Both the Saudis talking down oil and Olmert & Co. talking love and peace with the Palestinians  each an abrupt change in policy mid December the week after Cheney’s two-hour visit to King Fahd  each of these seems to me preparations for the attack on Iran. May take a few months yet, but it’s coming, and will swamp whatever initiatives Pelosi and Reid may manage to mount.
Strange, ahistoric hurricane-force winds have been killing people and pushing cars around these past days from the British Isles to Germany.
Those who have never seen harmonious Amsterdam should perhaps book a trip (when master permits) before it becomes a watery necropolis.
Art Buchwald died today. I remember my mother, who aside from Watergate (the hearings re which we watched together that summer of ’73 while she ironed) had no interest in politics, chuckling over his columns. He was 81.
The NY Times has a video interview  filmed this past summer as a pre-obit piece. (?!) The Last Word. Something new, it seems. Pressing the bounds of taste. But providing the passing spirit the Tom Sawyer-like satisfaction of attending one’s own funeral. The video opens with a happy roar: “I’m Art Buchwald and I just died!”
The BBC says:
Known for his wry humour, he published his final book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye, in November of last year. The book includes his plan for getting a big newspaper obituary: Don’t die on the same day as a Nobel Prize winner.
Buchwald published his first column in 1949 when living in Paris, and went on to write thousands more after he returned to the US, many poking fun at Washington’s elite. That led to one of his most-quoted jabs: “If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.” His Pulitzer Prize came in 1982, for distinguished commentary.
He suffered from kidney failure a year ago and went into hospice, where he was not expected to live long. But he defied doctors’ predictions, surviving for nearly a year despite refusing dialysis treatment. He received friends including respected journalists Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite and Ben Bradlee at his hospice before choosing to move back home after several months.
Too Soon to Say Goodbye includes classic Buchwald observations, such as that dying is not as difficult as finding a place to park in Washington, DC. (END BBC piece)
As Bush’s War Strategy Shifts to Iran, Christian Zionists Gear Up for the Apocalypse
By Sarah Posner – Alternet.org
January 18, 2007
Is Bush pushing for a second war or a Second Coming?
Christian Zionists are dancing the hora in San Antonio. Armageddon appears to be at hand.
As George W. Bush sets his sights on Iran, even Republicans are wondering how to constitutionally contain the trigger-happy king. But for an influential group of Christian fundamentalists — White House allies that garner not only feel-good meetings with the President’s liaisons to the “faith-based” community but also serious discussions with Bush’s national security staff — an attack on Iran is just what God ordered.
Biblical literalists, convened together through San Antonio megapastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI), are now seeing the fruits of their yearlong campaign to convince the Bush administration to attack Iran.
Hagee came to Washington last summer on the warpath, and many Republicans — and even a few Democrats — welcomed him as an alleged supporter of Israel.
More than 3,500 CUFI members fanned out across the Capitol to meet with their congressional delegations. Televangelist power brokers, like rising star Rod Parsley of Ohio, who serve as directors of CUFI, now proudly display photographs of their meetings with senators, brows furrowed over the seriousness of the task at hand. But probably Hagee’s most important meeting was smaller and not public, at the White House with deputy national security adviser and Iran Contra player Elliott Abrams.
Did the two men talk dispensationalism or diplomacy? That the president’s top national security advisor on Middle East policy met with the popular author of a best-selling book that claims that God requires a war with Iran demonstrates just how intensely politics trumps policy (and human lives) for this unhinged administration.
Emboldened, Hagee returned to San Antonio fretting that “most Americans are simply not aware that the battle for Western Civilization is engaged” and “don’t want to believe that Iran would use nuclear weapons against mighty America. They will!”
As the bloody fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raged last August, Hagee organized a grassroots lobbying campaign to blitz the White House switchboard with callers opposed to a cease-fire. Members were urged to call the White House to “congratulate” Bush on using the term “Islamofascists” and on his “moral clarity.”
Armed with blood-red rhetoric and the hubris of the politically connected, Hagee filled his 5,000-seat church for a weekend-long event culminating in his Night to Honor Israel in October. To an eager audience preparing for the end times, analogies to Hitler and denouncement of “appeasement” were flying. Anti-Muslim rhetoric was at a fevered pitch.
