Jeff Lewis

One of the great lines from Saturday Night Live was delivered many years ago by Martin Short’s brilliant comedic character, “Ed Grimley”, when he described a situation as,” Doomed as doomed can be!” That summarizes my prognosis on the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. With events of this past week, the disciples of the world’s first cyber revolution have passed the point of no return.

WARNING: Graphic Video

The graphic scene of the young woman, Neda, bleeding to death from a fatal gunshot on the streets of Tehran has become the symbol of the upheaval caused by the controversy surrounding the recent national election. Civilian control apparatus is in high gear as the ruling clerics attempt to quell the insurrection of hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets throughout the country. Wounded demonstrators are being beaten savagely, pulled out of their houses at night, and even arrested at hospitals. Some families trying to reclaim the dead bodies of murdered relatives are being charged a fee for the bullets expended by security forces that remain logged within the victim’s corpse.

The Iranian authorities are taking every step possible in interfering with electronic transmissions from all sources that are broadcasting messages to the world about the emerging atrocities of governmental suppression of the dissenting demonstrators. The Guardian Council issued a statement that there were no fraudulent voting incidents and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, said all those people who continued to demonstrate would be dealt with as traitors.

Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Lindsey Graham (SC) are criticizing Obama’s tepid response as a failure to lead on an issue that should require him to be aggressive in his denunciation of Iran’s rulers. Other Republican members of Congress are carping at Obama about not leading the free world’s outrage over the unfolding events in Iran, notably Mike Pence (R-IN). Representative Pence compared President Obama’s reticence to Ronald Reagan’s bold declaration to Gorbachev regarding tearing down the Berlin Wall, in 1987. Not all Republicans are as quick to demagogue the issue, however. Indiana Senator, Richard Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, feels Obama is wise to keep his cool, for now, as events continue to unfold. Pat Buchanan, MSNBC’s right wing firebrand, praised Obama’s stance as did Conservative columnist George Will on last Sunday’s ABC regular broadcast. Mr. Will even criticized Obama’s detractors by name.

MSNBC, CNN, and all the major old-media networks, have interviewed dozens of guests including Iranian expatriates, college faculty, and American citizens with family still living in Iran. The old-media has called for America to be supportive of the demonstrators, but not to overplay their hand and provide Ahmadinejad with the excuse to castigate the U.S. as “The Great Satan” that is fueling the discord in their country, as has been done since the 1979 revolution. In his Cairo speech, President Obama admitted the CIA’s role in deposing a popularly elected government in Iran in 1953. Iranians have also not forgotten that the U.S. supported their archenemy, Saddam Hussein, in their brutal war with Iraq in 1982 where over a million Iranians were casualties.

Most of Obama’s critics do not take into account the history of unpopular U.S. involvement in Iran over the last sixty-years. The short sightedness of that view was articulated last Thursday during an interview on MSNBC’s, “Hardball”, with host Chris Matthews and Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (GA). Senator Chambliss said he thought that America’s previous transgressions against Iran happened long enough ago that they were largely forgotten by the Iranians of today. Matthews missed an opportunity for a great follow up question to Chambliss when he failed to ask the Georgia Senator, “When did Georgians stop remembering General Sherman?”

For his part, President Obama has steadily ramped up his criticism of Iran’s ruling theocracy, but in his news this past Tuesday, he allowed that events are continuing to unfold. However, the days of government by theocracy in Iran are numbered. This youthful generation in Iran, those 30 and under, which amounts to over sixty percent of the country’s total population, are the products of the emerging technology that is changing how the world interacts. It will take several months to make changes in Iran sufficient to quell this culture of the future, but one thing is for certain, history does not have a reverse gear.

China is next.

Allison Bricker

NEW YORK, New York – Amidst the recent hysteria over swine flu, the bigger story as it relates to exotic disease and the possibility for pandemic was lost in the fray. The independent Chinese language network “New Tang Dynasty Television”, filed a report this past Wednesday about a new disease which seems to mimic the AIDS virus but is spreading through mainland China via casual contact or exchange of bodily fluids such as sweat or saliva. Due to the Chinese government’s restrictions on the press, details are light at this time with the following video report being the only credible footage available at this time. Estimates at this time are indicating at least 600 have been infected. The mortality rate of the disease is as of yet, unknown.

UPDATE # 1: Whether or not the emergence of this disease is in anyway related to the previous report that the WHO plans on raising the pandemic scale to Phase 6 later this week is unknown at this time. “The Smoking Argus Daily” will report additional details once verified as they arise.

