This is my opinion and I could be wrrong...

The other day Phillip Adams’ column referred to Conspiracy Theorists (and aren't we loopy beyond sanity)...
So I wrote a short blog on that subject (Conspiracies greater than democracy?) that ended with a couple of words: “Annuit Cœptis

Musing about economics and my empty pockets.

I know zero about “economics

From the BBC

New York bank settles fraud case

The oldest bank in the US, the Bank of New York, has agreed to pay $38m (£21m) to resolve long-running fraud and money-laundering investigations.

The bank will forfeit $26m to the government and pay $12m to victims of the fraud, prosecutors said. The case dates back to 1999, when two of bank employees
helped launder $7bn from Russia through several accounts.

One key employee, senior executive Lucy Edwards, admitted accepting bribes from Russian gangsters to set up accounts.

Guscomment:
Seven (7) billion potato-dollars of laundered money... That's near twice the huge NAB bank profit that is 30 per cent on last year's. Anything less and we would have had to wonder where our penalties for overdrawn account would have gone.

I suppose the penalty of 38 measly million dollars was in proportion with the Bank of New York's ability to pay, and the bank itself was not aware... And 12 million back to the victims of the fraud is about 0.17 per cent of vanished Roubles... Not only that, there must be some rich gangsters floating around in the US and in Russia...

From the Moscow Times

Instant Credit Helps Drive Shopping Frenzy
By Anastasiya Lebedev
Staff Writer
The ancient refrigerator in your apartment has just died, but you cannot spare an extra $1,000 for a fancy new one at the moment. But before your stock of pelmeny has time to melt, many Moscow stores will let you take that new fridge home for one-tenth of the price. Although you are sure to pay extra as the interest accumulates on the remainder, instant or express credit offered by many Russian retailers can be a convenient option.

The price of money

Slavery has been abolished we’ve been told; yet slavery exists stronger and stronger, bigger than ever before in our mist. Through many subtle changes in our way of life, although we’re not hit with lashes of a whip or hit on the backside with a stick, most of us are becoming slaves, slaves to debt. Our freedom has been bought off. We cannot do this or that because we would compromise our ability to repay our “debt

Folks, if you have a spare $2.50, take it to the newsagent and buy today's Financial Review. Or go to the public library. There, on page 3, is Murdoch returns to his family roots (subscription needed).
Rupert Murdoch stood face to face with a sculpture of a giant white chimp yesterday and perhaps, for a moment, contemplated the monkey on his own back. ...

The story is about "a sculpture prize ceremony at the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park on the outskirts of Melbourne".

The accompanying photo of Rupert in front of the said ape is worth a million words. I can't reproduce it here, but this is a clueto what I'm thinking. There is a mischievous hand at work, and there should be more of it, although it is probably a crime of high treason against the reigning monarch, to make such a suggestion.

The photographer is Glenn Hunt.

From Who They Are  (The double standard that underlies our torture policies.) by David Cole -
... Hermann Cohen, a 19th-century Jewish philosopher, once wrote, in an exegesis on the Bible, "The alien was to be protected not because he was a member of one's family, clan, or religious community, but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity." We are in danger of losing that idea.

From Why Western governments fall apart by Robert Spengler -
... The tragedy of the Americans, I have argued in the past, is that they cannot understand the tragedy of other peoples. With force as deadly as the mounted hordes of the past, America's influence has swept through the world and overturned the traditional order, leaving ill-prepared peoples to fend for themselves in the chaos. The president's presumption that Americas can lead Iraq towards American-style democracy ignores the fact that Americans selected themselves according to precisely the criteria that make democracy succeed. Those who remained behind are the other sort.
Survivor bias is the most insidious of logical flaws. Americans selected themselves out of the nations of the world. Americans believe that Chinese and Indians are clever, simply because most of the Chinese and Indians they have met are clever. I can assure the Americans on the basis of personal observation that rural India is teeming with dull Indians, and that rural China is full of dull Chinese. Those are not the ones who have immigrated to America. Rather it is clever Indians and Chinese who have emigrated, either by accumulating capital in business or by passing competitive examinations to obtain a university degree. ...
and
... Bush will go into retirement wondering what he did wrong. The trouble is not what he did, but what he is, and what Americans are. ...

The wilfull blindness of this Us vs Them view of life, is most eloquently portrayed in Robert Baer's The Cult Of The Suicide Bomber. In Iran's Shi'a communities, the martyrdoms of selected individuals are venerated. Elaborate memorials are built, annual commemorations are made, the exploits are advertised on billboards. These are powerful, motivating themes. There are thegraves of half a million martyrs from the Iran-Iraq war to form the foundation of generations of more of the same.

Why is Australian life so different? For one, we have institutionalised alcohol. Take the youth, who harboured and nurtured his feelings against Israel for years, bringing them to conclusion in a suicide-bombing mission in Lebanon. What would be the chance of a distraught Aussie youth following down the same path? Not great. Alcohol is a mollifier, and disinhibiter. The average youth would have taken his mixed up feelings to the pub, with his mates. Under the influence, he would have either lost his intense motivation, or bragged about his ambitions too openly and come to the notice of the cops. Or he would have taken a one-way stroll into the bush, with a slab and a rifle.

We cannot criticise the Shi'a belief in the martyr's instant translation to paradise, since ordination to sainthood is a central plank in orthodox Christian dogma. (Billions believe in it, but I choose to disagree.)

If, as Baer states, the battle is between Iran and the West, we need to know why. And we shouldn't be asking the Bush liars and their sycophants.

Important facts, that bear closely on our ability to understand our place in the world, are being disclosed daily. This is not a time to fight old battles to a standstill. More stories about ourselves are needed,  and Chris Haywood has a good idea, in a letter (sorry - subscription needed) to Financial Review:
... I think the government should further cut funding to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This amount should be given instead to the Film Finance Corporation to be used specifically for the funding of quality Australian television drama. The amount should be equal to the percentage of the total ABC TV budget when it last met Australian drama production levels that reflected the spirit and intent of its charter. It is obvious that the management of the ABC cannot be trusted to fulfil the terms of the ABC charter that states quite clearly that the ABC should support drama. As an Australian performer I believe the ABC management have been totally self-serving, protecting those on permanent contracts from the cuts while taking the easy way out and cutting drama dead, as most of those employed in drama productions are contracted for that program only. ...

Sedition laws;

Guscyclopaedia : Sedition is sedation and constipation put together on an intellectual level. The slowing down of intelligence of a country by enforcing a don’t think, don’t say anything policy.
----------------------------------
Sedition: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Sedition refers to a legal designation of non-overt conduct that is deemed by a legal authority as being acts of treason, and hence deserving of legal punishment. The term is deprecated in most countries, though equivalent language may still be in use in totalitarian and fascist jurisdictions.

Critical speech, political organization, and mere association between individuals may be considered as "sedition." And though such behaviours may be common in a free society, in societies where sedition laws exist the acts and behaviours which qualify are highly subjective, and typically left to the whims of state agents. Legal definitons of sedition often include subversion of a constitution, or incitement to rebellion or insurrection toward the lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws.

Because "sedition" is typically considered the subvert act, the overt acts that may be prosecutable under "sedition" laws vary from one legal code to another. Where those legal codes have a traceable history, there is also a record of the change of definition for what constituted sedition at certain points in history. This overview has served to develop a sociological definition of sedition as well, within study of persecution.

The legal difference between sedition and treason consists primarily in the subjective ultimate object of the violation to the public peace. Sedition does not consist of "levying war" against a government nor of "adhering to [its] enemies, giving them aid and comfort" (Article Three, U.S. Constitution). Nor does it consist, in most representative democracies, of peaceful, non-violent protest against a government, nor of attempting to change the government by democratic means (such as direct democracy or constitutional convention).

From the ABC

Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has fired a broadside at the Federal Government for what he says is the exploitation of the public's fear of terrorism, to rob them of basic human rights.
Mr Fraser has presented a Melbourne university lecture tonight entitled "Human rights and responsibilities in the age of terror".
He admits he has considered resigning from the Liberal Party because of the Government's acquisition of what he calls arbitrary powers to introduce sedition laws and preventative detention.
Mr Fraser says free society is best defended by adherence to its own principles, not by blindly trusting governments.

etcc
____________

Gus: Thank you thank you... , Mr Fraser... But the little man in Canberra occupying your former shoes, needs to be firmly stopped...
Please go and tell him... He will bullcrap you about "intelligence" information but it is his cunning ability that is to be feared.
All his minions are going along for the ride, some of them giving an impression of conscience like Barnaby Joyce but it's only for show... just to give His master the illusion of flexibility and compromising generosity... The reality is only an implacable pursuit of making the life of the most vulnerable a misery by a majority asleep in the comfort of greed... Capitalist Nazism is arriving.

Sanctions against Iran 'bad idea'

ElBaradei called on Iran to arm him with information
Iran is not an imminent threat and sanctions against the Islamic Republic would be a "bad idea", the UN nuclear watchdog chief has warned.
"We need to lower the pitch," Mohamed ElBaradei said.

Earlier, ministers from six powers stressed Iran must heed a statement by the UN Security Council, which urged the state to halt uranium enrichment.

Tehran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful and has rejected the Security Council's call.

The UK's Jack Straw warned sanctions could follow if Iran remained defiant.

Speaking in Qatar, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief said his "message to Iran" was "the international community is getting impatient".

"You need to respond by arming me with information," Mr ElBaradei added.

'Spirit of consensus'

Earlier, the five permanent members of the council and Germany said Iran had 30 days to return to the negotiating table or face isolation.
.......................

Gus adds: Russia and China agree with ElBaradei... and it appears they won't support sanctions...

From the BBC

French protesters claim victory
By Caroline Wyatt
BBC News, Paris

Trade unions and protesters in France are claiming victory after the French government performed a complete U-turn on its controversial youth jobs law.
On Monday, the French government said it would withdraw the law, which would have allowed employers to sack anyone under the age of 26 within the first two years of their employment.
The measure had provoked weeks of protests, until finally, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin conceded defeat and said he would find other ways of reducing the numbers of young jobless.
This was a humiliating climb-down for Mr de Villepin, who had staked his political reputation on pushing through what initially seemed like a minor reform to a wider law on equal job opportunities for the disadvantaged.
Vociferous anger

The youth jobs law, the CPE, was aimed at helping youngsters in the troubled suburbs find jobs, after anger over high unemployment exploded into rioting last November.

Read more at the BBC

----------------------------

This news item is interesting.... because it is headed on the BBC front page by these questions

"Dangerous U-turn? How the French youth job climb-down may hurt the government... "

--------------------------------

Here lies a little secret of globalisation... ,The WTO , the G8 and other organism are part of this general flattening of all political, social and economical differences around the world... in favour of profiteering. Most countries have secretly colluded to achieve some social reforms to de-protect their workers... They are pursuing these goals according to their own existing laws but the aim is the same end... Why do you think Howard has introduced the new IR laws?... It's only a stepping stone to the globalisation of competition to the max where massive profits can be made by the selected few, including multi-national companies and multi-millionaires... Why do you think that patent GM food is being introduced around the world even by stealth... We're just pawns in the greater chess games of the triangle's eye... We are enticed with a bit of cash —just enough—, lots of fear and "moralisationing" medicine thrown at us to soothe the pain and stops us from asking questions. On the subject of morality, today's article by Gerard Henderson was a beauty in kind, although very naive:

--------------------------------

"Time for non-believers to hear the word

The pivotal role faith plays in democracies everywhere has long been overlooked, writes Gerard Henderson.

MANY histories of Australia downplay, if not ignore, the importance of religion in society since European settlement in 1788. This reflects the fact that much - but not all - history is written by non-believers, of either the atheist or agnostic persuasion. Some are hostile to established religions, others merely indifferent. Yet the result is much the same in that all too many historians edit out faith when reporting the past. This is perhaps the only occasion where history does not replicate contemporary news."

---------------------------------

Yes we know that Gerard... but this does not mean that the proper history of humankind has to be coloured by this or that religion.... Influences ARE taken into account in the writing and most history of Europe is coloured by wars, massacres and "robbery" from religion... But historians do not necessarily have to believe in it . It will be a sad day when history becomes locked in from a pulpit viewpoint...

-------------------------------

Gerard carries on:

"The latter development is not the product of a clash of civilisations but, rather, stems from a reassessment of Christianity, which is in decline in many Western societies. There is a tendency among some commentators and journalists in the West to regard the religious focus found in the contemporary US as odd, if not mad. However, this overlooks the fact that it is in Europe - and such nations as Australia, Canada and New Zealand - which have changed, not the US.

The English writer Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) once declared: "Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe." He would not write this about Europe today. But someone might make a similar comment about contemporary America. In the US, religion is taken seriously - from affluent whites to middle-class Afro-Americans and on to the poor Mexican immigrants. This is how it used to be in the West up to between three and five decades ago, when the "God is dead" ethos began to take hold."

----------------------------------

Yes Gerard, this is why, the latest world sociology reports that the US score very poorly on many social fronts. From the debacle of their medicare laws to the food coupons for the poor, the numbers of people in prison and of violent crimes shows that they do not have the freedom to be, that is the freedom to exist without having to be maniacs, workaholics or subdued by creationist beliefs... Lucky, they have strong, but too few non-believers who keep that country on an even keel otherwise it would be Bushiatollah estate...

But back to the flattening of political and social laws in most WTO countries, religion and fear are used by the people in power to impose the new rules. It did not work with the French... It shows a maturity in desire and non adherence to the globalisation crap... Globalisation needs to be accepting of differences in which every one can live equally happy rather than enforce an impossible equality of competitive madness on a global scale in which capital is behaving badly...

As on the back cover blurb of Mark Latham's "Civilising Global Capital" says:

"Global capital treats us all with ruthless efficiency We are either consumers, factors of production, or a dead weight loss. Our human aspirations —individual and social — are feeling the pressures of globalisation... "

We can't destroy workers rights for the sake of capital dictatorship...

--------------------------------

Gerard concludes:

"Sometimes this is reflected in the general media. Dr Eric D'Arcy, formerly the Catholic archbishop of Hobart and one of Australia's leading philosophers, died in Melbourne in December. Despite his important role in Australia there was no obituary in major Melbourne newspapers. It was as if one-time religious leaders are not as important as deceased authors or sporting stars.

World Youth Day will make a statement about the faith of some Australian Christians and the impact their faith has had, and is having, on their society and the world. Whatever the faults of Christian faiths, it is a fact that Christianity has coexisted with democratic forms of government. This is manifestly not the case with some secular ideologies (that is, communism, fascism) or with some fundamentalist theocracies (that is, Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini)."

