A Peace of Oil

The many who concluded long ago that oil was the prime reason for the invasion and occupation of Iraq are watching.

They expect an Iraq with enough oilster and warster troops there to prevent harassment of their oil machinery (puppet government, ports, pipelines, wells, personnel, etc.), even after the bulk of the invasion forces leave.

So when the mass killings, destruction, and the political dust settles they expect oil barons to be "invited" to run the Iraq oil scene "for the Iraqis", using a puppet government, puppet army, and backup US troops for awhile.

The oil robber barons will have used a generation's worth of U.S. taxpayer dollars (feeling a bit short these days?) to pull off this oil nation building for their own purposes, while practically bankrupting the rest of us and our children.

In that light ExxonMobil is one of the few that will be heard of from time to time on this matter.

Perhaps they will form a company with an Iraqi face.

2 4 U 1 4 me - Isn't That Tax Special?

The politicians who have been banksters are treated like royalty.

The people are treated like the subclasses when it comes to taxes sometimes.

Professor Caron notes:

This provision was extraordinarily valuable to Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, both of whom had hundreds of millions of dollars in unrealized capital gains in Goldman Sachs stock. When they were appointed secretary of the Treasury, they were able to realize all the gains on their stock shares, saving them tens of millions of dollars in taxes, and diversify their portfolios at the same time.

What I have always found interesting about this obscure provision of the tax law is that it recognizes a principle that ought to apply to all taxpayers.

(TaxProf Blog, italics added). What, the tax laws are not even handed? Banksters are special? No way, not in my country!?

Obama Administration And Straw Men

The Obama administration's lawyers in the Department of Justice have made a silly argument and have argued that prisoners should be denied the justice of due process of law by the courts:

The Obama Administration, taking its first position in a federal court on claims of torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, urged the D.C. Circuit Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit by four Britons formerly held there. In addition, the new filing argued that a recent appeals court ruling makes clear that “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”

Moreover, the document called for a sweeping ban on lawsuits against U.S. military officials, claiming constitutional violations by such officials. Allowing such lawsuits “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it said, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”

The brief was another indication that, at least so far, the new Administration is not moving to make a wide-ranging break with detention policies of the former Bush Administration. While President Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo by next January, lawyers for the government have taken positions in a variety of detainee court cases that do not propose fundamental change.

(SCOTUS blog). So their position is "We don't torture, but if we do too bad"? Get used to it?

They are siding with those who say "I was following orders", which is the Nuremberg defence.

That is patently bogus and hypocritical. It does not meet the standards we have agreed to and stood for all these decades and centuries.

This chump change does not bode well for the future either, at a time when the reputation of the United States needs to be improved to say the least.

It is egregious when it comes soon after another flip flop on presidential signing statements which Obama raged against in the past.

It is all the more egregious when he wants to send more troops to Afghanistan where the Supreme Court there has upheld:

Afghan courts have produced yet another example of its de-evolution into a medieval Sharia system. The country’s Supreme Court has upheld the 20-year-sentence of Parwez Kambakhsh for blasphemy. He was convicted of asking questions in a university class about women’s rights under Islam and downloading an article on equal rights for woman. We are about to send thousands of more troops into the country to preserve it from . . . radical Islamic influences.

(Professor Turley). Obama what the hell has gotten into you? Is Michele with you on this one?

In another case today before Judge Bates in the DC federal court the administration departed from the Bush II regime:

The Obama Administration disclosed on Friday that it will no longer claim the power to detain terrorism suspects under the label “enemy combatant,” even while claiming broad authority to detain those who are a part of terrorist networks or who supplied “substantial support” to such forces.

(SCOTUS blog). It is difficult to tell whether these variations are positions of individual US Attorneys of the Bush II era who are refusing to leave, or whether it is muddled policies that are causing these seemingly inconsistent positions.

Slap Sam For What Jonny Did?

Remember when your sister or brother did something and you got blamed and punished for it?

China is out to punish you and I for what the past regime has done, unless the current administration cleans up the past regime's mess:

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said the country was “worried” about its holdings of U.S. Treasuries and called on the United States to provide assurances that the investments were safe, and that China was watching United States economic developments very closely.

