A Reader Writes About Going Off-grid

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I got a note this afternoon about an old article, “Getting off  the grid”:

Ms. Rajiva,
Your article Getting Off the Grid was excellent. I like your suggestion to
start letting go of things you can do without first. It is how I’ve
progressed and seems like a more natural path to getting off the grid.
Thank you for sharing your insight.
A.B

Thank you, A.B.   I’m replying here, because I’ve decided it’s not wise to reply to people I don’t know a bit, on my email.

Letting go of anything always sounds difficult when it’s proposed to you theoretically. When you run up against it in the course of living, it’s not that hard.

How many people worry about trivial blemishes in their appearance. And then cancer strikes and suddenly they don’t care about anything but getting the pain to stop.

People throw tantrums about a rearrangement of their office furniture, and then they’re fired and have to get used to a trailer or a basement apartment.

Instead of waiting for fate to take something away from you, just figure out what you can release on your own.  It hurts less when you do it yourself.

Elite Mouthpiece Taunts Ron Paul On Failure Of Fed Campaign

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Added July 21, 2012:

How did I see the confrontation? I thought Paul did as well as anyone could in the time given. Except for a few word slips, he was pretty cogent and effective. Bernanke looked discomfited in the middle, when he was questioned about the transfer of authority from Congress to the Fed and when the issue of secrecy was brought up. Other than that, he was impassive and spoke little.  Paul wasn’t “subdued” at all. I don’t watch all his videos, but I’ve seen him a number of times in debate, and that was fairly straightforward Paul. If there was a white flag, I didn’t see it.

If he wasn’t as combative as some seem to think, it’s most likely because it’s his last such confrontation. He’s retiring, I’m told. Too bad.

I thought it was a fairly effective performance and a good wrap up of his major arguments. I think if you’d known nothing about the Fed until then, you would have got the salient points of the anti-Fed argument: he described Bretton Woods,  exchange-rate and interest-rate manipulation; big government financing through debt; transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the wealthy; malinvestment; money supply expansion versus CPI inflation; the housing bubble; and the need for Congressional oversight.

I wouldn’t call it a knock-out, simply because Bernanke was so impassive through out.

That of course helps the media to reframe the confrontation anyway it suits them. Which is what Dana Milbank promptly did.

Paul Vs. Bernanke video

“Ron Paul Vs. Bernanke: final battle ends on surprising note,” David Grant, Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2012

“Ron Paul Has The Final Say,” Bob Adelman, New American, July 19, 2012

ORIGINAL POST

“Skull & Bones affiliated establishment journalist Dana Milbank taunts Ron Paul about the end of the “End the Fed” campaign in a piece entitled, “Ron Paul Fed Up With Trying To End The Fed” (Washington Post, July 18, 2012)

Well, I have plenty of problems with the whole Ron Paul movement these days (for a view from a Paul supporter see  this:), but the piece does more than criticize Paul.

What it does is gloat.

Here are some lines from it, with my parsing.:

“He didn’t even make a dent in it.”

[LR: The Fed is unassailable]

“…Paul raised the white flag.”

[LR: The Fed has won…]

“For the fiery Paul, it was a subdued surrender.”

[LR: So now you know how powerful we really are, old man.]

“….treating him with the cautious affection one might use to address a crazy uncle.”

[LR: You didn’t reach the point where we’d have to assassinate you, so we’ll just let people know that you and your supporters can’t be taken seriously.]

“But Paul faded away with surprising deference.”

[LR: Yes. He’s under our thumb. We call the shots. He knows what’s good for him, so he’s fading away.]

“The one substantial challenge to Bernanke — Paul’s “audit the Fed” bill, which the House is expected to approve next week before it dies in the Senate — was easily dispatched by the Fed chairman,”

[LR: Audit the Fed is croaking.]

“The Paul to Bernanke word ratio this time was 12 to 1.”

[LR: He’s just a rambling  old man. Real men don’t talk, they print.]

“There’s no constitutional reason why Congress couldn’t just take over monetary policy,” he said. “But I’m advising you that it wouldn’t be very good from an economic policy point of view.”