Source(s): New Tang Dynasty Television

Kelly

Free market economist and president of Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff, not only predicted the current economic crisis, but has also been insistent about the growing economic power and rise of China.  The following video from CBS Evening News is very telling as it depicts the changing tide of the world’s top banks over the course of the last three years.

Joseph Marohl

Here are some words from Matthew Parris, gay British Conservative, in yesterday’s The Times (UK) on the present financial crisis:

“This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it’s the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn’t just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We’re falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.

“Politicians cannot do much to jack up the first. So it falls to them to arrange and explain a reduction in the second. The great task facing the next British government is to help the country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip with as good a grace as possible into the world’s second league. Yes, there is a rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.”

Parris’s penchant for bile and outright hatefulness aside, and not so evident here besides, the column raises some pertinent points. The United States and the nations of Europe have not relied on productivity for some time. The idea of actually producing a product has been in decline since World War II. And, Parris points out elsewhere, it’s probably too late to turn back to industrialism and so, needless to say, much too late to return to agrarianism.

I suppose the reason we can not return to an economy based on productivity is that technology today has advanced to the point that inhuman technology can mass produce things more consistently and efficiently than human workers can—a circumstance that has relegated us humans to the role of consumers of what the machines produce for us (sometimes useful and wholesome, sometimes not).

Parris applauds India and China for thrusting ahead of the West in recent decades. In a world divided between venture capitalists with hedge funds and unskilled labor with desperate growling bellies, India with its rigid caste system and China with its totalitarian form of Confucianism have proved to have the traits evolutionarily favorable to survival. The Western democracies, with their quaint embrace of Enlightenment values like education, liberty, and equality and their Romantic obsession with individualism, humanism, and pleasure, have taken a serious fall on the course and can expect to be put out of their misery soon.

I suspect that Parris belongs to the set that blames the laziness of poor people and union members for the present decline. Lord knows, the upper classes have worn themselves out struggling to pull us up on our feet. And all we’ve done in return is clamor for even more liberties, decent health care, affordable living conditions, and equality for everyone. It must be awful for them. And when disaster strikes, they allow us 30 months to pull ourselves up to some measure of prosperity—and then the “free ride” of welfare and charity dries up. And, honestly, what more can they do? There are limits.

Responding to Parris’s column, Andrew Sullivan, British-born American little-c conservative, states on his blog this morning:

“I don’t understand why, after two decades of bubbling our way to phony prosperity through the dotcom chimera and the housing boom, it is somehow a ‘crisis’ that our standard of living is falling. It is surely a good thing that the standard of living is falling. It means that reality is beginning to return. A hangover may be painful but its cure is not a bout of more binging. My fundamental concern with the stimulus is that its spending be focused directly on real investment and immediate demand and that it be swiftly followed by a brutal assault on long-term entitlement and defense spending.

“We need to take a machete to social security and Medicare and a very sharp scalpel to all domestic discretionary spending. And we need to think very hard about big withdrawals of troops in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and about the foreign aid we give Egypt and Israel. Between the boomers at home and the expanding, unending empire abroad, the next generation will have no sane fiscal future unless something is done very very soon.”

I agree. The standard of living should fall—though I might add that it’s in society’s interest to ensure a reasonable bottom. Unless we want cities of slums and even more burgeoning criminal networks and gangs, not to speak of the current “Mad Max” scenarios the American bourgeoisie is currently envisioning, we need to protect, as much as possible, those who have not yet achieved what we regard as an average standard of living.

To the extent that constraints on the poor and the wealthy ought to be fair, if not entirely equitable, I support what some (including Sullivan) demonize as “class warfare.” The prosperous should not continue to go unchecked in their pursuit of even greater prosperity.

I suspect there’s enough blubber on the thighs of CEOs of most mega-gigantic corporations to feed every assembly-line worker. If we can limit welfare moms to 30 months of benefits, we can probably afford to limit Presidential candidates to no more than two residences. Outcries against government restraints on liberties almost never extend to the benefit of poor workers.

It just seems more reasonable to me, if restraint is needed at all, and I would always insist on no unneeded restraints whatsoever, to restrain the powerful, rather than the powerless. To burden further the already powerless is, de facto, to give undeserved, unjust, and unconscionable immunity and privilege to the powerful.

Joseph Marohl

Six days after the inauguration—six days after Pastor Rick Warren, looking like a reupholstered Jerry Falwell, bestows his blessings on America and Barack Obama’s Presidency—the Chinese New Year begins.

It will be the Year of the Ox. Oxen, as you probably know, are castrated bulls.

