LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for July, 2009
Suhayl Saadi’s New Novel Cited by Independent As Booker Material
Friend and fellow Asian immigrant Suhayl Saadi gets more recognition for his original and linguistically inventive writing. Check out his new novel:
The Independent: ‘Joseph’s Box’ should have been a Booker contender
Joseph’s Box has been mentioned by The Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin in an article on the Booker Prize as one of the novels that should have been a contender. Well, we did enter it … but, like Tonkin, have given up expecting anything other than the obvious from most big literary prizes. But it’s great to see some recognition for this stunningly original novel. Tonkin says: ‘We should never have expected a jury as orthodox in taste as the one James Naughtie chairs to seek out as waywardly extravagant a novel as Joseph’s Box by the Scottish doctor-author Suhayl Saadi, which drives us deep into the history and myths of Europe and south Asia alike. But, in a bolder year, he and other writers from non-corporate imprints might have stood a better chance.’
Publication date is tomorrow (Friday 31 July). Take a look at the book-specific website, www.josephsbox.co.uk, which is a whole world in itself. Order the book at only £10.99 (RRP is £13.99) or the e-book at just £7.
Wiki Editor’s Incorrect Assertions Display Bias
(Note: Some correction of grammar, typos, removal of upper case letters, improvement of style made on August 1 (no change to substance), to make the post more readable, per my usual blog policy.
I make grammatical, stylistic, and unimportant factual corrections without strike-through. All major or important factual corrections, however, are notated)Update (July 31):
Further corrections of the wiki editor who nominated my post for deletions:
*My book contract was with Wiley, not Agora. Agora is nowhere mentioned in the contract. The wiki editor who brings in Agora is confusing the issue.
*Another wiki editor claims my post is irrelevant. Actually, the context in which the deletion nomination appeared is very relevant. The blog posts on Agora, on the Wall Street media mafia, and on certain powerful political figures that manipulate opinion are all highly relevant.
*Notability, at least ordinarily, is established by more things than just the number of books. Influence, popularity, and the quality of work is also important.
*I did not have a blog at the time the original wiki entry was set up in 2006. My blog started in April 2007. Thus, I couldn’t have canvassed through it. There are no Indymedia posts as he suggests, either. The only person who asserts that is a web-stalker who started posting in November 2007, apparently as part of a campaign against Agora Inc. in general.
*I posted my response on this blog. I did not ask anyone to link it. I cannot control how readers act. A wiki editor cannot make baseless charges that are damaging and then tell me I have no right to state my side of the issue on my own blog, without being guilty of canvassing. Much the same could be said of wiki editors.
*This post is going invisible each time I publish it, because code keeps appearing that makes it disappear or get garbled, not because I am removing it for ulterior reasons.
Original Post:
I visited my wiki page and saw that whoever nominated the bio for deletion has made several incorrect assertions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Lila_Rajiva_(3rd_nomination)
How do I as an author correct this sort of thing, without then being accused of something else?
*The editor accuses me of “canvassing” supporters for the ORIGINAL entry. This is false.
*The editor accuses me of “canvassing” supporters now. Well, I did make a blog post about the entry because I was taken aback by the deletion, but I quickly took it down.
Why? Because I then read on the wiki page (and it’s hard to even figure out what is permissible) that (apparently) authors can not defend themselves or they’ll be seen as canvassing.
On the other hand, editors can say whatever they like anonymously without informing the authors? Does that sounds fair?
What it amounts to is that anonymous wiki editors can nominate pages for deletion, and canvass other editors to do so, without even bothering to tell the author.
And they can say whatever they want, even if it’s false, without inviting the author to present his side. I don’t think any fair observer would claim that’s anything but arbitrary.
Respectfully, this editor also made several other false and damaging assertions:
He says the original wiki page was set up because of my “canvassing” and “Indymedia posting”?
False Actually, there was NO “canvassing” or “Indymedia posting” to set up the wiki. I didn’t even have a blog. The editor can verify by checking with the original editors who debated the entry. I know none of them, wrote to none of them, and had nothing to do with the setting up of the page. I’d ask the editor for one email or post soliciting that page. I would ask that he/she check with the original editors and writers who set up the wiki.
True I discovered I was on wiki entirely by accident in 2006. I wasn’t terribly happy with it first, because it had a large picture of a tortured prisoner and a picture of my face, and it was actually causing me problems at work. I later asked for the images to be removed. I can send the emails in which I asked for that. That doesn’t sound too much like promotion to me.
The editor says I posted and canvassed for a wiki on Indymedia. FALSE
My articles on politics in online magazines have been republished (without my permission) on Indymedia. That’s not anything I can control. And it’s not “posting”. And it has nothing to do with canvassing for wiki or anything else. Here’s what’s true: Some posts that I deleted ON MY BLOG were fished out of the google cache by a web stalker and reposted by him on Indymedia, but they have nothing to do with my wiki bio.
They describe my problems with Agora Inc. I deleted these posts not because they aren’t true, but because whenever mentioned by name, the stalker would reappear on my blog and spam me. I do not know this stalker at all but he has harassed me on and off for two years with wild slanders, and is a stock felon who lives abroad. He’s an incessant poster on message boards and Indymedia. He has been charged repeatedly with libel and now lives abroad to elude US law (you can see him described on “Deep Capture” blog. Maybe it’s my citing of this blog that’s got me in trouble, come to think of it….)
Now, is a
convicted felon<shady securities dealer and a web-stalker who lives in Guatemala the source of a Wikipedia editor’s assertions about a published writer?Is a Wikipedia editor confusing the victim of web-stalking with the stalker?
False: Information about my articles being the first on a couple of subjects are unverifiable. True: They are quite verifiable. There are two assertions that were made about my being the first on certain topics: The torture of women as part of US policy. Articles in Dissident Voice in July 2004 are the first magazine articles by a journalist in the American media that present the torture of women as part of a systematic US policy. My book, published in November 2005, is in fact the first book to describe the torture of women as systematic and part of a US torture policy. Later articles in The Nation (to whom the book was sent in 2006 January) were published in July 2006, fully six months after the book. My original articles laying out the torture of women were published in July 2004 in Dissident Voice. They can be googled, they were widely read, and reprinted in a number of online magazines. They were read and followed by American Prospect, which is an influential magazine. It’s true that this refers to the English language press in the US. It’s quite true, there may be Arab articles that laid the story out more extensively.
My article on Goldman Sachs and on Sachs and AIG were in fact the first to suggest that the derivative fiasco was an intentional scam by GS and AIG and to draw a link between the two outfits and shows systematic corruption. My first articles on Goldman were published in Money Week (2006 July) and Dissident Voice (2006- July and later) - and they do predate other systematic accounts of Goldman’s corruption. That can be verified by checking against the New York Times coverage of Goldman and AIG, which began only after my article in 2008. Morgenson’s article on an AIG nexus dates from just after my AIG article appeared.
Again, this can be googled. I’ve described the propaganda effort to sideline alternative journalists or co-opt their work into mainstream coverage on my blog, repeatedly. Those statements about my articles being the first were removed not because they are incorrect, but because there were no links provided that would prove this. It would be better to add the links to the mainstream articles, before having those assertions there. When a deletion nomination is made, it’s natural to try to correct anything you can find that might not conform to wiki criteria. It’s editing and it’s done all the time to articles. The editor’s contention that the removal means the assertions are unverifiable or marketing is a leap of logic.
I would request the editor to contact me directly, and I will provide referees from academic and activist circles of sufficient standing.
An anonymous editor on wiki should not unilaterally make assertions that are inaccurate and damaging, without first inviting the author to rebut them. What are the editor’s credentials to do so?
And even if the wiki editor believes the claims are unverifiable, the usual procedure is to delete them and ask the author for further links.
The action of deleting the entire page shows clearly that there was a bias and a political motivation. Pages are constantly being modified to improve them. False:
The editor claims I am “circling the wagons.”
True: I posted the wiki entry for deletion on my blog. Why shouldn’t ? If wiki can secretly and unilaterally (without informing the author) nominate (and possibly delete) articles, because they dislike something or misunderstand something from a random blog post, that’s giving a lot of power to anonymous editors to coerce or manipulate credentialed writers and prevent them from exposing certain things.
Wiki is an international source, not simply an American source. It should not be biased toward mainstream American news
This editor could have done nothing stronger my point that the web is sometimes as manipulated as print media.
Why wasn’t I notified about the deletion nomination? It was only because I suspected that my blog posts would result in a social media attack, that I had a chance to respond. Since deletion discussions are over within a few days, does that mean I would have been deleted by an anonymous editor, on the basis of wrong statements?
True:
*I wrote certain extremely provocative but verifiable things (they’re actually in the public domain in the news archives) on my personal blog about certain powerful people. I later made those posts private, not because they aren’t true, but because I saw how my wiki was attacked and was worried about what else might happen.
*I defended myself against a spammer. The defense has led to the wiki editor assuming certain things wrongly, without checking. That’s not very professional.
*The blog post in which I defended myself against the spammer happened to mention the names of some people who have a history of editing Wiki from political motives. Should I follow the editor’s method of reasoning and assume the editor is one of them or connected to one of them?
*I mentioned that certain left-liberal associates (briefly) cold-shouldered me for writing with a right libertarian author. I believe the editor at wiki took this as a notice that he should keep in step …
*The editor uses the term “vanity press” to deride my co-author’s company (which is the same word used by my stalker - in his rants on Indymedia). Using the editor’s logic, it would be just as plausible for me to conclude that he is some way associated with the stalker.
*My question: Is he?
* My co-author’s company has nothing to do with the authorship of the book. The book is written by Bonner and me and is published by John Wiley. My contract is with Wiley. Trying to run down the book by calling it the product of a vanity press is lame and using the stalker’s assumptions and language is suspect. My first book was published by Monthly Review Press, which is a very reputable and scholarly socialist press. From my experience with both outfits, I would say MRP is actually better at editing and fact-checking, which are the important scholarly criteria.
*I tried to defend myself against the stalker, because he was publishing disinformation on the web. I contacted Indymedia about it but was told that trying to get people like that to stop through legal means isn’t easy. They just change their names and IPs. I have found this to be true.
* I tried to correct Agora Inc.’s incorrect postings of joint pieces. It was making for multiple web-pages where my name was not showing up on my own pieces and I thought it could lead to copyright infringement or confusion. I fail to see how correcting incorrect web attribution is marketing. In fact, it’s a defense against marketing.
By not recognizing this, wiki is lending itself to use by the very forces that are manipulating the public record and destroying the work of independent journalists and people of conscience who are trying to keep the record straight. It’s telling that the editor tries to disparage me by asserting that the wiki page was set up a 9-11 conspiracist.
First. This is irrelevant, since the page was discussed and approved by other editors.
Second. The editor is not the definitive authority on 9-11. If he is, let him show his credentials. Why doesn’t he reveal his name and his publications?
How does he know for sure what’s conspiracy and what isn’t if he hasn’t been studying the subject?
Third. It’s unseemly for a wiki editor to nakedly express his political preferences.
I’d respectfully ask the editor to think through the implications of what, given the context in which it occurred, amounts to censorship of independent journalists.
Falwell Versus Flynt - Notes On a Comment
One reader, commenting on my Berlusconi post, defends Larry Flynt’s attacks on Jerry Falwell (something I’ve written on before).
Note: Flynt attacked Rev. Jerry Falwell with a satire in print of the pastor having sex with his mother. Falwell sued Flynt and lost.
I decide to debate the assertions he made in his comment, point-by-point in this post, because they misuse language in ways that are quite common these days.
COMMENT: “I found Flynt’s raunchy satire of Falwell to be very funny and appropriate, although I can understand if others might have different opinions…..”
