Ja, und Warum Nicht?

Apple? I’d rather chew gum.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html

This round of Republican half-wits

Politicians have always stretched the truth, embellished facts with indecorous deceits, and otherwise pushed the boundaries of decency. There is, however,  a new, deeper level of lying in this generation of Republicans. It’s not just Romney, though he is a particularly annoying kind of liar. When Perry speaks of his Christian nation nonsense and suggests that such a stance is perfectly American; when Boehner can eliminate “the rich” from his vocabulary and replace it with “job creators” — as if the rich had no other concern than in using their spare cash to hire high school graduates; and when Gingrich can portray himself as a family man, an idea man, well, now we have a veritable deluge of lies the likes of which America usually sees only in forgettable fringe candidates.

Those who swallow these lies uncritically are vulgar entertainment junkies to whom the truth is too boring. The Republican Party seems to be courting the Fox News ignorami in the same way they courted the religious right and the Tea Party. Very soon, the party, which many now see as a distortion of the historical party, will devolve into an entertainment entity permanently assigned to the lunatic dustbin of politics. May that day be soon.

Thank you, Funny or Die!

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in years.

How to save Europe in one year

What an idea! Greece can get out of its debt crisis easily. All the PM has to do is to say, “We’re going to leave the Euro!”, then buy up a shitload of stock the next morning. By the next day, retract the statement. Sell those stocks as they jump through the roof. Repeat as necessary and apply accumulated funds to your deficit reduction program. (I’m thinking of copyrighting this.)

The Republicans target American workers – Rex Nutting – MarketWatch

The Republicans target American workers – Rex Nutting – MarketWatch.

Why would I try to write something as good as this?  It would amount to reinventing the wheel by making it round.  Hm.

Israel and Palestine

Let’s get one thing understood right away, and that is this: “Middle East” is a European term, invented by cartographers in service to imperial powers.  It is telling that so many in Palestine refer to “the Middle East” and don’t see the irony.  Imagine if we referred to America as Sovershenniy Shtaaty Amerikoy?  We would, if we were under Russian domination.  And believe me, Palestine is under Western (i.e., European and American) domination. You can’t fiddle with linguistics.

Muslims had their period of imperialism, which resulted in vast swaths of north Africa being Muslim.  For a while, Spain was Al Andalus.  (While it was Al Andalus, by the way, it was the only place in Europe scholars could go to learn science and mathematics.  For Europe, these were the Dark Ages.)  Europe fought back and established Christian kingdoms; the Muslim world fought back and had its version of kings.  People were generally better off in the Muslim countries if they were of a different faith, because under Islam, you were okay but had to pay taxes.  In Europe, there were pogroms and religious wars.  But there were some crucial differences between these two parts of the world.

Christianity allowed for interest to be charged; Islam prohibits the charging of interest.  This is no small matter, as we shall see shortly.  And Islam prohibited religious images.  Christians had to fight over this: remember the Iconoclasts?

Aside from some nasty belligerence from Europe from 1096 to 1271, which the Christians called The Crusades, 1500 years pass reasonably quietly.  The Crusades were a result of Christian longing for the capture of Jerusalem, which is a pivotal city in their holy book.  Unfortunately, it is also a pivotal city for Jews and Muslims, too.  You can’t divide 1 by 3 and get 1.

Let’s move up to the 20th Century.  Europeans were humming along, dividing up the world for their national glory and prestige.  It is notable that no Islamic country was involved in the carving up of Africa and Asia into colonial dependencies.  It is also notable that Muslims were by no means blameless in this time, since they were the principal slave traders in the world.  But the big deal for Islam and Christianity was the development of the ideology of Zionism.  Simply put, this late 19th Century concept was a call for using European political strength to confiscate land in Palestine to give to Europeans.

I know the word “confiscate” has negative connotations, and I am not using it here to plead a point.  However, when one person is talking about creating a nation from some existing distant land, presumably he is not speaking of a new Creation.  The land had to be taken from somebody, since the fathers of Zionism never mentioned amassing such wealth as would enable them to purchase enough land to be a national home.

