Mar 23, 2008

Two cheeks

As the home mortgage industry continued to reel in January, 2008 from the Countrywide Financial Corp. debacle, a federal bankruptcy judge learned that the company, in at least one case (with others suspected), had not only backdated crucial documents but fabricated them altogether and then told the judge the company was merely trying to be "efficient." A court had approved the recasting of a client's debt to Countrywide in March 2007, closing the case, but the next month, Countrywide "discovered" a way to get extra money and thus created three letters supposedly sent to that client before March 2007. However, Countrywide later acknowledged that the letters were actually written after March 2007 but that making up documents was merely "an efficient way to convey" information. [New York Times, 1-8-08]

M. Sarkozy, the French press has noted, is a sayan [helper], that is, an agent of the Israeli Mossad security services, planted ready for action when required.

As might be expected, therefore, he is an extreme hardliner, especially on Iran, but also making a virtue of his contempt for the immigrant populations in France, especially those around Paris, equal to the Israeli contempt for the Palestinians. They are, frankly, scum, as Sarkozy has said many times. The publicity given his marriage, divorce, and girl friends have earned him the title “President Bling Bling” in the French press, and recent election results in France have removed many of his party from control of local areas. He is currently scheduled to meet with Mr. Brown, the UK leader, to coordinate nuclear reactor production and other matters.

Mr. Brown’s earlier undertakings to reduce British forces in the Basra region of Iraq and hand over to local authorities - how long can he resist US demands for a surge in Basra? - have now been reversed, in favor of a US style “surge” of troops into the area. It is not entirely clear, however,

1. That he will have the luck that the US surge had, of coinciding with a six month cease fire declared by Moqtada Al Sadr’s Mahdi army;
2. That Basra may be as easily controlled as Baghdad, since it is not divided into neat segments by huge concrete walls as Baghdad is; and
3. That the UK treasury can afford the $10 per day paid to the Sunnis for their alliance even if it can manage to hand out the free weapons and ammunition they are receiving.

To borrow the description of Mr. George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green in London, “Brown and Blair are two cheeks of the same arse.”

Zero interest exists in whether the UK current hero is better or worse than the US current military hero. Calling in air strikes on the hapless Afghans is about as difficult and heroic as calling a waiter for more drinks in a night club, his real expertise, and the last useful act of the US hero, who bought himself out by doing a propaganda video for the Viet Cong, was “Hollowed Out,” of the early nineties, which is now thrown to the winds in favor of complete evisceration of the hollowed out military. Easy come, easy go.

The official Bush/McCain policy being followed in Iraq appears to be to abandon the troops there, at a rough cost of one thousand lives a year, and about $9 billion a month, which should throw Mr. Schickelgruber’s abandonment of the troops at Stalingrad into the shade. All current efforts are concentrated on the program to invade and occupy Iran to seize their oil as was done in the case of Iraq. The obvious lack of troops means that aerial bombardment and destruction is the only option left as long as there is no military draft.

For the hopelessly naïve: The question “What is the proper function of the president of the United States in presiding over the country” was answered in a refreshing fashion by the campaign representative of Senator Clinton at the United Jewish Communities conference, reported in the Washington Post.

Mr. Obama’s campaign rep asserted that “he needn't have a "Likud view" -- that of Israel's right-wing party -- to be pro-Israel. [He] explained that Obama wanted to see a "plurality of views.” This produced silence in the room.

To that, Lewis (representative of Senator Clinton’s campaign) retorted: "The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties." The audience members applauded.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” said Lewis Sinclair and so the paid hacks like Mr. Hitchens of Vanity Fair can continue to assert that “Islam has many doors, but no exits. You cannot leave. This is regarded as non-negotiable by every Muslim cleric I have talked to.” That Indonesia, the country with the largest number of Moslems on earth, has a law that anyone can switch from any religion, including Islam, to any other religion as many times as they like, - usually to marry someone of that religion – means that Mr. Hitchens is either too ignorant or too dishonest to be any kind of expert.

A word on Buddhism. It is impossible to imagine the effect of having grown up to teenage years without ever seeing or hearing about any thing dead, or sick, or imperfect, or the shock of coming into “the real world.” The Buddha does not strike one as a very bright guy compared to, say, Thomas Aquinas. The main reaction to any of his really illuminating statements is to clutch one’s forehead and say “My God! He’s right! It’s obvious! How come I never noticed that?” The answer is that like everybody else you didn’t start with an ingrained experience of normality, but got dropped straight into this sewer where you spend the rest of your days. A reasonable example is his instruction to spend a year without opening your mouth, just doing your chores. At the end of the year, said the blessed Siddhartha, “You will know that there is nothing to ask, and there is no one to answer.” Indeed.

