LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for June, 2009
The Other Side of the Mountain
My new piece, “Going Over the Mountain,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/rajiva/rajiva21.html, is posted at Lew Rockwell. So many of you had written asking where to go that I thought I’d write a piece answering some of your questions - and stoutly refusing to answer some of them.
Which questions DIDN’T I answer? Questions like is Panama better for you than Mexico. How would I know? It all depends on what you want to do and who you are.
Meanwhile, I am going to be AWOL at this blog for a few days. So bear with me if you don’t find your mail answered or posted here. I value everyone of my readers and contributors and hope to help you out much better after I’ve finished making a few arrangements for myself.
When I’ve done that - it should take a few months more - I will be in much better shape to answer more of your questions…
Meanwhile, the blog isn’t broken or discontinued. I’m just unable to write for a few days.
So adios for the moment.
Ambrose Bierce on Corporations
“Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”
– Ambrose Bierce
Tips to Survive Hyperinflation..
Greg at Holy Cause has actually lived through the infamous Zimbabwean Zaire’s hyperinflationary crisis in the 1990s, so his words carry their weight in…er..gold (dollar-holders, I know that stings).
“Most Americans have not lived in hyper-inflationary environments. I have, and assure you that your primary protection is to not hold cash. Treat it like a hot potato, let it rot in somebody else’s hands. This is repeated as Rule #1 below, but it bears saying several times. Never forget it, when you get cash, flee to something else as quickly as possible…..
Just don’t hold an inflating currency - pass it on to the next guy like a hot potato, let it rot in his hands rather than yours.
Rule #2 – Have some type of business, even a “black market” one. Businesses which survived the inflationary hurricane in Zaire included those which were involved in the supply chain of basic consumer goods….money changing was also a profitable business…..
Rule #3 – Own a house and enough land to farm to feed your family. Houses (a primary residence), well bought and paid in full, served as a good hard asset, and provided a roof over one’s head as well. Having a little land to garden or for raising small animals helped keep a family from starving….
Read the rest of this great post at Holy Cause.
Gurdjieff on Machine Man
“For a man of Western culture, it is of course difficult to believe and the accept the idea that an ignorant fakir, a naive monk, or a yogi who has retired from life may be on the way to evolution, while an educated European, armed with “exact knowledge” and all the latest methods of investigation, has no chance whatever and is moving in a circle from there is no escape…..
What do you expect? People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything.
“Progress” and “civilization” in the real meaning of those words, can appear only as the result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as the result of unconscious efforts. And what conscious efforts can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand.”
– G. Gurdjieff, quoted in “In Search of the Miraculous,” P. D. Ouspensky
My Comment
I’ve been fascinated with the influence of Gurdjieff on western artists in the early part of the twentieth century - pianists, painters, and writers (Katherine Mansfield and Aldous Huxley among them), including a large number belonging to the Harlem Renaissance.
Scholars generally dismiss Gurdjieff as a charlatan, or at best, obscurantist. Quotes like the one above don’t help. What can Western science (which wasn’t solely Western, of course, but that’s another story) possibly have to learn from “fakirs, monks, and yogis” ?
More later.
Daytime Reminiscences of Midnight Posts
I wrote a long post at midnight two nights ago describing how someone was posting on my site deceptively. I described the hacking and threats/warnings [from whom I'm not sure, but the evidence points in a certain direction].
Anyone who thinks that a single individual can easily stand up to a corporation in court is dreaming. Unfortunately, some associations trail behind you like a ball and chain, dragging you down, no matter how hard you close your eyes and run away. The one thing that’s verboten in a masquerade is for someone to see through it.
Musing on how prone life is to imitating cheap fiction, I bought myself a small item of self-defense.
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness
- George Simenon
Update
The individual who owned the blogs was upset by my post. Actually, I posted no personal information, only the IP address, country and profession of the pseudonymous mail, not the letter with the real name. And I took the material down quickly on my own. A blog post in the middle of the night is a low-profile way to send a message.
What message? Something like, don’t post repeatedly under different names on a blog that’s just been attacked and where the blogger suspects stalking. The targeted blogger will justifiably assume you’re the culprit. Sorry….that’s the way it is.
England Unrepentant for Role in Torture
Lynndie England is unrepentant for what she did, says this piece:
“We move on to another hideous image, in which the same group of prisoners - one of whom Graner had punched full in the face - were lined up and ordered to masturbate.
How long had this sick charade continued? ‘You are going to find this ridiculous,’ says England, half suppressing a snigger. ‘One guy did 45 minutes! Freddie [Graner's fellow prison guard, Ivan Frederick] just wanted to see if they would do it - and all seven of them lined up doing this.
‘Well, six stopped after a few minutes, but the seventh carried on.’
Hearing this account for the first time, even Roy T. Hardy, her lawyer, who had thought himself beyond shock after representing England for five years, is clearly taken aback…..
‘Sorry? For what I did?’ she interjects, incredulous. ‘All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty’
……it is impossible to empathise with her, for she is such an unsympathetic character……”
More of the same at Drudge on England’s interview with the German news magazine, Stern.
My Comment
I read this report with interest for two reasons.
1. It substantiates, as many other reports have done since then, my early (July 2004) insight that there were pictures of women being abused that were being deliberately held back and that the key to understanding Abu Ghraib was that it was a deliberate policy.
2. It also vindicates the argument of an essay I contributed to “One of the Guys” (Seal, 2006), a piece called “The Military Made Me Do It,” that England got the benefit of double-standards that treated the women torturers as somehow victims themselves.
I was sympathetic to England, as far as she - and others low down in the pecking order - were made scapegoats for the military and government elites who actually developed the policy. I was also sympathetic about the class bias shown toward them (shown in phrases like “trailer trash” that are used in this report as well).
But I thought England could still have behaved better than she did. I compared her to Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower, who did his duty despite all the dangers of being seen as a “snitch” by his colleagues. Both were about the same age. I thought England benefited from a double-standard exonerating the young women torturers.
I suggested in the essay that England’s sex was really as much an advantage as it was a disadvantage in the prison where she was a guard (female-deprived).
Another point of vindication: many journalists treat the story of Abu Ghraib as primarily a story about America. I find this somewhat narcissistic. The story is about the victims. To my mind, putting England and her colleagues at the center of Abu Ghraib adds a second injury to the victims. And, as this report illustrates, the perps are rarely worthy of it, even as psychological case studies. Most evil is done by depressingly ordinary people.
A final point. I recall that some journalists made the culturally obtuse decision to interview the raped women, completely forgetting the consequences to the victims of such media exposure. Sure enough, some of the interviewed women ended up dead.