------------------------------

Yes Gerard... and this is why your idol George Bush goes to war, let's mention the word he used it a moment of truth serum, "crusade" , the word he was quickly asked not to use as it could offend religious sensitivities... Meanwhile many people have died too young in Iraq and hopefully none will from today... And weaponry has revitalised a stagnant industry using fake money...

A sad case of globalisation as potent as the Ebola virus for some...

Meanwhile, as the students and union in Paris have shown strength of resolve, in Aussieland we worry about the price of diverting traffic...

From the ABC

Court limits students' Sydney protest
A court order issued last night will restrict a rally being organised by the National Union of Students (NUS) in Sydney today.

Today's rally is part of a national day of action by students across the country in protest at the Federal Government's policies.

The police sought to have the Sydney demonstration cancelled because of traffic concerns.

However, the Supreme Court last night ruled in favour of the students but found they had to limit the area where they would hold speeches.

"We will campaign and we'll campaign to win and if we lose we'll keep campaigning for every single right that we deserve," Anglela Khodeir, from the NUS, said.

Police and Sydney City Council will now have to decide who will pay for the blockades needed because of the new route.

read more at the ABC

From The Independent

World Bank accused of lying over funding to fight malaria

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 25 April 2006

The world's largest foreign aid organisation is accused today of deception and medical malpractice that has contributed to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of children from malaria.

The World Bank, which has a $20bn (£11.2bn) budget and a mission to reduce poverty, is alleged to have published misleading financial claims and false statistical accounts and wasted money on ineffective medicines for treating the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, 90 per cent of them children.

More than half a billion people suffer from malaria and incidence of the disease is getting worse. Eight years ago the World Bank, with the World Health Organisation and the UN Global Fund, launched the Roll Back Malaria programme to halve malaria deaths by 2010. Instead, the toll has risen by at least a quarter and in some areas by 50 per cent. The WHO estimates 3,000 children die from it each day.

Today, 13 malaria specialists from around the world accuse the World Bank of reneging on its promise to spend at least $300m on malaria control in Africa. They say much of its spending from 2000 to 2005 has been concealed, but the available figures suggest it has spent less than half the amount pledged.

They allege the Bank has cut its malaria staff from seven to zero, exaggerated the success of its projects and is continuing to fund "clinically obsolete treatments". They demand an independent inquiry into the mistakes made and say the World Bank should wind down its malaria projects and allocate $1bn to other organisations with greater expertise, such as the UN Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria

Read more at The Independent

From Al jazeera

Violence over US bases in S Korea

Friday 05 May 2006, 17:08 Makka Time, 14:08 GMT

On Thursday, military engineers moved in and cordoned off two townships about 70 km (44 miles) south of Seoul, where South Korea and the United States have agreed to relocate the main US base now in Seoul and several others across the country.

Scores of protesters, police and several journalists were wounded as riot police cleared the way for the engineers, fighting pitched battles with protesters and eventually overpowering them.

......
Compensation declined

Witnesses on the scene said fighting continued late into the night with soldiers, who are under orders to refrain from fighting back, defending themselves.

The confrontation that erupted on Thursday had been brewing for months as about 100 farmers refused to vacate the area.

Last ditch talks between the government and residents aimed at a compromise broke down on Monday. Local residents who remained, mostly elderly farmers, and protesters have said no amount of compensation would justify the move.

"Do not insult the residents who are fighting here," said Kim Ji-tae, who leads the farmers remaining and protesters in the area, in an open letter to President Roh Moo-hyun on Friday.

"As we said a number of times, we are not interested in compensation. What we want is to continue living here."

'National interest'

Yoon Kwang-ung, the defence minister, said the base relocation, which had been agreed to by Seoul and Washington in 2004 and authorised by South Korea's parliament, could no longer wait.

He said the delay was caused by opponents of US military presence in the country who had taken advantage of the farmers.

The presidential office in Seoul said in a statement it regretted the injuries suffered by the protesters and police.

"The enforcement of administrative order for the US base relocation was inevitable if we were to prevent large losses to our national interest diplomatically and economically that would be caused by delay," the statement said.

Read more at Al jazeera

--------------------------
Gus says that in the past one would have been bulldozed by a "you can't stop progress" tagline now the "in the national interest' banner is popping up everywhere and covering for all the sins we want to commit next...

From Al Jazeera

Israel to delay Gaza reprisals

Sunday 25 June 2006, 21:53 Makka Time, 18:53 GMT

Israel has decided to put off any major reprisals in the Gaza Strip for the killing of two soldiers, despite sending in tanks and troops earlier.

The cabinet said any action will be delayed until a third soldier who is believed captured has been recovered, Channel 10 Television reported.

Israel earlier on Sunday sent tanks and troops into the Gaza Strip hours after a Palestinian attack against an army border post that caused Israeli and Palestinian casualties.

The decision came at the urging of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, the privately owned channel said, citing a politician it did not name. It said Olmert was determined that the life of the soldier seized from an army post at the Gaza border should come first.

But ministers gave their approval in principle to a phased series of operations in the Gaza Strip later, the channel said.

readd more at Al Jazeera
-----------------------------
Gus: Yes revenge, reprisal or retaliation are usually best after a few days... a bit like cold meat... Why not add a bit of mustard (gas) as well?

Great negotiation : "...Yeah, you give our soldier back to us, then we beat the clappers out of you..."
Are these people nuts? Reprisals? More grief ahead of us for many more years...

I'm afraid... More dead kids, women and old people on all sides... Bloody tit for tat...

From the New York Times

MEMPHIS JOURNAL
Lady Liberty Trades In Some Trappings

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: July 5, 2006
MEMPHIS, July 4 — On Independence Day, Lady Liberty was born again.

As the congregation of the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church looked on and its pastor, Apostle Alton R. Williams, presided, a brown shroud much like a burqa was pulled away to reveal a giant statue of the Lady, but with the Ten Commandments under one arm and "Jehovah" inscribed on her crown.

And in place of a torch, she held aloft a large gold cross, as if to ward off the pawnshops, the car dealerships and the discount furniture outlets at the busy corner of Kirby Parkway and Winchester that is her home. A single tear graced her cheek.

It was not clear if she was crying because of her new home, her new identity as a symbol of religion or, as the pastor said, America's increasing godlessness. But although big cheers went up from the few hundred onlookers at the unveiling, and some people even wore foam Lady Liberty crowns bearing Christian slogans, she was not universally welcomed.

Most of the customers at the Dixie Queen food counter near the church viewed the statue as a cheap attention grab, said Guardia Nelson, 27, who works there.

"It's a big issue," Ms. Nelson said. "Liberty's supposed to have a fire, not a cross."

read more at the NYT

Apostle Alton R. Williams?

Now there's some foam .... foaming at the mouth!!!

The Dixie Chicks would love that. 

This is part one (randomly cut) of the unabridged unedited introduction to my forthcoming book, still in writing, titled “The Age of Deceit”. Hopefully I won’t die before I finish it, although some people may wish it that way.

THE AGE OF DECEIT

INTRODUCTION (part one)

"""""''This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,'' he said, his remarks carried live on television.

Bush read from remarks he had written himself on sheets of white paper. """"""

-----------------

Today, once again, our nations are fairy-dusted by an old foe, an acid test to our own desires of nation building and preservation, from which the mangled constructing roots are quietly kept away from the general public’s view so we, the populace, do not ask the hard questions — while too many of us are thanking god that Dubya is not asleep on the job. He-he-he… Ooomph… Dud.

Strangely, in this day and age of choice, we can vote whomever, but no matter how often we press the button or tick a box, we do not even scratch the veneer of what the powerful have chosen for us. We should be "happy" anyhow that Tweedledee or Tweedledum are leading the charge, because what else can we do?

“Happy” has varied manifestations for each individual but on average happy means being in a state-of-mind, in which we are not under threat, are protected from threats, while enjoying contentment via natural or acquired comfort. This comfort includes “lifestyle”, money, religious beliefs, and entertainment, most of which comes as a reward for our social contributive toiling of work.

Thus, while we are distracted by the tits and bums of celebrities spread eagle in magazines, while we are amused by clowns, are exhaustively excited by sporting activities and while our after-life is taken care of by priests and preachers, "we" (our government and its institutions) find and squash the everlasting plots (external and internal) against us. We are good because “we” foil these plots (most times). We reinforce our resolve to prevail because these battles contribute to our moral rights to lift the drawbridges, feel smug in our castle-comfort while we delegate out mercenaries to go and fight off more threats in someone else's patch... It’s a jungle out there.

To a great extent, three major philosophical thoughts have influenced our twentieth century nation building — philosophical thoughts, some used since Greek and Roman times, which, from the nineteenth century onwards due to the accelerating development of technology, needed variegation in formulations in order to give out enough slack and still maintain enough controls not to appear despotic or totally anarchistic in a "more democratically enlightened" world.

Some nations failed miserably: Nazi Germany within 20 years, but the USSR took more than 60 years to bite the dust, and it’s still sitting on edge. Reconstruction is usually painful and needs to dig deep into these core philosophical understandings.

Strangely so far, the most successful country on earth is the one that lied the most about its construct — the USA.

I will develop this interesting premise of porkie-building later on.

First, I am referring here to the three modern expression of philosophy underpinning most of our present Western societies relationships: Existentialism (Jean Paul Sartre), Structuralism (Claude Levi Strauss) and Neoconservatism (Leo Strauss)...

These are HUGE topics and in order not to write a 20,000 pages thesis that would still be incomplete, I will have to massively distil their three-dimensional purpose, their influence and their relationships with our esoteric and exoteric processes such as feelings and actions, with just a few words, quotes and annotations —here, in this far too long introduction to "The Age of Deceit".

Each of these expressions of philosophy can make strange bedfellow with the other by combining parts of one with some part of the other, or one can combine with an opposing concept, in a strange symbiotic relationship. I will of course concentrate on the Neoconservatism philosophy since it carries the most seeds of deceit, is embedded in many modern politicians of various persuasion in the USA — for example tainting a Condoleeza Rice to the core, while a Dubya would not have a clue about any essential philosophical thought, except being a dumb kid on the block having fun helping his “red-neck” mates make a load of cash.

Yes — due to the messy nature of things, we philosophically formulate the whatever of our destinies and these formulations create various cultures throughout humanity, although the neocons wish-list contains the subtle eradication of these.

Quite often, the formulations will contradict themselves within the same system in order to marry expenditure with receipt, while not killing each other. Greed and compassion can thus coexist in continually adjusted percentage points in the greater order of whichever system we choose to name as our main political sustenance — usually chosen for us by the powerful.

I will take the plunge here against my own best advice to suggest for example that Buddhism is the symbiotic relationship of existentialism (“selfish”) with compassion (“unselfish”), bound by a protocol of rituals. The rituals are the exoteric activities that link the esoteric thoughts to an exoteric activity. The aim is to achieve enlightenment of the pure self (“selfish”) while maintaining an unlimited compassion (“unselfish”).

Binding existentialism to compassion is not exclusive to Buddhism — but its rituals are its own. I will also suggest here to my detriment that scientology follow a similar combination, using a different binding ritual, with blend of money and success.

Rituals are mostly beautifully staged porkies.

I will suggest here, to the outrage of most people, that Capitalism is only a process not a philosophy. Capitalism is only the value-added exteriorisation of wants using the illusion of need... in whichever philosophical framework we choose.

Explaining the variegations in the various systems:

------------------------

Quoting from the Ludwig von Mises Institute [Liberalism]

"""""" IX.THE ROLE OF IDEAS

2. World View and Ideology

The theories directing action are often imperfect and unsatisfactory. They may be contradictory and unfit to be arranged into a comprehensive and coherent system.

If we look at all the theorems and theories guiding the conduct of certain individuals and groups as a coherent complex and try to arrange them as far as is feasible into a system, i.e., a comprehensive body of knowledge, we may speak of it as a world view. A world view is, as a theory, an interpretation of all things, and as a precept for action, an opinion concerning the best means for removing uneasiness as much as possible.

A world view is thus, on the one hand, an explanation of all phenomena and, on the other hand, a technology, both these terms being taken in their broadest sense. Religion, metaphysics, and philosophy aim at providing a world view. They interpret the universe and they advise men how to act."""""

----------------------------

I would say that Liberalism too, digs deep into the existentialism pocket with a different mix of acceptance of relationships in its practicality to minimise conflict and promote personal wealth.

EXISTENTIALISM defined by Gus Leonisky

Existentialism is the mainstay of Freedom. Pure existentialism is frightening to many people because there are no limits, not even a simple structure to follow. Many people do not have the knowledge, the power or the will to acquire this ultimate freedom — a self, free of structured-comforting illusions such as religion, beliefs or calculated interdependence. Existentialism is the only place where we could find our true fighting self, our ego, our individual. But do we really want to find it? We might not like what we find...

Since our childhood we have been fed on “milk” (food) for our body’s good function — and grand illusions for our "spirit", to fill its "existential angst", with fairies, santas and popes.

Changing/de-structuring this stack of esoteric/exoteric purposes can be a shock to the system (threatening our individual and social mental health[s] usually manifested in depression) unless we are prepared to dip our mind into our natural constructs plus accept a large dose of uncertainty.

Thus, can we be “complete” without the interactions that did and do shape our personal thoughts and ideas, most designed to reduce our cosmic uncertainty by safety in numbers, whether we, as a group, get it right or wrong? How much reactive is our true natural self, to events and external input? Is true existentialist freedom not to be reactive... but deliberately having sublimed above our constructs to bypass reactivity?

Anarchy could be described as jungle-level--opportunism dipped into existentialism. Existentialism and anarchy are not very welcome in our present social constructs, but the existentialist concept of freedom is the great lure that strongly drives our search for greater success, and feeds our positivism "can do anything" yet we temper it with the "moral" limits of our society... Pure existentialism is a lonely place. Existentialism parallels the "hermit" of past times.

Secondary systems of governance, such as Liberalism carry the seed of Existentialism applied to economic activities…

Existentialism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"""""Existentialism is a philosophical movement that is generally considered a study that pursues meaning in existence and seeks value for the existing individual. Existentialism, unlike other fields of philosophy, does not treat the individual as a concept, and values individual subjectivity over objectivity. As a result, questions regarding the meaning of life and subjective experience are seen as being of paramount importance, above all other scientific and philosophical pursuits. Existentialism often is associated with anxiety, dread, awareness of death, and freedom. Famous existentialists include Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus.

