Diplomacy

Tribal Warfare And Imperialism

Wen and Fukuda play ball.

December 29, 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bin Laden is back in the news again. A classic controversial figure, he is rapidly achieving 'god' status. People debate whether he is alive or dead but we do know that he is auditioning to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Ron Paul says sensible things while his 'interviewer' snarls and snaps at him. The US is totally off the track here and into the 'To Hell In A Handbasket' mode. I decided it is time to see all this through the Dragon's Eyes. Indeed, they are covering this story very closely along with their happy story about bonding with the Japanese. This story is being ignored by the West, fatally, I might add.

I nominate Ron Paul as the only sane Republican. He sounds a lot like my grandfather. That, alone, is pretty scary. My grandfather also hated Santa Claus and would go to great lengths to explain how dangerous and stupid Santa Claus really was. He gave us no presents on Xmas, of course. But we could, if we were really good, get a book or three from him on that day and I still have these books which I am very fond of. More than one was about either economics, history or operas.

Ron Paul dares to tell us things we don't want to hear. He is quite aware that our entire Middle Eastern and Central Asian international policies are doomed to create chaos. The many internal conflicts within our own nation coupled with the eternal conflicts of these ever-changing, over-run by invading hordes, ancient tribal, religious cradle of great religions, these lands that seem to spawn more phantoms and elevated philosophical discourse, this region which has given us gods and magic numbers, all the stresses of time and space converge in this part of the earth. Time is both frozen and shooting forwards at the same time.

There is too much history and not enough foresight. Systems set up thousands of years ago are lurching into the 21st Century as a great deal of the world's wealth flows into this region and armies of invaders follow in its wake, seeking power, energy and dominion. The general feeling in the US is, we must seize the genie of this region and enslave it. The need for wealth, power and security means we must stuff the genie back into his bottle one way or another. The only way we seem capable of doing is to threaten the genie with annihilation.

Or elections. I see this in the news, how we must bring democracy to lands that are nearly as incapable of this as here at home, note how our own system stumbles along, barely. The Chinese don't want this sort of 'democracy'. They want harmony and order. Of course, this means some people take orders and others issue orders. But the Chinese do have a point here: their system is certainly more functional that Pakistan's system or a lot of their neighbor's systems. So I figure, it is time to view Pakistan through Chinese eyes.

Chinese Premier elaborates "three bases" for healthy China-Japan relations

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao elaborated on Saturday the "three bases" for healthy China-Japan relations, underscoring the principle that people of the two nations were the real foundation of bilateral ties.

One of the bases was that the two sides should abide by the three key political documents on ties, including the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement, the Peace and Friendship Treaty and the Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration, said Wen.

As for the second base, "the real foundation lies in people. People of the two nations shall promote mutual respect and understanding and treat each other equally," he said, while hosting a breakfast for visiting Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

The future of China-Japan relations would rely on young people, which Wen depicted as the third base.

Yes, this is the top story in China: the baseball game between Wen and Fukuda, Japan's LDP henchman. The deep resentment of the Asian people is expressed rather openly here. The US views all other nations and people as either tools or dogs to kick around or co-conspirators who will join us in beating up someone else. The Hu visit last year was a total disaster...for the US. The outrageous demeanor and behavior of our press, our President and nearly everyone involved, was astonishing and still annoys the Chinese. The Japanese get the red carpet treatment but then, they are hammering us in world trade, massively, so they are happy we don't care about market share or market penetration. They despise us. I watch Japanese TV. It is amusing, how they view us.

Not charming, by the way. And if they want a bad guy who gets punished by the gods, it usually is an American. We have fallen very far, from the Angels of Mercy to the Demons of Death. And this isn't one's imagination. We really have fallen far from our own ideals. I watched this happen over my lifetime. When we lost the Vietnam War, we made movies like 'Rambo' where one American beats up all those Vietnamese peasants who successfully defeated us fair and square in a full-scale war. Then, we put up those maniacal black flags which were supposed to be about freeing missing prisoners of war. These flags still fly in my own village, for example. A prime case of mental collapse.

With the War on Terror, we are seeing quite a bit of this sort of madness. Either we react with severe paranoia whenever there are world events or we pretend there isn't anything happening at all. At least, during the Vietnam war, we could debate the facts or wisdom of imperialism and peasant uprisings. Today, with religious unease adding to the classic anti-imperialist, peasant's right's movements, we see a collapse in the ability to talk rationally about this. China went through 50 years of painful internal struggles over what it means to be a nation, a people and a society. Actually, this is still ongoing and subject to future stresses and changes as the forces of history push China to the front ranks of nations of the world, as the Chinese flex their minds and try to sail across the Seven Seas. Their sun is rising. And they know this.

