Free Learner

The doomsayers

A lot of people disregard disastrous predictions because they usually don't come true.  But from my perspective, what's amazing is how often these predictions almost come true.  While our esteemed politicians may not know how to do anything but attend cocktail parties and bloviate, the people behind the curtain who actually run the show turn out to be reasonably competent... on occasion.  We come to the brink of disaster time and again, only to be dragged back by the seat of our pants.

We've nearly run out of diesel fuel in certain regions of the country, as predicted by many peak oil analysts, but we've never had the trucking system break down.  We've nearly run out of heating fuel in the Northeast -- we've come within a few days' worth of usage, in fact -- but, again, contrary to some peak oil forecasts, the fuel did not quite run out.  To go way back to the Clinton era, some non-establishment researchers thought the Serbian conflict was all about launching another war (cold or otherwise) with Russia.  And indeed, Wesley Clark nearly bombed the Russians, but the British general receiving those orders simply refused to carry them out.  Nuclear weapons were almost shipped off to the Middle East in late August 2007, right around the time Webster Tarpley was going nuts on radio shows hollering about imminent war with Iran-- but those nuclear weapons were stopped at Barksdale Air Force base (apparently costing several soldiers their lives). 

And although I don't know of anyone who predicted a possible incident with Russia in 2001, some worrying things happened vis-a-vis Russia on September 11th.  That morning, when we went to Defcon 3 and locked down the Norad facility made famous in the movie War Games, both the US and Russia were conducting nuclear war drills over the North Pole.  (During such war games, the other side cannot be 100% sure that it's truly all a simulation, and not an actual attack.  Thus, the simultaneous war exercises, just in case.)  Additionally, it appeared to some in the foreign intelligence community that a coup might be taking place (i.e., where the hell was Bush? and what of the multiple threats against Air Force One?).  We had to call the Russians and request that we both stand down, to avoid any unfortunate accidents.  Both sides behaved like rational adults and backed off.

One way to look at near-disasters is to be scared by how close we came to catastrophe (the Cuban Missile Crisis being first on my list), but on the other hand, it suggests there are better and smarter people behind the closed doors of the Establishment than you might think from watching C-SPAN.  They have snatched us back from the precipice quite a few times.

I think analysts issue dire warnings because they feel they're acting proportionally to the danger.  True, they may be wrong, but if they're not it's going to be very bad.  This is why I've urged people to get a couple of weeks' worth of food together and shove it in a closet or the basement or wherever.  Sure, bank closures or diesel shortages or massive power outages may carry only a small probability of occurrence.  But if you don't buy that spaghetti and one day you're explaining to your hungry kids that there is nothing to eat, well... better to be safe than sorry.  I always think of the line "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"  You don't ever want to go there.  The better reaction to Doom and Gloom predictions is to listen to them, take them with a grain of salt, but see if there's anything simple you can do to prepare for the given calamity.

* * * * *

On October 7 of last year I passed along my own dire warning about bank closures, under the title The Fed buys us another day:

[The news today] is all very bad, but we did not suffer utter implosion today.  Jim Sinclair wrote: "If the Fed hadn't taken the rather strange action they took today by becoming OTC derivative dealers themselves this would have been the day the USA banking system imploded."

Sinclair is predicting a bank holiday, and quite soon.  If you do have extra cash available in your bank accounts (lucky you), go and withdraw some.  If not, consider going to a discount or bulk store and getting some pasta and pasta sauce and canned tuna and canned beans on credit.  The US government says you should have 2 weeks worth of food on hand, anyway... and this way, if for some reason there is a banking crisis, you will not have to scramble and borrow cash from others to buy something to eat.  If you bank with Bank of America, this goes double for you.

Today I found out that on October 10, three days later, the UK came within a hair's breadth of having a systemic bank closure (including ATM withdrawals, known as "hole in the wall" withdrawals in the UK).

Britain was just three hours away from going bust last year after a secret run on the banks, one of Gordon Brown's Ministers has revealed.

