. But no need to be if you’ve been following the treatment of antiwar protestors around the country in the past few years. In Pittsburgh, a couple of years ago, at one march, an elderly grandmother was tased and dogs were also used….
It’s good for ordinary citizens to see that the cops are now armed like SWAT teams and that a little confrontation can end in serious injury or death if you make the wrong move.
So, no — I’m not shocked. I am a bit shocked, though, by the number of people saying this student was a brat and had it coming.
The guy asked a question. A question. On his own campus. And no, Mr. Hume, doing some blogging and filming some of your pranks does not make you a semi-professional provocateur — whatever that means.
This is intimidation by the state. Pure and simple. The sort of thing, no doubt, the police are doing on a regular basis in Iraq. And, if you object, you probably get labeled a semi-professional provocateur.
That would also be known as “insurgent,” I guess.
So when Blackwater, the private security contractor, is criticized by Iraqis who claim that its guards just beat them up - and even kill them - for no good reason, we might want to think a bit before dismissing it as just anti-Americanism.
There are, no doubt, plenty of people who have a reflexive dislike of anything American. Just as there are people who reflexively dislike the Chinese or Latins, I suppose.
And an influential super-power will attract all sorts of unwarranted criticism.
But criticism of the Iraq war really does not fall into that category. My sense is that as they watch the shapes and sights of a police state emerge in front of their noses, people are going to ask what role the war played in allowing that to happen. And as they get to know more about the anti-statist argument, they are going to ask themselves, maybe, just maybe, some of these antiwar types aren’t moon-bat hippies, but people who are tired of being played and have decided to say something before the political class do more damage to the economy, to national security, and to any good will towards this nation.
PS:
Consder how many (I wrote 19 first as the reporters used that number, but it looks like an error and may have been 8-9 - corrected , it looked like 5-6 to me), cops were able to rush to this guy and tase him, whereas when students were being gunned down at Virginia Tech, the SWAT teams took their time getting there. Check out the Virginia Tech post on this blog (and others) and compare the response there for yourself.
The tasing appears to have been 50,000 volts (this is usual with tasers and is no joke - it can be lethal). University regulations say that a taser can be used only in cases of harm to the officers. Meyer, while behaving rudely, was carrying a book, Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse, which questions the 2004 election. Whatever you think of Greg Palast, that is not a lethal weapon.
The Cojones Crowd….or the reasons why reasons are useless sometimes
My co-author Bill Bonner on mail from his dear readers at the Daily Reckoning, taking him to task for wondering at the War on Terror:
“I value your insights into the markets, the economy and investments tremendously. Since becoming a reader of The Daily Reckoning, my portfolio is way up. However, I have just a few points to add to your liberal slant on all things non-financial. You say that the radical Islamists are impotent because they don’t have governments and standing armies? Did a government or standing army kill 3,000 plus people at the World Trade Center? Did a government or a standing army give the strategy, training, explosives and determination to kill 300 people in the Madrid train bombings? And don’t forget the Indonesian nightclub bombing. And by the way, if the 9/11 attacks were a criminal matter, could your ‘cops’ have gone after the Islamic brass in Afghanistan? And, sir, if you haven’t learned it yet, the threat of retaliation is not a reason not to attack your enemies. Particularly when they have already stated that their goal is your death, and that they are working on the means to accomplish their goals. So send your brandy-swilling friends out for a walk and grow some cojones!”
We never thought of our point of view as ‘liberal.’ But the liberals attack us as a ‘conservative,’ so we’re happy to annoy them both - liberals and ‘conservatives’…republicans and democrats. We are truly impartial; we love them all.
If you tried to apply a kind of ‘pure logic’ - admittedly impossible - to the matter, where would it take you? Our critics maintain that some criminals are special. They are so dangerous, so potent, such a threat to life and limb, that the cops can’t deal with them. They must be pursued by the army. (And any man who says otherwise isn’t a real man!)
Of course, to the average American, the current threat posed by the ‘Islamic terrorists’ is vanishingly small. Every day, more or less, someone is murdered in Baltimore. As far as we know, no one has ever been killed by ‘Islamic terrorists.’ Not a single one in the last 350 years. Logically, murder by a homeland Christian (just guessing) is a much larger threat. But there is no great demand for intervention by the troops from nearby Fort Meade.
