This is an excerpt from the anti-fascist film, “V for Vendetta” (a dystopia based on the comic book series by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, screen-play by the Wachowski brothers):
(’V’ is a masked revolutionary bent on destroying the totalitarian government of Britain)
Evey In Her Cell:
Interrogator: I am instructed to inform you that you have been convicted by special tribunal and unless you are ready to offer your cooperation you are to be executed.
Do you understand..what I am telling you?
Evey: Yes
Interrogator: Are you ready to cooperate?
Evey: No
Interrogator: Very well then. Escort Ms Hammond to her cell. Arrange a detail of six men and take her out behind the chemical sheds and shoot her.
Guard: It’s time.
Evey: I’m ready.
Guard: Look. All they want is one little piece of information. Just give them something. Anything
Evey: Thank you. But I’d rather die behind the chemical sheds.
Guard: Then you have no fear any more. You’re completely free.
Evey and ‘V’
V [Entering] Hello, Evey.
Evey:…You…it was you…
V: Yeah.
Evey/: That wasn’t real. Is Gordon….?
V I’m sorry, but Mr. Dietrich’s dead. I thought they’d arrest him but when they found a Koran in his house, they had him executed. Fortunately I got to you before they did.
Evey: You got to me? You did this to me? You cut my hair? You tortured me? You tortured me! Why?
V: You said you wanted to live without fear. I wish there’d been an easier way, but there wasn’t.
Evey: Oh, my God!
V: I know you may never forgive me, but nor will you ever understand how hard it was for me to do what I did. Every day, I saw in myself everything you see in me now. Every day, I wanted to end it. But each time you refused to give in, I knew I couldn’t.
Evey: You’re sick! You’re evil!
V: You could have ended it, Evey. You could have given in, but you didn’t. Why?
Evey: Leave me alone! I hate you!
V: That’s it! See, at first, I thought it was hate too. Hate was all I knew. It built my world, imprisoned me, taught me how to eat, how to drink, how to breathe. I thought I’d die with all the hate in my veins. But then something happened. It happened to me, just as it happened to you.
Evey: Shut up! I don’t want to hear your lies!
V: Your own father said that artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie, but because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.
Evey: No…
V: What was true in that cell is just as true now. What you felt in there has nothing to do with me.
Evey: I CAN’T FEEL ANYTHING ANYMORE!
V: Don’t run from it, Evey. You’ve been running all your life.
Evey: [gasping] I can’t… can’t breathe… Asthma… When I was little… [collapses while V catches her]
V: Listen to me, Evey. This may be the most important moment of your life. Commit to it. They took your parents from you. They took your brother from you. They put you in a cell and took everything they could take except your life. And you believed that was all there was, didn’t you? The only thing you had left was your life, but it wasn’t, was it?
Evey: Oh… please…
V: You found something else. In that cell, you found something that mattered more to you than life. Because when they threatened to kill you unless you gave them what they wanted… you told them you’d rather die. You faced your death, Evey. You were calm. You were still. Try to feel now what you felt then…….
Evey: God. I felt…
V: Yes?
Evey: I felt dizzy. Please. I need air. I need to be outside.
I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler - by Tom Paxton, sung by Arlo Guthrie
Oh the price of gold is rising out of sight/And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight.
What a dollar used to get us/Now won’t buy a head of lettuce/No, the economic forecast isn’t right
But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray/I can even glimpse a new and better way
I’ve devised a plan of action/Worked it down to the last fraction/And I’m going into action here today.
[Cho:]
I am changing My Name To “Chrysler”/I am going down to Washington, D.C.
I will tell some power broker/What they did for Iacocca/Will be perfectly acceptable to me.
I am changing my name to ‘Chrysler’/I am heading for that great receiving line,
So when they hand a million grand out/I’ll be standing with my hand out/Yes sir, I’ll get mine.r you
“Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?”
- Jack Kerouac
Note (Added Nov. 3): I originally had another post following this one, with some email correspondence. I’ve deleted it because I don’t like it showing up at the top of a google search of my name. I’ve posted the emails instead further down on the blog, in the place of an article (deleted), with an explanation of the change. I’ll eventually move that post to one of my permanent pages (Lila at the DR or Media Control).
ORIGINAL POST
Some of you might have heard that Burning Platform (denial of service), Naked Capitalism (denial of service), Lew Rockwell (credit card fraud, copyright violations). and Zerohedge (denial of service) have all been attacked quite recently. These are big blogs, so it’s to be expected. There are people out there who’d like everything to be swept under the rug.
But what could be behind the attacks on a small blog like mine? That’s what bothers me. Who would think it worthwhile?
Yet, the attacks have gone on now for some three years. Obscene comments, stalking, flaming, web-libel, subtle threats, wiki deletions.
Fortunately, you know what they say about fish that can’t keep their mouths shut? They get caught. And over the three years, I’ve been able to catch a few fishy folk who lurked around this blog.
Fish one - the disgruntled Mr. T.R., whose history I’ve recounted at the tab Lila at The Daily Reckoning.
Fish Two - attacks on the book and on my articles and wiki page. I finally figured those were from cyber-vigilantes and assorted liberal blog mafias who disliked my blogging in support of 9-11, on extremist Zionism, and on the banking elites.
Some of that is recounted at Lila at The Daily Reckoning…..
[Note 1 added: There were also emails and stalking set off by a post contributed to this blog by Douglas Valentine, on the CIA.
Note 2: I’ve deleted a section here that goes into this incident in more detail. I’m afraid of setting off the stalker, who, I should mention, is seems to be an ex-CIA operative. I’ve also deleted the links placed on my blog by a commenter, since that was what provoked him. The sexual assault case cited in the comment link has since been resolved in the stalker’s operative’s favor….or so, it would seem, but, meanwhile, what court’s going to give me back my reputation, peace of mind, career, and privacy, all grossly violated by this man’s actions?
And for what? For posting someone else’s piece on the CIA, a piece that was then reprinted widely on the net
That brings me to the last point I want to make - which is that female bloggers attract a very high number of threatening and sexually intimidating comments.
“Kathy Sierra, a software developer, gained a large following on her design blog. She never dreamed her benign postings would attract an online attacker.
“I started getting comments on my own blog that were really threatening like, ‘I’m going to slit your throat,’” Sierra said.
Then the threats became more personal. Her attacker posted a photo of Sierra in a muzzle as if she was being smothered, along with the words, “I dream of Kathy Sierra.”
“At the time, I thought, ‘This is something serious. This is not some kids. This is someone going to great lengths to frighten me,’” she said.
She shut down her blog, and in her final posting wrote, “I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”
As more women enter the blogosphere, with sites running the gamut from professional advice to cooking recipes, they are increasingly being singled out as targets of threats and sexual harassment.
“Cyberharassing or stalking of a female blogger in particular will often be sexual harassment,” said Internet and privacy lawyer Parry Aftab. “They will often take her head and put it on someone else’s naked body. There may be threats to her children.”
Aftab runs Wired Safety.org, an organization that has handled thousands of cyberstalking cases. She advises women who are targets of online harassment that they not respond to threatening posts.
“The easiest thing to do is turn around and attack your attacker, but that is exactly what they want,” she said. “They will come at you more and more.”
True enough. It’s what I’ve learned.
Still, I’ve tried to put these unpleasant things behind me. I’ve tried to keep the conversation here courteous and free from personal attacks. Any criticism has always been directed at people for their public positions or professional performance. And I’ve only done that to support serious arguments, or in self-defense, to salvage my reputation from slander.
But it doesn’t seem to have helped.
Having failed to find anything wrong with my credentials or professional actions, my ‘enemies’ (I wish I could reassure them somehow!) hacked my personal email addresses in 2008. My blog was also hacked. Vague threats directed at me or my family showed up in the comments section whenever I blogged about certain subjects, even though I was obliged to comment on them by the nature and mandate of this blog.
In short, even though what I wrote wasn’t from malice, I was attacked by malicious people…..and, at the same time, by ignorant people who claimed I was “covering up.” I’ve described all this in posts on this blog.
But still, it’s not enough for someone. Strange things keep happening.
Today, again, I got a comment with a vague threat. Much too vague to go to the police. Not too vague to leave me in the dark. It is, I think, the final straw. I can’t waste so much energy and time, and I can’t risk any hurt or danger to my family. I’ve decided to call it quits……for real, this time.
My blog will be taken over by a libertarian friend (s). There’ll be other people running it. It was time for me to leave this country anyway.
Let’s see how that goes. It could take a few days….or a few weeks. Until then - goodbye, good luck, and thanks very much for reading.
To Sir John Chilcot, The Iraq Inquiry,
35 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BG
Your ref Alastair Seaton, IE0054
27 September 2010
Dear Sir John Chilcot,
Thank you for your recent letter in which you state:
“Thank you for your further letter of 27 July, in which you urge the Committee to challenge the conclusion that the 911 bombings were perpetrated by Al Qaeda. The attribution of responsibility for the 9/11 bombings is out with the terms of reference for this Inquiry, except insofar as it impacts on the UK’s involvement in Iraq. We are nevertheless very grateful for the information and sources of further information provided in your letter and hope you will continue to follow the Inquiry’s progress on our website.”
We welcome your agreement that the attribution of responsibility for 9/11 is relevant insofar as it impacts the UK’s involvement in Iraq. Blair made clear that 9/11 was indeed a major factor in the invasion of Iraq while the official paper trail shows that the attribution of responsibility, which includes the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, is murkier than first appeared.
It is noteworthy that your terms of reference start in summer 2001 when, we now know, warnings of the 9/11 attacks were flooding into Washington.
1. BLAIR’S EVIDENCE AND THE QUESTIONS IT RAISES
In case there can be any doubt as to the central role of the 9/11 attacks in the decision to invade Iraq, please recall that Blair made his “shoulder to shoulder” speech in the weeks after 9/11 and as we now know decided effectively to subordinate UK foreign policy to the Bush White House at that time. As he explained to you very clearly and repeatedly in his testimony, 9/11 was a major factor in the decision to invade Iraq because it changed the “calculus of risk”. This confirms what commentators across the political spectrum have been saying: that the invasion of Iraq was made politically possible by 9/11.
Assuming Al Qaeda carried out the attacks independently of any other organisation, an extremely important question remains: how were the attacks able to succeed and hence to change the “calculus of risk”?
2. DANGER OF PUBLIC DISSATISFACTION IF WASHINGTON’S EXPLANATION NOT EXAMINED
We accept it is not up to your Inquiry to determine what happened on 9/11, but we contend the public will not be satisfied unless you examine whether the explanation of the causes, offered to London by Washington, of this massive US defence failure was reliable. Given the anger that now exists in many quarters over the weapons of mass destruction allegations and the “dodgy dossiers” in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, we submit that the public will expect you to look into this with great concern and investigate whether the official 9/11 story is wrong, self-exculpatory, misleading, or simply not adequately substantiated. If Washington’s explanation is unreliable we contend your report should state that further investigation is needed.
3. MISLEADING MEDIA REPORTS AND OFFICIAL STATEMENTS
A review of the media reports at the time confirms that the initial 9/11 account was indeed seriously wrong and that this is the version on which Tony Blair seems to have based his decision making. Politicians and commentators said that Al Qaeda succeeded in this unprecedented, audacious and well-planned attack because they had immense resources and, in the words of Condoleeza Rice, that in the US government “nobody could imagine” that such an attack might occur. Blair made similar comments.
However we now know that the main features of the 9/11 attacks had all been built into various Pentagon war games in the months before 9/11, that Rice had ignored multiple warnings from top officials and foreign governments, and that the failure of the CIA to co-operate with FBI investigations into the presumed 9/11 hijackers was a major factor in the success of the attacks. The 9/11 Commission chair said at one point that the attacks “could and should” have been prevented. There is much further evidence to support this view. It may be noteworthy too that the CIA’s Inspector General later gave George Tenet, CIA director at the time, a severe reprimand over 9/11 on grounds that remain secret.
4. INADEQUACY OF INFORMATION SUPPLIED TO LONDON
If you agree with the consensus view now, that failings of the US authorities, glossed over at the time, were a significant factor in the success of the 9/11 attacks, and if London was trusting information supplied by Washington rather than carrying out their own checks, this has a major bearing on the UK decision to invade Iraq.
It would mean that the alternative policy to war was not properly evaluated. This would have been to avoid launching the invasions, deal with terrorism in the ways that had always been followed up to then, and deal with the causes of the intelligence failings at home.
5. WAS 9/11 ADEQUATELY INVESTIGATED PRIOR TO WAR?
We are not asking you to mount an entirely new investigation into the 9/11 attacks, but we hope you will agree that judgment by media acclamation and White House press release is not a sufficient basis to launch two wars. Therefore we submit that you should note in your final report that the 9/11 attacks have never been fully investigated by a well resourced and independent body prepared to consider a range of ideas on what the full story might be. Many people in the US, including many of the bereaved and members of the 9/11 Commission itself, emphasize the lack of a thorough investigation. The 9/11 Commission was starved of funds, given a very tight timescale and was refused access to key evidence. See note below for some more failings of the 9/11 Commission. The promised trial of alleged ringleader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the only person ever indicted for a central role in the 9/11 attacks, seems to have been postponed indefinitely.
6. NEED FOR A NEW INVESTIGATION
A new 9/11 investigation, and particularly a sharing of the mountain of still secret evidence with the public, is all the more important in the light of the many details which still have not been satisfactorily explained. For instance there is so far no official explanation for the recent discovery by associate Professor Niels Harrit of uncombusted high energy artificial nanothermite particles in the dust at Ground Zero, which indicate the possibility that the collapse of the buildings was some sort of a controlled demolition which could explain the rapid and symmetrical downward collapse of the three (sic) multistorey WTC buildings. Official sources insist the collapses all happened spontaneously in a way unforeseen by any expert before the event, but independent experts have not been given access to the evidence or the computer models which government scientists rely on. Hundreds of architects, engineers and demolition experts have spoken out publicly calling for a new investigation.
Another reason for a further investigation is that the 9/11 Commission discovered the CIA had a top secret 80 strong Osama Bin Laden unit working on projects in the months before 9/11. This contrasts with the explanation proffered by many politicians and commentators that Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan. The CIA reportedly refused to talk to the 9/11 Commission about vast areas of what the OBL unit was up to.
Similarly no details have been given of the Pentagon’s anti-hijack exercise running, apparently by sheer coincidence, at the exact time of the 9/11 attacks and which we now know interfered with the response from air traffic control and the Pentagon. Even the flight manifests for the hijacked planes are still secret.
7. QUESTIONS THAT NEED TO BE ASKED
As well as the more general recommendations mentioned above concerning the preventabilty of the 9/11 attacks and the failure to investigate the whole affair in any depth, we submit that you should ask some specific questions to Tony Blair. Before he gave his almost unconditional support to the Bush White House, did he task MI6 or any other UK agency to make an independent assessment of the 9/11 attacks, of who was behind them, and of how they came to be carried out so successfully? Did anyone mention to him that the Oklahoma bomb was at first wrongly blamed by Washington on Islamic extremists? Did he and his advisors discuss the possibility the attacks were successful as a result of failings in the US? Did they inquire if 9/11 resulted, as now seems possible, from a CIA sting operation gone wrong?
8. WHAT WE CAN OFFER
Finally we submit that you should take adequate evidence from us and make appropriate recommendations in your report, not only because the decision to invade Iraq is at the heart of your inquiry but also out of respect for the rights of the bereaved and other victims of many nationalities in both the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Please take public testimony from Paul Warburton on the general legal issues, Niels Harrit on the nanothermite at the World Trade Centre, and Ian Henshall for an overview on how the official 9/11 story has changed and whether it is reliable. Other experts could probably be made available including retired FBI and CIA officers.
Ian Henshall (co-ordinator Reinvestigate 911, author 911 The New Evidence)
Paul Warburton (barrister)
Niels Harrit (associate professor of Chemistry University of Copenhagen, nanotechnology specialist)
Noel Glynn (Convenor Quakers for Truth on Terrorism)
NOTE
The only official attempts to investigate 9/11 were the FBI probe that was ended prematurely and run by Bush appointee Michael Chertoff (later Homeland security chief in charge of the Hurricane Katrina disaster), and the 9/11 Commission. The latter was severely underfunded, short of time, and stuffed with Washington insiders. It never considered any scenario other than the official story. Its executive Director Phillip Zelikow was caught reporting regularly in secret to the White House, while Senator Max Cleland resigned angrily denouncing the process as a whitewash. Later the chief investigator John Farmer wrote that there was an agreement in the White House or the Pentagon to lie to investigators. The Commission failed to clarify the role of the CIA’s top secret Osama Bin Laden unit and its refusal to pass on important information to the FBI prior to the attacks. It failed to investigate the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings one of which was not struck by a plane and which we now know fell at free fall speed. For the chaos and manipulation of the 911 Commission by Zelikow and the Bush White House, see the book The Commission by Phil Shenon the New York Times specialist on the subject.