City Minister Paul Myners disclosed that on Friday, October 10, the country was 'very close' to a complete banking collapse after 'major depositors' attempted to withdraw their money en masse.

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the Treasury was preparing for the banks to shut their doors to all customers, terminate electronic transfers and even block hole-in-the-wall cash withdrawals.  Only frantic behind-the-scenes efforts averted financial meltdown. (source: International Forecaster newsletter)

Had UK banking shut down, investors in other countries would have doubted their own banking systems, and the panic would have spread.  As the UK is 5 hours ahead of us, there would have been ample time on Friday, October 10 to create bank runs in the United States.

The doomsayers are not way off the mark, but when disaster is narrowly averted the general public rarely hears so much as a whisper about it.  Even when bad things do happen (say, a 6,000-point fall in the Dow in 12 months) many people fail to notice the magnitude because it happens gradually and things seem more or less normal.  If someone had said, as the Dow approached its 14,165 high, that it would dip below 8,000 within a year, they would surely have been labeled the most pessimistic of all doomsayers.  All the while the Dow was plummeting, television was broadcasting its 24/7 "Everything Is Normal" message, and anyone who became too disheartened was ridiculed because "the market always bounces back" or some such tripe.

This is not a normal environment.  This is the reversal of globalization, the end of some currencies, the Great Depression II, and a time of insurrections and revolutions.  You may disagree with the doomsayers, but it's no time to ignore them.

Freddy the Pig: A Children's Classic

I've been wanting to explain why I've recently become obsessed with the Freddy the Pig series, but I couldn't seem to find the words to convey how excellent the books are.  Thankfully, over at the Friends of Freddy site, they had a copy of a May 1994 New York Times Book Review, written by Adam Hochschild, which says it all.  Here is that review, in part (and with minor editing):

That Paragon of Porkers: Remembering Freddy the Pig

The moral center of my childhood universe, the place where good and evil, friendship and treachery, honesty and humbug were defined most clearly, was not church, not school and not the Boy Scouts.  It was the Bean Farm.

The Bean Farm, as all right-thinking children of my generation knew, was the upstate New York home of Freddy the Pig and his fellow animals.  They were the subject of 26 books by Walter R. Brooks... that appeared between 1927 and Brooks's death in 1958....

Brooks had many admirers, from my fifth-grade classmates to the mighty Lionel Trilling, who called the books "delightful."  Other loyalists have claimed Freddy as the ancestor of more famous literary pigs such as those in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945).  In fact, in Freddy the Politician (first published in 1939 as Wiggins for President), the animals foil a crafty gang of woodpeckers who try to seize control of the Bean Farm by making extravagant promises - a revolving door for the henhouses, cat-proof apartments for the rats, and so on.   In his book Fairy Tales and After, the critic Roger Sale pointed out that Freddy the Politician "not only preceded Orwell's work but is a good deal more careful with its materials and, for that matter, shrewder about its politics… The actions emerge much less mechanically than do Orwell's."

. . .

Walter R. Brooks's gentle genius shines even brighter in his villains....  Almost all the villains foiled by Freddy are representatives of the Establishment.  The bank president, Mr. Weezer, who appears in many of the books, has glasses that fall off anytime anyone mentions a sum over $10.  General Grimm is "short, stocky, and red-faced and looked as if his uniform was too tight for him, but nobody had better mention it."  Mr. Gridley, the high school principal "never came close to anybody he was talking to but always stood off several yards and shouted."

The pompous, timid Senator Blunder flees the scene when pursued by the animals, because "should I be struck down, into what hands would fall the reins of the ship of state?"  The fabulously wealthy Margarine family tears up farmers' fields with fox hunts in Freddy Rides Again.  (The fox, of course, is a friend of Freddy's, and the Margarine's are undone.)  And, until he is exposed by the animals, a conniving real estate man pretends he is a ghost and haunts houses he wants the occupants to sell.