“This threat is different,” say the cojones crowd. True, it is. But in order to justify a ‘war’ - such as the war in Iraq - they must also believe in a series of abstractions, theories, metaphors and guesswork:
- That there really is an organized group of ‘Islamic terrorists’
- That the group is growing, becoming more effective
- That it will continue to grow
- That it will pose a real danger sometime in the future
- That these terrorists really have it in for Americans
- That they will get powerful weapons and learn to use them
- That international police organizations cannot stop them
- That military intervention can stop them
- That we (or someone) knows what kind of intervention will be effective
- That the effect of military intervention will not be negative
- That collateral damage and unanticipated consequences will not outweigh the benefits
- That there will not be a backlash, actually aiding the terrorists
- That we can afford the intervention; that it’s worth it
- That we Americans are behind intervention (a consideration for true democrats)
- That God himself is on our side (a consideration for religious people)And so on…and so on…
The odds that any of these things are correct are unknowable. Some are probably more or less true…some are probably more or less untrue. Logic requires that the individual odds be toted up…some added…some multiplied…in order to yield the likelihood that the whole list is correct. We don’t know, but our guess is that an unemotional logician - with cojones or not - would come to the same conclusion as Maggie Thatcher. War always has consequences you can’t foresee. In this one, there were too many “uncertainties,” she said.
No one ever accused Ms. Thatcher of lacking cojones.
“Cojones has nothing to do with it,” says the logical mind. But cojones has everything to do with it, is our guess. The actual odds that military intervention will make the world a better place are probably very small. In any case, they are certainly unknowable. So, the rational person would probably not want to use military force - killing thousands of innocent people…putting millions in danger…spending billions of dollars - except when he had to…
…or when he wanted to.
Critics of the war in Iraq don’t give cojones their due. Critics imagine that the war crowd has made a mistake. They try to argue with them…to meet their foes with reason…and with reasons. What a waste of time. They need to step back and look at the people they’re arguing with; look at all of us.
We have brains. But we have cojones too. Occasionally, we use our brains…and occasionally we howl at the moon…”
Bill Bonner
Comment:
Is howling at the moon all this is about?
I beg to differ. I think a large component of the pro-war crowd has allowed themselves to be worked upon by propaganda, yes. But I don’t think the people who move policy are lacking in logic — though in my opinion the logic is faulty and is showing it at every step of the way.
So what is the logic?
The logic is to control the domestic population more fully so that its work product (savings) is available for financial elites to use as they please, its consumption is manipulated toward products that are most highly profitable to those elites (high priced drugs, weapons, for example) and its leisure is saturated with mind-numbing entertainment or political spectacles that are essentially distractions and lead no where. These days, politics is the opium of the people…..
Whatever will change people’s minds won’t be simply political. It will have to be something more…
Ron Paul Revolution: Here Comes the Sun…..
“Literally, in the dark hours of the morning at the end of the year, it has become tradition for the Appropriations committee to rush the famous omnibus bill to the floor for a vote, mere hours after it is introduced…..
Of course, the most well-known example of this phenomenon might be the Patriot Act. Legislators passed the 300+ page bill less than a day after it was introduced, many out of an urgency to do something.…..This has long been a concern of mine, and for this reason I have reintroduced The Sunlight Rule. (H.RES 63) This proposed rule stipulates that no piece of legislation can be brought before the House of Representatives for a vote unless it has been available to members and staff to read for at least ten days. Any amendments must be available for at least 72 hours before a vote. ….”More at Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul.
Go Ron!
or, lyrically,
“Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it’s all right…..Little darlin’ I feel the ice is slowly meltin’
Little darlin’ it seems like years since it’s been clear
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it’s all right
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
It’s all right, it’s all right…”Or something like it…..
One Ludwig defending another….
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ludwig Von Mises, that is.
A paper by Roderick Long on the use of Wittgenstein to defend the Austrian position that economic laws are a priori rather than empirical.
Robert Pirsig on Zen and the concept of Quality…
“By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory…but he was pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they couldn’t deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, “I used to just hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else.” Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last….”
From Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Ron Paul, General Petraeus, and shock doctrine sloganeering…
My new piece on Ron Paul and David Petraeus (at Lew Rockwell):
“This past week the buzz has all been about the House testimony of General David Petraeus on the “surge” in Iraq and an inflammatory ad in response that dubbed him General “Betray Us.”
The ad, the brainchild of an antiwar group, ripped the general’s assessment that the increase in manpower in Iraq in 2007 (the “surge”) has been effective. It pointed out that the Petraeus report is in stark contrast to independent evaluations of the situation by the GAO as well as evaluations by the Republican party itself.