Well, as it happened, World War One came along.  England, France, Russia, and, in 1917, America were the Allies; Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire were the Central Powers.  Not to give a lesson in the futility of war, but of the 7 main protagonists of that war, two disappeared forever as countries and two changed beyond recognition.  The real victors were England and France, because now they could take all the places the Ottoman Empire used to call home, and what the European cartographers called The Middle East.  Redrawing the borders would be easy, since America never signed the Versailles Treaty ending the war.  This was to be France’s revenge, and England’s satisfaction of its expansionist dreams.

This subject is far too complex to go into in this small blog entry, but for those interested in knowing how Europe used its carving knife on the Ottoman corpse, check this link.  Suffice it to say that the Middle East was a European creation.

Zionists were, of course, Europeans.  As such, they shared in the national aspirations of their cultures.  Everyone was taking land and drawing new boundaries: why not the Zionists?

During the 1920s, European Jewish emigration to Palestine was a non-starter.  Europe was getting back on its feet after four years of incendiary devastation and financial ruin.  Then came the 1930s and the Great Depression.  If there was no interest in emigrating to Palestine in the ’20s, there was no money to do so in the ’30s.  And then came the war that changed everything.

World War 2 reshaped the world.  Once again Europe lay in ruins; and not only Europe.  Large areas of the Pacific Rim were laid waste.  Southeast Asia, divided between the British and the French, was left reeling.  “Where were all the Muslim countries in this war?” one might ask.  Simply put, there wasn’t one.  That is, there were no independent, self-governing countries in the Muslim world save for Turkey.  (Turkey, wisely, sat on a fence for some time in this war.)  And Turkey was militantly secular.

Now, remember when I wrote how important it was that Islam prohibits the charging of interest?  Here’s where it picks up.  As Europe and Asia rebuilt, massive amounts of money flowed through the Western banks.  Some loans were gifts; most bore interest.  Billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction in the years 1945 -1950 by (primarily) American banks.  None of this money flowed to the Arab world, since there were no independent governments there to receive such largesse.  But suddenly, European Zionists knew their moment had come: of all populations who suffered during the years 1939 – 1945, nobody did so much as European Jews.  Well, except for the Russians, who lost 20,000,000.  But they already had Russia.  The Nazis had done an effective job in convincing the world that Jewishness was a racial matter, not a religious one.  Despite the fact that this had always been assailed as anti-Semitic nonsense, it made a useful tool in arguing for a national home.  And Christians hold two books to be sacred: the New Testament and the Old Testament (as if God could have two wills.)  So when Jews referred to God granting them rights in the lands of Palestine, many European Christians understood and sympathized with what they were saying.  For more information on this, see The Declaration of Establishment of the State of Israel.

As Jewish Europeans flooded into Palestine — some 600,000 in 1946-48 — they built up farms, houses, and industry on land they bought from poor Palestinians.  Since the Palestinians had no means of investing that money (remember the Islamic ban on lending?), there was not much to do but go somewhere where the land was cheaper.  So the Jews got wealthier, while the Palestinians were displaced.  This displacement became catastrophically intense when Jewish terrorist organizations like Irgun turned their attention to what can only be called ethnic cleansing.

On April 9, 1948, members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang attacked a small Palestinian town of Deir Yassin.  Over 100 inhabitants were murdered, their bodies left to rot in the sun.  This act seems to have been designed to terrorize as many Palestinians as possible, and indeed, many decided it was time to leave before they lost their lives.  This is the critical issue in the Arab – Israeli conflict.

• Israel claims no Palestinian has a “right of return” because they left voluntarily in 1948.
• Palestinians claim they did not leave voluntarily but only to preserve life and limb and demand a right to return.

I will leave it to others to sort out how much worse things got after the 1967 war, after the 1973 war.  It cannot go without mention, though, that Israel is doing the same thing today that they did in 1948: they are forcing Arabs out of the occupied territories by constant harassment and dehumanization.  Israel collects the taxes for the Palestinian Authority; Israel controls the electrical grid in the occupied territories; Israel controls the water system in the occupied territories.  Incidentally, building permanent settlements, which Israel continues to do, is specifically prohibited by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949.  Israel signed that document.  Israel, however, by flagrantly violating it with every nail that is driven into a board in the occupied territories, has made a mockery of international law.