Poking fun at generals, realtors, bank presidents and the like was unusual fare for children's books of the 1940's and 50's.  Other volumes make a few digs at the space program and at the FBI - Freddy's bumbling Animal Bureau of Investigation often misses the evidence right under his snout.  In a subtle way the books even prefigured the spirit of the 60's.

In Freddy and the Bean Home News the animals start their own paper because Mrs. Underdunk, the rich, haughty newspaper owner, and her editor, Mr. Garble, distort the news.  When the evil Mr. Condiment hits Freddy, Freddy thinks: "He slapped me because I am a pig….If I were a boy or a man he wouldn't have done it...."

Still, you don't have to be in the 60's generation to appreciate Freddy.  As with all books that last, their attraction is broader and deeper.  Essentially, they evoke the most subversive politics of all: a child's instinctive desire for fair play.  Brooks speaks powerfully to his young readers' moral sense without ever overtly moralizing.  The local sheriff, for example, tells Freddy's sidekick, Charles the rooster, that he will get much tougher penalties for pecking the face of a rich man than that of a poor one. Truer words were never spoken.  But how can a reader feel preached at when it's someone talking to a rooster?

Some dozen years ago, says Dave Carley, a Toronto playwright, he "stopped in at a children's library to see if they still had any Freddy books.  The librarian told me that she was photocopying pages and binding the books with hockey-stick tape because they were in such demand."  Mr. Carley found others who remembered the books as fondly as he and formed the Friends of Freddy, who meet every two years for a weekend of book trading, talk, and pork-free dinners....

"I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario," Mr. Carley told me by telephone from his home in Toronto.  "A Friends of Freddy member from [Peterborough] told me recently that when he was a boy there were two thugs who came to the library on Saturday mornings.  The bigger one blocked the door, and the smaller one ran upstairs and checked out all available Freddy books.  I had to confess to him that these two were my brother and me."

. . .

Above all, it is Brooks's moral words that stick with his readers.  "I distinctly remember learning things from the books that I could apply to my own life," Mr. Carley says.  "For example, that if somebody says, 'To be frank with you" it means they're lying."  Geoffrey Stakes, in a 1992 article in The Village Voice, pointed out that the Bean animals had "a one-animal, one-vote rule in place long before the human Supreme Court established our version."  Wendy Wolf, a New York book editor, learned that the Nuremberg defense is no good: "Like when the children of Simon the Rat say, 'Our father made us do it,' they're told: 'Forget it, you're going to jail'."

. . .

"They represent the very best of American fantasy writing for children," says Mr. Cooper [of the New Yorker] of the books.  "They are the American version of the great English classics, such as the Pooh books or The Wind in the Willows."

Thoughts on reading

Yesterday I ran across a good post about reading, which had this to say about reading in schools:

What was more disturbing was that the second a child succeeded in reading a level with only a few mistakes, they were given a harder book. There was never any ease or comfort in reading. It was always a hard, boring chore. Children were not allowed to linger in a level to achieve fluency, to enjoy the reading, they were always being forced to struggle through to the next stage to try to keep up with provincial requirements.

I left this comment:

You make a great point about kids being moved on to the next reading level as soon as possible, keeping them constantly frustrated. That's really unfortunate. Even when kids are reading books below their reading level, they are still cementing spelling & grammar rules simply by absorbing them from the text. Plus, not only does it make them more confident readers, but it allows them to read the book more dramatically (whether out loud, or just using their internal, mental voice) because they aren't distracted constantly by challenging words. My daughter used to say that yes, she could read, but she couldn't read "like the audiobooks." She meant that it was hard to imagine the setting, the voices, & the emotions because the text itself was still quite challenging. I submit that if you can't get wrapped up in a book enough to imagine the characters & their tone of voice & so on, you are not fully reading that book. But of course, in school it's simply a matter of being able to say the words aloud. (I'm sure we all remember listening to other kids reading aloud in a total monotone, with no regard for the ends of sentences!)

