Webster at the Barricades

I almost incredibly agree with most of what Webster Tarpley has to say in this letter to his congressman. Webster has a website at http://Tarpley.net, and is a hot opponent of our messing around in Libya, etc. and our other murderous activities around the world (not that I am so crazy about the New Deal but I am all for 0% interest from the central bank to build infrastructure and make entitlement payments):

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
July 21, 2011

My dear Congressman –

The American people are not interested in Obama’s Grand Bargain or the Gang of Six plan, which are cowardly and dishonest attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, jobless benefits, and other vital programs. Cuts in these programs will not reduce the deficit, but they will kill Americans. Such cuts represent a veiled form of genocide. We want to save money by ending all the wars, including Obama’s fiasco in Libya. We want the repeal of the failed Bush tax cuts. We want to see Wall Street forced to pay their fair share through a Tobin tax or Wall Street Sales Tax of 1%, with half the proceeds kept by the US Treasury and the other half distributed to the states to stabilize budgets and protect social services. We want the most toxic derivatives — including credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations — banned, as they were from 1936 to 1982. We want a recovery and jobs program in the New Deal FDR tradition, all financed by 0% federal credit from a nationalized Federal Reserve. Reactionary Republicans and Tea Party fanatics need to be fought, not appeased. As for the ratings agencies, they should be on trial for their malfeasance of 2008, and not dictating policy to the US government. If Obama thinks he can get re-elected by catering to Wall Street and by betraying his own base to pander to those morally confused independents, he will meet the fate of Jimmy Carter. Any Democrat who votes to weaken entitlements must expect to be primaried and ousted. We urge you to call McConnell’s bluff and avoid the cataclysm of default by passing a clean bill to raise (or, better, abolish) the debt ceiling with NO CUTS to our hard-won New Deal and Great Society economic rights.

Webster G. Tarpley Ph.D.

Creating "Demand"

Watched Charlie Rose last night. He had Larry Summers on for the second night running. Summers is a weird guy, no kidding. It would take a month to try to tell how powerful and wicked he has been over the years, but he manages to look "simple and innocent" on TV.

Last night he kept harping on one thing needed to "get the country moving again": create demand. He outlined four ideas for doing that. I forget what they were. They all stopped short of what I would go for. Summers would as soon mention knocking the bankers out of control of money issue in this land as he would undress in public. Nonetheless that is the way to go. Have the government create all money, interest free, spend it on infrastructure and, if necessary, give it away in great gobs to the people (not the rich).

That is, implement Major Douglas's plan for govt. handouts to create demand, to bring the "power to buy" somewhere near the "power to make." I'll give Summers credit for spotting the main problem: there isn't enough purchasing power to buy even the limited amount of stuff available now from the factories.

I do recall one of Summers's ideas: step up promotion of American manufactures to foreign nations. Why is that better than getting our own people to buy our own stuff? These giant economic brains seem never to see the obvious.

All this may seem a little obscure to the uninitiated. Have no fear. We live in a world of (relative) abundance even in spite of peak oil. It's just that our damned élites are terrified of letting ordinary people have some access to it.

But that's the needed trick: let the people be able to buy their own product. What a revolutionary idea!

Class War

The signs are unmistakeable. The Class War is on, full tilt. The central raw fact is this: 1 percent of the population gets one-quarter of all income, and owns 40% of the nation's wealth.

All the shouting and screaming among the people is chiefly directed to making this worse by stressing anti-government attitudes, favoring "privatization," and booming ignorantist candidates for office who can be counted on to curry influence with the rich by pushing their agenda. The agenda of the rich can be simply stated: open the road to their getting even more of the income and wealth of the nation into their hands. It is the apotheosis of greed, the ultimate statement of fealty to the Great God Mammon. Ye gods, what a picture of national lunacy! Or, as it may be, world lunacy, since the same thing seems to be going on nearly everywhere.

It would be nice to say some sort of relief lies directly ahead, but I do not see where it can come from. The government is quite corrupt at present and would have to be cleansed somehow. By whom and how? The rich are corrupt. Nothing new there. Some sort of catastrophe is our only hope. Not a gradual improvement, but a sudden shocking change of some kind that would leave our present rich without ownership of the media and the leading think tanks, bereft, that is, of their usual bugles, and relatively helpless against a great swelling of the rage of the people. But I find it impossible to think of this in any detail or with any glee because it will certainly be an ugly business, very hard indeed on the mass of people.

So I won't think of it any further today. Perhaps think of it tomorrow.

Osama bin Laden, etc.

What is to be said about OBL? Not much by this writer. I am convinced 9/11 was some sort of combo horror unleashed on us by the CIA, the Mossad, our govt., Israel, and a whole bunch of very strange freakheads, whose estimate of our total, national intellectual competence is lower than a snake's belly.

So a CIA assassination of OBL seems to me a bit theatrical and phony all these years later. Good luck to all those who have attempted to make sense of this thing. I can't really.

I rather liked what J.H. Kunstler said headlining his blog this week: "Lying is the New Normal."

I was in hospital five days this week and am quite tired from the experience. Maybe that's why I am so dispirited. But that's it for now.   

Two Kinds of Money

I got an email yesterday from the American Monetary Institute that at last made clear to me something I have never before had really clear: there are two moneys: government money and private money.

Our Constitution originally provided only for government money, but left the implementation of that to people who had various motivations for making it less than entirely comprehensible; the U.S money system wobbled around badly for more than 100 years until in 1913 a corrupt (or stupid) Congress turned our money system over to "the bankers," who immediately made "private money" de rigeur for the nation. It has been so since.

The AMI email further made clear that there is true money and false money: true money is government money (it could, I expect, be gold, if the state passed a law to make it money, that is, legal tender), and there is false money, which is credit. Credit is a loan, and it almost universally requires that interest be paid. In our mad system all loans are of private money; all interest goes to private bankers.

Here in the U.S. and elsewhere in much of the world, the only serious money is credit, false money. That underpins the trouble were in: interest charges build up and eventually get dumped on the taxpayers. Now I believe our congressional shills are being asked to raise our public debt ceiling to $16 trillion. Them's a lot of money, principal plus interest, to owe. It will of course never be paid under the present system somewhere down the line, to the point past which the can can't be kicked, lies default. If anybody asks, I'm for that. It does not strike me full of horror since I own no debt.

But meanwhile, the can is being kicked down the road, and the true source for money reform is ignored. It's not obscure or hard to find. It was entered in the last Congress as HR 6550 by Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland. It can be read at the AMI website (Google for that).

