20 Comments so far

1. yapchongsan February 10th, 2007 3:19 pm

   It is very interesting to observe the panic that is rumbling in the Pentagon and Congress over their total helplessness to prevent a President who has gone a little bit mad and is hell bent on taking the USA into another disastrous war that the people of the USA are overwhelmingly against. This is the American model for democracy, a political structure that is touted for its checks and balances that is designed to curb the powers of a crazy President. The situation that is unfolding in the USA vis a vis their confrontation with Iran demonstrates that all that American jazz is all so much hot air; American democracy is just like any old thing, even just the same as what good ole Saddam was. The USA is as much a fascist state as was the Nazis under Hitler; the USA is just simply a dictatorship.

   There are no checks and no balance; and Congress is just like what the USA has so often and so self righteously denigrated the Chinese People’s Parliament as mere rubber stamp. Congress too is as much if not more of a rubber stamp.

   I have said it many times and as long ago as % years ago that like good ole Saddam, the USA will attack Iran because the Americans just cannot allow renegades like Saddam and Iran to demolish the myth of the US$. America will go broke if they are allowed to chip away at the base of the US$ myth. The USA is attacking Iran, and soon enough will attack Venezuela for the same reason, they must not be allowed to destroy the myth of the US$. It is everything self serving for the Americans.

   I believe, all this provocation that is coming from the USA is to prepare the ground for the US to attack Iran pre-emptively; the question that I will ask if I were an Iranian is, “WHY NOT IRAN ATTACK THE USA pre-emptively; there are 1 or 2 CARRIER groups that are anchored in the Mediterranian Sea, and Iran has the right missiles to reach American targets there so why wait for the Americans. Why not attack the Americans before they attack the Iranians. The USA in their aggression on Iraq, launched their attack on good ole Saddam under the fig leaf cover that they had the right to pre-empt Iraqi attack on the USA. In the case of what is going on, we in the world community all know that the USA Carrier fleet are anchored in the Meditteranean Sea for the purpose of mounting an attack on Iran, so why not attack the US first on the same pretext ?

2. GARBOTOO February 10th, 2007 4:00 pm

   yapchongsan…makes a good point

   AIR CRAFT CARRIERS…are sitting ducks for any nation that is the least bit sophisticated in the ways of warfare..IRAN might just have the “right stuff”.

   I don’t think the Iranians have been sitting idley by without having some kind of contingency…blow back scenario.

3. colleen February 10th, 2007 5:05 pm

   Those carriers contain nuclear material. How contained is that material in the event that those ships are attacked and sink?

   Any attack in that region will create terrible consequences. There will be no winners.

4. ezeflyer February 10th, 2007 7:43 pm

   “There is nothing puzzling … about America’s gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about the oligarchs’ successful efforts to drag the Republic into five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope.”
   Walter Karp

5. frere loup February 11th, 2007 1:21 am

   Colleen is right to think about consequences. Sometimes a straight-line set of results allow learning. When consequences trigger chain reactions however, the consequences cascade and the child learns nothing and goes fetal in the face of aggressive chaos poking from all directions. Our collective soup pot appears about to boil over in a similar fashion.

   The people at the top seem to be playing an all or nothing game. They labor for the Masters. The Masters do not need a middle class or a consumer economy in order for their families and clans to rule. Instead, we get constant war so the Masters can suck all resources to themselves. No peace dividends, not after Nam or at any time since. Always the next war, and here we are. In fact, a middle class is generally something of a nuisance to a thriving Oligarchy. Literate, middle class people with leisure time can become informed. Informed people with leisure want to participate in the decisions affecting their lives and the lives of their children. Such people believe that the benefits of their labor should be shared among the general population who produced that abundance. That means health care, quality education, a place to dream and plan and act in creative ways that make the world around you a nicer place to breathe the air.

