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.