“President Obama and his new government have adopted a series of measures to deal with the financial crisis. We have expectations as to the effects of these measures,” Mr. Wen said at a news conference in Beijing after the final session of the National People’s Congress, the Chinese legislature.

“We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.”

(NY Times, italics added). The past robber baron regime implemented policies, backed by their supporting banksters, which took value from you.

The value of your house and the value of your stock and perhaps even your job has been diminished by the policies of the past regime.

You got slapped. But you did vote them out of office.

Let's hope we don't get slapped by China too ... for what they did.

Taking Without Just Compensation

You have done nothing negative to your house for years.

But your equity in it, what you use as a measure of what you are financially worth, is being taken away from you daily. As a matter of fact, one shocking article says it this way:

The net worth of American households fell by the largest amount in more than a half-century of record keeping during the fourth quarter of last year.

The Federal Reserve said Thursday that household net worth dropped by a record 9 percent from the level in the third quarter.

The decline was the sixth straight quarterly drop in net worth and underscored the battering that U.S. families are undergoing in the midst of a steep recession with unemployment surging and the value of their homes and investments plunging.

(NY Times). Who is taking this equity, value, wealth, and worth from you?

If it was the government, it might violate the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment which is an injunction against violations of your property rights.

That amendment says "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". When it is taken without an official declaration that is what is called inverse condemnation.

This current form of "taking your property" is just as real as if they build a garbage dump in the lot adjacent to your property.

The loss is just as real but there seems to be no just compensation to this current insidious mess.

We have suggested here and here some remedy that we feel could, if properly and carefully developed over time, bring more security and safety to our economy.

Start Your Backup Thrusters

The current NASA mission to the planet Saturn is named Cassini-Huygens.

The project is already an overwhelming success, and has successfully adjusted to a backup thruster system early this morning.

We have written about some of the wonderful and inexplicable discoveries the Cassini mission has accomplished.

The only downside is that many science textbooks have had to be thrown away.

Flood Of Prosecutions A Cover Up?

We are told that a flood of prosecutions may be coming for those who have done financial wrongs which led to our current financial demise.

I hope I am not being paranoid for worrying about whether those prosecutions will become cover ups or become place holders for some of the other serious crimes that have outraged the public.

Do we want that type of pacifier which lets the warsters off the hook while going after only the banksters?

Crimes like lying to us about practically everything, wrong wars, missing war money, torture, Plame outing, destroying evidence, politicization of the DOJ, obstruction of justice, secret rendition, and contempt of congress, to name a few.

Oh, I know that "the economy is fundamentally sound" types of fraud and deceit should be prosecuted too.

It is just that the other should not be forgotten because they tended to destroy our form of government, while the financial crimes tended to destroy the economy.

Every country has an economy, even China and Darfur, however the greatest value we have is our American constitutional way of life.

We must protect it with a signal to despots here that they will be prosecuted for those types of crimes too.

Is Your Blog A Honey Pot Blog?

Got some pot, honey?

In bloglatin a 'honey pot blog' is a blog designed to attract a certain clientèle.

A clientèle who have a certain mindset at a particular time on a particular subject matter.

It is not the same as a 'honey pot server', but it is an expansion of that theme to blogs.

Honey draws flies and bees and bloggers.

This is just an analogy, so the actual content on the blog may not be 'sweet', and in point of fact, many 'honey pot blogs' use hate speech or hate anything to draw people.

Other blogs do in fact use sweet things instead to draw people.

And of course there are genuine hate blogs and genuine love blogs. Genuine in the sense they are not 'honey pot blogs' but are sincere.

For instance Aryan racial hatred blogs are not fake they are real. World peace blogs are not fake they are real.

A honey pot blog draws only for the purposes of building a file on its bloggers (domestic or foreign espionage blogs), changing their minds on the particular subject matter (evangelizing blogs), or trying to discover what ideas are 'out there' on a particular subject matter (poller blogs).

A honey pot blog, then, in general will tend to be 'a one trick pony', i.e. focused on a single or very narrow range of subject matter.

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One Trick Pony, Paul Simon:

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Oil Sheiks 'Borrow' Bail Out Money

Rep. Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said on the MSNBC program "1600 Pennsylvania Ave" today that taxpayer TARP money is going to Dubai, UAE.