   This is the foundation of the Four Freedoms and the Roosevelt legacy: taxation; Glass-Seagal; the Wagner Act, FLSA, ERISA; the Fairness Doctrine along with significant media & corporate regulation; and a social safety net worth talking about. The taxation was quite specific: 90% on earned income over $6mn/annum, adjusted for inflation; 52% on unearned income; 50+% on mega-estates. The people who brought America back from the brink of chaos and by the mid 60’s delivered the greatest distribution of wealth in the history of our species knew that we can either have a tiny Ruling Class with immense wealth, power and privilege over us, or we can have Democracy. Do we have an honest Democracy today? Iran is the symptom of the disease, not the cause. BY the mid 60’s our Ruling Class was nearly moribund. BY ’71 the Trilateral Commission decided America suffered from “Excessive Democracy” and now we live in a rickety house of cards with a ‘middle class’ you could drown in a bathtub. Have you ever seen a ping-pong ball suspended in a fountain of air? We’re the ping-pong ball folks.

   As Yapchongsan has often pointed out, that funnel of air supporting the ball is produced in China. Someone could easily say, “If you do “X”, China will turn off the ‘air’.” Until one remembers that if you loan a man $10grand, you own him. If own loan him $100 billion, you have a partner. China needs our markets, at least until their Overseer Class reaches critical mass and becomes a self-supporting consumer economy selling to itself. My humble estimate is that Masters comprise the top 3%, heavily weighted to the top 0.25%, 15-20% in the Overseer Class; and 80-85% left as dog meat. And China can shoot down satellites from Earth based stations. OOoooppsss. And they are renowned for their patience in waiting to pick the fruit only when it is ripe. I understand they are a very ‘practical’ people. Be afraid. Be very afraid. China has survived everything up to and including mass starvation and civil wars that collectively number hundreds of years. Long history. Many from Eastern Europe still remember the Golden Horde. The Chin, the Ming, and the Mandarin could write the book on the rule of Families and Clans passing the Mandate of Heaven from one hand to another like a cup of rice wine. Our drunken jumped up roadhouse thugs and our lice-ridden psychotic warlords got anointed by the Hebrew tribal totem Yahweh to Rule, through HIS Holy Mother Nightmare Church. The people always suffered. Let us hope the Chinese have as much collected learning as they have history. It is the ruin of men that they forget.

   If China decides that it must run the world in order to protect itself, this will be a very different world indeed. Especially since my melanin deficient Aryan cousins are a declining population, past the tipping point here in the land we committed genocide to own and built with forced human labor. You don’t have to believe me: 2000 Census, population projections. We’re toast. Not all the fundamentalist ministers, priests, rabbis, or mullahs can put that baby back into the womb of an Aryan gender slave. Aryan Europe is caught in the same decline.

   Melanin deficiency, all Aryan illusions to the contrary, is not a dominant ‘color’. The future of humanity is golden brown to blue black. Men and women from all parts of the world like to move the genes around and I ain’t talkin’ Levis, even if they are made in China under conditions that would make a Xrstian despair of their loving tribal totem. We were so stoked up about mixing the genes, especially among the ones we formerly held as slaves, still hold as de facto slaves, we made it a crime, miscegenation. WWWhhhhooooo. Hell no, we weren’t afraid. We were terrified of life. We still are. We wanted to hold all Life in our tiny infantile fist. It is the fate of all peoples who live as conquerors. Even Chinese conquerors.

   Families and Clans. There’s the key to Ruling Oligarchies. Yes, especially in the US. It’s them or us.

6. yapchongsan February 11th, 2007 3:03 am

   Hello frere loup ! Greetings ! You said a lot, but don’t mind me. I am just a Chinaman, and we mind our own business.

   Please take notice that in all of Chinese history, China has never been a predator power. We mind our own business. Good luck to the USA and may god help them to become the mightiest predator power on earth, but remember that China only wants to mind our own business. However please leave us alone or any aggressor will be very sorry if they interfered in our business.