All of it was dressed up as love and benevolence for God’s chosen people. But what masqueraded as Biblically mandated generosity toward the Jews was nothing more than a political rally for a war not just against Iran, but against Islam, and for the dominance of Christianity (Hagee’s brand, of course).
By the end of the year, Hagee was warning his followers that Iran was “reloading for the next war,” claiming that he had “reason to believe that Iran will face a military preemptive strike from Israel to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons,” and denouncing the Iraq Study Group as “anti-Israel.”
Although he had spent nearly a year claiming that Iran intended to destroy Israel, Hagee, in rejecting the ISG’s recommendation to diplomatically engage Iran, fumed, “America’s problems with Iran have nothing to do with Israel. Iran’s president has said he intends to use nuclear weapons against the United States of America. My father’s generation would have considered this statement a declaration of war and bombed Iran by this time.”
Bush knows Hagee’s minions are locked and loaded for a war to end not only all wars, but the world. He might have already signed a secret executive order authorizing military action against Iran. But last week Bush nonetheless lamely tried to bring the rest of the country on board with his tried (but by no means true) device of uttering the words “Iran,” “nuclear weapons” and “9/11″ in the same breath.
His saber rattling won’t work for the majority of Americans outraged by his conduct of the Iraq war and opposed to its escalation. But for his listeners gearing up for the end times — a segment of American evangelicals increasingly united around this issue — Bush fired up the grandiose rhetoric of a final showdown: “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time.”
END of SUSAN POSNER piece.
From Not a Pretty Picture re a California woman caught defrauding painters and consumers of art:
Ron Kyle, a then-out-of-work computer technician, discovered the auction program while channel surfing one night. He thought the prints were being sold at a bargain and could be resold for profit. He used a credit card to buy five prints  two Picassos, two Icarts and a Chagall  for $9,533.76, though he said they were touted as being worth a little less than $200,000.
It didn’t take Kyle long to surmise that his purchases were fake. For one, he couldn’t find a trace of the art dealer in Britain who supposedly signed the certificates of authenticity that came with the pieces. For another, he said, the Chagall was signed on the wrong side of the print.
Kyle tried unsuccessfully to get his money back. He has filed suit …
Longtime art collectors Tom and Mary Ann Cogliano of Santa Rosa, Calif., said they spent more than $50,000 for six pieces on Eubanks’ show.
They donated one of the prints, ostensibly by Salvador Dali, to a charity fundraiser, only to have an appraiser declare it phony. Tom checked, and told law enforcement authorities that the rest of the prints were bogus as well.
For him, the worst part was not the money.
“It made me look foolish, especially with these folks who are my friends  and here I am with a fake piece of art,” he said.
“You’d have to give me a check for a million bucks to go through that kind of embarrassment again.”
Two Minutes Closer to Doomsday â€â€
Scientists Change Symbolic Clock to Recognize New Dangers
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post
Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ ticking nudge to the world’s conscience, moved two minutes closer to nuclear midnight yesterday, the closest to doomsday it has been since the Cold War.
North Korea’s nuclear bomb test, Iran’s nuclear plans, and atomic energy projects posed as an answer to climate change prompted the scientific journal to move the hands of the clock on its cover to 11:55. Midnight represents doomsday on the clock, for six decades a symbolic indicator of the threat posed by nuclear proliferation.
Nuclear science has changed the world, “but it hasn’t managed to change the way that people think about the world, and that’s why we’re here,” said Mark Strauss, editor of the journal, founded by University of Chicago scientists whose work on the first atomic bomb led them to anti-nuclear advocacy. Decisions to change the clock come from the bulletin’s board of sponsors, a group of scientists and policymakers that includes 18 Nobel laureates.
The group unveiled the new clock and made a statement at a joint news conference in Washington and London yesterday. “Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices,” the statement declared.
Nuclear weapons expansion, renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons in war and poor safeguards of nuclear materials “are symptomatic of a failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.”
This is the 18th time the clock’s hands have moved since it was created in 1947. At the start of the nuclear arms race in 1953, the timepiece came within two minutes of midnight. In 1991, after the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the clock moved the farthest from doomsday it has ever been, to 11:43.
