Author Archives: Lila

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?

MindBody: Parallel Universe proof?

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“The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.

In Everett’s “many worlds” universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out – in its own universe.

A motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. Yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.

It is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful by many experts. But the new research from Oxford shows that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly – and suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was on the right track….”

More here.

Now how long have science fiction writers, poets, mystics, yogis, and even ordinary self-aware people been suggesting this? For aeons.

More here at the Telegraph. 

Of course, we await further proof and analysis of this story.

If only it would get through to people that if we spent more time importing the implications of science into moribund fossilized social/political theory,  our current murderous, crime-spawning, corporate- state system would be long dead — gone the way of every other bad idea… and maybe with it, total war and our insane weapons arsenals…

Econ-job: Bill Anderson on recession and the Golden Calf of Keynsianism

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“One of the continuing debates throughout modern economic history (modern meaning the past 300 years or so) has been that of the relationship between production and consumption, the source of what we call Say’s Law. [Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406): “When tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase, because the low taxes bring satisfaction. When cultural enterprises grow, the number of individual imposts and asssessments mounts. In consequence, the tax revenue, which is the sum total of (the individual assessments), increases].

This is what separated Say and his allies from Thomas Malthus and the Classical economists from Marx and his followers. The debate went on into the 20th Century, with the Austrians taking one side, and the Keynesians the other.

The basics of the debate are this: One side (Say and those who followed him) says that consumption and production are directly related, and that consumption flows from production, or “supply creates its own demand.” The source of one’s consumption, they argue, is one’s production. On larger scales, economies that produce much also are going to be societies that engage in the most consumption of goods…..”

More on why the party really is over, from a look at the historical evidence, presented at the Mises site by Bill Anderson.

And at the art houses, according to Rick Ackerman,

the festivities are also slowing down:

“Ms. Sharp may be right about the emetic effect a shakeout would have on all of the second-rate stuff being snapped up these days by collectors with bigger money and pretensions than taste. However, we think she may be grossly underestimating how very bloated prices are for Picassos and Warhols. Indeed, at $50 million to $70 million a pop, the best works have quite a bit of room to fall, especially if the global financial bubble pops. Will the owners of such works feel as passionate about them if they decline in value by 50 percent or more? We may get a hint in the coming weeks, since an unusual number of works are headed to auction. Our guess is that if prices merely fail to rise, let alone drop, the smell of fear will become as pungent in the art world as it already is in the bond houses…..”

And, finally, we know it’s closing time from the writing on the wall…er…house...at Bloomberg.

“Sales of previously owned U.S. homes fell in August to a five-year low, extending a slump that threatens to stall economic growth.

Purchases declined 4.3 percent, less than forecast, to an annual rate of 5.5 million, the National Association of Realtors said in Washington. Sales dropped 13 percent compared with a year earlier and median home prices rose 0.2 percent to $224,500.”

Predictably, the dollar slumped toward 78 on the index.

Econ-job: planning your finances will get harder…

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“There are two fundamental problems with long-term financial planning under the regime of irredeemable currency. First, and most obvious, it is impossible to forecast the future purchasing power of money. Irredeemable currencies don’t float, they sink. At what rate, though, is unknowable. Second, and less well understood, is the systemic reliance on intermediaries. Hold financial assets, for instance, and you are beholden to the leveraged broker or dealer with which you have an account. Eliminating risk means eliminating the middleman, but this has become increasingly impractical by design. An individual’s future financial well-being depends to a large extent on dealing with these two problems successfully….”

More by Stephen La Chance.

And here is Jim Rogers on where you need to be — in agricultural commodities (except for wheat) 

Propaganda State: Iran no threat to Israel says Ahmadinejad (Updated, 9/25)

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Update: While everyone is in an uproar about Admadinejad’s Israel remark, did you know that in 2001, Richard Perle, a prominent Iraq war hawk, talked openly and repeatedly about wiping out terrorist states (by which he meant Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran) — without censure.  Can the Iranian PM’s remarks – however you construe them –  have been a response?