[LR: We’re the constitutionalists, not you. Audit the Fed is only about Congress taking over monetary policy, folks. Imagine! They can’t run a post office. How do you think they’re going to do with deep stuff like economics?]

“”At this point, the committee chairman cut him off. Paul’s time had expired.”

[LR: We’ve put up with you long enough, grandpa. Your time’s up. The game is over.]

The framing of the whole piece is quite masterful. There is not one substantial piece of analysis about the actual policies in question. We are not told what is involved in either “End the Fed” or “Audit the Fed.”

We are instead given information about procedure….rules regarding how bills go through the house, and how speakers get to speak. A contrast is set up between the grave, measured proceedings of the state and the law (the constitution) and the self-indulgent rambling of an aging politician.

The roles are reversed.

Paul becomes the political class. Bernanke becomes the embodiment of the constitution and of law.

From beginning to end we’re told how to think about what’s going on.

This is what we’re supposed to think:

Bernanke is sage, powerful and indulgent.

Paul is a crazy old man, who doesn’t know the elements of civility….or the constitution.

He’s an anti-government politician, but he’s for the government control of the money supply.

He cuts into other people’s time. He rambles on. He talks too much.

Paul is just a “supplicant” before the great Fed chairman. The final word is with the Fed.

So, even though he gets his fifteen minutes, it’s clear Paul doesn’t really understand the constitution or money.

And he’s for the government!

Notice how the piece distorts Paul’s position to make it look as if “Audit the Fed” (Paul’s fall-back position from “End the Fed”) is about putting arcane and complex professional matters into the hands of politicians.

Milbank turns Bernanke into the “private” expert and Paul into the bumbling government man.

That is sure to appeal to Americans of every political stripe. The average reader would immediately distrust anyone who intends to subject policies about the country’s money-supply to ignorant legislators driven by partisan bias.

What that does is clear.

It turns the  whole anti-government argument against anti-government activists.

It also turns  the pro-constitution argument against constitutionalists.

This is propaganda of the highest order.

Legendary Journalist, Alexander Cockburn, Dies Of Cancer

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L.A.Time reports (h/t David Kramer, LRC) some sad news:

“Alexander Cockburn, the leftist journalist, has died. The 71-year-old had been living in Berlin and fighting cancer.

Cockburn was the co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the political newsletter Counterpunch. On the publication’s blog, St. Clair writes, “Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy.” Cockburn was a dedicated leftist; St. Clair described him as “friend and comrade.”

Jeff St. Clair describes him writing and publishing right through chemotherapy until the end.

This is really too bad.  I used to write quite a bit for Counterpunch, but stopped during the financial crisis, because I felt my views on economics weren’t in synch with theirs. But I’ve never stopped reading their combative and committed writing.  Both were good friends of India, as well. And both collaborated successfully on some of the most seminal works on propaganda and intelligence.

As long back as I can remember Alex  Cockburn defined smart, rowdy journalism, not afraid to roll up its sleeves and sock it to them, but always with wit and panache.  He will be sorely missed.

Two Years For Spying For Enemy, Possible Sixty Years For Hot Tip

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I blogged last year about Professor Angana Chatterji, of the California Institute of Integral Studies (founded by Hindus for the studies of the mind-body connection), who, with her husband Richard Shapiro, has been an ardent activist against human rights abuses in Kashmir.

Indian nationalists don’t see her actions in so benign a light, and last year,  she and her husband were fired from CIIS for misusing her academic post for political activism. There was more.

Apparently, she had been in touch with one Ghulam Nabi Fai,  a Kashmiri activist, alleged to be a Pakistani agent, who was arrested in July 2011.

Fai pleaded guilty in December 2011 to two counts of lying  to the government and defrauding the IRS.

< >

The Express Tribune (Pakistan) reports:

“”Arrested in July 2011, Dr Fai, director of the Kashmiri American Council, had been accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He has been accused of, and later pleaded guilty to, taking money from the Inter-Services Intelligence to run his US-based NGO. In December 2011, Dr Fai had admitted that from 1990 to 2011, he had received money from Pakistani officials including the ISI and the Government of Pakistan through the Kashmiri American Council.