Lacking a true gift for superstition, I assign little real importance to this fact. But as horoscopy goes, Chinese astrology has always served me better than the Western version. Under the latter, I am an Aries, therefore, stubborn, egoistic, combative, impulsive to the point of foolhardiness, all moral sense subjugated to raging lust. Fair enough. Under the former, I am a Snake, therefore, carnal, sensuous, intellectual, artistic, unforgiving with a preternaturally long memory for grudges. Bull’s eye.

The United States is in deeper debt to China—$585 billion—than to any other nation, only another reason to believe our collective futures lie in Chinese hands. So let me peer into my weathered, brittle paperbound edition of Theodora Lau’s The Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes, copyright 1980, to see what the new year holds in store.

Lau opens her section on The Year of the Ox with the statement: “We will feel the yoke of responsibility coming down on us this year.” Okay, so after 2008, we could all see this one coming, though Lau pegged it 28 years ago. She follows with “The trials and tribulations the Ox year brings will be mainly on the home front. It is a good time to settle domestic affairs and put your house in order.” Henry Paulson should only have been this prescient.

After stating that the Ox views politics and diplomacy, along with frivolities of every sort, with indifference, Lau begins to sound like my dad: “No work, no pay! … The Spartan influence of the Ox will be a constantly cracking whip over our heads. [T]he year of the Ox favors discipline. … This is no time for tricky shortcuts.”

Just so I get her point, Lau aims a closing shot directly at me: “For the rebels, it may be worthwhile to point out that although the stoical Ox is soft-spoken, he carries a big stick, and this is his year.”

In particular, the year 2009 will be the year of the “Earth” Ox—not a nod to environmentalism, though no doubt cleaning up the mess we’ve made of the planet is part of the work cut out for us. The Earth Ox favors duty over creativity, practicality over idealism, stability over progress, sense over sensibility, endurance over complaint, and determination over cynicism.

On a happier note, children born next year can be expected to whine less (“This child will not be a crybaby”), value privacy more, and exhibit patience, perseverance, and responsibility. Ox-people thrive on discipline and order (Richard Nixon, the Emperor Hirohito and Adolph Hitler were all Ox-people, but, happily, so were Walt Disney, Vincent Van Gogh, and Charlie Chaplin).

Astrology aside, it seems clear to me that we have work to do in the coming year. Given the work’s immense importance—to our pocketbooks, to peace, to justice, to life, to the preservation of what it means to be human—it’s important that we look at the tasks ahead with all the optimism we can humanly muster. We must persevere to survive.

We must not panic, and we must contain our worries and sense of dread. We need to gain or regain a sense of the common good—set aside our private interests, if necessary, even perhaps our high ideals (at least the ones so high we can’t actually see the tops of)—and pitch in to make things better than they are.

Even without lunar insights, I can pretty well assure you that we will not entirely solve the mess we’re in—and are about to slip into deeper—even with God’s and Obama’s help. But we can take a point or two from the stoical Ox, and whine and moan a little less, however Mad Max the world becomes, and temper the cynicism we’ve so carefully cultivated since our freshmen years at college with a little kindness and humane understanding.

One certainty I subscribe to, which all forms of astrology support: Things will change.

Joseph Marohl

I can’t quite bring myself to wish for a too speedy recovery of the economy, fearing the selling out of unions and workers in the interest of Wall Street investors and corporate CEOs to achieve an empty, polarizing national “prosperity.”

When I hear Republicans (Senator Bob Corker et al.) blame unionized auto workers for the collapse of the US auto industry—not bad management, not overcompensated CEOs, not arrogance and irresponsibility towards the environment and consumer safety, not the prioritization of advertising over customer service—and, further, to tweak the figures on worker compensation to include benefits as part of hourly wages and yet make no comparison to what the highest paid execs get for failing miserably in their jobs—I suspect that the plan in the works is to screw the little people to make them compliant employees and consumers—like the Chinese, from whose financially engorged government the US will borrow the billions that will disappear into the black hole of corporate bookkeeping and overseas wars (lest we forget the $9 billion that vanished in “Iraqi reconstruction” in 2005).

I am hardly an expert on money—I’m deep in debt, living payday to payday on a community college instructor’s salary, yet as subject to the allure of smart, trendy bistros and glittering commodities as the next guy—so I do not understand how further debt and inflation will solve matters.

Isn’t a large part of problem speculation and the fluffing up of fiat currencies to self-fulfill capitalist myths that business must grow or die? Really, why can’t somebody who makes a million dollars, let’s say, live comfortably on that amount—and not immediately set sights on a billion? Why must a corporation favor investors so very much more than its customers and employees?