I have to wonder at journalists with so little imagination and compunction for the subjects of their stories…
‘Subjects’ are also subjects in the other sense - they have their own voices.
All this adds to my belief that the mediacrats can be as big a problem as the kleptocrats.
Progressives Seeing the Light On Obama
Believers waking up to the fact that they drank the kool-aid on Obama…
GOP’s Operative’s Racist Remarks About Michelle Obama
Just as I was blogging about hate [this is government jargon] speech having the ability to become inflammatory and harmful (something some libertarians don’t seem able to understand), along comes a GOP operative to provide the requisite moronic example - he compared a gorilla to Michelle Obama.
Frankly, this isn’t only bigotry, it’s an example of such oral incontinence the man shouldn’t be let outside without Pampers around his mouth.
Animal imagery is an important clue to racist tendencies in a speech. Calling someone a “bitch” is fairly generic, but thinking up specific animal comparisons that have clearly racist histories to them is inflammatory and offensive. How do people not get that?
And by the way, why do these terms always seem to come out of people who don’t particularly look like the flower of the human species themselves?
I feel personally offended by this. Not having Scandinavian features and a bustless, hipless physique doesn’t make you ugly. That’s cultural conditioning. You don’t have to subscribe to the Michelle-is-Jackie-we’re-all-back-in-Camelot-whoopdeedoo being peddled, but what is this ugly reference?
And then I noticed in the blogosphere recently a few references to Jewish people that also use animal imagery - parasites, vipers.
With women, it’’s bitch, dog, and body parts - but that’s almost standard.
We don’t want to recognize the faces of other people. Reducing them to bodies, body parts, animals, animality…is a way of doing that.
Very troubling.
Words are powerful. We can’t use freedom in essentially cowardly and self-destructive ways without causing a reaction. People remember attacks like this for a very long time. They don’t forget them. I recall reacting to some of the language about Jerry Falwell at his death. I loathed many of Falwell’s Christian Zionist positions. But the language used about him was so venomous and degrading, I felt the critics lost their own self-respect and dignity when they wallowed in it. [The piece is "God's Son, Falwell's Mother and the Rest of Us 'Ho's"- at Dissident Voice, 2006].
And then people ask what a middle-class, privileged black women has to be angry about… How about - not being able to escape this sort of thing even when your husband is in the White House?
Criticize the Obamas as savagely as you want for their policies. Leave their children, their bodies, their private lives alone. Same with the Palins.
Flight AND Fight..
My latest piece at Lew Rockwell, answers some questions readers had asked me about leaving the US:
“My last piece, “Time to Run,” provoked a lot of reaction, almost all of it positive, but some negative.
The readers who liked it wanted advice on where to run. That’s a tall order and I’ll come back to them in another piece.
Those who didn’t like it brandished a few arguments that ought to have a stake driven right through them immediately.
Here goes, point by point.
1. Running away doesn’t help
1. Actually, running away is often the best response to a bad situation.
Speaking practically, when a dump truck turns into your drive, mows down your rhododendrons and heads toward you, do you stand your ground yelling Sicilian imprecations at the driver until he rolls over you too? Or do you leap aside nimbly, take a photo, and call a lawyer? You have as much chance getting through to the poisonous shills in DC with constitutional arguments, as you have charming a rabid pit bull with Shakespeare.
Speaking theoretically, your body and brain are hardwired to either put up or shut up, a “fight or flight” response built into the structure of the autonomic nervous system. That is the physiological term for what you think of as your “lizard brain.” Fight or flight is the either/or response that helped your ancestors survive. It’s not the best way to tackle complex problems, but when it gets down to basic survival, it’s a handy guide.
And how do you know when your survival is at stake?
Check your gut response…..”
Read the rest at Lew Rockwell.
[I will be posting reader email on my blog and will respond there, since my email is often compromised]
A Red and Blue Two-Part Lobotomy
“California is broke. Good. They deserve it. It’s not as if bankruptcy were an act of God, like getting hit on the head by a giant meteor. It was deliberate stupidity. Spend more than you make, and you end up on the street. I’m supposed to feel sorry for that? I’ve known roundworms with better sense. As I understand it, the Democrats refuse to cut spending and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes. See? A lobotomy in two-part harmony. Sounds like the whole country.”
Media theorist Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
The concept of the “society of the spectacle” developed by French theorist Guy Debord and his comrades in the Situationist International has had major impact on a variety of contemporary theories of society and culture.[1] For Debord, spectacle “unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena” (Debord 1967: #10). Debord’s conception, first developed in the 1960s, continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.
Building on this concept, I argue that media spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sports events, political happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call news — a phenomena that itself has been subjected to the logic of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of the media sensationalism, political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War. Thus, while Debord presents a rather generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, I engage specific examples of media spectacle and how they are produced, constructed, circulated, and function in the present era.
As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming more technologically dazzling and are playing an ever-escalating role in everyday life. Under the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and consumption, which deeply influence thought and action. In Debord’s words: “When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs (#18). According to Debord, sight, “the most abstract, the most mystified sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society” (bid).
Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and mediated by the spectacles of media culture and the consumer society. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a “permanent opium war” (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life — recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively consuming spectacles, one is estranged from actively producing one’s life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals inertly observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The Situationist project, by contrast, involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice.
The correlative to the spectacle for Debord is thus the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission, conformity, and the cultivation of marketable difference. The concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its wares mainly through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday life. Parallel to the Frankfurt School conception of a “totally administered” or “one-dimensional” society (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1964), Debord states that “The spectacle is the moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social life” (#42). Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical privation is augmented by “enriched privation” of pseudo-needs; alienation is generalized, made comfortable, and alienated consumption becomes “a duty supplementary to alienated production” (#42).
Since Debord’s theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an “entertainment economy,” business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.[2] Via the “entertainmentization” of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).[3]In a competitive business world, the “fun factor” can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers’ attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an “experience,” as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and “links to other cool sites.”
To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace.
Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle always contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s.
Christopher Dawson on Hostility to Religion (Comment added)
“Behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.”
– Christopher Dawson
My Comment:
As I’ve written, I am an agnostic and a skeptic….not so much about God, as about language. Which means, I read Dawson or Voegelin, with as much attention (or inattention) as I read Marx. The latter does not seem any more “scientific” than the former to me. Indeed, the only thing that makes something a religion is the hostility to opposition that adheres to it. [correction: this is an overstatement. It should read "one of the things that make something a religion."] From that point of view, most of those who believe themselves to be actively hostile to “god” and “religion” are actually devout believers - their temperament is exactly like the rabid fundamentalists they denounce.
I, on the other hand, believe myself to be a Christian agnostic and a Christian skeptic.