A Department of Justice press release at the time had stated that Dr Fai could face a maximum sentence of five years on the conspiracy count, and three years for tax violation. Dr Fai had also agreed to forfeit his interest in $142,851.32 seized by the government in July 2011.”

Pai ended up with a relatively light sentence of only two years on the conspiracy charge, against a possible five. The Times of India reports:

“Fai was sentenced to 24 months o byf imprisonment followed three years of supervised release against the maximum possible 5 years (for conspiracy) plus three years (for tax violation).”

So, do I understand that if are a foreign agent of a country the US government is bombing, and you are running a lobbying outfit on US soil to influence US foreign policy favorably toward your country,  and you are actively engaged in conspiracy directed against the US and its allies, and you lie about it to the government and you launder your illicit payments, you get two years…

On the other hand, if you are an American citizen originally from a country ostensibly allied with the US, a friend of prime-minister and presidents,  one of the most highly regarded  and competent senior consultants in the world, a man with many philanthropic accomplishments, and you are convicted on flimsy circumstantial grounds of having made some money on insider information at a board meeting of one of the most corrupt outfits that ever graced the planet, then you are liable to face sixty years?

And the man who actually was guilty of insider-trading and was caught on tape doing it is gets off with no jail, because of his exemplary co-operation?

Ezra Pound: Radio Broadcast, December 7, 1941

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Yamaguchi.com

[I found this excellent resource of  19th century texts about banking history and am posting one of Ezra Pound’s well-known speeches, with the anti-Jewish vituperation removed. Please note that I do not endorse Pound’s analysis, but I do believe it is necessary not to succumb to intimidation, either, and to read the original words of the primary source of much of the anti-Fed arguments made by Eustace Mullins, who surely was a racist. Has Pound’s reputation be damaged by this rhetoric? Not seriously.  Nor has Eliot’s, nor Carlyle’s, nor Kipling’s, nor Belloc’s, nor Jung’s, nor any of dozens of other writers, who, rightly or wrongly, voiced anti-Jewish and misogynist and racial feelings. As long as these feelings don’t taint the entire personality, as they did with Eustace Mullins, and lead to psychotic misreading of history (as they did at the end of his life with Nietzsche) or to grossly evil actions, as they did with Hitler, there is no reason to shun opinion, however wrong we may think it. There is never any knowing whether something is fully wrong, wrong only in emphasis, or in this or that particular, unless we stop ideological gulags and out-casting. Until then, we will be feeble creatures, fully deserving of the tyranny of mind that is our fate in this allegedly free-thinking age.]

5 (December 7, 1941) U.S. & U.K.(A66)

Ezra Pound (somewhat bowdlerized):

Europe callin’, Pound speakin’.  Ezry Pound speakin’.  And I think I am perhaps still speakin’ a bit more TO England than to the United States of America but you folks may as well hear it.  They say an Englishman’s head’s made of wood, and the American head made of watermelon.  Easier to git something INTO the American head, but nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes.

Of course I don’t know what GOOD I am doin’, I mean what IMME DIATE good.  But something you folks on both side of the wretched ocean will have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later.

Now what I had to say about the state of MIND in England in 1919, I said in my Cantos (14 and 15).  Some of your theosophists and fancy thinkers would have called it the spiritual state of England.  I am content to say state of mind.

I can’t say my remarks were heeded.  I thought I had got ’em simple enough.  Words short and simple enough.  In fact some people complained that several of ’em contained no more than 4 or 5 letters (some less).

Now I hold NO Catholic has ever been or ever will be puzzled by what I said in those Cantos.  I have, however, never asked for sympathy when misunderstood.  I go on trying to make my meanin’ clear and then clearer.  And in the LONG run people who listen to me (very few do, but members of that small and SElect minority) do know more in the long run, than those who listen to Mr. H.G. chubby Wells and the liberal stooges.

What I am gitting at is, a friend said to me the other day that he was glad I had the politics I have got, but that HE didn’t understand how I, as a North American, United Stateser could have it.