No, I have no answers, and I fear I have an insufficient grasp of the problem—but even if American workers are indeed “overpaid” when compared to workers in India and Mexico, how is it that they—and not CEOs who average over $600,000 per year ($14.2 million per CEO at Fortune 500 companies)—have “only themselves to blame” for the collapse of the economy, not only in the United States, but in Japan, the UK, Iceland, etc., etc., etc.?

Allison Bricker

In past conversations with colleagues and friends, I have often commented that some day soon the internet our generation has come to know, the wealth of information available via the click of a mouse, will cease to exist. That in the place of this unfiltered and uncensored access to information, will come a government controlled, censored version of the world wide web under the auspices of the FCC or some other bloated failure of a bureaucracy.

Many have replied to me stating that this was “Henny Penny” or “Chicken Little”, that this simply could not happen here in the land of the free. My counter has been and remains that this will come wrapped in the veil of “protecting the children” or “net neutrality”. We have already seen internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T implement “bandwidth filtering” and “I.P Blocking” as a means to restrict access or to make viewing videos difficult or next to impossible.¹

The technology to accomplish complete filtering already exists and is being used in China with the help of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco. These American companies are co-conspirators with the Chinese government in constructing what is now known as “The Great Firewall of China”. This censorship completely removes hyperlinks from search engine queries/blog posts and includes any and all websites the Chinese government deems “inappropriate”. Websites such as Falun Gong, the Tibetan government-in-exile, and critics of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, just to name a few.²

Further, just this past summer during the Beijing Olympics, athletes staying in the Olympic Village found their own internet access censored, uncensored, then censored again from going to websites like Amnesty International, Wikipedia and the BBC.²

Additionally, for those readers who think its just the Chinese government, think again. Australia is joining in mandatory internet filtering for all of its citizens after first suggesting that the censorship would be optional. The impetus behind this fascist move? You guessed it, the scare tactics of Child pornography and child predators.³ Nevermind, that perhaps parents should consider monitoring their own child’s activities online. Hell, why bother when you can just have the government do the parenting for you? – ah the nanny state.

In fact, Human Rights Watch states:

“…there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it”

With the coronation of President Obama just around the corner and the likely enlarged Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, we are already beginning to hear calls for a reimplementation of “The Fairness Doctrine” echoing the halls of Congress. The “Fairness Doctrine” implemented in 1949 mandated holders of FCC “Broadcast Licenses” covering political or controversial topics to supply “equal time” to the other side of the issue.⁴ Finally, In 1987, during the Presidency of Ronald Regan (R-CA), “The Fairness Doctrine” was finally abolished⁵

Some statists would love to see government mandate what and how we hear specific issues. However the funny thing is,”The Fairness Doctrine” only applied to radio and television broadcast which contained an opinion, it did not cover newspapers. It is my opinion that if the newspapers were not specifically mentioned via the 1st Amendment, they too would have fallen under the iron fist of “The Fairness Doctrine”.

The pull-peddling bureaucrats gained control over radio and television by vomiting up the socialist epoch that “the airwaves are collectively owned by the public and thus under government domain.” Well fellow readers I say bullsh!t, the airwaves are no more public than a newspaper company’s printing presses are public or that somehow Smargus.com is owned by the public.

Do we think for a moment that had radio, television, or the internet been realized at the time of the Bill of Rights that the founders would have limited the inherent right to free speech and opinion to newspapers? It is my opinion that the Founders would have not truncated our inherent right to free speech solely to the printed word. The underlying principle of the 1st Amendment is that we are born with the gift of communicating our opinions to anyone willing to listen, my right to share how I feel on a topic is not mine by government license, it is mine and yours simply by our breaths.

Do we think this very simple principle will halt the control freaks in Washington from reinstating “The Fairness Doctrine”? In my opinion, no. Only this time as the economy begins to collapse further and that “international crisis”⁶ that Senator Biden carelessly quipped forces President Obama to make those “unpopular decisions”⁷ we will see a new more vigorous “Fairness Doctrine” implemented by the plutocratic scoundrels in Washington. It is also my opinion that this “Fairness Doctrine” will seek to implement “internet filters” vis a vis China and Australia, and perhaps some sort of “Internet Domain Licensing” as they have as well.⁸

Source(s): ¹Converge Network Digest • ² The London TeleGraph, Online •³The Herald Sun• ⁴Donald P. Mullally, “The Fairness Doctrine: Benefits and Costs”, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1969-1970), p. 577 • ⁵United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Syracuse Peace Council v.FCC • ⁶The Washington Post • ⁷ABC News Blog ⁸Administration of China Internet Domain Names Procedures

Kelly

Fortunately, I don’t live in China and therefore I do not have to worry that the Chinese Government will kill my family for writing this post. Instead, I have to worry that the Chinese Government and United States Government together will kill my family because of their complete failure to ensure the safety of the food supply coming into this country.

