Iran war mongering: Fallon sounds the gong….

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From MSNBC:

“BAGHDAD – The commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East does not believe current tensions with Iran will lead to war and urges for greater emphasis on dialogue and diplomacy.“This constant drum beat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Adm. William Fallon said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television, which made a partial transcript available Sunday”
From Wiki:

“During his tenure as head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Fallon took a conciliatory approach towards China, a position that drew the ire of hardliners including Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz.

His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal, Navy Commendation Medal, and various unit and campaign decorations…”

More:

“Fallon, a world history buff, told The Washington Post through a spokesman that he recently finished reading the book “No God but God,” by Iranian author Reza Aslan, an advocate of ending religious conflicts between East and West. Fallon had served in the Middle East before, on a joint task force in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and he recently traveled to Iraq to meet with some of the thousands of U.S. troops deployed there from the Pacific Command.”
OK….there’s the gong for recess and here come the big boys to tell the kiddies to stop throwing sand in each others’ faces, make nice, and get something to eat….

Now, where are the rest of the adults?

MindBody: The Stock-chart Sutra

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Update:

I rethought what I wrote about dogmatic belief not being conducive to morals. I think that was an exaggeration of my position and I corrected it:

1. Mentalism (everything is driven by the mind)
2. Correspondence (things are fractal)
3. Vibration (everything is a packet of energy)
4. Polarity (everything oscillates between two opposites)
5. Rhythm (everything has a pulse or cyclical aspect)
6. Causation (all effects have causes)
7. Gender (everything has a negative/passive and positive/active/ aspect)

(I can hear the yowls about sexism/misogyny/mentalism/fraud already but they move me not a whit… nor, I should add, rereading this, are they true. You could, for example, see the active-passive polarity as part of any interaction — not just of a relationship between a man and a woman, but of any exchange. You could also hold quite “progressive” positions, on some social issues – as I do – without necessarily being bound to hold them either, and accept these principles as analytical tools).

According to many esoteric traditions, the seven principles are fundamental principles of the organization of the world around us. This would be anathema or obscurantism to many social scientists — and surely, there is a lot of pre-scientific mythologizing, woolly-headed fluff, wishful thinking, Panglossian smugness etc., etc., in what is called New Age thinking….which is really age-old and better called neo-Hindu or neo-Buddhist (available in the west also as the wisdom or esoteric tradition of Christianity and Judaism).

(For instance, I think the first principle – mentalism – isn’t properly defined and devalues the body/materiality).

But when people argue that religious teaching is largely pre-scientific and that its most valuable component is its ethical teaching, I dissent. Ethics is not dependent on religion. And may often be hampered by it. Some of what we take to be the result of religious values may be at least as much the humanizing effects of the sciences and the arts – especially literature – on culture. I take the minority view that the most valuable part of religion, hidden in mythology and symbolism, lies in its empirical observations and even in its “pseudo-scientific” descriptions…

The teachings in the Gospel, for instance, are most interesting to me as “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive” — they are very useful assessments of the world around us. (Of course, I’m in sympathy with the prescriptions, too, in a general way. I’d just hate to be the final arbiter of how and where they should be applied to anyone but myself).

Now, that descriptive component of religious thought is precisely what critics of the New Age do not understand and which New Agers (and I confess to being in sympathy with them) do. The New Age probably will teach you nothing exceptionally useful about ethics and might even tend to corrupt anyone who didn’t already have clear values – because it’s essentially a set of tools —  that works.
Still, anyone who doesn’t grasp the extent of the cultural renaissance arising from the interaction between Western science and Eastern religion and the numbers of advances in science and medicine that come out of that interaction, is ignorant of one of the most important currents — perhaps ,the most important — of the last century and a half.

Time for the social sciences to come to grips with all this.

And they are. Even if it hasn’t filtered into punditry. But in academics, there is plenty going on in a number of fields, from the life sciences to the organizational sciences that take the new (it’s not that new, except to die-hard positivists and materialists) approach.