Stephen Zarlenga of the Institute says HR 6550 provides an "elegant and gentle accounting" means for converting all of the loans issued by the private bankers into "U.S. money." You'd think the possibility that we could make that big change, get interest-free govt. money and pay off the public debt "elegantly and gently," and get $2.5 trillion for desperately needed infrastructure (thus ending unemployment) would interest somebody, but greedy people are hard to convert. Marvelously hard, I'm told.

A Bit More on Religion

A week or more ago I wrote a letter to the editor of a magazine I have contributed to in the past that sets out my reflections on whether or not a government in the U.S. could ever likely be what is called a "confessional state," that is, a govt. where a religion is formally accepted as being the bedrock of its morality and laws. This was stimulated by an article arguing in a book review that the "bedrock" religion for the U.S. ought to be the Catholic one.

My letter addressed the point:

". . . .The cultural scene here is profoundly confused: our ruling Judaic elite is pouring its antagonistic products—“entertainment” and “porn”—on top of the endless back and forth contests of the many “Christianities” already stressing the population. We are mammonite to a fare-thee-well and getting worse by the hour. I have no notion that a confessional nation is possible anywhere in this land lying between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Certainly not a Cathoiic one.

The crucial phrase for me in [the] review is from the Vatican document Dignitatis Humanae: “God Himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve him and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness. We believe that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church and to embrace the truth they come to know. . . . Religious freedom has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion, and toward the one true Church of Christ.” (I assume this is an accurate translation.)

I certainly agree with all my heart that everybody should have “immunity from coercion in civil society” but what is one to make of the contention that “this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church”? I could argue of course that the reference does not really mean the politico-religious institution headquartered at Vatican City but rather the true church that is an entirely spiritual entity, but I doubt any Tamils or Sikhs or Malaysians or Chinese or Esquimos will be taken in by that. They will recognize that what is meant is just the famous old Roman Church.

The claim I have quoted is insupportable in this global world where the Europeans and their colonial diaspora are fast disappearing into insignificance. Not that that political shift invalidates any truth, but I insist that a just God has always spoken to his chlldren on earth equally. I can believe nothing contrary to that. The Lord Christ said to look within, not at earthly institutions.

It seems plain to me that no anthropomorphic religion can claim exclusive truth and try to brush everybody into their basket; rather that all of them partake of the one truth of the one God in different ways, adjusted for culture and especially language. I’d expect a certain  amount of static for that view from hard-nose Catholics, none at all from, say, Hindus, Buddhists, or Taoists. More and more that static seems to me something one just has to live with.

I’ll close with a quotation from Ibn Arabi, a 14^th century “Andaluisian Moorish Sufi philosopher,” who seems to me to have hit the nail on the head. Would the Lord Jesus Christ have disagreed?

“My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a pasture for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, and a temple for idols, and the Kaabah of the pilgrim, and the table of the Torah, and the book of the Qoran. I am the religion of Love, whatever road his camels may take; my religion and my faith are the true religion.”

More on Religion Pro Tem

To return to the topic of religion: I was awake for about two hours after 3 am last night and was thinking about religion rather more radically than I do when more than 1/2 awake. I think I'll try to set down, rapidly, some of the thoughts that came to me in those rather stressed and dreamlike few hours,

I am a Catholic, but am increasingly upset that the Church, at least the American branch of it, does not seem to go in for the Lord Jesus' nonviolent way. Rather it rubber stamps the horrible war mongering we are up to in service of our banker-munitions men rulers. Individual clerics and their civilian cohort are often in the opposition camp, but they have no influence on the public church, which seems, to quote Eliot, "wrapped the old miasmal mist" as much as ever.

I can't get out of my mind a website that outlined what the well-dressed bishop needs to appear on the altar. The custom-tailored rig costs something like $150K and is elaborate and antiquated to a fare-thee-well. I fear the Church (I mean the Rome-based political-religious HQ of it which functions as the top-down ruler) is asking for another reformation. It may get it from the surrounding culture, which is foundering (IMHO), as Japan shows in the recent tsunami events and as the world is showing in its reaction to Peak Oil.

Can the old Church survive all this unchanged? I doubt it. In what direction does it need to go? I'd say toward simplification of costume and rigamarole for starters.  I do not mean toward more guitar music, etc., but toward a more direct worship of the man-God Christ and a keener appreciation of his tenets. The Oxford Group of the first half of the 20th century was going in the right direction, I'd hazard, until it was cut off by the deaths of Frank Buchman and, almost immediately, his appointed successor, Peter Howard. These untoward events seemed a clear rebuke of Buchman's own top-down theory of church-rule: clerics will lead, the sheep are to follow. As Newman made clear the Athanasian-Aryan crisis was resolved by the lay people not the clerics. Why expect anything different now?

And some sort of solution at least needs to be bruited for solving the shortage-of-priest problem. The profound and basic rules for the establishment and maintenance of an ecclesia are well known. Gather two or three in Christ's name and let the the resulting church be supported by the contributions of its members, without outside help. AA is the model here. If a church can't support itself, it'll disappear. Fair enough. And let it be clear that the HQ is supported and ruled by the multiple churches not vice versa. A church needs a place to gather but doesn't need to own it or decorate it in gold leaf, not at first anyway. Again, AA is the model.

One can be grateful for the great church that has existed for the last 2000 years without feeling obliged to keep it going as an ancient relic for 2000 more. The Spirit of Christ is the lodestar and determinant of all. But the Church has delivered an intact liturgy it would be crazy and improvident to reject. John Paul did not reject the Anglican liturgy, one of the most wonderful to emerge from the Protestant thing.

It will be a great day, too, when the Catholic Church recognizes that the Spirit of Christ, Second Person of the Trinity, has represented God to the human race from its beginnings. And has spoken to all races and in all languages in the "religions" dispensed over the centuries. (There is and can be only one religion, but there are many "vernaculars" of it.) The word "Christ" is local and language-bound; the Spirit (of Christ) is worldwide and universal.

Well, that's enough for one post. Enough, perhaps, to get me burned as a heretic in times past. but probably not today. Who cares enough to do it?