When we found the Freddy the Pig audiobooks, I realized that my kids can learn an immense amount of vocabulary, random cultural knowledge, figures of speech & proverbs, grammar and syntax, all from audiobooks. All that's missing is deciphering symbols (reading, as it's often measured in school) and correctly arranging symbols (spelling and punctuation). They get everything from an audiobook except the mechanics, in other words. In fact, they get more, because the voice acting is usually quite good, and those vocal cues help kids understand unfamiliar slang or vocabulary. The Freddy books are chock full of old proverbs and odd slang (plus the word "phaeton"). I guarantee my daughter learns more listening to Freddy than reading any of the crappy early readers used in my old elementary school.

A blogger (I wish I remember who it was) once said that the early schooling years are all about symbol manipulation, and I agree.  There is a great deal of focus on the mechanics of language, and very little focus on why we read and write language in the first place.

The logic gap

Thanks to my Mom for alerting me to this video, in which anti-abortion protesters are asked what the penalty should be for women who obtain an abortion illegally.  I've roughly transcribed one portion:

Interviewer: Do you think abortion should be legal or illegal?

Woman: Illegal... because it's killing.  It's killing of a human person.

Interviewer: And what should happen to women if they have illegal abortions?

Woman: Just pray for them... I don't think they have to spend time in jail or anything... we should just pray for them so they repent and don't have any more.

Interviewer: So you think that there should be no punishment under the law?

Woman: No, I don't think that they should be punished, because the life has been taken, the crime has been done.

Interviewer: That's true of murder too, isn't it?  Isn't there a punishment for murder?

Woman: Yes, there is a punishment for murder... it is taking of a life.

Interviewer: So why should there not be a punishment for a woman who has an illegal abortion?

Woman: As the other ones say [?], it's kinda between her and God.  She will get her punishment in the end.

Interviewer: Then why should it be illegal?

Woman: Because it's the taking of a life....

Another woman says that abortion should be illegal because when it's legal, society is sanctioning it.  She too thinks any state punishment for illegal abortion is unnecessary.

It never occurred to me that in the abortion debate we might be disagreeing about the meaning of the words "legal" and "illegal," but so it seems.  To most of the people on the above video, legal and illegal are merely synonyms for "approved of / right" and "disapproved of / wrong".  If an act is legal, it means it's sanctioned.  Ergo, if it's illegal, it is not sanctioned.  No actual punishment need be attached to illegality.  Legal status is simply the declared opinion of the State, although it may be an entirely toothless declaration. 

To most of the country, "illegal" means that society has found this act to be a violation of another's rights or an act harmful to society itself, and has stipulated a range of typical penalties to be imposed.  Meanwhile, "legal" is simply the default state for all actions, unless and until we decide that penalties must be imposed as a deterrent against such acts.  No penalty?  No fines, probation, counseling, or jail time?  Then it's not illegal.  You can't have it both ways.

If these folks really believe that life begins (instantly, in binary fashion) at the moment of conception, then the penalty for obtaining an abortion should be life in prison.  One of those interviewed agrees with this, and she's the only one who is logically consistent.  Similarly there are all sorts of anti-choice folks out there who illogically have no problem with in vitro fertilization (in which fertilized eggs are discarded), or with the Pill or IUD's (in which fertilized eggs are miscarried).

Someone should show up to one of these protests with a white board and some dry erase markers and start in with "P implies Q"....

Fire and ice

(With apologies to Robert Frost.)

You guys who aren't into economics may not be aware of the argument which has been raging for a couple of years or so, as to which way the US will meet its final economic doom (currently scheduled for 2011-2012).  Think of the options as "fire" and "ice," as in the famous poem:

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
to say that for destruction ice
Is also great
and would suffice.