At issue is the timing of troop withdrawal.
The antiwar movement (with a large part of the population) wants the troops out immediately and insists that the US presence in Iraq is itself inciting violence and terrorism. Bush supporters, many Republicans, some Democrats, and the rest of the population support staying on. They say that immediate withdrawal could create a strategic and humanitarian disaster.
Whatever we think of the administration, we can safely assume that most war supporters really do believe that the occupation of Iraq is central to US national security and the war on terrorism. Questioning their good faith isn’t necessary. Asking why they think this way is.
Take the language war-supporters use. It suggests that people like Ron Paul who want immediate withdrawal are dangerously unrealistic, not merely unpatriotic.
These critics should take another look and see if it isn’t their ideas that run counter to reality. They give us “withdrawal” and “staying on” as mutually exclusive opposites. But any kind of withdrawal can’t possibly happen without some staying on. The troops can’t simply come home tomorrow, presto, because we want them out. So, the issue really is not withdrawal but different lengths of staying on. A few months or many years? At this point you’ll notice that the troops have already stayed on for four years.
Is all this hairsplitting?
No.
By constantly talking in binary terms (withdrawal/no withdrawal), we play into our brain’s hard-wired tendency to think along the lines of group rivalry. We play into the “mob mind” that loves nothing more than slogans.
Obviously if there is a yes/no, either/or divide, we can safely perch on one side and shove our rivals (and the divide immediately creates rivals) to the other side. Then we can devote all our energies to reinforcing this fictitious model with every shred of evidence and lung power at our disposal. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology will tell you what the result will be. We will get more and more of what we focus on – an impasse. And our model of the world will increasingly diverge from the reality underneath.
Take away the “withdraw/no withdrawal” slogan and something happens.
What you get turns out to be not one question but at least two, both of which require us to look at history, not just ideology.
The prescriptive question is –
How long should we stay?
(The post-mortem version is more accurate, how long should we have stayed?)
And the descriptive question is –
How long have we already stayed?
The second question is more interesting….and quite clear.
We’ve been in Iraq not for 4 years, but for 16. (If we count all the meddling with different groups, we’ve been there even longer – for decades). A baby born when George père halted at the gates of Baghdad would be taking her SAT’s by the time George fils first started showing withdrawal symptoms.
To people who think that getting out now will create a national security and humanitarian disaster, the question we really should be posing is this one:
What sort of national security and humanitarian contingency ever needed a 16-year troop presence half way across the globe that took, all told, around 1.5 million civilian and military lives and around 1.5 trillion dollars?
Seen this way, the issue is no longer the timing of the withdrawal. That’s simply the logistical seal on a 16-year bipartisan strategy that’s already about as big a disaster in humanitarian, economic, and national security terms as you could possibly have without entirely wiping out a country.
The real question is the point of such a disastrous strategy in the first place.
Focusing on the past 16 years (rather than the past 4) tells us where we should be looking for explanations: To the end of the Cold War.
The Cold War, of course, was a boon to the mob mentality. There were all those stark slogans of bi-polarity – us/them, good guys/evil empire, capitalist/communist.
At one level there was good sense in them. Nobody can read Solzhenitsyn or Robert Conquest without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the horrors in Soviet Russia. Or in Mao’s China. Or under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
It would be easy to conclude from that that what the US did from fear that such communist regimes would expand was always and everywhere justified.
But it wasn’t – because the slogans swept a great deal under the carpet. Some of which was more precious than the painted furniture on top. The label of communism, for instance, failed to tell apart communists and nationalists, communists and anti-imperialists, communists and anarchists, communists and socialists. The real facts of history and politics got washed out in the ideological spin-cycle.
Worse yet, instead of standing firmly on its own individualist, libertarian, and rational principles to counter the evils of utopianism, America – or rather the US government – began to adopt the collectivist methods of its enemies. From a modest republic content with commercial pursuits it transformed itself into a grasping empire of ideologues. Some would say that this has always been the case and that the roots of empire reach much deeper into American history. They could be right.
However, it was really during the Cold War that the non-interventionist principles of the old republic were most thoroughly dismantled. And the sloganeers trying to rally the masses were the primary victims of the sloganeering:
Conservatives started discarding rather than conserving traditional principles of state-craft to pursue a world order made in their own image.
Free marketers began to believe that the state ought to subsidize their risk-taking.
