I have done what seem endless stories about pedophilia and the Roman Catholic clergy, and another number about Islamic orthodoxies profound sexual dysfunctionality concerning women, and several on the same problem with Ultra-orthodox Judaism. Here is another story. I think one has to conclude that religious fundamentalism of whatever stripe is defined by its sexual pathologies particularly the suppression of women, and the sexual exploitation of children.
Journalists self-censoring is what you see in authoritarian states. I saw it in the Soviet Union, in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. Now we are seeing it here.
China: On 12 November, the Third plenary meeting of the 18 Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party concluded its four days of deliberations and issued a communique.
Many analysts and commentators have published their views of the meaning and implications of the many topics covered in the communique. The more superficial have focused on language in the communique that discusses reform and market economics.
One fine commentary from the University of Sydney, Australia, notes that the key theme is continuity of the policies that have helped transform the Chinese economy since 1978. The argument is that the leaders and managers of the second largest economy cannot risk dramatic changes and are more interested in maintaining steady growth.
Observers looking for political changes or reforms will find none in the guidance issued by the Third Plenum. Economic changes concern allocation of resources and economic growth strategies. Social changes in urban-rural relations in Chinese society promise to be the most important innovations, provided economic growth remains steady.
Excerpts from the communique follow [along with analytic commentary]:
NOTE: The movie “Hackers” was based on HOPE co-founder and spiritual leader Emmanuel Goldstein (not his real name) and his various Pheaker (phone hacks) and Hacker (computer hacks) colleagues. There is no other event on the planet quite like this, at least in the English language. Robert Steele moves heaven and earth to be there (it takes place every two years). In passing, you can leave HOPE a certified lock picker, fully equipped. Hackers are like astronauts, full of the right stuff, pushing the edge of the envelope in whatever domain they choose (not just software).
More than two years since the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the Fukushima power plant meltdown is still a major, global environmental problem. And the staggering price tag for cleaning it up continues to rise.
The Japanese government just announced that it’s borrowing about $30 billion more to cover costs related to Fukushima, bringing the total amount the Japanese government has borrowed to clean up the mess to around $80 billion, more than three times the amount BP spent to clean up the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. That money will go into cleanup, along with compensation for the people who may never go back to their homes near the contaminated area, and the decommissioning of the nuclear reactors. But it’s not money that the government is on the hook for, Reuters reports:
Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, the owner of the Fukushima plant, remains responsible for covering the costs of compensation and paying to clean up the surrounding areas under a framework set by the previous government.
But the government has issued bonds to pay the related costs up front. The embattled utility remains on the hook for paying back the money spent to the government over a period of decades under current arrangements.
Fortunately, in the shadow of Fukushima, there is some good news. Just about 12 miles off the coast of the Fukushima prefecture, a symbolic floating wind turbine switched on for the first time on Monday. The turbine alone will send 2,000 kilowatts to Tohoku Electric Power Co. It’s a small step in the country’s push toward more renewable power, but the wind farm is expected to eventually have 143 turbines with a generating capacity of one gigawatt. But it’s just one of the ways Japan looking to make up for the lost energy production from its nuclear reactors, which accounted for about 30 percent Japan’s electricity capacity.
…. Read this obscene description of the “let them eat cake” policies of the Fed (and by extension, the President and Congress) that feed Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.
We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.
By ANDREW HUSZAR
I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.
Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system's free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.
The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed's central motivation was to “affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative “credit easing.”
“Frankly, I am nervous,” says Robert Hale, the Pentagon’s comptroller. And with reason.
A month and half into the new fiscal year, Congress can’t seem to decide between what are three, wildly different scenarios for Hale’s world in 2014. The House endorsed most of President Barack Obama’s $527 billion request for the Defense Department in July. Last month’s stopgap CR went back to $496 billion. And DOD will drop by another $21 billion in mid-January if lawmakers do nothing to stop sequestration.
“We still don’t know what fiscal ’14 is, which is an extraordinary situation,” Hale told POLITICO. Making it worse, perhaps, is a growing acceptance—even callousness— in the Capitol toward the level of disorder sequestration brings.
Robert Hale
The first round of cuts that began on March 1 already forced DOD to implement $37 billion in reductions in the space of six months. Why should another $21 billion –spread over more than eight months—be any harder?
Indeed, this equation is now fundamental to the politics of the House-Senate budget talks which resume Wednesday. A significant faction of Republicans have come to embrace the lower post-sequestration caps set under the Budget Control Act in 2011. And the real-life math for the military has become submerged in the tit-for-tat politics over Obama’s healthcare reforms.
The next two weeks running up to Thanksgiving are pivotal if Congress is to have any chance of restoring some order for the Pentagon and a broken appropriations process. But what’s most remarkable is how lawmakers seem to be backing into decisions without first having a full debate over what level of defense the U.S. needs going forward.
Phi Beta Iota: The above requires an honest informed legislature and an honest informed executive, both committed to the public interest. Mike Nelson described the problem in 1994: “1970's technology and 1950's mind-sets struggling with 1990's opportunities.” It has gotten worse, not better. Cyber Commands are retarded — they destroy productivity, do not protect anything at all, and generally cost vastly more than they are worth across multiple forms of accounting.
Fraudsters are surprisingly successful at convincing call centre staff they are someone else, until their voiceprints are compared against the genuine article