Update:

Here’s a great piece by a Columbia University student about the Iranian PM’s visit. An excerpt:

“Meanwhile, outside the auditorium, protesters were cordoned off in “free-speech zones,” which looked more like corrals enclosed by police barricades. The protesters – being of all ideological stripes, from Orthodox Jews to anti-war protesters – fought at least as much with each other as against Ahmadinejad. Especially unpopular with the Hillel protesters was a sign held by members of the anti-war coalition that stated that Iran has the highest Jewish population in the Middle East and that Jews have representation in parliament and are allowed to worship freely. The feminists were united in dislike of the sign mentioning that 60% of Iran’s college students are female and – unlike in our beloved ally Saudi Arabia – women are allowed to drive and otherwise move about without a male family member as chaperone. There’s no pleasing some people…”

More by A.C. Bowen.
“Iran will not attack any country,” Ahmadinejad told The Associated Press. Iran has always maintained a defensive policy, not an offensive one, he said, and has “never sought to expand its territory.”

From an AP report on Ahmadinejad’s much criticized speech at Columbia University, for which President Bollinger deserves kudos.

Update:

Well – I take back the sentence above, having read now that Bollinger in his introduction tried to skewer Ahmadinejad, before he even began. Presumably to make himself right with donors.

(Buchanan says Ahmadinejad should take Bollinger on the road with him — he was that bad).

Where is everyone’s backbone? Aren’t universities about going against the crowd? Thinking for yourself? Or what are they for?

By the way, the two students (Democrat and and also Republican) on this evening’s Hardball, who represented the student reaction to the speech compared quite favorably to the various pundits we heard from earlier, who were simply scandalized that Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at all (gasp! give me the smelling salts)…followed, of course, by the usual reductio ad hitlerum, that always goes down well with historically-challenged audiences. As Murray Sabin points out in USA Today, even if Ahmadinejad really does believe anti-Semitic propaganda about the Holocaust, he would be no worse than many a pol who believes other – less inflammatory- forms of propaganda.

Another point. This refers to the Iranian PM’s remark about Iran not having homosexuals, which people construed as either a flat-out denial of reality or a hint at the fate awaiting gays in Iran. My understanding of him was quite different. I took the remark to mean that the category of homosexuals (i.e. as a category of people and not simply a set of behaviors) did not exist in Iran.

That would be a misunderstanding very similar to the one over Ahmadinejad’s remark about wiping away Israel, which was taken in the US to mean the physical destruction of the Jewish people, but seems much more likely to have meant the ending of the regime there. In this speech, the Iranian leader said clearly that the Holocaust did occur in Europe, but pointed out also that the Palestinians were not the ones who committed it.

In any case, what this shows is that language is very important and one of the problems we have today seems to be that people are not actually listening to each other but are projecting their own beliefs onto what they hear. I am sure it is happening on Iran’s side too.

What occurs to me is that the American audience took the words in both cases in a very concrete, literal manner, while the Iranian seems to have meant them in a more abstract, conceptual way. Something to do with the two cultures and languages, perhaps?

Another important point that Ahmadinejad made was that the MEK (mujahadeen-i-khalk) insurgents from Iraq are infiltering Iran. Now, the MEK is the leftist cult/terrorist group (according to the State Dept) which Ledeen and Co. have been sponsoring, and which has been provoking retaliatory Iranian support of the Shia in Iraq. Ahmadinejad also pointed out that the US used chemical weapons against the Iranians in the Iraq-Iran war (when we armed both sides), overthrew Iran’s democratically elected PM, Mossadegh, and installed the widely unpopular Shah on the Peacock throne, from where he terrorized the country for years with his repressive CIA-trained torture-happy Savak police.

As Buchanan says – there is an Iranian case against the US, and there is a US case against Iran.

But what we have in common is that neither of our two countries wants war.

And that’s a good enough reason to talk.

Buchanan is often mistaken and sometimes too strident. But when he talks, it’s as if you’re hearing English spoken for the first time, instead of the obtuse PC-varnished pablum that comes out of our forked-tongued politicians.

(Re-reading this, I think I am too harsh. Politicians speak that way because the system compels them to. If they are too much in the center in the primaries, they lose their base; too partisan later on and they lose the breadth of appeal they want. Besides, I do have ungrudging admiration for HRC’s ability to survive so many personal attacks – even though I don’t much agree with her positions on most things.)
To wit., Ms. Clinton manages to describe her government mandate health- care plan as a “sharing of responsibility.”

When you hear politicians say, “share,” “care,” “accountable” and “responsible” — you know a tax , penalty, or regulation can’t be far behind.

Meanwhile, here’s an account of Scott Pelley’s questioning of Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes:

“But Pelley did not question him so much as make a series of highly dubious war-fueling statements as fact. And far more revealing than Pelley’s tone were the premises of his “questions” — ones which blindly assumed every accusation of the Bush administration towards Iran to be true — such as these:

PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans. AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?