Capitalists started adopting socialist language and policies.
Liberal democracy – of the particular kind enjoyed by western states in the twentieth century – was now said to be an unconditional good for all states, at all times.
But, as a mad, wise man said, “everything unconditional belongs in pathology.”
So, at the end of several decades wrestling with the unconditional theories of world communism, the US too began to display its own pathology.
This was enough the case that in 1989 when the sloganeers said that the capitalists had defeated the communists, some observers feared that both had lost. They were right. The rivalry between capitalism and communism turned out to have been a race to the bottom. The price of winning the fight against communism was the loss of the principle at stake in the fight.
Liberty holding up the torch of reason to guide the state became liberty torching reason in abject service to the state.
This new liberty was not liberty at all but license. The regulations it effectively dismantled were mainly those that applied to businesses feeding off government contracts that were large enough to rule out the rule-makers. The rest of America was hog-tied with rules. Here, too, employing the slogans of the mob misleads: It turns out you can have too much regulation and too little – simultaneously.
So, while ordinary individuals and businesses are persecuted at every turn by ham-handed bureaucrats, a handful of corporations, especially those connected to the military, banking, finance, and energy, have become a rentier class, deriving their profits not from genuine free enterprise, from value added, innovation, foresight, and risk-taking, but from their special relationship to the government. Entrepreneurs have been displaced by over-paid technocrats, experts, and managers every bit as bureaucratic and wasteful as the state enterprises they claim to be stream-lining.
Even the most sensitive government functions, like intelligence, are handed over to private contractors working hand-in-hand with the state in mercantilist ventures that rely increasingly on war and disaster to achieve their goals. Simultaneously, the life-blood of the economy, its paper money, is subject to continuous manipulation. As more and more of middle-class savings in the bank, in pension funds, and in home equity, are sucked into the financial markets, financiers siphon off the profits for themselves, while government bailouts socialize the costs of their risk-taking.
It is this corrupt “corporatism” that has claimed the mantle of liberty and free enterprise and swindled millions all over the world into believing it is the true face of free enterprise.
Thus, in her new book, “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein, author of the anti-globalization manifesto, “No Logo,” draws a connection between government shock therapy and human rights violations (echoing a fine essay by Peter Linebaugh in Counterpunch in 2004).
For her, as for many on the left, mercantilism and financialization are capitalism.
But why should we argue the point with socialists when so-called capitalists themselves agree? When the right claims that opposition to torture and war are opposition to the American way of life – isn’t it conceding just this? That capitalism and individualism require endless war and torture?
But suppose, just suppose, the case is precisely the opposite. Suppose it is our slogans that are at fault, not capitalism. Suppose – as it really is – that capitalism and free enterprise best go hand in hand with peace and that the welfare-warfare state we’re so comfortable with is properly called collectivist, not capitalist.
Suppose that the war on Iraq is not a defense of the individualist way of life but the final assault on it – then what?
Then we might notice that the sense of duty that General Petraeus shows – the unquestioning loyalty to the organization he works for, the competitive desire to get the job done, is quite a different thing from that displayed, for instance, by the plain-speaking General George C. Marshall, whose name happens to be on an award given to Petraeus.
Today, plain-speaking is out. Part of the duty the military is to undertake public diplomacy so extensive that it is no more than disinformation.
It is disinformation, for instance, to say that a reduction in troop size of around 30,000 by next year (that is, after the elections) is a withdrawal of troops, when all it would do is return troop strength to what it was before the surge in 2007.
That is not a reduction, it is actually an extension of a surge originally expected to produce a result in 6 months – or be declared a failure.
But should we blame this on Petraeus, who, with a PhD from Princeton in Public Administration, is after all as much a technocrat as he is a general? A technocrat who is intimately part of the financialization and mercantilism of US Govt. Inc. In Bosnia, for example, he was Deputy Commander of the U.S. Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force (JITF-CT), specially created after September 11 to add a counter-terrorism capability to the U.S. forces under NATO in Bosnia.
That was at the time when Dyncorp, one of the largest private military contractors in the world, was providing police officers as part of a $15 million annual contract for logistical support.
Two of its employees alleged that several colleagues had colluded in the black-market sex trade of women and children – allegations supported by a court finding that the firing of one whistle-blower was retaliatory and by an out-of-court settlement with another.
Nonetheless, Dyncorp was active again in Iraq, sending out ex-cops and security guards to Iraq to help train a new police force. And again, it was none other than Petraeus who was in charge of that training as well as in setting up Shiite militias (death squads) to go after Sunnis.