It's easier to explain the economic death of America by ice.  It's simple, really.  We just run out of money and credit, that's all.  It's the Big Freeze (aka deflation).  No more loans.  No more paychecks.  Not enough cash.  Business crashes.  People starve or die of the cold or the heat.  It's The Great Depression Redux, except that this time the US would be forced to default on the money we owe to other nations.  (When we entered Great Depression I, they owed us money, not the other way around.)  Not paying back the money we owe other countries would... shall we say... piss them off.  This would cause our currency to become worthless, and would result in a cessation of imports.  (If "cessation of imports" sounds technical, replace it with "no shoes, no T-shirts, no gasoline, no DVD players, and no i-Anythings.")

Death by fire is more interesting and less predictable in its speed.  In this scenario, powerful people try to keep the game going by any means, including printing lots and LOTS of money out of thin air and handing it all 'round in an effort to keep the party going.  The man currently in charge of printing US money once suggested we could print it up and drop it out of helicopters to the waiting public, if that's what it took to maintain the revelry.  (You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not.  That's why we call him Helicopter Ben.)

Problem is, there is no bender long enough to prevent that eventual hangover.  The "hangover" after you go around inventing new money and tossing it around like confetti is that the money isn't really worth much after that.  If we gave everyone in America a million bucks, they'd be thrilled... until they got to the grocery store and found out that it now cost $324.99 for a loaf of bread.  After all, if printing new money made a country rich, Zimbabwe would be the wealthiest country on the planet.  (Current largest Zimbabwean bank note: 100 Trillion Zimbabwe Dollars, worth about thirty US bucks.)

Continuing on the bender / hangover metaphor, imagine a drunk who gets more and more tolerant of alcohol with every passing day.  This guy is desperate to stay drunk and avoid a hangover, but every day it's taking more and more alcohol to maintain the buzz.  What used to require a jigger now requires a half pint, and then a whole pint, and eventually a fifth, and....

That drunk is JP Morgan Chase bank.  Or, if you like, Goldman Sachs.  Or California.  Or Congress.  Whatever you prefer.  They need money, and they're going to need a lot more money before long.  After all, as Cheney said, the American way of life is non-negotiable.  We refuse to become poor!  We'll just print the damn money!  Keep that music playing!

Eventually this results in something called a "crack-up boom".  One day, workers begin to realize that these dollars in their wallets are buying them less groceries with every passing week.  They take out a Federal Reserve Note and say to themselves, "Well, land sakes... it's just a bit of green cotton, is all!"  And suddenly they are struck with the idea that they'd better get rid of all the green cotton and get some REAL stuff.  Food, and clothes, and batteries, and shovels.  Might as well buy it today, since it will only take more cotton next week.

When everybody shifts into that mindset, people frenetically buy anything and everything.  I saw pictures of people wheeling away extra refrigerators and TVs in Zimbabwe some years back, desperate to convert their failing money into anything of real value.  This is the phase in which you take your paycheck to the nearest store the moment you get off work, and if all they have for sale is 8 toasters, then you buy 8 toasters.  At least you can barter a toaster!

In such a way, we burn up our wealth, burn up our supplies, and then go home to sit in the cold and starve because now there's a shortage of absolutely everything.  We've gone on the bender of a lifetime, and the hangover will literally kill some of us.

Naturally, I always used to read the Frost poem with a romantic idea of the word "desire," and I apologize for wrangling it into the realm of economics, but if you consider the possible synonym "greed," you get the idea.  We can burn up our money and possessions in drunken avarice, or we can fall straight into a cold, dark night.

I hold with those who favor fire.

Anti-semitism is made in Israel

Some days ago I read this perspective on Uruk.net, regarding the Gaza crisis:

Unfortunately, many innocent Jews will pay the price just as mostly innocent Palestinians are paying the price, with their lives and the lives of their children and beloved ones, for the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mindset. In the final analysis, anti-Semitism is manufactured in Israel, not in Damascus or Cairo or even Gaza.

This seems to me to be plainly and obviously true, and I don't understand why Jews worldwide don't protest against Israeli / IDF apartheid, cruelty, slaughtering, and war crimes.