Existentialism emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence and is fundamentally opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism. That is, it argues against definitions of human beings either as primarily rational, knowing beings who relate to reality primarily as an object of knowledge, or for whom action can or ought to be regulated by rational principles, or as beings who can be defined in terms of their behavior as it looks to or is studied by others. More generally it rejects all of the Western rationalist definitions of being in terms of a rational principle or essence or as the most general feature that all existing things share in common. Existentialism tends to view human beings as subjects in an indifferent, objective, often ambiguous, and "absurd" universe in which meaning is not provided by the natural order, but rather can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by human beings' actions and interpretations."""""

Hum…

Back to some reality:

Sartre referred to terrorism as a "terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.

If fact I would say Sartre was somewhat wrong on this, as terrorism can be a twisted rational of higher class-groups taking a stand in defense of the poor and the oppressed... but terrorism can also be a weapon used by states in order to maintain their power or to influence a regime change in other countries.

Most states do not like Existentialism as it removes the controlling power over people and can lead quickly to a mild form of anarchy. In fact this is the essence of what Sartre would argue that we are all born free and only the existence of some bastard who want to control us for power can remove this freedom...

I would say the word “freedom” is used by the powerful bastards to conjure an illusion, for us to be mesmerized with, while they tightly control our purpose. So when some pantomime president talks of “freedom”, think of sweet deceit. His package has many fishy restrictions and his hooks are fully baited.

We should have more affinity with a male Chimpanzee who plays with his own turd than with a president who claims to spread “freedom” — left, right and centre — and engages in silly wars that kill hundred of thousands of people… Yes, the chimp is less dangerous... but, strangely, too many people support a president’s heinous action and condemn the chimp for discovering he’s got two ends to his digestive tract.

[ interrupting note: If any publishers of decent books here, feel their ears pricked, please do not hesitate to contact the good patrons of this site for further information]

STRUCTURALISM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"""""""Structuralism is an approach in academic disciplines that explores the relationships between fundamental elements of some kind, upon which some higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc "structures" are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, or culture.

Structuralism appeared in academic psychology for the first time in...

Sorry folks...

End of Introduction part one.... Next instalment (if you so wish) soon.

STRUCTURALISM
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Structuralism is an approach in academic disciplines that explores the relationships between fundamental elements of some kind, upon which some higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc "structures" are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, or culture….

Hum… And so on…

Structuralism from Gus Leonisky
Structuralism is a fine theory and works well to navel gaze the constructs of small communities, especially those that have become isolated or those that codify their encounters with other societies in a very specific manner… If my memory serves me right, there were these two tribes in South America that for many centuries used to have wars of a strange kind: they would kill each others in a specific ritualistic number (one of yours one of mine, one of yours one of mine) for just a few days and then stop, until it was agreed to start the hostilities again, after two to three years period of peace basis. They would take some male prisoners for copulation with their women and then kill these men afterwards. Empirically, this weird behavior maintained the gene-pool’s health and controlled the number of individuals so that food supply would stay abundant.

Applied “structuralism” relies on kinship, tribal spirit, contribution of individuals to the common good, usually not far from basic survival with a bit of ritual thrown in to maintain the continuum of the codification, which in some tribes can be quite complex.

I would suggest that structuralism has little elasticity when it comes to greater social construct… It defeats itself, becoming cumbersome in its administration and has little defense against dissent but to sideline dissent severely. Also in a changing technological environment, Structuralism has difficulty coping with the new inventions, social and technological, especially those that could change the ritualization of the structure.

Contrary to Existentialism, Structuralism suggest and accept we are born from a system (family, tribe, group, region, country, language, culture) and are fully dependent of that system, in survival, in stylistic expression and in the necessity to contribute. Communism in Russia (a process backed by a philosophy of structuralism) was a prime example of struggling structuralism and it went bad — mainly due to the energy needed to control the structure on such a vast scale,... Communism in China is more of a paternalistic system of governance with a certain amount of flexibility thrown in to include change. The Chinese ethics for work but specially the Western Nations having deliberately cooperated with the regime, have both helped China to survive and prosper away from isolation.

Communism has also been relatively successful in (smaller) Cuba. First the Neoconic Yanks decided to turn their back on Cuba after a pitiful attempt at invasion — thus reducing the after-threat of discontent forces-within by helping the Cubans focus on defeating the external forces of an after-threat… Second, due to being isolated, Cuba's structure put in place was much closer to Socialism in which everyone (most) knew they had to pull their socks up if they were to survive, and survive well they did — despite being close to the poverty line if one measure success in drooling dollars. Those who did not like the regime “escaped”, and more often than not they were the ones who had been affected (infected?) by drooling greed and Hollywoodian illusions.

Hippies in the 60s had a vague sense of structuralism in their communes, with a penchant for anarchy — with a bit of free-sex thrown in — so that every one would participate in the easy growing of a good weed. It was back to the bare bottom basics, as long as breathing the air remained free.

Socialism thus is a form of Structuralism, in which there is room for individual to personally enjoy the product of their labor, while being taken care of by the state if they flounder… Major enterprises remain in the hand of the state, such as communications, energy supplies and health… and if developed smartly without departing from a sense of community, this system can fulfil greater needs with a more direct effort, reducing the need for payola hungry ”middle-men”.

In this system too, entertainment can reach a high degree of sophisticated simplicity in which the cult of stars and heroes is minimal — although some would argue that Castro cultivated his status as such, but I would counter-argue and would propose that the imposition of his persona on the Cuban public was not for personal profit but for the benefit of the group. One of the “disadvantage of structuralism” is that it’s difficult to amass a big loot of some kind without being looked upon by the neighbors and thrown in to the lions of the system that require a reasonably equitable sharing of the common pie. Thus greed is minimized… Some would argue by minimizing greed one destroys incentives and invention, but this like a lot of things here is debatable.

Back to Wikipedia

Structuralism appeared in academic psychology for the first time in the 19th century and then reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most popular approaches in the academic fields that are concerned with analyzing language, culture, and society. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure concerning linguistics is generally considered to be a starting point of the 20th century structuralism. The term of "structuralism" itself appeared in relation to French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss' works, and gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement," which gathered thinkers such as psychoanalyst Lacan, Foucault or Althusser and Poulantzas' structural Marxism. One should note that almost all members of this so-called movement denied that they were part of it. Post-structuralism attempted to distinguish itself from the use of the structural method. It is also worth noting that it has been influential in some part of social sciences particularly in the field of sociology while in the field of economics it is barely mentioned.

Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way that human behavior is determined by various structures.

LEVI STRAUSS (from wikipedia…)
For Lévi Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events where the outcome was uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands, he found the proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – you just postulate a trait of personality when you need it.

But the accepted way of discussing organisational function didn't work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups can interact. But exactly what they can do – trade, intermarry – is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups.
Nor will it do to say that dividing-in-two is a universal need of organisations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.

More bits from the Liberalist (Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell et al)
There are psychiatrists who call the Germans who espoused the principles of Nazism lunatics and want to cure them by therapeutic procedures. Here again we are faced with the same problem. The doctrines of Nazism are vicious, but they do not essentially disagree with the ideologies of socialism and nationalism as approved by other peoples' public opinion. What characterized the Nazis was only the consistent application of these ideologies to the special conditions of Germany. Like all other contemporary nations the Nazis desired government control of business and economic self-sufficiency, i.e., autarky, for their own nation. The distinctive mark of their policy was that they refused to acquiesce in the disadvantages which the acceptance of the same system by other nations would impose upon them. They were not prepared to be forever "imprisoned," as they said, within a comparatively overpopulated area in which physical conditions render the productivity of human effort lower than in other countries. They believed that their nation's great population figures, the strategically propitious geographic situation of their country, and the inborn vigor and gallantry of their armed forces provided them with a good chance to remedy by aggression the evils they deplored.

Now, whoever accepts the ideology of nationalism and socialism as true and as the standard of his own nation's policy, is not in a position to refute the conclusions drawn from them by the Nazis. The only way for a refutation of Nazism left for foreign nations which have espoused these two principles was to defeat the Nazis in war. And as long as the ideology of socialism and nationalism is supreme in the world's public opinion, the Germans or other peoples will try again to succeed by aggression and conquest, should the opportunity ever be offered to them. There is no hope of eradication the aggression mentality if one does not explode entirely the ideological fallacies from which it stems. This is not a task for psychiatrists, but for economists.

Man has only one tool to fight error: reason.
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Gus has a good laugh here… Reason? Reason? Not so for the Neoconservatives… No, the major neoconservative tool is spruiking to sell the error (or the whatever) as a plus! Never admit there's a mistake in the pipeline...

NEOCONSERVATISM
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neoconservatism is a political current and ideology, mainly in the United States, which emerged in the 1960s, coalesced in the 1970s, and has had a significant presence in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. It is today most closely identified with a set of foreign policy positions and goals: a hawkish stance during the Cold War and, more recently, in various conflicts in the Middle East. At times there have been distinct neoconservative positions in domestic policies; in particular, the first generation of neoconservatives were generally less opposed to "big government" and to social spending than other U.S. conservatives of the time, though they also called for significant restructuring of the goals and methods of many social programs. Blah blah blah…

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NEOCONSERVATISM explained by Gus Leonisky

Neoconservatism is an extension of the rule of kings and queens, in which there are subjects and nobility geared to serve at various level of duty, a system itself being an extension of the core belief sprayed onto the masses of the gullible and the weak, since the origin of time — well ingrained in the old Jewish spruiked mantra, that “one is from the “chosen” people…”

Yes Neoconservatism relies on the good old “god-anointed person to rule”. Of course this is the biggest porkie of them all, but it works superbly because if you can reach the top of this woodpile with such a huge porkie, you deserve to be king anyhow.

Neoconservatism thus relies on a fine construct of elegant lies and gives itself the right to intervene into other peoples business, especially other country’s affairs, all for the benefit and profit to itself. Now, in a "democracy" one has to realize that the grand ruler is not a dynasty of people but the dynasty of the greater ruler of them all… money — and not just plain old scrooge’s gold coins, but the ascending dynasty of the almighty Dollar.

I know some people will argue here that we really live in a democracy, so how can we be “ruled” in such way when we can elect… blah, blah, blah… You know the answer to this one: no matter who you vote, the system has to continue to grow and grow, no matter how one desires it to stop or change. Only very few twiddles are allowed. The reconstruction from this kingdom’s collapse would be horrendous, although, in my book, necessary if we wish to survive our melting planet. My opinion for what it's worth...

Yes… thus King-Dollar has its grand masters and grand priests, who maintain its kingdom rule, themselves massively benefiting from the general crumbs. Some would call this: “Capitalism” but in my book here, Capitalism is only the process that maintains the Kingdom of the Mighty Dollar… Neoconservatism is the philosophy that underpins the process.

Yes I know some will say but how come, since Neoconservatism was only devised in the 1960s?

I will argue the US has been in a state of Neoconservatism since the US’s inception, although most Americans may not acknowledge this fact, because of some variants and errants along the way. But when the first dollar was minted, decorated with its truncated pyramid and the eye set in the triangle of glory, it was not done for fun or artistic desire. It was a deliberately chosen symbol to illustrate a new order of things… in which this new money was going to be king — at any cost.

New forms of lying were devised.

Yes the beauty is that this Neoconic system taps deeply into our own personal ability to fudge, porkie, lie to our selves, and find at which point principles can be bought out (since everything has a price). The smartest fudgers take the large slice of the cake, — the role of the Dollar Keepers — as long as one is not thrown in prison for being found out fudging. It’s a game of hide and seek for the participants, in which everyone knows something’s crook about someone else but no-one can say anything unless being exposed in turn for thy own crookery…

Thus starts the greatest poker game of all in which Democrats, Republicans and the Corporate powerful can only play, while the general public buys them the little chips to put on the table. Small change really, but the system holds up because no-one can sneeze without creating a small upset, and the original foundations, based in the belief of the Dollar’s powers to rule, cannot be shaken easily.

Of course from time to time some sacrifice will be performed to the altar of truth to maintain the illusion in the eye of the comfortable masses… Overall the system provides extraordinary well to its people so why should we question its structures?

For good measure, “moral” questions such as refusing gay marriage and stem cell research are thrown in to give credibility to this totally immoral system… This is why in the USA, the theory of evolution is struggling to take proper roots, as the “praise-the-lord” masses are constantly massaged through well tuned moral gobbledegook ritual analysis of the good book which translate roughly, “give me your souls and your moneys, and you will be saved from eternal hell…” Thus the con of the neocons goes back to Moses and his tablets… "We cannot be monkeys since we are the children of god" but we can be fooled... And Mel Gibson could be right with history to a point where he loses it with his own beliefs…

By adaptation from the Byzantine theory, for a king to stay in power, he needs at least 67 percent of his subjects to support him. Any less and his kingdom becomes unstable through plots designed to overthrow him, plots that cannot be successfully found out, or wars in which not enough of his fodder wishes to participate in.

In a true democracy, one needs only 50 per cent of the votes plus one vote to be the ruler of the mob. End of story.

For Neoconservatism to work, and boy does it works well, one needs only a small troop of well-briefed officers ready to spread the word that : “no worries, why don’t you enjoy the comforts we provide while we take care of your security…” and maintain a neat “structure of lies that often self-fulfil like prophecies to prove the point. Even if there are cock-ups, the train cannot be derailed. More lies, more porkies can be manufactured, including the “proofs” needed, to protect the lies, in a thin coat of truth.

This Neoconic embedded capitalist system works beautifully as the price of fish does not really matter as long as someone is prepared to buy the fish (including petrol and its myths) — and as long as It becomes harder for participants to challenge the system — as comfort sets in at the same time as debt. Thus the majority of us are caught in a well crafted web from the masters of credit, in which we are free to live or die… Some of us are free of this shackle but it is very tempting to participate in the suckling of the rest, while very few can claim true freedom of spirit.

Back to Wikipedia

The prefix neo- refers to two ways in which neoconservatism was new: many of the movement's founders, originally liberals, Democrats or from socialist backgrounds, were new to conservatism; neoconservatism was also a comparatively recent strain of conservative thought, which derived from a variety of intellectual roots in the decades following World War II. While some (such as Irving Kristol) have described themselves as "neoconservatives", the term is used today more by opponents and critics of this political current than by its adherents, some of whom reject even the claim that neoconservatism is an identifiable current of American political thought.

Within American conservatism, the foreign policy of neoconservatism is particularly contrasted to isolationism, especially as found in paleoconservatism. While the neoconservatives share some of the Christian right critique of a purely secular society, this is not as central to their politics as it is for the Christian right, nor are the neoconservative prescriptions always the same as those of the Christian right.

Neoconservatism is associated with periodicals such as Commentary and The Weekly Standard and some of the foreign policy initiatives of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Neoconservative journalists, pundits, policy analysts, and politicians, often dubbed "neocons" by supporters and critics alike, have been credited with (or blamed for) their influence on U.S. foreign policy, especially under the administrations of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) and George W. Bush (2001-present).

