Gore Vidal on the American police state

Here is a terrific essay by Gore Vidal on the present American police state. The last few paragraphs are very chilling.

Read about the American police state here

Why you should ignore the general news media

The other day it was reported in the general news media that recent new house sales had experienced the largest increase in eight years. That must be a really big number because the last eight years were the real estate bubble where everybody with a pulse was buying houses. Sounds good, huh? Happy days are here again...

The facts are otherwise. This graph tells a grim and completely different story:



(Source: ShadowStats)

Kooky thinking about the depression

Here is an astonishing statistic: U.S. manufacturing is currently operating at only 65.6% of capacity. That is, fully one-third of American manufacturing is idle. Not since the Great Depression (the other one in the 1930s) has such a huge chunk of American manufacturing--once the engine of wealth creation for the entire world--stood unused with no prospect of recovery. Considering that manufacturing was once fully 25% of this country's economy but now comprises not more than 9%, the sad tale of the decay of America's industrial base leaves a person almost breathless. This decline is unprecedented in human economic history.

Incredibly given these facts, people are still forecasting a "recovery" in the fall; indeed, Mr.Obama has staked his entire administration on this recovery. But how is recovery supposed to happen? With what will anybody recover? Exactly what will be recovered? How can an industrial economy "recover" despite one-third of it being idle? What could "recovery" mean under these circumstances? These preposterous forecasts are exactly like those absurd predictions of "top psychics" that get published in "The National Enquirer" and other such rags.

The truth is that America's industrial base is severely wounded. World markets are shrinking fast; the American domestic market continues to decline. The world is awash in idle industrial capacity. I'm willing to bet a dollar that the idle capacity of China alone exceeds total American industrial capacity. What sensible person thinks that high-cost America will recover sooner than low-cost China? If you were a capitalist investor, where would you be putting your money?

And if American industry remains hobbled, where's recovery going to come from? Want a peek at our real future? Just keep up with current events in California. California this year is America next year.


Read the article here

The limp noodle wants us all to just get along

In a previous post I wondered how long we would wait before Mr. Obama went soft, waffled on his previous "acted stupidly" statement about the Cambridge police, and basically leave his good friend Professor Henry Gates twisting in the wind. Answer: a matter of hours. Apparently Mr. Obama has determined that there's blame for everybody involved, but that everybody involved is good and well-intentioned, so nobody is to blame for anything, and nobody should be held accountable for anything. Now that we're all friends again, Mr. Obama has invited both the arresting officer and Professor Gates to the White House for a beer. How chummy!

Can't we all just get along?

What I want to know is what does Mr. Obama do for the back pain caused by his spinal chord being filled with marshmallow creme?

Stupid, arrogant, contemptuous, and abusive

Have you heard about Harvard Professor Henry Gates? Having returned from a trip, he found that the door to his home was jammed, so he and his taxi-cab driver tried to force it open. Eventually Professor Gates got into his house via the back door. Some sharp-eyed neighbor saw the professor trying to get into his house and called the police to report an attempted burglary. The police arrived, and Gates explained. Now the story diverges: Gates contends that the police demanded proof of residence because he is black and would never have made such a demand to a white man who obviously was the legal occupant of the house; the police claim Gates flew into an abusive, unreasonable rage, so they arrested him on a charge of "disorderly conduct." The charges were subsequently dropped, a fact which demonstrates that the charge of "disorderly conduct" was pure police intimidation of somebody who irked them because he wouldn't obsequiously put up with their crap. The story got extra legs when, at his recent press conference, President Obama stated that the police behaved "stupidly." Now the police are demanding an apology from Mr. Obama; Mr. Gates is demanding an apology from the police.