“Bush the father’s policy decisions produced the biggest one-time move away from midnight the clock ever experienced and Bush the son’s policy decisions have pushed the clock almost as close to midnight as it’s ever been,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University and a former member of the Atomic Scientists board that sets the clock.
Yesterday’s announcement was attended by scientists and policymakers including Stephen Hawking, an astrophysicist, author and University of Cambridge mathematics professor; Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society; and Leon Lederman, director emeritus of the Fermi Laboratory.
Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the International Crisis Group, sounded one of the news conference’s few semi-bright notes by pointing to renewed talks with nuclear aspirants: “Diplomacy ought to be our first resort, especially when there is time.”
Six workers in Honduras were crushed to death by sacks of coffee beans unleashed when a wall in a warehouse gave way, rescue officials said.
The men were young seasonal workers at a coffee farm in Villanueva in the north of the Central American nation.
Officials said the wall collapse caused an overhead storeroom to come down, burying the men under around 10 tons of coffee beans.
Dozens of rescuers searched the site as relatives gathered for news.
“We’ve recovered five of the bodies, and there’s one left,” rescue worker Francisco Alvarenga told Reuters news agency.
Other workers were reported injured in the collapse.
One man, Cristian Nahun Hernandez, said he was inside when someone shouted that the wall was collapsing.
“I missed being crushed to death by a miracle,” the Associated Press news agency quoted him as saying. “I ran, and I saved myself.”
And here is ING, advising clients on January 9 to worry about the US and/or Israel attacking Iran.
Juan Cole (always worth reading) seems to side with Scott Ritter as to whether or not the American-Israeli attack on Iran has been shelved since the November elections, wondering, these past days, re the arrest of the Iranians in Irbil, Were the Americans trying to provoke Iran? (Posted as a comment below, in case you can’t get into the original at Salon)
This BBC feature story (from Sunday January 7) mentions in passing that Israeli plans for attacking the Iranian uranium enrichment plant at Natanz feature the use of nuclear weapons.
QUOTE: If things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole. The theory is that they will explode deep underground, both destroying the bunker and limiting the radioactive fallout. END QUOTE
New mini-tactical nuclear weapons were dreamt of in the Project for the New American Century’s warmongering manifesto of September 2000, and then developed by Bush-Cheney when they were installed four months later. Bill Clinton, during his speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention, warned that the Bushmen had not only built these new weapons but were “talking” about using them in first strikes. Are these the weapons Israel has now told the BBC it is planning to use against Iran?
In any case, the plan is to go nuclear, and across the pond not a ripple disturbs the americans as they order the dispatch of another 20,000 troops to the blood-belt that, should Israel strike, will become the front in a regional war. The Iran-Iraq war of the 80s writ larger. Boots on the ground, the US will have no choice as to whether to join in this war.
In the Ritter-Hersh debate about whether or not the Attack-Iran plan is still on track, Ritter has edged ahead. The London Times a week ago featured stories about Israeli military and psychological preparations for attack. Bush’s speech on Wednesday re New Ideas for Iraq buried Baker’s “Talk to Syria and Iran” idea. Then on Thursday the US “arrested” (using stun grenades) Iranians in an office in Kurdish Iraq. Yesterday Iran demanded their release. And today the americans flip them the bird on TV:
“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq,” said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley on Sunday. “We know there are jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq. …We know also that Iran is supplying elements in Iraq that are attacking Iraqis and attacking our forces,” he told ABC Television.
This compares favorably to the nasty declarations of the Palestinian Authority premier in Tehran a few weeks ago.
Hamas leader acknowledges ‘reality’ of Israel
Conal Urquhart  Wednesday January 10, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Hamas accepts the existence of the state of Israel but will not officially recognise it until the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, according to the group’s leader in Damascus, Khaled Meshaal.
In comments made to Reuters, Mr Meshaal softened his anti-Israel rhetoric, suggesting that Hamas does not seek the destruction of Israel as written in the group’s charter. He said that Israel is a “reality” and “there will remain a state called Israel, this is a matter of fact”.
“The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel. The problem is that the Palestinian state does not exist,” he said.