7. Edip Yuksel February 11th, 2007 11:26 am

   I am a Muslim author who have been promoting Islamic Reform since 1986, long before the US mass media discovered the problem in Muslim world. Unfortunately, the current Crusader/Neocon/Zionst coalition is not helping us; to the contrary, they are helping the extremists. I do not think that they are making “the errors” unintentionally; they have vested interest in having evil enemies around so that they can accumulate more power, land and money.

   ***

   As for Iran:

   It was Iran that used the nuclear weapons against Japan and killed tens of thousand civilians and wounded hundreds of thousands.

   It was Iran that massacred millions of Jews in Holocaust.

   It was Iran that invaded Panama, Granada, Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.

   It was Iran that has killed tens of thousands Palestinians after invading their land.

   It is Iran that is the number one weapon manufacturer and dealer in the world.

   It is Iran that through a covert operation of its secret agents conducted many military coups in the world and deprived nations from democracy.

   It is Iran that supports Saudis, one of the most repressive and corrupt regimes in the world.

   It is Iran that steals from other nations treasury by playing with their currency.

   It is Iran that supports Nazi Zionists in their quest for land-grab and mistreatment of Pals.

   Should I list more?

   Isn’t it clear how evil and dangerous Iran is for the world?

   PS: I invite frere loup, ezeflyer and our chinese friend to participate in articles section at http://www.19.org which is open for those who promote peace and freedom. Please contact me at:

   19@19.org

   Peace,
   Edip Yuksel

8. ezeflyer February 11th, 2007 11:49 am

   Oh oh…the MSM today is headlining that Iran is sending arms to Iraq.

9. frere loup February 11th, 2007 12:47 pm

   Greetings Yapchongsan. In ancient Aramaic the term ‘to be Blessed’, means to become Ripe. Welcome and be Blessed.

   You wrote: “I am just a Chinaman, and we mind our own business.”

   Surely, no one from the Middle Kingdom is, “…just a Chinaman, …” and I would ask, what if the world is your business?

   You wrote a 2nd time: “We mind our own business.”
   I find this a highly admirable trait in neighbors. Neighbors also exist in neighborhoods, those neighborhoods connect to communities and communities give us common interests. We all need to breathe, no? And I would ask again, what if the world is your business?

   You wrote: “China has never been a predator power.”
   By comparison with my Aryan cousins, that is precisely true, the arc of our history is the path of the locust. But, I do wonder how The Great Khan and his Mongol ‘horde’ were regarded by those they displaced? And sometimes I wonder what the Lords of Indochina apprehend when they contemplate their ‘Elder Brother’ in the Great North? What do you think? Not always a beneficent neighbor, no, maybe not?

   It is in the nature of us undeveloped, unevolved, barely conscious pond scum that we share many things in common. Like a sense of humor. I am told the Deneh people of what my Aryan cousins call northern Arizona have a pretty rough sense of humor, so do Hell’s Angels, Cops, and cowboys from Montana and Tejas. Others have a humor so dry that stones look wet, like the folks in Maine, or the Lakota people. I’m sure from your background you can find many variations in the Celestial Kingdom. Whatever the flavor, people laugh when their hearts have not dried to a husk from misery or cruelty. You know what I mean, the laugh that makes the tears flow and the sides ache when the belly is full and the hearth is warm.

   Many things in common, neighbors have. Like questions, “How are we to live? Are humans food? How do we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the most violent? What harms us and what is merely difference that makes wondrous variety? What cruelties are part and parcel of our daily round? As humans, as neighbors, as communities? Do neighbors stand by while parents beat their children to death? Short answer, sometimes they do. Are daughters really a curse or is the curse merely an artifact of patriarchy and gender slavery? What are the boys gonna do when all the daughters have been aborted? Where will they find the feminine balance that puts the “I” in your “Ching”?