You know, oil soaked billionaire country, "the projects". Dubai sheiks have built the highest building in the world and are building the largest airport. And on another note, they were the only nation to officially and publicly support the Taliban prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Those are the sheiks who wanted to run US ports a while back. The very ones that enraged Americans, the ones who Cheney's Halliburton moved its headquarters next door to a while back (NY Times, ABC News [ABC News 'lost' the page so I use the Wayback Machine to recover it: ABC News].

I am sure there is no connection (wink, wink). No connection that Halliburton moved from the US to Dubai and then plane loads of cash followed when the Bush II Treasury Secretary approved it.

Never mind that 2 million Americans have lost jobs recently, the sheiks need a little cash to tidy them along.

Here is a link to an article indicating Dubai got billions, and below is an MSNBC video of the "1600 Pennsylvania Ave" program where the matter is discussed.

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Burn Notice - Cheney The Assassin

Well now Hersh has gone and done it and Raw Story is spreading the news.

He has said Cheney was maybe assassinating Americans and who knows who else.

The Yoo memos said he could use the military within the US despite the posse comitatus law.

I doubt that the Dick was pulling the trigger, since he can only hit pals at close range with a shotgun.

The new administration will probably not be too concerned as long as he had a bipartisan crew:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

(Raw Story). The military was running it. And they were sure to let the Dick know what they thought he should know.

I'll bet they did not tell him much after he shot his buddy in the face then tried to hide it from the press.

Huffington Post is covering it too, and they have a link to the prime source.

Get Over It, V?

The movie V for Vendetta is a story about a torture victim, "V", who escaped.

During the movie V lives underground while plotting to overthrow the big brother dictatorship that tortured him and those like him. V could have been a Jew at one of the death camps during the time we refer to as the holocaust.

Should the Israeli and German officials get over it or should they continue in their prosecution of American citizens accused of being NAZI murderers?

A recent thread here pointed out the sensitivity the Catholic Church has, and the insensitivity some Americans who call themselves progressives have.

Some of them think free speech is yelling "F*** You" to anything they perceive as ... well ... Veeish. Hey, we all have to think with the brain we have, including Cable Guy.

If they think yelling "F*** Israel" is the best way to bring peace to the mid east and that is the best they can do, hey, that is the best they can do.

Freeman Resigns - Foreign Pressures

We wrote about Charles Freeman in a thread a while back.

We were upbeat then because we think there needs to be balance in the Palestinian / Israeli scene.

That is to say, the past 8 years of the Bush II regime have been decidedly unbalanced.

In the interest of mid east peace, before Bush II, the US had traditionally attempted to play the role of an independent broker fair to both sides.

No one wants a biased judge. But the Bush II regime was clearly unbalanced in favour of one of the parties. We saw Freeman as a reset and a start toward a new balance.

Well, the waters are evidently so poisoned, according to Mr. Freeman, that he could not stay in his post any longer. He had hardly unpacked.

Some will say zionists did it. I think it was warsters, i.e. neoCons. But warster zionists, warster palestinians, and warster neoCons all have the same mental and emotional "DNA".

Those types all have the same behavioural and cognitive pattern, so the label is less important than the fact they are rabid and do not want peace. At this moment their polarization does not bode well for mid east politics.

This development also shows how difficult the job is for the Secretary of State and the ambassadors to that region.

Obama - All Blogs Are Not Equal

George Washington's blog has an interesting article entitled The Truth About Blogs.

I like that blog because it looks like this blog.

Anyway, the article concerns financial comments on blogs. The GW thread says Obama does not trust blogs. Is that like saying one does not trust the news media at all?

Zip, none, nada? Surely some newspapers are more worthy than other newspapers?

Well, Mr. President, please slow down and remember that not all newspapers and TV news are the same. Some are pure bunk and some are valid.

Fox News is different from Mother Jones. Likewise, blogs are not all the same. I said the following on a blog a long time ago:

Bob Ney helped create the American housing bubble as I have posted here before. His legislation set us up for what is now happening to the stock market. The financial stocks are crumbling pulling hedge funds and who knows what else, like Diebold, down with it.