PELLEY: Well, sir, you’re the head of government of an Islamist state that the United States government says is a major exporter of terrorism around the world. . . .

PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans, as if to be mocking the American people.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?

PELLEY: Well, the American nation . . .

PELLEY: Mr. President, you say that the two nations are very close to one another, but it is an established fact now that Iranian bombs and Iranian know-how are killing Americans in Iraq. You have American blood on your hands. Why?

AHMADINEJAD: Well, this is what the American officials are saying. . . .

PELLEY: Mr. President, American men and women are being killed by your weapons in Iraq. You know this.

AHMADINEJAD: No, no, no.

PELLEY: Why are those weapons there?

AHMADINEJAD: Who’s saying that?

PELLEY: The American Army has captured Iranian missiles in Iraq. The critical elements of the explosively formed penetrator bombs that are killing so many people are coming from Iran. There’s no doubt about that anymore. The denials are no longer credible, sir. . . .

AHMADINEJAD: Very good. If I may. Are you an American politician? Am I to look at you as an American politician or a reporter? . . . .

PELLEY: Mr. President, you must have rejoiced more than anyone when Saddam Hussein fell. You owe President Bush. This is one of the best things that’s ever happened to your country.

Scott Pelley wants Ahmadinejad to know that — like all of us — he “owes President Bush.” Almost every word out of Pelley’s mouth was a faithful recitation of the accusations made by the Bush White House. Ahmadinejad obviously does not watch much American news because he seemed genuinely surprised that someone he thought was a reporter was doing nothing other than reciting the script of the government….”

more by Glenn Greenwald, via Crimes and Corruptions of the New World Order.

New studies: high IQ correlated with Ron Paul voting…

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Well – not really, but apparently, geeks support Paul.

“As campaign finance records show and the blogosphere has noted, a substantial base of support for Paul comes from professionals in the technology community.

“People in the technology industry tend to be more educated, and more intelligent,” said Jeffrey Schwartz, a Paul supporter who organized the fundraiser through Meetup. Schwartz is a psychiatrist and a long-time libertarian….”

says this Wired piece.

The explanation, it says, is that tech-oriented people tend to want detailed, rational explanations, not emotional sound-bytes. In other words, there is less of the “mob” in the minds of the technology and science crowd…

Marcel Marceau dies…

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“In 1944, Marceau’s father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Later, he reflected on his father’s death: “Yes, I cried for him.”

But he also thought of all the others killed: “Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug,” he told reporters in 2000. “That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another.”

More at AP.

Financial Follies: the Greenspan lobby……

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“Finally, let’s put the cherry on the cake. Indeed, there is a most disturbing piece in former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s recent Memoirs (The Age of Turbulence) and in the explanations he gave in interviews granted to promote his book, and it is his confession that while he was acting chairman of the Fed he actively lobbied Vice President Dick Cheney for a U.S. attack on Iraq. If this was the case, it was most inappropriate for a central banker to act this way, especially when he had other things to do than lobbying in favor of an illegal war. Does it mean that Mr. Greenspan was an active member of the pro-Israel Lobby within the U.S. government and joined the Wolfowitz-Feith-Abrams-Perle-Kissinger cabal? It would seem to me that such behavior would call for an investigation.

Indeed, to what extent was the pro-Israel Lobby responsible for the Iraq war and the deficits it generated? Already, polls indicate that forty percent of American voters believe the pro-Israel Lobby has been a key factor in going to war in Iraq and that it is now very active in promoting a new war against Iran. This figure is bound to rise as more and more people confront the facts behind this most disastrous and ill-conceived war. Indeed, how many wars can this lobby be allowed to engineer before being stopped? And, to what extent can the current financial turmoil in U.S. and world markets be traced back to the influence of this most corrosive lobby?”

More by Rodrigue Tremblay at The New American Empire.

Comment:

Tremblay’s argument is simply an extension of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis about the influence of the Israeli lobby, which has come in from criticism both from the right and left – at best, as an overbroad generalization, at worst, as a form of not-so-covert anti-semitism.

The latter charge, in my opinion, is only reflexive ad hominem. But the other is more plausible.

