Was the War a success?
$1 trillion in bond business .
Media profits on steriods.
Israel--autonomy, brings client America to region, no cost.
Venezuela avoids invasion and consolidates populist rule .
Military--promotions, lucrative retirement work.
Mafia(s)--re-energized golden triangle.
American corporate mercenary armies feeding frenzy concealed successfully.
American Fundamntalists-Jingoists retain semantic focus and primacy viz. a "war" on a threat, "terrorism", 1/14th as great as snakebite.

So who won? The fact one might not know is alone sufficient proof of China's historic triumph. Reporters on Bush's tour have noted that Asians understand this if we do not. The war's greatest lesson is: don't expect an enemy studying war for 2000 years to behave differently than England vs Spain when we are ruled by crooks.

"You are what you do..."

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"State of Denial"

The Popes 2 cents

Santa Barbara residents are in a good position to appreciate the Pope's concern for religious intolerance. In fact, the socio-dynamics of the spread of Islam may be quite similar to the Catholic conquest in New World. What partisans may miss is the practical necessity of religious exclusivity under the exigencies of colonization. It is one thing to have a plethora of religions enjoying tax exempt protection under basically secular government. The evidence that this produces a deeply moral or spiritually advanced culture may have been lost in the blowback of corruption and scandal, although individual cases of illumination can no doubt be found. The tribally organized Arab clients we sponsored in the aftermath of the Second World War are hardly environments where alien historically powerful missionary religions have a claim to carte blanche intervention.

In other words, Italy, an industrial European nation, colonized a part of Islamic North Africa. As a result of this economic subordination, residual colonization by Muslims occurred. Erecting worship facilities in Italy for this immigrant group is not quite the same as demanding facilities for Italian religion in the Islamic world, in this case in places not colonized by Italy. Yet that is the thrust of this allegedly scholarly Pope’s critique. The wonder is, hundreds of feckless editorials, and caterwauling by the usual suspects later, no one has recognized this essential inconsistency.

A Democratic Senator bravely ignored the career risk and called the Iraq war a breeding ground for terrorists. Ooops, sorry, I guess that was a CIA agent! Let me start over. A Democratic Congressperson courageously testified on CSPAN in an eloquent evisceration of President Bush and the Neocons, in a comittee pettily botcotted by Republicans. No no no, my mistake. That was a two star General! But, really, a Democratic Presidential hopeful defiantly took Fox News to the woodshed and blamed President Bush's team for ignoring Al Qaeda in the run-up to 911. Gosh darn it! Now I really stepped in it. That was the Democratic President from 6 years ago!

The Democratic officeholders and aspirants? I think they were at an AIPAC dinner.

What the apoplectic Neocon blogosphere are missing is that Clinton, like other leaders recently charicatured by the elite media, is not running for leader of the 1% of the worlds population (that 40% dittohead American zombies), who eschew substantive, articulate statesmanship for their sophistry, but the other 99%. The job of running this shriveling empire may fall to his spouse. Let the haters prattle over sartorial defects. He's not speaking to the suited and coiffed micro-minority. The unflattering camera work will backfire. They're just burnishing his man of the people bona fides. And every new exposure, another person gets it: failed Neocon coup>911...hmmm.

Response to Pat Morrison Anti Fence Polemic
The environmental consequences of overpopulation in this state are orders of magnitude greater than any local effect of a fence. Nice try. If the need for below market domestic wages is your criteria, slavery would never have been moved offshore.

Thank God real Latin American populists know that exporting their underclass as slaves is not the answer to reforming their societies. If only their American counterparts would stop importing their crucial populist voters, we might have a chance to see some real democracy in our hemisphere instead of this elite controlling the media.

If savvy observers like yourself can do no better than regurgitate advocates' talking points on an issue that requires fresh perspective and honesty, it's depressing. Rudderless Democrats are willing to lose this election over pro mass immigration militancy. The sight of African American congresspersons pandering on immigration to the detriment of their constituents is disgusting.

The fact is that it's an anti-populist position to begin with. You're willing to run on "Fighting Israel's wars better" and "more low wage* labor" as an ideology, when our economy is nearing meltdown and the world despises us. Jeez!

Voting Machines

As a disinterested citizen, what is troubling about the voting "machines" issue is the lack of known technology brands. Obscure privately held security firms, as ubiquitous now as once were day traders , have an aura of clandestine mischief that, say, a consortium of Microsoft, Google and Intel would alleviate. Can these credible corporate citizens not provide us with a foolproof technological voting process, perhaps as part of their vaunted philanthropy, independent of these state politics- contracted public trough entrepreneurs of mysterious origins?