Well that looks simple to me.  Things OFTEN DO look simple to me.  On the CONfucian system that if you start right, and then go on, start at the root and move upward, the pattern often is simple, whereas if you start constructin’ from the twig downward, you get into a muddle.

My politics seem to me SIMPLE.  My idea of a state OR an empire is more like a hedge hog or porcupine, chunky and well defended.  I don’t cotton to the idea of my country being an octopus WEAK in the tentacles and sufferin’ from stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis.

I wish Brother Hoover had spilled his facts about the stinking and rotten Treaty of Versailles while he was still in the White House.  But I am glad he has done so now.  Tho’ he could also confess his OWN errors and aid even now to acceleratin’ the United States of America welfare.

Anyhow, I have, in principle, NO objection to the U.S. absorbin’ Canada and the whole NORTH American continent.

The rot of the British Empire is from inside, and if the whole of that senseless organization, headed by Montagu Skinner Norman, makes war on Canada, or Alberta, I see no reason for Canada not making war on the bankers in London.

What I am ready to fight AGAINST is havin’ ex-European Jews making another peace worse than Versailles, with a new two dozen Danzigs.  Namely the United States bein’ left with war baby bases in Aberdeen, Singapore, Dakar, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean! All draggin’ the tail of their coat, and making dead mathematically sure of another war for Dupont, Vickers, Mond, Melchett, Beit, Ellermann in ten or fifteen years after the present one (present war).  And to that end Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Lehman are working, day and night, not to mention the Warburgs.  And precisely on the subject of Warburgs, I wish Herb Hoover would say MORE about the stink of Versailles.

God knows I have loathed Woodie Wilson, and I don’t want to see more evil done to humanity than was done by Woodrow codface.  And the sooner all America and ALL England wake up to what the Warburgs and Roosevelt are up to, the better for the next generation and this one.

And as an American I do NOT want to see my country annihilatin’ the population of Iceland, as the British annihilated the Maoris.  And as for the Australians, they deserve a Nippo-Chinese invasion.  Criminals were their granddads, and their contribution to civilization is not such as to merit even an imperial medal.  Why the heck the Chinese and laps don’t combine and drive that bankers out of Australia, and set up a bit of civilization in those parts, is for me part of the mystery of the orient.

And in any case I do NOT want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up the Sassoon and other banker rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai.  That is not my idea of American patriotism.  We are gittin’ on for the centenary of the opium war, that never did any good to the lads of Lancashire or of Sussex, and that brought no prosperity in Dorset or Gloucester.

Hardy’s England, aye, aye sir, where is it ?  Did Rothschild save it ?  He did not.  Did the Goldsmid save it ?  He did not.  Does Churchill endeavor to save it ?  He does NOT.  I repeat the rot and stink of England, and the danger to her empire is inside, and has been: from the time of Cobbett.

And NO number of bank touts in Wall Street and in Washington can do one damn thing for England, save let her alone.  And a damn pity they didn’t start doin’ sooner.  That is a pity for England.

And a peace with American war bases all over the whole of the planet would be no more a real peace than Versailles was.  And as to all visible signs Roosevelt is MORE in the bankers’ hands than Wilson was in 1919.  I am against havin’ him mixin’ into ANY post-war matters whatever.  This objectin’ being academic.

An’ I think it would be well for ALL men, from China to Capetown to SEE as soon as possible what Franklin is up to.  Let him keep his paws on the North American continent.  Even if it means DIMinished gun sales for all his pals, and for all gold-bugs.

Eight years ago he was sayin’ “nothin to fear but fear.” Well what has become of THAT Roosevelt ?  What has he done for three years but try to work up a hysteria on that basis ?  He got his face into a paper called Life, eight or ten photographs.  Jim Farley would have been less nuisance in the White House than snob Delano, who objected to Farley NOT on moral or ethical grounds, but PURELY as snobism; didn’t want a mere henchman to succeed him.

And as to American labor.  When will American labor start lookin’ into the currency question ?  “Question,” of course there ought not to be any INTERROGATIVE element in it.  Even a hod carrier OUGHT to be able to learn why interest payin’ debt is NOT so good a basis for money as is productive labor.