Update:

I was thinking about stock-charts, for instance, which fascinate me as very beautiful examples of the intersection of emotions and numbers. The typical chart exhibits all the seven Hermetic principles (the choice of the number seven, is fraught with metaphysical and symbolic significance, even though from our standpoint today it might be considered arbitrary…. more on that at another time).

The stock chart is driven by fundamental or technical values ascribed to the underlying stock by the investors — as well as by their irrational moods (the former being active and the latter more passive); it oscillates between resistance and support at a variable rate (the beta); it’s traded at varying levels of intensity and energy (trading volume); it exhibits fractal patterns (compare intraday and weekly/monthly patterns); and it exhibits greater and lesser cycles (eg. Elliot Waves).

You’d only expect it of any human activity, but it’s still food for thought..and makes me regret not knowing more statistics.

Rage against the war-machine….

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“Freedom” ~ Alice Cooper

“We the people of the United States
In order to form a more perfect union
Stop pretending that you’ve never been bad
You’re never wrong and you’ve never been dirty
You’re such a saint, that ain’t the way we see you
You want to rule us with an iron hand
You change the lyrics and become Big Brother
This ain’t Russia, you ain’t my Dad or Mother
(They never knew anyway)
‘Cuz I never walk away from what I know is right
But I’m gonna turn my back on you….

Freedom, we’re gonna ring the bell
Freedom to rock, freedom to talk
Freedom –

Raise your fist and yell!”

Tell it, Alice ! If more people would raise their fist and yell, this world would be a better place. Don’t wait until you figure out what to yell or what to rail against, or how to object “properly.” Make some goddamn waves already! Use a barter system for things you need and help starve to death the war machine. Question authority – take your children back from the state – they’ll thank you. Stage an old-fashioned sit-in, decry the bitter truth in a blog, or hang a sign on an overpass. Whatever way you do it, stop licking the hand that feeds you! Get your miserable ass out into the street and snap yourself and your neighbors out of the collective trance this nation is under. If you do nothing, that’s what you’ll get. Take a whack at the root of tyranny. Raise your fist and yell, damn it! It’s not insanity!

Burying your head in the sand hoping your life won’t be confiscated for the greater good is insane- it’s already on the chopping block with taxation at over 40%. Announcements over public address systems to be on “orange alert,” whatever that is, is insanity. Perpetual war in hopes of finding peace is insanity. Bloated government is insanity. Bleating like sheep at the ballot box in hopes of changing things is insanity.

If you can’t think of what to yell – experiment. Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up! For starters, take yourself out into the middle of the street, take a deep breath and scream, “NOOOO!” Would I tell you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, dear reader? NO, I WOULDN’T. Take a page from Network and try screaming out your window, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore! See if it makes you feel crazier or more sane than ever. Do you want to live or do you want to keep dying, slowly, one bitch-ass, bullshit law at a time?!

What’s that, you say? Your neighbors will think you’re crazy? Sorry, they are not thinking about you that much. To keep taking it up the tailpipe like they do is what’s crazy. To keep voting for more of the goddamn same is what’s crazy. Maybe they’re just waiting for someone else to rage at the machine first. Revolution was an outrageous notion too. Aren’t you glad it happened? Let that teenage energy buried inside you out of prison. Someone has to be first. Get up off of that thing! Don’t expect someone else to do this. You have to show the world that it is not crazy to object to tyranny. Putting human beings in cages or killing them en masse, now that is crazy!

Don’t make me come over there and get all up in your face, damn it! You’ll be sorry. Do you really want a visit from the Motor City madwoman?! Well, do you? There is one angry teenager inside me who’s mad as hell and not going to take it anymore! ”

Retta Fontana, at Strike the Root.

The Boss turns his back on the Mob…

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“Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake

The last to die for a mistake

Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break

Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake.”

The mistake is the Iraq war and the singer is
Bruce Springsteen on his new album, Magic, available on the net already and just in the stores.

“We don’t measure the blood we’ve drawn anymore,”

“We just stack the bodies outside the door.”