How can I subscribe to such a contradiction in terms? [For those unfamiliar with theology, there are many leading theologians who are quite skeptical or even unbelieving in "god"].
For me, it is not a question of lacking faith in God. That is quite a simple-minded kind of contrarianism.
My heresy is a little deeper. I lack faith in language. I have no faith in words as a fixed repository of meaning.
As for “god” - the conventions and symbols one grows up with can never really be uprooted and it seems wiser and truer to accept them as equally the outgrowth of the mind as logic or empiricism. If I must confess disbelief in “god,” then I must confess it equally in “man,” “truth,” “justice” or “logic,” “you” or “me.”
What naive empiricists never realize is that what endows facts with their “factuality” is the “mind.” There is no escaping that.
Not do we have to go from naive empiricism to naive idealism, i.e., we don’t have to leap from “just the facts, ma’am” to “Just my opinion.”
Instead, we continually adjust our thoughts and subjective experience to the hard edges of facts so-called, to the limitations of objective experience. We do that through the refinement of our language. We continually reflect the tension of existence in a conditional, fractured, and fluctuating reality through language that expresses the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in our existence as mind-body.
In that spirit, I have no problem with affirming:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium…..
Nietzsche On the Individual and the Tribe
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
More Web Abuse
OK. A new one. Shortly after my blog posts on antisemitism, the gunman, and racist language, I get an email in my inbox saying I’m subscribed to Pak Alert.
I didn’t pay any mind and didn’t click on it, thinking it was spam. Then I googled Pak Alert, which seems to be a news group. Glancing through it, I see it has the Protocols of the Elders of Zion listed….and some antisemitic language that I didn’t bother to read through since it was clear what it was.
I deleted the mail, thinking it was spam.
But then I got to thinking about how I got the mail. So I went and and checked and sure enough, someone had subscribed me to the group. That’s abuse, and I reported it twice to Google.
Wondering if someone wanted to create an embarrassing record to “prove” I was anti-Semitic, since I’d subscribed to the group.
Now, how did that happen? Did they get my password or can you just add an email without permission? No idea. I don’t frequent chat groups.
Tomorrow, I’m going through and making note of some of the things that have happened since I started writing for the web. It runs the gamut from name-calling to hacking, spamming, stalking, provocation, libel, threats, delinking articles, plagiarism, copyright infringement, personal harassment, forgery, invasion of privacy, sending out private email to public groups…….
Not complaining, merely observing the follies of my fellow men.
And wondering if they’re worth it.
When In Doubt, Blame Reagan
“We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income… It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared…, culminating in the near-zero savings rate … on the eve of the great crisis. …”
– Paul Krugman, Reagan Did It, blaming the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, which Reagan signed in 1982
“Close but no cigar,” says Bill Fleckenstein.
“The actual offending cancerous legislation that kicked off the move toward extra reckless lending did involve then-Rep. Fernand St. Germain, a Rhode Island Democrat. But the problem legislation was the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of March 31, 1980…….”Reagan’s real mistake was appointing Greenspan.
“Greenspan did it, aided and abetted by almost everyone in the regulatory apparatus who abdicated their responsibility.”
– Bill Fleckenstein, on Paul Krugman’s latest one-note samba (Paul’s finally over his crush on Dubya, it seems..)
The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality
“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”Palins Fight Back Against Letterman’s Lewd Jokes About Daughter
From New York Daily News:
“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands – that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’ ”
Todd Palin added: “Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”
My Comment
Not being much of a fan of Governor Palin’s, I think I can say that my outrage over the way she’s been treated by the media is probably pretty objective. So I’m glad to see her rip David Letterman on his tasteless (to put it mildly) comments. Missing from the column is another Letterman joke - about Sarah Palin’s look - that of a “slutty flight attendant.”
Perhaps next time, some one should “joke” about Letterman’s own looks. How about a “pedophilic bank teller”? Sounds shocking when it’s done to a man, doesn’t it?
Update:
This is quote from Bernhardt’s “funny” routine about Palin from October, which I blogged here (October 2). I’m posting it again to show how the anti-Palin “jokes” go far beyond what would have been said about any other candidate without provoking censure or outrage. That’s only the beginning of the routine. I took out the last part which went something like “one of my big black brothers here in New York will rape you” - that’s not a mistake - she really said that. I took it off because in the context of the elections, you never know whom it might set off. It manages to be offensive to Christians, black men, females, and Jews (yes, if I were Jewish, I’d be really unhappy to have Sarah speak for the Old Testament, a fine book that doesn’t need her in-ter-pre-tay- shun).
Now the election is over, I think it’s not irresponsible to post it in paraphrase in the context of proving that there’s a history of this sort of invective against Sarah Palin. Recall that the New Yorker cover of Obama as a terrorist (as stupid an editorial choice as I’ve ever seen) and the cartoon about killing the chimp both were widely considered incitatory - and rightly so.
But when it comes to a white, Protestant woman with fundamentalist beliefs, from a small town, who is pro-life, she doesn’t deserve any consideration whatever…
If this isn’t sexual, racial, and class-based discrimination, what is?
The woman is running for high office, and she’s a slut because she happens to be attractive? That doesn’t affect her job performance? That doesn’t affect how others see her and her work?
Phooey. Something really stinks in the way people think about these things here in the US.
Sorry. No intention to go all nationalist. But actually, Indian female politicians are treated more equitably.* No wonder the US hasn’t had a female president.
Now you got Uncle Women, like Sarah Palin, who jumps on the sh*t and points her fingers at other women. Turncoat bitch! Don’t you f*ckin’ reference Old Testament, b*tch! You stay with your new Goyish crappy shiksa funky bullsh*t! Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you b*tch! Because we have left it open for interpre-ta-tion! It is no longer taken literally! You whore in your f*ckin’ cheap New Vision cheap-ass plastic glasses and your [sneering voice] hair up. A Tina Fey-Megan Mullally broke down bullshit moment.” (rest of the comment censored)
*On second thoughts, I remember some of the language used about Sonia Gandhi, which was also racial. I wrote a piece about it on the net, “The New Post-Colonial Racism.” But it wasn’t misogynistic…
WHO Declares Swine Flu Pandemic
In the news:
“GENEVA – The World Health Organization told its member nations it was declaring a swine flu pandemic Thursday — the first global flu epidemic in 41 years — as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.
In a statement sent to health officials, WHO said it decided to raise the pandemic warning level from phase 5 to 6 — its highest alert — after holding an emergency meeting with its flu experts.”
More in this AP report.
88-year old Gunman In Shoot-Out Inside Holocaust Memorial Museum
“An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.
The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization…….
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said von Brunn’s Web site has long been listed as a hate site.”