Recall, too, that conditions for interrogations involving torture were often set by private contractors unaccountable to government through traditional channels.
And that it was General Petraeus who set up the Shia militias in July 2004 as part of a “surge” that immediately followed the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib but was immediately displaced by it in the media sensation.
Now, with this new surge in Iraq, three years later, what Petraeus is doing is simply switching his enemies. He is now arming and training Sunni militias to fight Shia.
But he’s not switching contractors. In June 2007 Dyncorp was again chosen by the US army to provide logistical support, this time to the tune of $5 billion a year.
This is the backdrop to Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s falling out with Petraeus this past summer. Al-Maliki, a Shia, demanded that Petraeus stop creating Sunni militia. He wanted an end to the surge and the US out of Iraq immediately.
But why would the administration want to get out when arming Sunni militias provokes Iranian support of the Shia? And when that, in turn, provides a convenient justification for more sabre-rattling against Iran? It perfectly fits a decades old neo-conservative plan to destabilize the Middle East.
Obviously, Petraeus, who did his doctoral dissertation on the impact of Vietnam on the conduct of war, has learned the lesson from it that public perception of a war must be thoroughly managed. Too bad that’s not quite the same lesson learned by one of his best advisors, Col. H. R. McMaster, a soldier celebrated in Tom Clancy’s novels.
McMaster’s book on Vietnam, “Dereliction of Duty,” blames not just the arrogance of Johnson and McNamara for the failure in Vietnam but their calculated deception of the American people. The book is now required reading in the army. Yet, oddly, its author was passed over twice for promotion, while Petraeus shot to the top. That should tell us exactly which lesson from Vietnam is in favor with this government. And what sort of patriotism is popular these days.
Just there lies the difference between the Patriot Acts of this administration and the acts of patriots like Ron Paul, who owes nothing to any organization for his views. Who stands entirely apart from the two-faced one-party system currently in power.
Paul’s patriotism comes from an older time, when someone like “George Marshall could tell the truth and be praised for it, not slandered.
“When General Marshall takes the witness stand to testify,” it was said, “we forget whether we are Republicans or Democrats. We know we are in the presence of a man who is telling the truth about the problem he is discussing.”
The truth-telling of General Marshall and Dr. Paul is what this country desperately needs today. Without it, we face a defeat much greater than anything than we have experienced in Iraq so far. We face a loss whose magnitude dwarfs any loss of security or power that could be feared from withdrawing at once.
We face a defeat of the very values that originally formed and guided this country. The values professed especially by the Republican party – individualism, free enterprise, limited government, and liberty. Ultimately, these values will be discredited simply because they will be seen as part of the discredited policies of this un-republican Republican administration.
For the truth is that to the world the occupation of Iraq is not simply a blunder. It is a neo-colonial adventure of a very savage sort. One that recalls, to many, the carving up of the globe in the nineteenth century by the European empires. And in much of the developing world today, these empires are identified, falsely, with free enterprise and individualism. Colonialism and capitalism are attacked as one.
Which is why severing the ties of enterprise to empire is the crucial task at hand for individualists and free marketers everywhere. A task only a man like Ron Paul can undertake, when all the other enemies of imperialist collectivism are also friends of socialist collectivism.
Buy this book. As individualists, though, we know better. We know that it is only free markets (and the laws that protect them) that let the poor raise themselves out of poverty. Corrupt governments and crony capitalists can never do it. And if we cannot care for the poor, sheer self-interest should tell us that our commerce too cannot thrive in a world where people are impoverished by war and plunder.
Before defending the blundering of an inept administration this should have been the first duty of Republicans – defending the slandered honor and interests of free enterprise
Instead, today, Republicans have done what a century of communism failed to do. They have let the occupation of Iraq triumphantly resurrect collectivism from the ashes of Cold War defeat. They have given it a credibility its own performance never could.
Buy this book. Everywhere we look, collectivists celebrates moral victories: the fiery analysis of anti-globalization activists and antiwar activists strips the corporate-state of its last fig-leaf. And rightly so.
What is truly calamitous, however, is that in the popular mind, the free market stands equally stripped as well.
That is why the important question before us now is not who will save Iraq.
For Iraq was lost the day we attacked it without just cause.
The question before us now is who will save individualism and free markets.
Hating your friends….