RAJIVA: Funny? Sexually and publicly humiliating someone in terms that rubbishes the most sensitive areas of their life - their family, their mother, their childhood affections, their sexuality, their religious beliefs, the public’s perception of their work as a minister, their capacity to perform professionally (counseling young people on sexuality or faith or family) - is “very funny,” and “appropriate”?
Actually, it’s considered torture (when done in the military), domestic abuse (when done in the family), and sexual harassment (when done in the work-place).
But it seems as though, if it’s printed, then suddenly it goes scot-free, it gets tagged “free speech.”
Well, some speech is not speech. It’s effectively action. And it should be treated as action.
Libel is a tort.
COMMENT: “He wasn’t attacking Falwell directly, so much as his absurd pompous messianic holier-than-thou persona and the oppressive and xenophobic underpinnings of his beliefs — the very same oppressive and xenophobic culture that was trying to silence and sue him.”
RAJIVA: You’re doing a lot of name-calling.
I disagree with Falwell’s fundamentalism. I never found him to be “holier than thou”. He was genuinely affable, as far as I could tell. Your opinion that someone else is personally xenophobic and oppressive doesn’t equate to their actually being those things, unless you show some evidence of injury, as I did in my previous response. Whatever Falwell said, he said quite courteously and even affectionately, when he spoke to Flynt. I saw them on TV (after the lawsuit, I believe).
COMMENT: The two had completely and violently opposing views on almost everything — I don’t see how anyone can be “cheerful” and “tolerant” and “reasonable” with someone who so thoroughly undermines one’s values.
RAJIVA: The essence of civilization and civility is to be tolerant of views that undermine your own. I have good friends who are evangelical Christians and devout Catholics. Many of them probably hope I will leave off my “heretical” views. It doesn’t bother me at all. And likewise, they aren’t bothered by my questioning of their dogmas. Ideology is only a dimension of personality…
COMMENT: Moreover, Falwell was not cheerful nor tolerant nor reasonable — he brutally tried to sue Flynt for $45M because of this insignificant work of fiction printed in his own private subscription-based magazine,
RAJIVA: You’re worried about the “brutality” of suing a man who made a huge fortune out of overtly misogynistic imagery of female sexuality (this is Hustler, not Playboy)….That’s a twist. Why should you “tolerate” any injury done to you? Do you tolerate muggers and bank robbers or financial criminals? Why should you tolerate vicious slanders in the media? Being civil in debate doesn’t mean you have to give up your legal rights, I hope.
The image was very damaging to Falwell and to his memories of his mother. It was degrading. How do you cap the monetary damages on that? Personally, I don’t think monetary damages alone are suitable for all torts. I think Flynt needed to have some small taste of what he himself had inflicted.
And it’s interesting that he ultimately did. His daughter accused him of incest, didn’t she?
Karma?What’s more, it turned out, he was the incestuous one. Cheap psychoanalysis isn’t very useful usually, but in this case, it does seem that some compulsion made Flynt deride Falwell for exactly what he (not Falwell) was guilty of.
Shades of all those CEOs and political bosses who harass their female employees…. and then protect themselves by turning around and preemptively accusing disaffected employees of “stalking”… or in other ways undermining their professional claims. I’m talking about the sainted Bill Clinton, beloved of liberal feminists….and of a few other people……
I’m sure this satisfaction with punishment won’t sit well with those who see religious and spiritual values as all “milque-toast” and “mildness.” -
To me, that’s a sign of the decay in our sensibilities and the loss of the noble and chivalric value of honor, which is now confined to the Muslim world, or so it seems.
COMMENT: “Not to mention the far more insidious repressive venom he would spew to his students (all his draconian Religious anti-sexuality stuff, and twisted anti-free-speech poison).
RAJIVA: Did Falwell libel anyone when he was expressing his views? No. Then, those are precisely the views the first amendment is for, not for nasty, libelous attacks.
Also, disliking Hustler-type imagery and language don’t make you anti-sex or repressed, unless your idea of sex is not much more than what boys scrawl on bathroom walls. People can be quite sexual, and not want their sex lives displayed like graffiti.
Or can’t anyone tell the difference any longer? Throwing around the word “prudish” at anyone who doesn’t agree with your own level of tolerance for public coarseness is a misuse of the word.
COMMENT: I’m still not sure how the two managed to become friends later in life. (Also, unless there is more credible evidence — why doesn’t Tanya take a polygraph like her dad did? she already wrote a book about it — one can’t simply assume such character-assassinating crimes :b.))
RAJIVA: Again, most of your argument is personal bile, ad hominem, and assumption.
Jerry Falwell got on with Flynt at the end because, like him or not, Falwell took his religious beliefs seriously, and really did feel he could “hate the sin and love the sinner.” That may not sit well with the left, but my opinion of him has nothing to do with his political views or his dogmas - none of which I share. My opinion of him is based on my perception that whatever he was otherwise, as a public person, he presented himself genially, affably, and reasonably (
[Correction: I should add the phrase 'when speaking to other people.' It is true that Falwell used harsh language about groups of people, but that was language based on evangelical and fundamentalist criteria that he held about their behavior. This was the argument I made in a piece called, "God's Son, Falwell's Mother, and the Rest of Us Ho's"].
He did not deserve the filth slur thrown at him by Flynt, he was a better man than Flynt
(Correction: I should add the phrase - ‘in this respect’), and Flynt recognized it at some level….Update: The fact that through most of history both secular and religious thinkers have regarded homosexual behavior as morally wrong can provide some rational justification for differentiating between Falwell’s attacks on homosexual behavior ( in language like “part of a Satanic system”) and any other random personal attack on another human being. There is a distinction that can be made between those two types of attacks.
Camille Paglia makes this point in an essay she wrote about a Martha Nussbaum critique that I’ll try to link here…
Note: I am a firm supporter of gay marriage.
Aurobindo on Voluntary Socialism
From an article on Indian revolutionary leader and philosopher-poet, Aurobindo, later known for his system of yoga, “integral yoga.”
“The fact that Sri Aurobindo did not receive a favorable reception in India intellectual circles during the last half a century has been very unfortunate but not very surprising, because he was in his views and in his vision so radical and so much ahead of his times, that he effectively alienated four of the strongest intellectual establishments in the country, namely, the traditional Hindu religious establishment, the Gandhian establishment, the politically non-committed but eurocentric university intellectuals who are the products of Macaulay’s educational system, and also the leftist, communist/socialist establishment.
The Hindu religious establishment did not take kindly to Sri Aurobindo because he emphatically denied world-negation as the central thrust of Indian culture. Many of our countrymen still take great pride in the Shankarite and Buddhist legacy of regarding the world as a delusion, and therefore as of no value. His insistence on worldly progress being a quintessential part of the Indian spiritual tradition alienated Sri Aurobindo from the Hindu establishment, strangely enough. The Gandhian establishment was not entirely happy with Sri Aurobindo because of his insistence that India must cultivate the kshatriya (warrior) spirit, not merely Bhakti and Jnana.
The reason why the academic establishment in India was opposed to Sri Aurobindo is that he rejected the colonial-missionary model of history, which regarded the Aryan invasion theory as its crown-jewel. Sri Aurobindo was probably the first to issue a warning against the invasion theory in his book On the Vedas, written nearly 80 years ago. Nor was Sri Aurobindo an uncritical admirer of the Western liberal-humanistic tradition.
The reasons for the neglect Sri Aurobindo suffered among leftist intelligentsia in India was that he was cold to the promises of communists and the dreams of socialists, and because of his strong spiritual orientation. But it must be pointed out that Sri Aurobindo was not opposed to communist ideology per se as can be seen from the following statements of his:
‘‘If communism ever re-establishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul’s brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a world-wide fiasco.’’
Social Media Attacks..
1.Shortly after blogging on certain ongoing and past problems, I got two emails. Each of them is from an IP from my residence in the US… and now here abroad. The messages were odd and mildly threatening.
2. RSS feeds and twitter have been broken - for some time apparently.
3. And now, the latest - my wiki entry (set up by others) has been tagged to be deleted. Why now suddenly? After 5 years and support by numbers of people? Editing is one thing. Why tagged for deletion?
Berlusconi Is a Misogynist not a Lover of Women…
Interesting how wrong language leads us to wrong sensibilities..
We are told that Silvio Berlusconi’s improprieties were just his “love of women.”
[Berlusconi is in the news for having been caught on audiotape in a sex scandal]Love of women?
He loved women so little, he publicly humiliated them - his wife of 19 years and the mother of his 3 children, in this case - by telling a topless model he would marry her instantly if he could.
This is a “bad boy”? Boy? This Dionysos is a 71-year old (correction: I read 72, in some accounts) man with a reptilian stare and matching gonads, who ‘bought’ sexual favors from astute “pros” or near underage women with daddy-complexes. If sexual realism suggests that ‘that’s what all men want’ - then sexual realism should tell us that minus his money, all he was was a dried up old creep.
He ‘loved’ one young thing enough to attend her 18th party, but apparently didn’t attend his own children’s 18th birthday parties.
Love?From appearances, Berlusconi didn’t “love” anything but power and sex.
Adultery, in a marriage where both partners live separately, isn’t the problem. The problem is the public pain and humiliation Berlusconi repeatedly inflicted on his family by his compulsive behavior.
He ‘loved’ his lusts and physical drives. Whether this should be the object of public censure, titillation, or gloating is another thing.Personally, I think his control of Italian media, his gagging of critical journalists and his bribing his way out of legal charges are things libertarians should be much more concerned with….
Still, casting his behavior as some kind of splendid victim-less frolicking is dubious. He seems to be a lecher and a liar who subjected his wife and children (she wasn’t the first, either) to endless pain.
The New York Times is wrong on a number of things. But they’re not wrong to consider him corrupt - and, “aging Lothario” is putting it very nicely.
Berlusconi is a senile goat.
Paleolibertarians shouldn’t be using him as the centerpiece of a “boys will be boys” argument.
The NY Times notes how both political sides are taking partisan stands in contradiction to their professed principles:
“Things are completely turned upside down,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a commentator for Il Sole 24 Ore radio. “Those who always represented the family and faithful couples are happy to justify hanky-panky,” he said. While some on the left, “which always professed a belief in total sexual freedom, are now like inquisitors with their fingers wagging.”
That’s where the ideological mind-set gets you…
Desmond Tutu on Neutrality to Injustice
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
-Bishop Desmond Tutu (via 321gold)
Sri Aurobindo on Reason versus Experience
They proved to me by convincing reasons that God does not exist; Afterwards I saw God, for he came and embraced me. And now what am I to believe- the reasoning of others or my own experience? Truth is what the soul has seen and experienced; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.
– Sri. Aurobindo
[Aurobindo, one of the brightest minds that ever existed, a poet, polymath, revolutionary turned sage, and author of some of the most profound books ever written, is for me the central figure of modern India - not Gandhi. And he is for me also the central figure the West has to adopt from the East...]
Libertarian Living: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay as Libertarian Destinations“
I promised some of you a few tips about countries you might be considering fleeing to.
Here’s a quick guide to how three of them might work for runaway libertarians:
1. Cheap Living:
Forget what you’re reading about Chile being expensive and Uruguay being cheap. It all depends on where and how you’re living and what you’re doing. Comparing capitals, Santiago has more and cheaper living options than Montevideo. So does Buenos Aires. But you can find cheaper living in a smaller town in Uruguay. On the other hand, in smaller towns, don’t expect to find the variety of accommodation you find in a city like Buenos Aires. You may not find youth hostels, camping, budget hotels, or house-shares. In general, the more of an international crowd a place draws, the more and better your options.