Old Friends Are The Best

I read the sentiment expressed in my headline above somewhere a long time ago and have never forgotten it, even thought I don't much act as if it were important to keep in touch with Old Friends. I am actually living these days more or less as a hermit, that is, very much alone with my wife in an encircling world of some impressive craziness, with which I don't seem to have much connection. I am not unhappy with this, which I guess proves the herrnit point. I don't have to be a hermit. I could very easily step up my contacts and be all over the place with social activities. But I don't do it. Make few phone calls and put off over and over again the ones I should make. In other words, self-chosen hermeticism.

Today I intend to communicate with two Old Friends. Let's see if I do it. Will try to report tomorrow.

An Early Morning Blog

I'm writing this at 10:30 am on a Friday morning, when I am usually deep into news on the internet and unlikely to write anything for hours. But I have a great need to get some writing done on a book that is seven years overdue at the publisher's, who says he is still waiting for it (mirabile dictu!), so I am wondering how to get myself started on a new morning regimen of writing no matter what, à la the great writers of yesteryear, like Trollope, for example, who no matter what, on foot or horseback doing his rounds as a postal guy, got his 3,000 words a day done or made up for it the next, hell or high water.

Them were the guys. I am apparently not one of them. But I still need to get that writing done. Could attempting this blog in the am, when I am usually numb of brain and mute of ideas, work? Maybe I'll try. Anyway this is the effort for today. So far not a useful idea in the whole kaboodle.

Had lunch yesterday with a friend (much younger) who thinks the budget rattle in DC is just that, a rattle, a kick-the-can-down-the-road bit of political theater. So do I. I am much more conspiratorial than he is, however, and I insist O is just a mouthpiece for the bankers, starting with the rich Jews in Chicago, who picked him as a winner early on and put him over on the country. Now we shall have to pay for that. How? What do the "rich Jews from Chicago" want? It would be nice to know. I shall think about that.

The Blabber Boys Are At It Now For Sure

The highly heralded debate over the ongoing national budget and the raising of the debt limit by Congress is now officially launched and in full swing. It is a crashing bore because it is all words and very little substance. It won't have much of that until the whole money system is put on the operating table for deep surgery. And that won't happen while there is a breath left in any banker or a volume of words left in any banker's publicist-puppet-legislator.

We ought to nationalize the Federal Reserve, notify the bankers their day is over, and operate the Federal creation of money as the single most important branch of the federal government and run it with at least as much honesty as the Postal Service. Hahaha, you say. And I say, Hahahah indeed. References supplied on request. It has all been throughly worked up—and ignored because it means the end of the 500-year sway of private banking, and that is upsetting to our élites, who are mostly banker-minions. Take about paradigm change. Wooweeeeee.

We are in the age of big-time baloney. My wonder is if "things can keep going anyway" while the baloney roars around the electronic echo chambers (TV, that is). Everyone seems to think so. Everyone in the sense of "most people." I tend to like the contrarians, who are insisting that disaster is at the door, not so much because I am a disaster-lover but because it seems that we teeter at the moment on the edge of a whole bunch of disasters, and I am convinced one of them is going to turn out to be real. The one that is most likely to hit soonest I'd guess is some version of the Peak Oil disaster: somebody is going to fail to deliver oil and that will create a result and the result will be some version of breakdown.

But of course it may well be something else. It'll be something, I'd guess, and something pretty unexpected and unpleasant.

  

My New Book on WWII Is Published

I just this morning checked Amazon, and they have my new book, A War Far Off for sale at $11.95. I have used Amazon's CreateSpace print-on-demand service to print it. I have ordered a few copies to give relatives and friends, but I'd be delighted if all you zillions of readers of this blog sped out and bought a copy. It's my record in 40 letters to my granddaughters of what I (chose to) remember of WWII all these years later. I first went off to a Navy school in January 1944, 67 years ago. It's a wonder I have not been ashcanned long since, but I think that as of this moment I am still compos mentis. Anyway, lots of luck to me on this venture.

News Flash! Govt. Tells Fibs

    Joel Hirschorn (whoever he is) has a telling article on the Global Research website to the effect that the U.S. Govt. is lying about unemployment big time.
    
    Here is a critical paragraph about relative wealth: "In other words, contrary to all the blabber from politicians and pundits, the current recovery is largely delusional as far as the vast majority of Americans are concerned.  Of course, the rich Upper Class is doing just fine.  In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth.  The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively hold just 12.8 percent.  As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion."

    And the true uemployment rate is about 17 percent, not the feel-good number the media has been pushing in the last few days of 8.8 percent. (I love that ".8," as if it were a "significant" number.) This state of affairs is a fine backdrop to GOP efforts to savage "social network" provisions. Not that I think the thing is a matter of Dems vs Repubs. It's rich versus poor, naked class rip off. 


    I haven't any idea where all this is going, but I venture it is not going to be to a good place.  

A Bit More on REligion

I responded to Culture Wars Magazine's March 2011 issue with a letter to the editor mostly in praise but with a knock of sorts on a review of a book by a college professor named Kozinski. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

I was particularly interested in the review by David Wemhoff of Kozinski’s book, The Political Problem of Pluralism. The cultural scene here is profoundly confused: our ruling Judaic elite is pouring its antagonistic products—“entertainment” and “porn”—on top of the endless back and forth contests of the many “Christianities” already stressing the population. We are mammonite to a fare-thee-well and getting worse by the hour. I have no notion that a confessional nation is possible anywhere in this land lying between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Certainly not a Cathoiic one.

The crucial phrase for me in Wemhoff’s review is from the Vatican document Dignitatis Humanae: “God Himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve him and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness. We believe that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church and to embrace the truth they come to know. . . . Religious freedom has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion, and toward the one true Church of Christ.” (I assume this is an accurate translation.)

I certainly agree with all my heart that everybody should have “immunity from coercion in civil society” but what is one to make of the contention that “this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church”? I could argue of course that the reference does not really mean the politico-religious institution headquartered at Vatican City but rather the true church that is an entirely spiritual entity, but I doubt any Tamils or Sikhs or Malaysians or Chinese or Esquimos will be taken in by that. They will recognize that what is meant is just the famous old Roman Church.

The claim I have quoted is insupportable in this global world where the Europeans and their colonial diaspora are fast disappearing into insignificance. Not that that political shift invalidates any truth, but I insist that a just God has always spoken to his chlldren on earth equally. I can believe nothing contrary to that. The Lord Christ said to look within, not at earthly institutions.

It seems plain to me that no anthropomorphic religion can claim exclusive truth and try to brush everybody into their basket; rather that all of them partake of the one truth of the one God in different ways, adjusted for culture and especially language. I’d expect a certain  amount of static for that view from hard-nose Catholics, none at all from, say, Hindus, Buddhists, or Taoists. More and more that static seems to me something one just has to live with.