“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
Ecce Homo, Foreword
Friedrich NietzscheIraq war casualties higher than Rwanda?
Accodring to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Business, UK, more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed since the invasion took place in 2003. An earlier estimate published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths), but was still attacked as too high.
ORB has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005 and with their Iraqi fieldwork agency, polled a representative group of 1,461 adults aged 18
•Results were based face-to-face interviews amongst a nationally representative sample of 1720 adults aged 18+ throughout Iraq.
•The standard margin of error on the sample size was +2.4%
•The methodology uses multi-stage random probability sampling and covers fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq. For security reasons Karbala and Al Anbar were not included. Irbil was excluded as the authorities refused our field team a permit.
•Interviews were conducted August 12th – 19th 2007.More at Opinion Research Business.
Criticism of the figures and criticism of the critics:
Quote:
“ditto with air strikes: 116,000 deaths (mostly unnoticed despite insurgent/militia/anti-occupation incentives to publicize them) and 132,000 injuries from air strikes. Given the nature of aerial bombardment, does this under-reporting or ratio make sense?
first point first: if do not accept the main result of a poll, do NOT bother with subresults!
or the other way round: imagine, if they had the bomb dead wrong by 50%! oops, next to zero effect on totals!
there are airstrikes in Iraq every day. after over 1000 days of war, the number of dead is rather low. and the majority of “air strike dead” might still have happened during the initial invasion.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62511/
A few other strange things from the detailed tables on ORB’s website:
one more other strange things, from observing “iraq death toll critics”: the majority of you has some serious lack in basic statistics!
1. It looks like they oversampled Baghdad relative to its share of the population. This could be important in pushing numbers up.
please, try to find out, what “oversampling” is. hint: it has something to do with SUBSAMPLES, that you are interested in. please assume, that the O.R.B. guys do HAVE some basic statistical understanding.
http://www.opinion.co.uk/who-we-are.aspx
2. Anbar is not included (as far as I can tell from the table listing provinces). Strange.
reading statistics, requires basic simple reading skills. in the article that Tim linked to, they explain that they ignored Anbar, because it was too dangerous!
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
4. They also interviewed a disproportionate share of non-Muslims (only 45% of respondents were “Muslim” overall and 28% percent in Baghdad — the reset where orthodox, catholic, protestant, etc.).
please explain: what line in what table, did you take that information from?
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/TABLES.pdf
5. The study suggests a lot of movement/displacement. External refugee flows probably mean that ORBs baseline population estimate for Iraq is too high, and internal displacement has probably increased the average size of remaining households as people flee to live with relatives. Together, this would alter the total number of estimated households in Iraq downward and increase the average household size — suggesting the ORB estimate is probably skewed high.
wow. you really expect movement, death and displacement to bias numbers upwards?
instead of assuming, that those displaced might be the ones, who suffered the worst casualties? and will not be polled, because they are in a camp or abroad?
For all these reasons, it would be good to know more about the methodology here.
for all this reasons: i seriously doubt, that you are the right person, to challenge their methodology.”
More on the methodology and its critics at Deltoid
via Daily Kos.
Nassim Taleb on the asymmetry of perception…
“We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our success to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad. This causes us to think that we are better than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers.” (p. 152)
From Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Black Swan.”
Financial Follies: smart money is against the surge
“This NBER paper by MIT’s Michael Greenstone reinforces Paul Krugman’s message…. that the “smart money” is betting against Iraq’s survival. According to this analysis of the Iraqi state bond market, since the Surge began there has been “a 40% increase in the market’s expectation that Iraq will default. This finding suggests that to date the Surge is failing to pave the way toward a stable Iraq and may in fact be undermining it.”
More by Michael Greenstone of MIT at the Social Science Research Network
Media-trix & inforwarmongering: 3 day strike against Iran?
Alexis Debat, former media consultant to ABC (especially to Brian Ross’ s reports) is proving worthy of more and more scrutiny, especially after posting a widely circulated report that the US planned a 3-day strike against all Iranian military facilities. Apparently, Debat was also active in the run up to the Iraq war and in concocting interviews-that-never-were with Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and others…
“The renewed scrutiny has been driven by revelations about Mr. Debat after a French news Web site, Rue 89, reported this week that an interview supposedly with Senator Obama was entirely made up. Mr. Debat, who could not be reached last night, sent an e-mail message to ABC yesterday saying the allegations against him “are slanderous.”