Demo-crass-y: questioning the tyranny of the majority…

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“China’s threat to sell its US Treasuries – if actually carried out – will be triggered by the US Congress. This fall, the US Congress will vote on a bill that would impose a 20% across-the-board tariff on all Chinese goods imported into the US. The supporters of the bill describe its passage as “veto-proof” – that they now possess enough votes to override a presidential veto.

This possibility calls again into question the very efficacy of democracy, to wit., the belief that the collective will of the people is preferable to the capricious stupidity of a king or queen or any other selected or self-appointed tyrant, or indeed, virtually any government official…..”

Ah yes. Precisely the theme of “Mobs.”

And one no one likes to hear. Masses of ignorant, ill-informed, or passion-driven people are not exactly the ones we should be listening to. Not, of course, that the majority ever wanted to get into this war in the first place. They didn’t. Our elected oligarchs did that. But they can always count on enough mass hysteria to let them get away with it.

Of course, criticizing “the people” is out of the question these days. That would make you, what, an elitist? Well — I am an elitist. When I study something I don’t go to someone just as ignorant as me, I go to some one who knows better. When I want financial advice, I go to people who know how to make money and have more of it than me. Everything revolves around that sort of hierarchy – and acceptance of it. So, this constant talk of egalitarianism moves me about as much as “self-esteem” babble unaccompanied by any effort to improve. People who make better decisions, contribute more, and work harder ought to do better. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when rewards don’t match the value added and are a result of the system being rigged.

So, when the demagogues jump into protectionism (just as they did with Smoot-Hawley) what is likely to happen?

“China is longer dependent on America to buy its goods. The Eurozone now shares the distinction of being China’s largest market. Additionally, when and if the US Congress votes to impose 20% tariffs on Chinese goods, the damage to China’s economy will be significant.

China will retaliate; and, dumping $1.33 trillion of US Treasuries on the open market will be an all too easy and accessible option. It would destroy the US dollar and deal the US economy a body blow from which it would take years to recover….”

and more fun stuff here.

Frankly, I would rather live under a despot who left me alone most of the time than under an endlessly meddling democracy.

Breaking up is hard..er…easy…to do

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Joe Biden has something to gloat about at Wednesday night’s New Hampshire presidential debate.

The Deleware Democrat’s amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill calling for a fundamental change of policy in Iraq passed the Senate overwhelmingly Wednesday, 75-23.

The non-binding resolution is based on Biden’s long-talked about plan to divide Iraq into three regions based on its ethnic makeup — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd….”

Comment:

The British empire went in and made a fake state out of three rival groups in the Middle East. Now the US empire goes in and breaks that all up. Iraqis, of course, had nothing to do with it either time. They didn’t like it then, and they won’t like it now.

As an admirer of small states (the smaller the better), I am all for breaking up multiethnic empires, along whatever lines people want. Only, I would rather it happened voluntarily and peacefully and not through civil war — as in the former Yugoslavia — or through implosion – as in the ex- USSR. Peacefully, let them all break up — including India.

So, the question I want to put to Biden is only this. When is he going to start working on breaking up the United States?

Then we’d go back to being what we were supposed to be —  a federation of states….

Global Games: James Kunstler on the need for change…

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“We have to make other arrangements for living. We have to behave differently in the Western World, but particularly in North America. We’re going to have to do farming differently; we’re going to have to do commerce and trade differently; we’re going to have to do schooling differently; we’re going to have to learn to make some things in our own countries again….”

More by James Kunstler at the Rude Awakening.

Comment:

Exurbanization — the trek to small towns and rural areas, enabled by the Internet – is one development along these lines. I think others include the rise of what Daniel Pink calls the free agent nation — people opting for working for themselves, instead of for others; for self-sufficiency over consumerism; for certain forms of survivalism.