Neoconservative: Definition and views
Usage and general views
The meaning of the term has evolved over time. James Bryce offered it as a neologism in his Modern Democracies (1921). In "The Future of Democratic Values" in Partisan Review, July-August 1943, Dwight MacDonald complained of "the neo-conservatives of our time [who] reject the propositions on materialism, Human Nature, and Progress." He cited as an example Jacques Barzun, who was "attempting to combine progressive values and conservative concepts." The term was prominently used circa 1970 by socialist author and activist Michael Harrington in a manner similar to MacDonald's meaning, that is, to characterize former leftists who had moved significantly to the right – people he derided as "socialists for Nixon." The "neoconservatives" thus described in this original sense tended to remain supporters of the welfare state, but had distinguished themselves from others on the left by allying with the Nixon administration over foreign policy, especially in their anti-communism, their support for the Vietnam War, and strident opposition to the
Soviet Union. This support for the welfare state is not implied by the contemporary use of the term. Critics suggest support for an aggressive worldwide foreign policy, especially one supportive of unilateralism and less concerned with international consensus through organizations such as the United Nations. However, neoconservatives describe their shared view as a belief that national security is best attained by promoting freedom and democracy abroad through the support of pro-democracy movements, foreign aid and in certain cases military intervention.

This is a departure from the classic conservative tendency to support friendly regimes in matters of trade and anti-communism even at the expense of undermining existing democratic systems. Author Paul Berman in his book Terror and Liberalism describes it as, "Freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for freedom for others."

In academia, the term "neoconservative" refers more to journalists, pundits, policy analysts, and institutions affiliated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and with Commentary and The Weekly Standard than to more traditional conservative policy think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation or periodicals such as Policy Review or National Review.

According to Irving Kristol, former managing editor of Commentary and now a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Interest, a neoconservative is a "liberal mugged by reality," meaning someone who has become more conservative after seeing the practical impact of liberal foreign and domestic policies.

Some critics argue that the intellectual antecedents of neoconservativism can be traced back to the work of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Although Strauss rarely stated positions on foreign policy issues, according to some Strauss has influenced the foreign policy of Neo-Conservative governments, most notably the attitude that such governments have taken towards international law in situations where terrorism is alleged.

Strauss on politics
According to Strauss, modern Social Science [probably the study of Structuralism] was flawed. It claimed the ground by which truth could be discovered on an unexamined acceptance of the fact-value distinction. Strauss doubted the fact-value distinction was a fundamental category of the mind and studied the evolution of the concept from its roots in Enlightenment philosophy to Max Weber, a thinker Strauss credited with a “serious and noble mind”. Weber wanted to separate values from science, but according to Strauss was really a derivative thinker, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s relativism. Therefore, Strauss treated politics not as something that could be studied from afar. A political scientist examining politics with a value-free scientific eye, for Strauss, was impossible, not just a tragic self-delusion. Positivism, the heir to the traditions of both Auguste Comte and Max Weber, in making purportedly value-free judgments, failed the ultimate test of justifying its own existence, which would require a value-judgment.

While modern liberalism had stressed the pursuit of individual liberty as its highest goal, Strauss felt that there should be a greater interest in the problem of human excellence and political virtue. Through his writings, Strauss constantly raised the question of how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist. Without deciding this issue, Strauss refused to make do with any simplistic or one-sided resolutions of the Socratic question: What is the good for the city and man?

Liberalism and nihilism
Strauss taught that liberalism, strictly speaking, contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism. The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. These ideologies, both descendents of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics and moral standards and replace it by force with a supreme authority from which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered. The second type- the ‘gentle’ nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies- was a kind of value-free aimlessness and hedonism, which he saw permeating the fabric of contemporary American society. In the belief that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy,

Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this state. The resultant study lead him to revive classical political philosophy as a source by which political action could be judged.

Noble lies and deadly truths
Strauss noted that thinkers of the first rank, going back to Plato, had raised the problem of whether good and effective politicians could be completely truthful and still achieve the necessary ends of their society. By implication, Strauss asks his readers to consider whether
"noble lies" have any role at all to play in uniting and guiding the polis. Are "myths" needed to give people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society? Or can men and women dedicated to relentlessly examining, in Nietzsche's language, those "deadly truths", flourish freely? Thus, is there a limit to the political, and what can be known absolutely? In The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately, and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth.

According to Strauss, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies had mistaken the city-in-speech described in Plato's Republic for a blueprint for regime reform--which it was not. Strauss quotes Cicero, "The Republic does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things- the nature of the city." (History of Political Philosophy, p.68). Strauss himself argued in many publications that the city-in-speech was unnatural, precisely because "it is rendered possible by the abstraction from eros (Strauss' italics). (HPP, p.60). The city-in-speech abstracted from eros, or bodily needs, thus it could never guide politics in the manner Popper claimed. Though very skeptical of "progress,"

Strauss was equally skeptical about political agendas of "return" (which is the term he used in contrast to progress). In fact, he was consistently suspicious of anything claiming to be a solution to an old political or philosophical problem. He spoke of the danger in trying to ever finally resolve the debate between rationalism and traditionalism in politics. In particular, along with many in the pre-World War II German Right, he feared people trying to force a "world state" to come into being in the future, thinking that it would inevitably become a tyranny.

Ancients and Moderns
Strauss constantly stressed the importance of two dichotomies in political philosophy: Athens and Jerusalem (Reason vs. Revelation) and Ancient versus Modern political philosophy. The "Ancients" were the Socratic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, and the "Moderns" start with Niccolo Machiavelli. The contrast between Ancients and Moderns was understood to be related to the public presentation of the possibly unresolvable tension between Reason and Revelation.

The Socratics, reacting to the first Greek philosophers, brought philosophy back to earth, and hence back to the marketplace, making it more political. The Moderns reacted to the dominance of revelation in medieval society by promoting the possibilities of Reason very strongly — which in turn leads to problems in modern politics and society. In particular, Thomas Hobbes, under the influence of Bacon, re-oriented political science to what was most solid, but most low in man, setting a precedent for John Locke, and the later economic approach to political thought, such as initially in David Hume, and Adam Smith.

Not unlike Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Jefferson, Strauss believed that the vices of a democratic regime must be known (and not left unquestioned) so that its virtues might triumph. However, insofar as his teaching suggested that the argument for the pre-eminence of democracy is not an apodictic principle (i.e. not self evident or beyond contradiction), he has gained the reputation for being an enemy to democracy.

Strauss [Leo] in the Public View
Strauss is a controversial and much caricatured figure in some academic and journalistic circles. (M.F. Burnyeat, "Sphinx Without a Secret," New York Review of Books, May 30, 1985). This has been both for his criticisms of various modern movements and thinkers (including many conservatives), and because some of his students and proteges, such as Allan Bloom, Harry V. Jaffa, Joseph Cropsey, Paul Wolfowitz, and Harvey C. Mansfield, are themselves controversial public figures. Many of these people are now frequently referred to as Straussians.

Yet Shadia Drury of the University of Regina, author of 1999's Leo Strauss and the American Right, claims Strauss' thought itself is dangerous and anti-democratic. She writes that Strauss taught different things to different students, and inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders which is linked to imperialist militarism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury believes that Strauss taught some of his students to believe "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them. ..

The Weimar Republic was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt." Drury adds, "Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews." Another well known critic of Strauss is Anne Norton, although she is primarily an antagonist of Straussians rather than Strauss himself.

Paul Wolfowitz was a student of Strauss; Wolfowitz attended two courses which Strauss taught on Plato and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. Indeed, James Mann claims that Wolfowitz chose that University because Strauss taught there and believed him to be "a unique figure, an irreplaceable asset," recommended to him by teacher Allan Bloom who taught at Cornell when Wolfowitz was an undergraduate there. Wolfowitz himself has claimed to be more of a student of Albert Wohlstetter.
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Back to Gus, here...

THE JEWRY
When actor Mel Gibson had a volley of insults referring to Jews, to a cop while being arrested for driving while being drunk, he may have been expressing a dizzy frustration that we, gentiles and honest Jews alike, feel at a Jewish “superiority”… Since time back to the dawn of civilization, the Jews have declared themselves the “chosen” people, The "Children of God"...

Sorry folks... the next and last instalment of the introduction to "The Age of Deceit" coming soon...

From the Sydney Morning Herald
Obituaries
He was anti-globalisation before it had a name

August 15, 2006
[http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/he-was-antiglobalisation-before-it-had-a-name/2006/08/14/1155407738263.html|Murray Bookchin], 1921-2006

THE American political philosopher and activist Murray Bookchin was a theorist of the anti-globalisation movement before its time, an ecological visionary, an advocate of direct action and a polemicist. "Capitalism is a social cancer," he argued. "It is the disease of society."

read more at the SMH
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Gus: Did this amazing fellow ever made it the front page of a newspaper?

In this day and age of the futile, useless and entertaining fluff — like a footballer who swears at a touch judge and becomes more important than people of great ideas, making the front page of this sleepless city while an attack on Aussie troops in Baghdad only makes page two (ah... but we did not have any photographs?) — would great ideas wet the cotton wool of our comfort zone? And demand that we really start to think again?

THE JEWRY
When actor Mel Gibson allegedly sprouted an insult referring to Jews, to a cop, while being arrested for driving while being drunk, he may have expressed “in vino veritas” a dizzy fluff that we, honest gentiles and Jews alike, feel at odd with, when we contemplate the Jewish “superiority” and its full momentum. Though this feeling of "being-the-one" may have been transferred on to him, via his own religious belief under the headline: the only “truth”… his outburst may have been directed at this extraordinary school — well entrenched now in all prominent political circles, driving the USA, the UK to a great extend, profoundly in Australia by alliance — that uses the Jewish Straussian model of neo-conservatism rule, by association or by desires…
Since time going back to the dawn of civilization, Jews have declared themselves the “chosen” people, The Children of God. Although they claim it was God himself who chose them. Why? Who know? It does not make particular sense but it gives us a great reason to exist.

In order not to be left behind, the Christians have also adopted the same label with value-added tourism concept to go and spread the good news to the rest of the world, spreading like manure on a vegie patch of the vegan people. And the Muslims jumped a bit later on the same treadmill. Whatever suits anyone, says Gus… but could “being the chosen people” be the secret mother of all porkies, especially those of the Neoconservative system? A porkie that is underpinning the values of our activities, of our various associations and of our little wars even those before the crusades: Yes, we can be (and are) better than our competitors.

It would be foolish to start Israel history when it was reborn in 1947 with the 1920s’ Zionist movement successful landing, helped by an international community secret desire to elegantly rid themselves of the Jewry (as we know this has been replaced with a reverse effect: the Muslim infiltration of the western world). The layers of time go back to Abraham from whom the three religions of Middle East sprung and are still weirdly “fighting” each other today in many complex and fluxing alliances. All wars of course waged in the name of freedom and justice, but truly in the name of greed: Freedom of Greed, as long as it is Jewish, or that the Jewish gate-keeper takes its cut.

If one looks at a modern map of Israel drawn by Israelis who believe in their rights to exist where they are, one could be amazed but there is no argument: the Palestine, including the Gaza strip, the Sheeba farms and the Golan Heights are firmly included in the state defended borders…
That a concrete wall is being built here and there, that the Gaza strip is “given” back to the Palestinians are mere setbacks in the long history of up and coming Zion. A bit like pulling back to run faster and jump higher so to speak, when the wind is right.
One can see the Palestinians are between a rock and a hard place. The Palestinians could either stop harassing Israel and become, as slowly as the long hour-glass of the days of our lives can take, eventually absorbed by greater Israel since on the maps they already are or they keep on a few extremist attacks that give their frustrations a bit of release. These sand-flies attacks of course are secretly back-fermented by Israel to give itself the high moral ground of retaliation and the “right to defend itself” slowly diminishing the population of Palestinians to a rate of ten to one… Either way the Palestinians are shafted... And in the Arab world Palestinians have very few friends — since the greater stock of greed, Oil, could be upset, thus stop filling the Ali-Baba mega-treasurous caves of little despots.
The march of greater Israel is on, slowly, one little step at a time… Unfortunately, the Sinai had to be given back and the recent spat with Lebanon — that has exposed a small chink in Israel armor — are but broken gossamer threads in the winds of Jewish history… Big threads mind you if you count the money and prestige, but the webs are still being silk-woven in the back rooms by a million newborn spiders.
In these slow and carefully crafted conquests made walking on eggshells with 500 pounds bombs, alliances are made. The Christians and the Jews (the US and Israel), The Christians and the Muslims (the US and the House of Saud) and the Jews and the Muslims (Israel and Turkey). And the Europe also threads some iffy alliances with all to maintain supplies of the good oil… The use of Fundamentalism on all sides provides the fodder necessary to wage wars... Imagine half-hearted soldiers non-committed to perform! They would not die for a flimflam, would they?
Many of these alliances are designed to weaken the Saracens so they never unite again, letting Zion rule on its former empire once again. The empire of course is only that — an empirical and false memory written in the great book of illusions, in which defeats are turned into sins and victories into god’s work. These illusions carefully tendered growing through history to culminate into the superman syndrome that drive big brother, the USA, who can see the great grab at the end of it all. Little things that happen by “accident of the imagination” are rounded up and corralled into masterful purposes. Zarathustra becomes Superman, but to make it palatable and plausible to the masses of poor morons, the fight is disguised as protecting justice and the underdogs, while it is fought for the smart rulers to rule over a greater growing empire…

Of course the sins of the Luthors of this world have to be demonized, evil-ized so that we have no qualms in defending our patch by waging wars in advance. But the real Luthors and the real Supermen are never black and white — as in the comic books or the legends of history… They bleed of the same blood and dream of the same peace… and may be of their own little patch.

It was a strange caravan that saw many Arabic chiefs go to the UN and beg Washington to help stop the war Israel was wagging in Lebanon recently (July-August 2006)… The overt alliance between Bush-the-Idiot and Israel-the-warrior was no tom-foolery. Most of these Saracen chiefs rule like dictator, some worse than Saddam, over their Kingdom of oils and they feared their subjects would start waking up to the drum of their brothers in distress, revolting within, to go and fight against Zion, demolishing the carefully constructed alliances and creating unrest in their own Saracen states… These chiefs deal with their own complex problems, their own divisions between Sunnis and Shia, all praying to the same god via different prophets, but, good bless ’em they amass the greatest of all fortunes that even the richest man cannot dream of… Of course, the chiefs have a weapon in their own lies about their buried resources, the proportional output and the tightening of it that can make a president listen (it did work in the early 1970s).