I’ll close with a quotation from Ibn Arabi, a 14^th century “Andaluisian Moorish Sufi philosopher,” who seems to me to have hit the nail on the head. Would the Lord Jesus Christ have disagreed?

“My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a pasture for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, and a temple for idols, and the Kaabah of the pilgrim, and the table of the Torah, and the book of the Qoran. I am the religion of Love, whatever road his camels may take; my religion and my faith are the true religion.”

In the Face of Political Turmoil

As of today the objections to Obama's military actions in Libya have now swelled into a chorus as the Republicans, who strike me as at least slightly more odious than the Democrats, have begun to gather their troops to attack O, just now back from S.A. I don't disagree that O has overstepped his constitutional powers nor do I disagree that he faced an ungodly mess in Tripoli, but I am newly convinced that I am wasting my time tending so zealously to North Africa and Japan since I can do nothing about either.

Therefore I shall obey my son's advice at least partly and stop being such a dedicated news-webbie and try to turn up here a little more often.

And deal with a topic that really interests me: the whole question of religion. I am interested in it because it is about first and last things, and it behooves me at close to 88 to be concerned more with those things than with the devilish carryings on of governments and with the doings of more or less crazy "celebrities," who compete with governments for the top headlines.

Now to religion: I can today only hold as serious religious views that take in the whole world. Back when one's whole world was "the tribe," it made sense for religion to  be tribal. The Jewish group is a tribe and behaving like one in its exclusivity, its narrowness. It wishes to advance the interests of its tribe, and in my opinion is attempting therefore to "rule the world." I don't think that will work, not for the Jews and not for the whole of "Christianity," which is infected with what you might call the Zionist virus. America's thrust for world empire is a corrupt, secular, extension of Christian "evangelism" now raging all over the world, and it has left the Lord Christ far behind in its dust, since He would never have suggested using force to impose rule on others.

That gives me my first religious axiom. Force is out. Religion may not use violence legitimately. Government is the monopoly of violence. There will always be, I am convinced, government to "keep the peace," but once it has done that, it has completed its work.

To be continued.

A Thought on Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera’s English website seems to me a most welcome and extraordinary media phenomenon. Headquartered in Dohar, Qatar, Al Jazeera covers the whole world with what appears to me to be a remarkable evenhandedness. With that general compliment out of the way, let me get to my present point: the English version of this Arabic/Muslim service underscores what I consider one of the central and even amusing facts of today’s world: the British are today’s “Greeks”; the Americans are its “Romans.”

Many of the site's anchors are actually British, but even more significant is the fact that many of its non-British anchors and announcers employ a crisp British-accented English, most of them closer to the Oxford standard than to what I think of as any of the contemporary provincial Englishes. So the whole thing gives off a kind of British, upper class sheen that tends to convince us that we are getting the cool, crisp, superior overview.

A considerable number of their correspondents, especially from America, speak with American accents, but they do not dominate; the British “thing” does.

Alexander conquered the “East” in his time and spread Greek language and culture far and wide. Then came the Romans with their bigger, more ruthless, and somewhat flat-footed empire such that one tends to forget that the Greeks had pioneered the conquest of the world before them. Things Greek persisted, with a marked undertone that “things Greek” were more cultured, more cultivated, and generally tonier than “things Roman.”

Ditto now. The British did their empire first and always dressed for dinner and never (almost never) “went  native.” Then we, that is “the Americans,” came along and have lain on the world with a very heavy weight, with a great deal of even heavier hypocrisy about out purposes.

Where am I going with this? Rome produced a religion that in its turn conquered the Roman Empire and ultimately the world, when the British took up capitalism and the “white man’s burden,” accumulating colonies until the map was almost all British red.

The Christian religion broke in two about 1000 AD—into Greek and Roman (Latin) halves, with much further fisiparousness, another 500 years along, into a zillion protestantisms in the Roman half.

What can we look for now? Let me state as a kind of cultural axiom that religion undergirds all. 

Now, Christianity has been rejected by Europe in favor of “science” and all that. America is too flat and dead and Mammonite in its present manifestation to offer much hope for spiritual reform. (Maybe, but I don’t look for it.) It is also hard to even imagine an improvement on the eternal and metaphysical implications of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ego sum qui sum) were his impact to be somewhat detached from hierarchical Rome and broadened to take in—democratically—the whole world, as the writings of Meister Eckhart, Brother Lawrence, Simon Weil, and many others imply can be done.

I’ll leave it there for the moment. I have some more ideas but need to think a bit and perhaps return to them later.

About Japan

I have written nothing about Japan’s woes until now. The earthquake and tsunami have revealed that the world’s corporations and governments are not to be trusted with such an immense power as atomic energy, but then we knew that already, following August 1945. Meanwhile the people of Japan have enlisted in another unimaginable suffering. May God help them. May God help us all as the worldwide implications of this event become clearer

Phillip Weiss on Jews and Palestine

Phillip Weiss is a terrific writer and great fellow. He runs the blog Mondoweiss, which treats of matters Jewish, Zionist, and American-Jewish reactions to both. I was particularly struck by his post below and reproduce it entire. (I don't seem to be able to fix type size; also this is a longer post than most of mine. Apologies.) It is pretty much self-explanatory. He was out promoting his book on the Goldstone Report; he reports on some sessions in Michigan. Over to him:

The Jewish sideshow (and why I want to play in it)

by PHILIP WEISS on MARCH 11, 2011

Like 1Retweet 0

   

I’m just home from a three-day swing to Michigan to promote our book; and the trip has sharpened my sense of purpose.

I had speaking engagements at two universities, and in both halls Israel supporters came out to oppose my views. The first night, Tuesday at Wayne State University, they were easier to handle because they were so intolerant. A tall man kept talking about the five Arab armies invading, and the anti-Semitic Hamas charter, and asked me how long I would tolerate people firing missiles at me. It gave me a chance to talk about Gaza being populated by the refugees from 1948, and the failure to address festering historic grievances. I said that Jews always worry about being pushed into the sea, but in the meantime who was actually pushed into the sea-- the Arabs of Jaffa in 1948.

After the event I went out to eat with a few friends, and one of the friends seemed very concerned about what will happen to Israel in the changing environment of the Middle East. He expressed concern about the Hamas charter and the irredentist feeling of the Palestinians: that if the state of Israel is not preserved, the Palestinians will wipe out the Jews. The others at the table sought to assuage his fears. I don’t think we were very successful.