Ian Henshall is also proprietor of Coffee Plant ( www.coffee.uk.com)
and chair of INK, trade organisation for UK alternative print media (www.ink.uk.com)
Ian Henshall’s email is crisisnewsletter@pro-net.co.uk
I’ve expressed my skepticism about some of Rand Paul’s positions, but as I hear the rhetoric from the establishment demonizing the Tea Party at every chance, I’ve come to the conclusion that Rand Paul might still be worth supporting. In support of that, I found this at Humble Libertarian:
“Ron’s success in the 2012 Presidential race is DIRECTLY tied to Rand’s success in 31 days.
WHY?
Think it through.
Allow me to elaborate the possible scenarios:
Scenario 1- Rand loses. The media, liberals, Democrats, and even Republican establishment will declare that the liberty movement and tea parties are not viable and have no chance of electoral success. Rand is seen as the leader and if he fails then the symbolic victory of the statists will be crushing to any hope for 2012. If this happens then Ron might not even run in 2012 because it would be somewhat pointless for him to do so. Morale will be in the gutter, donors will turn cold, and enthusiasm will be largely nonexistent; not to mention the lack of momentum.
Scenario 2- Rand wins barely. Although victory is victory, a small margin of victory will then give the commentators and media an edge to fight against us in 2012. They will say that we just barely won, and that it was a fluke, or we just got lucky, or whatever. It’ll still be an uphill battle in the fight for legitimacy and credibility. This also will not bode well for Rand when he has to fight for his seat again next time around in perhaps a less friendly political atmosphere.
Scenario 3- Rand wins in a large victory (Randslide). A mandate by the People will be undeniable and cannot be countered. This paves the way that our ideas are now mainstream, acceptable, and that Ron stands a good chance of winning in 2012. Think of it as leap frog. Rand run’s on Ron’s shoulders and wins. Then Ron runs on Rand’s shoulders and wins. We will be unstoppable and perceived as unbeatable because momentum will be on our side.
There you have it — those are the possible outcomes as I see it. If you are cold on Rand, realize you are hurting Ron’s chance in 2012. A large victory for Rand paves the way and is even necessary for Ron’s electoral success in 2012. Anything less makes it highly unlikely. The campaign needs money, it needs volunteers, it needs people on the ground. It needs door knockers, phone bankers, sign placers, etc. Will you come to KY in the final weeks of the campaign and help out? The realization that when you are campaigning for Rand you are also simultaneously campaigning for Ron to be President is critical.”
My Comment
First. I don’t think libertarians should be pouring money into anything..Their first job is to look after themselves and their families. Ron and Rand Paul have received a lot of money already.
They need volunteers and support more than money. Besides, there are plenty of wealthy businessmen and gold dealers in the hard money community who can and should support them financially.
[I say this because some libertarian activists have expressed anxiety about what's actually been done with the money they've given. That’s always a problem for all politicians, of course. I just mention it here, because I've heard concern expressed by a couple of activists.]
Two. I think the answer isn’t political - it’s education. And criticism/analysis of propaganda.
The best contribution libertarians can make is to refuse to demonize the Tea Party or ANY candidate being bashed by the establishment. That will allow the candidates’ voices to be heard on their own merit.
Participating in the media circus is a problem in itself. Ignore it. Refuse to listen. Refuse to change the terms of your argument.
Three. I don’t think any libertarian should support only one person. Support anyone who is antiwar, first and foremost. War is the heart of the police-state. I would sooner support someone who was antiwar and pro-government than someone who reduced domestic spending, but wouldn’t touch the military budget, which I think might be where Rand Paul ends up….
But if he’s willing to do both - cut the military and domestic spending - then of course, I would support him.
Still, just because I don’t know what he’s going to do, I would NEVER make common cause AGAINST Rand Paul with the establishment liberal/left. That would be simply opportunistic.
I would only make alliances with principled people on the issue of war and the police-state.
Once the military budget is cut, we will be on a sounder footing to tackle other problems.
And when people aren’t deathly afraid of surviving (”Muslims are going to get us!”), they’ll be a lot more open to libertarian thinking too.
I know Rothbard moved to the left. But that was then. Things are very different now. Libertarians must keep to the right and try to convince neo-conservatives and the Christian right to stop selling out their core values to socialist ones.
We don’t have to concede ANYTHING to the liberal establishment.
The only thing we want from them is a groveling apology for their Stalinist behavior.
A moment of unusual creativity and rationality, from The Economist (or, from a more cynical point of view, a glimpse into the mechanics of co-option):
“What should democratic parties do when lots of voters back a far-right party? At a time of recession, populism cannot just be wished away. One answer is to address legitimate grievances about the scale and nature of immigration. (In France Nicolas Sarkozy has, controversially, pinched far-right rhetoric.) Another is to use the law to curb blatant examples of hate speech.
But the temptation for many is to isolate the extremists, perhaps with an alliance of mainstream left and right. That risks intensifying voters’ sense that politicians are not listening to them, further boosting the extremists, but it may be necessary against the most odious groups. Some, like Mr Reinfeldt in Sweden, may try to ignore the far right. More stable would be a Dutch-style deal to secure their backing for a minority government; some Christian Democrats hope this will tame the wilder side of Mr Wilders. The danger is that it just gives him power without responsibility—and without forcing him to recant outrageous positions.
A better, braver strategy, in some cases, might be to bring far-right leaders into the cabinet, exposing their ideas to reality and their personalities to the public gaze. It may make for tetchy government, but it could also moderate the extremes. So roll the dice and make Mr Wilders foreign minister: for how long could he keep telling the world to ban the Koran?”
This clip from the ‘Man from U.N.C.L.E’ - a Cold War TV series from the sixties, featuring the intrepid spies, Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) and Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) - perfectly suits the lyrics of “Everybody Knows,” by Canadian singer-poet-mystic, Leonard Cohen.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose/Everybody knows……
Everybody knows the deal is rotten Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows/And everybody knows…”
The U.N.C.L.E. clip used in the video is interesting in both anticipating the globalist agenda and capturing the disenchantment of people awakening to the dialectic by which the power elites subjugate them.
Wiki has this description of the U.N.C.L.E. series:
“The series, though fictional, achieved such notability as to have artifacts (props, costumes and documents, and a video clip) from the show included in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s exhibit on spies and counterspies. Similar exhibits can be found in the museums of the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies and organizations involved with intelligence gathering.”
Lila:This seems fitting, since the series accomplishes one of the ongoing tasks of the elites themselves, conditioning the popular mind to accept the need for a worldwide intelligence agency run by “good guys,” while distracting from the biggest “bad guy” of all - government.
“U.N.C.L.E.’s archenemy was a vast organization known as THRUSH (originally named WASP in the series pilot movie). The original series never explained what the acronym THRUSH stood for, but in several of the U.N.C.L.E. novels written by David McDaniel, it was expanded as the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, and described by him as having been founded by Col. Sebastian Moran after the death of Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Final Problem“. Later, an alternate—and more plausible—explanation was offered, with THRUSH rising out of the fall of Nazism and founded by high-ranking Nazi officials—including Martin Bormann—who fled to Argentina when defeat was seen as inevitable, taking with them enormous financial wealth, including gold and precious works of art.”
“THRUSH’s aim was to conquer the world. Napoleon Solo said (in “The Green Opal Affair”), “THRUSH believes in the two-party system: the masters and the slaves”, adding in another episode (”The Vulcan Affair”) that THRUSH will “kill people the way people kill flies: a careless flick of the wrist — reflex action.” So dangerous was the threat from THRUSH that governments, even those most ideologically opposed such as the United States and the USSR, cooperated in the formation and operation of U.N.C.L.E. Similarly, if Solo and Kuryakin held opposing political views, the writers allowed little to show in their interactions.
The creators of the series decided that the involvement of an innocent character would be part of each episode, giving the audience someone with whom it could identify.”
Though executive producer Norman Felton and Ian Fleming had developed the character of Napoleon Solo, it was producer Sam Rolfe who created the organization of U.N.C.L.E. Unlike the nationalistic organizations of the CIA and James Bond’s MI6, U.N.C.L.E. was a worldwide organization composed of agents from all corners of the globe…”
“I propose to return to Gandhi’s wisdom. It is impossible to move masses of people without a vision. Peace is not just an absence of hostilities, not the product of a labyrinth of walls and fences. Neither is it a utopia of “the wolf dwelling with the lamb”. It is a real state of reconciliation, of partnership between peoples and between human beings, who respect each other, who are ready to satisfy each other’s interests, to trade with each other, to create social relationships and – who knows – here and there even to like each other.”
“In the February 2003 Liberty Magazine, Mr. Timothy Sandefur, lately a Lincoln Fellow at Claremont Institute, complains that in the wake of the Trent Lott affair, too many American political leaders are“minimizing the offensiveness of a Mississippi good ol’ boy who tells his audience that things wouldabin bettah if thar hain’t bin nunna dat dee-seg-ruh-gay-shun.”1
For my part, I am more taken with the offensiveness of the words I just put in italics. The effect is hideous – sort of Joel Chandler Harris + 90-proof anti-Southern venom! Luckily for us, post-colonial analysis saves the day.
If this Fellow (a singular counterpart to General Lee’s “those people”) can dress up in Hickface, what happens to all the post-colonial literature about white folks, minstrel shows, and all that? Will new theories arise? If Br’er Strauss and Br’er Jaffa ask to be thrown in the hermetic briar patch, is it all a big trick?
Mind you, the Fellow’s sally is not very funny, but perhaps he did not mean to be funny. I expect he meant to be insulting. He knows that Southerners don’t enjoy being insulted. There is a whole literature on this, including a very tedious book by Professor Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who studied under the even more tedious C. Vann Woodward.
There is an implicit syllogism here: 1. People who don’t sign on for full-bore Lincolnianism, rightly understood (= mercantilism), are bad people; and (1. B.) bad people should be insulted, and as often as possible. 2. Southerners don’t sign on for full-bore Lincolnian mercantilism. 3. Therefore, Southerners should be insulted daily, partly because they dislike it so much. It’s good for them, builds character, you know.
As Nietzsche might have said, that which doesn’t torch Atlanta or Columbia, once a week, strengthens us.
And now I read the sentence: “Things wouldabin,” etc., again. “Well, shut my mouth,” I cry, slapping myself on the knee; indeed I slap my knee a mite hard, but am somehow able to keep time with the high lonesome fiddle music that runs through the soundtrack of my post-Hillbilly mind. “How do,” I say, in the general direction of the imagined “good ol’ boy” conjured up for our contemptuous contemplation by the Fellow. How do these Northern gentry (and scalawags) find so much time to worry about little old us, when, left to our own devices, we would seldom pay any heed to them whatsoever? It is a mystery.
Perhaps Southerners’ general lack of interest in what “those people” do and say is the greatest crime of all…….
…
THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE OF HISTORY
What sociological or ideological conclusions may we draw from the above?
The Fellow has no ear for “dialect” writing. If he really wanted to present a Mississippi accent, he could sample the oeuvre of the late Jerry Clower. There he would find one variety of Mississippi speech along with ample evidence for Celtic substratum sentence-structure traceable to Ulster. My guess is he will not find this project very fetching.
It is more likely that the Fellow is just following the set “national” media rule (in place since the 1960s) whereby white Southerners’ speech must be rendered pseudo-phonetically so as to display the speakers’ boundless depravity, while all other persons will be written up as conforming in every way with the strictures of Mr. Fowler, no matter what they sound like.
George Wallace always got the Yankee pseudo-phonetic write-up, but can you imagine Ed Koch, the Rev. Al Sharpton, or Larry King written up the way they sound? Ha!
For a couple of centuries, northern interest groups and their allies have badgered and defamed Southerners. Poor old critics, I worry about them: If they finally succeed in abolishing the South, whatever will they do with themselves? Abolish the World, I suppose.
For two centuries, Yankees of a certain type were in the habit of denouncing Southerners for talking like Blacks, for eating the same food, and more of the same. They didn’t much care how this reflected on the Blacks.
Things have changed. And here’s the rub, if white Southerners are stupid for clinging to certain colonial expressions, where does that leave African-Americans who also use just as many – perhaps more – of them? If you sneer at one set of linguistic Southerners, how do you immunize another set of them from this assault?
I’m glad enough it isn’t my problem. Anyway, if the Fellow wants to hear some funny dialect material, he should listen to tapes of the late Lewis Grizzard. Old Lewis could do a good imitation of a flat, washed-out Midwestern accent. He found that regional accent amusing, I guess, but there wasn’t much venom in his depiction of it.
For venom mixed with the wisdom of the serpent you must betake yourself to New England, where fanatics grow out of the rocky soil. Maybe the Fellow will go up there sometime. Maybe he will render their speech phonetically for our edification.
Notes:
1. Timothy Sandefur, “One Cheer for Al Sharpton,” Liberty, 17, 2 (February 2003), p. 14 (my italics).
2.
John Samuel Kenyon, American Pronunciation (Ann Arbor, MI: George Wair Publishing, 1966), p. 106 (my emphasis).
3. C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955 (1933): “ain’t” (p. 38), “an’t” (p. 72), and “hain’t, haint” (p. 854).
4. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 52.
5. Cf. Cleanth Brooks, The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1935).
6. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 256–264.
On waking up this morning, I rethink this post. True, the people below aren’t people I’d normally want to emulate. But these aren’t normal times. So the right reaction to this is yes, but what else do you expect? Can’t expect people to leave all the legal looting to the government…
“If you were making $1 million per year or more, but lost your job, would you file an unemployment claim? Nearly 3,000 American millionaires would have answered “yes” to this question in 2008, according to an article by Ryan J. Donmoyer at Bloomberg. IRS data shows that a whopping 2,840 households earning at least $1 million in 2008 also filed for government unemployment payments that year. There are two sort of immediate questions that arise from this fact: what were they thinking, and should this be allowed?”
What They Were Thinking?
To non-millionaires it might seem absurd that people who had such a staggering income recently would turn to the government for help after losing their jobs. But it shouldn’t. First, most wealthy people didn’t become that way by accident. They tend to be pretty savvy about money. So if the law entitles them to collect unemployment when laid off, then they aren’t the type to turn down free money. Only a fool would do that.”
My Comment:
If it’s foolish for millionaires to turn down government benefits, I suppose it’s insane for school teachers to.
Ah. And I thought there was something about honor in it. Silly me. Time to make a trip to the government trough and see what I’m due for.
Well, it only confirms what I’ve said before.
Except for the rural poor and some pockets of ghetto poverty, except for children, the elderly, the sick, and some unfortunates, the rest of the people who are on the dole now are there because they aren’t willing to work at the part-time jobs out there, they’re not willing to make do with makeshift work. and they’re not willing to change their spendthrift ways. The more they’re given, the more they’ll take.
[I rethought this. I think anger at abuse of the system shouldn't make us forget that people really are suffering].
I should make it clear that, as a libertarian, I don’t support sanctions against any country. I wouldn’t have supported sanctions against South Africa, didn’t support them on Iraq, and don’t support them on Israel. However, targeted boycotts against specific, responsible parties (journalists, academics, government officials, businessmen or military officials directly involved in genocidal crimes or in their cover-up) would be defensible under international law. General sanctions only impoverish people and undermine resistance.
So my problem here is less with Chomsky’s position on divestment - whatever it is - so much as his apparent double-standards on the issue - one standard for South Africans…… and another for Israel.One for Israel…and another for Palestine. One for the US…and another for Israel.
If the Jews deserved a homeland, and they did, the Palestinians surely deserved land that was already their home and had been their home for centuries…
Original Post [all varieties of emphasis - underlines, capitals, and italics - are mine, not Blankfort's]:
The indefatigably brave and honest Jeff Blankfort analyzes Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel and Palestine. I’ve been very conflicted about Chomsky’s blind-eye on 9-11 for some time now. What to think about it? This analysis convinces me finally that Chomsky’s bias is not simply an emotional blind-spot, but a deliberate obfuscation that in such a prominent, sophisticated, and powerful voice, must be called out and questioned closely.
“His reluctance to label Israel’s control of the Palestinians as “apartheid” out of concern that it be seen as a “red flag,” like describing it as “inflammatory,” was a red flag itself and raised questions that should have been asked by the interviewer, such as who would be inflamed by the reference to ‘apartheid’ as a “red flag” in Israel’s case and what objections would Chomsky have to that?