Some of the stories coming out about the IDF have been so bad they've made me skeptical.  They smacked of old propaganda about the Huns (meaning the Germans circa WWI) or those imaginary Iraqis who tipped over infant incubators in Kuwait.  I mean, do grown men really shoot a 9-year-old boy and then use his body as target practice in front of his parents?  But there is quite a bit of evidence that the Israelis actually are behaving in this inhuman way:

Cairo: Doctors operating the only brain-scanning machine at an Egyptian hospital near Gaza have been almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children arriving with bullet wounds to the head.

Among them last week was nine-year-old Anas Haref, who arrived with a bullet in her brain. Dr Ahmad Yahia, head of the trauma team, broke the news to her grandmother that the girl was not expected to live.

"The bullet has damaged a big part of her brain," said Dr Yahia. "It came in, hit the skull wall and then changed direction downwards." 

Dr Yahia, a professor of neurosurgery, believes that the bullet was shot from close range. "If it changes course inside the brain it has high velocity and its penetrative force is also high," he said.

"I can't precisely decide whether these children are being shot at as a target, but in some cases the bullet comes from the front of the head and goes towards the back, so I think the gun has been directly pointed at the child."

Dr Ayman Abd Al Hadi, a medical team leader at the hospital, said: "We've had one child with two bullets in the head and nowhere else. We think this shows something."

He praised the medical teams in Gaza for managing to save so many lives despite a shortage of staff, supplies and equipment. "But only a very small percentage of children can survive bullet wounds to the head," he said.

"If we see three children here who have survived bullet wounds to the head, there are probably 97 still in Gaza who have not."

Another story claims that the Israelis shelled a Palestinian home, killing a 4-year-old girl who was out in the back yard.  When her parents and siblings attempted to rush to her side, they were fired upon by Israeli snipers and were forced to take refuge in their house.  Over a period of 4 days, they made repeated attempts to collect her body, in part to preserve it from being eaten by dogs who were frequenting her corpse in search of food.  Each attempt was repelled by Israeli snipers, until finally her two older brothers were fired upon and killed in the attempt.  I have no reason to doubt this story, since it's documented that this is exactly how the IDF treats the Red Cross when they attempt to collect the killed and injured.

The IDF are shooting toddlers, children, the elderly, women; pregnant women are shot in their bellies, to kill the unborn baby.  There is ample photographic evidence, but you don't want me to prove it to you.

James Kunstler recently suggested that anti-Israeli sentiment is all because Alan Greenspan is Jewish and so is Goldman Sachs management, and therefore, in the current economic downturn, people are becoming anti-Semitic.  The man has his head firmly up his ass.  We have anti-Israeli sentiment because the Israeli army is a big fraternity of goddamn psychopaths who willfully murder women and children.  It's really not that hard to explain, frankly.

And yeah, I could make you feel as angry as I do, but I'd have to show you pictures, and I'm conflicted about that.  I'm not really here to upset anyone.  Let's just say that after a time, when viewing photos of the carnage in Gaza, you stop thinking things like "Are they dead?" or "But those kids just look like they're sleeping...?"

They're all dead, in the photographs.  After a while, you start to understand that.  Not just the gray hand sticking out of the rubble, but also all those kids wrapped up in white, and even the ones simply lying there in everyday clothes, looking peaceful.  They're all dead.  And the goddamn Israelis killed them.

A stunning situation in California

If you want to see what an economic implosion looks like, just keep reading the news on California.  Politicians on both sides of the aisle have stuck to their ideological guns, one side refusing to raise taxes and the other side refusing to cut spending.  Unlike the federal government, California cannot print money (in fact, this is a crucial reason why the entire country is not -- yet -- totally up a creek that way California is).

From the Los Angeles Times, via Mish's latest post on this fiasco:

The state will suspend tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants and other payments owed to Californians starting Feb. 1, Controller John Chiang announced Friday.