So who's telling the truth? My money is on Professor Gates. I don't believe a word by any of these cops, whose defensive is "we followed procedure". So what, if that "procedure" lets you target black men because of racial profiling? That's precisely what Professor Gates is claiming. How is following racial profiling procedure a defense against a charge of racial profiling? So I am on the side of one of Harvard University's most distinguished, celebrated, and honored scholars. The cops responded to a possible burglary 9-1-1 call, found a black man in the supposedly burgled house, and hassled this man because they could and because that is their standard operating procedure. Now the cops are lying about what they did and pretending that they're the real victims because the police always do the right thing and their actions should never be questioned.

Once upon a time, I might have given the cops the benefit of the doubt. But real life, personal experience forbids. I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the abuse, harassment, and belittlement of a black man, charged with no crime, by white cops in a public place in full view of a store full with customers. I was livid. No white citizen would have tolerated such behavior, and no cop would have dared treat a white citizen with such contempt. But they treat black men in this manner with impunity. So I'm standing with Professor Gates.

But the squishy Mr. Obama may not be standing with us, for he has already back-pedaled a bit by stating yesterday that "cooler heads should have prevailed," which means that maybe Mr. Gates did something wrong. How long before he melts like an ice cube in the hot summer sun and blames everything on his good friend Mr. Gates? A day? Two? Let's see. Today, Mr. Obama stated that he could have "calibrated" his comments differently. What does that mean, I wonder? Nothing good for Mr. Gates. What will this limp noodle say next?

Read about it here

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: The worst is yet to come!

A while ago, the Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky did some figuring and some ciphering and discovered that when the Bush-Obama borrow-and-spend splurge finally bankrupts the government and the fiscal you-know-what hits the fan, everything that the federal government pays for besides the military and the "stimulus" will have to go because there will be no money to pay for it. That's right: all the federal tax receipts pay for only two things: the military-industrial complex and the so-called stimulus spending. Welfare, education, science, health--currently all these things are paid for by borrowed money; when the borrowing stops because no rational person will lend the insolvent federal government another dime, all these things are unfunded and must be cut!

So you think that such a situation can never happen? Au contraire. It's happening right now--this very moment--in Ireland. It seems that the Irish, just like Americans, love to live it up on borrowed money. Now the Irish are broke and the bills have come due. The Irish government is taking a meat axe to its budget and cutting, cutting, and cutting some more. The Irish are up in arms (almost), but there's nothing they can do. They can't pay for their lifestyle and nobody's lending them any money to keep the good times in the Emerald Isle going. Every social program is getting whacked, and people are facing unemployment and destitution without the government's promised social welfare safety net. You can read about this mess in the article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard below.

If you haven't noticed, the same process is happening now in America. For the present, the state governments (most of which are broke) are doing the cutting and the raising of taxes. The federal government has kept the borrow-and-spend splurge going because after last summer's crash, many people panicked and put their money in US Treasury bonds. That allowed Bush and then Obama to impose their preposterous spending "stimulus" programs. As a consequence, this year's deficit will be about $2 trillion and so will next year's. Just a few years ago during Mr. Bush's first term, $2 trillion was the entire budget (deficit included) of the federal government; now that number is just the borrowing the government must do (billions and billions every week) merely to keep the doors open and the lights on. With the Europeans, the Americans, and the Japanese borrowing any penny they can lay their hands on, the bond markets will soon suffer an interest explosion. When that happens, the value of the dollar will evaporate, and we Americans will be paying $25 for a gallon of gas, $15 for a loaf of bread, $20 for a small bag of potatoes. But only for a while. Then hyper-inflation will kick in, and the sky's the limit on prices.

Whatever happens, you can't say that we haven't been warned.


Read Evans-Pritchard here

Paul Craig Roberts--The worst is yet to come!

Excerpt from Paul Craig Roberts' latest column:

The worst of the economic crisis has not yet hit. I don’t mean the rest of the real estate crisis that is waiting in the wings. Home prices will fall further when the foreclosed properties currently held off the market are dumped. Store and office closings are adversely impacting the ability of owners of shopping malls and office buildings to make their mortgage payments. Commercial real estate loans were also securitized and turned into derivatives.