A more disturbing exchange occurred later in the interview when Chomsky was asked if sanctions should be applied against Israel as they were against South Africa. He responded:
“In fact, I’ve been strongly against it in the case of Israel. For a number of reasons. For one thing, even in the case of South Africa, I think sanctions are a very questionable tactic. In the case of South Africa, I think they were [ultimately] legitimate because it was clear that the large majority of the population of South Africa was in favor of it.
Sanctions hurt the population. You don’t impose them unless the population is asking for them. That’s the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.”
Obviously not. But is it acceptable to make such a decision on the basis of what the majority of Israelis want? Israel, after all, is not a dictatorship in which the people are held in check by fear and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their government’s actions. Israel has a largely unregulated, lively press and a “people’s army” in which all Israeli Jews, other than the ultra-orthodox, are expected to serve and that is viewed by the Israeli public with almost religious reverence. Over the years, in their own democratic fashion, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have consistently supported and participated in actions of their government against the Palestinians and Lebanese that are not only racist, but in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Chomsky made his position clear:
“So calling for sanctions here, when the majority of the population doesn’t understand what you are doing, is tactically absurd-even if it were morally correct, which I don’t think it is. The country against which the sanctions are being imposed is not calling for it.”
The interviewer, Lee, understandably puzzled by that answer, then asked him, “Palestinians aren’t calling for sanctions?
Chomsky: “Well, the sanctions wouldn’t be imposed against the Palestinians, they would be imposed against Israel.”
Lee: “Right… [And] Israelis aren’t calling for sanctions.”
That response also disturbed Palestinian political analyst, Omar Barghouti, who, while tactfully acknowledging Chomsky as “a distinguished supporter of the Palestinian cause,” addressed the issue squarely:
Of all the anti-boycott arguments, this one reflects either surprising naiveté or deliberate intellectual dishonesty. Are we to judge whether to apply sanctions on a colonial power based on the opinion of the majority in the oppressors community? Does the oppressed community count at all? [7]
For Chomsky, apparently not……
………In an exchange with Washington Post readers, Chomsky was asked by a caller:
Why did you sign an MIT petition calling for MIT to boycott Israeli investments, and then give an interview in which you state that you opposed such investment boycotts? What was or is your position on the proposal by some MIT faculty that MIT should boycott Israeli investments?
Chomsky replied:
As is well known in Cambridge, of anyone involved, I” was the most outspoken opponent of the petition calling for divestment, and in fact refused to sign until it was substantially changed, along lines that you can read if you are interested. The “divestment” part was reduced to three entirely meaningless words, which had nothing to do with the main thrust of the petition. I thought that the three meaningless words should also be deleted… On your last question, as noted, I was and remain strongly opposed, without exception — at least if I understand what the question means. How does one “boycott Israeli investments”? (Emphasis added). [10]
I will assume that Chomsky understood very well what the caller meant: investing in Israeli companies and in State of Israel Bonds of which US labor union pension funds, and many states and universities have purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth. These purchases clearly obligate those institutions to lobby Congress to insure that the Israeli economy stays afloat. This isn’t something that Chomsky talks or writes about.
The caller was referring to a speech that Chomsky had made to the Harvard Anthropology Dept. shortly after the MIT and Harvard faculties issued a joint statement on divestment. It was gleefully reported in the Harvard Crimson by pro-Israel activist, David Weinfeld, under the headline “Chomsky’s Gift”:
MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky recently gave the greatest Hanukkah gift of all to opponents of the divestment campaign against Israel. By signing the Harvard-MIT divestment petition several months ago—and then denouncing divestment on Nov. 25 at Harvard—Chomsky has completely undercut the petition.
At his recent talk for the Harvard anthropology department, Chomsky stated: “I am opposed and have been opposed for many years, in fact, I’ve probably been the leading opponent for years of the campaign for divestment from Israel and of the campaign about academic boycotts.”
He argued that a call for divestment is “a very welcome gift to the most extreme supporters of US-Israeli violence… It removes from the agenda the primary issues and it allows them to turn the discussion to irrelevant issues, which are here irrelevant, anti-Semitism and academic freedom and so on and so forth.” [11]…….
….
Chomsky’s rationalization of Israel’s criminal misdeeds in The Fateful Triangle should have rung alarm bells when it appeared in 1983. Written a year after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in what would become a sacred text for Middle East activists, he actually began the book not by taking Israel to task so much as its critics:
In the war of words that has been waged since Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, critics of Israeli actions have frequently been accused of hypocrisy. While the reasons advanced are spurious, the charge itself has some merit. It is surely hypocritical to condemn Israel for establishing settlements in the occupied territories while we pay for establishing and expanding them. Or to condemn Israel for attacking civilian targets with cluster and phosphorous bombs “to get the maximum kill per hit.” When we provide them gratis or at bargain rates, knowing that they will be used for just this purpose. Or to criticize Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ bombardment of heavily-settled civilian areas or its other military adventures, while we not only provide the means in abundance but welcome Israel’s assistance in testing the latest weaponry under live battlefield conditions... .In general, it is pure hypocrisy to criticize the exercise of Israeli power while welcoming Israel’s contributions towards realizing the US aim of eliminating possible threats, largely indigenous, to American domination of the Middle East region.[ 21]
First, the PLO was seen as a threat by Israel, not by the United States in 1982, particularly since it had strictly abided by a US-brokered cease-fire with Israel for 11 months, giving it a dangerous degree of credibility in Israeli eyes. Second, whom did Chomsky mean by “we?” Perhaps, President Reagan and some members of Congress who gently expressed their concern when the number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the invasion and the wholesale destruction of the country could not be suppressed in the media. But he doesn’t say. It certainly wasn’t those who took to the streets across the country to protest Israel’s invasion. Both political parties had competed in their applause when Israel launched its attack, as did the AFL-CIO which took out a full page ad in the NY Times, declaring “We Are Not Neutral. We Support Israel!” paid for by an Israeli lobbyist with a Park Avenue address. The media, in the beginning, was also supportive, but it is rare to find an editorial supporting US aid to Israel. It is rarely ever mentioned and that’s the way the lobby likes it. So is Chomsky creating a straw figure? It appears so.
If we follow Chomsky’s “logic,” it would be an injustice to bring charges of war crimes against Indonesian, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, or Filipino officers, soldiers, or public officials for the atrocities committed against their own countrymen and women since they were funded, armed and politically supported by the US. Perhaps, General Pinochet will claim the Chomsky Defense if he goes to trial.
He pressed the point of US responsibility for Israel’s sins again in his introduction to The New Intifada, noting that as one of the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, “It is therefore Washington’s responsibility to prevent settlement and expropriation, along with collective punishment and all other measures of violence… .It follows that the United States is in express and extreme violation of its obligations as a High Contracting Party.” [22]
I would agree with Chomsky, but is the US refusal to act a more “extreme violation” than the actual crimes being committed by another signatory to the Conventions, namely Israel? Chomsky would have us believe that it is.
It is a point he made clear at a talk in Oxford in May, 2004, when he brought up the killing a week earlier of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin by the Israeli military as he left a Mosque in Gaza. “That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but inaccurately” said Chomsky. “Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by an Israeli pilot. Israel does not produce helicopters. The US sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly.”
Chomsky is correct to a point. What is missing from his analysis is any reference to the demands from Congress, orchestrated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s officially registered lobby, to make sure that the US provides those helicopters to Israel to use as its generals see fit. (In fact, there is not a single mention of AIPAC in any one of Chomsky’s many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict). What Chomsky’s British audience was left with was the conclusion that the assassination of Sheik Yassin was done with Washington’s approval.
While its repeated use of helicopters against the Palestinian resistance and civilian population has been one of the more criminal aspects of Israel’s response to the Intifada, absolving the Israelis of blame for their use has become something of a fetish for Chomsky as his introduction to The New Intifada [23] and again, in more detail in Middle East Illusions, illustrates:
On October 1, [at the beginning of the Al-Aksa Intifada] Israeli military helicopters, or, to be more precise, US military helicopters with Israeli pilots, sharply escalated the violence, killing two Palestinians in Gaza… . The continuing provision of attack helicopters by the United States to Israel, with the knowledge that these weapons are being used against the civilian Palestinian population, and the silence of the mainstream media is just one illustration of many of how we live up to the principle that we do not believe in violence. Again, it leaves honest citizens with two tasks: the important one, do something about it; and the second one, try to find out why the policies are being pursued. (Emphasis added) [24]
What to do Chomsky again doesn’t say, but he does try to tell us why:
“On that matter, the fundamental reasons are not really controversial… It has long been understood that the gulf region has the major energy sources in the world… ” [25]
Chomsky then goes on for two pages explaining the importance of Middle East oil and the efforts by the US to control it. It is the basic explanation that he has repeated and republished, almost verbatim, over the years. What it has to do with the Palestinians who have no oil or how a truncated Palestinian state would present a threat to US regional interests is not provided, but after two pages the reader has forgotten that the question was even posed. In his explanation there is no mention of the lobby or domestic influences.
Chomsky does acknowledge that “major sectors of American corporate capitalism, including powerful elements with interests in the Middle East [the major oil companies!]” have endorsed a “two-state solution” on the basis that
the radical nationalist tendencies that are enflamed by the unsettled Palestinian problem would be reduced by the establishment of a Palestinian mini-state that would be contained within a Jordanian-Israeli military alliance (perhaps tacit), surviving at the pleasure of its far more powerful neighbors and subsidized by the most conservative and pro-American forces in the Arab world… .This would, in fact, be the likely outcome of a two-state settlement.” [26]
Such an outcome would have little direct influence on regional Arab politics, except to demoralize supporters of the Palestinian struggle in the neighboring countries and around the world, a development that would clearly serve US interests. It would, however, curb Israel’s expansion, which is critical to Israel’s agenda, not Washington’s. Chomsky also fails to recognize a fundamental contradiction in his argument.If the support of Israel has been based on its role as protector of US strategic resources, namely oil, why does not that position enjoy the support of the major oil companies with interests in the region?…”
“Egoism, in a broader sense, has been… presented as the source of moral action. It has been said that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounds of the man beaten by thieves, pour oil and wine into them, set him on our own beast and bring him to the inn, because we receive ourselves pleasure from these acts… These good acts give us pleasure, but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses... The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for a social animal without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man, because there is no rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule.”
{Note: I originally had a post here “The Rise of the Sofa Samurai” - an old piece written in 2006 and first published at Endervidualism (later used in “Mobs”) and the emails below were the last post, after I closed my blog. But I didn’t want them to be coming up at the top of a google search, which is what happened, so I republished them in place of the earlier post on sofa samurai, since I saw that some of the material in it was being attributed again to my coauthor (one of his websites).
(Correction: the piece in which this line occurs is actually “Satan and Sex Manias” (DV), not the sofa samurai piece).
Those are the perils of joint copyright when the authors’ contributions are partly separate and when one author has more marketing clout than the other.
In any case, I decided that in place of the original piece, I’d publish the correspondence from 2008 in which I’d asked for the third or fourth time to have the wrong attributions corrected…of course, now, 2 years later, they’ve gone back to their incorrect form, or been deleted altogether, along with everything else with my name on it. So I thought I’d place these emails on my blog, only a tiny part of the hundreds of emails that show clearly the nature of the collaboration and its unfortunate denouement].
Hi Lila,
Hope you are well.
Where on Bill’s website does it mention the articles you reference below?
Thanks,
J
—–Original Message—– From: William Bonner
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 6:09 AM To: J H Subject: Fwd: foreign rights
I don’t know exactly what Lila is referring to…but her request sounds reasonable…could you try to figure it out and ask Addison to add a line such as she suggests?
Thanks
Bill
In a message dated 1/29/2008 12:38:50 PM Eastern Standard Time, lila rajiva writes:
Mr B -
Just a word about those articles (Transit of Venus, Consuming Passions etc) which you’ve published under your name.
I am OK with it because the original pieces were written under your name. But, I should point out that they were not written solely for the DR (as your web page says) but BOTH for the DR and the book. I checked my email record. In fact, we really wrote them for the book and used them in the DR, especially CP.
Writing that it was only for the DR looks like an effort to undermine the copyright. Copyright, I should point out, isn’t affected by our agreement on acknowledgment and promoting……the copyright on all the material is still held by both of us.
The acknowledgment agreement just means we are allowing each other to cite our own work freely as a courtesy but we still accept that the essays were written for the book.
In the case of Transit, it’s all your essay and no input from me, so there is no problem even if there is a confusion.
But Consuming Passions was an essay I worked on and gave you important ideas for (homo farber etc) and it was one we wrote with the intention that it was to be used in the book. And I didn’t mind it being under your name because I knew the copyright would still be under both our names.
So it’s not fine to say it was written for the DR only. It was actually written for Mobs and published on DR.
I’d like a piece like that to have a little thing underneath saying (with the help of Lila Rajiva)…I’m not asking to share the byline, but just a little acknowledgment. Since no one ever knew I helped you on the DR for the period we wrote the book..and your readers don’t know that a lot of the essays under your name have some input from me…
Which means, if I cite my own idea later on, it will just seem - unfairly - like I was poaching on your idea.
You can publish C Passions under your name under your collected works, for eg, but I would like you to acknowledge my help on it and on the essays central to the argument (Consuming Passions, All Men are Created Equal - where it was me who originally gave you the idea of scale from the Hutterite research and argued it was more important than the public-private distinction).
In turn, although my solo essays contain references to do-gooders and world-improvers, I would credit you as having coined those terms in any discussions…but that’s less important, because most people who read us would recognize them anyway as your terms since it’s obvious I am imitating you.
Doesn’t mean you can’t publish the essays under your name. But it means we need to draw up a consistent citation policy that will spare us trouble later. And Addison had better abide by it.
Hope you are OK with that. I will draw up a very detailed analysis of the whole book which will show how each part can be cited which will let you use your own work separately but also acknowledge whenever there was substantial contribution (more than editorial) from me. You will have a chance to vet it of course.
I will consult with a copyright attorney and then send it to you for future citation.
Meanwhile, just let Addison know that those essays were written for the book as much as for the DR..even more so, so he should take that line off..
So that’s something concrete you can give your assent to. Since you asked what you could do to help.
I tried to call you but you weren’t available.
Say hello to Claire. She was nice to me.
Lila
From: William Bonner
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:11:17 -0500
Subject: Re: foreign rights
I know she thinks she’s been treated shabbily. But when I ask how…and what can be done about it…I never get an answer that I can understand or act upon. I just get insults.
She seems to want explanations from me for things that I don’t know anything about. And when I tell her that I just don’t know anything about it…she believes I am lying.
(And then accuses me of lying to her for the last couple of years…about what, I’m not sure.)
Not that this is your problem…but you seem to believe that she actually has been treated shabbily. So, I’ll assume you are a reasonable person…and just ask — How?
And if so…is there anything I can do about it?
Bill
P.S. I’m at my phone..in London…but only for a few minutes more…I have to leave for Paris this afternoon.
From: Lila Rajiva Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 9:15 PM To: J H Cc: Bill Bonner; T R Subject: French contract/Dr Skousen book signing /PR issues
J -
I think we can take care of the Chinese contract this week.
Not a problem except that the Chinese agent is now charging us, a second fee, probably another10% or so, like the Germans.
So, I’m asking DELETED to put a note in that the contract is acceptable assuming reasonable fees. It’s not a deal breaker, it just means I don’t want them asking for something exorbitant like 20% after we sign. Let me know if that might be an issue.
I’ve asked DELETED to go over to your office and sign off on it, including the royalties change and acknowledgment document, whenever you both can arrange it. [J H] No problem. French contract:
If you are able, please tell Bill I am willing to do what is reasonably possible to help him on it.
Also, if you can, please ask him if he would consider another (more commercial) publisher?
Or even translating and publishing on our own or through something like Interlink..
It may actually be better that way. [J H] He said that if you or someone can find a publisher it’s okay with him. He is not interested in publishing ourselves…we have no way to distribute.
PR peculiarities:
Also, a couple of odd things:
1. Wiley refused to let me do a book talk or signing in August/September in Baltimore where it would cost nothing (I had a lot of requests). But now they have Dr. Skousen talking about the book and signing it in Texas (listed on their website) in April… A reader wrote and asked…..Is that some kind of mistake…or did Bill OK it? Is it usual for third parties to sign and talk about books…isn’t that part of the promotion designated for authors? Just asking. [J H] He can’t imagine it…and it doesn’t make sense to him. He doesn’t know anything about it.
With respect, it wasn’t what we agreed….
