Camus 50 years gone

M

Sarkozy proposes to move the body from Lourmain to the Pantheon in Paris.

Obama sides with Volcker, finally, contra the Zombie Banks

Is Tiny Tim going to cry? Gonna get a spanking when he gets home to Broad and Wall tonight?

Poor Paul looks like he’s STILL not sure the Prez’ll give the word.

Gitmo Sgt blows whistle: Prisoner “suicides” were murder

Major piece in February’s Harper’s. Hats off to them.

The center does not hold.

Obama has done nothing but talk on this.

9/11 truth tidbits

For files.

1. German magazine publishes a general blast at the official story: “We Do Not Believe You!”

Recall that the German Defense Minister, Andreas von Bulow, stated loudly soon after the attacks that they were in some fashion an inside job, thinking it seems of Mossadist influence working within the western agencies to nurture and clear the way for the misison (a guess that I continue to think is worth keeping in mind, against, some day distant, the appearance of evidence).

2. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s appointee to run the Ministry of Truth, advocates (in 2008) infiltration of Conspiracy groups as a means of turning off the message.

Kierkegaard:
The destruction of Jerusalem

He weeps over Jerusalem.

And yet the city was still standing in its glory, and the temple still held its head high, higher than any structure in the world.

And Christ Himself says, “If thou hadst known in this thy day the things which are for thy good!” But to this he adds, “Now they are hid from thine eyes.” In God’s eternal counsel its destruction is determined, and salvation is hid from the eyes of its inhabitants.

Was the generation then living more wicked than the foregoing generations to which it owed its life?

Was the whole nation corrupt, was there none righteous in Jerusalem, not a single one who could check God’s wrath?

No, its destruction was determined. In vain the besieged city looked in anguish for a way out, the army of the enemy crushed it in its mighty embrace, and no one escaped, and heaven remained shut and sent forth no angel except the angel of death which brandished its sword over the city.

Is this the jealousy of God, that He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, in such a way that He does not punish the fathers but the children?

What answer should we make? Should we say:

“There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days. Such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see. We thank God that we live in peace and security, that the scream of anguish from those days reaches us only very faintly. We will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness, unaffected by the storms of existence. We do not feel strong enough to reflect upon such things, but we are ready to thank God that we are not subject to such trials.”

Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk?

Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world?

Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur?

And has not this fact, the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?

If once it occurred in the world that man’s lot was essentially different from what it ordinarily is, what assurance is there that this will not recur?

What assurance that this is not the true thing, and what ordinarily occurs is the untrue?

Or is the true proved to be such by the fact that it most often occurs?

And does not that really often occur which those ages witnessed?

Is it not what we all of us in so many ways have experienced, that what occurs on a great scale is experienced also in a minor degree?

“Think ye,” said Christ, “that those Galileans whose blood Pilate commanded to be shed were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered these things?” It was a providential dispensation, you will say, not a punishment.

But the destruction of Jerusalem was a punishment, and it fell with equal severity upon the innocent and the guilty …

EITHER/OR – The Ultimatum

Yoo tries to speak

Wow. Sounds like a little boy.

His bland loyalty to Daddy perhaps explains North Korea.

The more things change …

Alfred Hitchcock presents …

… a fine elderly unemployed couple, about to be bounced out of their home, try to work things out.

… the trauma of losing your job.

Gaza a year after

M

1. Noam Chomsky talks about Gaza a year after the Israeli attack.

2. Meanwhile Israel complains because George Mitchell has threatened to cut off the cash trying to pressure Netanyahu — a precise echo of the Bush-Baker years.

3. And the Israeli general who once headed their nuclear weapons program says that Iranian nukes are seven years distant.

Team Obama this year has enacted a betrayal of the Cairo speech.

M

Ye Olde Retirement Account:
Whither the Buck?

Since Pearl Harbor Day, everybody — everybody — in the money world has setting up for a dollar rally in early 2010, to correct the Buck’s big fall in 2009. The rally — or at least a snap of the dollar’s downtrend — began in December.

But recent US economic news has been mixed, with housing optimism again failing. And yesterday’s unexpected drop in the monthly Jobs report — when the whisper numbers, reported by Todd H at Minyanville, were as sunny as 100,000 jobs created, not the 85,000 lost in fact reported — has people scratching.

And has a lot of fat set-ups suddenly looking pale. If the dollar were to turn down here with any authority, it would touch off a panic sell. And gold would soar.

Here’s the past year for the DXY index, which measures the Dollar against the Euro, Yen, Pound, Swiss Franc, Swedish Kroner and … Aussie dollar, if memory serves.

You can see the year’s tumble, the upturn in December, and the flatline since, as people puzzled and waited for yesterday’s US job number — which sent the dollar down.

Also this past week, bad employment news in Europe and an unusual public disagreement in Tokyo enriched the currency picture.

The new Japanese Finance Minister on his first day loudly renounced his predecessor’s Strong Yen bias — but the next day the Prime Minister rebuked the new Finance guy.

Nevertheless, people seem to think the Japanese bank may begin to publicly intervene — buying dollars — to weaken the Yen, trying to recover the balance that was broken this past year as the Dollar tumbled. (A relatively weak Yen helps Toyota and Sony sell stuff to the corpulent American consumer.)

So. New employment weakness in Europe will promote a weaker Euro.

Tokyo wants a weaker Yen.

But the (mixed) weakness in USA economic numbers across the past month will also blunt the momentum that had been building at the Fed to raise its bank rates sooner than later, blunting the Dollar’s heavily anticipated rise.

So. The three big currencies seem ready to race each other to the bottom.

Makes it very difficult to guess or bet on the currency pairs (ie, to trade dollar versus euro, euro vs yen, dollar vs yen, etc).