It all starts with a chemical known as melamine. The same chemical used in plastics, heat/flame resistant materials, and filters. Melamine is in our counter-tops, the upholstry of our furniture, and apparently it is what makes Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser work so well on those scuff marks.¹ However, melamine is also known to be the culprit of the contaminated pet food that sickened and killed thousands of dogs and cats beginning in early spring of 2007. Nearly one hundred brands of dog and cat food were affected and recalled. But, the use of melamine by the Chinese manufacturers has not stopped and our government has continued to accept shipments of tainted food into this country.

You see, melamine is added to a powder, be it milk, wheat, or soy powder, ”because it can make diluted or poor quality material appear to be higher in protein content by elevating the total nitrogen content detected by some simple protein tests.”² We have seen the recent effects of this manipulation of “protein tests” via the tainted baby formula that made over 50,000 infants critically ill in China just last month.³

Recent reports indicate that adding so-called melamine scrap has been the standard practice for Chinese food suppliers for the past five years.

Chemical plants used to pay companies to treat and dispose of melamine scrap, but about five years ago began selling it to manufacturers who repackaged it as “protein powder,” the Nanfang Daily reported, citing an unidentified chemical industry expert.

The inexpensive powder was first used to give the impression of higher protein levels in aquatic feed, then later in feed for livestock and poultry, the report said.

“The effect far more exceeds the milk powder scandal,” the newspaper said.⁴

And, just this week, several more reports on the discovery of melamine in several more food products, ranging from a variety of candy(some of which has already been found to be in the United States and Canada), to animal feed that is distributed worldwide by China. The FDA has yet to alert you or I as consumers that melamine tainted candy sits on our store shelves, but was kind enough to issue a letter to food manufacturers.

The FDA’s letter indicated that seven Asian countries plus Australia and Canada report they have found melamine in a variety of products including candy, flavored milks and cakes. A variety of candies including Cadbury, Snickers, Kit Kat, M&M’s and Dove have been recalled from China, Hong Kong, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States.

Additionally, the letter indicates an extensive list of products that could potentially contain melamine: “Milk and milk products that could originate from China include condensed, dried and non-fat milk, condensed and dried whey, lactose powder, permeate powder, demineralized and partially demineralized whey powders, caseins, yogurt, ice cream, cheese, whey protein concentrate and milk protein concentrate.”

The letter, which is directed at food manufacturers not consumers, went on to explain there are many unknown factors the FDA has discovered in attempting to understand the extent of the contamination. For example, soy-based products may also be tainted with melamine.

“In addition, it would be useful for manufacturers to be alert to the possibility that non-milk-derived ingredients from China that are or may be sold on the basis of protein content, such as soy protein, also could be contaminated with melamine,” the FDA said.⁵

This is unacceptable. Very few American newspapers are reporting this story. It seems the election between ‘Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumber’ alongside ‘Joe the Plumber’ and the Dow Jones have kept the news media much too busy to inform the American people that there is a seemingly strong possibility that any products containing ‘milk powder’ and made in China could be tainted with melamine.

Attempting to rid our cabinets of food containing milk powder made in China is no easy task, it seems most food labels only specify who the distributor is and not who the actual ‘maker’ of the product is. But, bear in mind that researching food brands on the internet or simply calling a distributor is of the utmost importance when feeding your family. The FDA continues to refuse to test our food supply for melamine since small doses are not lethal, though the ridiculousness of this speaks for itself, as I cannot find anyone who would actually eat melamine in any dose. It is not meant to be consumed regardless of parts per million. I urge all of you to pay attention to the food you buy and if at all possible, boycott all food made in China. I also urge you to link to this blog or re-post this blog on Digg, MySpace, orStumbleUpon.

Lastly, below you will find the video that has sparked much of this conversation. As Americans we do ourselves a disservice of serious consequence when we sit back and expect that the government will keep us safe. It is our duty to keep each other informed.

Source(s): ¹WiseGeek • ² The European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products • ³ World Health Organization • ⁴ The Houston Chronicle, “China’s animal feed tainted with melamine” by Anita Chang • ⁵ The Bulletin