My Comment
It’s interesting how shootings in recent years have had some connection to the Holocaust (one heroic victim at Virginia Tech was a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust survivor fell victim to the Mumbai attacks).
Von Brunn, according to reports, thinks “Jews control the Federal Reserve” and the banking system and are basically evil. He has a long-standing relationship with Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist and anti-Semite.
His is also one of many people who question President Obama’s birth certificate, a group that’s apparently been christened the “birther” movement by many of our liberal-left pundits. At TPM Cafe, Joshua Marshall hastens to let us know that your ordinary, garden “birther” (I first thought they meant some kind of natural child-bearing advocate) is only a harmless wing-nut, but alas, not Von Braun.
Note:
It seems very clear from his previous arrests, writings and statements, that Von Brunn is NOT harmless. While I certainly think the federal government isn’t above milking every bit of lawless behavior to impose further controls, the fact is bigotry does increase during times of stress. And the most recent “hate crimes” legislation, does, in my estimate, try to deal with a broad range of victims - including anti-Christian bigotry in its language.
That’s a decided improvement.
I’ve been looking over some sites and postings that I’d consider antisemitic (this applies to other forms of racism or bigotry) and here are some thoughts:
1. Noting the ethnicity/religion of someone (especially if it’s germane to the story) is not racism/antisemitism/bigotry
2. Drawing an ineluctable connection between the ethnicity/religion and the behavior is racism/antisemitism/bigotry (the operative word is ineluctable).
Of course, in ordinary life, people do generalize about other races, even if it’s only in their own minds. In a stressful situation that might be understandable. (You get hit by a car and the driver, from a different race, ignores your plight and speeds off…you react by saying, “all so-and-so always act like this…”).
This sort of reaction is a momentary generalization or simplification of the kind that the brain is actually biologically prone to make (creating a binary of us versus them). The feeling crosses over and becomes racist when the reactive element in the response is deliberately cultivated and sustained through willfully ignoring all other factors, explanations, and theories.
Here’s what I mean.
It’s one thing to observe that there’s a high proportion of Jewish people working in finance and banking. There is. To deny that is to be out of touch with reality. The danger in trying to pretend this reality isn’t so deny reality is an obvious one. Uninformed people will then assume that every other part of what you’re saying is equally untrue and out of touch with reality. And they will assume every other thing they believe from appearances alone is true, even when in those cases, appearances are deceiving.
Now, if you are not a bigot, after that preliminary observation, several other things will (or should) occur to you. The first is that Jewish people are well-represented in practically all intellectually oriented professions. This itself should dilute the strength of any argument tending in an anti-Semitic direction.
Perhaps the dominance of Jewish people in banking could then be attributed to other factors - historical and cultural, rather than to “Jewishness.”
Now, I realize I am on tricky grounds here, because sensibilities have become so over wrought that any misstatement can be construed as intentionally offensive. So, let me first say, if I do make a misstep, it’s not intentional and will be glad to restate my position, if someone points out why it might be offensive.
More later..
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Wright has gotten into hot water for saying “the Jews” have kept him from Obama.
And, the thought police (in this case Newsweek) is after Oprah as well. Turns out the Queen of Talk is sympathetic to the anti-vaccine folks - the ones who think that vaccines are often about big pharma’s profts more than about your health. The article also criticized Oprah on other grounds, but methinks that’s the crux of the matter. The feds might have an interest in nixing any possible joining of forces between left-oriented alternative medicine advocates and right-oriented ones, in advance of selling swine flu vaccine to the public.
A swine flu pandemic also makes a convenient pretext to control the movement of people between countries.
Of course, it could all be coincidental, and I could just be another “wingnut” on the loose….
But so far, the wing-nuts are winning the credibility contest.
2 US Reporters Sentenced to Prison by N. Korea
In the news recently:
“Reporting from Daegu, South Korea and Beijing — Two American television journalists today were convicted of a “grave crime” against North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor, a move that increased mounting tensions between the U.S. and the reclusive Asian state.
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were sentenced by the top Central Court in Pyongyang in a two-day trial that started Friday as U.S. officials demanded the release of the two women.”
More here at The Los Angeles Times.
Bill Blum on the Obama Cult
Bill Blum at the Anti-Empire Report:“The praise heaped on President Obama for his speech to the Muslim world by writers on the left, both here and abroad, is disturbing. I’m referring to people who I think should know better, who’ve taken Politics 101 and can easily see the many hypocrisies in Obama’s talk, as well as the distortions, omissions, and contradictions, the true but irrelevant observations, the lies, the optimistic words without any matching action, the insensitivities to victims. Yet, these commentators are impressed, in many cases very impressed. In the world at large, this frame of mind borders on a cult.
In such cases one must look beyond the intellect and examine the emotional appeal. We all know the world is in big trouble — Three Great Problems: universal, incessant violence; financial crisis provoking economic suffering; environmental degradation. In all three areas the United States bears more culpability than any other single country. Who better to satisfy humankind’s craving for relief than a new American president who, it appears, understands the problems; admits, to one degree or another, his country’s responsibility for them; and “eloquently” expresses his desire and determination to change US policies and embolden the rest of the world to follow his inspiring example. Is it any wonder that it’s 1964, the Beatles have just arrived in New York, and everyone is a teenage girl?
I could go through the talk Obama gave in Cairo and point out line by line the hypocrisies, the mere platitudes, the plain nonsense, and the rest. (“I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.” — No mention of it being outsourced, probably to the very country he was speaking in, amongst others. … “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.” — But this is precisely what the United States is trying to do concerning Iran and North Korea.) But since others have been pointing out these lies very well I’d like to try something else in dealing with the problem — the problem of well-educated people, as well as the not so well-educated, being so moved by a career politician saying “all the right things” to give food for hope to billions starving for it, and swallowing it all as if they had been born yesterday. I’d like to take them back to another charismatic figure, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German people two years and four months after becoming Chancellor, addressing a Germany still reeling with humiliation from its being The Defeated Nation in the World War, with huge losses of its young men, still being punished by the world for its militarism, suffering mass unemployment and other effects of the great depression. Here are excerpts from the speech of May 21, 1935. Imagine how it fed the hungry German people.