2. The invites to Bermuda and to Freedom Fest to me to speak on the book seem to have been canceled around the week in December when I asked for more time to review the contracts.
Was that related? Not giving offense, just curious.[J H] He doesn’t know anything about the invitations and has never spoken to anyone about it.
And a couple of corrections I hope can be made:
Corrections:
1. On Bill’s bio on the DR, there is still no reference/link to “Mobs” at all.. I’ve been asking for that for a few months. And it would be nice, if the page mentioned me as author too. Otherwise it really sounds like a deliberate snub. Not good PR.
Attribution isn’t promotion. It’s an ownership issue, like the title to a house. [J H] I will ask them to include this.
2. On the same page, the page length review by Alex Greene doesn’t credit me at all and then quotes a couple of lines I wrote (and have published on the web) as Bill’s….it was probably a mistake but I’ve asked for it to be changed a number of times[J H] He doesn’t know anything about Alex Greene’s review and nver spoke to Alex. And Bill says that quote IS from you. I will ask whoever controls the website to make the changes you requested.
http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2007/20070827.html
“As Bill writes, “Thus does the neocortex sputter in fits and starts from dubious assumptions to preposterous conclusions with nary a whisper of doubt in between.”
(actually, these are my lines in Ch 4)
(Also, in the review Greene still uses that quote from Faber’s from my private email..Bill told me it’s minor…maybe..).
Not sure if there are other implications for me arising from this…
Does Bill think this is fair and in keeping with our deal on the book?
Not sure what I have done really except ask for some time and clarity on things and do my best to keep my end of the bargain.
Respectfully.
Lila
______________________________________
Note on November 3, Wed.: I added this additional email exchange from the time, to show that I was already working on the Goldman Sachs connection in June 2006, that it originated in my larger research interests from my first book and my writing for Counterpunch, that Mr. Bonner was aware of this, and aware of my ongoing media activism and my professional stake in having my contributions being seen independently, not as simply ghost-writing or editorial work on behalf of Agora’s marketing of its own products. Again, no malice or harm is intended to anyone mentioned here. I post these simply to show I was telling the truth all along, didn’t exploit the company platform in anyway, didn’t insinuate myself into it in order to bust its modus operandi, didn’t manipulate or otherwise do anything self-aggrandizing, but simply negotiated a contract fairly and truthfully…and then found myself at the receiving end of a lot of abuse from several different people who are far more powerful and connected than I am...
Re: Christison CP article on Israeli lobby?
Dear Lila,
We’re honored to have such good comments from a great writer and activist
like you. Thanks so much…… It would be nice to think that
someday we truthtellers will emerge into the light of the mainstream and be
heard, but on most days this seems a forlorn hope
Keep up the good struggle anyway–just in case, as Gandhi said, we win in
the end.
Thanks so much,
Kathy & Bill Christison
—– Original Message —–
From: “Lila Rajiva”
To: kathy and bill christison
Cc: Willam Bonner; editor at dissidentvoice.org
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2006 11:31 AM
Subject: Christison CP article on Israeli lobby
Enjoyed your critique in CP of Chomsky/Finkelstein over the
Mearsheimer/Walt piece immensely. It’s right on.
When I was researching “The Language of Empire” - on the US media - I
realized that I would have to make the Israeli lobby fairly
central….spent three chapters doing just that only to find them axed
with a lot of feeble excuses by my publisher. Nor have I heard any
alternative magazine mention the conservative Jewish organization EMET
which promoted the Iraq war, though the Wall Street Journal actually did a
piece on it.
I am currently writing about the appointment of Hank Paulson of Goldman
Sachs and even a cursory glance at the literature shows how far back its
influence over government extends and to what it tended.
It’s easy to succumb to the Marxist analysis that US foreign policy is
always only about corporate interests. But in my view, the ascendancy of
Israel’s power in the West has more to do with esoteric religious
claims…from the truth of the Darby Bible to the Lost Tribes of
Israel….to the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple. One needs to connect US
to British history to see this.
And a conspiratorial view of history is merely a view that says that
individuals act at the helm of history not as unconscious forces of a
material dialectic but also and at least equally as conscious forces in
the services of ideas.
Lila Rajiva
__________________________________
Added: November 10, 2009
It was Mr. Bonner who approached me and asked me to work with him. It took 4 months of back and forth before, with some reluctance, I agreed to.
I liked the style and content. It made me wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to meet. I have a publishing business in Baltimore, Agora, Inc. We have offices all over the world (we’re a mini-multi-national). We hope to open one in India next year, as a matter of fact.
If you are interested in freelance or salary work…it might be worth a visit.
Unfortunately, I’m based in London. I’m in Baltimore today only (leaving at 6PM).
One of the reasons I ended up accepting his offer, even though I had doubts about it, was that I’d actually lost quite a bit of money selling out of some mutual funds (where I held my savings), all because of something I’d read in a Daily Reckoning editorial at a certain point in time that turned out later to have been the bottom of the market. After that debacle, I started following other newsletters.
Before my loss, I’d been subscribing to a couple of Agora newsletters - NAMES DELETED. I wasn’t unhappy with either. They were cheap (about $60 a year) and they gave me some good ideas. I never made any money from them, but, except for one stock, I didn’t really lose. And even that probably had more to do with the fact that I never followed their timing. Since I subscribed mainly to get ideas, I didn’t think it was a bad deal at all. I enjoyed reading the DR commentary, nonetheless, and considered them to be on the cutting edge of alternative insights into the economy. I still think they are.
As for the money I lost that fall, I guess I learned a hard lesson. And I learned it well. Although it made me too terrified to trade for several years (until 2008 really), I did learn to control my emotions, an invaluable skill in recent years. So, like Ryals, I too lost money, because of Agora. The difference is that I didn’t blame them. Instead, I tried to get better at investing.
In any case, at the time I was hired in late 2005, I mentioned my loss to Mr. Bonner and told him that he ought to write in a less alarmist fashion. I recall he told me then to consider his offer a partial payback. Of course, he was also opening an Indian office, and my ethnic background, as well as my interests in international politics, propaganda, and globalization, all recommended themselves to him.
Now, before my interview, I’d googled the company and had run into the posts by Ryals. I’d written to him and asked him what his criticism was about. He wrote back so elaborately and in such detail that I decided he might be a bit unhinged and imagining things.
Still, I did ask Mr. Bonner about Davidson and Stansberry. I was told that the former no longer worked there. Bonner also insisted that the Stansberry case was not a “pump and dump,” as the press had dubbed it. That was certainly true, although my opinion was that Stansberry was nonetheless guilty of hyping, beyond what might be normal even in the newsletter business. I recall telling Mr. Bonner at the time that the first amendment would not protect blatant exaggeration when there was a large sum involved. He shrugged and remarked that the people who bought these sorts of investments were not innocents. Many of them were speculators and touts themselves, and the rest ought to know better than to gamble. He admitted he had developed a somewhat callous attitude about such things.
Throughout, our conservation was courteous. As anyone who knows him would vouch, Mr. Bonner is a very polished, charming, and persuasive individual, and when he assured me that I could work on my own, without any contact with either of the two people mentioned, I figured it would be worth giving the project a shot.
So that’s what happened. I’ve described it here at length so as to counter the false, malicious, and positively ridiculous allegations Ryals has plastered about me all over Indymedia and other sites.
There was nothing in the slightest bit nefarious about how I went to work for Agora. I did not know Stansberry or Davidson at the time, or at any point after. I believe I’ve been in the same room as Stansberry just once. And I subscribed to a newsletter published by him. That’s it. Davidson I know nothing about, beyond what I’ve read.
As for Stansberry writing to Ryals at the same time as I did, that’s simply a coincidence. And not such a remarkable one, considering that Ryals was calling Stansberry names all over the net. It would be only natural that Stansberry, or someone like me who was about to work with the company, would find the reams of allegations interesting and write to Ryals.
Ryals also claims some kind of conspiracy because both Stansberry and I said the same thing about Davidson in our letters to him (i.e. that Davidson didn’t work at Agora any more). Well, maybe we both said so because that was precisely the case at the time. Or, at least, that was what the company was saying at the time.
Then Ryals makes a big issue about Davidson now being back at Agora. That too has an obvious explanation. Davidson seems to be an old friend of Bonner’s and has a long history with the company. A friend might well choose to honor that history over whatever happened between Davidson and the SEC. Most people tend to stick up for old friends, regardless of what they do.
So, from these perfectly innocuous events that have quite harmless explanations, Ryals - apparently out of random malice and anger over his own losses - concocted a grand conspiracy in which a “strange woman” (”he,” “she”, or “it,” as he puts it), of “supposedly Indian” origin goes to bat for a far-right Anglo-American conspiracy outfit of epic proportions, all for the mind-boggling sum of $25 bucks an hour… and an advance of roughly $25,000.
Now, I’m a fairly well-off woman, with several degrees and professional skills that would pay me twice that. I’m told I’m a talented writer. I’m in no want of any kind, especially as I live quite frugally. Is it reasonable to believe that I “sold out” for a monetary sum so piddling? Especially, when those who allegedly bought me are described as “fabulously wealthy”?
“So yes, Professor Krugman, it does matter how we try to get ourselves out of depressions. The world is not upside down and vices aren’t virtues. War isn’t peace and destruction isn’t wealth-creation. The real solution to digging out of a recession is to remove the barriers to the free exchange and production that actually comprises wealth-creation. Borrowing trillions more from our grandchildren to spend on building the equivalent of pyramids or on blowing up innocents abroad only digs the hole deeper. And when one is reduced, as Krugman is, to saying we “needed Hitler and Hirohito” to get us out of that hole in the 1930s, one has abandoned morality to worship at the altar of economic aggregates.
No critic of free-market economics can ever again accuse us of being irrational and immoral when it is Paul Krugman who says destruction creates wealth, and war is an acceptable second-best path to economic growth. Don’t let Krugman’s Newspeak fool you: War and destruction are exactly what they appear to be. To argue as Krugman does is to abandon both economics and morality. Big Brother would be proud.”
Stephen Thrasher at the Village Voicedemonstrates once again that egalitarianism or racial harmony is not the goal of the intelligentsia. Inflaming, goading and misleading is:
“It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).
But when that streak was broken—and, for the first time, a non-white president accepted the oath of office—white America rapidly began to lose its grip..…”
It is inflammatory nonsense, but that’s the whole purpose. Without the demon of race, people might actually start working together, forget about both political parties, and rediscover that as human beings we can manage to meet our own spiritual and economic needs, no matter what happens at the political level.
(Added, Nov. 3) A blast from the past for Village Voice - Tennessee Ernie Ford and Odetta singing together:
And confirming that moral language is in fact the only language most men respond to, here is Ayn Rand:
“In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally rightand will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.”
An excellent piece by the brilliant cognitive linguist, George Lakoff at truthout.org, which argues (from a Democrat perspective) that framing debates in terms that appeal to readers’ deepest values, rather than to narrowly defined self-interest, has been the reason why Republicans have been more successful in the public debate, recently. In fact, the notion that there is a narrowly-defined “economic man” out there, ceaselessly calculating his narrowly-defined economic self-interest, is one of the many reasons that academic economics has been so little accurate in either describing what is going on in the economic world, predicting the future, or offering any prescriptions that are not simply band-aids or downright counterproductive.
“It is morality, not just the right policy, that excites voters, that moves them to action, that creates movements. Legislative action must come from a moral center, with moral language repeated over and over.
What should be avoided, besides policy-wonk and pure-policy discourse? Again, the answer comes from Neuroscience 101. Offense not defense. Argue for your values. Frame all issues in terms of your values. Avoid their language, even in arguing against them. There is a reason that I wrote a book called, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” Don’t list their arguments and argue against them using their language. It just activates their arguments in the brains of listeners.
Don’t move to the right (Lila: that would be left, for Republicans) in your discourse or action. That will just strengthen the conservative moral system in the brains of swing thinkers. Frame your arguments from your moral position.”
“By this time the crowd, unwieldy and stepping on each other’s toes, numbered into the thousands. But Jesus’ primary concern was his disciples. He said to them, “Watch yourselves carefully so you don’t get contaminated with Pharisee yeast, Pharisee phoniness. You can’t keep your true self hidden forever; before long you’ll be exposed. You can’t hide behind a mask forever; sooner or later the mask will slip and your true face will be known. You can’t whisper one thing in private and preach the opposite in public; the day’s coming when those whispers will be repeated all over town.
4-5″I’m speaking to you as dear friends. Don’t be bluffed into silence or insincerity by the threats of bullies. True, they can kill you, but then what can they do? There’s nothing they can do to your soul, your core being. Save your fear for God, who holds your entire life—body and soul—in his hands.
6-7″What’s the price of two or three pet canaries? Some loose change, right? But God never overlooks a single one. And he pays even greater attention to you, down to the last detail—even numbering the hairs on your head! So don’t be intimidated by all this bully talk. You’re worth more than a million canaries.
8-9 “Stand up for me among the people you meet and the Son of Man will stand up for you before all God’s angels. But if you pretend you don’t know me, do you think I’ll defend you before God’s angels?
10 “If you bad-mouth the Son of Man out of misunderstanding or ignorance, that can be overlooked. But if you’re knowingly attacking God himself, taking aim at the Holy Spirit, that won’t be overlooked. [Lila: attacking God here means attacking what is clearly true, good, or blameless. One who attacks the Holy Spirit is one who consciously attacks what he knows to be blameless, but finds expedient to attack."]
11-12 “When they drag you into their meeting places, or into police courts and before judges, don’t worry about defending yourselves—what you’ll say or how you’ll say it. The right words will be there. The Holy Spirit will give you the right words when the time comes.”
“Matt Taibbi’s latest blog post demonstrates again the reality disconnect that’s required by the dual jobs of providing cover for President Obama while still trying to display lefty street cred with an attack on the latest obscene tax break for multi-millionaires. Taibbi’s post is by appearances about how a 50% tax break on hedge fund income has successfully survived Obama’s first two years and likely his entire time in office. But the focus of the piece is not Obama. He’s mentioned only once and not in a negative light, in paragraph 11:
Naturally [the tax break] became a campaign issue in 2008. McCain, of course, supported keeping the carried interest exemption. Obama promised to end it. And indeed, toward the tail of his second legislative season, the Democrats took up the issue on the Hill.
Now wait, wouldn’t the 2008 presidential campaign and that Obama promise be the perfect time to stick this into the post:
Yes, informing readers that Obama received double the hedge fund money that McCain did might help readers read a little into that ‘promise’, and get clued into what has really transpired in Congress. Including (of course) why the Obama agenda placed dealing with hedge fund income tax reform at the “tail of his second legislative session.” Taibbi might have also mentioned that Dem Congressional candidates received more than twice as much hedge fund money as Republicans did in 2008, or that Rahm Emanuel was the number one House recipient of hedge fund money that year.
And yet, no, Taibbi proceeds to buckle down and report the unimportant nuts and bolts of the shadow play, as if that really matters. And yes, the usual bad guy is front and center. A mild reform measure passed in the House, but “then went to the Senate, where Max Baucus got hold of it and softened the bill …” Oh yeah, as with health care, once again failed progressive pushes are all Max Baucus’s fault. Taibbi also provides details about Max’s hedge fund manager campaign contributions.
The conclusion to the story is that the reform bill further softened was not voted on during the current session of Congress. And then the afterthought:
The Dems could of course vote it through during the lame-duck session, but they won’t.
Well, okay. But why won’t they? Well, ’sounding bummed’ (cuz he’s one of ‘our’ guys) John Kerry (who often is prominent in these shadow plays (he ostensibly represents Massachusetts, after all)) gets the last word:
“If there are a lot of bridges burned and unhappy people [after the election], and people anticipate a major change-over in the Congress, it’s going to be very hard to get things done,” Kerry said, referring among other things to the fund-manager tax break.
As usual, that makes no sense compared to what does: hedge fund managers contributed a great deal of money to the Dems in 2008, and sure, they expected a feigned push for reform (intended to satisfy sincere, reform-minded Democrats) that would quietly (with the assured cooperation of the corporate/mainstream media) be abandoned. That’s what we got, and that’s what we always get from the corporate Democrats: “Hey, we tried, but it just wasn’t in the cards. So stop whining.”
Bluntly, this is Barack Obama’s administration with his party dominating Congress, and once again it is behaving exactly as his campaign donation numbers would have predicted. Of course he could’ve got Congress to cancel the hedge fund multi-millionaires tax dodge in the euphoria of his first 100 days, we all know that. This is not a story of ‘foiled strategy’ and/or ‘whoops, that damned Max Baucus again’!