Israel and the international community have demanded that the Hamas government recognise Israel as a prerequisite to receiving tax revenues and international funding. Its refusal to do so has led to Palestinian Authority employees receiving little or no wages for almost a year and a severe depression in the Palestinian economy.
Mr Meshaal, who Israel tried to assassinate in 1997 by injecting poison into his ear, is seen as a hardliner who has used his influence in the last year to move Hamas from a political direction to greater confrontation with Israel.
He was seen as the driving force behind the Hamas-led attack on Israeli positions near Gaza in June last year, which led to the capture of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit and a full scale confrontation with Israel.
Because Mr Meshaal is the conduit for much of Hamas’s finances, he is able to exert a major influence on the armed wing of the group, which diverged from the political wing led by Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister.
Palestinian observers have long suspected that Mr Meshaal, who has never set foot in Gaza or the West Bank, is a pragmatist whose ultimate aim is to lead the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
Hamas is not currently a member of the PLO but as the dominant political force in the Palestinian territories, it is only a matter of time and negotiation before it takes its place. The PLO is dominated by Fatah and leftist groups who were powerful in the 1960s and 1970s but whose influence has waned. The current head is Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president who took over after the death of Yasser Arafat.
Mr Meshaal’s comments are far from the rhetoric of the Hamas charter, which was published in 1988. In the pre-amble, the charter notes that “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it has eliminated its predecessors”.
But speaking in Damascus, Mr Meshaal said: “As a Palestinian today I speak of a Palestinian and Arab demand for a state on 1967 borders. It is true that in reality there will be an entity or state called Israel on the rest of Palestinian land.”
Mr Meshaal’s comments caused some surprise among Hamas officials in Gaza, although they were quick to point out there was little substantial divergence from other statements by the group.
Ahmed Yusuf, an advisor to Mr Haniyeh, said that Hamas recognised Israel’s de facto existence but was not going to recognise it officially.
“Israel is there, it is part of the United Nations and we do not deny its existence. But we still have rights and land there which have been usurped and until these matters are dealt with we will withhold our recognition,” he said.
From The Independent in London:
By Michael McCarthy and Stephen Castle
10 January 2007
Europe, the richest and most fertile continent and the model for the modern world, will be devastated by climate change, the European Union predicts today.
The ecosystems that have underpinned all European societies from Ancient Greece and Rome to present-day Britain and France, and which helped European civilisation gain global pre-eminence, will be disabled by remorselessly rising temperatures, EU scientists forecast in a remarkable report which is as ominous as it is detailed.
Much of the continent’s age-old fertility, which gave the world the vine and the olive and now produces mountains of grain and dairy products, will not survive the climate change forecast for the coming century, the scientists say, and its wildlife will be devastated.
Europe’s modern lifestyles, from summer package tours to winter skiing trips, will go the same way, they say, as the Mediterranean becomes too hot for holidays and snow and ice disappear from mountain ranges such as the Alps – with enormous economic consequences. The social consequences will also be felt as heat-related deaths rise and extreme weather events, such as storms and floods, become more violent.
The report, stark and uncompromising, marks a step change in Europe’s own role in pushing for international action to combat climate change, as it will be used in a bid to commit the EU to ambitious new targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
The European Commission wants to hold back the rise in global temperatures to 2C above the pre-industrial level (at present, the level is 0.6C). To do that, it wants member states to commit to cutting back emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, to 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as long as other developed countries agree to do the same.
Failing that, the EU would observe a unilateral target of a 20 per cent cut.
The Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, gave US President George Bush a preview of the new policy during a visit to the White House this week.
The force of today’s report lies in its setting out of the scale of the continent-wide threat to Europe’s “ecosystem services”.
That is a relatively new but powerful concept, which recognises essential elements of civilised life – such as food, water, wood and fuel – which may generally be taken for granted, are all ultimately dependent on the proper functioning of ecosystems in the natural world. Historians have recognised that Europe was particularly lucky in this respect from the start, compared to Africa or pre-Columbian America – and this was a major reason for Europe’s rise to global pre-eminence.
“Climate change will alter the supply of European ecosystem services over the next century,” the report says. “While it will result in enhancement of some ecosystem services, a large portion will be adversely impacted because of drought, reduced soil fertility, fire, and other climate change-driven factors.