   These questions are always with us. What can we do to ameliorate the misery around us without making it worse? Will the people from the Middle Kingdom do to Tibet what mine did to the peoples we conquered and attempted to destroy in the US and for the same reasons, Lebensraum, resources? Just questions. And yes, sometimes questions are verboten. Does Israel have “the Right” to be the exclusive hegemonic nuclear power in the Middle East? My people live that way too. Some questions are forbidden. Like Miramoto Musashi wrote in the Five Rings, “…the rigid hand is a dead hand.” Will humanity die in the stink of their own denials as they choose suicide rather than community? No Race. No Shining City on the Hill. No New Jerusalem. No false dichotomies over what is Sacred and what is called Profane, Vulgar, & Common. Differences without distinctions. No Divine Dispensations for tiny groups of predator elites to rape anyone they can get their hands on because they have guns or nukes. Only humans here, all sizes, shapes, colors, and creeds trying to live as tenants on a Living Planet some call Gaia.

   We don’t get out of hell until we make a place for everyone at the table and reject war and conquest as a way of life. Part of that is making right as well as we can the wrongs we have inflicted on those around us. That includes genocide and slavery. But very likely we won’t. It is the ruin of men that they forget.

10. Jaded Prole February 11th, 2007 4:02 pm

    frere loup has said a mouthful. Especially, “Will humanity die in the stink of their own denials as they choose suicide rather than community?”

    That is the question of the day.

11. robertdayfield February 11th, 2007 4:19 pm

    Please, Congress of the United States, stop this maniac before the we try to destroy another Mid-Eastern country.

12. ChristIsntComingBack February 11th, 2007 6:12 pm

    This is sheer insanity. Josh Muravchik wants blood, theirs and ours. He doesn’t give a rats ass about consequences whatsoever. He believes everything he thinks is true and is God’s word and will. He’s nuts.

    And the Chief Nutcake Bush? Does ANYONE believe he isn’t the leader of Al Queada? Everything that Bush as ‘done’ has NOT made us safer, has exponentially grown terrorism. It’s not that BushCo is incompetent, it’s that they do not work for us. They are evil moles.

13. iammyself February 11th, 2007 7:06 pm

    Edip Yuksel,

    Very interesting questions. You make your point very well!

    I would suggest to all to re-read the article that we are commenting on and note the organizations behind the calls for war. The American Eneterprise Institute (isn’t this the same org that tried to bribe scientists into watering down global warming conclusions?) and the Heritage Foundation (of which Meyrav Wurmser is a member) are two of the biggies behind neocon thinking and strategies. They also house a good number of pro-Zionist operatives working their magic on our policies.

    We need to start paying attention to the folks behind the curtain!

14. Beowulf February 12th, 2007 2:14 am

    Interesting reading.

    In the first place;

    Yapchongsan, I believe you miss the point entirely; there is no effort to “contain” a mere errand boy doing the bidding of his corporate criminal masters due to the simple fact that the so called US Congress is complicit in the crimes and receives their recompense from the same masters.

    Ditto the so called “free” press of the western world which deliberately refuses, as a ludicrously small example, to even MENTION that appr. 500,000 concerned Americans publicly voiced only their “concerns” regarding the ongoing crimes of their own “representative” administration recently in WADC. Those who own the corporate media are also complicit in the ongoing crimes against the innocent, and this is an amply proven FACT.

    Lastly, for the moment, your concept of a “preemptive” strike by the Iranian defenders of their sovereign rights is, mercifully, not regarded as a sane measure by the leadership of that cultural entity…

    Are you truly not aware of the FACT that the corporate regime has repeatedly provoked, extorted, and intimidated innocent nations precisely in order that they would “preemptively” strike so that the western corporate regime, supported 100% by the corporate mouthpiece the fake free press, could cakewalk the largely ignorant and bovine western populace of consumers pretending to be citizens into another highly materially profitable genocidal war perpetrated by fools against the innocent?

    The Iranians do not, nor will they, blink.

    I think any sane individual can take it for granted, at this late stage, that those defending their sovereign rights have long since initiated measures and installed the necessary means with which to counterstrike, effectively I might add, any criminal aggression from the corporate cabal that controls the lives and souls of the bleating mass of bloated, consumerist sheep that the vast majority of westerners truly are.