As it turned out this was to be a theme the next night at the University of Michigan.

Over the next day I often thought about my dinner companion's fears and wondered how much energy I should put into this Jewish dialogue. Isn’t it just a sideshow? Isn't history unfolding in Israel-- from the Egyptian revolution to European impatience-- in ways that make conservative American Jewish attitudes irrelevant?

I was staying at a friend's house in Detroit and had an email exchange about the “sideshow” issue with a Jewish friend back in NY. We discussed the blindness to Palestinian suffering inside the Jewish community and Jews' fears about losing the Jewish state. My friend was long a supporter of the two-state solution, for practical reasons; but history has passed that view by, because guess what, it’s one state now. Here’s part of her very smart email:

I think that in the end the Jews and their lobby (and the Congress) won't be able to save Israel; in that sense they can be seen as an irrelevant sideshow. But for now American Jews matter in how things play out here. The future is not with Israel, but the process looks to be speeding up even here.

They're hysterical in Israel because they know that on some level they've lost Europe (I heard a story that the lobby tried to shut out Gideon Levy at Jewish Book Week in London--they couldn't do it), and they fear the US is next.

Honestly, I think they can't be saved. The vote at Brandeis Hillel to excludeJewish Voice for Peace is just another sign of the profound blindness to the fact of JVP and what it signals. An Israeli I know told me just the other day that Israel needs "better PR." This is a disagreement we've been having for decades: I've been telling him for almost 30 years that Israel needs better policies, not better PR. Look at Netanyahu; he's floundering because he doesn't know what to do in the face of a changing world.

That night in Ann Arbor nearly 50 people gathered in a large room at the Michigan League building and a local activist suggested that we put the chairs in a circle so everyone could see everyone else. I spoke for 25 minutes and then we had a conversation. I would say that the audience was ¼ Jewish; and a debate began about the sideshow issue: whether my message to Jews that we need to wake up to what we are supporting has any political significance. People (including a couple of Jews) made smart arguments against the sideshow: Jews are generally hopeless on the issue, and the most important forces that are bearing down on the issue are not Jewish any more. The European Union, the South American countries, and of course, the Egyptian revolution. Very few Jews involved at all. Even the Israel lobby is a spectator.

But soon the conversation became monopolized by Jews.

An Israeli-American who had served in the occupation said that Jews were now a minority between the river and the sea and they would just have to get used to that, and learn to live with a Palestinian majority. This statement was worrisome to a fellow from the local J Street chapter, a man in his 50s with a high forehead and small intelligent eyes and a thoughtful manner. During my presentation I thought he was on my side from the way he was nodding. But he said that there were no democracies in the middle east and he didn’t trust the talk of a one-state solution. He didn’t see who was going to prevent the persecution of the Jews. He was as fearful of the outcomes as my friend the night before.

A number of people went back and forth. How can you favor a peace process that has gone on for 20 years and produced nothing? Well, I don’t think it’s dead, the J Street guy said. He said he had relatives in Israel and he was a secularist. But they liked Zionism, they liked having a Jewish state. I said, you and I are both privileged. We enjoy incredible rights in this country. We’ve participated in great liberations, women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, the gay right’s movement. We live as a privileged minority without fear of discrimination. But look how Zionism has worked out. If tomorrow anyone were to put forward a law to keep Jews from renting apartments in the United States, we would be in the streets!

As I heard myself saying these words the fuel rods went into the nuclear reactor and I lost my composure and stood up, and started yelling—we would be in the streets of Washington, you and I both would. My mother wore a silver clothes hanger pendant around her neck to protest anti-abortion legislation, she would go crazy about such a thing. Well some are pushing that kind of legislation against Arabs renting apartments in Israel right now! That country has lost its way, and so why sholdn’t we try as liberal secular American Jews to impart our political experience to them, our understanding of being a minority, rather than deferring to racism?

I was just about screaming. Later I apologized to the guy for losing control. I’m your guest. I shouldn’t be going nuts, I said.

I felt so bad about my meltdown I even found myself standing up for the guy. Someone in the audience said, I'm confused, what’s the big deal about the end of a Jewish state, lots of unfair political orders have ended all around the world without this anguish in the U.S. I said the significance of the end of the Jewish state is that Israel was regarded by many Jews as the greatest Jewish achievement of the 20th century because it seemed to answer the Jewish question that had bedeviled Europe for many centuries and that had led to the Holocaust. Israel was seen as the deliverance and resolution. Losing it is very hard for Jews to accept, for it would seem to put us “at the mercy of the gentile world,” as Peter Beinart said recently.

I disagree with them, I think they're xenophobic, but that’s what they believe, I said. The guy from J Street nodded.

Afterward I hung around to talk to people, and the J Street guy and I talked for a few minutes. He berated me for exposing the Jews to greater danger. He is afraid of the Palestinian rage. The U.S. democracy is unique, and the benign view of the one-state solution is a delusion. They need partition there, or there will be massacres. Language differences alone are a cause for horrifying atrocities. And boycott will only make the Israelis feel more besieged.

I have a tribal side to my identity, an ethnocentric aspect, and in the day since the Ann Arbor meltdown I’ve felt called by my ethnocentrism, worried about the Jews and what will be brought down on them by the blindness to Palestinians suffering. I feel as determined as ever to speak to the Jewish community. The guy from J Street was clearly expressing a majority view inside the Jewish community that has licensed the Israel lobby: We have to safeguard Israel come what may, we have a solemn charge to protect other Jews. 

Then I think about the email from my friend saying the two-state solution is dead and Jews are in denial. The political realities are these:

--There is one political entity right now in Israel and Palestine, controlled by Israel. Nearly half the people have no rights, and about half of them live in a prison.

--Israel long opposed a viable Palestinian state, most recently through its dismissal of the Arab Peace Initiative. Instead it has set up a Jim Crow regime, and Obama has been powerless to stop it. As John Mearsheimer has said, the likely eventualities at this point are: 1, one democratic state, 2, apartheid, 3, ethnic cleansing to try and preserve a Jewish majority.

--Christiane Amanpour, and the New York Times, and Bernard Avishai, and Congressman Jared Polis at J Street, and other mainstream voices are retarding the Jewish community’s ability to deal with these realities by insisting that an “extraordinary” (Ahmanpour’s word) two-state deal is ready to be had-- somehow reviving 3-year-old terms between teams that don’t represent either side, terms giving prime West Bank real estate and Jerusalem to settlers. I'm sure there are arguments for partition, I've made them myself; but fragments and tunnels for Palestinians aren't the answer.