———————HITLER:“….. Germany, too, has a democratic Constitution. Our love of peace perhaps is greater than in the case of others, for we have suffered most from war. None of us wants to threaten anybody, but we all are determined to obtain the security and equality of our people……….The German Reich, especially the present German Government, has no other wish except to live on terms of peace and friendship with all the neighboring States. Germany has nothing to gain from a European war. What we want is liberty and independence. Because of these intentions of ours we are ready to negotiate non-aggression pacts with our neighbor States.Germany has neither the wish nor the intention to mix in internal Austrian affairs, or to annex or to unite with Austria.The German Government is ready in principle to conclude non-aggression pacts with its individual neighbor States and to supplement those provisions which aim at isolating belligerents and localizing war areas…….Germany is ready to participate actively in any efforts for drastic limitation of unrestricted arming. She sees the only possible way in a return to the principles of the old Geneva Red Cross convention. She believes, to begin with, only in the possibility of the gradual abolition and outlawing of fighting methods which are contrary to this convention, such as dum-dum bullets and other missiles which are a deadly menace to civilian women and children.To abolish fighting places, but to leave the question of bombardment open, seems to us wrong and ineffective. But we believe it is possible to ban certain arms as contrary to international law and to outlaw those who use them. But this, too, can only be done gradually. Therefore, gas and incendiary and explosive bombs outside of the battle area can be banned and the ban extended later to all bombing. As long as bombing is free, a limitation of bombing planes is a doubtful proposition. But as soon as bombing is branded as barbarism, the building of bombing planes will automatically cease.
Just as the Red Cross stopped the killing of wounded and prisoners, it should be possible to stop the bombing of civilians……The German Government is of the opinion that all attempts effectively to lessen tension between individual States through international agreements or agreements between several States are doomed to failure unless suitable measures are taken to prevent poisoning of public opinion on the part of irresponsible individuals in speech, writing, in the film and the theatre.…… [1]– End of speech excerpts –
How many people in the world, including numerous highly educated Germans, reading or hearing that speech in 1935, doubted that Adolf Hitler was a sincere man of peace and an inspiring, visionary leader?
NOTES
[1] The entire speech can be found at: http://members.tripod.com/~Comicism/350521.htmlReiki Therapy at Maryland Trauma Center
Alternative medicine gets some recognition at the University of Maryland:
“At one of the nation’s top trauma hospitals, a nurse circles a patient’s bed, humming and waving her arms as if shooing evil spirits. Another woman rubs a quartz bowl with a wand, making tunes that mix with the beeping monitors and hissing respirator keeping the man alive.
They are doing Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields. The anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, calls it “mystical mumbo jumbo.” Still, he’s a fan.
“It’s self-hypnosis” that can help patients relax, he said. “If you tell yourself you have less pain, you actually do have less pain.”
More in this AP report.
Time to Run
My latest piece, “Time to Run”, at Lew Rockwell:
“Is it time to run?
That’s what I’ve been asking myself for three years now.
Before that, I thought it was simply a matter of finding a better place to live. A place that was quieter and cheaper. Where flippers and developers hadn’t taken over the neighborhood. Somewhere safe I could park my car on the street and not worry about it.
But by the time I found it, I also found that the thieves were inside the house, not on the street. There’s really no hiding from them. And no hiding from what they can do.
Our mene, mene, tekel upharsin is on the wall.It’s time to run, not hide.
I mean that. We’re in the throes of an economic collapse of a kind last seen in the 1930s. The government is intent on grabbing control of whatever it can. American firms are dropping like flies. Unemployment is soaring. Debt is soaring. The money supply is soaring. Our foreign policy is a wreck – we have more enemies than we can count. We have a drug war on the borders, we have gang war in the ghettos, we have culture wars in the academy and media.We have criminals in government.
The future isn’t any brighter. Subprime is only the first leg down. We still have a second wave of housing trouble in store, centering around commercial real estate and option ARM loans.Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research, wrote a piece last year predicting that by 2012 there would be food riots, tax rebellion, and revolution across the country. Celente has a good track record in the forecasting business.
Experts predict a 100% rise in prices across the board. In the best-case scenario, it will happen over ten years. In the worst case, it might happen within months….”Read the rest at Lew Rockwell
The Streets of Bakersfield
The Streets of Bakersfield
– Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakum.
Hat tip to Jeff St. Claire at Counterpunch for the link.Paul Craig Roberts on the End of Empire (comment added)
Washington Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
by Paul Craig RobertsHat-tip to David Redick for the link
“In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
~ Justice Louis Brandeis
Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United States government responsible? Yes.The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted from; (Item numbers inserted by ARTS)
1. the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposed the Shah;
2. from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia;
3. from the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq,
4. bombing weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games;
5. from the US violating international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims
6. from the US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban;
7. from the US violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians;
8. from the US government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages;
9. from the assault of American culture on Muslim values;
10. from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its puppet;
11. from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example, and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington confronts but revolution……
The change over which Obama will preside will have no American victories. The change will come from
1. America as a failed state,
2. from the dollar dethroned as reserve currency,
3. from America repudiated by its allies and paid puppets,
4. from massive unemployment for which there is no solution,
5. from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
6. The day might arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home as well as abroad.December 5, 2008
My Comment
Roberts’s piece is provocatively stated, so I thought should add this comment. I think he’s fairly correct to state that the Pakistani and Indian governments are not to blame, fundamentally, for what’s happening. However, to the degree that these governments - like others - tend to take the line of least resistance and go along with Washington’s agenda, or buy into it, or stand on the sidelines while that agenda is enacted elsewhere, they encourage the misdeeds of the prime culprit. And, to the degree that they are themselves corrupt or lawless, they don’t help the situation…
(Not following either of the two countries’ internal politics, I can’t do more than make a general statement).
How not to go along, you might ask?
Well, there’s Angela Merkel’s recent condemnation of global central bank interventionism. Why can’t we hear more of that from the global community?
Or has the cat got its tongue on every issue but the issue of Israel-Palestine?
George Galloway on Conrad Black
George Galloway on convicted press baron, Lord Conrad Black, the man behind the campaign impugning Galloway’s own integrity:
I admit that I love the schadenfreude in Galloway’s voice. Not a very Christian sentiment, admittedly…Lord, give me forgiveness…only not now, etc., etc….
Still, my petty mishaps with the media have given me a special dislike for the punditry-at-large, in spite of honorable exceptions. And slagging off the press barons behind the punditry is even more delicious.
[Another press baron, Robert Maxwell, briefly figures in this piece and the part about “bobbing” refers to Maxwell’s suicide by drowning shortly after the luck ran out on his Ponzi scheme. No surprise that the Goldman boyz were in that mess too…
You see how it goes. Here a Ponzi, there a Ponzi, pretty soon we’re talking about world economic collapse, mass unemployment, starvation, riots, war…..Financial crookery isn’t some victimless offense, as some suggest. It’s as evil as mugging old ladies and grabbing their wallets or any of the other interesting things people do in their spare time to make a buck.
Here’s a piece on Black by Paul Krugman, which notes that both Bill Buckley and George Will (two staunch advocates of neoconservatism) were on Black’s payroll and wrote columns praising him without disclosing that relationship.