It is not clear to me how Israel actually benefited from the Iraq war. In fact, it seems to have substantially lost – Iran is a good deal more influential and powerful in the neighborhood and civil war and terrorism has made the whole region more dangerous. As for “creative destruction” in the Middle East, it might seem like a good thing for someone in the US, but no Israeli could possibly find it an advantage.

Financiers, bankers, and defense contractors have always profited from war.

That AIPAC and the rest are powerful is not arguable. But it’s perfectly legitimate for any group to organize and promote its interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt do concede themselves. And there is no reason that a state should not have allies or special alliances, based on any number of factors — shared geo-political interests, cultural or historic ties, military alliances… That has always been a feature of the state system. There is a strong tie between the US and the UK, but no one especially complains about a British lobby (maybe they do and I haven’t heard…).

And I don’t recall anyone complaining about Brzezinski – a Pole in origin – influencing US policy in an excessively anti-Russian manner, or about the “Pakistani lobby” influencing policy against India. Or the old China lobby of the interwar years.

So – Greenspan as an active part of an Israeli lobby part doesn’t quite fly, to my mind. But Greenspan as part of a Wall Street-Treasury-Big Media (remember that fawning Time magazine cover “The Committee to Save the World”?) crony system does…..

That makes Greenspan’s comments blaming “oil” for the Iraq war very interesting. Of course, the war was not pushed for by oil interests, contrary to the usual left-socialist critique. The oil interests in the Bush I administration (Baker, for eg.) were notably against destabilizing the region. There was simply nothing to be gained by it, says this oil industry consultant, as well as this energy security researcher, in terms of improved access that the US did not already have. Oil companies probably make less of a profit and at greater risk to themselves than many other companies – especially defense contractors, and certainly, the financial industry.

[Revision: On rereading this, I think I am committing a logical fallacy here. It’s perfectly possible that oil industry experts thought that the oil business as a whole would be destabilized, while the Bush team (with a high number of officials with vested interests in oil) felt that their particular oil companies could seize post-war control, and gain profits that would make the war-time disruption worth it to them. In other words, direct oil profits for those companies could have been a motive too. That would not take away from the criticism of the banks, of course. But Greenspan’s remarks would then be more in the way of finger- pointing between two sets of elites each with their motivations for war and each with responsibility for it – but one tied to the Republicans and one tied more to the Democrats].

So, the attempt to put the blame on “oil” seems to me to be an attempt by Greenspan to deflect attention from the financialization of the economy during his watch at the Fed, when the banking system was consolidated in an unprecedented manner (through Glass-Steagall pushed through by people like Robert Rubin, part of that famous committee on the Time cover, and through “Financial Modernization” legislation actively sponsored by Senator Gramm and Greenspan, which effectively led to the Enron fiasco). At the same time, the revolving door between the US government and banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs became even more extensive.

The war was less about oil than about which currency pays for oil, and thus, for everything else — it was about the future of the dollar as a reserve currency.

Greenspan effectively scammed dollar-holders all over the world by shucking off US debt onto them (including the bail -out of the big banks in the various debt crises in the 1990s in Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, etc. etc., as well as the costs of war and occupation in the Middle East), while also diluting the value of that debt. Then, with the establishment of a military presence in the Middle East, the US gets to sabre-rattle at any country (read, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and by extension, other countries with close ties/oil agreements with that region) that might be considering moving its reserve currency out of dollars into euros (that was what Saddam was planning to do, by the way, on the eve of the war).

Not so much access to oil, but control over others’ access to and payment for oil.

Why is that an important distinction? Because if big oil needs war to extend its markets that seems to subtantiate the left critique of capitalism, per se. But if big oil itself is not the problem but rather the government-corporate complex that manages the financial system and adjudicates where and how the rewards flow, then the problem is not capitalism as such, but the corporate-state and the financial managers of the global managed (i.e. collectivized) economy.

Our of deference to our left-libertarian allies in the antiwar movement, I will not call that socialism (which, in its anarchist version, right libertarians cannot philosophically object to).

I will call that global collectivism.

Taken together with the unprecedented erosion of civil liberties in the US, the stranglehold of propaganda over big media, and the network of police agencies and states involved in the war on the terror, this financial system could (given a few developments) provide the underpinning for a totalitarian state. (Even as it is now, it certainly doesn’t represent individualism or free markets).

I am quite optimistic that such a totalitarian system will not ultimately arise, simply because of the existence and strengthening of so many other centers of power in the world financial markets. On the other hand, the jockeying for power between them all is likely to create shocks of an unpredictable kind…