Hearing Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak raises the issue of whether we have a leader capable of engaging either of these men, or of articulating a vision that inspires the world more than the one they are presenting. One may disagree with Noam Chomsky, for example, but I wonder if John McCain or Hillary Clinton read at the equivalent level of scholarship in the literature of the cultures they would like to influence, or even in our own. Do they show that much respect to their audience, or do they feed us the shallow polemic of paid ideologues, focus group polls, and foreign lobbyists? Unless they are willing to do so, don't look to win the world's approval back from the likes of China any time soon.

Religion spread by the sword.

The phrase “by the sword” is telling. A recent review of Aeschylus’ “The Persians” highlighted his sympathy for the enemy, though the Persians were known as a mercenary army. The story showed two ways in which our society has removed presence from the encounter of cultures. Beheading, for example, where one is forced to personally strike a fierce, bloody blow to a victim whom one has looked in the eye and smelled the sweat of is portrayed as barbarous. Death by bunker-busters delivered from 20,000 feet, oblivious of collateral damage, or rockets fired from a sponsor’s high tech helicopter at a home or vehicle at someone you will never meet are portrayed as civilized. The commitment and involvement of the two styles of contest, the ancient and the modern, are of a different order entirely. And so are the results.

There are two types of wisdom absent in the Modern context that are present in Medieval and Ancient. The courage and skill required in hand to hand combat require accessing dimensions of ultimate reality unknown to technological killing. Ultimately there is some recognition, based on experience of becoming one with the opponent, of fusing his being with yourself. That is why world literature is so rich in material exploring the essence of these encounters. That is why warrior training occupies such an important place in the spiritual disciplines of humanity. Modern combat on the other hand, while sometimes physically violent, falls short of the level of engagement of a sword fight by orders of magnitude.

Aeschylus' play reminds us of another missing ingredient. The theater of Dionysius required citizens themselves to reenact the events of history and mythology in order to re-experience the emotions of the participants and to access the wisdom originally revealed so that society as a whole might gain spiritual growth. Contrast this experience of the community, present for the performance in person, everyone at one time having played a part in the performance, the performers practicing for a year leading up to the performance, with our modern involvement with historical events: detached, processed, and spun to a degree of meaningless remoteness, or exploited to the ends of corrupt administrations. Add to this great poets' lending emotional insight, spiritual depth, and aesthetic quality under the influence of community scrutiny and competition for excellence. What do modern states offer in place of this other than propaganda and cynical manipulation pitched to an ignorant audience? Again, and order of magnitude of difference in engagement, presence, and wisdom.

911

The singnifigance of 911 is simply that it marked the beginning of a 5 year period where the human race emphatically embraced the new millenium as a continuation of the ethnic conflict unleashed in the 20th century. No greater exclaimation has ever been made of humanity's futility in finding hope. The American Empire in particular has stamped its signature of destruction on the world definitavely, dragging the Chinese in our consumerist, rapacious wake. Whatever potentialities opened as a result of the lone superpower status are utterly wasted. Human progress is a pipe dream of naive children. All hail the scions of the new gilded age. The tribal rivalries of Arab and Jew that converged in the WTC blowback event brought our empire to a cynical realpolitic karmic dead end for Anglo-American capitalist hegemony. A society that offered violence, meaningless consumerism, and mistifiying tribal religion along with destruction of the biosphere would be better off never to have existed. Just a giant bad example for anyone that follows. All the thoughtful people who can have long ago moved on.

Response to Frostee Wooldridge review of Buchannan http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty185.htm

I don't sense that Pat Buchanan has grasped the root of the issue, which someone must, if it is to be solved. How can a Catholic apologist really decode the population eugenics his institution clearly embraces? A historical context must be presented for immigration. This is impossible without a clear understanding of the economic structure of the Age of Exploration (i. e., the lack of labor to exploit royal grants to corporations, followed by the overthrow of these grants to sieze Indian lands, and grants of huge private commercial concessions underwritten by the government, such as railways, mines, timber, or grazing.). To do this involves replacing the myths of American history with critical thinking. A good overview of colonial economics and the development of big capitalism in North America is The History of the Great American Fortunes, although progressives like Gustavus Myers are blind to the role of tribal family size imperatives in causing social inequity. The Spanish American War, an essential context for current events, falls clearly within this economic history. (see Hearst, advocate of Mexican annexation with his vast private holdings run by Chinese serfs, below)

On a more practical level, Americans are trapped in a debt structure dependent on a real estate pyramid scheme of property appreciation based on underclass expansion (and below market construction labor-see New Orleans). Here in California, real estate is the biggest "industry". In America, the middle class relies on property appreciation for its entire wealth. Immigrant bashing in this context is just a ruling class red herring, a red flag for a "false flag" operation of distraction. (Immigrant romanticism and immigrant bashing are the same mystification.) Globalization is essentially an admission that after a century and a half of industrialization, no one can improve upon medieval feudalism. Your allusion to the Titanic is telling because the social structure duplicates our wealth distribution.