I am not overly pessimistic about recession. I guess, like many people in the middle class, who saw a dramatic decline in living standards in the last few years, I have got used to adjusting to things. And I have found that “doing without” is not only not scary – it’s positively liberating…and creative. Nothing like learning how to forage for fenders at Junk Yard Dog or do cordon bleu cooking on a ramen noodles budget.

One of the arguments we (Bonner and I) make in “Mobs” is that people don’t really need a lot of the stuff they think they do. It’s all relative. A lot of it is simply status. We make quite a thesis of that and it’s something I fervently believe. Take college education. Having waded through a few degrees myself, I can assure you that most of that knowledge – all, I would say — can be got much cheaper and faster in other ways. Hanging out with intelligent people and working with other people have useful aspects to them, for sure, but on the whole, unless you are in some of the sciences , engineering, or medicine, the negatives exceed the positives.

Somethings get ruined – perhaps permanently – by education. Intuition, street smarts, independent thinking. Then you get a nation that will let any expert tell them anything. Just what’s led us into the financial and military mess we are in now.

Get the book. Not just because it will help me eat (that too). But it really does put the picture together – financial and socio-economic. Don’t fall for the guff. We are not that helpless. We don’t need politicians and pundits to run our lives….

A ratio of 2,801:1+ million

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Anyone who says that 9-11 justified the war in Iraq is saying, in effect, that the deaths of 2,801 people (let’s round it up to 3000) justifies the killing of over a million (and here we are ignoring the deaths of US and Iraqi military and Afghan civilians and military). Let’s round that down to 1 million. That’s 3000 to 1 million or 3 to 1000 or 1 to about 333.

What that means is that for each American life, we think killing 333 foreign lives is justified.

Try to translate that into private life. Imagine that you come home and find that someone has killed your son or wife. Imagine that you then feel justified in going into a neighborhood (sort of) close to where your suspected murderer lives and blowing up all the homes there and killing several hundred people.

What do you think the reaction of other people, let alone the government, would be? Wouldn’t you be considered insane? Wouldn’t you quickly be arrested, hauled off to a maximum security jail (with bail set as high as possible) and put on a 24-hour watch?

By contrast, in the world of states, the avenger is allowed to justify himself in public places, create alliances with other neighborhood thugs, threaten new neighborhoods, arm himself to the teeth, threaten even his own family members and feel highly virtuous — even pious — while doing so.
Is there anything more telling about the fundamental immorality, and even lunacy, of the state system? No use just blaming the US government. You can be pretty sure that there are dozens of other governments all over this planet, which in the same place, would do the same…. or worse.

Which leads us to the inescapable conclusion – the state system is a grossly immoral conspiracy against all decency and humanity.

Another child-sex sting….

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“Atchison was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after arriving for a meeting with someone authorities say Atchison thought was the mother of a 5-year-old girl with whom he allegedly arranged to have sex. The woman was actually a Macomb County sheriff’s detective participating in an Internet sex sting operation.

Atchison was charged with three felonies, the most serious of which is crossing state lines with intent to have sex with someone under 12. Conviction carries a minimum 30-year prison sentence and a maximum of life….”

More here .

Apparently, there is quite a bit of this stuff going on.

GOP City Council chairman, John Bryan, committed suicide around 2 weeks ago, on being the target of investigation for sexually molesting his 12 and 15 year old adopted daughters. (formerly his foster children). Apparently, he also molested a former babysitter when she was a minor…”

Comment:

No doubt this is a frightening story for parents. But, here at The MindBody Politic, my interest confines itself sternly to the less sensational questions that need asking:

1. What are the dangers of sting operations like this one in terms of entrapment? What are the political rewards that might entice overambitious cops to cross the line and create crimes that would otherwise not have happened?

2. What other ways could child-sex crimes be tackled without using the Internet to lure people?

3. In consideration of the life-long impact on the wife and children of the suspect, was it necessary to reveal his identity, especially before his guilt has been proved in court?

4, What bearing do such operations have on requests for greater control over the Internet by the government?