Someone else's sun is also rising: Islam. Despite the terrible death and destruction all over Islamic lands, the birth rate still greatly outstrips the death rate. In this, by itself, means that Islam is a rising political power. On top of this, wealth is pouring into Islamic lands. True, many live in poverty, but if we look at actual wealth and not the side effects of the giant debt balloon the West has created which makes it look as if we are rich even though we are not so rich, after all. This sovereign wealth is money pouring out of the West and into the cauldron of Islam's great mass of people.

Japan is dying. Catholics in the southern half of Europe are dying off. Northern Europe's children will be like the children in the Pied Piper: gone. The quiet surrender in the West and in Japan, the End of our Civilizations, is increasingly obvious. And occasionally is alluded to but then, dropped. Japan's wealth is purchased via a crushing depression laid like a whip on the backs of the people who live there. This regime has suppressed childbirth yet the Palestinian people who have far less than anyone on earth, on a starvation diet, locked in hopeless ghettos, they have one of the highest birthrates on earth. This is their final act of defiance of the West. And it is a source of power, one that is neglected by everyone but the Zionists who can read the data and know these numbers spell their own doom, for many Jews are opting out on having 10 children each.

The US rate of birth is masked by immigration and the habits of the poor who still have multiple children. The point here is, we have decided to go to war with a culture and a people who are reproducing at a very rapid pace. And we can't handle this war because we don't want to die. Few Americans want to think about the troops we send back, over and over again, into the death trap of Iraq. Or Afghanistan, for that matter. We kill far more than they kill us but they are winning because they outnumber us increasingly as each year passes.

Death toll in Pakistan riots reaches 38

spokesman from Pakistan's Interior Ministry said Saturday that the rioting across the country had killed 38 people and injured 52 others.

Speaking at a news briefing here, Brig. Javed Cheema said the riots also caused tens of millions of U.S. dollars in damage across the country, with 174 banks being burnt.

China fears this sort of chaos. Greatly. The leadership there, consumed with their latest little conquest, a major one, by the way, the love-fest with their former foes, Japan, still are very concerned about their Western Frontier which borders on the regions where a lot of stresses and wild actions are endangering Chinese control of local populations. China wants, above all, secure borders. Under Mao and his entourage and the cruel Madame Mao, got entangled in a number of border wars with neighbors such as Korea, Vietnam, they invaded and took over Tibet and then clashed with India and Nepal immediately afterwards. Then there was the clash with Russia.

After years of insane non-diplomacy, Mao and his mad hausfrau mercifully died, the female half of this hellish couple, dying in prison. Slowly, China learned how silly all this was and how much easier, profitable and power-enhancing diplomacy is. This is why they practice it every day, dutifully and carefully. The US should have been playing baseball with the two Asian leaders, not running about, screaming about bin Laden and assassins. China hates assassins and is willing to see these sorts of things terminated. Assassins can strike anyone and they want to stay alive while moving about the planet. The US, on the other hand, has decided to play the game of 'gotch-ya' with a bunch of crazed assassins by acting like we are creeps, too. The kidnappings, tortures and punishments meted out by the US match those of our foes and we are much diminished by this. It is as if Madame Mao has been reborn in Condi Rice. Not good, is it?

Militant leader denies involvement in Bhutto's assassination

A militant leader in Pakistan who is reported to have links with al-Qaeda Saturday denied involvement in former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

The News Network International (NNI) news agency quoted Mauli umar, spokesman for militant leader Baitullah Mehsud, as saying that they were not involved in Bhutto's death.

Mauli umar said that they were sad at Bhutto's death and did not have enmity with Pakistani leaders but the United States.

Throughout history, most assassins have been either individuals who get shady assistance from black ops people far in the rear or they are part of a 3-member or 9-member conspiracy that operate pretty much free of all controls. It isn't all that hard, being an assassin. So long as one doesn't expect to survive. Most have been sworn to die with their victims. Usually, nearly always, these people are 'low value' people who take out 'high value' leaders. There is also a strong whiff of madness as motivation. During the late 19th century, for example, more than one leader was wounded or killed by fanatical anarchists seeking chaos.

People seeking chaos is no surprise. For some reason, there is a strong human urge deep in all of us, to destroy things, even things we love. The stresses of the Industrial Revolution coupled with the liberalization of education and religion led to many unhappy political violence events. In the US, even as more than one President was assassinated in the 19th century, we kept our Constitution mainly intact. Even as we let in millions of immigrants, some of whom were assassins! Unlike the 'old world', the US early on, sponsored 'free' schools paid by taxes where all the children of these immigrants were gathered together and taught a new doctrine, the philosophy, history and psychology of 'patriotism'. This was the envy of the world.

Irish children saluted the same generic flag as English children. Black children of the freed slaves were now struggling for full citizenship and they, too, learned about patriotism. German and Italian, Catholic and Jewish children, all sorts of people's children were drawn into this system and taught to defend, protect and LOVE this nation they were now part of and building. This, by the way, was very revolutionary 150 years ago.