For us, the ordinary folks that toil our virtues daily, all these greater machinations are above our heads. As long as our comforts and securities are maintained, improved, and that we can drive from A to B, from pump to pump, we do not realize we are the pawns of the greater game — the deadly game in which we kill or die for illusions that our masters implant in our brains. We are distracted by singular purposes — the tits and bums of dolly idols — while the march of history passes us by.

Some fools would like us to believe that the end of the world is nigh… But this deceit suits the greater original porkies of all sins to enforce our fears into tightarse-ing spasms. The spruiks are getting louder and louder, the lies are inflating beyond belief! Will the bubble explode? The theme of Armageddon is implanted in each of us, as our individual lives are finite. The priests of civilization momentum know that and all they have to do is press that button and we bend at the knees to protect the continuum…

All it takes to push for subtle greater conquest, at this moment of history is a bumbling idiot or an extremely clever man to be in charge of the western civilization… I would suggest we have both. Our front man is out of his depth, brain dead, unable to know a cow from a horse, with flashes of surprising self-deprecating humor… But our Bushie is only the dummy of a puppet master whose dream of history is passed-on from secret Doodah to secret Doodah, using the Jewish grail to transmit their Luthorish ways… A unified peaceful world that they own and control… Leo Strauss was one of their prophets…

A Jew I may be or not, a visionary I hope I am not… I hope I have the wrong visions here… trying to mono-phase the future… It is a difficult task that even historians don’t agree upon. History has many connecting hidden strands, like the strings of a complex puppet the face of which distorts like a soap bubble. The flow and ebb of historic machinations can wait another day… The sun is coming up. China, Europe and Russia are also waking up on the same planet. Some slowly, and there are a few minnows trying to also quack… The US Empire is slowing Europe by not releasing its strange hate-love grip on the UK, and relentlessly trying to break the bond between the French and the Germans. Eventually Albion may be cast adrift by Europe, and the English Sausage can become as full of fat as before… The US has favored China to avoid the greater yellow peril spill but in the process abandoned Mexico. Now the Latin America is awakening to its oil power, making new alliance with Russia and Iran…

Cuba, by default may have been the only non-greedy place on earth… watch for the swarms of stinging bees flying there, to pinch the sugar of its sweet flowers to turn it into honey-greedy-pot…

Back to the great Neo-con.
By now, one has to realize that Neo-conservatism is a form of greater “structuralism” with porkie-added value to give it that important flexibility that lacks in any system where “equality” rules solid with a stick (whether it does or not, in reality). This noble lie loosen the adherence to the now elastic principles of the system (whatever the system), via a couple of simple devices that encourages the bum rush — competition (greed) and spruiking (all the form of media including advertising and propaganda), the latter used in the case of Neo-conservatism like a carrot to a donkey — to crown the Dollar-King and create a world of scrambling scrooges. But these are only mechanics… The surfaces of the true ideals are kept to a minimum, because the heart of the greater con cannot be spruiked…

For the lowly priests of this adapted “structure”, everything has a price, including principles. Very early on, many people, especially those with no conscience saw great opportunities to make loads of cash, as the system “created itself” with a bit of push and shove from below, exhumed from the long-tried bases of grab-all kings who had the bigger stick, until finally formulated, — but well implemented by then under the guise of a democratic system — by Leo Strauss. Like in most kingdoms, deceitful psychopath can go to the top, but not exclusively.

For the individual person, money-grab becomes the key motivation for anything that is performed, not the benefit of the group — although this can, and often does or should, come as an extra benefit. The beauty here is that everyone can play positive reinforcement than one is “better” than everyone else. The cultivation of hero and role models, like in antiquity, becomes essential but with complex categories, entities from Superman to pop stars being used daily in the sauce of real news (tailored spruik) to keep the masses amused and dazzled.
Hey? Who in their right mind are going to question the system that provides us with our wants and needs, while political democratic meetings can be so boring compared to an easy night on the tele, where the amusing fodder is already pre-munched for our lazy and tired bones… Isn’t it why so-called junk food is so popular too?… Are we Masochists?

Only a few of us can win the true favors of the illusionary dollar-king, while the rest of the ordinary fodder-making slaves burn their guts out at various level on a strong pyramid of growing greed (including people outside the system, whose lands and resources are appropriated by various subterfuges, for basic energy) hoping that one day they will become top dog… and pigs might fly…
Truth, of course, takes a massive battering in the various increments at which people can be enticed to partake of their money to fuel the higher echelons. Spruiking is the essential ingredient to trample the opposition — and war becomes validated by the system’s needs and is used on many occasions. Nothing new here since Plato’s times nor since Bertold Brecht exposed this nature of business in wars with his play “Mother Courage and her Children”, but the scale at which the Neoconservatives use the spruik to control people, like ditty birds following the flock leader or a herd of lemmings, is mind-bogglingly enormous and fantastically growing.
Media proprietors have an exclusive role to play, maintaining the illusions of worship of stars, spreading the government porkies with variants of truths, and cashing in one of the spruiking tools —advertising. Not all advertising is misleading but most use the power of the illusion to induce desire.
Spruiking is also the sweet process of inflating/disclosing/setting the value of whatever, using various techniques from advertising, propaganda and even “poker-face” playing in certain situations. Yes, better than a priest sermon that transforms our cosmic angst into beliefs and fear of god, spruiking modifies, and even creates, nothing into wants then into needs. This fantastic tool, applied to the desire (and the created need) to rule over a greater kingdom base, to increase the value of the top of the pyramid, leads to the justification for pre-emptive wars. The more we have, the more we “need” to protect, the greater the lies. And all’s well in the best of the growing worlds. Inflation and recessions become little levers to keep the money moving, because without movement of money, there is no profit to be made. The structure would collapse...
The “noble lies” are used to create the illusions necessary both to control the masses within the neoconservative system and bash those outside of it.
The pure magic here is beautifully maintained by throwing in some truths and some reality amongst the lies, so it becomes difficult to know if we have a half-truth or a half-porkie or a fully baked con-artistry. We are far from the notions of Existentialism, in which one accepts or rejects one’s own reality. We are far from compassion, as we divide our takings to give crumbs to charity in an effort that gives us the glow that maintains the porkies. We are told that the government is doing fine with a small surplus of cash while the rest of us is hammered with personal debts that could run a small country. This to make sure we can never be truly free. Neo Conservatism hates pure freedom.

Every bit of information is loaded with a purpose to suit the master viewpoint, but not to explore the ultimate truth or its construct. Thus the Minotaurs and the half-goat-half-people truly exist as, even if some of us cannot believe in these, enough of our population fall into the traps, the webs and sticky lines of deceit, listening to an ever-increasing amount of porkies, coming to you via all sorts of media.

This concept “that everything has a price, including principles” let the USA to become the major home for bounty hunters who traipsed the landscape for reward — not principle, nor justice. You scumbags… And nothing much has changed. The price placed on the head of some of “terrorists” have been so huge, (in millions of dollars), that someone’s high Muslim principles somewhere are bound to crack to the shimmering lure and become a traitor to his boss...
The wandering Jews have been a bit like bounty hunter… traipsing the land for rewards —the holy grail of Jewishdom, the chalice of the savior that never comes, the promised land that is now implanted in realdom Palestine…
Yes, many great thinkers and many artists, analysts of where we are and where we want to go — politically, scientifically and stylistically — have been great Jewish minds or fascinated by the Jewry. Einstein, the two Strauss, and many more have proven solid in structuring the modern western world.

History is full of fantasies that are written on stones, in books and revered in relicts for the only purpose of spreading an idea, right or wrong, beyond the present relationships. The facts of history are muddled with interpretations that could shame Hans Christian Handersen for being too literal to the truth.
There, in the back room of a tailor shop in Pittsburgh or Chicago may be, the Grand Doodah of Doodahs presses the buttons of subterranean history… and more porkies surface somewhere in the world:

From another report:
""""Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)
The Pentagon consultant told me [not Gus] that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition — including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt — that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
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Yep… Even intelligence gathering has been supercharged with porkies

So, back to the beginnings. Since its fiery origins, the Earth has experienced many Aeons, Periods and Ages such as that of Fishes and that of the Dinosaur... Now, we are advised we live in “the Age of Information”... In fact, we have been marooned in The Age of Deceit for yonks. Corruption and deception are part of nature... but as clever humans, we’ve made a full-blown art form of it… Even our rulers may have lost the thread of purpose, a bit like a cat catching a mouse without the hunger-driven instinct, since it was fed with processed crunchy ersatz that same morning. Just tricked by a vicarious pleasure to do it. But I believe somewhere someone has the key to the ultimate secrets. Relative secrets sure, but secrets do not exist if everyone knows them...

So we’ve been tricked by spider-webs that are so hard to see, our face gets full of sticky stuff when we walk through our garden. It’s a deceptive deadly insect-capture apparatus, part of the survival of the spider. We have expanded on the tricks of nature beyond our own knowledge using unbound imagination… We imagine little vibrating gossamers to explain the world and its possible multi-world of pulsating membranes… All this to conquer uncertainty… while time does not really exist.

Yes, corruption happens in nature at the core of life blocks —even in the smallest of energy blocks that are elusive.

So-called genetic engineering is gene corruption. Cloning on the other hand goes against the natural survival necessity of incremental uncertain variety.
Well entrenched in nature, corruption and deception are thus also part of human relationship. We have devised inter-systems to control, managed and encoded corruption and deception, since too much is harmful to our comforts. Nowadays, corruption and deception have become very sophisticated — hidden in their role of axle grease that helps the modern human world spin faster and faster. Spruik, man… spruik… But do not bring in morality and religion into it... please.

Yes, we are fodder as we get dazzled by the sparkling illusion of a magic trick and admire the skill, rather than try to understand the reality, hidden in front of our nose... actually inside of our selves.

The following chapters in this book, "The Age Of Deceit", explores the processes, the reasons, the excuses and the accepted forms of deception and corruption, at all levels — including governments that use spin, decrees, secrets and straight lies to win our trust and beliefs in more cases, detailed as much as possible... and may be with porkies included...

As Murray Bookchin said:

"This challenges the traditional image of evolution, of life pitted against the inorganic world, of society pitted against the natural world, including life itself. It's obvious that we can no longer go back to this very simplistic Darwinian notion of life as a struggle for existence in which there are inorganic or otherwise hostile forces that select the 'fittest.' Fit to what? We are not fit to live in the original atmosphere of this planet, which was anaerobic [devoid of oxygen]. All of these things lead to a very important ethical conclusion that symbiosis, not competition, seems to be the main driving force in evolution."
Gus would suggest a bit of both, more peaceful symbiosis, with much less murders included in the competitive element. While our desires and successes become more and more stylistic — as we peel away from survival — the more sympathetic symbiosis and understanding are needed in our invention.

Neo-con artistry in its association with capitalism is perverse and hypocritical and less of a civilizing factor than woven grass-skirts in the most of primitive society… it’s a return to dog eat dog, so dangerous. Unless… Is this a necessarily development due to the size of our cultural burden that we seem to be entering a chaotic phase of deconstructionism? The greatest tool of human is not the stick nor the wheel, but our imagination. Like most invention have a dark side when placed in our hands, the dark side of imagination is the porkie. We excel at it... and cartooning is the porkie closest to the truth.

The questions now are: Can we do better than that? Should we do better than that? How long have we got before we need to do something different.
Our little planet might let us know sooner that we may care.
Thus ends the far too long introduction to “The Age of Deceit” by Gus Leonisky

In the introduction to the "Age of Deceit" (the last bit [3] —above blog) a reference to the Nazis dropped off accidentally... It mirrored the "master race" ideology with the "we're the chosen people" syndrome, that lead to justify a many bad deed... Will reinstate it the book, in due course...

From the ABC

Former ambassador accuses Australia of pro-Israeli stance
A retired ambassador says Australia has lost respect in the Middle East because of its uncritical defence of Israel.

The former Australian ambassador to Israel, Ross Burns, says Australia's international interests could suffer because of the Federal Government's failure to adopt a more balanced approach.

In a speech on foreign policy in Perth last night, he said that Australia had been outed for its lack of a Middle East policy during the Lebanon crisis, that the Australian Government was happy to be a mere "stalking horse" for Israeli ambitions, and that the foreign affairs presence in the region had been allowed to run down so much that the department was no longer the Government's eyes and ears in the region.

He has also attacked the Federal Opposition, saying it too views conflict in the Middle East from a pro-Israeli point of view.

Mr Burns says Australia's reputation in the region is suffering.

"Of course we're never going to be able to leap in and produce a solution for the region's problems, but I think where we've put ourselves now is very much in a corner where we are identified with one side," Mr Burns said.

Mr Burns served as high commissioner to South Africa and ambassador to Syria before serving in Israel from 2001 to 2003.

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Gus: The interview was on the 7:30 report last night...
And don't get me wrong... I am not anti-Jewish despite my rant in the "age of deceit" above. I am in favour of recognising the importance of all the moires of humanity from our natural origins, enlightened by our inventions. And our best invention is approaching our differences from a shared peace point of view, not a superior nor a war attitude. That's all folks.

In the blogs above I forgot to mention again (I have mentioned it before), that when I use the concept of "Liberalism" it is in its American meaning. "Liberals" in Australia are full-blown Neo-conservatives, while "Liberals" in the US are more akin to "Democrats" in opposition to the Republicans who are the full-blown Neo-conservatives...

From the New York Times...

Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: August 24, 2006
Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/washington/24evo.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin|omission] is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”
Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.
If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.

From the ABC

Consumerism a national religion, says ACF boss
The president of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) says Australians are living unsustainably and nothing is being done to improve the scenario.

Professor Ian Lowe has addressed the National Press Club in Canberra.

He says the Federal Government is failing to address the crisis.

"Consumerism is now our unofficial national religion, with ever larger shopping centres being built so we can worship seven days a week," he said.

"The present policy settings in Australia would lead any outside observer to conclude that we either can't see that we are living unsustainably, or are too short-sighted to care."

He has also accused the Government of pressuring scientists not to conduct research that may have an impact on public policy.

"Research organisations and individual researchers are now increasingly practising what a colleague called a 'pre-emptive crumble', falling over before they are pushed and taking great care not to antagonise the national Government," he said.

"Given the problems we face, we should be encouraging new ideas and supporting challenges to conventional wisdom, not suppressing them."

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Gus: may be we should encourage scientists to publish their results here on the YD site, using a beard, a false nose and a trench coat.