--Israel doesn’t accept any of these realities. And Israel has nukes. A frightful situation. (There is evidence that in the Gulf War, Israel wanted to use tactical nukes against Iraq...)

--Meanwhile, rage continues to grow on the Palestinian side. I spent a lot of time in Detroit, a city devastated by white racism and the black backlash to that racism. The conditions are far worse in Israel/Palestine-- who doesn't fear the fire next time?

--Israel isn't going anywhere. The vibrant global institutions and infrastructure created in the state will be valued by its Palestinian citizens, if they are only granted rights to enjoy them too. That is the great challenge.

It struck me today that the tragedy here is if Jews fail to see the realities coming and fail to prepare their community to accept them. They will continue to support Israel in its Jim Crow treatment of Palestinians and bolster Netanyahu no matter what he does and contribute to widespread denial in the US political establishment. American Jews can actually help Israelis escape a psychosis-- the widespread belief that Michael Sfard laid out at J Street, that we must be either the victim or the victimizer, so let's be the victimizer. We ought to be talking about the possible/likely end of the Jewish state. A belief that this will come to pass along the lines of the Jewish experience in Europe in the last century only raises the likelihood of a bloodbath.

The Brutalization of Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning is a sort of Forgotten Man. At 23 years old he is holed up in a U.S. military prison, uncharged so far, and treated abominably by the government he once chose to serve as a soldier. If he had asked me (I once chose to serve, in WWII, as a sailor) I'd have advised him to avoid military service as he would avoid the plague. At best it's deadly, and it certainly is if you have ideas about bucking the system.

I do not know if Manning leaked the documents to Wikileaks that evidently the govt. thinks he did. Assange won't say, as he shouldn't. And Assange is in enough trouble of his own anyway.

Manning, at 23 (God, that seems young to me with my 87 years) is being tortured in prison in various effective ways, and his lawyer thinks he is breaking down into catatonia.

If this young man is wrecked, as seems likely, I mean permanently reduced to a near-thing, it can be laid directly on Pres. Obama's doorstep. I daresay Obama thinks he has bigger things to worry about than some nobody airforce sergeant.

But Obama, who is coming to seem to me the Super Hypocrite of the Age, is quoted in the press as having said during his 2008 campaign:

"Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy, and must be protected from reprisal."

What a lovely sentiment. Too bad he didn't mean it and apparently can't recall it. And Bradley Manning is meanwhile expected to care about our government?

I'll keep this in mind in 2012. I hope Manning makes it whole to the same date.

War, War, Everywhere

The world picture is dismaying, true. It's war, war everywhere except where it's Porn Inc. Or Charlie Sheen. It's almost enough to drive you back to religion or sanity or something else, anyway. Michael Moore is in Wisconsin, by the way, so perhaps a movie will be forthcoming. And twitter is tweeting and fribl-ing and building up steam all around.

This is of course a nonsense post, but you have to admit that the Internet is tonight a feast of war, war, and lighthearted posts about thoroughly crazy people—at last they look crazy to me—so that you conclude that all is coming apart at the seams.

That I do believe is what is happening. There must be a residual amount of sanity somewhere; you just can't located it via computer.

I promise to try to do better soon.

Wisconsin to the Ramparts Nationally

Webster Tarpley, who describes himself as an investigative reporter, has a post up today at http://tarpley.net/ that strikes me as cutting through a great pile of bull crap presently choking the American political landscape practically to death.

Tarpley says that the limited union protest activity in Wisconsin's protest should be broadened to take in everybody but the famous top 1% of fat-cat capitalists, who own 40% of everything, and proceed to legislate a 1% sales tax on ALL financial trading activity, which presently goes tax free, while every last poor family must pony up (in my state, Texas) 8.25% of the price of even a pair of cheap sneakers for their kids.

Tarpley has a paragraph that practically sings about paying for rebuilding the nation's infrastructure and maybe adding to it (high-speed rails, etc.) with the same tax applied nationally, together with the same zero- or near-zero-percent interest rate loans the Fed is now supplying all the banks for their brisk carrying trade wherein they rip off borrowers from them who pay real interest.

Tarpley sees the Koch billionaire brothers behind the Tea Party and all its dimwitted calls for Friedman-style shock and awe "neoliberal" financial austerity. Well, I dunno. Maybe so. But I do agree with Tarpley that the austerity the GOP is peddling is Hooverism reborn: cut everything and watch everything go to hell. The only vigorous part of our economy is the part the tax-cutters are out to kill. Don't send out those SS checks and see what happens. Maybe that's what should happen to energize the lumpenproletariat. Anyway, read Tarpley and give it a thought.  

Good God, Where's My Check?

Watching Charlie Rose tonight talking to Chris Matthews and heard Matthews say the wrangle in DC will probably come to a "shut down of govt." What does that mean? asked Charlie. Well, said Chris, the SS checks won't go out. And the conversation went a little too fast at that point and I didn't get it all, but it seemed that whoever gets blamed for that, will have struck the third rail of American politics. What no checks this month? Yeeeeeeooowwwll! Murder with the rim off.

Actually I wanted to do a more thoughtful post on this and may yet, but for tonight this is all: keep an eye out for how the Dems and Repubs play this budget thing, and see who catches the hell. And I think your checks (OUR checks, dammit) will go out. Count on it. This ain't Egypt. Yet. 

The Rebolution Rolls On

Indeed the wash from the Egyptian revolution resembles the wake of a motorboat racing around a harbor. All the nearby boats are rocking. As they rock on, let us take a longer look at "forces in the world."

Chief among them is global banking. The bankers globalized before anyone else. All the central banks in the world (I do think) are interconnected and may, for all I know, take their marching orders from the World Bank or the IMF, a couple of really sleazy outfits if ever there were any. OUR sleazy outfits by the way, not that that can possibly surprise you.

So now we await developments. Until the bankers are set down, to join their puppets in disgrace, I am not holding my breath.
 
Anyone who wants to turn up this blog in a quick way should google for tomasoblanco. That should do it. You can ignore the  references to Lady Hamilton's18th-cent. diary. But I am grateful to the dear Lady for having known a Spanish grandee whose first name was Tomaso; thus am I saved from condemnation as an utter ignoramus as to things Spanish. 