Note: The publication of Black’s upcoming memoir is being held up until the Supreme Court review of his 2007 conviction is completed.
What’s the Point of Dollar Devaluation?
“If all a country needed to do to achieve manufacturing supremacy and economic dominance was devalue their currency then Georgia and Bosnia would be considered paragons of economic prosperity.”
– Michael Pento, via 321 gold.
Aha. The folly of naivete. Mr. Pento’s mistake is to think that manufacturing supremacy is what our oligarchs have in mind for the US. He must be kidding.
The goal is to destroy US economic independence (let alone dominance) and subjugate it to an international cabal centering around….guess who…the oligarchs.
The Muddled Market
The market is talking out of all sides of its many mouths:
- USD/JPY is rallying and most currencies strengthened against the dollar, except the pound, suggesting a return to the risk trade.
- But……the pound sank..suggesting risk aversion
- But…the stock markets are up, suggesting an increase in risk appetite
- But……. the bond market is teetering as long bond yields are soaring, an indication that bond traders are skeptical about the future outlook
- But…..gold and silver prices are hitting resistance and falling back, suggesting either technical exhaustion or some return of risk appetite
- But….gold and silver prices are still high, especially for the season, which suggests widespread uncertainty about the economy
- But….jobless claims are down, which is good news for the economy
What does your earnest blogging-trader do on a day like this? She sits on the sidelines and spends the day printing charts of the indices. She also reviews her most recent trading sins and repents. Here’s her mea culpa.
I repent that I entered a trade with panic rather than reason.
I repent that I entered it on a Friday morning before a long weekend (last week) when the markets were thin and volatility greater than normal. I also didn’t calculate the spread and bought higher than I should have.
I repent that I forgot about position size and just dumped whatever I could into it
I repent that when the trade moved in my favor, I didn’t sell the whole position but left half in
I repent that I didn’t do the fundamental analysis but did a multicultural trade - picking 12 currencies that sounded good to me.
I came out alright, but it was pure fluke.
Your blogging-trader did not lose money. She made a bit. Enough to pay some pressing bills. She should be thankful, but being a trader, she knows that making money on a bad trade, is not the way to go.
Update: Non-farm payrolls came in at negative 345k after an expected negative 525k - signaling that the recession could have bottomed. This should feed the risk trade, which means my multi-currency trade (Koruna, Nordic currencies, and Singapore dollar) should end up alright (I’m a bit in the red now). The time frame is one more week or two)
Is Madoff’s Ethnicity Relevant?
Dr. Phyllis Chesler comments on the Madoff fraud,at Pajamas Media (originally published at Jewcy).
“Yes, of course, Madoff’s betrayal is unforgivable. He has gutted an entire generation of Jewish philanthropic wealth, destroyed trust within the Jewish philanthropic world but, far more important, impoverished widows, orphans, and the elderly and, in so doing, endangered and shamed the Jewish people at a time when we have many real, not merely neurotically imagined enemies.……..
In the Middle East, graft and nepotism make the wheels turn. Everyone is on the take. Beggars aren’t beggars, entire civil services are staffed by one or two clans. I could tell you a thing or two about corruption in southern Asia today, let’s say in Afghanistan, that would make Heller’s Catch-22 seem like child’s play. Everyone, from the President on down is on the take and opium is a most abundant and attractive cash crop. The Afghan drug lords are addicting, infecting, and murdering entire global populations with their poppies as are those who buy and sell the heroin. No one holds the Afghans accountable. But woe to the Jewish nation that has harbored, abetted, profited from, or has even been fleeced by Madoff, the greedmaster.”
My Comment
This is an interesting commentary from just after the Madoff story broke and it makes some good points.But I think it’s on shaky grounds in one or two other places..
I’m posting it today because I recently posted two pieces that some might see as critical of the Jewish people. Mind you, I don’t. I see criticism of Madoff or of US Israeli policy as simply criticism of a conman and of international criminality.
On the other hand, I also don’t think religion or ethnicity is irrelevant to that criticism, any more than religion or ethnicity was irrelevant to criticism of George Bush (hmmm…did I hear any voices raised to protest the attacks on fundamentalist Christianity, whites, Anglos, Wasps? No, I think not).
And is there any let up whatever in the criticism of Islam (Islamofascists), Muslim extremism, jihadis, violent Middle Easterners, etc. etc? None whatever. Doesn’t the color black get dragged into discussion of crime in the ghetto? Didn’t the phrase “Hindu extremism” pop up in discussions about Godhra?
It seems pretty natural to me that people would point out the religion or ethnicity of conmen, especially when the con men are relying on both to play their con game.
Torture Pictures You Can See and Torture Pictures You Can’t…
In the news last month, was a torture tape that implicates a UAE royal sheikh (who isn’t in the government) in acts of sadism. In it a uniformed policeman watches as the victim (who shortchanged the Sheikh in a grain deal) is whipped, beaten, electrocuted, and run over by an SUV). From an ABC report on the tape:
“The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly…..
He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame…….
The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail. At one point, he puts the nail next to the man’s buttocks and bangs it through the flesh.
“Where’s the salt,” asks the Sheikh as he pours a large container of salt on to the man’s bleeding wounds. The victim pleads for mercy, to no avail.
The final scene on the tape shows the Sheikh positioning his victim on the desert sand and then driving over him repeatedly. A sound of breaking bones can be heard on the tape.”
This is all pretty gruesome and horrific. The Sheikh is clearly a monster. But that torture exists in Arab countries is not new. Can there be more to explain the media highlighting of this tape? Remember, it took CBS several years before it got around to the Iraq torture story (it was first reported in the US in 2001. The CBS expose of Abu Ghraib was in 2004).
Could it have anything to do with a recent piece of legislation?
Barack Obama, is throwing his weight behind The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009, passed on June 1, 2009. What this does is make the Secretary of Defense certify whether any images of prisoner treatment between September 11, 2009 and January 22, 2009 would endanger military personnel or US citizens, and at his discretion and without any possible review, prevent their disclosure. The certification lasts for three years and can be renewed indefinitely.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the subject:
“For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied. For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers. And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law — again — this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.”
Greenwald acts surprised, which is a bit funny. What did he think? That Obama was going to change things?
It makes you wonder if the Abu Dhabi tape was given airtime simply to provide enough impetus (as in, See, they do it too - and so much worse ) to pass this horrible bill.
Franz Werfel on the Way of No Roads
“Which road, which road did you take
That brought you here at last?No road, no road did I take.