    Bleating sheep who will be “discussing” the known crimes and the known fugitives from justice among us all the way to their own slaughter.

    Does this, in any way, sound familiar to ANY of you?

    Oh, just a couple of more things before I tire from the useless talk which even I cannot resist at times due to my severe frustration at not yet being able to strike the known enemy;

    Dear Colleen, your comments are appreciated and your concerns are at the least relevant and sane. However, my sadly naive humanist, has it not occured to you (or any of the rest of you) that what was done in the Gulf of Tonkin can readily be duplicated… in the Straits of Hormuz?

    The scenario is obvious to a fool, but at least an honest fool.

    The western corporate regime representative will, at the last resort, sink it´s own ship (NOT, I repeat NOT one carrying nuclear devices for obvious reasons….)and the lives of the willing curs onboard be damned, (just as the lives of the willing curs serving in The Two Towers and the Pentacle were worth more dead than alive…to the criminal´s interests.)

    Thereafter you will see an amazing run on the market for American flags and “patriotic” paraphernalia, closely followed by a “defensive response” against those terrible Iranians.

    Start paying attention to the folks behind the curtain? Precisely. However, as you have now seen clearly, no, you cannot trust a Moron pretending to be a Marine.

15. rtdrury February 12th, 2007 4:43 am

    Americans may each take individual action by doing more of our work and trade at the local level to strengthen local economies, deprive the Pentagon of inputs, and impose the public will upon Washington.

16. Ragdoll February 12th, 2007 9:13 am

    The Bush administration appears to be banging on the wardrums again, making use of the recent revelation that 170 US troops were killed with Iranian-made weapons. So the “crime” would be that Iran made the weapons. It’s less clear whether they actually sold or gave them to insurgents in Iraq.

    But following this current piece of Bush-Cheney logic, in which “might” rather than “right” once again seems to prevail, wouldn’t any other country or coalition of countires be equally justified to attack the United States on the grounds tthe US manufactured and sold to Israel the one million cluster bombs dropped on Lebanon in the last 48 hours of the Israeli campaign last summer?

17. crackerjack February 21st, 2007 12:09 pm

    Ragdoll: Then there’s the 100 US made bunker busters the Israeli’s took delivery of the first of 2007. THERE IS no coalition of countries to defend the world from cluster bombs and anti-personnel mines.

    yapchongsan: American obfuscation probably has a Chinese proverb equivalent. What would it be?

    Colleen: There are always winners and losers in the short term. Nuclear matters lead to loss of human habitat and quality of human life. How to encourage the longer term goal?

    GARBOTOO: Carrier groups allthough vulnerable and if successfully attacked, would bring havoc from the skies from such a dominant force as the USA on the home country of the attacker. China’s new carrier fits your description though, and for how long, will be seen.
    _________________________________________________
    IF Iran does not give up its non-peaceful nuclear ambitions, very quickly, there will be a nuclear mess there. And maybe a nuclear mess in a city or two in America as retaliation. The world won’t be much different because frere loup has it pegged (we are still in a primitive stage of human development). The UN sanctions on Iran indicate all the major powers are onboard and Bush has his mandate. 6 nuclear powers in North Africa and the middle east is deemed not workable until the US expends it’s treasure and it’s middle class disappears. So the negative Machiavellian forces continue to dominate the world stage. If Iran were smart it would threaten the world with genetically engineered destruction if it was attacked. This might move the world away from the hell that frere loup identified (toward another?). But I suspect the officials in Washington are martyrs in the same vein as the Islamists so at best it is a game of chicken with the world as a bystander.

18. bnsocixunery December 10th, 2007 1:13 am

    titrypixepuni…

    exxonypepixy…

19. bnnokewirike December 11th, 2007 7:45 am

    titcytevoveti…

    exharasukuhi…

20. bnpiryzapipo December 26th, 2007 7:23 pm

    tithecivesepu…

    exwywocihipi…

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