No, the failed reform of the 50% hedge fund tax break is about simply looking at those campaign donation numbers and then asking what a reasonable person would expect. So Barack Obama’s name and 2008 campaign donations needed to be front and center in Taibbi’s post. Why weren’t they? I don’t know, maybe it was just an oversight.”
My Comment:
Of course it’s no oversight…it goes back to 2007-08 when Taibbi was following the Ron Paul libertarians around…I know. I saw him watch us.
Some day, I’ll put this all down with the corroborating detail it deserves, but right now, it’s more fun watching other people do the work for me…
Once upon a time/You dressed so fine,
You threw the bums a dime/In your prime, Didn’t you?
People’d call/Say, “Beware doll,
You’re bound to fall”/ You thought they were all Kiddin’ you.
You used to laugh about/Everybody that was hangin’ out.
Now you don’t/talk so loud/Now you don’t/seem so proud
About having to be scrounging/for your next meal.
How does it feel?/How does it feel,
To be without a home/Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
You’ve gone to the finest school/All right, Miss Lonely,
But you know you only/Used to get/Juiced in it.
And nobody has ever taught you/How to live on the street
And now you find out/You’re gonna have to get/Used to it.
How does it feel?/How does it feel, etc.?……
You never understood/That it ain’t no good,
You shouldn’t let/Other people get/Your kicks for you….
With the 233rd Independence Day celebration on it’s way in America, we thought it would be a good idea to honor the radical extremists that founded this country.
Now, it might be true that calling Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin “right wing” is a bit historically questionable within the original context of the old Left-Right paradigm laid out in the French Assembly in the late 18th Century. We understand that technically the founders had more in common with what would historically be deemed the “left” than anything. ……”
‘The gift which is given as being given,
to one who does no favor,
at the proper place and time and to a worthy person,
this gift is considered good.
But that which is given for the sake of reward
or again with a view to the fruit or unwillingly,
that gift is considered emotional. That gift which is given
in the wrong place and time to the unworthy
disrespectfully and with contempt is said to be dark.”
“Because I write about politics, people are forever asking me the best way to teach children how our system of government works. I tell them that they can give their own children a basic civics course right in their own homes.
In my own experience as a father, I have discovered several simple devices that can illustrate to a child’s mind the principles on which the modern state deals with its citizens. You may find them helpful, too.
For example, I used to play the simple card game WAR with my son. After a while, when he thoroughly understood that the higher ranking cards beat the lower ranking ones, I created a new game I called GOVERNMENT. In this game, I was Government, and I won every trick, regardless of who had the better card. My boy soon lost interest in my new game, but I like to think it taught him a valuable lesson for later in life.
When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is “fair”. Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being “selfish” and “greedy”. Later in life he will thank you.
Make as many rules as possible. Leave the reasons for them obscure. Enforce them arbitrarily. Accuse your child of breaking rules you have never told him about. Keep him anxious that he may be violating commands you haven’t yet issued. Instill in him the feeling that rules are utterly irrational. This will prepare him for living under democratic government.
When your child has matured sufficiently to understand how the judicial system works, set a bedtime for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When he tearfully accuses you of breaking the rules, explain that you made the rules and you can interpret them in any way that seems appropriate to you, according to changing conditions. This will prepare him for the Supreme Court’s concept of the U.S. Constitution as a “living document”.
Promise often to take him to the movies or the zoo, and then, at the appointed hour, recline in an easy chair with a newspaper and tell him you have changed your plans. When he screams, “But you promised!”, explain to him that it was a campaign promise.
Every now and then, without warning, slap your child. Then explain that this is defense. Tell him that you must be vigilant at all times to stop any potential enemy before he gets big enough to hurt you. This, too, your child will appreciate, not right at that moment, maybe, but later in life.
At times your child will naturally express discontent with your methods. He may even give voice to a petulant wish that he lived with another family. To forestall and minimize this reaction, tell him how lucky he is to be with you the most loving and indulgent parent in the world, and recount lurid stories of the cruelties of other parents. This will make him loyal to you and, later, receptive to schoolroom claims that the America of the postmodern welfare state is still the best and freest country on Earth.
This brings me to the most important child-rearing technique of all: lying. Lie to your child constantly. Teach him that words mean nothing–or rather that the meanings of words are continually “evolving”, and may be tomorrow the opposite of what they are today.
Some readers may object that this is a poor way to raise a child. A few may even call it child abuse. But that’s the whole point: Child abuse is the best preparation for adult life under our form of GOVERNMENT.”
“Ignorance is often hidden behind an urbane surface. Many otherwise educated people lack the most elementary understanding of certain subjects. One of these is religion.
When I was an aspiring Shakespeare scholar during my college days, I was surprised to find that most commentators on Hamlet missed the play’s religious aspect. Prince Hamlet is evidently a Catholic, but he has been a student at Wittenberg, home of the Reformation. He puns on the Diet of Worms. His father’s ghost laments that he was murdered without a chance to receive the sacraments, a fact Hamlet recalls when he hesitates to kill his uncle at prayer; Hamlet later sends two former friends to their deaths without confession. Ophelia, an apparent suicide, is given a Christian burial, to the scandal of her gravediggers.
None of this would have been lost on the ordinary Elizabethan playgoer. Whether the ghost comes from purgatory or hell, whether the old sacraments are efficacious, whether Ophelia is damned — these are questions that would have occurred to everyone in the audience, Catholic, Anglican, or Protestant. Modern scholars consign them to footnotes. But Elizabethans would have agreed with the Anglican Samuel Johnson (writing two centuries later) that Hamlet has descended to a diabolical level by seeking the damnation of his enemies.
Public discussion of three current topics shows how ignorant most Americans have become about religious questions that would have electrified their ancestors. Pope Pius XII and Patrick Buchanan were accused of pro-Hitler sympathies because their critics didn’t realize that Communist persecution of Christians would take precedence, for them, over all other considerations. And in New York, a tax-supported art show stirred controversy because it featured a blasphemous picture of the Virgin Mary, splattered with elephant dung; for liberals, as usual, the only issue at stake was “artistic expression.”
The great vice of liberal thinking is its failure of imagination with respect to Christians. For all their preaching of “sensitivity” and “multiculturalism,” they are belligerently ignorant of Christian culture and Christians’ feelings. In fact they seem to think that there is something specially “artistic” about offending Christians. Offending blacks, Jews, feminists, or homosexuals is “insensitive,” while offending Christians is “irreverent” — a word that has come to suggest a rather cute sassiness.
Yet the whole history of Western Civilization is rooted in religion. Unless you understand Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, along with the rise of Islam, you don’t understand the events that shaped the modern world. The issues of the Reformation were still alive when the United States was founded, when slavery was debated, when the Civil War tore the country apart, when Prohibition was adopted, when Joe McCarthy assailed “godless Communism,” when John Kennedy became the first Catholic American president.
The Christian Right is closer to its own historic roots than most Americans, yet the media and the history textbooks treat it as a marginal, virtually un-American movement. This isn’t “multicultural”; it’s anti-cultural. It refuses to take America’s real origins seriously, adopting the Supreme Court’s shallow and ahistorical interpretation of the separation of church and state.
Liberal diatribes against “McCarthyism” leave out the crucial fact that American Christians felt deeply betrayed by the outcome of World War II, when our “Soviet ally” won control of a huge section of Christian Europe, just as Pius XII had feared it would. The war began when the Soviets and Germans had invaded Catholic Poland; it ended with Roosevelt’s turning Poland over to “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s tender mercies. It took the leadership of a Polish Pope, John Paul II, to win back Poland’s freedom.
Yet the young pass through our entire educational system without being taught what the Christian perspective was, and is, or how it has shaped the great events of history. Few of them know that many of the authors of the Constitution were clergymen; fewer still realize that the separation of church and state applied only to the federal government, not to the states. (The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” leaving the states free to do so.)
Like Soviet history, American history has been rewritten, with inconvenient facts deleted. In both countries, the “progressive” forces have subverted their subjects’ sense of the past.”
The NY Times now backtracks, claiming that Israeli cyber warfare experts are “too smart” to leave a clue behind. Thus..by inference…it must be a country that wants to implicate Israel, which..by inference…is Iran (surprise). Too clever by half, these folks. Another reason I believe Israel or an Israeli-backed team is behind Stuxnet is the fact that Wikileaks apparently had a reference to a possible nuclear “accident” in Iran in July 2009. That is around the time when some researchers argue Stuxnet infections first began.
October 2, 2010
Jeffrey Carr backs off from the allegation that Israel is the culprit, claiming that Ralph Langner was the sole source of the allegation and was irresponsible in posting it on his blog as though it were the opinion of the intelligence community. Carr quotes an earlier piece of his, along with these words:
“Last week I wrote about how the Israel-Iran conspiracy theory around the Stuxnet worm was built entirely on one security engineer’s personal conjecture (Ralph Langner) with absolutely no weighing of alternative possibilities for attribution, nor any objective assessment of the evidence.”
However, if you click on the earlier piece he cites, he wrote nothing of the sort in it. Nowhere in that piece did Carr claim that Langner was the sole source of the allegation; he quotes the NY Times as noting several people who’d reached the same conclusion. Also, there is no hint in the piece that he considered Langner’s allegation speculative or poorly founded. He cited it instead as a likely possibility. This is clear back-pedaling, probably provoked by the fear that the story might lead to a crackdown on Iranian dissidents and foreigners. Well, of course it will. But that’s not the fault of journalists reporting on the story. Or of Ralph Langner, who clearly states on his blog that he is “speculating” (see previous link).
The fault lies with the unknown cybercriminal/s who came up with Stuxnet.
“Stuxnet Speculation Fuels Crackdown By Iranian Intelligence,” Jeffrey Carr, The Firewall, Forbes, October 2, 2010/
Cryptome is arguing that Israel would never have done anything so sloppy as what’s alleged. Could it be that some group is deliberately playing off one side against the other, that is, playing divide-and-conquer? Or is this more “plausible deniability”?
“Really? Personally I’d be surprised if a crack team of Israeli software engineers were so sloppy that they relied on outdated rootkit technology (e.g. hooking the Nt*() calls used by Kernel32.LoadLibrary() and using UPX to pack code). Most of the Israeli developers I’ve met are pretty sharp. Just ask Erez Metula.
“It may be that the “myrtus” string from the recovered Stuxnet file path
“b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb” stands for “My-RTUs”
as in Remote Terminal Unit. See the following white paper from Motorola, it examines RTUs and PICs in SCADA systems. Who knows? The guava-myrtus connection may actually hold water.
As you can see, the media’s propaganda machine is alive and well.”
I am completely out of my depth in the technical part of this. But not in the propaganda part.
As an instance of the way group conflicts can be set off, think of how during the financial crisis there were an inordinate number of Indians being trotted out to do the explaining…and taking the brunt of the public’s anger, although last I looked, despite a respectable number of Indian billionaires, the head honchos of the major banks (with one exception) and the biggest and most important speculators, managers, and international officials were not Indian, to phrase it as politely as possible.
Setting race and nation each against other is of course the modus operandi of the power elite, and both Kashmir and Israel have played that divisive role in the past….and continue to do so.
*October 1, 2010
A link to an Examiner piece is coming up right at the top of a Google search of Stuxnet and Israel. With all due respect to the author, who probably thinks he/she is on the side of the angels and simply preempting an outburst of anti-Semitism by this effort, the piece is quite misleading….and, apparently, deliberately so, as an examination of the other links listed here, from a variety of sources in the West(see this NY Times pieces) will prove.
For instance, the Examiner piece doesn’t cite the reports from many western security companies and research teams (see links below) that have extensively researched the issue, nor does it acknowledge that it was these sites that first advanced the claim that Israel/Israeli hackers were likely responsible. Instead, it cites a Times of India piece that republishes the claims.
The attempt, apparently, is to mislead the public into thinking that the allegation of Israeli involvement is one mainly advanced by untrustworthy foreigners with axes to grind (note the description “Iran’s friend, India”).
“Another of Iran’s friends, India, is pushing the notion that Israel did it. According to an http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com on Friday, “A Biblical reference has been detected in the code of the computer virus that points to Israel as the origin of the cyber attack.” It’s further explained that the word “myrtus” is in the code, and that this is a “reference to the myrtle tree”
In point of fact, it was western security companies and western researchers who came to that conclusion. Moreover, the targets of the worm fit very well with Anglo-Zionist imperial objectives - covering as they do the largest Muslim populations in Asia.
"Buried in Stuxnet's code is a marker with the digits "19790509" that the researchers believe is a "do-not infect" indicator. If the marker equals that value, Stuxnet stops in its tracks, and does not infect the targeted PC. The researchers -- Nicolas Falliere, Liam O Murchu and Eric Chen -- speculated that the marker represents a date: May 9, 1979. While on May 9, 1979, a variety of historical events occurred, according to Wikipedia "Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community," the researchers wrote. Elghanian, a prominent Jewish-Iranian businessman, was charged with spying for Israel by the then-new revolutionary government of Iran, and executed May 9, 1979."
Quote:
"Last weekend, Iranian officials confirmed that tens of thousands of PCs in their country had been infected by Stuxnet, including some used at a nuclear power plant in southwestern Iran that's planned to go online next month. The Symantec researchers also revealed a host of other Stuxnet details in their paper, including a "kill date" of June 24, 2012, after which the worm will refuse to execute."
Symantec puts out a dossier of information on Stuxnet that includes the following:- attack scenario and timeline, infection statistics, malware architecture, description of all the exported routines, injection techniques and anti-AV, the RPC component, propagation methods, command and control feature, and the PLC infector.
Eric Chien summarizes findings about the worm:
“Only more recently did the general public realize Stuxnet’s ultimate goal was to sabotage an industrial control system.
Analyzing Stuxnet has been one of the most challenging issues we have worked on. The code is sophisticated, incredibly large, required numerous experts in different fields, and mostly bug-free, which is rare for your average piece of malware. Stuxnet is clearly not average. We estimate the core team was five to ten people and they developed Stuxnet over six months. The development was in all likelihood highly organized and thus this estimate doesn’t include the quality assurance and management resources needed to organize the development as well as a probable host of other resources required, such as people to setup test systems to mirror the target environment and maintain the command and control server.”
The director of the Information Technology Council of the Industries and Mines Ministry has announced that the IP addresses of 30,000 industrial computer systems infected by this malware have been detected, the Mehr New Agency reported on Saturday.“An electronic war has been launched against Iran,” Mahmoud Liaii added.“This computer worm is designed to transfer data about production lines from our industrial plants to (locations) outside of the country,” he said.
A piece in the Guardian suggests that a government agency is most likely behind the worm but warns against leaping to conclusions. It notes that many hackers/criminals might have become sophisticated enough to create a worm of this type. The piece notes that attacks against Iran have increased and that the identification of the worm was originally made by a Belarus security firm for an Iranian client and that Iran had been experiencing problems with their nuclear facility at Bushehr for months. It notes that the worm uses a stolen cryptographic key from the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer Realtek.
Symantec researchers say that Stuxnet had to be created by a state, because it was the most devious and sophisticated malware they’d come across.
Quote:
“I don’t think it was a private group,” said O Murchu. “They weren’t just after information, so a competitor is out. They wanted to reprogram the PLCs and operate the machinery in a way unintended by the real operators. That points to something more than industrial espionage.”
The necessary resources, and the money to finance the attack, puts it out the realm of a private hacking team, O Murchu said.
“This threat was specifically targeting Iran,” he continued. “It’s unique in that it was able to control machinery in the real world.”
“All the different circumstances, from the multiple zero-days to stolen certificates to its distribution, the most plausible scenario is a nation-state-backed group,” said Schouwenberg, who acknowledged that some people might think he was wearing a tin foil hat when he says such things. But the fact that Iran was the No. 1 target is telling.”
German computer security research Ralph Langner speculates that Stuxnet is part of cyberwar:
Ralph’s theory — completely speculative from here
“It is hard to ignore the fact that the highest number of infections seems to be in Iran. Can we think of any reasonable target that would match the scenario? Yes, we can. Look at the Iranian nuclear program. Strange — they are presently having some technical difficulties down there in Bushehr. There also seem to be indications that the people in Bushehr don’t seem to be overly concerned about cyber security. When I saw this screenshot last year (http://www.upi.com/News_Photos/Features/The-Nuclear-Issue-in-Iran/1581/2/) I thought, these guys seem to be begging to be attacked. If the picture is authentic, which I have no means of verifying, it suggests that approximately one and a half year before scheduled going operational of a nuke plant they’re playing around with software that is not properly licensed and configured. I have never seen anything like that even in the smallest cookie plant. The pure fact that the relevant authorities did not seem to make efforts to get this off the web suggests to me that they don’t understand (and therefore don’t worry about) the deeper message that this tells.