The real crisis awaits us. It is the crisis of high unemployment, of stagnant and declining real wages confronted with rising prices from the printing of money to pay the government’s bills and from the dollar’s loss of exchange value. Suddenly, Wal-Mart prices will look like Nieman Marcus prices.

Retirees dependent on state pension systems, which cannot print money, might not be paid, or might be paid with IOUs. They will not even have depreciating money with which to try to pay their bills. Desperate tax authorities will squeeze the remaining life out of the middle class.



Read the complete column here

California Dreamin'

Want to know why California is going broke? Here's a small part of the problem: in San Jose, police and fire fighters are collecting $100,000+ pensions in their mid-50s! Yes, that's right. You can "retire" in the prime of life in San Jose and for the next 30-40 years receive $3,000,000-$4,000,000 from the taxpayers for your "service." And these are only the egregious examples; no doubt many more "retired" ex-police and ex-fire fighters are receiving just a bit less than $100,000 per year in "retirement" pay, which makes their total take a tad less than $3,000,000 for "retirement" years. And they get free medical, too!

How can San Jose afford to pay this army of parasites? The city can't anymore, so soon there's going to be an ugly showdown between the greedy retirees (and their unions) and everybody else in Silicon Valley. And how did this absurd situation happen in the first place? The citizens of San Jose let their city government do what it pleased, and it was pleased to rip the citizens off. Now the citizens are shocked, shocked to find out that they've been played for the fools that they in truth are.

Read about it here

All jobs created in 21st century are gone!

All the US jobs created since the turn of the 21st century are gone. Apropos employment, it's as if the last 8 1/2 years never happened and we are back in the summer of 2000. And the losses keep coming. So much for the dimwit bloggers who think that there's good news about the economy. Over at ShadowStats the news is even grimmer. The unemployment-underemployment figure now exceeds 20%! We're in Great Depression territory and a long way from the bottom. Even worse: when we finally hit bottom, who says that we won't stay there?

Trouble right here in River City and at Burger King

As related in the news report below, fast food peddlers are using sex to peddle fast food. Can you imagine? There's trouble right here in River City.

Elsewhere I posted a frivolous reply to an outraged comment on this subject; the post didn't survive long and was deleted--probably in a huff. For some reason unclear to me some people take this matter very seriously. Why?

All advertising is by definition vulgar. Its purpose is to excite appetites by any means necessary. Consider the issue using the medieval Seven Deadly Sins to give context. The complaint is that advertisers appeal to Lust and that this appeal is out of bounds. Why? What moralist complains when advertisers appeal to Pride by way of vanity? Or to Gluttony as they urge us to cram our gullets with sugary treats or 3000-calorie meals? Could advertising even exist without appeals to Envy and to Greed--to want more of what some else has? What would religious advertising be without appeals to Anger disguised as holy outrage against the outcast group of the moment? Where would the hospitality and entertainment industries be without appeals to Sloth?

Of course, my point is that advertising is inherently and incorrigibly detestable simply because the sole purpose of advertising is to get money from you by appealing to any and all of your base desires. Its purpose is vulgar, and it accomplishes that purpose by employing vulgar means. How could it do otherwise? What's the point of bellyaching about one facet of advertising vulgarity when the entire endeavor assumes vulgarity as a given, requires it, and couldn't exist without it?

View an ABC report on this non-issue here

Good riddance!

Robert S. McNamara, one of the evilest men ever to walk to the earth, died today. Mr. McNamara, a one-time executive at Ford, was selected by John F. Kennedy to be his Secretary of Defense. When Lyndon Johnson became president, McNamara retained his office and became a co-conspirator with Johnson in the deceiving America into the war in Vietnam. McNamara, despite knowing that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fake, happily implemented Johnson's genocide against the people of Vietnam--both North and South. Millions of men, women, and children died or were maimed by these madmen; hundreds of thousands of Americans were sent to Vietnam to kill the Vietnamese people; tens of thousands of American deaths and scores of thousands of American casualties were the consequence.