By January 20, 2009 it should be obvious that it doesn’t matter which of the fifteen clowns in the year long carnival wins. (Ron Paul might have salvaged something, but the party machines will block him without effort.) America will progress to becoming a regional super power with some global reach.

By the end of this century eighty per cent of humanity will be dead. Southern Europe will look like the Sahara starting with Spain, so will Australia, and much of London will be under water.

So much can be made out with a pretty high probability with lots of leisure, the excellent media access in the US, and rubbing available brain cells together, depending heavily on the real bright guys around and what they’ve dug up. Best available advice: “Enjoy yourself while you can”

Below is the “Sober assessment” of December 2007. No reason to change a word of it.

What would be a sober assessment at this end of 2007?

Starting at the top, folks living in the USA will become accustomed to floods, mudslides, and being up to their whatevers in their own sewage. It is much too late even to make a dent in the climate changes rushing down on us in the next fifty years. The end of summer Arctic sea ice, predicted by our experts for 2040, was in fact complete before the end of 2007.

Next one down, the USA is bankrupt, its credit cards are all maxed out, and it survives because in the immortal words of one commentator, “It is not in the interest of China or Russia that the value of the dollar should be zero,” the possibility already raised long ago by Ron Paul. The Chinese feel, by their own official announcement at Hu Jin Tao’s global press conference this year, “A responsibility for stability,” and a global meltdown from a zero value dollar does not promote stability. Whatever the current value of the US dollar is, we may have the Chinese to thank for that.

In particular, the policy of making life unbearable in people’s home countries is what produces the floods of migrants the west is no longer wealthy enough to support. (The current mass mechanized slaughter policy is too much hard work, believe me, as demonstrated the last time they tried it. You end up doing nothing else.) The vast sums being paid over by sovereign wealth funds, especially in Singapore and the UAE (United Arab Emirates, the Gulf states like Qattar and Dubai) are not to be mistaken for friendly loans. Both the above are merchants with many thousand years experience and not in philanthropy.

The USA certainly has some nasty weapons in stock, like the microwave unit that can bring huge crowds to their knees screaming in pain, but like the Indonesian army they are for internal control. In any state-to-state army-air force-navy conflict, like the Indonesian army, they would have no alternative but surrender. This was demonstrated in typical oriental style by the Chinese Song class submarine that got silently into easy firing range of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in November as also by the Chinese knocking out one of their own low orbiting satellites. (Low orbiting satellites are what control the smart bombs and paraphernalia. Without them the navy has blind and deaf hunks of metal.)

The Americans appear to consider their troops as disposable as toilet paper, and will be forced to continue their headlong production of aircraft carriers simply because no congressman can afford the massive unemployment resulting if the production line for ships in his district is halted. These floating coffins will almost certainly continue to be produced.

The Iranian premier’s speech at the UN was skillfully aborted by our “news media” who played Farsi and English at full blast, making both inaudible, but Mr. Ahmedinajad’s speculation that “the age of nuclear weapons has passed” may be the most intelligent statement of the year. With Old Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all having nukes, as now, who can actually afford to start firing them? Probably no one.

It is impossible to imagine Donald Rumsfeld’s Aspartame deal happening in China. He had to “call in all his markers,” so many people in the FDA and elsewhere would have been aware how dangerous removing the FDA ban must have been. Poisoning the entire population with an excitotoxin? The Minister of Health recently executed by the Chinese never dreamt of anything on this scale, nor could he have started to do so in that society. That Rumsfeld remains unhanged reveals the bunch of wimps he’s poisoning.

Oddly enough, the importance of the US military has increased as their real strength bled away, like some ‘Heart shall be keener as our strength lessens’ saga, illustrated by Admiral Fallon’s reference to General Petraeus as an “asskissing little chickenshit.” The military have become our best bulwark, the only remaining one, against the crazies. Jack Murtha has been kept out of top positions by the party machine, but those people are still around, and by now they are our best hope, though only politically, and only for the danger of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, kindly reincarnated.) Even they can not stop the rampaging Blackwater mercenaries being deployed here or anywhere else.

Pretty sober assessment, wouldn’t you say?

No comments: