Saturday, October 23, 2004
the fourth rail: The Battle of the Sunni Triangle
Good rundown on the battle for the Sunn Triangle the fourth rail: The Battle of the Sunni Triangle
Clayton Cramer's Blog WHY OIL PRICES ARE SO HIGH
Clayton Cramer's BLOG
Why Are Oil Prices So High?
I've heard some of the explanations, and they make some sense: the hurricanes shut down production in the Gulf of Mexico for a while. There has been unrest in Angola. But the Iraq situation shouldn't matter much; they haven't shipped that much oil since Gulf War I. Dan Gifford, a long-time journalist, tells me about the following interesting items that he has heard recently. From financial journalist Jim Cramer (no relation) on CNBC's "Kudlow and Cramer" show:
I don't want to sound too conspiratorial here, but there's something about this oil market that just doesn't smell right. Do you think certain big hedge funds could be buying oil contracts to drive the market up in order to make our current leader [George W. Bush] look bad?
From Jon Burnham, Burnham Financial Group, October 12, 2004, CNBC-TV, "Closing Bell" 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET:
The price of oil is high because it's being pushed up by speculators and money from the big hedge funds. The important thing that gets lost in all that is that there is no shortage of crude oil in relation to current demand.
And from Adel al-Jubeir, Advisor to the Saudi Crown Prince September 28, 2004 at about 1:40 PM Pacific time, CNBC interview with Maria Bartaromo:
We believe the price of oil should be between $22 and $28 per barrel. $25 is a good reasonable price. There is no extra demand accompanying today's very high price for oil. We are seeing no extra customers lined up and there is no shortage of supply. The high prices we are seeing are due to speculation in the oil markets.
Then we have this interesting item from the New Yorker (of all places):
On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
“No one was supposed to know about this,” an assistant to one participant told me, declining to be named. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal, or some sort of Masonic plot!” His concern was understandable: the prospect of rich men concentrating their wealth in order to sway an American election was an inflammatory one, particularly given the Democratic Party’s populist rhetoric....
The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy.
...
Flying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix....
Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.
The wealthiest participant at this meeting of hard-core partisans—and the one whose presence was the most surprising—was George Soros, the seventy-four-year-old Wall Street speculator turned philanthropist.
...
Sperling proposed a potential new project for the group: unionizing Wal-Mart workers. Soros, however, had no interest in union drives. He wanted to stay focussed on the main objective—ousting Bush. Yet he also warned the group against the idea of combatting right-wing propaganda with leftist demagoguery. “I do not have an interest in replacing one extremist movement with another,” he said.
Andrew Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, a holdover from the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party, was also at the summit. In an interview not long ago, he conceded that consorting with billionaires had become a strange but increasingly common part of his job. “I have to admit, I used to think I was doing well when I met millionaires,” he said. “I’m glad we’ve got the billionaires with us. But it did feel a bit odd.”
...
The Quantum fund, a pool for hugely wealthy investors that profited by anticipating and exploiting price swings in foreign currencies, is famously iconoclastic. Soros recently passed much of the fund’s management to his two grown sons, Robert and Jonathan, but under his direction it rejected the prevailing orthodoxy about the rationality of the market in favor of the notion that markets were prone to chaos and distortions stemming from human error.
Now, the Quantum Fund is no stranger to oil trading. But what is interesting is another remark in the New Yorker article. After explaining that Soros has contributed $18.5 million to defeat George Bush:
Critics of Soros see his donations as brazenly hypocritical, considering that, until recently, he was a leading crusader for campaign-finance reform in America. Starting in the late nineteen-nineties, he donated eighteen million dollars to groups that supported the cause, and he is credited with having contributed significantly to the passage of the McCain-Feingold law. When Soros was asked about this reversal, he said, “This is the most important election of my lifetime. These aren’t normal times. The ends justify every legal means possible.”
Now, Soros has said in the past that he would give away all his billions if he could be guaranteed of defeating Bush--and you wonder, since Soros has been a big player in currency markets in the past, if he could be manipulating oil prices right now.
Remember this: until oil prices started skyrocketing in early summer, the economy seemed to be flying upwards. What would it cost for Soros, Lewis, and some of the other billionaires to manipulate oil markets? It doesn't have to last for long--just long enough to derail the economy into October. You don't need to actually buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil. You can buy and sell oil future delivery contracts for a fraction of the final delivery price. (This highly leveraged nature of futures contracts is why you can make--or lose--an enormous amount of money in commodities trading.) Once you start playing with the price of a commodity, and causing panic buying, you can jerk the price up--or down--quite impressively.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that people at Soros's level can probably spend two or three billion dollars to adjust future prices of 50 or 100 times that much oil--at least for a few months. The Quantum Fund was, back in the 1990s, what is called a "global macro fund", described this way:
By borrowing money to buy and sell futures contracts—themselves a powerful form of leverage—macro funds possessed the capability to move indexes like Japan's Nikkei or to influence significantly the value of important international currencies.
Now, supposedly the Quantum Fund isn't that powerful anymore. But is it powerful enough? Soros also returned to an active role in the Quantum Fund in 2002--after 9/11, when it became apparent that Soros was going to have to do something to bring down George Bush.
Large scale commodities market manipulation can't continue indefinitely, and you can lose your shirt on this sort of thing--but Soros has already said that he was willing to lose it all to defeat Bush. On the other hand, with a little care, he might actually make money. This article reports:
Soros, the founder of Quantum Endowment Fund, one of the world's largest hedge funds, was dubbed "The Man who broke the Bank of England" for his role in betting heavily that the pound would fall in 1992. As a result, Britain suffered a humiliating exit from Europe's exchange rate mechanism -- the precursor to Europe's 12-nation currency. It was rumored that Soros earned $1 billion in a day with his bet against the British pound.
Of course, I doubt that an oil play like this could be kept secret indefinitely--but certainly, President Kerry's Justice Department isn't going to prosecute George Soros for winning him the election. If we suddenly see oil prices drop down again after the election, I certainly hope the Bush Administration will take a serious look at possible market manipulation. But if Bush loses, there won't be investigation at all.
posted by Clayton at 8:30 PM
Why Are Oil Prices So High?
I've heard some of the explanations, and they make some sense: the hurricanes shut down production in the Gulf of Mexico for a while. There has been unrest in Angola. But the Iraq situation shouldn't matter much; they haven't shipped that much oil since Gulf War I. Dan Gifford, a long-time journalist, tells me about the following interesting items that he has heard recently. From financial journalist Jim Cramer (no relation) on CNBC's "Kudlow and Cramer" show:
I don't want to sound too conspiratorial here, but there's something about this oil market that just doesn't smell right. Do you think certain big hedge funds could be buying oil contracts to drive the market up in order to make our current leader [George W. Bush] look bad?
From Jon Burnham, Burnham Financial Group, October 12, 2004, CNBC-TV, "Closing Bell" 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET:
The price of oil is high because it's being pushed up by speculators and money from the big hedge funds. The important thing that gets lost in all that is that there is no shortage of crude oil in relation to current demand.
And from Adel al-Jubeir, Advisor to the Saudi Crown Prince September 28, 2004 at about 1:40 PM Pacific time, CNBC interview with Maria Bartaromo:
We believe the price of oil should be between $22 and $28 per barrel. $25 is a good reasonable price. There is no extra demand accompanying today's very high price for oil. We are seeing no extra customers lined up and there is no shortage of supply. The high prices we are seeing are due to speculation in the oil markets.
Then we have this interesting item from the New Yorker (of all places):
On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
“No one was supposed to know about this,” an assistant to one participant told me, declining to be named. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal, or some sort of Masonic plot!” His concern was understandable: the prospect of rich men concentrating their wealth in order to sway an American election was an inflammatory one, particularly given the Democratic Party’s populist rhetoric....
The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy.
...
Flying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix....
Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.
The wealthiest participant at this meeting of hard-core partisans—and the one whose presence was the most surprising—was George Soros, the seventy-four-year-old Wall Street speculator turned philanthropist.
...
Sperling proposed a potential new project for the group: unionizing Wal-Mart workers. Soros, however, had no interest in union drives. He wanted to stay focussed on the main objective—ousting Bush. Yet he also warned the group against the idea of combatting right-wing propaganda with leftist demagoguery. “I do not have an interest in replacing one extremist movement with another,” he said.
Andrew Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, a holdover from the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party, was also at the summit. In an interview not long ago, he conceded that consorting with billionaires had become a strange but increasingly common part of his job. “I have to admit, I used to think I was doing well when I met millionaires,” he said. “I’m glad we’ve got the billionaires with us. But it did feel a bit odd.”
...
The Quantum fund, a pool for hugely wealthy investors that profited by anticipating and exploiting price swings in foreign currencies, is famously iconoclastic. Soros recently passed much of the fund’s management to his two grown sons, Robert and Jonathan, but under his direction it rejected the prevailing orthodoxy about the rationality of the market in favor of the notion that markets were prone to chaos and distortions stemming from human error.
Now, the Quantum Fund is no stranger to oil trading. But what is interesting is another remark in the New Yorker article. After explaining that Soros has contributed $18.5 million to defeat George Bush:
Critics of Soros see his donations as brazenly hypocritical, considering that, until recently, he was a leading crusader for campaign-finance reform in America. Starting in the late nineteen-nineties, he donated eighteen million dollars to groups that supported the cause, and he is credited with having contributed significantly to the passage of the McCain-Feingold law. When Soros was asked about this reversal, he said, “This is the most important election of my lifetime. These aren’t normal times. The ends justify every legal means possible.”
Now, Soros has said in the past that he would give away all his billions if he could be guaranteed of defeating Bush--and you wonder, since Soros has been a big player in currency markets in the past, if he could be manipulating oil prices right now.
Remember this: until oil prices started skyrocketing in early summer, the economy seemed to be flying upwards. What would it cost for Soros, Lewis, and some of the other billionaires to manipulate oil markets? It doesn't have to last for long--just long enough to derail the economy into October. You don't need to actually buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil. You can buy and sell oil future delivery contracts for a fraction of the final delivery price. (This highly leveraged nature of futures contracts is why you can make--or lose--an enormous amount of money in commodities trading.) Once you start playing with the price of a commodity, and causing panic buying, you can jerk the price up--or down--quite impressively.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that people at Soros's level can probably spend two or three billion dollars to adjust future prices of 50 or 100 times that much oil--at least for a few months. The Quantum Fund was, back in the 1990s, what is called a "global macro fund", described this way:
By borrowing money to buy and sell futures contracts—themselves a powerful form of leverage—macro funds possessed the capability to move indexes like Japan's Nikkei or to influence significantly the value of important international currencies.
Now, supposedly the Quantum Fund isn't that powerful anymore. But is it powerful enough? Soros also returned to an active role in the Quantum Fund in 2002--after 9/11, when it became apparent that Soros was going to have to do something to bring down George Bush.
Large scale commodities market manipulation can't continue indefinitely, and you can lose your shirt on this sort of thing--but Soros has already said that he was willing to lose it all to defeat Bush. On the other hand, with a little care, he might actually make money. This article reports:
Soros, the founder of Quantum Endowment Fund, one of the world's largest hedge funds, was dubbed "The Man who broke the Bank of England" for his role in betting heavily that the pound would fall in 1992. As a result, Britain suffered a humiliating exit from Europe's exchange rate mechanism -- the precursor to Europe's 12-nation currency. It was rumored that Soros earned $1 billion in a day with his bet against the British pound.
Of course, I doubt that an oil play like this could be kept secret indefinitely--but certainly, President Kerry's Justice Department isn't going to prosecute George Soros for winning him the election. If we suddenly see oil prices drop down again after the election, I certainly hope the Bush Administration will take a serious look at possible market manipulation. But if Bush loses, there won't be investigation at all.
posted by Clayton at 8:30 PM
BLACKFIVE: The Good And Bad Days in Iraq
BLACKFIVE: The Good And Bad Days in Iraq
This is a good first hand account of what is a good and bad day in Iraq.
This is a good first hand account of what is a good and bad day in Iraq.
The 9/11 Election
The 9/11 Election
From the November 1 / November 8, 2004 issue: "This is the first presidential election since September 11, 2001, and it will define America's response: On the one hand, we can attempt to return to the 1990s; on the other hand, we can face our challenges, and carry out our duties."
by William Kristol
11/01/2004, Volume 010, Issue 08
"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance."
--John Kerry, New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2004
"What American would not trade the economy we had in the 1990s, the fact that we were not at war and young Americans were not deployed?"
--John Kerry, on Larry King Live, July 8, 2004
"During the decade of the 1990s, our times often seemed peaceful on the surface.Yet beneath the surface were currents of danger. Terrorists were training and planning in distant camps. . . . America's response to terrorism was generally piecemeal and symbolic. The terrorists concluded this was a sign of weakness, and their plans became more ambitious, and their attacks more deadly. Most Americans still felt that terrorism was something distant, and something that would not strike on a large scale in America. That is the time my opponent wants to go back to. A time when danger was real and growing, but we didn't know it. . . . September 11, 2001 changed all that. We realized that the apparent security of the 1990s was an illusion. . . . Will we make decisions in the light of September 11, or continue to live in the mirage of safety that was actually a time of gathering threats?"
--George W. Bush, October 18, 2004
THIS IS THE FIRST presidential election since September 11, 2001. Its central issue is the meaning of September 11. The events of that day did not really "change everything," as Bush sometimes says in a defensible shorthand. But they did reveal, as columnist Paul Greenberg put it, that "everything we had thought/assumed/expected in the Golden '90s hadn't been so." The surface peace of the 1990s had been bought at a great price. On 9/11 a failure of American leadership was revealed, a failure to look ahead and act forcefully to forestall threats--to do what Bush has called "the hard work of fighting terror and spreading freedom."
This is what President Bush thinks. John Kerry really doesn't agree. That's why it is so fitting that Bill Clinton will reemerge to campaign for Kerry this week. The choice will then be clearly posed: On the one hand, we can attempt to return to the 1990s. This is not, of course, an unattractive prospect, but it is surely an unachievable one. To pretend we can go back to the 1990s raises false hopes that will prove dangerous to the country. On the other hand, we can face our challenges, and carry out our duties--as President Bush has tried, with considerable success, to lead us to do.
In his October 18 speech on the war on terror, President Bush noted correctly that his opponent "has not made democracy a priority of his foreign policy." Indeed, Kerry's critique of Bush goes beyond competence in the execution of policy to first principles. Kerry does not see a need to fundamentally change the political culture of the Middle East. Bush posed the challenge well: "Is he content to watch and wait, as anger and resentment grow for more decades in the Middle East, feeding more terrorism until radicals without conscience gain the weapons to kill without limit?" Bush isn't. Thus he embraces the task of helping to spread "democracy and hope" so that "governments that oppose terror multiply across the Middle East."
He does so for reasons his counterpart Tony Blair recently explained. This is the only way to deal with a "worldwide global terrorism" based on a perversion of Islam: "Its roots are not superficial but deep, in the madrassas of Pakistan, in the extreme forms of Wahhabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia, in the training camps of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. . . . If you take this view, if you believe September 11 changed the world . . . the only path to take is to confront this terrorism and remove it root and branch."
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently criticized the Bush administration for being "addicted to 9/11." He praised John Kerry for "wanting to put terrorism back into perspective." Friedman continued, "I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them--the bad guys--not about us. We're about the Fourth of July."
We at THE WEEKLY STANDARD yield to no one in our loyalty to the Fourth of July. But September 11, 2001, also cannot help but define us 21st-century Americans. And it defines us not simply in terms of those we have to fight, and defeat. For September 11 is not simply about "the bad guys," about the attacks on America. September 11 is also about our response. It is about the police and firefighters in New York, the servicemen and women in the Pentagon, and the passengers and crew of United Flight 93. September 11 was a day of infamy. But it was also a day of bravery, and of nobility. And it could go down in history as a day that began an era in which the American people, and their leaders, rose to the challenges before them--an era in which they acted wisely, and steadfastly, and honorably. September 11 saw horrible hours. But it could also be the beginning of one of America's finest hours. The chances of that will be greatest under President Bush.
--William Kristol
© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
From the November 1 / November 8, 2004 issue: "This is the first presidential election since September 11, 2001, and it will define America's response: On the one hand, we can attempt to return to the 1990s; on the other hand, we can face our challenges, and carry out our duties."
by William Kristol
11/01/2004, Volume 010, Issue 08
"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance."
--John Kerry, New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2004
"What American would not trade the economy we had in the 1990s, the fact that we were not at war and young Americans were not deployed?"
--John Kerry, on Larry King Live, July 8, 2004
"During the decade of the 1990s, our times often seemed peaceful on the surface.Yet beneath the surface were currents of danger. Terrorists were training and planning in distant camps. . . . America's response to terrorism was generally piecemeal and symbolic. The terrorists concluded this was a sign of weakness, and their plans became more ambitious, and their attacks more deadly. Most Americans still felt that terrorism was something distant, and something that would not strike on a large scale in America. That is the time my opponent wants to go back to. A time when danger was real and growing, but we didn't know it. . . . September 11, 2001 changed all that. We realized that the apparent security of the 1990s was an illusion. . . . Will we make decisions in the light of September 11, or continue to live in the mirage of safety that was actually a time of gathering threats?"
--George W. Bush, October 18, 2004
THIS IS THE FIRST presidential election since September 11, 2001. Its central issue is the meaning of September 11. The events of that day did not really "change everything," as Bush sometimes says in a defensible shorthand. But they did reveal, as columnist Paul Greenberg put it, that "everything we had thought/assumed/expected in the Golden '90s hadn't been so." The surface peace of the 1990s had been bought at a great price. On 9/11 a failure of American leadership was revealed, a failure to look ahead and act forcefully to forestall threats--to do what Bush has called "the hard work of fighting terror and spreading freedom."
This is what President Bush thinks. John Kerry really doesn't agree. That's why it is so fitting that Bill Clinton will reemerge to campaign for Kerry this week. The choice will then be clearly posed: On the one hand, we can attempt to return to the 1990s. This is not, of course, an unattractive prospect, but it is surely an unachievable one. To pretend we can go back to the 1990s raises false hopes that will prove dangerous to the country. On the other hand, we can face our challenges, and carry out our duties--as President Bush has tried, with considerable success, to lead us to do.
In his October 18 speech on the war on terror, President Bush noted correctly that his opponent "has not made democracy a priority of his foreign policy." Indeed, Kerry's critique of Bush goes beyond competence in the execution of policy to first principles. Kerry does not see a need to fundamentally change the political culture of the Middle East. Bush posed the challenge well: "Is he content to watch and wait, as anger and resentment grow for more decades in the Middle East, feeding more terrorism until radicals without conscience gain the weapons to kill without limit?" Bush isn't. Thus he embraces the task of helping to spread "democracy and hope" so that "governments that oppose terror multiply across the Middle East."
He does so for reasons his counterpart Tony Blair recently explained. This is the only way to deal with a "worldwide global terrorism" based on a perversion of Islam: "Its roots are not superficial but deep, in the madrassas of Pakistan, in the extreme forms of Wahhabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia, in the training camps of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. . . . If you take this view, if you believe September 11 changed the world . . . the only path to take is to confront this terrorism and remove it root and branch."
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently criticized the Bush administration for being "addicted to 9/11." He praised John Kerry for "wanting to put terrorism back into perspective." Friedman continued, "I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them--the bad guys--not about us. We're about the Fourth of July."
We at THE WEEKLY STANDARD yield to no one in our loyalty to the Fourth of July. But September 11, 2001, also cannot help but define us 21st-century Americans. And it defines us not simply in terms of those we have to fight, and defeat. For September 11 is not simply about "the bad guys," about the attacks on America. September 11 is also about our response. It is about the police and firefighters in New York, the servicemen and women in the Pentagon, and the passengers and crew of United Flight 93. September 11 was a day of infamy. But it was also a day of bravery, and of nobility. And it could go down in history as a day that began an era in which the American people, and their leaders, rose to the challenges before them--an era in which they acted wisely, and steadfastly, and honorably. September 11 saw horrible hours. But it could also be the beginning of one of America's finest hours. The chances of that will be greatest under President Bush.
--William Kristol
© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Friday, October 22, 2004
Incivility in Polotics
Right As Usual: "INCIVILITY OF POLITICS
Maybe it's just me, but I'm finding that this may be one of the most heated and contentious elections in recent history, and that is wild, considering the 2000 election.
There are few political discussions anywhere, at least in the tradition of give-and-take. I'm hearing a lot of heated spews about the OTHER side (not, in general, about the merits of one's candidate) and the cataclysmic consequences of letting THAT PERSON steal the election.
What on Earth is going on?
I remember when the 100-year anniversary of the Civil War was celebrated. At that time (I was 10 at the start), I couldn't get a handle on WHY people became so filled with righteous bile that they couldn't calmly discuss the issues, and work together. I just couldn't imagine problems that people of decency couldn't handle in a reasonable way.
I'm beginning to understand. It didn't happen all at once. It built over time, like today's situation. Both sides believed themselves to be right, and the other to be, not just wrong, but potentially dangerous. It ceased to be a political discussion, but a battle against the forces of evil.
Each episode of conflict just led to even greater grievances, with the losing side more determined to prevail. And the losing side only associated with others like themselves. They couldn't contaminate themselves with contact with THOSE EVIL, VILE PEOPLE, IF YOU COULD EVEN CALL THEM HUMAN.
The Civil War didn't happen overnight. It was a long road from the Transcendentalists to war. But the same people grew more agitated each time they suffered a political or legislative loss, and this led to an 'end justifies the means' attitude, and eventually to chaos."
Maybe it's just me, but I'm finding that this may be one of the most heated and contentious elections in recent history, and that is wild, considering the 2000 election.