“Europe can expect a decline in arable land, a decline in Mediterranean forest areas, a decline in the terrestrial carbon sink and soil fertility, and an increase in the number of basins with water scarcity. It will increase the loss of biodiversity.”
The report predicts there will be some European “winners” from climate change, at least initially. In the north of the continent, agricultural yields will increase with a lengthened growing season and a longer frost-free period. Tourism may become more popular on the beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic as the Mediterranean becomes too hot, and deaths and diseases related to winter cold will fall.
But the negative effects will far outweigh the advantages. Take tourism. The report says “the zone with excellent weather conditions, currently located around the Mediterranean (in particular for beach tourism) will shift towards the north”. And it spells out the consequences.
“The annual migration of northern Europeans to the countries of the Mediterranean in search of the traditional summer ‘sun, sand and sea’ holiday is the single largest flow of tourists across the globe, accounting for one-sixth of all tourist trips in 2000. This large group of tourists, totalling about 100 million per annum, spends an estimated €100bn (£67bn) per year. Any climate-induced change in these flows of tourists and money would have very large implications for the destinations involved.”
While they are losing their tourists, the countries of the Med may also be losing their agriculture. Crop yields may drop sharply as drought conditions, exacerbated by more frequent forest fires, make farming ever more difficult. And that is not the only threat to Europe’s food supplies. Some stocks of coldwater fish in areas such as the North Sea will move northwards as the water warms.
There are many more direct threats, the report says. The cost of taking action to cope with sea-level rise will run into billions of euros. Furthermore, “for the coming decades, it is predicted the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events will increase, and floods will likely be more frequent and severe in many areas across Europe.”
The number of people affected by severe flooding in the Upper Danube area is projected to increase by 242,000 in a more extreme 3C temperature rise scenario, and by 135,000 in the case of a 2.2C rise. The total cost of damage would rise from €47.5bn to €66bn in the event of a 3C increase.
Although fewer people would die of cold in the north, that would be more than offset by increased mortality in the south. Under the more extreme scenario of a 3C increase in 2071-2100 relative to 1961-1990, there would be 86,000 additional deaths.
From The Jewish Daily Forward, an interesting (and they say “exclusive”) report re the origins of the Iraq war:
QUOTE: [S]ometime prior to March 2003, Sharon told Bush privately in no uncertain terms what he thought about the Iraq plan. Sharon’s words  revealed here for the first time  constituted a friendly but pointed warning to Bush. Sharon acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an “acute threat†to the Middle East and that he believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Yet according to one knowledgeable source, Sharon nevertheless advised Bush not to occupy Iraq. According to another source  Danny Ayalon, who was Israel’s ambassador to the United States at the time of the Iraq invasion, and who sat in on the Bush-Sharon meetings  Sharon told Bush that Israel would not “push one way or another†regarding the Iraq scheme.
According to both sources, Sharon warned Bush that if he insisted on occupying Iraq, he should at least abandon his plan to implant democracy in this part of the world. “In terms of culture and tradition, the Arab world is not built for democratization,†Ayalon recalls Sharon advising.
Be sure, Sharon added, not to go into Iraq without a viable exit strategy. And ready a counter-insurgency strategy if you expect to rule Iraq, which will eventually have to be partitioned into its component parts. Finally, Sharon told Bush, please remember that you will conquer, occupy and leave, but we have to remain in this part of the world. Israel, he reminded the American president, does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by regional radicalization and the spillover of violence beyond Iraq’s borders.
Sharon’s advice  reflecting a wealth of experience with Middle East issues that Bush lacked  was prescient. The American occupation of Iraq has ended up strengthening Iran, Israel’s number-one enemy, and enfranchising militant Shi’ite Islamists. A large part of Iraq is slipping into the Iranian orbit. Iraq’s western Anbar Province is increasingly dominated by militant jihadi Sunnis who could eventually threaten Syria and Jordan, the latter a strategic partner and geographic buffer for Israel.