Now you may ask, what about the many other infections in India, Indonesia, Pakistan etc. Strange for such a directed attack. Than, on the other hand, probably not. Check who comissions the Bushehr plant. It’s a Russian integrator that also has business in some of the countries where we see high infection rates. What we also see is that this company too doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about IT security. As I am writing this, they’re having a compromised web site (http://www.atomstroyexport.com/index-e.htm) that tries to download stuff from a malware site that had been shut down more than two years ago (www.bubamubaches.info). So we’re talking about a company in nukes that seems to be running a compromised web presence for over two years? Strange.
I could give some other hints that have a smell for me but I think other researchers may be able to do a much better job on checking the validity of all this completely non-technical stuff. The one last bit of information that makes some sense for me is the clue that the attackers left in the code, as the fellows from Symantec pointed out — use your own imagination because you will think I’m completely nuts when I tell you my idea.
German computer security expert Ralph Langner writes to a friend:
Historical document: Ralph informs Joe Weiss what Stuxnet is. Note the date of the email.
*July 22, 2010
Symantec analyzed W32.Stuxnet as a worm that uses a hitherto unknown Windows bug to attack and then searches the target for SCADA systems and design documents. SCADA is a network used to control utilities, transportation and other critical infrastructure. The worm then contacted Command &Control servers that control the infected machines and retrieved the stolen information. The servers were located in Malaysia and Symantec redirected traffic away from them to prevent the take-over of the information.
Within a 72 hours period Symantec identified close to 14,000 IP addresses infected with W32.Stuxnet trying to contact the C&C server. 58.85 % came from Iran, with the rest coming from Indonesia (18.22%), India (8.31%), with the Azerbaijan, US, and Pakistan making up the other affected countries, with under 2% each (this information is also provided at the Microsoft website).
“The zero-day vulnerability, rootkit, main binaries, stolen digital certificates, and in-depth knowledge of SCADA software are all high-quality attack assets. The combination of these factors makes this threat extremely rare, if not completely novel.“
Quote:
“The complexity and quality of the attack assets lead some to believe only a state would have the resources to conduct such an attack. However, the usage of the second digital certificate is a bit odd. One could make the case that once the first attack succeeded, a state would take cover and not waste the second digital certificate. Instead, by signing a very similar binary, security companies were immediately able to detect the second stolen certificate, making it useless in further compromises…..
Quote:
.. Hackers bound by a common cause may target another country, organization, or company that they feel are their enemies. Such hacking groups often have the patience and expertise to gather such attack assets. Further, their goals of continued attack may lead them to continue to refine their attack as they are thwarted or discovered, such as resigning their driver files with a newly stolen digital certificate, modifying their binaries to avoid security product detection, and moving their command-and-control hosts as they are decommissioned…..
Quote:
…..This scenario [terrorism] is like something out of movie and, while for most attacks we’d immediately dismiss this as a possibility, given the amount and quality of the attack assets, terrorism even seems within the realms of possibility in this case.“
Researchers find that Stuxnet targets industrial control systems of the kind that control manufacturing and utility companies. It targets Siemens management software called Simatic WinCC, which runs on the Windows operating system.
The systems that run the Siemens software, called SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems, aren’t usually connected to the Internet, but the virus spreads when an infected USB stick is inserted. If it detects the Siemens software, the virus logs in using a default password.
Stuxnet could well have caused the glitch in the solar panels of India’s Insat-4B satellite onJuly 7, 2010. That led to the shutting down of 12 out of 24 of the transponders and 70% of the customers dependent on Direct to Home (DTH) including those using Doordarshan (Indian TV), Sun TV and Tata’s VSNL. The customers were redirected to point to the Chinese satellite ASIASAT-5, owned and operated by Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co., Ltd (AsiaSat) whose two main shareholders are General Electric (GE) and China International Trust and Investment Co. (CITIC), a state-owned company
Symantec Security Response Team begins its investigation into the Stuxnet worm. The first sample dates from June 2010, but the team believes the worm dates back a year, or maybe even earlier.
*June 2010
The malware is first identified by a Belarus security company, Virusblokada, for its Iranian client.
According to CNN Money the SEC and CFTC report on the May 6 “flash crash” blames it on an unnamed trader’s algorithmic trading of E-Mini contracts, leading to two crashes - one in the broad index and one in individual stocks. [None of this actually makes sense to me. I thought there were already circuit -breakers in place since "Black Monday" to stop crashes. Two. How does a sell-off in the broad index cause steep plunges in particular stocks, but not in others? Three. Why would an order of this size not be broken up? Four. Can you tell I don't believe this flimsy story?]
“A large investor using an automated trading software to sell futures contracts sparked the brief-but-historic stock market “flash crash” on May 6, according to a report by federal regulators released Friday.
In the 104-page report, staff members at Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said an unnamed investor used a trading algorithm to sell orders for futures contracts called E-Minis, which traders use to bet on the future performance of stocks in the S&P 500 index.
The contracts were sold quickly and in large numbers, according to the report, on a day when the market was already under stress due to concerns about the European debt crisis.
The selling was initially absorbed by “high frequency traders” and other buyers, the report said. But the algorithm responded to an rise in trading volume by increasing the number of E-Mini sell orders it was feeding into the market.
“What happened next is best described in terms of two liquidity crises – one at the broad index level in the E-Mini, the other with respect to individual stocks,” the report said.
In other words, the lack of buyers and the rapid selling of E-Mini futures contracts began to affect the underlying stocks and the broader stock indexes.
As a result, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged nearly 1,000 points, briefly erasing $1 trillion in market value, before regaining much of the lost ground to close lower. It was the largest one-day drop on record.
Waddell & Reed, an asset management and financial planning company based in Overland Park, Kan., has been widely reported as the investor behind the sell order. But the report identified only a “large fundamental investor.”
Waddell said in May that it was one of possibly 250 other investors trading the E-mini futures contract on the day in question, and that it did not intend to disrupt the market.”
Who’s Waddell & Reed? Its website has a brief self-description:
“Founded in 1937, Waddell & Reed is among the most enduring asset management and financial planning firms in the nation, providing proven investment and planning services to individuals and institutional investors.”
Huff-Po adds some details from the SEC report (which I’ll read in a bit):
The new “circuit breakers” are in effect until Dec. 10. Under the rules, trading of any Standard & Poor’s 500 stock that rises or falls 10 percent or more within a five-minute span is halted for five additional minutes. On May 6, about 30 stocks listed in the S&P 500 index fell at least 10 percent within five minute”
“The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
The report reveals thatDogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.
The report says Dogan had apparently been “lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time” before being shot in his face.
The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is “tattooing around the wound in his face,” indicating that the shot was “delivered at point blank range.” The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that “the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back.”
Now, some are arguing that the worm might have been developed elsewhere - say, India - and blamed unfairly on Israel. Frankly, I don’t find this plausible.
Further links supporting the Israeli sabotage thesis include this Reuters piece describing Israel’s motives, assertions, and capabilities in regard to Iran:
HOW MIGHT ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN?
Overt or covert? Israel has been developing “cyber-war” capabilities that could disrupt Iranian industrial and military control systems. Few doubt that covert action, by Mossad agents on the ground, also features in tactics against Iran [ID:nLV83872]. An advantage of sabotage over an air strike may be deniability.
The blog warincontext has an excellent piece analyzing Israel’s motives for and ability to launch cyber attacks. It concludes that the mere evidence of Iranian vulnerability constitutes an effective blow in strategic terms, perhaps even avoiding the need for Israel to literally commit an act of sabotage.
ORIGINAL POST
Earlier we blogged about the Stuxnet worm attack on Iranian computer systems. Only a few countries had the capacity for it. Now come reports that a crack Israeli team may have been behind the worm and that its code concealed a biblical reference (hat-tip to reader DCN for telling me about Unit 8200):
“Computer experts have discovered a biblical reference embedded in the code of the computer worm that has pointed to Israel as the origin of the cyber attack.
The code contains the word “myrtus”, which is the Latin biological term for the myrtle tree. The Hebrew word for myrtle, Hadassah, was the birth name of Esther, the Jewish queen of Persia.
In the Bible, The Book of Esther tells how the queen pre-empted an attack on the country’s Jewish population and then persuaded her husband to launch an attack before being attacked themselves.
Israel has threatened to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s facilities to ensure that the Islamic state does not gain the ability to threaten its existence.
Ralf Langner, a German researcher, claims that Unit 8200, the signals intelligence arm of the Israeli defence forces, perpetrated the computer virus attack by infiltrating the software into the Bushehr nuclear power station
Mr Langer said: “If you read the Bible you can make a guess.”
Computer experts have spent months tracing the origin of the Stuxnet worm, a sophisticated piece of malicious software, or malware, that has infected industrial operating systems made by the German firm Siemens across the globe.”
What’s interesting to me is that when I was doing a little googling to find out about Stuxnet, I came across a Microsoft page on it in July 2010 that listed Iran, India, Indonesia, and the US as the only countries in the world associated with the worm.
[While I disagree with his premise that public goods should be subsidized, Dey does make an excellent argument that the subsidy of higher education ended up being a subsidy of foreign corporations and economies. Yet another of the unintended consequences of statist benevolence....]
“India suffers from very low literacy even compared to other developing countries. Yet one gets to hear about the tremendous impact that Indian doctors, engineers and scientists have had around the world. This conveys the impression that the Indian schooling system works. I believe that that impression is wrong and that in fact the Indian school system is inefficient and biased against the poor.
Free Education
I spent many years the Indian school system and I must admit that I received very good schooling. My eleven years in a pretty good high school in Nagpur was practically free. I was given a scholarship during my bachelor’s degree in engineering. At IIT Kanpur, while doing a master’s degree in computer sciences, I received a stipend which was sufficient to pay for all normal expenses. I estimate that my entire education in India, including a master’s in computer science, cost me less than US$ 100 in today’s terms.
How is it that a poor society can afford to educate its children for free? I come from a middle class family and I am sure we could have afforded more than that. I am also sure that if the education had been priced at full cost, we could not have paid for it up front. [There is a way to circumvent this problem. See "Full cost pricing" at the end of this page.]
Someone else paid for my education. That is true for a very large number of people who are educated in India’s premier institutions–someone else paid.
Nagpur is a medium-sized city by Indian standards. It has a bunch of good high schools. You have to have a middle-class or better background to get into those because competitive pressures keep the poor out. But if you get in, and don’t goof off too much, you can do well in the competition for admission into a good engineering or medical college. And then you get heavily subsidized education in college. Armed with all the advantages, you fill out a bunch of applications, write the GRE and the TOEFL and off you go to the US, never to return.
Brain Drain
It was fashionable in the 1970s and 80s to refer to the migration of trained doctors, scientists and engineers to the advanced industrialized countries as a “brain drain.” Actually, it was a “resource drain” rather than a “brain drain.” India never really had a shortage of basic brains. There are hundreds of millions of basic brains in India. However it takes resources to train a basic brain and turn it into a useful brain. These scarce resources are lost to the economy when used to train brains that eventually migrate.
Just like capital flight from poor economies to the rich ones, the migration of trained manpower, human capital flight, is enormously expensive. It is an even more of a burden when the training is publicly funded. When a trained engineer migrates to the US, it is totally indistinguishable from a gift of US$ 100,000 from India to the US. Over the years, the total implicit subsidy from India to the US could be estimated to be of the order of hundred billion dollars.
Losses
When an educated person leaves India, there is a first-order loss to the economy if the education was publicly funded. There is no comparable first-order loss if private resources were involved in the training. But in either case, the economy loses the life-time stream of economic contributions that the migrant would have made. This is a second-order loss. There is what can be considered a third-order loss that is harder to estimate but whose impact may be the most damaging in the long run. This arises from publicly subsidizing higher education at the expense of primary education.
Primary education, somewhat like primary health care, has characteristics of what economists call a “public good.” The positive effects of primary education spill over into the larger economy more than that of higher education, which is more like a private good. Markets efficiently provide optimal quantities of private goods but are known to under-provide public goods. The market understandably fails in the case of primary education. The solution is straightforward: the public subsidy of primary education.
The essential point is that the subsidizing higher education is an inefficient use of resources which could have been used for primary education. And this distorted system has real-world consequences: the shameful neglect of primary education.
Dismal Statistics
The Indian constitution mandates universal primary education for all (see Article 8 of the Indian Constitution). Yet, 41% of children do not reach grade 5 in India. Compare that to some other countries:
Gambia 20%
Mali 18%
Senegal 15%
Tanzania 17%
Burkina Faso 25%
[Source: Human Development Report 1999. UNDP.]
Of the countries that rank lower than India in the human development index, only about four have higher percentage of children that do not reach the fifth grade. Mozambique does worse than India, for instance. But never mind small strange sub-Saharan African countries. Take Indonesia for example: only 11% of its children don’t go past the fifth grade. Or take Mexico with its 14% figure. Compare India with neighboring Sri Lanka with its 17%.
The failure of Indian primary education is hard to escape. Sixty years after India’s political independence, India is places 126th out of 175 countries ranked in the 2006 Human Development Report. India’s adult literacy rate is a dismal 61%, below Cameroon (68%), Angola, Congo, Uganda (67%), Rwanda (65%), and Malawi (64%). That 40% of today’s Indian adults cannot even “both read and write a short, simple statement related to their everyday life” implies that they did not get the equivalent of the most basic of primary education. Compare that to China’s 90% adult literacy. [Source: UNDP Human Development Report.]
Successful NRIs
The argument is often advanced that the Indian education system must be world-class. After all, doesn’t it produce world-class NRIs (non-resident Indians) like Vinod Khosla and Rajat Gupta? Yes, of course. And don’t they turn around and give millions of dollars to support the IITs? Yes, of course. Sure the NRIs send some money home. But what is the ratio of the amount India spends on their education to what these worthies send back home?
Even then, who could be so crass as to measure everything in terms of dollars? Surely there is something more important than money. Yes, there is. And it is the untapped human capital that India has in abundance and which it criminally neglects. It neglects them because the powers that be have it made under the current system and it serves their narrow purposes.
In practically every measure of education, India’s rank is so abysmal that it is depressing to even look at the figures. Even if the solution to India’s education problems were as little as a week’s worth of clean drinking water, India would still be in trouble. Around 60% of Indians don’t have access to clean drinking water.
For all our vaunted world-class scientists, doctors and engineers, India ranks miserably in the number of scientists and technicians it has: 0.3 such per 1,000 population. Compare that to: China 0.6, Islamic Rep of Iran 0.7, South Africa 1.7, Korea 2.9.
Hyperbole and Hubris
We in India lack many things. One thing appears not to be in short supply–the hyperbole and the capacity for self-delusion. We have pretences of being an information superpower. Our IT sector is supposed to make us great. It stretches the imagination beyond belief that this idea can be entertained by anyone. We account for less than 1% of the global $600 billion IT business. Remember we represent 17% of the world’s population. Even if we were to increase our share 10 times (and this is unreasonable by any account) we’d still be below the world average.
Judging the Indian education system based on a Chandrashekhar or a Ramanujan is misguided and delusional. It is like weighing a pinch of mustard seeds against a herd of elephants and declaring that the mustard weighs more. How do we manage to delude ourselves so? I believe that those doing the judging live in very rarified atmospheres. Their world is populated by jet-setting intellectuals and internet millionaires and H1-B visas and ecommerce and NRIs. Hard evidence to the contrary, it is more comforting to believe that we are not that badly off.
Is there any point in confronting the hard evidence, you may ask. Yes, there is. Unless we recognize the basic problem, examine it dispassionately, we are unlikely to even consider solving the problem. In a sort of defense through denial, we can go on with business as usual by declaring the problem does not exist. But the problem does exist. And the problem is not one that does not have wide ranging implications. The most devastating impact of our dismal educational system is that we are condemning ourselves to a future of exceedingly low economic development. If there is one thing that developmental economists have learnt, it is this: education is the most important factor in economic growth. Education has more impact on economic growth than natural resources, foreign investment, exports, imports, whatever. Neglect education and you may as well hang yourself and save yourself the pain of a slow miserable death.
So who paid for my education? It is the poor rural children, thousands of them, who paid for my education by losing their opportunity to become semi-literate. The system is tilted against them and unless there is a radical change in the way that education is funded, they will continue to pay the price for subsidizing the US for decades to come.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FULL COST PRICING
A brief solution to the problem of full-cost pricing is easy to state. Price all higher education at full cost. If a year of engineering school costs Rs 3 lakhs, price it at that. Then give loans to every student that needs it to pay the price. The loan is repayable upon employment and in terms commensurate with the level of employment. If you earn big dollars in the US, pay in big dollars. If you work as a doctor in a small village in India, pay small amounts in rupees. Essentially, with the loan system in place, there is no need for public subsidies for higher education.”
