WARNING NOTICE: http://www.taylormarsh.com has a major virus. Do NOT go to their story on the Houston meeting (apart from its being hype, now it's just plain dangerous).
Phi Beta Iota: We believe the following:
1. Michael Bloomberg wants to be President.
2. Wall Street wants Michael Bloomberg to be President not because Barack Obama has failed them, but because he has so visibly pandered to them. The elite mob includes Burson-Marsteller, the Clintons and Joe Lieberman as well as Peter Peterson and David Walker (former Comptroller General who declared US insolvent in 2007 without being witting of financial crimes legalized by the Clintons and sanctified by Bush II and then Obama).
3. Two groups have been started, one on the West Coast, one on the East Coast, both focused on convergence in the middle, with Michael Bloomberg as the “natural” anti-thesis to the Republican and Democratic alternatives. Both are eligible for and will channel massive funding from corporations exercising their ill-gotten “personality” rights.
Executive Summary: Extremes are in active conflict today within the USA, with Transpartisan Upwising being one extreme and the No Labels “Non-Party” being another extreme. They join the dysfunctional extremists of the two-party tyranny/bi-opoly. Not yet emergent is a co-creative function that brings together public money, public knowledge, and a public process to create a new form of hybrid self-governance that strips the power of the purse and the power to declare war from visibly unfit politicians and their banking masters, and restores all sovereign powers to We the People. 2012 is a year of convergence. What will emerge is not yet known. Below are a few thoughts on this.
Much ado is being made of the “revelation” in the Wikileaks data dump that some Sunni Arab leaders were quietly in favor of an American and/or Israeli strike on Iran to terminate Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program with extreme prejudice. Implicit in this war-mongering hysteria is an acceptance of an implacable Shia-Sunni conflict threatening the stability of the Islamic world and perhaps the belief on the part of the neocon Judeo-Christian great gamesters that this divide offers an opportunity to exploit the divisions in Islam. The attached article by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is important in this regard, because he aims to debunk popular assertions about the nature of the Shia-Sunni conflict and/or the Arab-Persian conflict. If Moghaddam is right, the game to remake the Islamic world in our image may be a little too complex for the neatly compartmented minds of the great-game wannabees in Versailles on the Potomac.
According to a bio in the Guardian, “Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is a lecturer in the comparative and international politics of western Asia at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was born in the Taksim area of Istanbul to Iranian parents and raised in Hamburg/Germany. He studied at the University of Hamburg, American University and Cambridge. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic and A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations (forthcoming)”
This Sunni-Shia relations is an area I do not know much about, so I asked a friend of mine, a retired colonel, with extensive experience living and working in the Middle East, for his evaluation of Moghaddam's thesis. My friend responded as follows:
Not for the General Reader, VERY Focused on Bureaucracy
December 1, 2010
The price is excellent. You cannot get a better deal than $20 for a book of this substance. HOWEVER, this is not a book for the general reader. It would be excellent as a paperback for a senior or graduate course, akin to The Army Gets an Air Force: Tactics of Insurgent Bureaucratic Politics, but as a negative case study.
Going through the book I recognized several issues that could be corrected or could be addressed by other readings. For what it sets out to do, document the agonizing inertia and general lack of savoir faire of the United Nations bureaucracy and its political protocols, it is as good as anything I have seen.
It desperately needs some charts, timelines, anything to spice up the dry text. Even photographs. I would have liked more comparative information, such as side by side depictions of where different elements came down or different countries came down, on specifics.
The author strives to provide some historical background but gets it wrong on more than one occasion, to be expected when someone is not steeped in history or reading very deeply across the literature. Below I list some books that have helped me appreciate the larger context of terrorism as a symptom, not a threat. Terrorism is directly correlated with US occupation of foreign lands and US support for dictators….this is straight forward and absolutely shut out by those who love war for its selfish power to enrich the few over the many.
There are many more. See my many books lists, most captured in the two top lists, one positive, one negative, visible at REVIEWS at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
This book is fairly priced, well put together, based on deep real experience, and if you want minutia about how screwed up the UN system is on this particular topic (and generally incoherent on all topics), this is the book.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a website, an effort to further a movement that has not been successful to date, and a very intelligent article by a very experienced agitator for change (and former Army Ranger who has also been homeless on multiple occasions, each time rising like a Phoenix).
Now that its clear to all the “political system is broken”, please be discerning about the expert “solutions” you hear being put forth. Knowing what I know about the “game controllers” — having been a junior league game controller myself — bipartisanship (with a third party “outsider coalition” similar to the British system) will be the professional solution offered to our current crisis. Already you see nostaligc images of the truce between Gingrich and Clinton and other “party fathers” who were adult enough to “put aside their differences.”
Chris Martenson not only paid attention to all of the early warning signals, but acted upon them, leaving a Fortune 50 job, selling his Connecticut home, getting out of the stock market, and buying gold and silver. Now he has produced the single best, down-to-earth, detailed free video (38 minutes), inexpensive video (208 minutes), forthcoming book, and a 50 hour week-end course for concerned citizens. This is essential education for all–it also demonstrates the fraud, waste, and abuse inherent in the continued support by the two-party tyranny of Wall Street. Wall Street STILL OWES twice the capital it actually has–the bail-out was a flim-flam to perpetuate the short-term bonuses and positions of the criminals who have looted America and the rest of the world.
Short Free Video
Amazon Page
Crash Course by Chris Martenson – 38 minute condensed version
DVD Release Date: March 5, 2009
Run Time: 203 minutes
Amazon Page
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 22, 2011)
Phi Beta Iota: In a perfect demonstration of the Hacker Principle that for every piece of information you share, you get back 100 pieces of which 10 are priceless (10:1 noise to signal and 10:1 return on investment), the below was brought to our attention by Dr. James C. Spohrer, Director, IBM University Programs World-Wide (IBM UP), IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA 95120 USA. We like IBM, we like it even more after seeing that this kind of thinking is well-understood by IBM. Bottom line: a number of others have sounded the alarm, Chris Martenson does it better than everyone else, in the most concise non-partisan manner possible. He is the Paul Revere of the Republic, the Commonwealth.
The results were surprisingly bad. <preconditions of revolution> is a little better but still not great. Here is the meat you were looking for plus some. The bottom line on revolution is that it results from scarcity compounded by corruption. The USA is in a pre-revolutionary situation today, with all the preconditions present, lacking just a precipitant.
Not for the General Reader, VERY Focused on Bureaucracy