From the Independent

'Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now'

By Patrick Cockburn in Gaza
Published: 08 September 2006

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the [http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1372026.ece|edge of starvation]. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.
A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

I will place this item in this series of blogs because all is related: the way we live and the way we organise ourselves, including the way we treat others... and treat our planet.

From the independent
Earth's ecological debt crisis: mankind's 'borrowing' from nature hits new record
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 09 October 2006
Today is a bleak day for the environment, the day of the year when mankind over-exploits the world's resources - the day when we start living beyond our ecological means.

Evidence is mounting that rapid population growth and rising living standards among the Earth's six billion inhabitants are putting an intolerable strain on nature. For the first time an organisation a British think-tank has sought to pinpoint how quickly man is using the global resources of farming land, forests, fish, air and energy.

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Gus: actually in my own estimates (over the years since the late 1970s, this half way point happened a few years ago: In various sectors of our planet's ecology, the turning point was on average in the mid 1950s... Our awareness about nature in Australia became somewhat more enlightened in the early 1980s (apart from the geniuses who created National Parks in the mid 1800s), then we fell asleep again, under the sleeping pill of greed...

The precise turning point in climate change, in which our output of CO2 should have been cut by 100 per cent (zero emission of CO2 and methane) to arrest further climate change towards hot (climate had already achieved record highs) was in mid 1996. Cuts planned (60 per cent reduction by 2050) for this decade are those that should have applied LAST CENTURY. We are more than a hundred years behind the eighth ball... And these "cuts" are not possible with the way we run our economies... unless we have a massive recession... MASSIVE. Since this won't happen in our greedy greed, be prepared for hotter days... and for massive loss of nature as we've known it...

Age of deceit

Chapter one (first part)
Welcome to planet Weirdo: Hope and fundamentals

I won't beat around the bush...
More than 30 years ago, the battle was on to save the planet from human disdain and a somewhat massive deliberate ignorance of nature. Many of us went on the barricades...

We must have failed. These days, there has been a frightening expansion of this ignoramus deliberatii and an extraordinary hardening of focused stupidity, in denial of nature, enforcing the destruction of it via many means, including official economic might and illegal operations — as if subconsciously and collectively, "intelligent" humanity as a whole, wished to destroy its own origins.

If you are a believer, you might get offended by my personal ramblings here in this exploration of reality — but the religious fanatic who ignores nature and science, and uses the "modern" technological products from these such as guns and bombs, to beat the crap out of non-believers — or infidels on the other side of their own narrow beliefs system — gets my back up.

Thus dear believing-reader stop here, hold on to your religious guns and go on a crusade against whatever windmills you wish, but preferably start with your own beliefs of peace — if you, your high priest or your church-going president, have declared war on something, including terror... And please fight against your sacred teachings if they've spurred you to a holy war against others for no other reason that your beliefs conflict with theirs. A holy war is an oxymoron. A Jihad is an oxymoron... A Crusade in an oxymoron... Dangerous sure, but oxymoron nonetheless. So, be bloody with your prophets! As the Jehovah witnesses (unless they're Mormons — who knows — I don't pay attention these days, as to the whiteness of the door knockers' shirt) every second day tell me: "beware of false prophets"!... Yes I am beware of all — them included. And please do not shoot this messenger because the journey you are about to embark on — or not to embark on, should you decline — is that of stated scientific evidence in a relative slice of our beautiful universe.

Please note, I am not the first person to present this strongly atheistic viewpoint. Throughout history, many people have lived their lives in the secret cocoon of natural knowledge in relative cosmicity. The few enlightened holistic humanists who tried to be heard above the cackle of religious fanatics — fanatics that included all kings and all popes who controlled what should be accepted or not — were "shut up"... but as you know the Earth is not flat anymore.

Have you ever asked yourself: what is the purpose of religion? Organised religion?
The answer is your own. The question itself is a hard one to fully grasp in its grand horror — especially if one is coming from an already loaded mind that answers everything from a religious viewpoint.
"We are the children of God... "We are the Chosen People..." "Allah is Great..." The spider webs are set.

Although there are many forms of spirituality, there are three main organised religions, with variants, that have taken over the minds of three-fifth of the word's population. The Christians, the Jews and the Muslims. All these come from Abraham's descendant in the Middle East, itself a product of rising civilisations, becoming adept in symbolising interpretations of life. Now, all these religions claim to have captured the direct phone-line to God, all claim to be the only way to Him (Her? It?) despite some feeble attempts at impossible Ecumenical meeting points. The respective adherents of all three fight each other to the death under the banner of His (her? Its?) name... for supremacy... for control... for power. Of course, there are moderate people amongst these — people who do not wish to war and accept that others have the right to believe what they will, but by being there, these moderates support, willingly or not, the fanatics, extremists and fundamentalists — although they might deny it.

Thus, "we" glorify God to glorify ourselves in humble resemblance to this master of the universe we do not know — and also to deny our natural origins, because... because we cannot be clever monkeys, can we?... But denying our natural origins is like denying we are actually living on this planet. Thus we live on planet "Waitingforheaven" or "Dieinmartyrdom" or planet "Waitforthe-secondcoming"... It's a weird planet. It's actually planet Ignoramus in total disguise. If aliens or a few trumpeting angels came by accident, they'd think this planet is inhabited and ruled by nuts — nuts that are hell-bent in destroying each other... and their mother Earth for a buck, calling her a "purgatory" or a slut, or a strange place to expunge the "sins" we did not commit... and that's a sad story. In "Forbidden Planet" — that major movie that revolutionised science-fiction on the silver screen — very superior intelligent beings destroyed their fabulous-selves accidentally by artificially augmenting their intelligence, but at the same time growing their dark subconscious to the point it became a monster killer. At this level, we are but miniature ankle-bitters, but we still find the sharp knives, the stones or the boiling water on the stove that will kill us and our mother in whatever order of destruction we can manage.

Is this human-nuttery part of nature's own secret path to an unthinkable evolution? or are we simply nutsos?

Any religious person who accepts the evolution theory is a fence sitter — a worry. An uncommitted nut who's avoiding the conflict between the fairy tale of creationism and the reality of what's out there by blending the unblendable... Yeah... But why in hell do we need this illusion of being fallen angels rather than being silly beasts on the way to a better mortal life?

Any religious fanatic who does not accept or does not try to understand the theory of evolution is a fruitcake too. If that religious fanatic decides to impose his or her views using violence, brainwashing techniques or war, that fanatic is bloody dangerous. That's my view. Hey I am not here trying to pussyfoot nor to convert anyone but to expose the hypocrisy of crooked usage of beliefs like a Christianity that explicitly forbids the killing of anyone but will be used to wage crusades and wars led by knights and a moron of a god-bothering President leading you to death from his comfort zone. This unethical duplicity gets my back up. I am also here exposing the narrow-mindedness of other religions like the Muslim religion or the Exclusive Brethren that brainwash reality out of young impressionable mind, creating fanatics specialising in not knowing the true nature of things. Curiosity in analysis and synthesis is the essence of intelligence. Uncertainty is our lot. Dogma is vile.

We and they are demanding tolerance? Sure as long as they let me speak.

Four billion years ago, something weird happened accidentally. In the turbulent cooling of the earth (formed by sidereal aggregation of matter about one billion years before that — at the level in the solar system in which particular elements would assemble — see Laplace's work on the subject), in the complex and acid soup of the cooling sludge, a few elements "crystallised" together in small molecules and the firsts of enzymes* appeared. The rest is the history of evolution. A picture that science can paint reasonably clearly from evidence in the rocks and other sources, including genetics — a picture that can be mathematically painted even as far back as one millisecond from an event referred to as the "Big Bang", about 15 billion years ago... Theory! theory! I hear some of you shouting, etc..... But the truth is that the exploration of our universe via probes journeying millions of kilometres and the understanding of ourselves via medical techniques, including cloning all compute back logically to these defining moments. No fairy tales here.

So why are we so afraid...? Why are we so callously massively resisting this greater line of origins that whatever good fancy book — Bible or Quo-ran — can deliver? A world made in six days? Loosing a paradise for eating an apple? The fight between "good n evil"? A black stone set in the corner of a building (a stone that is not the original black stone since the first one had been stolen by another kingdom's thieves?). A short journey, from a person dying on a cross? A civilisation built on guilded statues and grandiose monuments?... Virgins awaiting at the table?

Yes ultimately we are at the mercy of this universal angst, that greater mystery we cannot fathom... Uncertainty... Why? Why are we? why are we here? Why are we on this little planet that looks like a pinhead, in a dark concert-hall, when seen from the edge of the solar system, itself tinier than a tiny blimp in the scheme of things in an unfathomable universe where we measure distances in millions of light-years. Is this an illusionary place where science works? ...No! This is the real space-time line in which we live our short consciousness as individuals but are part of the continuum of life from about three and half billion years ago, via our genes in evolution, since these enzymes started to build complex acidic-proteins that became self-duplicating.

It took approximately another half a billion years to generate fully dedicated independent cellular units that could "feed" from the soup and duplicate themselves properly from that first accident(s) of molecular construct. The scientific record shows the earliest "life-forms" we can be certain of — although there would have been many other minuscule "formats" like primitive viruses. These geologically recorded early "life-forms" are stromatolites, blue-green algae that colonised shallow sea and built layers upon layers of themselves as the lower layers died-off, while collecting sediments for "food" (suspended mineral substances used in the duplication of themselves and in the construction layer of their "space")... this was approximately three and a half billion years ago (North Pole, WA*). And there are stromatolites still living today in special environment in which more recently evolved "creatures" cannot graze upon them, Shark Bay in Western Australia where the salt concentration is too high and Yellowstone National park where sulphur concentration is also too high for "newer" life-form to survive.

We have entered the world of the small earliest creatures, many of these would have been unicellular or protein without a casing... eventually, changes in the environment and the complexities in the construct of these molecules let to more complex unicellular "beings".
Via accidental encounters, varied symbiosis happened between some of the "newly developed" various origins and branches of these "beings"... some symbiosis died off, some flourished... Evolution is one pace forward and one zillion unproductive steps... It took nearly another THREE billion years for the first "sea creatures" to appear from that soup of evolving protozoarians... By then, a few distinct simple animals and plants formed, by cellular associations that gave a greater power of survival in which movement or stability was the key to success in a particular environment. There are still a few "basic" sea creatures living out there and I do not mean monsters of the deep but some strange animal species, some that are only a stomach — a large colony of cells that capture sediment or bits of other life form to survive and eventually sexually multiply by producing two distinct gametes. With the process of survival in evolution, two important factors come in early, even in the days of the "soup": Aggressiveness and receptivity… Without receptivity, food (molecules that were suitable) would not be "absorbed nor digested" and without aggressiveness food would not be captured... These two characteristics of being are at the basis of our every move, including in deceit and in corruption. And cannibalism… More of that later.

The sexualisation within species did happen with "beings" becoming too complex for just a basic cellular split, with cellular specialisation in a unit, but many, like plants, retain this "cellular cloning" ability and we have too, to a certain point in our "stem" cells. These are basically genetic whole blueprints of ourselves once our eggs are fertilised. These stem cells cannot develop in other places than within a protected environment and the group of increased-specialisation cells which they — the stem cells — create (creating complex structure of various organs) or in specific protected conditions which excite many researchers with a Petrie dish — while religious believers are frightened this process could demonstrate the true origin of life. But I am going ahead of the evolutionary line here.

Thus about 570 million years ago slowly started a "greater life under the sea"... Animals became bigger and more "ferocious" while breeding more and more. Many species came and went... Using these two important factors, aggressiveness and receptivity, some did better than others. Sexual activity needs a certain aggression and a certain receptivity...

About 400 million years ago, a few sea-weeds and sea-plants managed to survive outside the sea edge and starting to colonise land, developing characteristics that led them to retain water during dry time, and capture water from the ground via a root system and through their "leaves"... these earliest land plants have been found fossilised in the geological record. At the same time, some species of fish (some known as Devonian fish — impressive fossils in the geological record) developed and these can also be found between 400 and 350 million years. As you know, there is no life that can survive without water... Some animal species can survive with not much, but ALL need water.

By the Triassic period, starting 245 million years ago, weird fishes started to invade the land under the evolutionary guise of amphibians since there was by now a great abundance of "vegetal" food on land drenched with rains... and soon many of these creatures evolved to survive on land alone... See these strange creatures (not part of the original "amphibians” but a good comparison) that still exist today such as lung fish, salamanders, frogs and the like. Some became carnivores since there was abundance of easy "living" proteins to capture. This grand invasion of the land by "animals" took place AFTER the Carboniferous period, a time of luxurious "primitive" plants responsible for much of our coal and oil resources, although some coal and oil also formed later on. Had this animal invasion taken place at the same time, many coal seams would be but thin as one layer in puff pastry, or huge seams of fossilised dung... And a lot more carbon would have graced the skies... Earth as we know it would be a hot bloody place...

It's only by mid Cretaceous, about 90 million years ago that "modern" plants — the flowering plants — really took hold and started to spread with a greater vigour due to their more efficient reproducing ability and also coping more with various climatic environments. The "second wood*" in plants which had appeared in primitive plants mostly during the Permian period (286-245 million years ago) was by now allowing the massive flowering trees as we see today. "Living fossil trees" like the Wollomi pines are remnant of earlier family lines which did not evolve much from the Trassic period (245-208 million years ago) onwards... "unevolved" Cycad families also go back to these times. Most pines trees are more "modern" adaptation of pines from these earlier times too.

Dinosaurs came and went, between 200 million years ago and about 65 million years ago... The extinction of these massive (there were some small ones too but the big ones tickle our childish imagination —and they did start smallish anyway) animals is still controversial today... Many scientists think that a huge meteorite hit the earth and changed the environmental conditions. They could not survive... But most scientist also think that is was not that simple: despite the massive extinction, not only that of the dinosaurs, there had been a massive evolutionary step, adaptive accident of course in the scheme of things. Smaller animals, such as earliest mammals were able to survive better... feeding their young from their own body fluids rather than leave them fend for themselves as soon as exited from an egg, fluffing their lives in a hostile environment. Meanwhile what puzzled the scientists was that although the meteor that crashed in the earth was a precise moment recorded through most of the rocks around the world, it took another one million years for the dinosaurs to become extinct...

And during all these evolutionary and extinctionary steps of life, the continents were slowly wandering on the surface of the earth... Pangea and Gondwana were breaking up, broke up and some of the pieces slid across the globe... And climes changed from hot to cold and vice verso...

India — called the sub continent because it is not part of the Asian "plate" — was but a sliver of Gondwana (southern super-continent) that separated from Antarctica about 90 million years ago and hit Pangea (northern super-continent) at "high speed" (for a huge piece of rock) and formed the Himalayas... Australia, separated last from Antarctica about 45 million years ago and still moves northward at 7 centimetres per year... leading to some huge earth tremors and the daily earthquake along the New Guinean and Indonesian line...