I leaped, I leaped from dream to dream.”— Franz Werfel
Madoff Feeder Funds Sued for Complicity in Fraud
After having said I won’t touch the Madoff story until my site gets a bit more protection, I
couldn’t resist this latest confirmation of something I said way back in December - that the feeder funds probably knew perfectly well what was going on and that “philanthropy” in many instances was just a cover for criminal activity or for misuse of funds. Note the similarity to the scandals at Fannie and Acorn, where the mandate to help poorer people get housing loans also provided moral cover for crime.One critic correctly points out that Madoff targeted charities, precisely because their pay out every year was only 5% of their capital. This was ideal for a Ponzi scheme, since it allowed Madoff to give out very little of what he took in each year.
“the American Jewish Congress which “defends Jewish interests at home and abroad through public policy advocacy using diplomacy, legislation and the courts.” It reported about 24 million dollars in assets, but only spends about 3 million dollars per year. At that rate, it could have continued its work through 2017 without further fundraising or investment income. Instead they invested their money with Bernie Madoff, losing 87% of the endowment!” [Who Made Off With Our Tzedakkah? Time to blame the victims," Daniel E. Loeb]
I told you back then that people who’d made out like bandits would be suing as though they were victims. How did I know that? Well - I taught high school. There’s nothing about human nature, good and bad, you don’t see there..
I know how well-heeled non-profits operate. Half the time, money meant to benefit children never gets to them. It ends up in the pockets of administrators, lawyers, and various salesmen and middlemen.
The whole educational/research establishment is rife with fraud of all kinds. Some of it is unintentional fraud - where the money gets to the intended recipient, although the activity of the recipient (the research or whatever else) is pretty much a dead-end or a waste. But in other cases, the fraud is intentional, as below.
Here’s the latest from Fox News:
“Also among those sued Tuesday is one of the leading educational philanthropies in the United States, which claims it was wiped out by Madoff’s far-reaching fraud.
The complaint filed Tuesday alleges the Picower Foundation and several related entities made nearly $7 billion by investing with Madoff. At least $5.1 billion of that came out of the pockets of victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, and should be returned, it [the complaint by court-appointed trustee Irving Picard] said.”
And more:
“The Palm Beach, Fla.-based foundation had given millions to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Human Rights First and the New York Public Library. It also funded diabetes research at Harvard Medical School.
The trustee’s Picower complaint says Madoff managed accounts that earned astronomical returns over 13 years. One purported to earn 950 percent in 1999.”
My Comment
Very different from the spin we first heard, right? Remember they were telling us back in January that the funds returned very average earnings and no one could be expected to have seen through the scheme? Turns out that that wasn’t quite the way it was. Nearly thousand percent returns? How hard is that to question?
This also confirms what I said in “Nationalization in a Time of Monopoly,” as well as in a later piece “Nightmare on Wall Street”: A lot of the fraud was committed at the height of the bubble economy and involved a number of players. [Note: Obviously, Picard's allegations are just that at the moment. We will have to wait and see how the suit plays out to get a better idea and hear more of the evidence on either side].
Far-fetched conspiracy theory?
Not at all. There are only a limited set of powerful actors at the highest levels of Wall Street. Bernie Madoff wasn’t a sidekick. He played at the top. The people at the top knew him (I mean, SEC honchos, leading bankers and money managers, government bigwigs). He didn’t do all this without a wink and a nod.
Which means there’s more going on here than meets even Picard’s eye. But until I get my site better protected, I’m not planning on digging any more…
Meanwhile, on the Madoff connection to the mob, there’s an interesting post at Deep Capture blog, which has this:
“After Milken was indicted, Black rallied to Milken’s defense. It was Black [Leon Black], more than anyone, who prevented Drexel from firing Milken. And Black has remained obstinately loyal to the criminal Milken ever since. After Milken went to prison, Black founded the Apollo Group, an investment partnership that received most of its initial funding from a French aristocrat named Rene Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet.
Among Black’s first moves as an independent “prominent investor” was to launch a takeover bid for Executive Life, a bankrupt insurance and financial services conglomerate…….Later, though, it emerged that Black’s takeover of Executive Life had been illegal because he had secretly been fronting for certain French investors, including Monsieur Rene Thierry de La Villehuchet. Some of the French investors had illegally parked stock with Black to hide their involvement (“parking stock” being one of the favorite techniques of the Milken-Boesky-Thorp crew, and a recurrent theme in the 98-count indictment that sent Milken to jail).”
The French aristocrat, Rene Thierry de la Villehuchet, was the manager of one of the Madoff feeder funds. He killed himself earlier this year, reportedly from a sense of honor toward his clients whose money was lost in the scam. But if the account at DeepCapture is to be believed, he seems to have been involved in rather shady deals even before getting together with Madoff.
Blogging Projects..
Apologies for not having blogged for a while on Madoff and the “kleptocrat” angle of the financial story.
The reason is the web harassment I’ve talked about before. I’m not intimidated by it, but I think it’s a good idea for me to get my cyberhouse in order before I embark on more research on that. It looks like parts of that story might intersect with another story that’s been troubling me, which I can’t get into here.
When highly credentialed journalists start telling you to buy a revolver, you begin to wonder if you shouldn’t stop being bo-peep and try mata hari for real.
I also have some restructuring of my life going on that takes up most of my time and energy - so my posts have become a bit erratic.
My dream of becoming a professional wanderer, a vagabond of the net, is within a year (or so) of realization. Once I complete the structures I need to set up, this blog will become professional.
It will turn into a magazine and an online community, which is my dream.
Government Posts Highly Confidential Civilian Nuke Info on Internet
Oh dear. The blunderbuss in Washington strikes again. AP reports:
“WASHINGTON – The government accidentally posted on the Internet a list of government and civilian nuclear facilities and their activities in the United States, but U.S. officials said Wednesday the posting included no information that compromised national security.
However, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, questioned about the disclosure at a House hearing, expressed concern with respect to a uranium storage facility at the department’s Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The facility holds large quantities of highly enriched uranium, which if obtained can be used to fashion a nuclear weapon.
“That’s of great concern,” said Chu, referring to the Y-12 site. “We will be looking hard and making sure physical security of those sites (at Y-12) is sufficient to prevent eco-terrorists and others getting hold of that material.”
But later Chu told reporters that while the disclosure may be embarrassing “there’s no secret classified information that’s been compromised (and) the sites and everything are public knowledge” already available elsewhere.”
My Comment
The rest of the article, which refers to the material as “sensitive” and “highly confidential” and unavailable in one place anywhere else, seems to contradict the phlegmatic Mr. Chu.
But this is bureaucracy in action. Listen up, people. This is the lot that’s scaring you into thinking your safety is their number one priority. Right. That’s why Congress has its underground bunker all fitted out and ready to go in case of some endgame fireworks.
