LONDON — China has made a “secret commitment” to prop up the crisis-hit eurozone in return for budget reforms and public sector cuts, the Sunday Times reported, amid ongoing turmoil over the region's debt crisis.
The paper said Chinese representatives at the Paris G20 finance gathering on Saturday had indicated that Beijing was willing to pump tens of billions into the eurozone to purchase infrastructure assets from debt-plagued nations.
The Sunday Times, which quoted a source close to the talks, added that Chinese banks could also increase their purchases of eurozone sovereign debt.
“China wants to be sure that Europe knows the size of the hole and that it won't get any bigger before they agree to fill it in,” the paper quoted the source as saying.
Europe had vowed to its G20 partners Saturday that it would take swift and decisive action to resolve a debt crisis that is threatening to drag the world economy back into recession.
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin, speaking after the meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers, said the eurozone would present answers as soon as next weekend, at a summit of EU leaders in Brussels on October 23.
Phi Beta Iota: Predatory capitalism and inverted democracy are now “bracketed” by the emerging new financial order on the one hand (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa + 50 other countries behind the scenes), and OccupyWallStreet in over 900 locations around the world. The world is at a design opportunity point. China will err on the side of institutions (doing the wrong thing wronger) and OWS will err on the side of populism in place of insttutions. We need a blend of both–a hybrid system whose signal characteristic must be transparency for truth producing trust.
US Attorney General Eric Holder held a press conference on 11 Oct where he claimed Federal authorities had foiled a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and to bomb the embassies of Saudi Arabia and Israel in Washington (NYT).
The vagueness and innuendo in the language of the complaint filed with the federal court reek of a half-baked sting operation.
For example, attacking the embassy of Saudi Arabia is mentioned as merely a “possibility” of bombing foreign government facilities of Saudi Arabia and “another country” located “within and outside of the United States.”
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Chuck's entire commentary and all three attachments are fully repeated in this post (below the line). The Iranian “plot” is significant because it could serve as a precipitant of revolution in the USA. Combined with OWS and a soccer mom torching herself on the front steps of Capitol Hill, the USA is close to “the perfect storm.”
Missed this when it first came out. Multiple countries appear to be declassifying modern extraterrestrial contact information, should be interesting. Note the non-apocalyptic view of 12 December 2012.
Guatemala and Mexico release secret documents and artefacts for forthcoming film Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond
Ben Child
Guardian, 29 September 2011
The ancient Mayans had contact with alien visitors who left behind evidence of their existence, according to a new Mexican documentary.
Sundance winner Juan Carlos Rulfo's Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond is currently in production for release next year to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, reports the Wrap.
Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was “the good of mankind”. He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros.
“Mexico will release codices, artefacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists,” he said. “The Mexican government is not making this statement on their own – everything we say, we're going to back it up.”
Hmmmmm. Does this connect Israel's larger covert operations inside the USA to the specific Iran plot as a possible Israeli covert operation to influence US public and US Congress?
In 2009, Shamai Leibowitz was working secretly for the FBI, translating wiretapped conversations among Israeli diplomats in this country. He passed some transcripts of these conversations to me, which described an Israeli diplomatic campaign in this country to create a hostile environment for relations with Iran. I published excerpts from them in my blog, Tikun Olam.
. . . . . .
The true story was why and how Israeli diplomats were intervening so obtrusively in US political life.
Phi Beta Iota: We do not think the Israeli's are behind the Iranian plot. It may even be that the Iranian liberation nut-jobs are not behind it either, and this is strictly a standard FBI over-reach with a sting that netted a used car salesman. What we do know is that both Congress and the White House have been very irresponsible in their confrontational statements toward Iran, and very irresponsible in failing to challenge the authenticity of this plot in detail.
James Bond-style weapons found on North Korean assassin
Weapons straight out of a James Bond film have been put on display in Seoul after authorities found them on a North Korean assassin.
EXTRACT
The weapons include an innocent-looking black torch, complete with a wrist strap and the word “Police” along one side, that is actually a gun capable of firing a bullet.
Prosecutors in the South Korean capital say the weapon had a range of around 30 feet and was loaded with a bullet that was coated in a poisonous chemical. A mere 10 milligrams of the poison is sufficient to cause breathing problems or heart failure, they said.
In a televised demonstration of the gun, a bullet fired from the torch penetrated deep into a mattress from a distance of 16 feet.
Phi Beta Iota: The contrast to the Iran plot farce in the USA could not be sharper, especially when the bloated insane US budget of pasty-faced white guys engaged on “domestic security” is taken into account.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
In the below essay, famed Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, a veteran of both the Irgun and Knesset, a hero of the 1948 War and true Israeli patriot, paints a portrait of Israel's unfolding grand-strategic ruin.
While Israel's penchant for self destruction is self evident in Avnery's exposition, the extent of Israel's insanity becomes stunningly clear when Avnery's exposition is evaluated within the grand strategic framework evolved by the late American strategist Colonel John Boyd [which I have distributed before but am including again as Atch 2 for ease of comparison]. In foreign policy literature, the term of art “grand strategy' is used without explicit definition in vague often pompous sounding contexts. Part of the reason for this intellectual slipperiness, I think, is that the process of defining, or better, evolving a grand strategy is a creative one of synthesis; and the academy is notoriously poor in teaching or explaining synthesis, which is a messy creative process of trial and error conditioned by selection and reevaluation. One of Boyd's most important contributions in his theory of conflict is that he made the idea of grand strategy a precise concept intellectually that can be evaluated and understood analytically, at least after the fact. As you will see in the excercize below, analysis and evaluation is the easy part of grand strategy; the hard part, as Boyd also showed, is putting the pieces together (synthesis) to create a grand strategic course of action directed toward goals that improve a nation's (or any organism, for that matter) fitness to cope with the threats, constraints, and opportunities in its environment.
So, with this in mind, read Avnery's essay carefully, mark its crucial points, and then compare them to the criteria and argument laid out in my own essay, Chuck Spinney: Criteria for a Sensible Grand Strategy. Now ask yourself three questions:
Is Israel on a evolutionary pathway to ruin?
Is our blind obedience to Israel's policies good for Israel or is it reinforcing its pathway to ruin ?
And most importantly, is unquestioning obedience to Israel a sensible grand strategic course of action for the United States?
You will see that to ask these questions is to answer them. The first step in evolving a new course of action is to recognize that a course change is a necessity.
Chuck Spinney
Badalona, Catalunya (which some say is part of Spain)
AN OLD photo from World War I shows a company of German soldiers getting on the train on their way to the front. On the wall of the car somebody had scribbled: “viel Feind, viel Ehr” (“The more enemies, the more Honor”.)
In those days, at the very start of what was to be the First World War, country after country was declaring war on Germany. The spirit of the graffito reflected the hubris of the supreme commander, Kaiser Wilhelm, who relied on the war plan of the legendary German General Staff. It was indeed an excellent war plan, and as excellent war plans are apt to do, it started going awry right from the beginning.
The foolish Kaiser now has the heirs he deserves. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, a former army Chief of Staff whose intelligence is below the average even of that rank, has announced that Israel could not possibly apologize to Turkey, even though its national interests may demand it, because it would hurt our “prestige”.
Many enemies, much prestige.
It seems that we shall soon run out of friends whom we can turn into enemies to gather even more prestige.
* * *
LAST WEEK a black cat came between Israel and its second best friend: Germany.
