Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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SchwartzReport: Book on Congress Lacking Intelligence and Integrity — Literally Ignorant and Reduced to Partisan Posturing

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

schwartz reportI cannot express how strongly I agree with this.  My only critique: He does not properly place this in the context of the transition into the Age of the Non-geographical corporate states. If our democracy were functioning properly the lunatic Right Congresspersons would not be elected.  Click through to see the interview. It is worth your time.

Journalist Explains How Utter Lack of Expertise in Congress Is Ruining America

ERIC W. DOLAN – The Raw Story 

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

For his new book, journalist Robert Kaiser intensely researched the political maneuvering surrounding the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. His conclusion? Most members of Congress don’t understand what they’re arguing about.

Speaking on PBS, Kaiser said Wall Street reform only occurred in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse thanks to the unique talents of former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT).  Unlike the rest of Congress, Frank and Dodds had an actual grasp on the financial situation and understood the need to act. Frank provided the brainpower, while Dodds’ political skill was necessary for financial reform to pass.

‘But it was upsetting to me as a citizen to realize how few members understood the issues they were dealing with,” Kaiser remarked. ‘These are, of course, extremely complicated financial matters, how banks work, how they’re regulated, so on.”  ‘Not everybody can know this, but at the end, I concluded that you could fit the number of experts in Congress on financial issues easily onto the roster of a Major League Baseball team,” he added. ‘That’s 25 people. I think that is the max.”

Kaiser also said the lack of expertise was resulting in a deadlocked Congress. Rather than trying to craft meaningful legislation to aid the country, most lawmakers were more interested in scoring partisan political points.  ‘You don’t really engage on issues in this Congress,” he explained. ‘What you engage in is political warfare, partisan bashing, one or the other. And the result is that serious policy issues, as we have seen again and again, get very short shrift.”

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NIGHTWATCH: Turkish Unrest, Islamization

08 Wild Cards

Turkish Reach by Language
Turkish Reach by Language

Turkey: Protestors clashed with police for a third day in Istanbul. One press service reported 1,000 people were injured and 1,000 were arrested in the past three days. Protests also took place in Ankara, Adana and Izmir. One Turkish news source claims protests have occurred in 67 of 81 provinces. More are threatened on Monday.

Comment: Government plans to demolish the last large green space and public park in Istanbul and replace it with a mosque were the catalyst for the protests, primarily by secular urban youth. Another factor was a new law restricting alcohol sales. The root of the unrest is the growing lack of empowerment for secular interests and people who are less devout Muslims.

The protests resemble a Turkish variant of the Arab spring uprisings, which started with secular young city dwellers protesting conditions. The youth in the big cities are often out of touch with the electorate at large in almost every Islamic Middle Eastern country. Their ideas about elected government are naïve, as they have been reported in media interviews.

Turkish youths and city dwellers who support the protests are railing against the actions of a legitimately elected president and parliament. Their complaints are that the government is too authoritarian, too Islamist and not representative of secular Turks.

For Turkey, the revolution began when Prime Minister Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected a decade ago. It started a slow moving Islamist revolution that gutted the political power of the Army and continues to move Turkey toward a system of laws based on Sharia. It was not the revolution the secularists expected.

The Erdogan government is representative of the majority of Turks, as evidenced by its repeated electoral majorities. Any concessions it makes will be temporary. The direction of Turkey's political development is set and popular, except among some in the cities.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Turkish Unrest, Islamization”

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Michelle Monk: Collapse of Dollar, Forced Expulsion of Congress in 2013 — Weak Signals, Strong Wishful Thinking

03 Economy
Michelle Monk
Michelle Monk

Has the Dollar Collapse Begun?