If you are planning to live off the earth, farmland is relatively cheap and high-quality in all three countries, with Brazil and Uruguay being the cheapest. Soil quality is high in all these southern countries.
For organic growing, Chile and Uruguay are the places to go..
2. Eating/Shopping
But rent is not the only consideration. What about food and clothes?
Uruguay isn’t as cheap as Argentina, especially with the Uruguayan peso so much stronger than the Argentine peso.
Brazil is also more expensive.
In general, you’re wise to buy whole food in the markets and leave international brands alone in the supermarket aisles. Eating out is still cheap in Argentina, but less so elsewhere.
Again, you can always find a deal if you look. Brazil has the most variety. I had an all-you-can-eat meal in the border town of Chuuy, where the variety and quality of the asado was far superior to anything I’d eaten in Argentina.
Clothes tend to be relatively expensive, but again, if you look around, you can find places where there are sales, just as you have them in the US. A recent find, a jacket for about $4.
Electronic items like computers are more expensive. Make sure to buy the correct equipment for electronic appliances. Ask at a web forum before you visit.
3. Investment: Buying an apartment in Santiago, Buenos Aires, or Montevideo requires a lot of thinking right now. It all depends on whether you are buying it to live here or as an investment.
Prices are high in Buenos Aires, but evidence of the global crisis is everywhere, and the expectation is that prices will come down soon - perhaps sharply.
Santiago realtors are expecting a 15-20% drop in the next 6 months.
In Montevideo, the general feeling is that any price-drop in the other markets won’t be felt as sharply there. But everyone knows that even in Montevideo, prices have climbed as much as 30% in good areas, as rich Argentines move their money out of Argentina and put it into the stabler Uruguay economy.
That’s true not only of apartments but of land as well, although that’s a topic that would take too long a post to do justice to.
In general, don’t let anyone rush you into buying. Nothing is ever the dead certainty it’s made out to be, and getting in and out of a real estate transaction has costs. None of the property here is very liquid at all, in my opinion.
Also, don’t forget that old houses require constant maintenance and that if local currencies strengthen against the dollar, your labor costs for maintenance or renovation may end up being higher than your budget. Same goes for labor costs for management. You really might be better off buying a condo in Miami, no matter what Faber or Rogers thinks, if economic reasons are your only ones for living abroad.
Right now, you can find a waterfront apartment in Florida for a lower price than a comparable one in Uruguay. So if cheaper living is your only criterion, you might want to chew on that.
4. Privacy:
Uruguay is no longer on the black-list for tax havens, which is a good thing. On the other hand, it’s been a bit too compliant with US demands for transparency. Chile is a morass of bureaucracy, but predictable. Argentina is the least reliable, as far as banking goes.
This might not be something libertarians are going to like to hear. But the chances are that these societies too are going to be moving toward greater control. This is more true of Argentina than of Uruguay in my opinion.
5. Business Culture:
Chile gets top marks for a culture that is business positive, for those libertarians hoping to start a new life here. With English widely-spoken, low corruption and good property laws, it’s the best place to build a business. But watch out for a cultural problem - Americans I meet seem to find Chileans rude.
Brazil and Colombia (of which I know nothing else) are also good places for starting a business. Uruguay has some problems in this respect. It doesn’t have as much of a market or a business culture and the market also relies too much on foreigners. You’d have to know exactly how to work that. As Brazil, Argentina, and Chile go, so goes Uruguay. On the other hand, Uruguay seems to be the most accessible and easy-going culture of the three.Businessmen I met uniformly thought Argentina was a terrible place to do business - and some even called it the most corrupt country in South America, much to my surprise. Portenos (those who live in Buenos Aires) were singled out for blame - although for myself, I had nothing but a positive experience of them. People in the provinces were said to be more honest.
But then, I wasn’t doing business, I was trying to find out more about Monsanto….and in my off-time, figuring out salsa. People saw me as an Indian, assured me they loved India, and spent their time complaining about America to me, as though I wasn’t from there. So much for the liberal view of citizenship as purely political and cultural….
Brazil gets good marks, but with plenty of warnings about corruption and street crime…
I found the Brazilians I met more politically aware than the others., for what that’s worth. A lot of fans of Chomsky and much discussion of 9-11.So there you have it…a quick guide to selecting what you can do where..
In three important countries very far south of the border..Chesterton on the Supernatural and the Unnatural
“Take away the supernatural and what you are left with is the unnatural.”
- G. K. Chesterton
Color Coding in Brazil
A young Brazilian who works at Air France in Sao Paulo was breaking down the code on color in Brazil for us.
She herself is a fascinating mixture. On her father’s side, she’s African-Italian-Spanish-Portuguese.
On her mother’s side she’s fully Portuguese. Her skin color and features are European but her family members are both dark and fair skinned.My Guyanese friend (who is also mixed - black, Native Indian, East Indian, Portuguese) wanted to know whether Brazilians were easy-going about race. Yes, said the Brazilian, but they are very conscious about color.
Then she told us the different terms for skin colors:
Branco - white
Mestizo - white mixed with Native Indian
Mamulengo - black with native Indian
Mulatto - black mixed with white
Moreno - any unidentifiable non-white, darker-skinned personI would fall under morena..
My Guyanese friend would be a mulattaUpdate: According to information posted on this blog, moreno in other Latin cultures refers to a dark person with some European ancestry..or European features..
Which, as far as I know, I don’t have. I do have a little Chinese blood on one side..
I know that Nina Simone has a very powerful song about color codes among American blacks. I imagine moreno/a is like “high yellow”….to which Simone refers in the song.
Casey: Good Speculator, Bad Theorist..
Bad thinking and bad actions are more closely connected than we think.
Inevitably, bad ideas give rise to questionable ethical propositions.I am just realizing it after reading Doug Casey’s recent attack on charity ….
by which he means business philanthropy..Which is of course only one part..of “charity””
So much confusion of terms..so many questionable assumptions
It was a disappointment.
Filled with arrogance…
Inner law, outer law - perish them all, we’re libertarians - a great, unwashed mass of yahoos who feel it’s ok to do just about anything , because - blimey - Doug Casey, latter-day casuist and emeritus professor of ethics — in between land speculation and stock-pumping - has just discovered that the best thing we can do in life is to do whatever we want however we want - because that makes it better for everyone else..
Oh yay. What an insight.
How did I miss that..and all those idiot moralists and artists who thought differently - various nonentities who didn’t amass wealth through speculation..why, they’re just envious fools who got what they deserved..
Casey succumbs to theory..and bad theory, at that.
Although, any theory about ethics at all, if it pretends to rest on its own logical machinery is on its face bad.All true ethics proceeds from the practice of an ethical life. Not from theory.
Rich People’s Thefts
It’s interesting how the kinds of ethical and legal violations - i.e. sins and crimes - committed in more affluent circles are always defined downward - i.e. made less serious, whereas, the kinds of crimes committed by poorer people (purse snatching) are defined upward.
How convenient.
Rich people’s crimes - from bribery, to fraud, to falsification, to plagiarism, to financial chicanery - always find defenders who will tell you there’s nothing really so bad about them.
But let some kid in the ghetto pinch a trinket from a store on Christmas eve, then the same people will thunder on about antisocial behavior, mobs, the sanctity of public property and everything else..
Yes. I am beginning to see that libertarianism, in some circles, is simply the intellectual justification for the ethical improprieties of people with money.
Note: The phrase “defined down” had a special sense when it was coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in regard to deviance…but I use the phrase here as my own, simply to mean that some crimes are softened (defined in such a way as to be less than what they are)..and conversely, other crimes are made more than what they are - defined upward.
The use is my own and not to be confused with the Moynihan phrase.Five Things That Make America Work
In these times of self-flagellation in America, visiting abroad can give you perspective and make you see immediately the good things you left behind, as well as the bad.
Here goes:
1. Americans have a strong civic sense. There may be only handful of expats in a city, but you can be sure they already have a weekly meeting set up, a forum on the web, everyone’s emails and phone numbers, and a network of support and advice.
2. Americans - at least the ones I meet abroad - are helpful. They talk. They exchange ideas and emails. They are more cooperative than many other groups, it seems. (On the other hand, this could just be because I’m most at home with English…)
3. America is one of the cleanest societies around.
Poverty, over-population, and poor infrastructure can certainly explain some of the filth in India. Maybe even a lot. But ultimately, there’s a failure of culture. I know this because I’ve seen even middle-class Indians, who have money for elaborate decoration in their homes, display complete indifference to minimal standards of hygiene when it comes to public space. Cleaning up after yourself in public space and respecting the other fellow’s right to be free of noise and filth are things noticeably absent. Curiously, this goes hand in hand with quite a high level of personal cleanliness, even among people on the street.
In Buenos Aires, even middle-class neighborhoods that ought to be immaculate have litter on the streets. Yet the people dress fashionably for even small outings to the store. People often decry Americans as too informal. But to me there’s something wrong-headed about putting on make-up to go to the store, but dropping litter on the streets…
4. Americans are organized. America may be the country with the most..and best..signs. It seems like a trivial thing. Try living some place where you can’t tell where you’re going for miles. Every road in the country has clear and comprehensive information about every possible turn, angle, and destination on the way. Buildings are labeled clearly. Streets and numbers makes sense. At least, mostly. It’s something we take for granted in the country, but it’s actually probably one of the main reasons why it’s easy to run a business here. The same systematic approach characterizes the office desks, the filing systems, the realtor’s networks, the business directories. It’s easy to find you way here..and it’s easy to find whatever it is you’re looking for. America is the great connector.
5. Americans are genuinely multi-ethnic and PC. Why does PC count as a good thing? Well, there’s bad PC and there’s good PC. The fact is, in America, you can be practically any race or color. People aren’t going to stop and stare - at least not in major cities. Not unless you wear something terribly different from ordinary street wear.
On the other hand, an American traveler who’d just returned from India was telling us how many stares she provoked when she was traveling…and not just stares (which might be understandable), but hassles…scams…
And a young Guyanese friend told me she was stared at constantly in Montevideo when she walked out. There is an African population in the city - in Barrio Sur - so you’d think people would be used to a different look. On the other hand, my friend is a very pretty girl, and it’s possible she mistook admiration for rudeness or uncivility…..
Food for thought for libertarians on the run..
Slate On the Pathology of Plagiarism
From David Plotz in Slate:
“In a 1997 New Yorker essay, James Kincaid argued that plagiarism should not bother writers so much. Most journalism is mediocre, unoriginal prose, Kincaid says, so writers shouldn’t mind if it gets recycled. Some literary theorists minimize plagiarism for a related reason. They are skeptical of the ideas of authorship and originality, contending that everything new is cobbled together from older sources.
But these scholars, you will note, publish their articles under their own bylines. And both they and Kincaid ignore what makes the plagiarist so sinister. For writers, the act of putting particular words in a particular order is our hard labor. Even when the result is mediocre and unoriginal, it is our own mediocrity. The words are our proof of life, the evidence we can present at heaven’s gate that we have not frittered away our three score and ten.
The plagiarist is, in a minor way, the cop who frames innocents, the doctor who kills his patients. The plagiarist violates the essential rule of his trade. He steals the lifeblood of a colleague. A few paragraphs have made Stephen Ambrose a vampire.”
My Comment
This is a very convincing essay on plagiarism from Slate.
It notes, for one thing, that the people who think plagiarism is no big deal would, tellingly enough, never allow their own columns to appear without their byline. Corporations that take material from their contract workers are aggressive litigators against competitors who do the same to them.
Slate also draws a useful line between “influence” and “plagiarism”.
All writers are influenced - they pick up words or phrases from writers they admire, unconsciously…or sometimes intentionally.
But you can tell a writer writing “under the influence” from a plagiarist because the former is happy to credit his influence. And he usually makes what he took his “own” - giving it their own characteristic twist and often making it better than the original.