I am sure these will be seen as very trivial issues next to the nature of the alleged crime. And perhaps there is some validity to that position. But, to my mind, it’s precisely where the perps are unlikely to get sympathy from any quarter that such questions should be raised…

Other interesting points:

1. Partisanship rears its head even on this, at the Democratic Underground, with a jab at “family-values” Republicans…

2. Another undercover child sex sting in Florida unearthed 28 suspects, including three who worked for Disney.. Here’s a Maryland case involving a Homeland Security official. I noted comments from bloggers suggesting that the seeming high incidence of child sex suspects/perps among people in positions of authority in the community might be one reason these cases aren’t prosecuted as they should be.

3. The suspect in this case worked on asset forfeiture in civil and criminal cases in the US Attorney’s office, and had been on a committee to pick the police chief in Gulf Breeze, FLA, according to this report.

And another point:

Over in my native country, India, a well-known guru has been suspected for many years of being a serial pedophile, especially targeting adolescent males under cover of religious intitiation. Many of them are foreigners looking for religious experiences. The rumors have swirled for decades and several journalists and credible witnesses have come forward. In fact, the US State Dept. even has a warning out about him. Yet, I found out recently that the matter has never been investigated formally — and this after at least 25 years of rumors!

This doesn’t mean that I think everything this guru does is fraudulent. He certainly does an enormous amount of charity work. He also seems to have some genuine paranormal powers, along with conjuring and hypnotic abilities, that he uses to good effect on his audience.

And of course, adolescent males above the age of puberty are not five year old children.

But none of that should make him immune from investigation, if the allegations in the reports warrant them…

Still, witness accounts and testimony about a suspects unprovoked actions are different from a sting operation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marc Faber: beat inflation with gold (outside the US) and rural real estate

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“His [Marc Faber’s] thesis is simple. As the Fed reneges on its traditional duty of domestic price stability, Faber reckons the US central bank is becoming ever more a standard bearer for Wall Street and for key indices such as the Dow and the S&P500.

If they ever look like falling, the Fed will simply accelerate the operations of the printing presses. When too much money is chasing too few assets, prices rise. However, in real terms, there is little point in buying US assets, points out Faber, who estimates that in Euro terms US growth has been anaemic, if not negative, since the late 1990s. “Investors have to look for assets which cannot multiply as fast as the pace at which the Fed prints money,” he says.

Consequently, gold is a great bet, along with other precious metals. Faber recommends actually holding physical gold in gold-friendly countries such as Hong Kong, India and Switzerland. He counsels against holding gold in the US for fear that it might be nationalised by the government. He is still bullish on other commodities in the face of global shortages and booming Asian economies. He’s also bullish, as it were, on war. “Rising commodity prices often trigger wars – which in turn cause commodity prices to go ballistic.”

One thing seemed to be clear from Faber’s speech. If things continue along the current trajectory, the argument that Western financial and information technology expertise is a substitute for Asian R&D, a high savings rate and engineering expertise will have been comprehensively discredited….”

More here.

My Comment:

Faber is a leading financial guru, but I would say this is advice for people who know what they are doing…

You can lose money trading in and out of gold even in a gold bull market if you don’t.

It’s also worth noting that many people (and I take their side) think gold will go down before it goes up and that over the next year, if (and this is a big if, of course), the Fed does not embark on a reckless rate cutting course, gold will probably go down as a commodity in a general deflation, before eventually rising as big-time inflation sets in. But that’s simply one estimate.

Jim Rogers elsewhere suggests selling dollars and bonds immediately and getting into agricultural commodities (except wheat), Chinese renminbi and even Japanese yen. Again, I don’t know what time- frame is meant in that advice.

The long and short of it is that the government is fleecing middle- class (and lower middle-class) savers to service the improvident rich.

That is the official hall mark of a third-world country (and I should know, shouldn’t I?).

Of course, the average broker, banker, and stock tout will tell you differently. But ask yourself, who do you think knows better? The world’s leading investment experts or salesmen in the financial industry, who probably haven’t paid off their homes yet and may be writhing under as much debt as the poorest sub-prime holder?