01 Jun 2013 08:57 PM PDT

Some of you may have noticed when I passively posted this article by RT:  Dollar could be in danger as the world’s currency…  

Also see these articles:

Warning U.S. Dollar Collapse Underway, Massive Shortages in Gold …www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article40222.html‎
May 1, 2013 – Warning U.S. Dollar Collapse Underway, Massive Shortages in Gold and Silver :: The Market Oracle :: Financial Markets Analysis …

Gold Scents: DOLLAR COLLAPSE HAS BEGUNgoldscents.blogspot.com/2013/04/dollar-collapse-has-begun.html‎
Apr 30, 2013 – I've been pointing out for several months now that the recent rally in thedollar was a mirage, an illusion generated by the yen, euro, pound, and …

Homeland Security insider warns orchestrated collapse of US dollarwww.naturalnews.com/039744_US_dollar_collapse_Federal_Reserve.html‎
Apr 2, 2013 – Not only is a complete collapse of the U.S. dollar on the very near horizon, according to the unnamed source, but a single, uniform currency …

Dollar Collapse By End Of Year? – “We Are Preparing For Massive …www.dailypaul.com › … › LVRJ / Righthaven Lawsuit Info‎
May 4, 2012 – Through his sources, Hagmann confirmed Rickards' ongoing thesis of a fear of a U.S. dollar collapse at the hands of the Chinese (U.S. treasury …
At the time, I said that I didn't know what to think.

But I'd like to provide an opinion… so this is what a friend of mine says (with my additional links):

Continue reading “Michelle Monk: Collapse of Dollar, Forced Expulsion of Congress in 2013 — Weak Signals, Strong Wishful Thinking”

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Opinion: China’s Empire Soft and Pervasive + Meta-RECAP

02 China
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Opinion: China’s Economic Empire

By HERIBERTO ARAÚJO and JUAN PABLO CARDENAL

New York Times, June 1, 2013

EXTRACT

By buying companies, exploiting natural resources, building infrastructure and giving loans all over the world, China is pursuing a soft but unstoppable form of economic domination. Beijing’s essentially unlimited financial resources allow the country to be a game-changing force in both the developed and developing world, one that threatens to obliterate the competitive edge of Western firms, kill jobs in Europe and America and blunt criticism of human rights abuses in China.

Ultimately, thanks to the deposits of over a billion Chinese savers, China Inc. has been able to acquire strategic assets worldwide. This is possible because those deposits are financially repressed — savers receive negative returns because of interest rates below the inflation rate and strict capital controls that prevent savers from investing their money in more profitable investments abroad. Consequently, the Chinese government now controls oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan to China and from South Sudan to the Red Sea.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Opinion: China’s Empire Soft and Pervasive + Meta-RECAP”

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Berto Jongman: Professor Charles Kurzman Points Out Blatant Errors in World Map of Terrorism Now Posted at the Web Site of the NCTC

Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

As Phi Beta Iota likes to say, “we do not make this stuff up.”

Dear US Government: Your ‘Terror’ map of the Muslim World is from the Time of Shakespeare (Kurzman))

Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is author of The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (2011) and Muslim-American Terrorism: Declining Further (2013).

“The United States is not at war with Islam,” President Obama said last week at the National Defense University, in a speech that declared an end to America’s “wartime footing” in the fight against terrorism. President Bush said the same when he launched the war on terrorism in 2001: “We do not fight Islam, we fight against evil.”

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

But in America’s sprawling security establishment, not everyone has stayed on message. Until this week, the website of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) — the U.S. government’s primary counterterrorism clearinghouse — featured a map that appeared to identify the entire Muslim world as a terror zone.

All of North Africa, the coast of East Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, the north of India, and much of Southeast Asia was shaded in red. Wherever Muslims are a majority, the map implied, terrorism lurks.

But this map misrepresented the geography of Islamic terrorism, which has been concentrated in only a handful of civil war zones and is rare or non-existent in most Muslim communities.

The map also misrepresented American policy, which has avoided a blanket association of all Muslims with terrorism. The NCTC map literally threw a red blanket of terrorism over the Muslim populations of Africa and Eurasia.

Plus, the map was half a millennium out of date. A month ago, I finally remembered where I had seen it before. It was almost identical to the boundaries of the Muslim world in 1500, as depicted in William Brice’s Historical Atlas of Islam (see below) . Professor Barbara von Schlegell’s webpage has long posted this and other maps as a teaching resource.

Read full post with additional maps.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Professor Charles Kurzman Points Out Blatant Errors in World Map of Terrorism Now Posted at the Web Site of the NCTC”

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