How do we know all this? Simple my dear Watson... well not really but scientists who study the geological record in detail — and I mean in precise DETAILS — can see precisely the same rock formations and the same imprints of evolution (SAME fossils) in specific places that give an extraordinary clear picture of the past continental puzzles... How can we be sure of the dating? The dating processes are varied but more accurate than the clock on railway square tower... Within a few thousand — sometime only hundred years — over millions of years — the margin of error is thin. In evolutionary time, it is insignificant. Earlier at the beginning of the 20th century the time lines were out of whack but carbon dating and nuclear decay was not available... From the mid 20th century onward, scientists have been able to pin-point with "frightening" accuracy, all events along the earth history.

Why do we need to know all this? Because this is nature. The result of all these transformations, extinction and changes in "evolution" brought us to be from great ape stock from the dark forest of Africa three million years ago. There is no shame in that... It's a beautiful event. Our genes are so close to that of chimps that it's fascinating. 96 per cent at least are the same. But wait, there's more! Some plants have genes that are more complex than ours! Some animals too! whoa!

Does that mean that they are superior? Superiority of size or complexity is an edgy concept...Nearly a wrong idea, as even in a jungle where fierce survival fights can take place, the survival of ALL species depends often on the survival of only one, any one in the group of competing species. Consider for example a computer program that is evolved from a basic line of command, with bits being added on, to give it more features… eventually the steps needed to drive this stack of commands slows it down. To go from A to Z, the process goes A to B to C to D etc when eventually it reaches Z. Some programs can be rewritten less step-complex so that they can go from A to Z in a flash.

Despite our tremendous adaptability, some species might survive better if our environment changes. Our species might die. So... it means that there is diversity in life's forces — the amazing enzymes that crystallised 4 billion years ago and gave a blue print to an amazing molecular evolution that is DNA, our genes and the genes of all creatures...
In the early sixties when my dad had cancer, I "flippantly" proposed, but was serious about it, that many cancers were due to enzymes. This in the sense that the wrong enzymes could get out of hand, knowing that enzymes ARE catalysts... Joke apart, I also could see that "new soap powder loaded with enzymes" were destroying my socks or making them beyond slimy, if I left them in the wash for more than a couple of days... These days many cancer research laboratories are closely studying the behaviour of enzymes...

So how come a molecule can create what we call consciousness?
Here starts another journey, a complex but fascinating journey of memory, memorial increments and reactivity... For humans this is played out in uncertainty but still under the umbrellas of aggressiveness and receptivity, like for all other creatures... But the greater ability to perceive uncertainty has given us the ability to chose purposefully rather than just reactively although the line between both is very thin...
As a species, we thus have diversifed, not in our animality, but in our choices of associations via our management of aggressiveness and receptivity. We have created various cultures that are resonance of this management in specific environments … Most of this management, through our history has been accidental and responsive to “need”.

Rulers have come and gone by the power of the sword and their ability to lie.

We can do better than that

End of part one-chapter one "Age of deceit" (book, unpublished, by Gus Leonisky..)

From the Guardian

Britain backs revolutionary aid experiment

· Cash from mobile 'banks' replaces food parcels
· Scheme highlights divide on how to tackle poverty

Chris McGreal, Africa correspondent
Friday February 16, 2007
The Guardian

 

That is in contrast to countries such as the United States, where most aid is assigned by the US Congress, often with political, economic and even social strings attached, particularly over questions of abortion and birth control.

Almost no US aid goes direct to African governments. Washington also insists on shipping surplus food grown by its own farmers instead of providing money to buy from local markets.

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Gus: This Pommy form of aid although not perfect is far better than the US's that gives nothing except surpluses with an elastic band and caveats... No altruism in this US aid...

Noo so strangely I have for many years made some quiet noises in the ears of those who bother to listen, about using cash (small amounts or even larger amounts for whole communities, even if there is a bit of local corruption, at least it would be local dealing, — preferable to corruption at an international hopycrisy level using subsidies to overproduce in the US and create an ugly and deadly dependency on charity.

 

Please note that the blog at the head of this linne of blogs has been truncated... I will try to find the rest in the etherbytes of my computer.

Distress in Cotton cultivation is extended its boundaries and reached to Cotton seed production. The area under Cotton seed production is on a shrinking trend. This can be attributed to the exploitive nature of companies. Farmer both as a consumer and producer of seed is exploited by the seed companies. Farmer as a consumer of seed has to pay more price and inturn he is getting less price for his seeds. To get maximum yields companies promoting input intensive methods in seed production.

These methods increases cost of cultivation and made seed production labor intensive activity. After a tedious work cotton growers getting very little profits which lead the farmers into distress.

Hybrid cottonseed production is concentrated in Andhra Pradesh which alone account for 62% of the total seed production in India. Within AP, nearly 90% of seed production is concentrated in Mahaboobnagar and Kurnool districts. Area under cotton seed production in these two districts is around 14,000 acres.

Though seed production is carried out in most of the mandals in these districts there is high concentration of seed production in Gadwal, Dharur, Maldakal, Gattu, Iza, Atmakur, Jadcharla in Mahaboobnagar and Allagadda, Nandhyala, Sanjamala, Koillkuntla, banaganapalli, Uyyalawada, Emmiganur, Mantralayam, Kodumur mandals in Kurnool districts.

Seeds Of Distress

Anyone hearing about central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides, where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer.

Why Bremer? Because Indian farmers are choosing death after finding themselves caught in a loop of crop failure and debt rooted in genetically modified and patented agriculture - the same farming model that Bremer introduced to Iraq during his tenure as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American body that ruled the "new Iraq" in its chaotic early days.

In his 400 days of service as CPA administrator, Bremer issued a series of directives known collectively as the "100 Orders." Bremer's orders set up the building blocks of the new Iraq, and among them is Order 81 [PDF], officially titled Amendments to Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law, enacted by Bremer on April 26, 2004.

Order 81 generated very little press attention when it was issued. And what coverage it did spark tended to get the details wrong. Reports claimed that what the United States' man in Iraq had done was no less than tell each and every Iraqi farmer - growers who had been tilling the soil of Mesopotamia for thousands of years - that from here on out they could not reuse seeds from their fields or trade seeds with their neighbors, but instead they would be required to purchase all of their seeds from the likes of U.S. agriculture conglomerates like Monsanto.

Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death To Paul Bremer's Order 81

Op-Ed Columnist
The End of Philosophy
By DAVID BROOKS

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

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YD cartoonist
The beginning of the uprising...
by GUS LEONISKY

It has long been my belief that, as a species, Homo sapiens was, from the start, a gigantic failure. A reject. If nature was god then god ignored humanity to vanish itself from the natural gardens very early, for its faulty genesis. Extinction was begetting.

But by haphazard fortune, since then, we’ve survived, not because we’re a strong species, but with the lack of fur on our skin, we became a cunning species, hell bent on stealing other creatures’ pelt... We became a lying, a vicious species of robbers beyond the natural hunt — though also a loving species, a compassionate one — albeit a deadly one.

Maybe it was meant to be. Unless nature forgot to wipe us all before we became survivors — wonky survivors, nonetheless... threatening survivors on top of that. Nature is shaking in its boots. Nature is dying. We are killing it.

In many ways we help our weak survive while most other species reject the weakest in the nest. If you find a young bird that can’t fly — still covered with juvenile down — at the foot of a tree, it’s not because it fell off in a strong breeze, but, more likely, it was pushed. Pushed either by a stronger sibling or even pushed by its parents, tired of feeding an offspring that could not really make it in the wider world... It was lucky it was not eaten, like in some bird species, by its stronger brother or sister... On that behavioral score, we’re sometimes very close to nature, but as a whole we are compassionate mostly because as an individual we “may be’ (we are) in the same boat as the weakling. We've learned to protect our own degeneracy by protecting all who suffer from some degeneration of sorts and thus accept that degeneracy is not a problem of survival when the weakest of the weak can survive in our midst...

Some species that associate with us, tend to acquire various degeneracy of classification and “breed”... Cats, dogs, horses, chooks, sheep, interbreed to give us characteristics afar from the original templates. Dogs are wolves including the smallest of Chihuahua... And we dream of beefing up our beef further with genetically modified characterises that gives it double the meat...
The quality and the resultant iffy modification on our own proteins when ingested is secondary to us. All we want, really, is more of it, rather than just enough.
And we look in the mirror at our paunch, proud as punch, yet slightly ashamed.

This is why to the smart geeks who think of inventing the smartest computers that, passed a critical point, could become conscious — as spruiked by this smart fellow at a university in the US — and surpass our own ability, I'd suggest there are three major things to consider: first the computer needs to have some non-terminally destructive faults that the computer is able to bypass on its own. Second the computer needs to be cunning; It needs this to be able to find the short cuts that will give it time to be lazy on its own time or to adapt at amazing speed to major structural changes in its environment —all with no purpose other than being. Third it will have to be conceited. It will have to believe in itself and look in the mirror. The computer will thus have to be able to observe the universe through its own links with the rest of the world and its own senses, designed to provide the feedback of its influence on reality. And be proud or ashamed of the result. Hal...

Birds eat just enough. They even eat stones to grind their food in their gizzard since they have no teeth. But they know when too much is too much. We don’t. We stretch the idea of too much beyond safety limits in all of our ventures including financial dealings, because we can get away with it, by the counter-balance of “our systems” such as medicine, or bailouts...

A bird that eats too much would become too heavy. We invent the heaviest of birds to carry us around, in our flight envy, around the globe... Birds, like lorrikeets are perfectly formed and identical-like clones, in the present stage of their specific evolution. The difference between their top individual and the weakest one is very marginal, if any, at maturity. But that margin can be in the order of .01 per cent in differential, but in the reactive world it means a whole lot of difference in the “pecking order” and the “right” (opportunity) to reproduce.

As a species, our survival rate is very high, far too high, yet we devalue the gene pool by helping the helpless (which as pointed earlier, could be us) including the unborn. There are very few human individuals who could claimed to be “perfect specimens”. In the wild, most species are at their optimum of perfection or close to it. They have to. We’re way below par and bullshit our way through. We invented systems to prop up our deficiencies. Including cesarean birthing.

Our “technology” and our cunning help us sustain the naturally unsustainable.

Say 1 in a 1000 of our children suffer from some major disability. say 1 in 1000 die at birth.
In some countries, half of the children are dead before the age of 5, via lack of efficient care... Only the strongest lucky ones survive.

Say 1 in 4 adult suffer from depression at least once in a lifetime — and we still don’t know how to “cure” this, despite having several possibilities (I have my own solution but this for another bedtime story).

Say 1 in 10 of us has major mental problems, either hardware or software.

Say most adults need GLASSES to perform simple tasks like reading a book or see details on the horizon... 1 in 3 of our kids is lumbered with glasses, early in life, as test show that... Hang on a minute... here... Stop.
When I was a kid, there was no such test and we all strained our eyes to some degree to see, we plundered our brains to understand the dancing chalk on the blackboard (I was at the back of the class with the slow learners) and/or write with the stone scriber on our slate... When I was 15, an optician decided I should have glasses... I wore them once. I spewed. The world looked to me as if I was pissed. I knew pissed. Although as kids we drank alcohol, I only got really pissed at aged 12, when my grandmother, in the goodness of her heart, gave me several helpings of sugar cubes dunked with awesome homemade spirit/schnapps for me to “refresh”, after a ride on my bicycle... I nearly fell off the bike on my way home after visiting granny.
In regard to my new glasses, my brain could not cope with the “spread” of the “clearer” vision. I since made some calculation that my vision’s astigmatism compressed my vision 10 to 15 per cent vertically in one eye and the same percentage at 15 degree clockwise of vertical in the other. As well there is some minute “diffraction”.
But my brain did compute the information from each eye and EXTRAPOLATED a perfectly clear signal. A bit like a faulty digital signal that the receiver reassemble to give a perfect picture. And this vision? In stereo, would you believe...
At some point in the eighties, this interestingly-solved deficiency led me to design a satellite camera system using three cameras, with scanning at various angle (60 degree), the result merged via computerization, giving a perfect image of the ground in 3D. I never passed on the idea as I thought some geek would think of the same thing in some polygon somewhere and why help spy on ourselves, hey?
And would it work? I believe so.
Thus despite having passed the “accepted” age of “visual degeneration” by many many years, my vision is still clear as a bell. I still can read the small print in a contract and spot a fly at 50 metres without glasses. 20/20 vision? not quite. 20/20 extrapolation by the brain. Unless I am dog tired. Awesome: people tell me “but you’re not wearing glasses?” No... In the mid eighties, I had glasses prescribed to me again when I had a “check up” and went along with it. I spewed again. And when I took the glasses off, my brain was unable to re-compute a clear image as before. Everything was fuzzy, till I waited for an hour and the EYES and the brain readjusted their matching performance. Here I must add that I do eye exercises, daily/hourly/whateverly, but I do not ritualise the process (it is important not to). The movements and the strain I place on the eye muscles are random, from being cross-eyed to focusing on items afar while being crossed eyed, to rolling the eyes, and even looking afar then close-up within a spit second. Focus fast and furious as they say.

Back to the main game: the degenerated species.
Say two in three adolescent (if not all) suffer from irrationality and deadly inattention and/or foolish desire (with a tragedy attached or not) at some stage till the age of 25 is reached. After this critical point, foolish desire or deadly inattention become a rarity (see insurance empirical premiums and serious university studies on this subject).

Say our bodies— the creator of our consciousness — is often ill treated by ourselves and/or others.
    one in two adults is overweight. Conservatively, one in six is obese.
    One in ten suffer from chronic disease from birth such as diabetes one — a deadly genetic affliction. We treat.
    We eat the wrong food and catch diabetes type 2... These days we know the risks of some food but we still do it.
    There are thousands of “deadly genetic afflictions” that we counteract with props and pills. We’re even working on the “genetic codes”.
    We fight infection with the power of other species such as milking the penicillin from fungus to fight microbes and we use compounds from plants to fight viruses.
Say in some societies, such as the US, 1 in 100 is in “prison” for performing what is deemed “acts against the group” or smoking the wrong weed... We individually perform such acts against the rules of group hundreds of times in our lifetime, and sometimes we get caught, then excused or jailed, according to the severity of our trespass, and/or according to the benevolence of our Solomonic judges. Some societies are more severe and will punish the victims, such as women for being raped... Vicious.
    We breed our own death: we smoke it, we overcook it in our food, we concentrate deadly disease in hospitals.
We keep our oldies, whose mind has long gone, alive in the clean sordidity of homes. Most in the name of morality and compassion.