The plagiarist doesn’t acknowledge influence, until he gets caught. And then he has a bunch of excuses.
The plagiarist also rarely commits his errors occasionally. If he did, it could probably be seen as an honest mistake. Most plagiarists are actually pathological in that respect. They’re like kleptomaniacs who must appropriate whatever takes their fancy. And eventually this is self-destructive, because, especially in the age of Internet, it’s easy enough to look up something and find out who took it from whom.
One example of the plagiarist as addict is Kingsley Amis, who although not known officially as a plagiarist, actually took a number of his best lines from his long-suffering wife, Hilly, who also put up with his compulsive philandering.
Oddly enough, Amis’s son, Martin, was the target of plagiarism himself, from another talented writer, Jacob Epstein, in a famous case in 1980. Martin Amis correctly diagnosed the matter as one of compulsion and self-destructiveness. The plagiarist is often signaling some deep-seated shame.
The most interesting angle of plagiarism is that it’s often done by talented, even brilliant writers. Wilde did it. So did Stephen Ambrose, the well-known historian. These are people you’d think would have no need to take good lines from some one else.
So why do they do it?
In some, as I said, it’s a pathology. It reflects an inner compulsion in the personality, a compulsion often replicated in other out-of-control behavior.
In others, it’s laziness or exhaustion of ideas. Plagiarism is an easy way to keep up a fading reputation for wit as a writer ages or otherwise loses his edge.
Another reason - one that I’ve observed often - is competitiveness and envy.
We’re accustomed to think of envy as something felt by have-nots for haves. More often, however, it’s felt by haves for other haves.
We all know the pretty woman with dozens of admirers who still has to steal the boyfriend of the plain Jane next door, even though she doesn’t want him. We all know the CEO who must make one more flashy deal, even if it will kill him, because he can’t let any deal go by him.
We know rich people who want to be even richer and famous people who crave even more fame and envy even the smallest portion of limelight that someone more obscure might enjoy.
And so also there are bright, talented people, who can’t stand that there may be somewhere, someone who also has some ability. A bit of attention elsewhere becomes a diminution of their own ability.
In these cases, plagiarism is an indication of a hollowness inside the person that nothing can fill.Do You Own A One-Liner ? (Updated July 28)
Update: A google search and a reply from Agora tells me that both my ex and Casey are mistaken and got the line from an old movie. It is something in the public domain. It’s not an old Czech saying, as I first thought, but an old Vietnamese saying.
This is hilarious. It also makes me feel a lot better.
***
Still, it does nothing to assuage me after so many problems of attribution.A reader raises the question: Can anyone really own a one-liner?
My reply:
Yes. On several grounds.
First: Ethics
You certainly should attribute things correctly, to the best of your knowledge.…
And you should correct an attribution if you find out you’re wrong. We teach this in every first year language class in the country and kids are failed when they plagiarize.Second. Damage to the reader and the other author.
In this case, the line is a SPECIFIC MEMORABLE LINE, NOT A PHRASE.
A line of this kind is much more than a random phrase - it’s a one-liner that fixes quite complex ideas into a memorable creation - the definition of what can be copyrighted.Oscar Wilde, for example, was very famous for pinching other people’s one-liners, even though he was perfectly capable of making themselves up on his own. There’s a famous incident in which Wilde hears a friend’s funny remark and says, “I wish I’d said that..” and the friend, from whom Wilde had taken a number of such lines, responds wearily, “You will, Oscar, you will.”
Suppose I go to a village and perform Shakespeare, passing it off as my own work - of course, I have done something wrong. No one in his right mind would say otherwise.
Or, if I passed off some clever line of Johnny Carson’s as my own? I gain a reputation for wit I couldn’t sustain on my own, and MORE importantly, if it’s not Carson but some unknown comedian, I make it impossible for the original creator to use that line as his own - thus stealing his own creation from him….or making him look like a liar if he insists it’s his own.
I don’t know how anyone could argue that this isn’t fraud. It is. It’s a violation of truth -
And it’s also a fraud committed on the reader or audience. It’s not libertarian at all.Third -
There are several shades of meaning to the notion of ownership that libertarians confuse. This confusion is exactly why I find a lot of libertarian theory bunkum.
Actually, you DON’T own intellectual property in the same way you own your shoes…you own it in a MUCH STRONGER way..which is precisely what copyright law recognizes. The relationship is much more intrinsic. That is why your intellectual property is not sold in the same way as your ordinary work product. You have to consciously give it up.
You also own a dog in a different way from the way you own your shoes, don’t you?
And a woman “owns” her womb or her fetus in another way. This is an area of immense confusion, and libertarian theory is often clueless about it..Fourthly, your ownership rights are stronger when you have agreed on and have actually discussed that particular line and whether your coauthor could appropriate it or not. That is certainly both personally and professionally incorrect.
By the way, I’m not claiming I created that one-line.
I think it was coined by my ex-husband… or, possibly, one of his friends. The two of them use it all the time in their circle. It might even be a folk phrase, for all I know. I am double-checking it right now, by contacting the friend, who lives in Czechoslovakia.
I happened to quote it to Mr. Bonner and he liked it and asked if he could use it. I said no, not without attribution. He agreed. This was before the book came out.
Now, suddenly two years down the road, his business partner and close friend uses it….after a whole two years of attribution problems and promotional issues. Recently, I’ve just ignored them because I believe this endless runaround is intended to make me look foolish for objecting.
As a single incident, it doesnt matter. But as only the latest example of a whole bunch, it certainly does bother me - not least, because it’s an appalling waste of time.
I notice that plagiarism is now absolutely pandemic on the net. Even well-known historians seem to be plagiarizing (Doris Goodwin, for one).
But that’s no proof of the innocence of the action.
It’s proof of the corruption of our intellectual life.Whatever it costs, it behooves me to object, and keep objecting, when someone does something that’s the moral equivalent of pilfering..
Libertarian Living: Cybervigilance..
More thoughts on becoming self-sufficient in an age of cybercrime, PR, propaganda and psyops…
The simple way to discredit someone’s claims is to make them look as if they are making up stuff. So one has to be careful when one sees annoying email or posts. They’re often bait intended to provoke. One clever trick I’ve seen is to send threatening email to someone from their own IP address to make it look as if he or she is sending it to themselves….
Thinking back over the years, I’ve seen a lot of these tricks, but today, more reflectively, I have to wonder if I should be so anxious after all. 0
In the end, there is often a strange justice that gives us a glimpse of some hidden eternity, despite the banality of the troubles of the moment.
I still remember the words of an irate boss to an unhappy employee at my first job. He let slip this - “I hope you DO sue…I’m just waiting for it…”.
In that moment, his target, a young, quick-tempered but very honest young man from somewhere near the Pennsylvania steel town of Donora, had heard all he needed to hear. He quickly and correctly walked away from the situation. He knew he was being set up. He was poor and needed the money, but his instinct told him that money could always be had; his soul, however, might not survive the situation.
I’m happy to report that the treacherous boss, who thought he’d won that encounter, lived a long while after. Long enough to find that indeed the mills of God grind exceeding fine, even if they take a while doing it. That area near Donora (like a good part of Pennsylvania) has long gone to seed.. and the boss and his company with them. The young man went on to run his own successful business in Texas….which is booming.
Of course, many a time, it doesn’t work out so well. Umpteen whistle-blowers and even people who were desperately trying NOT to blow the whistle but kept having it thrust into their mouths, have ended up on the wrong side of life from encounters with the unscrupulous.
But even so...even so…we really do not know the destiny that shapes our ends…(Note: this is a line so well-known that reference to its creator - Shakespeare - is unnecessary. I note it only so that critics trolling the blog for evidence that I might be committing the acts I charge others with will have to go away empty-handed. I love attributing people, because I love writing and respect the craft of it)
To return to my thoughts on cybervigilance.
IPs, emails, instant messages, can all be forged…or can be dismissed as forgeries. Which is why it’s necessary to have a little more than that - say, published articles, time-sheets, audiotapes, witnesses or other kinds of records to back up.
Audio-taping, which I tend to use also has its limitations. Some places in the US make it illegal, unless the other party is informed and agrees. Still, this isn’t so everywhere in the US, nor is it true in many other countries in Latin America or in Europe or in Asia. And having a third-party witness also helps.
Fortunately, an old friend of mine happens to be someone who’s worked in the US government’s defense systems, and he has some knowledge of cybercrime… so I’ve always been a little forewarned in these matters..
Others might not be so lucky.
Some guidelines:
*Make multiple copies of your tapes
*Print out your email records and save several copies
*Store your records with a trusted friend or attorney
*Keep records off the premises of your own house or person.
*Audiotapes have to be kept carefully or the sound can degenerate in quality
*Never let on that you have such detailed records.That can create more tension and provoke defensive reactions from your opponents.
*Any legitimate claims you have against them can also then be distorted to look extortionist. This is what happened to the whistle-blower who knew about Cindy McCain’s drug addiction and thefts from her own company. His legitimate claim for severance pay was made to look like extortion.
Libertarians believe that security is first of all our own responsibility. We owe it to ourselves to read the annals of crime and become aware of what people can..and have..done. Ignorance kills, as a lawyer I know likes to say.
Still, despite my pessimism, I have to add one last thing.
Truth by itself usually has a power that people underestimate. There is a certain ring to it that other honest people tend to pick up. Whether it’s something in the energy a person projects or whether it’s something in the body language, tone, or even sentence construction, dishonesty has a palpable presence. It leaves its mark in shifty eyes and gestures, in coarse expressions and tones. This has nothing to do with features or body parts or body types.
It’s the subtle spiritual quality of each human being that animals and children pick up faster than human beings.
Look at people as wholes, take in their physical features, but focus most sharply on the “feel” or “tone” you pick up. This tone will vary, because people vary in the signals - physical and emotional - that they give off. I don’t want to say this is fool-proof or that one’s instincts can’t sometimes be mistaken. They can. But it’s been my experience that the body has its own sensor system that we ignore at our peril. The times when I have got myself in trouble have always been times when I ignored warning bells from this sensor.
But there is another defense that works: trying to remember the best in the past…
There is always at least one person you can remember even from the worst encounters. And even among those who weren’t good, there’s always the spark of soul, however neglected and abused it is.
Whatever their past actions, each has the chance to redeem himself and seek from grace what he doesn’t merit on his own actions. It’s not the past and its misdeeds, however villainous, that bring us down. It’s the refusal to confess the misdeed, the refusal to make amends, the refusal to set right and reconcile.
Unfortunately, the legal system, which is what spawns the corporation to begin with, also makes it difficult for it to develop into something more human and less mechanical, something that is less a part of the “public spectacle” that “Mobs” decries.
Rather than allowing the human interaction that would resolve things, the corporate structure and the lawyers who keep it so, encourage- indeed, fatten off - pushing people further and further into the mechanism of litigation..
Or, more accurately, anticipated litigation.
The boss doesn’t run the company. It’s the company that runs the boss, as my co-author on “Mobs” likes to say.
In the end, the human being inside vanishes altogether…
New Jersey investigation Turns Up Money-Laundering Rabbis
A few months ago when I suggested that the Madoff business might have ties to extensive money laundering involving Jewish philanthropies and religious charities and that some of the money involved must have been from Israel - I was met with thundering silence. A couple of interviews of mine also got taken off the web.