Ben Domenech on Matt Taibbi’s rant at Rolling Stone on the Tea Party, a very literate and entertaining illustration of pot-’n-kettling in the media.
Domenech rightly takes apart Taibbi’s faulty analysis of the Tea Party…only to then inject his own sophistry. Why is this? One reason only. Domenech is the better analyst and thinker, but in his haste to distance himself from the 9-11 movement, he allows himself almost as much dishonesty as Taibbi.
I mark the passage where his otherwise excellent analysis goes awry with italics:
“If sophistication is the ability to understand different kinds of people and grapple with different ideas, Matt Taibbi’s latest Tea Party bashing piece in Rolling Stone can best be read as an expose of the provincial unsophistication of Taibbi, his editors, and any readers who take his article seriously. Taibbi’s piece is a slovenly mess of leftist tropes, with his usual lazy approach to basic facts. This is a shame. The story of the Tea Party era, in the hands of a more competent writer, is incredibly interesting, breaking all sorts of rules of politics, changing our understanding of base and establishment relationships, and marking a possible turning point in the history of American political movements — but Taibbi is so committed to his predetermined plot, he blatantly ignores –- or in some cases abuses –- the truth along the way.
Taibbi blasts away at the Tea Partiers as stupid evil people manipulated by smart evil people — as a bunch of crazy redneck idjits created by Ron Paul, who then got co-opted by even more despicable corporate interests. His narrative is that the “Tea Party’s political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and BPs of the world,” and the subtitle of his piece is “How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster.” Of course he’s right about this, when you look at the facts. We’ve all seen how the Republican establishment and their corporate allies, with their savvy and secretive organizations, were able to manipulate the Tea Party movement into supporting candidates like Bob Bennett, Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist, Trey Grayson, Jane Norton, and Lisa Murkowski. The evidence is everywhere! Right? Right. And never mind that Taibbi happens to pick as his examples two corporations — BP and Goldman Sachs — known for their conspicuous donations to the Democratic Party (by heftymargins).
Here’s where it just gets silly. Taibbi writes that FreedomWorks was “conspicuously silent during George Bush’s gargantuan spending” — uh, did someone never learn how to use Google? FreedomWorks has long been known as an organization guided by libertarian principles and an emphasis on small government. Any schoolchild with access to Google can see an immense paper trail of FreedomWorks opposing big government approaches under Bush, Clinton, Bush, and even Reagan. FreedomWorks was one of the most vocal opponents of Bush’s spending initiatives from the right, including Medicare Part D and the TARP Wall Street bailout (which other less-principled outfits supported). Armey’s opposition to Bush’s Medicare reform was front page news at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. If Taibbi is revealing anything here, it’s that he himself was never much interested in critiques of big government until he was compelled by party loyalty to try to discredit them.
This type of inaccurate reporting goes beyond laziness — it’s so wrong, and so easily correctable, that I can’t think it is explained by a series of unintentional mistakes. It’s just a blatant lie, one the fact-checkers let stand.
I recognize that Taibbi was a tabloid journalist in Russia covering sports and gossip in the early 1990s while FreedomWorks was protesting HillaryCare at every speech where Clinton promoted her plan, but saying that anti-big government activists “only took to the streets when a black Democrat president launched an emergency stimulus program” is just flat-out wrong. Any honest Capitol Hill staffer will tell you that the real pushback started in September 2008, when the yet-unnamed Tea Partiers let fly against the Bush-Pelosi-Reid bailout
and exploded in the late summer town halls of the following year, primarily in response to the President’s health care bill. Yet somehow Taibbi credits this movement to Ron Paul + secretive Republican manipulators + those Jewish bankers he’s always yammering about? (A hint to Taibbi: if your conspiracy theory involves the Paul family collaborating with Goldman Sachs, that tinfoil’s screwed on too tight).
[Lila: Of course, Taibbi doesn't tie Goldman Sachs to the Pauls. He ties them to the current Tea Party and the Republican establishment, incorrectly, in a partisan move, and then somewhat churlishly admits that Paul is an "honest " man. By the way, thanks for the endorsement, Matt, libertarians were just waiting for you to put your stamp on their man.
So why does Domenech do the very thing he accuses Taibbi of doing - distort the record?
Because Domonech - exactly like Taibbi - wants to take the focus off the 9-11 truth movement and those "conspiracy theorists" who in fact have been right about every development in the post 9-11 world, from the Goldman Sachs story onward - and it was from those "conspiracy theories" that the original Tea Party got its intellectual steam.
Behold then every element of the establishment twisting itself into intellectual pretzels and swatting imaginary gnats, while the 9-11 camel bumps solemnly down their gullets
Why?
Need you ask?
The entire rationale for the US war on terror, homeland security, the police state and indeed the modern welfare-warfare regulatory state is called into question by a correct analysis of what is actually going on, whether you call it power-elite analysis, Zionism, kleptocracy, Anglo-American imperialism, the Bilderbergers, the German death cult, Luciferians, or anything else.]
ARTICLE CONTINUES:
There were precious few benefits to come out of the recent financial crisis, but one of them has to be the acceptance of Taibbi’s public descent into raving insanity. His reputation is as a once-interesting writer ruined by his increasingly partisan ideology — better than never being interesting at all, of course, but it’s never a good thing when more than one person compares your path to Paul Krugman. So few people who cover Wall Street or understand the economy take Taibbi seriously after his mumbling articles for Rolling Stone and the now defunct True/Slant, which contained buckets of paranoid meanderings and often bizarre inaccuracies about the beat he claimed to own. He seems far more petty and vindictive now, perhaps just because Rolling Stone’s editors seem uninterested in cutting it out.
It’s a small factor, but there’s something else here too. Taibbi became an exclusive magazine property after True/Slant was purchased by Steve Forbes’ publishing company, thereby ending his popular blog at the site — Taibbi doesn’t disclose this fact, but in a classic measure of his dry wit, he does brand Forbes a “billionaire turd.” No comment from Forbes, who was probably jetskiing across Lake Franzibald.
This piece is just clumsy. It’s not clever, it’s not new, it’s not even interesting, and it gets more facts wrong than it has pages. It’s Taibbi’s agenda tarted up as a piece of journalism and trotted out to please those seeking eager dirty talk about the Tea Party, as if he hopes they’ll ignore the smeared makeup and track lines.
I asked Max Pappas at FreedomWorks to weigh in on this, and he offered this response:
“Few in the GOP establishment would agree with his claim that the tea party movement has been ‘deployed’ to their advantage by groups like FreedomWorks. Rather, it’s been a hostile takeover resisted by the GOP establishment at every step,” Pappas said. “This genuine grassroots movement is the people reasserting themselves against the members of both parties who make up the arrogant political class that has abused its powers for too long… something the once-upon-a-time anti-establishment Rolling Stone may have sided with, rather than defending the powers that be.”
Apt, considering that Taibbi’s piece comes on the heels of Jann Wenner’s slobber-drenched interview with President Obama. As the saying goes, politics sooner or later makes a fool out of everyone. “Once you wanted revolution/now you’re the institution/how’s it feel to be the man.”
“Boy, does Matt Taibbi’s journalism stink. Why do I dislike Taibbi? 1. Nothing fresh to say. 2. Predictible. 3. Writes like someone in love with smell of his own farts.”
[Lila: Note: This piece at Mondoweiss tells you where Weisberg is coming from and what's behind this love for journalistic courtesy and professionalism emanating from a card-carrying member of the establishment media, not for nothing dubbed the ":drive-by media" by that not-always-wrong bane of the intelligentsia, Rush Limbaugh.
I would normally feel sorry for Taibbi at this point, not being a big fan of piling on people when the crowd is doing it, or of scatological personal attacks... but hey, he dished it out to everyone else, didn't he? So I'll just avert my eyes and chalk this one down to the mills of god.
Thus does Rolling Stone's vulgar effort to corner the traction of a popular movement while sliming the people who started it get what it deserves - a kick in the pants.]
Rahm Emanuel is being reported as stepping down as White House Chief of Staff tomorrow. Two close associates said that Emmanuel would be making an announcement over the weekend that he would be making a bid for Mayor of Chicago, now that Mayor Richard Daley will not be seeking reelection.
A piece at Slate sums up the reactions from the establishment and the “professional left.” To the former and to the media, Emanuel was a “fixer” who made things work. To such outlets as Daily Kos he was a Rasputin who sabotaged the progressive agenda.
But with no Rahm around, it’s not clear whom the left will have to blame for the failures of this administration.
Jack Cashill on the death of former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and its connection to a BCCI official and extraordinary corruption at the highest levels of the Pakistani and the US government.
“The story begins in 1987, when Benzahir Bhutto, the eldest daughter of a former Pakistani prime minister, married a polo-playing idler by the name of Asif Ali Zardari.
Educated at Harvard and Oxford, the pretend populist Bhutto denounced the greed she saw around her, especially the “avaricious politicians” who were destroying her country.
Among the greediest was the nation’s strongman ruler, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who was not about to share what he had so brutally acquired.
Eight months after Bhutto’s marriage to Zardari, however, Zia died in what The New York Times called “a mysterious plane crash.” This unexpected tragedy, added the Times, “opened the way for Bhutto to win a narrow election victory.”
Although there were no subsequent arrests, few in Pakistan believe this crash to have been an accident.
Bhutto’s new husband, Zardari, quickly proved to be more avaricious a politician than Zia. His conspicuous gift for extortion as Bhutto’s Minister for Investment earned him the honorific “Mr. Ten Percent.”
In 1990, Zardari allegedly attached a bomb to a Pakistani businessman and forced him to withdraw money from his bank account. He was arrested for blackmail and convicted.
Largely because of Zardari, the President of Pakistan dismissed Bhutto in August 1990 for corruption and inability to maintain law and order. In 1993, however, Bhutto was elected Prime Minister once again, and Zardari’s conviction was overturned.
Brown likely met Bhutto and Zardari for the first time in South Africa in May 1994, where all three had gone to witness the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first black president.
At about this same time, back in Washington, according to Dresch, Brown made the acquaintance of a Bhutto protegee, Pakistani’s new ambassador, the glamorous Maleeha Lodhi.
With a Ph.D. in politics from the London School of Economics and her movie star looks, Lodhi, a single mom, took Brown and Washington by storm.
In November 1994, although Pakistan already had an official lobbyist, Lodhi chose to give some of her business to Patton Boggs, Brown’s former employer.
Signing the contract for Patton Boggs was none other than Lanny Davis, a partner who would soon earn his fifteen minutes of fame by flakking on nightly cable shows for Clinton during the Monica fiasco.
Lodhi and her lobbyists had one overriding mission: to kill or suppress the so-called Pressler amendment and close the books on a deal for American F-16 fighter bombers that had been initiated years before.
In brief, the amendment declared that no American military or technology aid could go to Pakistan unless it would “reduce significantly the risk that Pakistan will possess a nuclear explosive device.”
Pakistan was understandably miffed that George Bush applied the amendment in 1990 after Pakistan had already paid General Dynamics $658 million for 28 F-16s.
Amer Lodhi, Maleeha’s brother, saw an opportunity in the F-16 imbroglio. A former executive with the infamously corrupt Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), Amer got to know Brown through his sister. When in D.C., Zardari joined the party.
Inevitably, Amer Lodhi and Zardari came up with a scheme. Not surprisingly, it involved the always pliable Brown. Brown was to use his influence not to secure the F-16s, but to get Pakistan its money back.
Incredibly, Zardari and Amer Lohdi planned to pocket at least $400 million of the returned money minus an 8%, or $32 million, cut for Brown. For Brown, this was to be the mother of all insider deals.
Although Brown’s pull was scarcely worth $32 million, the Pakistani investment in Brown had an insidious intelligence about it. By involving Brown the Pakistanis were by extension implicating the White House in their scheme.
With the 1996 election at stake, exposure could damage the Clinton administration almost as much it would Bhutto’s. The best way to avoid exposure would be to keep Bhutto in power. If push came to shove, everyone would have an interest in doing just that..”
It’s a mistake to think propaganda is solely something “they” (the power elites) do to us (passive viewers). It’s just not so.
While propaganda can often be so subtle that the viewer cannot recognize he’s being manipulated, it isn’t true that the viewer is completely helpless to resist it.
The reason for this is that contemporary propaganda is rarely a direct command. Instead, it’s couched in language that appeals to viewers’ self-interests. So, anything that flatters our self-perception or claims to fulfill our desires should alert us to the fact that manipulation might be going on.
The father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this process at length:
“The leaders who lend their authority to any propaganda campaign will do so only if it can be made to touch their own interests. There must be a disinterested aspect of the propagandist’s activities. In other words, it is one of the functions of the public relations counsel to discover at what points his client’s interests coincide with those of other individuals or groups.
In the case of the soap sculpture competition, the distinguished artists and educators who sponsored the idea were glad to lend their services and their names because the competitions really promoted an interest which they had at heart—the cultivation of the esthetic impulse among the younger generation. Such coincidence and overlapping of interests is as infinite as the interlacing of group formations themselves. For example, a railway wishes to develop its business. The counsel on public relations makes a survey to discover at what points its interests coincide with those of its prospective customers. The company then establishes relations with chambers of commerce along its right of way and assists them in developing their communities. It helps them to secure new plants and industries for the town. It facilitates business through the dissemination of technical information. It is not merely a case of bestowing favors in the hope of receiving favors; these activities of the railroad, besides creating good will, actually promote growth on its right of way. The interests of the railroad and the communities through which it passes mutually interact and feed one another.
In the same way, a bank institutes an investment service for the benefit of its customers in order that the latter may have more money to deposit with the bank. Or a jewelry concern develops an insurance department to insure the jewels it sells, in order to make the purchaser feel greater security in buying jewels. Or a baking company establishes an information service suggesting recipes for bread to encourage new uses for bread in the home. The ideas of the new propaganda are predicated on sound psychology based on enlightened selfinterest.”
I’m always on the look out for folk-remedies, but I think I might have a few qualms about this new…er…pee-ple’s drink in North India:
“If you pick up a labeled “health drink” in India you might find some unusual ingredients. The Indian reverence for cows, which gives religious significance to the bovine, has produced a good-for-you beverage made from cow urine.
The cow is considered by Hindus as symbolic of life-giving deities. The fundamentalist Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) launched Gauloka Peya, or “drink from the land of cow,” earlier this year.
Purushottam Toshniwal, a member of the cow protection unit of the RSS and the man who concocted the drink, says the group has already sold around 700 bottles to distributors.
RSS already sells soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, and skin-care creams made from cow urine and dung.
“Many were hesitant to try it in the beginning,” Mr. Toshniwal says. “However, once they tasted it, they liked it. You cannot taste the cow urine as it is mixed with other ingredients.” He also believes the drink will cure diseases.
The cow urine is distilled before it is mixed with traditional Indian herbs and medicinal plants such as Brahmi and basil and water in a 1-to-7 ratio. Gauloka Peya comes in four flavors – orange, khus(a fragrant Asian grass), rose, and lemon. A bottle costs about $3.
“It is like any regular sweet drink, without the harmful side effects,” Toshniwal says.”
Can’t be any worse than snails, crete d’ coque (cockscomb), bishop’s nose (chicken’s behind), prairie oysters (bulls’ testicles), Norman cheeses aged under cow-dung, chocolate-covered grasshoppers, slugs, and all the other less-than-savory savories that garnish the global plate.
The Indian cow is a one-critter industrial plant - providing its milk for drink, its hide for leather, its horn for vessels, its dung for fuel and medicinal products, and now its urine for medicinal drinks, shampoos, and soaps. (Still, I’m happy the ratio is 1 in 7 parts, not the other way round).
“Through the ages there have been literally thousands of champions of this curious practice: In the early 1800s, a book titled One Thousand Notable Things describes the use of urine to cure scurvy, relieve skin itching, cleanse wounds, and many other treatments. An 18th century French dentist praised urine as a valuable mouthwash. In England during the 1860-70s, the drinking of one’s own urine was a common cure for jaundice. In more modern times, the Alaskan Eskimos have used urine as an antiseptic to treat wounds……..