If you were a Palestinian, would you be angry?

One day in

The Debt Debacle and Now a Downgrade.

Well, what else did you expect?  Standard & Poor’s put the U.S out of the AAA club and into the AA+ fraternity.  Apparently, nobody flinched when Reagan increased the national debt* by 186% in his 8 years; nor when Bush 1 increased it 55%; nor took notice when Clinton increased it (a comparatively paltry) 36%.  Did they blush when Bush 2 blew it up 89% in his 8 years?

Naaah.  You’d have to be a black guy to understand why the Big White House, Standard & Poor’s, has now chosen to get real about how much money America owes to its banks and foreign creditors.  I’m willing to bet my life on the fact that not one of the chief authors of the report downgrading America’s debt are black.  Now, does that mean they should not have downgraded us?  No.  It means that S & P is entirely untrustworthy because everybody remembers Ross Perot and his charts showing how rapidly the debt was growing.  He said it was unsustainable: that was in 1992.  Was anybody at Standard & Poor’s listening then?  Or did they not care because good ol’ boys from the Ivy League Schools were in the Permanent Government and nothing bad could happen with those white knights in charge.

Well, when the white knights are out of the White House, they scheme to get back in.  They feel a chromatic affinity for the places of power in Washington.  So lest you think that President Obama should have done this, or done that, when he had both houses of Congress in his party: remember why 2009 is when we began calling the GOP the Party of No.  Obama and leading Democrats were threatened with filibuster on just about every piece of legislation originating on their side of the aisle.  This was a tactic that had been used mostly during lame duck sessions of Congress, but very rarely during a President’s first 15 months.  Anyone with any analytic thinking skills will quickly deduce that the main goal — the main goal — of the Republican Party has been to bring down a Democrat at whatever cost to the nation, and regardless of that Democrat’s mandate to change things in Washington.

So, the Republicans are getting what they asked for.  Obama’s probably embarassed to be the first president in history who has to preside over a nation with a less than pristine credit rating.  The White Knights have won the opening volley, tally-ho!  After some martini lunches they’ll pat their own backs and plan for more embarassment for the President.  More paralysis.  These guys are like kids tying firecrackers to the bumper of a car that’s about to have a head-on collision.  But they’re not looking at that.  It’s playing with firecrackers that really matters to those little White Knights.

Note: numbers about national debt and presidential records is taken from http://www.presidentialdebt.org, August 5 2011.

Wanna know why the government’s biggest job right now is NOT to cut spending?  Read what the IMF thinks.  In short, history shows that doing exactly what Obama and his Republican friends are ready to do is likely to lead to precisely the opposite effect from that which they desire.  Here’s that IMF study

What I know

I know that I am not perfect.
I know that I can be a hypocrite.
I know that I could be more generous.
I know that I hate conservatives.
I fucking hate conservatives.

Why?

Ever notice how all those radical Islamic clerics (what the hell is a cleric, anyway?) all like to gesticulate with their right index finger?  (Okay, okay, the guy in the middle would use a finger but what the heck, he lost it fighting for his god.)  It seems like they’re making a really vital point, but more likely, they’re just bullshitting as usual.  Take a look at this gallery:

Some of them look pretty silly.  (I just couldn’t help but put Boehner in there.)  That last guy before Boehner isn’t a preacher, but he just can’t help himself.  What in the world are they doing?  I mean, how many people speak to you this way?  Would you tolerate it?  Well, maybe if you were five.  Even then.

“It’s their custom,” you might say.  ”Just as the Italians and Greeks like to gesticulate, so do these guys.”  Yeah, except why is it that no woman would be photographed with the same didactic (or accusatory) pose?  Hm.  When do we say enough when it comes to custom?

Okay, it’s enough already.  Unless you’re trying to show me something on the ceiling, or a bird about to shit on my head, keep your finger busy doing something else.  Scratch your head, like.