But if all the central bankers are intent on keeping their currencies weak, it seems gold — despite the recent trend in thinking re the Dollar rebound — will benefit again this year.

So I got back into some gold yesterday in my retirement account (having sold out early December, on the report of the November employment numbers).

And may prove a bit early getting back into gold now, if indeed the Dollar bid of December holds a while longer. As always we shall see. The dollar was down yesterday, on the bad US employment news.

I also got into a Japan fund this week, inspired by the new Finance Minister. The chart here is inviting — for Japanese stocks have suffered of late, not like American, worse than Chinese. Thus obvious room for upside if the Strong Yen is truly dead. And Japan would serve as something of a hedge on my new gold bet if the dollar were to rock a bit skyward against the yen.

Am still 40% cash in the retirement account. Would like to get back in technology if the stock markets provide an opening (ie, go down) sometime. They’ve been up, generally speaking, since March last year — perhaps (another story this week) with direct help from Tsy and Fed, who may have been buying S&P Mini Futures on the sly (again).

(They began doing so in March 2003 to support the Iraq war. Fiendish. A great sickness. Free market capitalism? Don’t be silly.)

Daniel Ellsberg re Obama /
Bell helicopters in Vietnam & Predator drones in Pakghanistan

Another in Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frog interviews on the National Security Apparat.

Very worthwhile — as they’ve all been. This is number 18. She’s leading one of the most important discussions around.

Ellsberg is measured in assessing Obama, and even so the judgments are bleak. Syncs well with my own black-biled broodings.

Touches on the political consequences of allowing high hopes to fail for lack of leadership. Ellsberg doesn’t mention the Carter-Reaganism dynamic, but what he says brings it to mind.

And he puts the puzzle of the escalation decision in clear terms, observing that neither the top Pentagon brass, nor NS Advisor Jms Jones (retired four-star general), nor Rahm Emanuel — with the fine DC instincts and his eye on the 2010 elections — were pusihng the escalation. (Nor Biden.) And some were on record against it.

Is Obama more of a militarist than Petraeus, whose recent interview in Newsweek shows a mind less than persuaded of any successful outcome over there? Where did the decision come from?

Westmoreland and LBJ

M

Recall Col. Flectcher Prouty’s history of the American war in Vietnam — which he thinks began almost accidentally, with a big push by Textron and its lobbyists to get the Gov to start buying Bell “Huey” helicopters en masse.

As conglomerate Textron — then as now a major war supplier — was preparing a corporate takeover of Bell Helicopters, a guy from Yale working on Wall Street kept showing up at Prouty’s office atop the Air Force staff in the Pentagon — trying to sell the notion that tactical helicopters would revolutionize counterinsurgency ops …

The Air Force kept saying no. Finally somebody got to somebody on the Nat’l Security Council staff in the White House, and the order came across the river: Let’s buy some more helicopters — and let’s base them across the border from Laos, rather than where all the shootin’s going on. Yeah, let’s put them in Vietnam.

The Huey program was greenlighted — but under CIA auspices. Which perhaps rounds around to explain why a guy from Yale was lead salesman

The CIA had opened its first official spy store in Saigon in 1954 (post French defeat at Dien Bien Phu) but our involvement there reached back into the war, when the OSS helped to arm Ho’s nationalists against the Japanese. Some say that the same guys now with CIA badges, including Edwin Lansdale, were covertly on the ground again well before ‘54, working again with locals to oust the French …

In any case. Prouty writes that each new CIA helicopter base in Vietnam needed 500 soldiers to provide security. And the soldiers needed hundreds of support personnel.

And when the bases started drawing fire from local insurgents even more advisors were needed to keep the peace.

Wasn’t long before 16,000 men were in country, under CIA command, shooting at insurgents from behind barricades as the flyboys bounced and bombed around the South trying to figure out how to win their hearts and minds with helicopters.

Then a new President abruptly took office persuaded it was time to let the Pentagon clean house.

Obama and Stanley

M

The obvious parallel is the CIA’s drone campaign, based in Afghanistan, attacking Pakistan, which began under lame duck Bush-Cheney, August 2008, rather late — perhaps to be sure it was online fait accompli before the new prez came in.

The latter again brings to mind the Bay of Pigs — in particular the panicked revisions to the plan that went on between November 1960, when Kennedy shocked the planners by defeating Nixon, and January when he took office.

Steps were taken to downsize the scheme (quite consciously beyond hope of success) and to persuade the new White House team that the raid had been approved by Eisenhower (not so — rather, by VP Nixon, who headed the CIA oversight committee in Ike’s White House).

The raid came 70 days into Kennedy’s presidency. He wasn’t quick enough to choke it off, but deserves great credit for frustrating the prime motive by refusing its gambit — ie, refusing to send in the Marines to rescue the raid (and execute regime change).

And, of course, he never escalated with the Pentagon in Vietnam. That came after Johnson won his ‘64 election.

Obama within weeks of taking office enlarged the CIA drone program.

And now, against the advice and/or instincts of Jones, Mullen, Eikenberry, even it seems Petraeus (four four-star generals) as well as VP Biden and CoS Rahm, he’s escalating the war.

Ellsberg pointedly compares Obama’s decision to that of Johnson (under whom and closely with he worked) in 1965 — and sadly laughs at the notion of turning on a dime and getting out in July 2011. The commitment, he insists, cannot but be anything but indefinite re both time and manpower.

More than puzzling. Why did subordinate Stanley McChrystal win this policy debate? Why was he even involved in it?

And what is the War Aim over there? I STILL don’t see one, and neither it seems does the senior brass.

Let’s see, who makes the Predator drone? Expensive little bombs ….. Who’s their anchor banker …?