Its faux news and a faux economy. Bush must have planned for it to come down a bit later, because it is clear to see that the republicans produced the bubble by legislating the out of control bubble.

Bush was involved in the great savings and loan fiasco in the early 90's too. He hangs with the bubble crowd.

(BB 8-14-2007). I made that comment over a year before the big crash began and over a year before the 2008 election.

And that comment recalled an even earlier thread where the same subject matter had been discussed. Bloggers are saavy if you find the right places.

Blogs are the future, people, so it is time for folks to learn how to pick the good ones.

I Thought It Was A Play, A Skit, Not Real

The church attendees, when the pastor was shot dead directly in front of their eyes in the midst of their church, were amused at first.

It was entertainment in their view.

Where is the popcorn?

"Way cool, the powers that be are pretending that the pastor is being shot so we can see what it is really like," they mused inside their own shocked and awed minds:

... members of the congregation initially thought the attack was part of a play being performed during the service at First Baptist Church in Maryville ...

(Scotsman). Why is our mind seemingly not able to grasp reality sometimes? Why is reality something we must struggle to grasp?

Several professional journalists experienced the exact same phenomenon when they saw planes crash into skyscrapers in New York on September 11, 2001.

At times when the shock of reality hits us we are so unfamiliar with it that we cease to function in reality. Our personal operating system crashes.

The amount of time we are down while we reboot or reset varies from person to person, nation to nation.

Remember the reset button Secretary of State Clinton gave the Russian government official? Other US government officials, including VP Biden, lately are also saying that we need to reset after the Bush II regime did something to us.

The writers and directors of the movie The Matrix exposed or articulated upon this phenomenon with the expansive exaggeration technique.

Like a magnifying glass which makes a picture big enough for anyone to see, the film crew showed how far away from us reality can become.

The reality of the propagandised war on terror was out of reach of the Bush II administration, as recently released memos have shown those who can see at that magnification level.

President Obama has ordered a reset and return to the use of the investigative agencies Americans have traditionally used to target and handle those planning violence against others within the United States.

The wild and paranoid gyrations of the Bush II regime that eventually contemplated and activated spying on Americans and planned using the military against Americans was as far from reality as it gets.

Recently a man was found who had been planning a dirty bomb from materials he had purchased within the US. Why go to Nigeria? The international spy mechanisms of the NSA did not catch him:

Trust fund millionaire James G. Cummings, an American Nazi sympathizer from Maine who was slain by his wife Amber in December, allegedly had the radioactive components necessary to construct a "dirty bomb," a newly released threat analysis report states.

The man, allegedly furious over the election of President Obama, purchased depleted uranium over the Internet from an American company.

(Raw Story, emphasis added). His wife is saying she was driven crazy. Well, he was driven crazy by hate speech himself was he not?

We have complained here that some who call themselves progressives are driving themselves and others crazy with hate speech. We are correct.

We have had a war of deceit against us since about the time of WW I according to an article we posted here. We have a lot of work to do to reset ourselves.

Resistance Is Futile & Time is Focused

We have talked about big time which refers to our sun, our star.

We have talked about little time which refers to the time our planet has left to keep giving us life.

We have talked about our wrongfully interfering with that time by accelerating the time for disaster.

The resistance to the reality in our solar system or on our planet is futile, because time is a focused amoral machine.

The US Congress during the Bush II regime, and to a lesser degree now, does not understand that even our greatest efforts will not guarantee we will avert disaster:

The world's best efforts at combating climate change are likely to offer no more than a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rises below the threshold of disaster, according to research from the UK Met Office.

(Independent, italics added). If they could put the clock in their eyes when they look at the children, tears of hope might appear from the jaded matrix.

Happy International Women's Day 2009

International Women's Day has been observed since sometime in the early 1900's.

Originating during a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies, it has become a modern national and international fixture.

According to Raw Story:

One of this year's key events was a massive Women's Day meet this weekend in Liberia, hosted by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, which focused on the future of women in the world.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are among 400 leading women, several of them heads of state, who were expected at the gathering -- which also marks a milestone for Liberia, still recovering from its 1989-2003 civil war and hosting its first such high-profile event since the late 1970s.