ChAarlie Rose Heads Back Home-Day 4

Great proram on C. Rose tonight. He spent a half hour with an Egyptian "billionaire," evidently a telecom chap, who was a delightful presence—I thought authentic and encouraging. He was one of the "wise men" who have been mentioned throughout the days of protest, a senior group of considerable personal weight who have been working to resolve things. He does not think the revolution is going to be betrayed by the Army, although he argues from history that the fate of revolutions is not wonderful. But this one has been real, and can be betrayed only with difficulty. I hope I have caught his overall message. He restored me to hopefulness. There followed a passionate conversation among British journalists and Charlie on the Cairo scene. They too have their fingers crossed, and they mentioned the wonderful discipline of the protestors: cleaning up the trash and restoring the pavements. This they agreed will "go down in the history books" and is as big as the collapse of the USSR. I feel that is so. It is the return of the reviled Arabs to effectiveness. May Allah be praised. Hallelujah.   

Bad news from Egypt on Day 2

The (UK) Guardian has just reported that the Egyptian army is toughing up. Having sent the protestors home from Tahrir Sq. in Cairo (save for a few skeptical diehards) the Army has not ended the Emergency Law, has disbanded the Parliament, has refused to install a civilian government, and says it will rule until the "elections." Etc. Sort of just what we might have expected.

All along in this entirely political upheaval I have wondered what it would mean to send a puppet (Mubarak) packing. He was indeed a puppet; the real rulers of Egypt are whoever issues its money. (We have a Rothschild's witness to the truth of that.) In our domestic case the real rulers are the bankers who own the Federal Reserve; the puppets are Obama, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. The puppets by definition are interchangeable, replaceable, come-day, go-day, hell send Sunday.

I look forward to the day when the bankers will be set down for sure, here or in Egypt, but it won't be real soon probably.

Nations nowadays tend to be ruled by their intelligence services from behind the scenes and the bankers are there to tell the Intel guys what's next. By the time you get to the tough generals who are now ruling in Egypt you are quite a ways down the ladder from the top. 

Second Day of the New Era

Well, Egypt is now passing into history with results presently unknown. I particularly like the work Phillip Weiss has done on his site, Mondoweiss: he's  a gifted writer, and he features a tone I admire, a tone of optimism and honesty and above all relentless opposition to the Zionist crazies, the latter of which is the bedrock of his site.

It seems almost certain that Egypt is a deathknell for Eretz Israel, and good riddance to that. But we shall have to see. Dug-in age-sters like Mubarak and most of the ultra rich of our American and Israeli billionaire crowd think that money and power and all that stuff is the way the world works; that there can be no withstanding them. Not true. The people rule ultimately; when people really withdraw consent, it's "game over" for their lot. I trust the hour will come for our superbankers—the Mammonites, the usurers, the money fiends—whose game for the last 500 years has nearly wrecked the earth, our home.

It will be delightful to see them gone.    

Mubarak Is Out

The King is dead in Egypt. Is the Army now king? Or Suleiman? We shall soon know, no doubt.

February 11. 2011: a great and historic day; the Arabs are back, as Belloc said they would be. And they are young. And powerful. "We the people," Jefferson's Declaration began. Our principles. so dishonored at home, have taken Egypt to victory. God bless them. 

A Look Into the Future

My headline is misleading today. I do not attempt to read the future. it is (a) impossible and (b) always wrong anyway.  Also irresistible. So here goes.

Christopher Bollyn, who seems to me in many ways the most interesting of all observers of the current scene, thinks the O administration is being deliberately duplicitous re Egypt: O and Lady Clinton both sing songs of admiration for the protesters while O sends (as he did on Jan 31) the CIA's Frank Wisner to Egypt (think of the oil it took to fly him there) to buck up Mubarak and then to say we have to stick with M until the end, or words to that effect, which words Lady C felt obliged to disagree with.

Well, maybe. And maybe it's just governmental confusion. But surely Bollyn is right that the "U.S. interest" is to keep the status quo going; that is what Israel wants (MUST HAVE) so that is also what we must want. Does anybody any longer think that ol' Sharon was lying when he said Israel tells America what to do?

The USS Kearsarge is appaently en route to Suez or already there, to be used if needed. Suez must stay open. And I'm sure we would prefer to see to do that rather than have the Israelis do it. It will be done. As the peace between Israel and Egypt will be kept. But meanwhile there are all those mere people in Egypt who are cutting up.

At this point my predicting machine shuts down. But I wish the Egyptians all the luck in the world. They've got some coming. And I wish all the power--worshipping and power-possessing bastards everywhere a very bad time.  

Egypt aflame

I have become a devotee of Al Jazeera/English, and do admire the job they are doing reporting Egypt, which is blessedly free of the endless ads that appear on CNN and the rest of the American TV channels. I watch AJ on the web since my TV cable company does not offer it.

Israel Shamir says the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings are to be largely credited to the impact of Wikileaks and therefore the world services of Julian Assange. That seems reasonable to me. I find it hard to go with suggestions Assange is a "limited hangout" of the CIA. That's one level too deep into double-dipped conspiracy for me. Assange has embarrassed our govt., which richly deserves embarrassment. And Bradley Manning is being very badly treated in a military prison. He's the most celebrated home-grown political prisoner of the U.S. since Ezra Pound, or so it seems to me. Apparently nothing of this deflects even a little from Obama's sense of himself, his apparently iron-clad amour propre: "I'm OK and doing just fine, thank you."

As I have also noted I am also a fan of Charlie Rose, although I do not think he is as free to go against the Establishment. In fact he is a true hero of the E. But it interesting to watch his guests as they fishtail around the central point of the Arab "revolution," if that's what it is. In the Arab world Israel is a foreign body and their ultimate goal is to get rid of it, as one would take a cinder out of one's eye. Fancy the demographics: just for starters, Egypt, 80 million with a majority under 30; Israel 6 (?) million with a sclerotic mandate that is bound to fail. I do not look forward to the final payout of this mess.  

Baloney on the Half Shell

I have said on this blog before, I think, that I am currently addicted to Charlie Rose's talk show on the Public Broadcasting System. He had Sec. of the Treasury Geithner on tonight. Once again an extraordinary show of articulateness by Geithner, but it was IMHO all BS, sliced if you will, rather cleverly, but in  the end amounting to nothing.

A first point: when, in the name of all that's even remotely sane, will these govt. guys stop looking to "growth" as the way out of trouble? Apparently never, but until they do they are manifestly whistling in  the dark past the graveyard. "Growth" is over. More on that later.