But will they ?  Will the American hod carrier and skilled engineer (includin’ Mr. Hoover) ever git round to the currency issue ?  (I call it issue, not question.)

And will the American big employer or financier, except Baruch, ever start studyin’ the solution of HIS problem, which is a corporate solution, in the sense of that word now current in Europe ?

A CORPORATE problem, or issue, which does NOT mean starving the workman, or breakin’ him up by scab mobs.

Lord knows I don’t SEE how America can have fascism without years of previous trainin’.  Looks to me, even now as if the currency problem was the place to start savin’ America.  As I have been sayin’ for some time back, call it ten years or call it twenty.  At this moment it looks like as if John Lewis would take just as long to git round about feedin’ my books to his troops, as it would take the Harvard faculty to git Mr. William G. Morse’s permission to use ’em in Harvard (Economics Department).

Both sides will have to come to it.
continue

India’s Silent Scientists: G.N. Ramachandran

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From Shadow Warrior:

“Ask any scientist who acknowledges original research to give a list of Indians who should have got a Nobel Prize, and you will find the name G N Ramachandran (1922- 2001) there. Though trained as a physicist, Ramachandran’s greatest contributions were to biology, where he formulated the ‘Ramachandran plots’ which every biophysicist uses while studying proteins. His triplehelix structure of collagen is a classic discovery worth a Nobel.

“History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization’ says Ramachandran’s lesser known contribution was to three-dimensional image reconstruction , which redefined the way we look inside the human body without cutting it open. Some, like P M Bhargava, founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, believe Ramachandran should be considered the father of NMR and CT scan, though some others took credit for it. “Ramachandran was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society after some of us worked hard for it. He never asked for it,” says Bhargava . “He was neither elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, nor nominated for a Nobel Prize which he richly deserved.”

Comment:

Western prizes, from the Booker to the Nobel, have strong political biases and are heavily slanted to Westerners themselves, or to others whose agendas align with Western interests.

Scores of great scientists who should have won the Nobel, have continued Indian’s ancient and medieval scientific tradition – one that is unknown to most in the West and regarded as some kind of feel-good myth.

Instead, it is the Western narrative of European supremacy in cultural achievement that is the feel-good myth.

European achievements are tremendous, but they aren’t as unique as current history tells us. Instead, they accompanied the achievements of others.

Then, because of European imperial conquests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in many cases they supplanted those others, sometimes, after appropriating them for their own.

When the real story of India’s scientific history is told, we are likely to find that the great medieval and early modern learning of India that was brought to the Western church via Catholic priests and missionaries over centuries, also fed the Renaissance and Enlightenment and scientific development thereafter.

It was not simply the Greeks.

But that is a story for another blog post.

Explaining The Obvious About The Ron-Rom Entente

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Q from Lew Rockwell:

Why would he [Paul] not vote for Bush?

Does Lew Rockwell have to ask?

‘Bush is a Christian Republican. Bush, the son, had a an evangelical constituency that is socially conservative.

The financial elites, to whom Paul is tied, tend to be socially liberal.

Bush pere stood up to the Israeli Lobby by not toppling Saddam during Gulf War I.

They never forgave him.

Mitt Romney is a Mormon, but his socially liberal economic policies complement their goals and he’s the least favorite candidate of the social conservatives.

The elites prefer Mormonism to traditional Protestant Christianity, even though Mormons are usually socially conservative, because the doctrine is a form of heterodox/heretic Christianity and is related to British Israelism, the doctrine that teaches that British elites are the real Israelites of the Bible.

This notion is of course intricately part of the religious justification of Zionist supremacist claims to Israel and world domination.

The NWO is ultimately a religious dispensation, the religion being theosophical in orientation.

Think about Glenn Beck, a Mormon, and how he suddenly came to prominence..

The New World Order co-opts the atheist anarchists (what do you think Wikileaks was all about?) and appeals to the non-orthodox, but ultimately it channels them all back to itself.

The NWO co-opts the Christian patriots via Alex Jones on the right.