But I wasn’t so far off was I? Here’s a sting that’s landed a whole raft of money laundering rabbis in Brooklyn and New Jersey…only one of the most corrupt states in the US. The Jon Corzine mentioned, by the way, is a former US senator and a Goldman Sachs honcho. Goldman people can be found at high levels through the New Jersey political system…
From the New York Times:
“The authorities laid out two separate schemes, one involving money laundering that led to rabbis and members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, where many of them have summer homes. The other dealt with political corruption and bribery and involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken, where the pace of development has been particularly intense in recent years.Linking the two schemes was the federal informant who was not named in court papers but whom people involved with the investigation identified as Solomon Dwek, a failed real estate developer and philanthropist who was arrested in May 2006 on charges of passing a bad $25 million check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J.
Early on, Mr. Dwek helped investigators penetrate an extensive network of money laundering that involved rabbis in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the Syrian Jewish community is based, and in Deal and Elberon, towns on the Jersey Shore.
Mr. Dwek, a well-known member of the Syrian Jewish community whose parents founded the Deal Yeshiva, never concealed that he was facing bank fraud charges, instead telling targets, who included three rabbis in Brooklyn and two in New Jersey, that he was bankrupt and trying to conceal his assets, according to people involved in the case. The targets, in turn, accepted bank checks Mr. Dwek made out to charities that they oversaw, deducted a fee, and returned the rest to him in cash.
Much of the cash they provided him came from Israel, and some of that in turn came from a Swiss banker, prosecutors said. All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said..”
Walter Williams Pardons White People
Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to
All Persons of European Descent
Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,
Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,
Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words,
Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny.
But, in the recognition that Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,
I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.
Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.Walter E. Williams, Gracious and Generous Grantor
Jim Bovard On the Jobs Boondoggle
A trenchant summing up of the uselessness of most jobs programs by Jim Bovard:
“Advocates claim that job programs give kids lessons that will change their lives, but the lessons are often of doubtful value. The Tulare County, Calif. summer-job program provides kids with “workshops on safety, ethics and life skills” — as well as “referrals to armed services.”
True, there are things more absurd than government agencies’ paying teens for a day to learn how to find and keep a job. But the highlight of a job-preparation “summit” in Orlando, Fla., was a motivational speaker named Marvellous Mark, whose slogan is “Opportunity Rocks.” According to Workforce Central Florida (a successor to state unemployment offices, which also dispense federal job-training funds in the area), Marvellous Mark’s presentation “is based on this simple premise: The qualities successful rock stars have are also found in every successful worker.”
The key thing kids should learn from their first jobs is to produce enough value that someone will voluntarily pay them a wage. But the goal for summer-job programs is often simply to make kids feel good about themselves. Many programs bend over backward to avoid firing kids, regardless of their behavior. The D.C. program last year continued paying almost 2,000 kids long after they had achieved a record of perfect absenteeism.
Politicians brag that government-funded summer jobs helps kids get a foot into the labor market. However, the federal hiring criteria for this year’s program could affix a scarlet letter on youths later seeking real private jobs. Most kids who receive a federally subsidized summer job must possess at least one “barrier” to employment, such as being a school dropout, pregnant, criminal offender, runaway, homeless or deficient in “basic skills.”The precedents don’t bode well. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences reported that the summer-job program failed to reduce the crime rate among participants. As for the economics, a Health and Human Services Department-funded study of summer-job programs in the 1980s by two Harvard University professors concluded that “roughly 40% of jobs simply displace private employment” for minority youth.
Discouraging History
Forty years ago, the General Accounting Office condemned federal summer-job programs because youth “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” In 1979, GAO reported that the vast majority of urban teens in the program “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced, or realistic ideas on expectations in the real world of work were not fostered.” Persistent negative evaluations eventually convinced Congress to terminate federal funding in the late 1990s.
The federal government has run more than 100 different job-training programs since the 1960s — dozens of them targeted at youth — but has consistently betrayed people who trusted Uncle Sam to give them marketable skills. An Urban Institute study found that participation in the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1974-’83) produced “significant earnings losses for young men of all races.” And a 1992 U.S. Labor Department study concluded that federal training “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.”
There is no reason to imagine that the revived summer-job programs will be less harmful than previous ones. “Make work” and “fake work” are a grave disservice to young people. American teenagers should not be sacrificed on an altar of political photo opportunities….”
Read the rest of this at Jim Bovard’s blog.
My Comment:
Bovard documents his point pretty well in this post. So my comment is going to be more general.
Massaging self-esteem is the logical result when society as a whole refuses to allow “value judgment” of actions and behavior. You might think that this refusal to judge is confined to those liberals who simply can’t bring themselves to notice the bad behavior that welfare programs often incentivize. You’d be wrong. A lot of libertarians subscribe to some form of it.
For them, making a judgment is confused with “being judgmental,” in the negative sense. We are told that this judgmentalism is what’s wrong with society.
Actually, and this is often the case, we have too much of what we think we lack, and what we think we have too much of turns out to be completely lacking.
We lack judgment ourselves and we discourage its cultivation in our young people. I won’t spend this post explaining where and how this peculiar attitude developed. Some of it can be blamed on the New Age with its strange cross-breeding of neo-Hindu/neo-Buddhist thinking with American pragmatism and home-spun prosperity gospels..This school of thought refuses to believe in the existence of material facts, unpleasant limitations, or real physical bodies. Everything is mental. Variations of this mindset abound in New Age literature - a perfect illustration being the block-buster movie about the “Law of Attraction” - “The Secret.”
The New Age minus the discipline of systematic thought and rational ethics gives us the kind of mentality which produced credit derivatives - debt forever with never a creditor paid back. In fact, the whole credit bubble perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with “non-judgmentalism”. It was telling (to me) that many on the left, who until then had never had any use for Jesus or the Gospel, were quick to trot him out when it came to “forgive us our debts.”Non-judgmentalism gives us value-free education, jobs without productive work, journalism as stenography, off-balance sheets and on-balance debt, contrition as public performance, and every other economic and non-economic sin that has brought the country to its knees.
The topic bears much more examination, but I’d rather wander out onto the rambla just now and watch the waves - looking rather brown and muddy today - beat against the city. Living next to the sea has its uses. The city, man’s puny hive, is put in its proper place against the infinite, rhythmic chaos of nature - a chaos of higher order and meaning than anything humans can create. The waves have no pretensions. They suck at the beach, and grind down the sand and the rocks. There’s no escape from the tides - now in, now out.
Only man would try to create - or think it worth creating - a tide that always came in and never went out….
Welcome to the Poorgeoisie…
A clever piece on the latest in Depression fashion:
“Falcinelli describes the sensibility currently in vogue—and certainly on display in his restaurants—as a throwback to pre-industrial times, when regular folks actually knew how to make things with their hands. “People are always like, ‘What’s the dope shit right now?’” he says. “Well, the dope shit now is 120 years ago.” So cure your own boar prosciutto. Grow a beard. Go back to the land behind your remodeled seven-figure townhouse.
The retro aesthetic carries over to hooch, which would seem as recessionproof as any consumable. Good-bye, $300 worth of bottle-service vodka in the back corner of a velvet-rope warehouse; hello, $300 worth of single-malt-and-Chartreuse Depression-era cocktails mixed by a mustachioed dude wearing an arm garter. “Sure, there can be a certain level of snobbery,” says Alex Day, who has opened a string of thriving high-end speakeasylike lounges around the country, including Death & Co. in New York. “The bankers who come here never identify themselves as bankers—they don’t like to talk about it.”
So take heed, deposed hedgies aching to splurge with what’s left of your severances: Let that layoff beard get as tangled and bushy as you want—Jenulence makes a nifty hazelnut-and-cedarwood-infused conditioner for a mere $28—then spend away. It’s okay: You’re part of the poorgeoisie—no one will say a word…”
Lawsuit Reveals V-Tech Clinic Director Had Cho´s Records at House
Virginia Tech was in the news today. Cho´s mental health records turned up at the home of the director of Virginia Tech´s student clinic - where they´d been for two years while people were searching for them. It´s taken a lawsuit to find them.
It´s interesting that the Kaine commission never turned them up. It didn´t even investigate the director.
As readers of this blog know, I was the first person to suspect V Tech of gross negligence and a cover-up of what happened. I also noted that it was highly likely that Cho was being given drugs and that there was more to his mental history, which the university was probably concealing.
(You can check out my articles on this site, as well as my blog posts, through the search tab).
It´s satisfying to be vindicated after I got all that nasty mail for “attacking” ‘nice’ university administrators.
“Nice” isn´t good. Good takes a whole lot more effort .
“Why would he (Miller) take any student mental health records to his home at any time, and why that student?” Robert T. Hall said.
“It certainly is a question of whether there is more to the Seung-Hui Cho mental health history than we’ve been told,” Hall said.
Kaine said he was dismayed that it took two years to find the records.
“That is part of the investigation that I am very interested in and, of course, I’m very concerned about that,” Kaine said.
The discovery calls into question the thoroughness of the ongoing criminal probe and the findings of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, a commission Kaine appointed to review the catastrophe, one victim’s relative said.
“Deception comes to my mind in my first response,” said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured.
“To say it doesn’t make sense is an injustice,” she said. “It gives me the impression: ‘What else are they hiding?’”
While a large part of the shooting investigation focused on how university officials and law enforcement responded following the first reports of two deaths in a dormitory, family members of victims have also inquired how the troubled Cho slipped through the cracks at university counseling.
Miller was not listed among the more than 200 people interviewed by the panel. The leader of the investigation, former Virginia State Police Superintendent Gerald Massengill, said Wednesday that investigators interviewed Miller’s successor at Cook Counseling Center, Dr. Christopher Flynn, but not Miller….”
Funny, huh?
Check out Psych Time Line, one of scores of posts on V-Tech. You can get some of the posts by googling V-Tech and Lila Rajiva directly.
The rest can be viewed via the search function. You can also just search the archives for April 2007 and the months thereafter.
I contacted a couple of lawyers who were interested in the case and offered them the information on my blog. One of the victims´relatives was also in contact with me, because she felt strongly that what was happening was a cover-up. I thought so too, but I was involved with financial writing at the time and I couldn´t follow up. Besides, I was sure the students´lawsuits would turn up new evidence.
Which is what happened.There was also another reason I left the story alone…but it´s not something I want to post on publicly.
Thoughts on a Windy Day
Another of those cold windy days when you promise yourself you´ll go out… and then the thought of what it will take to battle the buses, the mad motorists, and the wind overcomes you.
I contented myself with sitting on the couch, wrapped up, sipping mate and tapping out a piece on the recent ethics charges levied against Sarah Palin. I didn´t read the charges in any detail. I don´t care to. At this point, it´s clear that every media hack in the country enjoys sticking a knife into her. It´s not pretty. Since when did small-town flute-playing moms provoke such visceral dislike? I did´t care for Ms. Palin as a candidate for Veep myself. But she´s no worse than many others. And if you think she had no experience, then what about….oh well, never mind.
Sotomayor is another topic not worth bothering about. The whole debate over how to interpret the constitution is so stale I wonder it´s not on sale at a cheap supermarket. Under half-baked products.
Sotomayor is not going to rend the fabric of the nation. That´s already been done. She´ll probably go along in that muddled way that passes for being a ‘thoughtful´justice.
And that´s as it should be.
I´m all for a period of doing what´s been done. And if the only conservation going on is the conservation of liberal achievements, then so be it. Continuity is still a good thing. The settled law of the land is still the settled law of the land. We´ve suffered from enough revolution- through- the- courts for me to believe that conservatives should adopt the same judicial activisim in turn.
Libertarians sometimes like to talk about radical capitalism. But to me, capitalism isn´t radical in its essence. It´s conservative. What it conserves is time. The frequent observation that capitalism ¨speeds” up time (you´ll find it in much modern political theory) is true enough at one level. But at another level, capitalism is backward-looking, not just forward looking. It concretizes our past actions, preserves them.
There are many libertarians who like to call themselves radicals, but I´m not one of them. I like to call myself a tory-bohemian. A traditionalist as to forms. An agnostic and skeptic as to substance.
This makes me fond of style…convention. Style is not everything, but it´s more than the left realizes. Style is our conversation with the past.
The past is important to me. Very important. And the kind of capitalism that uproots the past and overturns everything in its path is only one face of capitalism — it´s corporatism, gigantism - the out growth of state intervention.
I like to think that without massive state intervention, capitalism would emerge as something entirely different.
To return to Sotomayor. The court´s been political for decades. Pretending this is something new and not to be tolerated is simply silly. Let the courts go where they wish.
Pat Buchanan gained nothing by opposing Sotomayor for being an activist. I saw him debate Rachel Maddow on her show, and Maddow cleverly limited her argument to repeating that 108 out of 110 Supreme Court justices had been white males. She knew that one fact was enough.
And she´s right. Demographics have changed, and the court is expected to reflect demographics. Buchanan argued that justices are supposed to be picked for their mastery of legal analysis. But anyone who´s read case law knows how convoluted the arguments are. They´re mostly political…and sophistical. And often bogus.
So, arguing for some kind of mastery of bogus ¨legal science¨ isn´t nearly as effective as arguing for what the population wants. And Rachel Maddow is a smart cookie who knows how to argue effectively. It´s as simple as that.
Conservatives would do better to focus on society and forget the courts.
MindBody: Science Lends Credence to Existence of Auras
In the news:
“To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.
Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight - the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body’s miniscule light production.
Since this faint light is linked with the body’s metabolism, this finding suggests cameras that can spot the weak emissions could help spot medical conditions, said researcher Hitoshi Okamura, a circadian biologist at Kyoto University in Japan….”
More here.
My Comment:
And when yogis, religious teachers, alternative practitioners, spiritualists and psychics for centuries described and even drew auras, they were laughed at and called charlatans and liars out to make a buck.
Many people have trained themselves to pick up on these sorts of emanations. I had a friend, a medical intuitive, who accurately diagnosed diseases from them.
Anyone with a little intuition or even a connection to another human being can pick up thoughts, emotions, images, and ideas from them. I’ve had close friends whose minds I could literally read. It wasn’t a faculty within my control. But I was aware of it. There is nothing “supernatural” about this, as aggressive materialists like to argue. It’s simply the use of faculties that most people ignore, scorn, or suppress. Animals use them. “Primitive” people (who are often far more advanced than the “civilized” on many counts) use them. Artists use them. Great scientists rely on them.
It’s only the chattering class that shapes popular culture with its own naive ideas of ’science’ that seems oblivious to the existence of these dimensions of our existence.
Time for their brainwashing to end.
Activism: Reclaiming Freedom
I thought the two links below needed to be visible, so I am reposting them from a comment from Non Entity for you to check out:
ObscuredTruth.com
FreeTalkLive.comAnd of course, check out the Free State project in New Hampshire.
China Cracks Down On Web
In the news:
“BEIJING – Several Chinese Internet sites and parts of popular Web portals went offline Tuesday amid tightening controls that have already left mainland Web users without access to Facebook, Twitter and other well-known social networking sites.
China stepped up its crackdown on social networking sites in March over online allegations surrounding the treatment of Tibetans, and the blockages continued through the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and the recent ethnic riots in Xinjiang.
The harsh measures are also thought to be part of efforts to ensure social stability ahead of the 60th anniversary of communist rule on Oct. 1, when Beijing will mark 60 years of communist rule….”
Police Arrest Harvard Scholar In House
In the news, the arrest of a well-known professor of African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates, who broke into his own house after a long trip abroad:
“Gates said he turned over his driver’s license and Harvard ID — both with his photos — and repeatedly asked for the name and badge number of the officer, who refused. He said he then followed the officer as he left his house onto his front porch, where he was handcuffed in front of other officers, Gates said in a statement released by his attorney, fellow Harvard scholar Charles Ogletree, on a Web site Gates oversees, TheRoot.com
He was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge after police said he “exhibited loud and tumultuous behavior.” He was released later that day on his own recognizance. An arraignment was scheduled for Aug. 26.
Gates, 58, also refused to speak publicly Monday, referring calls to Ogletree.
“He was shocked to find himself being questioned and shocked that the conversation continued after he showed his identification,” Ogletree said.”
My Comment:
The initial questioning seems alright to me. It was natural for a bystander to wonder about two men (no matter of what race) trying to break into a house. I’d hope any neighbor of mine would do the same, if I were away.
But what happened after that seems odd. After Gates produced his ID, why was he treated so discourteously? The story about “disorderly” conduct also seems shady. It would be natural for someone to be upset in those circumstances. And if Gates was obliged to show ID in his own house, why did the officers decline to show theirs? Why arrest him?
All this sounds like typical bullying to me.
PS:
I changed the title of this post - since the first title seemed to imply a racial motive and the more I look at this, the more it seems like the usual police officiousness.
A friend of mine experienced something like this a few months ago. The police showed up at his door (without a warrant), demanding that he find an employee of his for them. The employee had not made a child-support payment, they claimed. It was - unbelievably - a TWENTY-year old mistake that had suddenly showed up on the computer after all that time.
My friend, being less than docile by nature, refused. He told them - correctly - that it wasn’t his job to keep track of people for the government. If they wanted him so badly, they could get him themselves. At that point, the cops pulled out guns and barged in, telling my friend they’d arrest him if he didn’t make the call.
Well, he made the call. But he made another one after - to his attorney, who told him to be cooperative but keep notes.
Then it turned out the employee HAD made the payment, only the woman to whom it was made didn’t put it down (or put down less than was made) in order to keep collecting her welfare checks. The employee was a very hard-working and skilled African-American man who owned his own home and had turned his life around from drug-addiction and accidents that had left him crippled and partially blind. He was dragged out of his home into a downtown court office in broad daylight, manacled and shackled at the leg like a dangerous murderer.
It was humiliating and enraging to watch. Innocence is no defense sometimes. The law has its own momentum and once things start moving, anyone who gets in the way of police or prosecutorial ambition (or corruption) can expect to be rolled over.In many cases, the only appropriate response is to take what I like to call, el haj (pilgrimage).
Or as some of my young friends say, make like a banana….split.
US-India Nuke Deal Gives US Right to Monitor Use
In the news:
“The nuclear deal would give American companies exclusive rights to sell nuclear power plants at specified locations in India — an opportunity that could be worth $10 billion for U.S. sellers. A second deal, which officials said they hoped would also be ready for signing Monday, is known as an end-use monitoring agreement that would give the U.S. the right to ensure that U.S. arms sold to India are used for their intended purpose and that the technology is not resold or otherwise provided to third countries.”
My Comment:
I haven’t been following the Indian press, so I hesitate to write about this, but this is all bad news to my ears. Any deal with the US - with its premise of increased cooperation between the two countries in the so-called War on Terror - is a mixed bag at best. And when the deal comes with carrots (more nukes from the US) and sticks (caps on carbon emissions as part of the new climate control agenda, pushed by those environmental philanthropists, Goldman Sachs) that are equally repulsive and globalist in intent, and is accompanied by a nicely-timed and comprehensive confession (?) from the lone Mumbai gunman to survive the attacks on Jewish and Indian targets in Mumbai last year - I have to wonder. How neat.
India is giving up its autonomy. For what?
The country that side-stepped Goldman’s financial nukes and stopped them blowing up her banks is now going to let the real thing in?
India is NOT a super-power. It’s a potential power — with vast social and economic problems that no amount of technological advancement can completely hide.
A nuclear buildup in India will be a huge drain on its economy - nuclear power is simply too expensive for a developing nation.
Even worse, it will be a surrender of Indian autonomy. US intrusiveness toward even its so-called allies is well-documented.
And a free hand for the US prosecution of the WoT in Pakistan means increased instability on the Indo- Pak border. That will spill over into further attacks on Indian soil.
Which will exacerbate the violence.
Which will entail more government control.
I see nothing good coming from this…
Bee-Positive Action
A young German here in Buenos Aires alerted me to an unfolding story I’d not heard of - the decline in the bee population in the US and UK, attributed by some to the genetic modification of crops, by others to the use of pesticides. Other experts blame cell-phones. Or stress from migration.
At Natural Choices, one writer, Ladd Smith, describes the crisis:
“A topic of real concern to gardeners across the country is the recent major decline in the honeybee population. Referred to as “colony collapse disorder (CCD),” it was first reported in the U.S. in October 2006 and spread rapidly, with beekeepers reporting losses of between 50 percent to 90 percent of bees. While the exact causes are not known, there are a variety of theories, including pesticide use, migratory stress and the bees’ immune system failure.”
The article offers the following suggestions:
1. Plant a bee garden (this takes a wide variety of plants and shade)
2. Create an insectary (don’t use chemicals pesticides that kill insects)
3. Add Orchard Mason bees (non-aggressive)Atlas Flubbed
Just to rile up market fundamentalists, here’s a sharp jab from a lefty blog at “going Galt” - the fantasy nurtured by some naive libertarians that were capitalists (theorized as financiers) to take a day off, society would collapse.
(The reference to Galt is a reference to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a book about which I have mixed feelings. Rand is a far more complex and interesting figure than either her defenders or her critics seem to realize..)
The quote below confuses genuine capitalists and the predator financiers currently in power, but it packs some punch:
“Have you heard of the documentary, “A Day Without A Mexican?” You know why it’s not called Atlas Shrugged? Because the people who made it aren’t utterly detached from reality. Because doing actual work gives one perspective. Because spending the day going from rooftop to rooftop in a helicopter to chew the fat with other geniuses could lead you to believe you’re the glue that holds the entire planet together. People who don’t have private islands have a more realistic idea of what they do to contribute to society.
You know why the uber-wealthy don’t go on strike? Because they know there are millions of smart, hardworking people ready to take their places…..”
My Comment
What I’d like to know is why more people don’t vote with their pocket books against this predator class. For instance, I try to avoid using Microsoft Word because of my antipathy to Gates’ monopolistic practices.The issue is not capitalism, ultimately. It’s monopoly and the absence of competition. In other words, it’s the absence of real free markets that’s the reason why “capitalism” is now synonymous with predation — and why rants like this are increasingly persuasive.
Monsanto’s Toxic Path in South America
Agribusiness titan Monsanto is the goliath every activist would like to slay:
Its patented Round Up brand of herbicide is ubiquitous in farmland world over, but new research suggests the product poses a danger to human health. [Note: an earlier version of this post dropped the word herbicide by accident so it read as though soy contained the chemical. I corrected it but the google cache still shows the old version in the header. Apologies. I often think I've corrected something and saved it and find that the save didn't actually take place...]
From Marie Trigona at America’s Program
“A study released by an Argentine scientist earlier this year reports that glyphosate, patented by Monsanto under the name “Round Up,” causes birth defects when applied in doses much lower than what is commonly used in soy fields.
The study was directed by a leading embryologist, Dr. Andres Carrasco, a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. In his office in the nation’s top medical school, Dr. Carrasco shows me the results of the study, pulling out photos of birth defects in the embryos of frog amphibians exposed to glyphosate. The frog embryos grown in petri dishes in the photos looked like something from a futuristic horror film, creatures with visible defects—one eye the size of the head, spinal cord deformations, and kidneys that are not fully developed.“We injected the amphibian embryo cells with glyphosate diluted to a concentration 1,500 times than what is used commercially and we allowed the amphibians to grow in strictly controlled conditions.” Dr. Carrasco reports that the embryos survived from a fertilized egg state until the tadpole stage, but developed obvious defects which would compromise their ability to live in their normal habitats.
Pointing to the color photos spread on his desk, Dr. Carrasco says, “On the side where the contaminated cell was injected you can see defects in the eye and defects in the cartilage.”
For the past 15 months, Dr. Carrasco’s research team documented embryos’ reactions to glyphosate. Embryological study is based on the premise that all vertebrate animals share a common design during the development stages. This accepted scientific premise means that the study indicates human embryonic cells exposed to glyphosate, even in low doses, would also suffer from defects.
“When a field is fumigated by an airplane, it’s difficult to measure how much glysophate remains in the body,” says Dr. Carrasco. “When you inject the embryonic cell with glysophate, you know exactly how much glysophate you are putting into the cell and you have a strict control.”
Glyphosate is the top selling herbicide in the world and is widely used on soy crops in Argentina.
Monoculture soy is grown on more than 42 million acres of fields across Argentina and sprayed with more than 44 million gallons of glyphosate annually. It is part of a technological package sold by Monsanto that includes Round Up Ready seeds GM to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate. This allows growers to fumigate directly onto the GM soy seed, killing nearby weeds without killing the crop. In the winter, crops are sprayed to kill off weeds and seeds are then planted without having to plow the soil, a process commonly referred to as “no-till farming.” Nearly, 95% of the 47 million tons of soy grown in Argentina in 2007 was genetically modified, adopting the Round Up ready technology marketed by Monsanto.The study on the top-selling agrochemical has alarmed policymakers, so much so that Dr. Carrasco has received anonymous threats and industry leaders demanded access to his laboratory immediately following the study’s release. Industry leader Monsanto wouldn’t talk to the Americas Program for this story, but in a press release on its website, the company says that “glyphosate is safe.”
My Comment:
There - the cat’s out of the bag. Now you know why I’m down here. South America has the last remaining land masses suitable for agriculture, the greatest biodiversity, the richest vegetation, the richest fauna….
No wonder one of the most predatory and rapacious corporations in the world is also here…
Marquez on Disbelieving in God
“I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.”
– Gabriel Garcia MarquezCodex Alimantarius Disinformation?
A few months ago I blogged a youtube video by one Rima Laibow on globalist control of food.
But recently I came across this article by Robert Singer at Dissident Voice, which argues persuasively that Laibow is part of a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting food security advocates by peddling exaggerated accusations against Monsanto, the main agri-culprit of the New World Order.
Here’s the money part from the Singer piece:
“The Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF) originated the Linn Cole articles.
The Organic Consumers Association and other legitimate heath advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years, and the criticism is universally the same: Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles such as Linn Cole’s?The answers start with the NSF founders, husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me explain. I’m not saying they’re doing sloppy research, and I’m not saying they’re being overzealous. What I am saying is that they are working, for pay, to spread false information and to make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.
My conclusion is Stubblebine and Laibow are using the Natural Solutions Foundation—and Linn Cole—to undermine the health freedom community by spreading disinformation about HR 875.
Stubblebine is a retired U.S. Army major general who designed AEGIS, “a major Homeland Security private initiative.” Given this background and his ties to the U.S. intelligence community, eyebrows were raised in the health freedom community in early 2005 when, along with Laibow, Stubblebine launched the NSF website and began to promote his wife as an expert on Codex Alimentarius, the commission working to adopt strict new guidelines for vitamin and mineral supplements.
Dr. Rath, founder of the 4.dr-rath-foundation, a legitimate health advocacy group, and the author of A Modern Major General Exposed? writes: “It quickly became apparent to experienced health freedom observers that Stubblebine either hadn’t done his homework properly, or that he and Laibow were intentionally spreading inaccurate and misleading material about Codex and other related dietary supplement issues via their website and press releases.
Moreover, despite repeated concerns being expressed by more experienced health freedom observers, Stubblebine and Laibow continued to disseminate this material, and pointedly ignored requests to remove it from their website.”
In my “Scared to CodeX Death” article, I refer to Dr. Rima Laibow when I write: “And although the effects of Codex are devastating and will result in humans dying from starvation and preventable diseases from under-nutrition, any claims that WHO or FAO have released epidemiological projections are untrue.”
Dr. Rima Laibow, to the consternation of those fighting Codex, is the source of the untrue claims about the “epidemiological projections” in her YouTube video “Codex Alimentarious & Nutricide.”
The NSF pair want to discredit HR 875, because when the cleverly worded HR 875 finally goes to committee, Monsanto will unleash a massive PR campaign aimed at, guess who? Linn Cohen-Cole and the other lefties who, according to Monsanto, are spreading false and misleading information about an innocent food safety bill.Later, the headlines such as “HR 875 doesn’t criminalize small agriculture” will warn the population about health freedom activists who, by spreading misinformation, are threatening our food safety and free speech. Then, HR 875 and the real threat, HR 859, are passed without fanfare.
….My Comment:
I know Stubblebine from my research into the CIA and mind control. He’s a leading figure in Jon Ronson’s “The Men Who Stare at Goats” - a book I cited in The Language of Empire. Unfortunately, I came across the book rather late in writing LOE, and was able to use it only tangentially. It’s written in an apolitical narrative style - which both gives it its power and also defuses its political content. (It’s no surprise to me that Ronson ended up with a gig in entertainment TV in Britain. The powers that be would no doubt prefer that any one who connects those sorts of dots ends up talking about aliens and shape-shifting lizards).
And why do CIA men stare at goats? Because yogic texts tell us that if enough psychic energy is brought to bear on a living creature, it can be killed. And the CIA apparently thought goats were the place to start practicing so useful a skill.
All this is not bizarre to anyone who has a long standing interest in parapsychology, as I do. In my teens, I spent a lot of time experimenting with lucid dreaming, color-sensing, psychokinesis, and all sorts of other “mind-control” phenomena. At one point, I taught extension classes in what is sometimes called transpersonal psychology. Some of my best reading was drawn from books about the CIA’s research in that area. And the CIA was itself playing catch up with the KGB in that area.
Sacrifice and Environmental Ethics
Many libertarians seem to think that environmental concern is “liberal” or “leftist” and that “having dominion” over the world implies that human beings can deal with the natural world indifferently….or even rapaciously.
They forget the notion of “stewardship” which is pervasive in the teachings of Jesus. Libertarians must balance the language of “ownership” (which they rightly defend) with this equally valuable language of “stewardship.”
Individual responsibility includes the dimension of “responsibility for...”
Reading the late Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the great historians of Christianity, I came across the Patriarch of Constantinople’s address on environmental ethics in 2002:
“We are all painfully aware of the fundamental obstacle that confronts us in our work for the environment. It is precisely this: how are we to move from theory to action, from words to deeds? We do not lack technical scientific information about the nature of the present ecological crisis. We know, not simply what needs to be done, but also how to do it. Yet, despite all this information, unfortunately little is actually done. It is a long journey from the head to the heart, and an even longer journey from the heart to the hands.
How shall we bridge this tragic gap between theory and practice, between ideas and actuality? There is only one way: through the missing dimension of sacrifice. We are thinking here of a sacrifice that is not cheap but costly: “I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing” (2 Samuel 24:24). There will be an effective, transforming change in the environment if, and only if, we are prepared to make sacrifices that are radical, painful, and genuinely unselfish. If we sacrifice nothing, we shall achieve nothing. Needless to say, as regards both nations and individuals, so much more is demanded from the rich than from the poor. Nevertheless, all are asked to sacrifice something for the sake of their fellow humans.
Sacrifice is primarily a spiritual issue and less an economic one. In speaking about sacrifice, we are talking about an issue that is not technological but ethical. Indeed, environmental ethics is specifically a central theme of this present symposium. We often refer to an environmental crisis; but the real crisis lies not in the environment but in the human heart. The fundamental problem is to be found not outside but inside ourselves, not in the ecosystem but in the way we think.
The root cause of all our difficulties consists in human selfishness and human sin. What is asked of us is not greater technological skill but deeper repentance, metanoia, in the literal sense of the Greek word, which signifies “change of mind.” The root cause of our environmental sin lies in our self-centeredness and in the mistaken order of values, which we inherit and accept without any critical evaluation. We need a new way of thinking about our own selves, about our relationship with the world and with God. Without this revolutionary “change of mind,” all our conservation projects, however well-intentioned, will remain ultimately ineffective. For, we shall be dealing only with the symptoms, not with their cause. Lectures and international conferences may help to awaken our conscience, but what is truly required is a baptism of tears…..
…An essential element of any sacrifice is that it should be willing and voluntary. That which is extracted from us by force and violence, against our will, is not a sacrifice. Only what we offer in freedom and in love is truly a sacrifice. There is no sacrifice without love. When we surrender something unwillingly, we suffer loss; but when we offer something voluntarily, out of love, we only gain……
Pasternak on the Power of Truth
“What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.”
Chutzpah Watch: Goldman Complains About Indian Corporate Governance
“Goldman Sachs has raised concerns about the standards of corporate governance in India by accusing the Government of siphoning off $20 billion (£14.1 billion) from India’s largest oil company without consulting other shareholders.
Goldman said that the funds had been diverted by the state-controlled Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) via “ad-hoc cash withdrawals” over five years to subsidise loss-making government-owned refiners.
“Despite repeated objections raised by investors and more recently by independent directors on ONGC’s board, there has not been headway on this issue,” Goldman analysts said.
“The market appears to have got used to this practice by ONGC promoters [controlling shareholder], while similar issues in privately run companies would likely cause serious concern.”
Times Online, March 9, 2009
My Comment:
Now that I’ve finished choking myself laughing at this piece of unmitigated gall, let me say it’s high time the rest of the world gives the finger to the moral sermons dished out by Goldman Sachs and and its backer, US Government Inc. (aka “the international community”).
India has plenty of corruption, no doubt about it. But it’s out there in the open, where it’s easy enough to spot.
And, the Indian government doesn’t routinely get to draw up lists of who’s corrupt and who isn’t.
The US government, on the other hand, poses as God’s viceroy on earth.
About time it was treated as just as another banana republic….a little more bananas than most of them.
Its citizens and scribes ought to get off their high horse too.
They’ve nothing to be proud of recently.
And that’s the mildest thing I can say.
More Dollar Decline Imminent?
I’m not any place where I can blog easily but I had to post this paragraph from Jim Willie’s newsletter on a possible dollar debacle in the coming week/weeks…
I’m hearing that US embassies are being instructed to buy the local currency (?) -Is this really in the works, is it scare-mongering, gossip, disinformation…?
Who knows, but it’s worth posting.
Be alert.
I note that gold, after looking like it would correct, now seems to have gone back up and the dollar is teetering again…as it’s done many a time.
I’m ready to move if I have to.
Down here in the pampas, swine flu is rampant. People go in and out of Buenos Aires with masks. The portenos don’t have the best reputation on the continent, and this is making it worse. Everyone is holding their breath anyway - with or without masks.
The winds are beginning to blow in from the delta, as they always do at this time of year. It feels like brisk spring weather in the US. Prices in the city are high but everyone is waiting for something to happen. Don’t buy now, says an expat blogger who watches real estate. Everything’s about to come down. People are pushing up the prices to squeeze out the last penny before things crash.
Don’t have anything to do with them, says a Brazilian businessman. “Them” means Argentines - who are said to be arrogant…touchy….corrupt…drama queens…
One the other hand, everyone likes the Brazilians. They’re the Italians of South America.
In Argentina, they have farms and food…and they cry, goes a Brazilian saying. In Brazil, they don’t have food. And they dance.
It’s true.I had lunch at a restaurant on the banks of the Rio dela Plata with an American - a just-retired attorney from Virginia - who is down here looking for property. He was talking about vaccinations. Some of his theories were definitely paranoid - but it’s the kind of paranoia that’s plausible these days. He wanted to drop his American citizenship, but was afraid it would raise a red flag. He talked about the exit tax and how it prevented the wealthy from leaving. It was the first time in my life I was grateful for not being a financial success.