But otherwise Geithner, who has to know better, never lets on that one way to solve the, as he said, "unsustainable" fiscal situation, that is, the horrifying growth of debt, public and private, is to "radically reform" the money system. That of course is a no-no to any banker, so it never comes up, and won't ever come up while the bankers continue to run everything. It is willed blindness; no one must touch their preserve as "money creators," sacred to them at least since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. More on that to come, too. But that's all for tonight.   

A Revolution or a "Disturbance"?

Are the Egyptians up to serious business or is this just street theater? Al Jazeera seems to be beating the sox off the US media in reporting the street action (still going on at 4 am there, late evening of Jan 21 here), and is running some fascinating comments from people who seem to be able to evaluate the action as few of us Americans can from our seats by the TV sets. A question arose as to the action in both Tunisia and Egypt, are these real revolutions or not? One American expert said he couldn't say yet, but keep in mind that Muslim states don't mostly have popular revolutions, ever. This explosion in Tunisia and Egypt is indeed something new. Hang on to your seats. Another young American Muslim said notice how the Americans don't want any blood but don't offer anything much but words to prevent it.  

The Hopelessness of It All

One of the conditions for radical actions among people is hopelessness. This is particularly dangerous in a society like ours today so heavily focused on this-wordly rewards and meaning generally. If you can't buy it and anyway you don't have any money, what's the point of the show? From there it's not far to go before trouble sets in. A look at the Google current news posting this morning has a string of bombings and killings all over the world such that you tend to forget that the dozen or so bloody stories are what's come up in a world of more than six billion people. A teensy-tiny fraction are involved in such violence. But it might worsen. That prospect seems to be one that "leaders" worry about. Or should worry about.

Obama is a case in point. His SOTU (State of the Union) speech to be delivered tomorrow comes while the Tucson massacre is still fresh and the loss of jobs in America to Asia has finally paid out in millions of desperate workers no longer able to put the "good life" together. Obama will have no option but to be cheerful, positive, and phony, as I see it.

He is also presiding over the wretched failure to rein in Israel; and his determined truckling to the Israel Lobby gets worse not better. See http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/012111a.html. The Israel mess is a time bomb. What to do? 

The Great Martin Luther King

Tolstoy was a great man. So was Gandhi. So was Martin Luther King, whose day is tomorrow. I say this confidently because they all agreed on one thing that I now totally concur in: the human race cannot go forward except on the basis of true non-violence as taught by the Lord Jesus Christ. (But denied in effect by most people and clerics who call themselves Christian. Woe to them.)

The man who taught me all this, while I was writing a book about my experiences in WWII, was the Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy. (website here: http://centerforchristiannonviolence.org/)

Fr. McCarthy is an incredibly persistent soldier for the Lord in the face of the bland, maddening refusal of his church (he is a Catholic of the Melkite rite) to do anything but truckle before our statist barons of the warlike U.S., the world's flamboyant model of a military-industrial-congressional engine of world violence and oppression.


King did some things you could quarrel with, but he was utterly steadfast in his non-violent stand. Fr. McCarthy supplies a quote:


I am committed to nonviolence absolutely. I am just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here. I plan to stand by nonviolence…(because) only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead toward community where people live together without fear. Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past…If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn humanity away from the long and desolate night of violence. May it not be that the new person that the world needs is the nonviolent person…A dark, desperate, sin-sick world waits for this new kind of person, this new kind of power. 

I believe that to be true.

New Yorker's Man in China

I spent time this afternoon reading an extraordinary article in the New Yorker for January 20, 2011, about Freud in China, "Meet Dr. Freud," by a most extraordinary man, it seems to me, Evan Osnos. When in my loser youth I would dream of holding a staff job at the New Yorker, it never, never, occurred to me you could hold a staff job at the NYorker AND live in such an exotic and unheard of place as Beijing. But Osnos does just that. He is the great-nephew of a Polish psychiatrist, Gustav Bychowski, who relocated to the U.S. when WW II started, and he is himself an expert on matters psychiatric and Chinese. I won't precis the article I mention. It's worth reading as a window on China's ghastly history since WWII and especially on current American efforts to introduce Freudian "therapy" to that forward-leaping land.


Here is a link to Osnos's blog on the New Yorker web site, newyorker.com. Check his postings and see if you agree with me that he is altogether something else. Beyond saying that I—for the time being—reserve comment.


As to Freud in China I'll say that I agree with Dr. Freud himself, who is reported to have said to Carl Jung as their steamship approached the U.S. for their first visit to America in 1909: "They don't realize that we are bringing them the plague." Indeed they were, although among other things Osnos reports is the loss of "Freudian Fever" in America over recent decades. Freud's "substitute religion" has proved ultimately unsatisfactory here, and I would guess also in Europe. I note that it has never accumulated miraculous elements around Freud's origins, which is an inescapably necessary accompaniment in the human environment to a genuine religion, that is, a proof of truth not of falsehood, as it has been taken to be by so many critics of the Lord Jesus Christ.  

Are "the Jews" Aiming to Rule the World?

The brief answer to my question in the headline is yes. But oh how the folk will yowl at that one. So how do you prove it? I think you don't. It's like religion: you believe or you don't, and that's that. The quotes around "the Jews" indicate that I am not talking about ordinary Jews but of the distinctly self-conscious ones who make a particular point of accumulating money in very, very large amounts, à la Rothschild or the chap who has a 35-room triplex on Park Avenue and spends $3,000 on groceries for a weekend. 


But of course one can talk, and that may move the ball a little. So I plan to talk. Here. Is anybody listening?I don't know. Probably not. But in case you, Dear Reader, are, and wish to reach me (not that I promise to answer) here is my email address:


tomwhite@ cableone.net

The Days Get Away

My last post was five days ago on Dec. 29. Happy New Year all!

I intend this to be short and to urge you to buy a book, Israel Shamir's PaRDeS: A Study in Cabbala. The Amazon link is here. It'll set you back about $13 dollars; I view it as one of the seminal books of the age and recommend that you read the reviews on the Amazon site.

You might also read my own extended review on Shamir's site, link here. The point is that Amurrica (the spelling is deliberate to indicate a certain impatience) needs to awaken out of its profound sleep and snap to the events actually going on the world, especially in the Middle East, where we are being drained into bankruptcy by a venal Congress responding to intense pressure from Israel.

I may quote from PaRDeS in future posts. Consider this a fair warning.