All these developments harm vital Israeli interests. This past summer, Israel fought a war against two militant Islamist movements supported by Iran  Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza  that were enfranchised and legitimized in their anarchic countries thanks to Bush’s insistence on hasty and ill-advised democratic elections “in this part of the world.†END QUOTE
If accurate, then we have the picture of the Likud leader advising against the war that the Likud lobby in Washington (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Kristol, Kagan, Ledeen, Adelman et al) had gone to extremes to bring off.
Nevertheless perhaps it fits with the picture of Sharon late in life, after a career of terrorism and war-mongering, having second thoughts about the wisdom of the Peace Thru War approach to statesmanship that is the Likud’s only card:
– When Sharon pulled out the Gaza settlers, the Likud’s other leading light, Benjamin Netanyahu, resigned rather furiously from Sharon’s cabinet.
– Not long after Sharon left the Likud to found his own party, saying that Likudism would never lead to peace.
– And not long after he suffered a somewhat mysterious stroke and left public life. Leaving people wondering if he hadn’t been pushed, ala Itzak Rabin.
The Century of the Self is a brilliant history of how professional psychology impregnated corporate and then political advertising in the 20th century, and how America was caught and sickened by its gaze. Written and produced for the BBC by Adam Curtis.
Advertising as we know it seems to have been invented by one man in New York in the 1920s: Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who began as Enrico Caruso’s press agent. Beguiled by his uncle’s ideas about primal irrational desire, Bernays began to sell to such desires with images, rather than to reason with words. He was the first professional media consultant and perhaps the most influential ever, advising Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover and Eisenhower, and later in life working for the CIA.
During the Depression the corporations hired Bernays to battle FDR’s efforts to banish fear and restore (?) reason to politics. Bernays responded with the 1939 World’s Fair, where the radiant Futurama and DemocraCity were brought to you by General Motors and Westinghouse, not Congress. The battle for the soul of the American people was on: would they be citizens, or would they be consumers? Josef Goebbels, the Nazi ad man, read and publicly praised Bernays’ books.
The four episodes are The Happiness Machine (about Freud and Bernays post World War I), The Engineering of Consent (into the 1960s), There is a Policeman Inside Our Heads (post 60s reactions, into the Reagantime) and Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering (the 90s). All four (on small screen) are gathered with some commentary here. (See also for video the Info Clearinghouse link atop this page.)
Mr Curtis & co. (hats off) have also produced The Power of Nightmares (2004), about the parallel lives in the postwar era of American so-called Neo-conservatism and the anti-Americanism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Paramount perhaps is the well-made argument that Al Qaeda is not a network or even worthy of organization but rather a disjointed collection of activists who, when in need of funding for their projects, asked Osama (until he died). To quote Curtis:
although there is a serious threat of terrorism from some radical Islamists, the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organisation waiting to strike our societies is an illusion.
As an explanation of American foreign policy it falls short for failing to speak of the oil mafia (without whose consent the Likud lobby’s dreamwar of pacification in the mideast would never have been realized). But one can’t say everything in three 60-minute episodes. Don’t expect to watch just one.
The Power of Nightmares had a limited theatrical release but neither it nor Century of the Self has been released on DVD or broadcast in the US. Thank goodness for the free press and public life of the mind. In Britain.
Here’s a list compiled by The Sacramento Bee (California) of houses bought probably by speculators at the peak and now back on the market for a lot less: Flippers In Trouble.
Global Markets Face Severe Correction, Faber Says
January 8 (Bloomberg) — Marc Faber, who predicted the U.S. stock market crash in 1987, said global assets are poised for a “severe correction” and it’s time to sell.
“In the next few months, we could get a severe correction in all asset markets,” Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York. “In a selling panic you should buy, but in the buying mania that we have now the wisest course of action is to liquidate.”
Faber, founder and managing director of Hong Kong-based Marc Faber Ltd., advised investors to buy gold in 2001, which has since more than doubled. His company manages about $300 million in assets.
The bullish outlook of traders in everything from bonds, equities and commodities to real estate and art suggests valuations are peaking, Faber said ….
Todd Harrison, a philosophical name trader on Wall Street who had enough and then founded Minyanville, where I regularly repair to seek aid and comfort while trying to carve a place in the wilderness, reported a rumor today that Fidelity (the mutual fund empire) has been selling energy, despite the season:
“As I just offered to Minyan Doug Kass, I continue to pick up chatter that the big dog (Fido, or Fidelity) is unwinding its long energy bet. He responded that it’s been in motion for weeks. This is speculation, naturally, but I wanted to pass it along.”