I suggested that the purloined letter strategy might be the best. Hide right out in the open, in the most obvious place. We discussed what that would be. It was a toss up between getting a job at Goldman Sachs, working for the Pentagon, or emigrating to some member of the Axis of Evil.
He had fish. I had a salad - an odd choice in this meat-saturated culture. But I’m on a budget. Wandering the globe on your own steam would be ruinous without one. For me, a night at a restaurant means a couple of days of rice and beans to make up for it. I haven’t couch-surfed yet, but it may yet be in the cards, if this trip gets prolonged.
Jim Willie:
“The globe is losing patience with leadership and management of the USGovt ship at sea. They simply refuse to offer a credible solution to the primary keynote crack in the hull, falling housing prices and cratered mortgages, each of which work their destructive magic to wreck the banks. The home loan modifications are a farce, a travesty not designed to modify but rather to frame a series of loan forbearances. The motive for not fixing the mortgage mess is mysterious to the masses, but not here. Jackass claims have been consistent, that effective loan modifications would alter the underlying mortgage bonds drastically. The Powerz wanted enough time delay to rejigger as many mortgage bonds as possible into new securities, thus rendering impossible any legal challenges to the original mortgage package process that was loaded with fraud to the hilt. Any drastic alteration of mortgage bonds would reveal vast fraud of two types. Many mortgage bonds did not have clearly certificate property titles with careful registrations. And then the coyote ugly part, that many mortgage bonds were simply counterfeits sold into a frenzy filled credit market designed to process the most vile vermin on paper. The USDollar is vulnerable here and now, as a new wave of bank losses is imminent from numerous types of mortgages along with some basic types. Let’s see if the grapevine is correct, that the USDollar will begin to see a trashing initiative starting this weekend, out of Asia. They must be impatient beyond description. This autumn is expected to see some rather tumultuous events unfold, as the US financial structures are breaking across most of its ramparts even as loyalty to it is fading like a mist. There will be no return to the US of yesteryear, only a tragic march.”
How to Diversify Internationally
Some good advice at Lew Rockwell on the need to diversify internationally from investing guru, Doug Casey:
“Q: Sounds like another good reason to move to Argentina. But what other investment implications are there?
Doug: Things haven’t changed much: buy gold, buy silver, and diversify your assets internationally. That’s the basic step. After you have a firm foundation with those things, you can start looking at speculations. Use the chaos to your advantage.
Q: Given how Vietnam-like wars tend to push the states that wage them towards bankruptcy (this happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well), is there a particularly leveraged way to short the government’s solvency of the sort you write about in The Casey Report.
Doug: Shorting the dollar and shorting long-term Treasury bonds are fantastic long-term bets. That’s especially so for shorting long-term Treasury bonds, as interest rates are still very close to their all-time lows, being artificially suppressed by Federal Reserve buying. That’s a one-way street where you can get huge leverage on your money, if you have a time frame of a couple years. That’s the best single bet I can think of…”
My Comment:
This is good advice. But it probably needs to be qualified quite a bit for general readers. Casey is a multimillionaire speculator and investor, with assets in Argentina acquired a few years ago. In other words, he invested earlier in the cycle and at a level a middle-class person certainly can’t afford. To take this advice without qualification could be disastrous.
For example, someone who sold the dollar in the fall of 2007, when it was at its nadir, would now be considerably worse- off. And gold looks headed for a short-term correction. Timing is always important. While it might not be a good idea to get in and out for short term profits unless you know what you’re doing, picking dips to buy is vital if you don’t want to suffer pain.
In my modest experience, Argentina is not the safest bet for ordinary people, outside owning a short-term rental in the Buenos Aires area. In Latin America, I can think of several places, from Panama to Chile, that are safer places for investors, even if you have to pay a bit more.
Again, the devil is in the details. Land comes in many sizes and types. Marc Faber, another well-known investment guru, has been advocating owning farmland in Asia. Now, coming from Asia myself, I’d say that could be quite good advice or very bad advice, depending on how you use it. Not all Asian countries have laws favorable to land-owners, even native-born ones. Most Asian countries are classified as risky markets. The few that aren’t, like Malaysia, have other issues which may or may not prove fatal to their development. Faber himself has settled in Hong-Kong, and through personal and professional ties, is in a position to know exactly what he’d doing. For instance, he bought farmland in New Zealand sometime around 2000 - that is, early enough in the cycle for him to have already realized quite a bit of profit.
That was the point of a recent Barron’s article on Faber that noted that land isn’t always the unqualified good bet it’s made out to be. In fact, Steve Leuthold, yet another investment guru, is leery of land prices now, believing that significant portions of land in the US are overvalued. Leuthold called the top of a bubble in land prices in the 1980s and sees a similar but smaller pull-back this time, 15-20%.
Still, land is likely to be a good investment over the next ten years if you keep all these caveats in mind.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that land isn’t all of a kind. Land that’s good quality farmland still has room for growth; on the other hand, some ranch-land has already gone bust, since 2006. There’s land in areas with water…. and land in areas without. There’s land that has potential for development. And land that doesn’t There’s land near the sea. There’s inaccessible land. There’s good land in bad countries. There’s bad land in good countries….
Telling people to buy land as a hedge against inflation and to diversify is good advice so long as the people who follow it realize that it’s up to them to do the research that translates a general statement into an effective investment strategy.
Libertarian Living: How Walkable Is Your Neigborhood
How walkable is your neigborhood? You can check it out here at Walkscore.com
Via Bob Sharpe´s blog, ¨Toward A Simple Life.”
Blaming the Net
I told myself I’d ignore politics for a while and comment - if and when I could - only on things that might help people figure out what to do financially.
But two recent stories call for comment.
The first was yesterday’s story about mob violence between Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese in China. The violence was said to have been triggered by the influx of Han into the oil-rich Uighur lands, which has led to resentment from the Uighurs. They see themselves as less well-off… and also as exploited by the Han. The Han regard these feelings as a sign of the Uighurs’ backwardness and stupidity.
Apparently, photos were circulated on the net of Han gloating over dead Uighur. That seems have led to violent confrontations between Han, Uighur and police. Chinese authorities also blame a nonresident Uighur activist for instigating violence over the photos. “Activists,” demands for disclosure of photos, and the web, all came in for blame.
The second story is in today’s news. Apparently, US Treasury and other web sites were subjected to Denial of Service Attacks that had them down for a long time. The same thing happened to some South Korean banking sites. The attacks are said to have been very sophisticated and to have originated with North Korea, which has been firing missiles defiantly over the past couple of weeks.
My first worry is - is this all posturing or is something bigger afoot?
My second worry is - is this going to be used to clamp down on the net and on net activists? After all, yours truly has written several articles since 2005 demanding that the US government disclose photos of torture of Iraqi women - those articles could also be seen as inflammatory. Am I inciting jihadists with articles like that? I have no idea. My thinking is that people brainwashed into jihad probably don’t need much of a motive beyond the history of US policy to get them going.
But I’m willing to admit that it probably adds a bit of gasoline to some fires.
What to do? Should one NOT demand disclosure and assume the state has its reasons that reason knows nothing of?
But what if the state is circulating its own fiery propaganda with lethal results? Don’t you sometimes fight fire with fire?
Fight fire with fire and the whole world turns to coal, says Mahatma moralist.
George Herbert said something better though. He said the whole world turns to coal anyway.
Only a “sweet and virtuous soul still chiefly lives.”
The question is how does a virtuous soul act in such times and in such complexities?
I have no answer.
In Seach of Dirt….
It rained the whole of yesterday. I walked out a bit at 10 AM to see if I could see a few things, but the wind here is strong and drives the temperature, from around 8-10 degrees to zero. It’s too humid to freeze or snow, though. Small mercies.
The first week I was down here - the last week of June - the weather was chilly and damp - the kind of damp that makes your knees and knuckles ache.
At first, I shrugged it off. Nothing’s perfect, I told myself.
Then a particularly cold blast from the ocean sent me scuttling to the provinces in search of warmer weather. But after a couple of days, I realized that with only English, a small town can pose problems, and I came back, sheepishly.
You can’t have beautiful old colonial houses, pristine air and water, safe streets… and complain because the weather is a bit chilly for a few months in the year. What kind of a pioneering attitude is that, I told myself.
Then again, I don’t fool myself I’m pioneer material. At heart, I’m a traditionalist. Even a bit of stick-in-the-mud. It’s an accident that I end up in the vanguard of things.
And the reason for that…the problem.. is rationality. I tend to argue things to their logical conclusions and then follow those conclusions - even when they don’t necessarily come easily. I call this a problem, because I’m not convinced that rationality is the best way to arrive at decisions. Instinct - gut - is better in most cases. And in some, just doing what the other fellow’s doing seems to work just fine. But I’ve always had a tendency to fall for beautiful symmetries - even when they’re misleading. Especially when they’re misleading.
And the beautiful, symmetrical argument is that the safest bet for most people is land.
They aren’t making cheap farmland in the US. There was still some in places like Alabama and Mississippi and Tennessee, until recently. But now it’s all been bought up. And what’s left is probably the dregs, as far as fertility goes.
Holing up in the Ozarks with a cache of ammunition probably works for some Americans. But somehow, I think a foreign born citizen taking to moonshine country might not work. It would be a shame to survive the Feds - and then succumb to the locals.
No offense meant.
In times of difficulty, people tend to stick to race and faith. I think it’s to be expected. I’ve begun to grow suspicious of everything foreign too - although personally, I’m nothing but a patchwork of foreign and borrowed.
It also sits much better with many people - morally - to hold a piece of dirt than to cling to ingots ….or scraps…of precious metal. Maybe childhood stories about golden calves…about Midas turning his little girl into gold…bother us at a certain level.
And gold mining is one of the worst businesses when it comes to water usage and damage to the environment.
Even if no one wants your piece of dirt…even if it crumbles with every other asset class into nothingness…..you can always scrape in the dust for turnips and roots. There’s something reassuring about that. Something solid.
You can’t eat wind - which is what we have an oversupply of now.
So - it’s land for many people.
And that’s what I’m seeing. Americans and Canadians are moving down here in something stronger than a trickle. Some of them, on a temporary basis. But the temporary seems to change into longer term for many.
My interest is both personal and professional. I came down to see for myself how the economic crisis is playing out in this part of the globe. And why Soros…among many other investors…is down here….
I’m on an assignment, it goes without saying. But one I’ve set myself.
I hope to leverage the information. How, I don’t know..
A Post-Card from Nowhere in Particular
So, what does it feel like to breathe free air again?
Invigorating…
By the way, an apology…
I just noticed that some more radio interviews seem to have disappeared from the web. This one was on the Gary Null show a few years ago. I just saw that it had been removed. It joins a growing list: a Money Dots interview in 2008, another small interview on Dollar Daze in 2009.
What on earth could I have said that was so upsetting?
I have no idea. But I apologize because these shows were listed on my credits on this blog and their disappearance from the web makes me look like a liar….
A few random observations:
The concept of customer service is overdeveloped in the US…. and underdeveloped most other places.
A barbecue on coal is for wimps. Real men barbecue on wood fires.
Avoid changing money outside a bank and always check your money.
Always get a receipt.
32 hectares can mean 32 square meters of road frontage.
Try to avoid driving a car directly through a rice field.
There are a lot of Americans buying homes abroad. A lot.
Don´t say too much to the person in the expat group who brings up the Zionist lobby. Tell them you love it… or better yet, say nothing. He/she could be an informant.
Suhayl Saadi’s novel 
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