Its a complex subject, so I just ask one thing from people who are serious about a solution: realize that a global problem doesn't have a national solution. Also, as your website suggests, a problem of a part of nature requires cooperation with the rest, an acknowledgement that the same rules apply to us.

As Grey Brecklin writes in "Imperial San Francisco", the greatest champion of the immigration-real estate hypothesis, Hearst, is also the inventor of the media-generated terrorist attack imperialist rationale. The head of our snake is his spiritual successor Mr. Murdoch.

Respectfully

Jack Blackwell

Election Special

If the stakes of international relations are too high for Neocons to trust other governments to democratic rule unless they are pro global capitalism, it would be surprising if a different policy were followed at home.

Where is the evidence that a non globalist government would ever be allowed to take back power here through free elections? Palestine, Iran, Venezuela have all elected governments that the Neocon Junta is attempting to violently overthrow. You can be sure beyond any doubt that no legitimate referendum would support them here. I would argue that no American election at least since the concentration of information media in private elite hands has been “democratic”, since no one has been told the truth about candidates or our culture.

A good example will be Cuba after Castro. The likely timing will be that Cuba will elect a successor to Castro hostile to the US at about the time of American elections. The Mexican election is the only recent Latin election where Populists were kept by fraud from seizing power. The presence of American colonial influence was too strong, by siphoning off dissent through mass immigration, and by subsidizing corruption through remittances and drug money. Even so, they almost did the unthinkable: a non globalist government on our doorstep.

Censoring Life

In the Martian visitor eye view conceit of historian Armesto of Millennium, a telling feature of our civilization will be its linguistic inaccuracy. The best example of this is stories about death, be they Aids in Africa, Monsoons in Asia, pregnancies terminated in the industrial world, or resource wars in Iraq. I would go so far as to say that this error was fatal to our race, and yet is easily corrected. There is a tortured censorship that is unique and maddening in these reports. The Martians’ eye view will register a single feature to the exclusion of all the rest: The unchecked rise in population of a world underclass. So every news story that excludes this information is contributing to our destruction. A story that reads, “terrorists killed 3000 people on 911”, but does not say, “the population of New York then only increased by 15,000 in Sept 2001”, has left out the most historically significant fact. A story which says, “50 million will die of Aids in Africa”, but excludes the story, “therefore the increase in the number of poor Africans will be only 100 million”, is no editorial conceit. Rather it is as toxic to the life of a species as radioactive waste.

Other Martian observations would include the simple truths obvious to any culture but ours that an individual or species does not exist autonomously from either the biosphere or society, and that “life and death” is a single phenomenon, not two separate ones. The slogan, “Right to Life” embodies both these errors with ignorance and deception that will ultimately be lethal. Such a statement is a great enough threat that it should be banned, and its adherents gagged. The correct wording should read, “Right to quantity of life and death of one species at the expense of all others.” Of course, “Right to Choose” is an equally dishonest misuse of language. It would be changed to something like, “the right to choose to become pregnant/not use contraception, and then change one’s choice to the opposite of what one originally chose”. In the either instance, Martians would say, giving individuals absent any qualification the choice of whether or not society should support a child is found in no other species or culture—for good reason!

The next election is shaping up as a referendum on globalization, and immigration.

The corporate control of both parties is finally exposed by the fact that neither of the major parties is going to offer an alternative to the agenda of big capitalism. The situation is very similar to that in Germany to before the rise of Hitler. Corporate censorship has pushed the views and interests of ordinary people underground by a vast brainwashing and dumbing down of people outside of the overclass. The situation is ripe for a demagogue to exploit the frustration created by this agenda of globalization and immigration. The power and wealth of the vast majority has been given away by a traitorous elite with no loyalty or allegiance other than their own aggrandizement.

What's revealed is how history is so vastly dependent upon just a few guardian type individuals who are called to and have the will to serve the interests of the larger society. The time has come to bring public choice theory out of the academic realm and see how it applies to the coming struggle for power.

To be continued.