He told The Washington Post Wednesday that an intermediary had spoken with Mr. Obama. But representatives for Mr. Obama denied that he spoke with anyone connected to Mr. Debat.
Subsequently, other figures whose interviews appeared under Mr. Debat’s byline in the French magazine Politique Internationale have come forward to say they never spoke to him. These included Mr. Clinton; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman; Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft; and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Since his departure from ABC News in June, Mr. Debat has continued to work as a senior fellow for national security and terrorism at the Nixon Center in Washington. He was quoted as a knowledgeable source in an article in The Times of London this month, saying that American military forces were planning attacks that would demolish “the entire Iranian military.” He has also been quoted by many newspapers and news services.
Guillemette Faure, a reporter for Rue 89, said doubts had been raised about an ABC report, with Mr. Debat as a source, during the buildup to the Iraq war. The report said that Uday Hussein, a son of Saddam Hussein, had ordered two French ballet students at gunpoint to have sex in public…..”
More at the New York Times.
Now, wazzup with that, eh?
Why would a known liar from the Iraq war run-up now be overstating the Pentagon’s plans against Iran?
You can’t guess? Well - here’s a little anecdote from the life of Bertold Brecht, the German writer. Brecht recalled fondly how he would snooker his teachers in much the same way. If he got back a failing grade, he would cover the right answers on his paper with red ink and then go back and complain to his teacher that the marking was all wrong. The embarrassed teacher would naturally undo all the redmarks, even the ones he had originally given, and Brecht would get through the exam.
Over at Kos, some bloggers seem to agree:
“The publicity over Debat’s alleged “massive” Pentagon strike plan has helped render a “less than massive” strike much more viable, in PR terms. ”
Oh, what a tangled web we weave/when first we practice to deceive etc. etc…Marketing books…
A reader at the New York Sun on reviewers, sales, and marketing:
“I think the mistake is thinking in today’s world that reviews really, really matter when it comes to how well a book will sell. It’s all about the marketing and not the Times Book Review cover. Sad to say authors should have a marketing plan of their own and work their website, their contacts, their blog and everything else they need to become well known.
There are going to be fewer and fewer reviews as time goes on but there are more and more opportunities for author’s to promote themselves. We all know it’s kind of a mystery as to why some books become bestsellers and some don’t. but today an author also has to be a marketer….”
So - dear, long-suffering reader of this blog, it is not immodesty but pure survival as a writer that compels me to assert myself in cyberspace.
On the first book I avoided even a bio. On this book there’s been more of a marketing effort, clearly. The result is painfully convincing to me, even though joining the blogosphere entails a loss of privacy I don’t like. Still, so far, I’ve been able to live with it, except for one or two peculiar incidents, which I think probably had politics behind them.
A little marketing also helps prevent misattribution.
Contrary to appearances, none of this has much to do with personal style. The persona of a blogger demands that even recluses leave their caves and saunter out, even if it’s with a mask….Raimondo on Petraeus…
More thoughts on Petraeus:
The media seems more comfortable with “horse-race” questions (i.e. how did this go down, do you think this will fly, etc. etc.) than anything substantial where they don’t have the knowledge or grasp of history to make any kind of real evaluation of the news.
But that said, I don’ t think Move On should be in the business of questioning the patriotism of people, simply because they interpret facts differently. As for Petraeus putting a good spin on things — this is a rather juvenile take on it. The man is in the army - it’s part of his job description to put the best face on an ongoing effort (and I have no means of knowing that he was being disingenuous in doing so).
I think the antiwar message by itself is strong enough that it doesn’t need a personal attack at all (on military people, especially). Of course, trust the MSM to run off-track with it…
Justin Raimondo at antiwar, on the other hand, takes the tack that this ad is a good thing:
“Petraeus is surely cooking the books, as the MoveOn.org folks aver in their great New York Times ad – nice to see they’re (finally!) growing a pair – but this avoids the larger question: what is the administration really up to in Iraq? They’re hanging on, “buying time,” as the pundits ceaselessly report – but what do they hope to accomplish?
If you go through the Petraeus report, the key passages are those that deal with Iran. Petraeus continually points the finger at Tehran as an explanation for the lack of “progress” in Iraq. He claims to have “disrupted Shia militia extremists” – you know, the ones that sit in the Iraqi parliament – and to have captured the leaders of “Iranian-supported Special Groups, along with a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative supporting Iran’s activities in Iraq.” Who is this operative, and what are these “Special Groups”? Apparently, they are too special to be named in testimony before Congress. The “ethno-sectarian competition,” Petraeus avers, is being pushed toward violence, in part because of “malign actions by Syria and, especially, by Iran.”