Energy prices and stocks have indeed been tumbling. Maybe Fidelity is the reason. Here’s a bland collection of others.
Why might Fidelity think energy is in a secular slide? (The warm winter so far in the USA seems hardly enough to jar them from their massive long-term positions.) Best guesses are that they think (i) global economic recessionary cycle is setting in and/or (ii) that the threat of the US and/or Israel attacking Iran went away with the Dem victory in the midterm elections.
Latter seems awfully optimistic. But if the slide continues much longer seems it’ll be a good risk-reward to put a few oil-and-gas cookies in the jar. Perhaps via long-dated call options. At the moment Belarus and Russia are arguing about the price of black gold and so Poland and Germany woke up yesterday morning to find their pipelines (which pass thru Belarus from Russia) dry.
Selling energy heading into the heart of the winter because one thinks the sector is going to slide is … just another indication that the world’s on its head. A pig just flew by. The Wicked Witch of the West. Not in Kansas anymore.
Excerpts from a piece in the Guardian:
by Hannah Pool
Phyllis Rodriguez’s son Greg was one of the 2,759 people who died in the World Trade Centre in 2001. The following year she and other relatives of victims of the New York attacks met Aicha el-Wafi, whose son Zacarias Moussaoui received a life sentence for his role in the hijackings. Rodriguez is involved in the Forgiveness project, a non-religious, non-political group that catalogues stories of forgiveness.
How did you first meet Aicha el-Wafi?
The meeting was arranged through two human-rights groups. Aicha had requested a meeting with any family members of victims who were interested. We agreed – on condition that it would be very private.
What happened at the meeting?
When she arrived, we embraced each other and we cried, and then we all sat and she told her story.
What was the first thing she said to you?
She expressed her sympathy for our losses and apologised. She said: “I don’t know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I’m sorry for what happened to you.”
Was it what you wanted to hear?
I didn’t expect her to apologise. I didn’t hold her responsible. The people who I would love to hear that from are the ones who died in the attacks, who sacrificed themselves. I don’t know that I would even insist on their apologising. I really wish I could have a dialogue with them, to understand what made them act that way.
Have people been angry at your willingness to forgive?
Yes, some people have been. I’ve been accused of being a bleeding heart liberal. I’ve been accused of not thinking seriously about what I am doing because it violates the memory of my son and those who were killed.
Many people hold Aicha indirectly responsible and I feel that she’s not responsible. First of all, I do not believe that her son had anything to do with it  there was no evidence, even though he pleaded guilty. But even if he were, she’s a mother, she did her best. I have never known a person well who was so abused in her marriage and in life and who fought and survived and kept her positive, generous nature.
Why forgive?
I think that, on a very intimate level, it helps me.
Is there a danger you are letting off those responsible?
No, I would not let them off. I would want them to pay, I would want them to have a fair trial, I would want them to have appropriate punishment, I would want society protected from dangerous people.
Do people confuse forgiveness with lack of punishment?
Yes, they do.
Are you more political now?
No, I don’t think I am more political, but I question a lot of stuff.
If you had five minutes with President Bush, what would you say?
What I would say to Bush is this:
“The military actions that you have taken, the Patriot Act that you have pushed through, those were not in the name of my son. I do not support this. You didn’t ask me. I wish you had asked me what I would have suggested in the name of my son. I do not feel that what you have done has made us safer  on the contrary, I feel less safe now. History has shown us, and international experience has shown us, that violence and repression do not make the world a better place.”
While Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh were talking uptown in October about the prospects for an American/Israeli attack on Iran, the honorable Daniel Ellsberg (primary leaker of the Pentagon Papers) was dropping off a piece re same at Harper’s on lower Broadway.
THE NEXT WAR
By Daniel Ellsberg
Harper’s Magazine  October 2006
A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.
My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war.
His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought “no wider war†and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in “retaliation†for the “unequivocal,†“unprovoked†attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol†in “international waters.â€Â
Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie ….
See Harper’s for the rest.