(Raw Story). You have come a long way baby, but don't even think of stopping until you read Why Women Should Rule The World.

We wrote about an especially noteworthy item a while back, concerning Michelle Obama.

For the first time in history a wonderful black woman is The First Lady. She descends from slaves who built her new home!

Brad Bloggers Being UnBradly?

Archived to save space.

The Doctrine of The Holocaust

The Pope is said to have ordered a bishop to recant of his views on the holocaust.

In a recent article we pointed out how some of the criticism of the catholic church by those who see themselves as progressives had missed the fact that a pardoned bishop was a bishop who said there was no holocaust.

We saw that blog's consistent harangue against "zionism" as the reason it often overlooked the big picture.

Evidently we were correct to see it as a big deal, because the Pope has intimated that if he had known of the bishop's holocaust statements he would not have pardoned him.

Instead the Pope ordered the bishop to unambiguously recant from the position that there was no holocaust.

The Tyranny of Value Evolution

How do you know what your home, vehicle, or computer is worth?

An appraisal, that is how.

You or someone else determines what that property's value is. After you or an appraiser happens to determine that value you may put it up for sale at that value, and then you will find out how good of an appraisal it is.

If 300 people come knocking at your door with cash in hand and they are fighting to be first in line, you may feel that appraisal was too low.

On the other hand, if all you hear outside for the next week is crickets chirping then you may feel that appraisal was too high.

The unfortunate truth is that depending on what day within a ten year period you try to sell it at that value, either the clamour to buy it or the cricket sounds of disinterest may come to your door.

Value evolution is so common we all understand it as a common phenomenon.

In other words the value of our home and everything else we own does not have a scientific, fixed relative value over the time of economic cycles.

It is a lot like desert sands that change shape as the winds blow from one place then another place over time.

Thus, we are not in a financially stable value condition because value is subject to value evolution. We are financially evolving value all the time.

That means party time when value is going up, and it means depression time when value is going down.

But clearly it is not stable in the sense of permanent or fixed. And professional appraisers do no better than you can do in the final analysis.

In an article in Appraisal Journal Magazine the following statement was made:

The universal goal of an appraisal is, or ought to be, to provide an accurate estimation of value. There are two broad ways in which appraisal accuracy can be achieved. One is to rely on the individual judgment and experience of an appraiser. A second is to establish scientific procedures that must be followed, which serve to guarantee or at least enhance the objective of accuracy, so that reliance on the subjective expertise and experience of an individual appraiser is minimized.

Those who emphasize the former tend to think of appraisal as a process akin to art. According to this view, providing an accurate appraisal is not, and can never be, a matter of science ...

(Appraisal: science or art?). In recent history we would probably say the appraisal business is neither science nor art, it is BS.

Values have fluctuated wildly in oil, gas, homes, food, and just about everything else over the past 10 years.

If we do not dare think "there has to be a better way" there never will be.

Iranian Intercontinental Missile - ICBM?

We expressed some doubt about this in an article a while back.

In that article we wondered out loud if the real Iran was much like that Iran we read about in the news.

After all, since the real Iraq was not much like that Iraq we read about in the news just prior to the Bush II regime invading it, don't we have legitimate reason to doubt?

Nevertheless there is an article in the India edition of Reuters that says Iran did launch a long range missile.

Open Thread

Michael Steele is the chairman of the news making Republican National Committee (RNC).

Steele garnered hours and hours of main stream media news coverage recently.

He made a comment that Rush Limbaugh spoke nasty things to be entertaining to his ditto head followers.

Steele implied that he, as leader of the RNC, not Limbaugh, was also the leader of the republican party, and that Rush only spoke for his radio land ditto heads, not the republican party.

Well that caused all republican hell to break out and Steele publicly apologized to Rush, who evidently had more of the republican party crown on his head than Steele had.

Now Chairman Steele, evidently as a comment on his first month in elected office as chairman of "the elephant", has said:

I’m trying to move an elephant that’s become mired in its own muck ...

(New York Times). Will that help his cause or did he only make more muck for the elephant to wallow around in?

Talk about anything on your mind in this thread, we just mentioned one subject that is in the news.