And you have…what? A house. Oh yes. That paper-mache prefab box on which you’re upside down anyway…
That should be a real haven in case of a thermo-nuclear accident in the vicinity.
And I suppose you also have a great permanent job with fantastic medical coverage for you and all your little tots too, in case…just supposing, I mean…that said nuclear incident might have a teeny-weeny negative effect on your health.
Eduardo Galeano on the International Community
Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, on the International Community:
“The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. The civilian victims are called collateral damages, according to the dictionary of the other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten collateral damages are children. And the maimed add up to thousands, victims of human mutilation that the war industry is successfully rehearsing in this operation of ethnic cleansing. And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.
Dangerous people –warning of another bombardment – in charge of the enormous manipulative media that invite us to think that each Israeli life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives. And those media also invite us to think that the two hundred atom bombs of Israel are humanitarian, and that a nuclear power called Iran was the one that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The so-called international community, Does it exist? Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers and war-makers?……..
Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands off. As always. And, as ever, the European countries wring their hands. Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, sheds a tear or so, while secretly celebrating this master move. Because hunting the Jews was always a European custom, but since half a century that historical debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who also are Semites and who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood money, the price of others.
(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by the Latin American dictatorships to which Israel acted as consultant).”
Neither Right Nor Left Nor Stupid
Increasingly, I find that I fit neither left nor right, as it’s conceived in the United States. I’m not even a libertarian.
I’m not surprised.
People have a relationship to language that I find puzzling and foreign to me. Even repugnant. It’s an instrumental view. It’s also a very fundamentalist and dogmatic view.
Words are much more complex than that. To fit our narrow ideologies into them, we have to drain them of their power, their ambiguity, their richness - all the ways in which they don’t mean what we say. They never do. And bless them for that. Bless them that they always escape us. As experience always escapes us.
I am not a progressive, if progress means latching on to every idiotic scheme that flatters its manufacturer’s vanity at the expense of hard-won experience.
I am not a conservative, if conservatism means mistaking your own prejudices and ignorance for immutable truths.
I am not a libertarian, if liberty is a theory that you force on the reality of freedom and unfreedom.
I am not a pragmatist, if pragmatism is simply opportunism disguising itself as prudence and state craft.
I am not an extremist, if extremism is driving a good idea into insanity by literalism.
I am not a moderate, if moderation means selling your conscience to mass opinion.
Large parts of public debate are simply stupid, in the broadest sense of that term.
First, they are stupid, because many of the people engaging in them aren’t smart. Sorry. It’s just so - they aren’t people who’ve subjected themselves to any discipline besides saying whatever they think at the moment, unrestricted by expertise, criticism, reality, history, memory, conscience, or anything else.
Journalists simply aren’t true professionals in many respects and don’t have standards equivalent to the legal or medical profession. The IQ necessary to practice journalism of any kind isn’t that high. Writers generally tend to be smart people, because it takes a high level of intelligence to sustain an argument through the length of a book or through a good academic paper. But most journalists write little reports of 5-8 paragraphs - most of it on the order of “he said,” “she said,” and “then so and so did” - and sometimes they don’t even get around to doing that.
Second - public debates have become stupid, because there’s too much chatter going on. And the quality of things tends to deteriorate when the quantity goes up. Good ideas get taken up by dumb people and at the end of it, the good idea isn’t recognizable any more as good…or even as an idea. It turns into a slogan, an idiocy, and it tends to produce idiocy even in intelligent people who take it up.
Third - public debate is stupid because ideology tends to make us stupid. It requires us to strait-jacket our thinking, to look through a particular lens, to read only our side sympathetically, to pick winners and losers competitively.
Words have their own destiny. They are not our pawns or hostages.
Royal Canadian Mint Missing Gold, Silver, & PM Holdings
In the news, a Canwest News report notes that the Royal Canadian Mint has been caught with its gold, silver and other precious metals AWOL…
“A significant quantity of gold, silver and other precious metals is unaccounted for at the Royal Canadian Mint.
External auditors are investigating a discrepancy between the mint’s 2008 financial accounting of its precious metals holdings and the physical stockpile at the plant on Sussex Drive in Ottawa.
The mystery raises possibilities from sloppy bookkeeping to a gold heist.
Officials with the commercial Crown corporation are saying little and refuse to confirm the amount and value of the unaccounted for gold, silver and palladium.”
Team Obama Turns Up Heat on NY Journalist
Michelle Malkin, writing in The Pittsburgh Tribune Online:
“As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.
In an e-mail message to whistle-blower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:
“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else. I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”
It’s only just begun.”
My Comment
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider Michelle Malkin anything but a very partisan source. I find her incredibly abrasive and limited. But this story really needs attention, not so much for the revelations about ACORN and the Obama campaign (what else would you expect?), but for the insight into how the government handles the “free” press when it gets out of line.
Short the American Public
Suze Orman on the FDIC versus a shoe-box:
Here’s what Karl Denninger at Market Ticker had to say about her performance:
“If you believe that having 0.27% of the insured base of deposits as a reserve, having lost more than two thirds of the original reserve due to malfeasance and misfeasance, when not one person has been indicted, prosecuted or imprisoned for their misconduct over the previous two years constitutes “well-capitalized, prudently operated and able to meet insurance obligations”…
… you are free to believe that.
I will however strongly suggest that you investigate the facts for yourself before believing Suze Orman playing “mouthpiece” for a clearly-desperate regulatory apparatus that has allowed the wholesale looting of the American Taxpayer to occur - a regulatory apparatus and government, from the top down that will, it appears, continue to rob you blind until and unless you, the people, demand that it stop.
Disclosure: Short the American people, who appear to be as dumb as a box of rocks for putting up with this crap.”
My Comment
The Suze Orman video isn’t alone. The past few weeks have seen an uptick in Polyanna-ish messages about the economy, some of them making distinct swipes at libertarian doom-sayers.
Here’s some positive spin early in May from The Times Online (UK):
“The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said yesterday there were indications that the country was experiencing a “pause in the economic slowdown”.
The multibillionaire investor George Soros echoed the positive forecast, saying that a meltdown of the world’s financial system had been averted. Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank, said that some countries had already moved beyond the worst of their recessions.”
That simply echoed what US policy makers were saying early in April:
“Top US officials on Saturday offered reassurances that the worst of the economic downturn is likely over, helped by unprecedented efforts to keep credit flowing, though the recovery will be slow. Two Federal Reserve policy-makers, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and New York Fed chief William Dudley, both pointed to signs that measures taken by the US central bank are indeed working to help revive the economy”
Note that Kohn was the one who stone-walled Congress when pressed for the names of AIG’s counterparties. What are the chances he’s a disinterested observer? Nil, I’d say…
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