…While many people are aware that Gandhi drank his urine, few know that leather-clad rocker Jim Morrison (who, like Gandhi, had an unwatchable movie made of his life) began the practice of drinking his urine while on an LSD-induced spiritual quest in the Mojave Desert. And like Gandhi, Morrison is now dead. As is John Lennon, another reputed fan of urine therapy. In fact, an entire legion of herion-addicted, long-haired rock and rollers are said to have tried Urine Therapy in the early 1970s following Keith Richards (unsuccessful) experimentations with the cure. One of the more famous modern day cases involves movie star Steve McQueen, who, it is said, in the last stages of cancer, survived solely on a diet of urine and boiled alligator skin prescribed by his Mexican doctors.”
And big pharma is not about to be left out of things:
“This summer, Enzymes of America plans to market its first major urine product called urokinase, an enzyme that dissolves blood clots and is used to treat victims of heart attacks. The company has contracts to supply the urine enzyme to Sandoz, Merrell Dow and other major pharmaceutical companies. Ironically, this enterprise evolved from Porta-John’s attempt to get rid of urine proteins-a major source of odour in portable toilets.”
Alexis Madrigal writes at The Atlantic about robot traders that spoof market orders and introduce potentially dangerous “noise” into high-frequency trading that could end up in a flash crash. The spoof trades can be used to coordinate what is effectively a denial service attack on certain nodes in the financial network. Essentially this is the same as what happens in the other DNS attacks in infrastructure critical to national security. It amounts to clogging the system with data so that it slows down and eventually seizes up.
“High-frequency traders have become a target for all kinds of people, but most of them appear to make their money being a little faster and little smarter than their competitors. And if they are playing by the rules, they improve the quality of markets by minuscule amounts trade after trade after trade.
But the algorithms we see at work here are different. They don’t serve any function in the market. University of Pennsylvania finance professor, Michael Kearns, a specialist in algorithmic trading, called the patterns “curious,” and noted that it wasn’t immediately apparent what such order placement strategies might do.
Donovan thinks that the odd algorithms are just a way of introducing noise into the works. Other firms have to deal with that noise, but the originating entity can easily filter it out because they know what they did. Perhaps that gives them an advantage of some milliseconds. In the highly competitive and fast HFT world, where even one’s physical proximity to a stock exchange matters, market players could be looking for any advantage.
“They are moving the high-frequency services as close to the exchanges as possible because even the speed of light matters,” in such a competitive market, said Stanford finance professor Peter Hansen.
Given Nanex’s data, let’s say that these algorithms are being run each and every day, just about every minute. Are they really a big deal? Donovan said that quote stuffing or market spoofing played a role in the Flash Crash, but that event appears to have had so many causes and failures that it’s nearly impossible to apportion blame. (It is worth noting that European markets are largely protected from a similar event by volatility interruption auctions.)
But already since the May event, Nanex’s monitoring turned up another potentially disastrous situation. On July 16 in a quiet hour before the market opened, suddenly they saw a huge spike in bandwidth. When they looked at the data, they found that 84,000 quotes for each of 300 stocks had been made in under 20 seconds.
“This all happened pre-market when volume is low, but if this kind of burst had come in at a time when we were getting hit hardest, I guarantee it would have caused delays in the [central quotation system],” Donovan said. That, in turn, could have become one of those dominoes that always seem to present themselves whenever there is a catastrophic failure of a complex system.
There are ways to prevent quote stuffing, of course, and at least one of the members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee thinks it should be outlawed.
“Algorithms that might be spoofing the market are something that should be made illegal,” said John Bates, a former Cambridge professor and the CTO of Progress Software. But he didn’t want this presumably negative practice to color the more mundane competitive practices of high-frequency traders.”
“Obama’s Wars also affirms what we already suspected about the decision-making process that led up to the president’s announcement at West Point in December 2009 to prolong and escalate the war. Bluntly put, the Pentagon gamed the process to exclude any possibility of Obama rendering a decision not to its liking.
Pick your surge: 20,000 troops? Or 30,000 troops? Or 40,000 troops? Only the most powerful man in the world — or Goldilocks contemplating three bowls of porridge — could handle a decision like that. Even as Obama opted for the middle course, the real decision had already been made elsewhere by others: the war in Afghanistan would expandand continue.
And then there’s this from the estimable General David Petraeus: ”I don’t think you win this war,” Woodward quotes the field commander as saying. “I think you keep fighting… This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”
Here we confront a series of questions to which Woodward (not to mention the rest of Washington) remains steadfastly oblivious. Why fight a war that even the general in charge says can’t be won? What will the perpetuation of this conflict cost? Who will it benefit? Does the ostensibly most powerful nation in the world have no choice but to wage permanent war? Are there no alternatives? Can Obama shut down an unwinnable war now about to enter its tenth year? Or is he — along with the rest of us — a prisoner of war?”
“Countless articles, books, thesis, papers and research reports have tried to answer the question, ‘what is wrong with India ?’ Global experts are startled that a country of massive potential has one of the largest populations of poor people in the world. Isn’t it baffling that despite almost everyone agreeing that things should change, they don’t? Intellectuals give intelligent suggestions – from investing in infrastructure to improving the judicial system. Yet, nothing moves. Issues dating back thirty years ago, continue to plague India today. The young are often perplexed. They ask will things ever change? How? Whose fault is it that they haven’t?
Today, i will attempt to answer these tricky questions, although from a different perspective . I will not put the blame on everyone’s favorite punching bag– inept politicians. That is too easy an argument and not entirely correct. After all, we elect the politicians. So, for every MP out there, there are a few lakh people who wanted him or her there. I won’t give ‘policy’ solutions either – make power plants, improve the roads, open up the economy . It isn’t the lack of such ideas that is stalling progress. No, blocking progress is part of the unique psyche of Indians. There are three traits of our psyche, in particular, that are not good for us and our country. Each comes from three distinct sources – our school, our environment and our home.
The first trait is servility. At school, our education system hammers out our individual voices and kills our natural creativity, turning us into servile, coursematerial slaves. Indian kids are not encouraged to raise their voices in class, particularly when they disagree with the teacher. And of course, no subject teaches us imagination, creativity or innovation. Course materials are designed for no-debate kind of teaching. For example, we ask: how many states are there in India ? 28. Correct. Next question -how is a country divided into states? What criteria should be used? Since these are never discussed , children never develop their own viewpoint or the faculty to think.
The second trait is our numbness to injustice. It comes from our environment. We see corruption from our childhood. Almost all of us have been asked to lie about our age to the train TC, claiming to be less than 5 years old to get a free ride. It creates a value system in the child’s brain that ‘anything goes’, so long as you can get away with it. A bit of lying here, a bit of cheating there is seen as acceptable. Hence, we all grow up slightly numb to corruption. Not even one high profile person in India is behind bars for corruption right now. This could be because, to a certain extent, we don’t really care.
The third trait is divisiveness. This often comes from our home, particularly our family and relatives, where we learn about the differences amongst people. Our religion, culture and language are revered and celebrated in our families. Other people are different – and often implied to be not as good as us. We’ve all known an aunt or uncle who, though is a good person, holds rigid bias against Muslims, Dalits or people from different communities. Even today, most of India votes on one criterion – caste. Dalits vote for Dalits, Thakurs for Thakurs and Yadavs for Yadavs. In such a scenario, why would a politician do any real work? When we choose a mobile network, do we check if Airtel and Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then, why do we vote for somebody simply because he has the same caste as ours?
We need mass self-psychotherapy for the three traits listed above. When we talk of change, you and I alone can’t replace a politician, or order a road to be built. However, we can change one thing – our mindset. And collectively, this alone has the power to make the biggest difference. We have to unlearn whatever is holding us back, and definitely break the cycle so we don’t pass on these traits to the next generation. Our children should think creatively, have opinions and speak up in class. They should learn what is wrong is wrong – no matter how big or small. And they shouldn’t hate other people on the basis of their background. Let us also resolve to start working on our own minds, right now. A change in mindset changes the way people vote, which in turn changes politicians.
And change does happen. In the 80s, we had movies like “Gunda” and “Khoon Pi Jaaonga”. Today, our movies have better content .They have changed. How? It is because our expectations from films have changed. Hence, the filmmakers had to change.
If we resolve today that we will vote on the basis of performance alone, we will encourage the voices against injustice and we will place an honest but less wealthy person on a higher pedestal than a corrupt but rich person. By doing so, we would contribute to India’s progress. If everyone who read this newspaper did this, it would be enough to change voting patterns in the next election. And then, maybe, we will start moving towards a better India. Are you on board? “
To many libertarians, these sorts of generalizations are specious, collectivist, and possibly racist.
I disagree.
Granted, cultural generalizations are just that and shouldn’t be misapplied, it’s still possible for an acute observer to identify cultural problems with a degree of objectivity.
Chetan Bhagat manages this quite succinctly.
But if Bhagat had wanted to be even more succinct, he could have summarized his entire thesis in one word: dharma.
“Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so much of it as it is profitable to them to know. Every age has had a religion suited to its capacity.”
AP reports that Chinese billionaires aren’t inclined to follow the power elite’s favorite piece of flim-flam - hyper-public philanthropy. Seems the canny Chi-Coms aren’t buying into the “good little rich boys” club:
“Some of China’s super rich are skeptical about Gates’ and Buffett’s approach. China’s wealthy don’t have to “copy the U.S. charity mode,” billionaire Guo Jinshu told Xinhua in a story Wednesday. “In China, an entrepreneur’s top responsibility is to keep his own business sound, to fulfill taxation payments, and create jobs. This is also out of a philanthropist heart.”
Just a thought. Could a DHS cyber security exercise scheduled for this week have had anything to do with these two market “accidents”?
According to this report, the following sectors (among others) were to have been targeted for several days this week:
“This year’s exercise will be the largest yet, including representatives from seven cabinet-level federal departments, intelligence agencies, 11 states, 12 international partners and 60 private sector companies in multiple critical infrastructure sectors like banking, defense, energy and transportation.”
The markets aren’t specifically mentioned, but then you’d expect that if they were the chosen target…
ORIGINAL POST
Peter Cooper at Arabian Money argues that an apparent Google “flash crash” last Friday signals a market correction in the offing:
“It also seems pretty clear that Wall Street insiders flicked the sell switch at the weekend. That would account for the ‘accidental’ Google flash crash last Friday (click here). You bet against this crowd at your peril.
On this reckoning the gold pit action is just a last burst of optimism from latecomers to the party. For the gold price will surely dip (if not to much more than $1,150) in a big sell-off in financial markets, and silver will also fall back below $20.”
Meanwhile, Rick Ackerman points to a mini flash crash that apparently took place on Tuesday night in the gold futures market…..and explains why Bob Prechter has been wrong for the last 18 months - he’s an expert in real markets, not completely rigged ones…
I’ll admit that I’m glad to see this because of my own market bias, which has left me a bit lonely waiting for some kind of correction in the gold price.
Years of making my very own patentable blunders have made me much more comfortable being wrong on my own rather than being right in a crowd…..
Move over, Rowan Atkinson, the B of E has a clown that puts your routine to shame….AND.. he’s got your name.
Charles Bean, deputy-governor of the Bank of England thinks pensioners should shut up about interest rates and just spend their retirement capital.
“Older households could afford to suffer because they had benefited from previous property price rises,” he said.
Yep. Your house value is higher than it was ten years, so why on earth do you need any interest for lending us your money?
Keen thinking yet again from the bandit class that sold Britain’s gold at the bottom of a 20 year bear and then hocked it into debt bondage to the banking mafia.
Let’s see. Even if house prices have fallen 25-35% from their peaks, property taxes haven’t fallen with them, have they? And consumer prices haven’t gone back to where they were when pensioners were working, have they? In fact, in terms of gold price, savings are now worth about a fifth or sixth of what they were just ten years ago.
The typical UK savings rate has fallen nearly 3%, for a loss of 18 billion pounds a year, but that doesn’t matter says genius Bean, because housing values have gone up.
Bean:
“Savers shouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to live just off their income in times when interest rates are low. It may make sense for them to eat into their capital a bit.”
He added: “Very often older households have actually benefited from the fact that they’ve seen capital gains on their houses.”
Of course, what this financial huckster isn’t saying is that older people still have to pay upkeep and maintenance costs (that have risen), still have to pay inflated property taxes (which don’t match the deflation in prices), and now also have to deal with higher food and other consumer prices, higher medical costs, higher gas prices, and higher travel costs from their eroded savings.
And there’s no easy out from all this. They can’t sell their houses and downsize easily, because the housing market is in shambles and bank credit is tight. Even if they do sell, they have to deal with the transaction costs and taxes involved for the house they’re selling and commissions and purchase costs for the one they’re buying.
Meanwhile, if pensioners do cut into their savings, their future income stream is going to be in trouble.
“So all those hillsmen in Idaho, with their Colt 45s and boxes of krugerrands, who sent furious emails to the Telegraph accusing me of defending a hyperinflating establishment cabal were right all along. The Fed is indeed out of control.
The sophisticates at banking conferences in London, Frankfurt, and New York who aplogized for this primitive monetary creationsim – as I did – are the ones who lost the plot.
My apologies. Mercy, for I have sinned against sound money, and therefore against sound politics.”
Eric Blair (via LRC) on the marketing of food shortages:
“The recent market speculation has now driven food commodity prices for corn and soybean to their 2-year highs. An emergency meeting Friday by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome to address the urgent shortages and sudden surge in prices had this to say:
In the past few weeks, global cereal markets experienced a sudden surge in international wheat prices on concerns over wheat shortages prompted by the drought in the Russian Federation. These unexpected events raise important questions not only about the stability of markets but, even more importantly, about the accuracy of production forecasts and ultimately the overall supply and demand prospects. However, with an increasing proportion of world grain supplies originating from the Black Sea region, an area known for large variations in yields, unexpected production shortfalls are likely to emerge more as a common feature rather than an exception in the years to come.
The Guardian reported on the meeting that, “Environmental disasters and speculative investors are to blame for volatile food commodities markets, says U.N.’s special adviser.” The article went on to quote from a research paper by the U.N.’s “special rapporteur” on food, Olivier De Schutter, which summarizes how speculation is inflating a food bubble:
‘[Beginning in ]2001, food commodities derivatives markets, and commodities indexes began to see an influx of non-traditional investors,; De Schutter writes. ‘The reason for this was because other markets dried up one by one: the dotcoms vanished at the end of 2001, the stock market soon after, and the US housing market in August 2007. As each bubble burst, these large institutional investors moved into other markets, each traditionally considered more stable than the last. Strong similarities can be seen between the price behaviour of food commodities and other refuge values, such as gold.’
He continues: ‘A significant contributory cause of the price spike [has been] speculation by institutional investors who did not have any expertise or interest in agricultural commodities, and who invested in commodities index funds or in order to hedge speculative bets.’
Certainly, the flurry of reports about the growing concerns over global food production, extreme weather, and a record-weak dollar have offered sufficient excuses for the speculation. While at the same time, the human ramifications of these events are immeasurably awful. Here’s just a few headlines from this week alone:
These are very real concerns for feeding the human population. And indeed, they are urgent matters to be solved. However, it seems too convenient to see the banksters profit, the public suffering turn to outrage, and the bank-owned government agencies to scramble for a “solution.” Haven’t we seen this Three-card Monte game enough by now? It’s a scam.
Almost right on cue, here comes the reaction from the food aid groups desperately calling for “swift action.” An ActionAid’s hunger campaigner, Alex Wijeratna, was quoted in the Guardian article: ”The emergency U.N. meeting in Rome is a clear warning sign that we could be on the brink of another food price crisis unless swift action is taken. Already, nearly a billion people go to bed hungry every night — another food crisis would be catastrophic for millions of poor people.”
If we believe Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, we can expect to be offered the solution of global food regulation. In June of 2009, in response to the 2008 food crisis, he called for “bolstered global governance system for world food security” under the cover of feeding the hungry. He said, “We have to build a more coherent and effective system of governance for world food security; we have to correct the policies and international trade system that have resulted in more hunger and poverty.”
Incidentally, the organization’s plans for increased global governance seem to mainly focus on divvying up the elite’s table scraps to the poor hungry nations. Under this governance, we will likely see food continue to be used as an economic weapon. It is also likely that more “free trade” agreements will be forced for food. And, finally, we can expect more focus on increasing crop yields — no doubt with the help of big agribusiness. The one thing that we are most likely NOT to see is the prosecution or regulation of the banking speculators who hold the real power to starve the poor.”
[Lila: Blair, writing from the left,Correction: I assumed Blair was writing from the left, but, on revisiting the site, I think the assumption mightn't be warranted]
I’m not sure I agree that more regulation is the answer, since the fundamental drivers of commodity speculation are to be found in artificial interest rates, centralized banking, the size of the speculators, and the use of the media not to inform but to market]
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