What actions? No answer is given: not that anyone is asking, at least not in the Congress or among the presidential candidates of either party. Prior accusations that IEDs found in Iraq were manufactured in Iran have proved sketchy, at best, and pure invention, at worst. Yet Petraeus’ words are simply taken as gospel, much as Colin Powell’s peroration of Scooter Libby-produced lies performed in front of the UN was hailed as a home run. Years from now, will we look back on the Petraeus-Crocker dog-and-pony show with the same bitter regret that nobody – or almost nobody – doubted them?
You can bet the ranch on it.
More lies from the “honorable” Gen. Petraeus…”
Comment:
Maybe so, if the point is to call the man on his actions. But is it? The point is to change enough minds among the leadership that we get immediate troop withdrawal. An accusation of treachery won’t help that. It won’t change minds; it will harden them.
But it feels good.Which is what a lot of activism amounts to.
(PS: not a criticism of activists….just a pensive afterthought that applies to me as well….)
Death of Alex: If only we were bird-brains…..
“Alex’s advanced language and recognition skills revolutionized the understanding of the avian brain.”
That’s Alex, the parrot.
“After Pepperberg bought Alex from an animal shop in 1973, the parrot learned enough English to identify 50 different objects, seven colors, and five shapes.
He could count up to six, including zero, was able to express desires, including his frustration with the repetitive research.
He also occasionally instructed two other parrots at the lab to “talk better” if they mumbled, though it wasn’t clear if he was simply mimicking researchers.
Pepperberg said Alex hadn’t reached his full cognitive potential and was demonstrating the ability to take distinct sounds from words he knew and combine them to form new words. Just last month he pronounced the word “seven” for the first time.
The cause of Alex’s death was unknown. The African Grey parrot’s average life span is 50 years, Pepperberg said.
She said Alex was discovered dead in his cage Friday morning. Pepperberg said she waited to release the news until Monday so grieving researchers could get over the shock and talk about it.
Pepperberg said the last time she saw Alex on Thursday, they went through their goodnight routine, in which she told him it was time to go in the cage and said: “You be good, I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Alex responded, “You’ll be in tomorrow.”
We could be spending money and time wasted on senseless wars to prod around in the mysteries in our own heads and the heads of other creatures.
Believe it or not, we might learn things that would do more to preserve peace and security in the world than a nuclear arsenal. More on Alex’s contributions to research on language and cognition here
Washington on the government as fire..
“Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” -George Washington
Financial follies - the plastic empire
“We’ve all had old-timers (usually a grandfather) lecture us on the virtues of cash, and the evils of credit. But, never content to stand on mere common sense, we typical Americans (among whom I number), credit shoved in our faces, felt emboldened to ignore the wise counsel of our elders.
Imagine spending money you don’t have, on things you don’t need, using a piece of paper that’s essentially – valueless. This is a concept so diabolically surreal, so Dada, it must have originated with a roving sixth-century performance artist or some gnarled monk-like sage. A mere “banker” could never have concocted something so outrageous. It’s simply too…insanely artistic.
So what have we reaped for not listening to grandpa? Widespread financial impoverishment. Chattel slavery, American-style. The destruction of our manufacturing base. A service (that is, a slave) economy. A government whose scope and control would shame a Roman emperor. And always…war. Endless war.
And all those Great American middle-class consumers? What about them?
They have placed a bet that they can play chicken with the Federal Reserve – and win. But the Fed is driving a Mack truck. And they’re driving a Fiat.
But…what if neither side “turns chicken?” What if there’s a head-on collision?
Well, there’s no need to wonder how it all turns-out. The credit streams have, in fact, run dry. And there has just been a massive head-on smash-up. The Fed has fled the scene of the accident, wounded.
And the middle-class consumer? He’s lying on the highway in a coma, perhaps dreaming deeply of a fading image on his wide-screen TV.
At this moment in historical time, it looks as if America could use a really good emergency room physician. Someone who has delivered 4,000 babies instead of 4,000 body bags.
Someone who can deliver prosperity instead of bubbles. Freedom instead of slavery.
Most urgently, someone who can deliver us from the evil of fiat currency, which is at the root of perhaps most of our evils, both social and political.
Someone, come to think of it, like Ron Paul.”
More by James Herndon at Lew Rockwell.
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