There are few political discussions anywhere, at least in the tradition of give-and-take. I'm hearing a lot of heated spews about the OTHER side (not, in general, about the merits of one's candidate) and the cataclysmic consequences of letting THAT PERSON steal the election.
What on Earth is going on?
I remember when the 100-year anniversary of the Civil War was celebrated. At that time (I was 10 at the start), I couldn't get a handle on WHY people became so filled with righteous bile that they couldn't calmly discuss the issues, and work together. I just couldn't imagine problems that people of decency couldn't handle in a reasonable way.
I'm beginning to understand. It didn't happen all at once. It built over time, like today's situation. Both sides believed themselves to be right, and the other to be, not just wrong, but potentially dangerous. It ceased to be a political discussion, but a battle against the forces of evil.
Each episode of conflict just led to even greater grievances, with the losing side more determined to prevail. And the losing side only associated with others like themselves. They couldn't contaminate themselves with contact with THOSE EVIL, VILE PEOPLE, IF YOU COULD EVEN CALL THEM HUMAN.
The Civil War didn't happen overnight. It was a long road from the Transcendentalists to war. But the same people grew more agitated each time they suffered a political or legislative loss, and this led to an 'end justifies the means' attitude, and eventually to chaos."
JS Online: Cosby urges city to get serious
JS Online: Cosby urges city to get serious: "Cosby urges city to get serious
Responsibility can cure social ills, he says"
Responsibility can cure social ills, he says"
Bad Example
Bad Example: "KERRY & TERRY EXPLAINED
Most excellently by Gerard of American Digest:
The French have an idiomatic phrase nostalgie pour la boue which means, roughly, 'yearning for the mud.' Nostalgie pour la boue is a compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation. This is a specialty of the French culture.
Nostalgie pour la boue is usually a mix of drink, drugs, and weird sex until the soul is obliterated by the abused flesh. You can see it at its most graphic in the party scenes in the French film, Killing Zoe. Most people try this sort of thing a time or two in their youth, but grow out of it when time, experience, or, in many cases, God gets the upper hand. Others grow out of it via deep psychoanalysis and a few trips to the rehab clinic. Many never kick it and were, in the past, thought of as 'perverts' but are now more kindly seen as 'differently minded' and left to go their own way in our 'consenting ' culture.
[...]
I'd like to suggest that there's another kind nostalgie going around in this hybrid culture; one that arises from nostalgie pour la boue, but is more damaging to the body politic: nostalgie pour la d�faite.
Nostalgie pour la d�faite is that dark state of the soul when an American, who either came of age in the Vietnam era, or who was taught and mentored by a leftist or liberal of that vintage, yearns for the defeat of America. American defeat is then seen as confirmation that his or her world view and social milieu is the right view and right milieu. It is simply 'the way things must be.'
I outgrew it when I was 17. I fell in love with a respectable girl and put my life in order so that I could be worthy of her. Never looked back.
I think one of the commenters said it best: 'I have so often wondered: How can an entire lifetime be spent pining away for the lunacy of youth?'
by Harvey "
Most excellently by Gerard of American Digest:
The French have an idiomatic phrase nostalgie pour la boue which means, roughly, 'yearning for the mud.' Nostalgie pour la boue is a compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation. This is a specialty of the French culture.
Nostalgie pour la boue is usually a mix of drink, drugs, and weird sex until the soul is obliterated by the abused flesh. You can see it at its most graphic in the party scenes in the French film, Killing Zoe. Most people try this sort of thing a time or two in their youth, but grow out of it when time, experience, or, in many cases, God gets the upper hand. Others grow out of it via deep psychoanalysis and a few trips to the rehab clinic. Many never kick it and were, in the past, thought of as 'perverts' but are now more kindly seen as 'differently minded' and left to go their own way in our 'consenting ' culture.
[...]
I'd like to suggest that there's another kind nostalgie going around in this hybrid culture; one that arises from nostalgie pour la boue, but is more damaging to the body politic: nostalgie pour la d�faite.
Nostalgie pour la d�faite is that dark state of the soul when an American, who either came of age in the Vietnam era, or who was taught and mentored by a leftist or liberal of that vintage, yearns for the defeat of America. American defeat is then seen as confirmation that his or her world view and social milieu is the right view and right milieu. It is simply 'the way things must be.'
I outgrew it when I was 17. I fell in love with a respectable girl and put my life in order so that I could be worthy of her. Never looked back.
I think one of the commenters said it best: 'I have so often wondered: How can an entire lifetime be spent pining away for the lunacy of youth?'
by Harvey "
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
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