Chiang said he had no choice but to stop making some $3.7 billion in payments in the absence of action by the governor and lawmakers to close the state's nearly $42-billion budget deficit.

They are suspending welfare checks!  How far off can the riots be when people will be going without food?  And even these stopped payments will not be enough to allow the state to pay its other bills come March.  This only holds things together for one month, February.  After that, they are looking at giving out some sort of IOU.  Uh-huh.  And will they accept IOU's at the grocery store?  No!

Other payments by the state government had already been halted, such as money going to new school construction.  Mish writes:

The amount of unpaid bills is increasing every day. As of 2009-01-17 the amount was at $3.7 billion up from $3.1 billion three days earlier.

Elsewhere in the piece, I read that firing every state government employee would not close their budget gap, and neither would closing all prisons.  This is a MASSIVE deficit, and it's growing by the day because revenues from sales and other taxes are falling.

As goes California, so goes the nation.

"He got off the podium and spoke to me...."

From the NY Times:

In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.

Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P.

Thanks go to Mr. Olmert for clarifying precisely which politician controls US Middle East policy: the Prime Minister of Israel.

If you're going to tell a lie...

tell a big one.  That's the first rule of any propaganda minister / press secretary.  So, when Obama nominated William J. Lynn III as Deputy Secretary of Defense, his press office released this massive lie:

“Lynn brings decades of experience and expertise in reforming government spending and making the tough choices necessary to ensure that American tax dollars are spent wisely.”

Wow.  It took some audacity to release such a statement.

William J. Lynn III was the comptroller (chief financial officer) of the Pentagon during fiscal years 1999 and 2000, during which OVER THREE TRILLION DOLLARS WENT MISSING.

Pardon me for shouting, but Mr. Lynn inadvertently misplaced $3,300,000,000,000.00.  That's over 4 times the amount Obama is proposing to spend to goose the economy.  This money has never been recovered.  Nobody knows where it went.

(Thanks go to Kandylini, without whom I would have totally missed the story of Lynn's appointment.)

By the way, Donald Rumsfeld did hold a press conference to announce that the mysterious loss of over three trillion dollars was going to be investigated.  He announced this on September 10, 2001.  No investigation took place.  It was all forgotten in the aftermath of the attacks.

And thus, William J. Lynn III was spared, and could go on to become the #2 man in the Pentagon, ostensibly because he manages money so wisely.

Reuters is shameless

I went over to the Reuters photos page for the Gaza crisis, and the bias is just unfuckingbelievable.  It's all crying Israeli soldiers, injured Israeli soldiers, pictures of discolored but intact pavement where "rockets" landed in Israel, Israelis cowering on the sidewalk while sirens warn of a possible incoming rocket, etc.

The reason, of course, is that Reuters is controlled by the uber-Zionist Rothschild banking family, the same family which essentially invented the state of Israel.  So if you find yourself reading an article on the Middle East and it turns out it's a Reuters piece, just close the tab and go elsewhere.  Unfortunately AP is also controlled by the Rothschilds, so that won't help you either.

Some of the best reporting on the Middle East is done by Robert Fisk.  In his latest piece he mentions the endless "What would you do if rockets were landing everywhere for years on end" justification which can be found in newspaper after newspaper:

I open The Irish Times to find a letter from the local Israeli ambassador, trying to explain to the people of the Irish Republic what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. Know what's coming? Of course you do. "What would you do," Zion Evrony asks readers, "if Dublin were subjected to a bombardment of 8,000 rockets and mortars..." And so it goes on and on and on. Needless to say, I'm waiting for the same writers to ask how we'd feel if we lived in Don Mills or Brossard or Dublin and came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft and Merkava tanks and thousands of troops whose shells and bombs tore 40 women and children to pieces outside a school, shredded whole families in their beds and who, after nearly a week, had killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 [now 900] fatalities.

In his January 7 piece titled "Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask," he debunks the myths used to excuse Israeli atrocities:

After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue.

. . .

And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.