And for exactly what? Not a living American can give a coherent reason why America fought that war, what its aims were, and why those aims were to be furthered by the massacre of millions. Toward the end of Johnson's term, McNamara went nuts and resigned; the pressure of mass murder and running a failed war got to him. To help assuage his conscience, Johnson appointed him president of the World Bank.

McNamara spent a good part of his later life trying to absolve himself of his crimes with a lot of phony-baloney pseudo-mea culpas that always exonerated him and excused his participation in mass murder and Johnson's conspiracy against the Constitution. In a moral world, this man would have been tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged as a war criminal. Instead, he spent his declining years in comfort and security. Robert McNamara is a good reason why the universe needs Hell.

Read about this evil man here

The book of Leviticus takes another hit

The Delhi High Court has ruled that a 160-year-old law prohibiting something called sex "against the order of nature" (usually understood as gay sex) violates the principle of equality before the law and is thus unconstitutional. So where did this weird law come from? Answer: from India's colonial overload, Great Britain. And where did Britain get this law? Answer: from the book of Leviticus by way of Paul's letter to the Romans.

For some reason I cannot fathom, Paul, who is famous for dispensing with the Mosaic law in favor of what he called "freedom in Christ," is nonetheless construed by obtuse readers to be both advocating and applying the Mosaic law in Romans 1, especially in the passage in which he mentions males lusting after males and doing what is unseemly. People unacquainted with either dialectical reasoning or Paul's theology fail to realize that the long passage from 1:19 through 1:32 in which he reprises the standard Jewish accusations against non-Jews who knew nothing about the Mosaic law (see chapter 13 in the book "The Wisdom of Solomon" for a more detailed account of gentile depravity) is the anti-thesis against which he argues beginning in Romans 2 and against which he has stated his thesis--viz, the just shall live by faith--in 1:17. If being outside the Mosaic law makes a person by definition an outlaw, Paul must have been one of those outlaws disparaged in 1:19-32. Instead, Paul argues that the Mosaic law is literally a dead letter and has no meaning any longer because Christ's death and resurrection have ended its authority and purpose.

Dialectical reasoning is the standard way ancient people educated in the Greek manner argued. Today, we seem to understand only expository and analytical reasoning, so the contemporary naive reader thinks that Paul is explaining his position in 1:19-32 when he is really presenting an opposing position (i.e., outside the law are only outlaws) against which he will argue in the rest of his letter. People forget that Paul is defending his theology of faith and freedom before a group of Roman Christians, mostly Jewish, who did not know Paul and who were likely hostile to his abandonment of Mosaic law. If you want to understand the depth of the Jewish Christian reaction against Paul, all you need do is read the Gospel of Matthew in which the evangelist puts in the mouth of Jesus a no-holds barred condemnation of Paul (and of his followers) as being the least in the kingdom for teaching that the law is no more. Not so, the evangelist has Jesus say. The law is eternal. Not so much as even a jot of it will ever go away.

Paul's opponents outlived him and got the best revenge: they reinterpreted his theology and reinvented him as a proponent of the law. The great apostle of freedom became the great supporter of the law (or at least of the parts of the law that partisans found useful to impose on others). This is now the standard, official reading of Paul's once radical theology, a reading supported by churches, popes, bishops, reverends, theologians, assorted legalists, and other enemies of freedom. Imagine: the great apostle of freedom as a ventriloquist's dummy for tyrants. Paul must be rolling over in his grave in fury and frustration!

Loonies running the government

The state of Pennsylvania, like many other states, is in a fiscal mess. The solution? The governor wants to increase the state income tax by 16%! In the midst of a depression, this loon wants to jack up taxes. Have people in government just gone nuts or what? What does it take to get this fundamental truth into the lead-lined skulls of politicians: Lower taxes and cut spending in a depression? Instead, the governor plans to bleed his fellow Pennsylvanians to financial death.

It's time for freedom-loving Pennsylvanians to march on Harrisburg, surround the statehouse, and burn it to the ground with the governor and the legislature trapped inside.

Read about the lunacy here