The NWO co-opts the left, via sites like Rense, and Benjamin Fulford and David Icke, all filled with so many outlandish things that the real information on them (and there’s plenty) gets muddied up.

I have been saying this until my face is blue for over two years now, when I belatedly began seeing through Ron Paul. Many of those despised statists on the right and left were much earlier.

It was his attitude to Goldman that confirmed it finally for me.

Right gate-keeping allows a lot more conspiracy-theorizing, so it can mislead people (including me).

Ron Paul is a decent man. But if you listen closely you will see he says a lot of things and says them ambiguously, allowing everyone to project their own ideas onto him.[ Correction: Rereading this, I should clarify that I’m talking about what’s coming out of his campaign….that might not be him. But surely, he has some responsibility for what people are putting out as his words. ]

Sibel Edmonds, Webster Tarpley, Wendy McElroy, Stefan Molyneux, and many others have felt something odd going on about his campaign, each for different reasons.

Maybe I am maligning the man. Maybe. But less hero-worship would be wise.

I’ve blogged dozens of suspicious things like this and commented about them at the Daily Bell and at Wenzel’s site.

Q: Do you really see Rothschild bankers (the power behind the Federal Reserve) allowing the  account books to be turned over before they’ve disappeared everything that matters?

Ron Paul Dithering Suspiciously About Romney

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Oh dear. I told you Ron Paul has been looking worse by the minute these past few months.

See this from Politico (h/t Wenzel):

“Asked on the Fox Business Network’s “After the Bell” on Thursday if he will cast his ballot for Romney, Paul responded, “I’ve not made a decision.”

Look, he seems to be a nice man. He’s cleaner than most people in politics. He’s been a huge name-draw for millions and brought attention to major issues that are important to anyone opposed to war and empire or the bankster regime.

But, am I deaf, an anti-white racist, an Indian spy or a potential terrorist, if I say the obvious – these are weasel words….. at least to my brown ears.

And I blogged about Paul’s weasel words before.

What’s difficult about saying NO?

As in, not, nein, nope, nah, nay, nada, nyet, noway, nohow,untilhellfreezesoverbuster

And what’s with Romney tweeting “audit the fed”

This is co-option central!

Thousands Attend Cremation Of Bollywood Legend, Rajesh Khanna

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Rajesh Khanna, who died yesterday, was the biggest Bollywood star ever until Amitabh Bhachchan.

Khanna was cremated in Vila Parle in Mumbai, as thousands of people followed the cavalcade in the monsoon rains. Present at the cremation was Bachchan, a big fan himself, who complained that the huge crowd had come out to see the dozens of film stars at the funeral and not Khanna.

Khanna made some 120 films and had millions of fans who mobbed him each time he set foot outside his house. Known as India’s leading heart throb, Khanna had female fans who were known to marry pictures of him and write his name in blood.

Thus has India been ruled since independence.  Escapist film spectaculars and star-gazing for the impoverished millions, a form of narcotics.  For the intellectual and bureaucratic ruling-class, there is a different kind of escape, the coconut political/literary circles funded by the West and dominated by its ideologies, all shot-through with the malevolent intent of western state-craft, ceaseless in its goal of total dominion.

The masses of middle-class people who actually create value in society, remain invisible to a Western world fed a diet of media hype alternating between jet-setting  maharajas, models, and tycoons on one hand, and slums, sex-gurus, and call-centers on the other.

Edward Feser On The Necessity Of Burke To Libertarians

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Edward Feser:

“It is the Burkean tradition – conservative, religious, celebrating deference and restraint and contemptuous of the “dust and powder of individuality” – to which Hayek points as providing both the true philosophical foundations of market society and the only hope of its renewal. Burke, along with Locke and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, represented in Hayek’s mind a “true individualism” which emphasizes ordered liberty and what the Catholic tradition would call subsidiarity, and has no truck with the radically autonomous self of contemporary egalitarian liberalism and popular libertarianism.”

I am not sure that I fully subscribe to this, but it would be an interesting project to explore strains in Burke’s thought compatible with libertarianism, understood as minarchist or anarcho-capitalist (a position that as it stands today I think an impossibility).