Say, our memory is often lacking. We get distracted easily. In fact our memory has an inbuilt resistor that will stop us learning new tricks that can interfere with our comforts (old tricks)... Our memory needs to be jogged along to maintain a certain flexibility of acceptance (more of this in another bedtime story). Our body need to be walked, not jogged as eventually we have a good change of damaging joints like knees and ankles. They become degenerated by age 40 if we stress them too much early. One in three people don’t know how to walk properly. Our knees knock or our feet are angled wrongly or our legs are not quite the same length... One in so many are flat-footed...

Our asymmetrical faces reflect the uncertain development of our psychological features and ancestral distortion via lack of certain elements in the diet. We are short because our father was short. Our noses, our foreheads, our eyes, our faces, especially in the female of the species, often need some powdered artifice, even surgery, to create attraction — and the ritual of football only applies to a small portion of near perfect males bods (often with uncultivated brains), while the rest vegetate on couches watching a luminous box. We’re pathetic.
    We deny ourselves the beauty of reactivity and adventure in uncertainty by using consciousness modifiers.  
Alcohol and prayer are sisters in crime to dull our minds. Alcohol make us lose our trousers at the wrong time, while prayer makes sure we never lose our trousers, even when we should — and prayer vicariously gives us hope, while we do nothing to a situation that requires we’d be strongly reactive to protect ourselves.

Our degeneracies are many. The list is long. Our hospital are full of them, yet only the severe cases make it there. We all live with small ailments of sorts, such as backaches, headaches, unless it’s chronic. For example we often take “medicine” for headaches... (The pill industry is a mega industry). I don’t. I will let my body sort the headache out, unless I know it’s going to be a long day should within a couple of hours the ache is not sorted out and still at full strength. This, once in a blue moon... By using the N-RD meditation (see on this YD site) I usually process a headache within half an hour — and I don't get them very often (usually self inflicted by overdose of alcohol), because I believe I have taught my body to deal with the sources of potential headaches, including stress. I also know when to cut out the daily vino indulgence.
And we all have some form of minor uncoordination that does not affect the result of our performance. We might attempt to grasp an object twice before we catch it properly... We’re not kung fu masters at all time...

On average, we, individually, would be at seventy per cent of optimum performance — and this is a generous maximum. Even on the professional football field, at one moment or another, there are some slack arses that will let a try through...

Meanwhile, most of the better specimen of the species are groomed to go and kill or get killed in theaters of war... It is often the “uneducated” yet strong of body, that the cunning diminutive bastards will use in their wars with another diminutive cunning bastard. The psychopath end up at the top of the pile. Including apparently dumb ones as we’ve seen in the past. They will sell us the purpose of the aggression, often useless and nasty purpose, with promises of glory and sanctified sacrifice.

In all these processes, our weaknesses may be our strength... by the need to bypass them. Weaknesses lead to necessity that forces us to act, deviously or “purposefully”..

Amongst all this clatter of uncertainty of downgraded well-being, we have developed the power of thought. The art of thought. The art of cataloguing our understandings. And packaging our misdemeanours. And valuing our activities. Some call this philosophy.

Philosophy is not dead. It is not the end of philosophy. To the contrary. Like art, it is “exploding” in a multitude of style. It is regenerating. It is dividing like cells of a new body. some totally useless, some beautifully crafted. this multiplicity is indicating to us that all our systems are relative and have weaknesses. In the past our masters have ritualized and pigeon-holed the art of thought till it became stale – all to achieve and maintain CONTROL. Control, so that the grand Doodahs of psychopath can be inaugurated as leaders. some of them are the ruthless ones, those characters who steal our money with our blessing because we don’t want to understand their trickery...

In the end here, each of us is at the centre of one’s own universe (although some of us are confused by multiple “personalities”). We are small powerful universes, albeit ephemeral ones. I would propose here that our individual consciousness is greater than that of the whole universe. This is a paradox.

And not only for humans, but for other species too.

No, philosophy is not dead. Though David Brooks makes some great points, they are related to the narrow spectrum of “morality” which I refer to often as Moralizationing — as it is most attached to dogmas rather than our own “heart”. Morality may be dead, but this is when decided ethics can take over the safety nets of humanity’s behavior without having to ritualize the purpose of the non-purposed life with absolute fairy tales and dangerous fear-mongering.

The uprising is near.

It's a shame that I cannot retrieve the full content of the top comments on this line of blog... Including one on ballooning debt crippling us into a form of submission akin to "slavery", written at least 3 years before this present crash, crash due to... over-exposure to debt by banks, would you believe. Read all the comments on this line of comments, bearing in mind, I'm only an old cartoonist who's done too many things and we're still in a submissive mode...

... I will try to get the full virgil's legacy article, nonetheless. meanwhile read the above the beginning of uprising...

Earwig mothers sniff out their "best" offspring and lavish them with care, according to new research.

The insects pick up odours from their clutch of "nymphs" and adjust their maternal behaviour in response.

When they pick up a chemical signal from healthy, well-fed youngsters, they spend more time nursing them, at the expense of their hungrier babies.

The study, which is the first to show this behaviour in insects, is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Earwig parenting, it seems, is about favouritism; the standard of care drops dramatically when mums pick up the chemical signals from hungry, unhealthy nymphs.

In these cases, the adults invest less time and effort in feeding.

The researchers, who expected to see the opposite result, suggest that this could be "because the insects look for signals of quality instead of need".

------------------

 

see tton at top and read http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/1947#comment-10071 and

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/7058#comment-9789

An Israeli tourism advert that showed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as an undisputed part of Israel has been rejected by the advertising watchdog.

The posters, on the London Underground, sparked hundreds of complaints from pro-Palestinian groups and members of the public.

The Advertising Standards Authority said a map labelled Israel implied the occupied territories were in Israel.

Israel's ministry of tourism said no political message was intended.

It added that its aim was to give tourists an idea of the areas in and around Israel.

But the ASA found the border lines for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were faintly marked and difficult to see.

And the map was positioned beneath the slogan "few countries pack so much variety into such a small space as Israel", it added.

------------------------

see comment above in which I state: If one looks at a modern map of Israel drawn by Israelis who believe in their rights to exist where they are, one could be amazed but there is no argument: the Palestine, including the Gaza strip, the Sheeba farms and the Golan Heights are firmly included in the state defended borders…

see toon overthere...

The history of the terrorism conducted by the CIA, since the end of the World War II when countries in Asia and Latin America, were trying to make changes to improve their economical and political situation, the Unite States of North America realized that it was not good for their status as new super power; and began a new campaign, with only one rule, Anything Goes.

This is the story of the terrorism of the CIA.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24441.htm

Motorists paying record prices at the pumps reacted with fury at news of a 135per cent rise in profits by oil giant  BP - earning a massive £463 a second.

BP said on Tuesday that profits hit £3.6 billion ($US5.6 billion) in the first three months of 2010 - more than double the level last year.

The 135 per cent  profits rise comes after the price of crude oil was pushed higher by recovery hopes for the global economy and due to market speculation.

For the first three months of the year it works out at at £40million a day, and £1.6million an hour and £2,777 a minute.

While motorists suffer record petrol prices BP doubles profits to £3.6bn | Mail Online

see also "age of deceit" above...

How do you know if someone is lying to you? What, exactly, are you supposed to look for?

A suddenly distended nose, possibly – if your name is Geppetto and your son a wooden puppet with a taste for hyperbole. Shifty eyes, more commonly. A wavering gaze. An inability to meet the stare of the inquisitor when asked to "look at me straight and tell me you mean it". Or, perhaps, a sudden divergence from the graphic norm when the speaker's vitals are being tracked by polygraph.

Whichever option you go for, whatever result it happens to yield, it wouldn't, ultimately, matter. The odds are that it was wrong. In fact, statistically speaking, it was even more likely to be wrong than if you had simply guessed at random, or had flipped a coin.

Even using the most advanced in lie-detecting technology, identifying specific falsehoods can be a stretch. The past decade has seen a number of truth-telling innovations. Electroencephalograms monitor the electric activity of the brain. Thermal imaging records one's eye temperature (people's eyes, it has been suggested, heat up when they lie). MRI scans measure blood flow to the brain. But science has yet to offer a method of specifically isolating deceptive (as opposed to, say, nervous, cagey, or intensely focused) brain activity. Humans, when it comes to separating fact from fiction, are fairly hopeless...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-science-of-lying-why-the-truth-really-can-hurt-2018293.html

Such nefariousness can only hasten the day when people discover the left-libertarian alternative. Is that expectation realistic? Perhaps. Many Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with their country. They feel their lives are controlled by large government and corporate bureaucracies that consume their wealth and treat them like subjects. Yet they have little taste for European-style social democracy, much less full-blown state socialism. Left-libertarianism may be what they’re looking for. As the Mutualist Carson writes, “Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom ‘petty bourgeois’ is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans.”

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/libertarian-left/

--------------------------

Gus: sure... but as we go further into this century, our freedoms must be fully alerted to our duty to the planet (and its biodiversity). Without taking care of this little planet, any form of "libertinage" or "libertation" — exercising an unbound or loose form of individualistic freedom, will lead to the doom of the earth (or wanton destruction). Too much restrictions and we loose — or shrink — our will to live — unless these "restrictions" are part of a dogma with illusionary "after-life" lollypop. The size of population in which we live also impact on our libertarian ideals... See "the Age of Deceit" above, in which the illusions in general stylistic life are looked at...

By Kishore Mahbubani

Dictators are falling. Democracies are failing. A curious coincidence? Or is it, perhaps, a
sign that something fundamental has changed in the grain of human history. I believe so.
How do dictators survive? They tell lies. Muammer Gaddafi was one of the biggest liars
of all time. He claimed that his people loved him. He also controlled the flow of
information to his people to prevent any alternative narrative taking hold. Then the
simple cell phone enabled people to connect. The truth spread widely to drown out all
the lies that the colonel broadcast over the airwaves. Similarly in Egypt and Tunisia, the
regimes lost control of the narrative. In short, technology has undermined dictators’
ability to lie to their people.
So why are democracies failing at the same time? The simple answer: democracies have
also been telling lies. Now we know, for example, that the eurozone project was created
on a big lie. All the major European politicians assured their publics that the
contradiction between monetary union and fiscal independence would be resolved by
insisting on fiscal discipline. Any eurozone member that violated the 3 per cent budget
deficit rule would be punished.
All this was a big lie. When France and Germany breached the 3 per cent rule in 2003,
nothing happened. This then opened the doors for others to break the rule (Portugal,
Ireland, Greece and Spain). Even worse, Greece began lying to its European partners
from the very beginning. To be fair to Greece, its European partners knew Greece was
lying.
The people of Europe went along with the big lie as long as they did not have to pay for it.
The great western financial crisis of 2008-09 changed everything. Bankers had to be
rescued. Taxpayers had to pay the price. Foolishly, the Irish government took on the
liabilities of Irish banks, passing the burden to Irish citizens. Today, the German
taxpayers balk at having to pay the price for rescuing an economic experiment that rested
on a big lie.

read more : http://www.mahbubani.net/articles%20by%20dean/Gaddafis%20and%20wests%20love%20of%20the%20big%20lie.pdf

 

see above: the age of deceit

British medical researchers have condemned a Europe-wide ban on the patenting of stem cell inventions derived from human embryos – setting back possible new treatments for a range of disorders, from heart disease and diabetes to blindness and Parkinson's.

Scientists expressed their dismay at the decision, saying the ban will act as a huge disincentive for investment in a critical area of research that promises to revolutionise medicine in the coming decades. They said the ban means that their discoveries, often made within universities with public funding, are unlikely to be developed into practical treatments for NHS hospitals because companies will not be prepared to take the investment risk without a guarantee of intellectual property protection.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/medicine-thrown-into-crisis-by-stem-cell-ruling-2372562.html

 

Great ruling... Any research on human life and life in general should actually be made in "public" (government's) hand and shared.... Greed and fame may be part of some doctors' and researchers' game but I know of many doctors being altruistic and generous... Money, public and private, need not be so possessively grubby...

Somewhere on this site, possibly in this line of comments (read from top, see also "age of deceit") I mention that politicians in ancient times (Roman, Greeks? I forgot...) were not allowed to be sober when voting on policies or doing some speeches. So now we use the word "tired and emotional" rather than ‘maggoted’ or sloshed...

 

 

Pity the poor Fleet Street scribes forced to use the genteel euphemism ‘‘tired and emotional’’ to describe their inebriated politicians. Our own Canberra press gallery can now employ the more colourful term ‘‘maggoted’’, thanks to the obliging colleagues of Northern Territory senator Samantha McMahon.

As reported by the Herald’s national affairs editor, Rob Harris, McMahon’s unsteadiness in Parliament on Tuesday night led fellow senators to believe she was intoxicated – which she vehemently denies. A video shows her being assisted out of the chamber by helpful Coalition colleagues. Others were less helpful, describing McMahon to Harris as ‘‘trolleyed’’ and ‘‘off her head’’ and the aforementioned ‘‘maggoted’’.

To be fairer to McMahon than those senators, she blamed her behaviour on the arrival of some ‘‘sad personal news’’. She’d had only one glass of wine, she said. Short of breathalysing politicians – as some on both sides of the Parliament have previously advocated – perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt. Or, for any who don’t, this would hardly be the first case of a politician under the influence in the chamber.

This episode likely says more about Australians’ tolerance for political drinking. The ensuing social media storm was nearly as concerned with the origins of ‘‘maggoted’’ as it was about renewed calls for MP breath tests. (While ‘‘trolleyed’’ is British slang for those so drunk they need a shopping trolley to get home, ‘‘maggoted’’ is a home-grown epithet.)

McMahon’s explanation might qualify her as having been genuinely ‘‘tired and emotional’’ rather than in the way this expression was intended when it was coined in the British satirical magazine Private Eye in the 1960s to describe the drunken speech of a Labor politician. Designed to avoid the country’s onerous libel laws, it quickly became ‘‘a part of every journalist’s vocabulary’’, according to the Guardian.

Sometimes journos needn’t find a clever way to say it. A few years back, former prime minister Tony Abbott made his own contribution to the nomenclature in a TV interview with Annabel Crabb. At last he confirmed widespread rumours as to why he’d missed a crucial vote during the global financial crisis in in 2009. He’d been so drunk that he passed out during the vote. Or, in Abbott’s words, he’d been ‘‘mellow and reflective’’. ‘‘I lay down, and next thing I knew it was morning.’’

 

Janine Perrett is a journalist, broadcaster and commentator.

 

SMH, 25/06/2021