The tribal leaders who deny they called for or conspired to assassinate Bhutto are not like the situation here in America. These people aren't mayors or governors or senators. Tribal leaders super cede the state. The US couldn't draw in one major group of people: Indians. The natives who were being brutally displaced by the immigrants. The treaties, negotiations, invasions, massacres, assassinations, raids and riots in this sector were ongoing and very, very violent, vicious and cruel. The US ended all this by annihilating all the food sources, hounding the tribes, persecuting them, machine gunning them down, herding them into desolate enclaves with few resources. They were decimated and destroyed. To this day, the struggle of these people continues! Dennis Banks, a person I have met more than once, recently declared his tribal lands to be a sovereign nation. He is very close to Mauli umar as to Black Elk. The modern world holds many destructive forces that are harsh on these ancient tribes, adapted to a totally different ethos and world view. What took us many centuries to do, they must do in one or two generations. And, as outsiders, they can see clearly what is wrong with our systems. Especially, how we are not reproducing rapidly anymore.

This troubles not only them, but many other people. We wonder, is civilization anti-child? After all, more than one civilization has simply died off and not in some huge violent motion but simply...died. Leaving either an empty land or becoming very rustic and tribal again.

Internet: Bin Laden accuses U.S. of seeking to control Iraqi oil

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden accused the United States in a statement posted on the Internet on Saturday of having a plot to take control of Iraq's oil.

In the statement, bin Laden also accused Washington of seeking to build military bases in Iraq and dominate the region.

The United States is making efforts to rebuild a pro-Washington national unity government in Iraq, which is meant "to give the Americans all they wish of Iraq's oil", said the statement, urging Iraqis to reject it.

Iraqis must reject the envisaged plan and those who join tribal councils fighting al-Qaida or take part in any unity government would be turning their backs on Islam, bin Laden warned in the statement.

He, meanwhile, made a sharp threat of attacks against Israel by saying that "I would like to assure our people in Palestine that we will expand our jihad (holy war) there."

"We intend to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the sea" with "blood for blood, destruction for destruction", he vowed.

A number of readers here want to believe that bin Laden doesn't exist. Unfortunately, his words ring true to many ears. This is a classic. The tribal chief who denies killing Bhutto doe go on to say quite cheerfully, he hates Americans and thinks we should be removed. Bin Laden's appeal to Shi'ites is minimal. The Shi'ites are working with the US for the simple reason, we put them in power and they are very happy about this. They hate us and have contempt for our efforts and hope we all die some horrible death. But they aren't attacking us because we are assisting them.

The US is also arming and assisting the Sunnis. And the sword hanging over our own heads in this region was sharpened by the US and we even gave them the string to hang it. The average American is being told by our leaders and the press that if we mess around there more, this sword won't fall on our heads. Indeed, we are giving them more and more swords, a whole armory of swords to hang over us. For our own protection, of course.

Bush is going to the Holy Land to fix things there. Yet another futile and frankly, evil, peace treaty will be rammed down Palestinian throats. For some bizarre reason, the Jews who kept their tribe together for 2,000 years of diaspora, think a mere 60 years of diaspora on the Palestinian tribes will cause them to give up their faith and hope and they will scatter and never return. Bin Laden's words show us that this is not possible. I can't imagine these people walking away from their lands without a fight. Dennis Banks' tribe was put down in the 1880's. Yet the desire to fight back, to change things, still is in his heart and soul. This is quite common with people. After all, I can recall all sorts of family matters going back a thousand years [we were invaders, by the way, very obnoxious].

Gred Mitchell, editor of Publisher and Editor Magazine:

Drilling deep into the PDF of the results in one of the most extensive national polls on the presidential election (and related issues) uncovers some opinions to ponder. It’s the new AP-Yahoo survey of more than 1,800 adults conducted in the middle of this month. Asked who they would vote for if the election were held today, more than 41% said a Democrat and less than 30% a Republican. But in a potentially significant finding – hello Ron Paul, Chuck Hagel and Mike Bloomberg! -- a whopping 32% said they might well vote for a third party candidate, 6% calling this “very likely” and another 26% “somewhat likely.” Only 28% called this “not at all likely.”
*snip*
Perhaps most importantly, given a list of 16 top issues, the respondents said Democrats could handle them better in every case but one-—terrorism.

The GOP solution to 'terrorism' is imperialism. This was true in 1789, 1889 and today. When the Indians gave problems to the invaders, we killed them and pushed them into hostile lands. Then, if we wanted those lands, we did this again and again. Until we killed off the vast majority of the native tribes. The GOP is very aggressive about all this. After 9/11, when our own military didn't defend us at all, we then heard lots of talk about 'glassing' Afghanistan, which is wild talk about nuking innocent civilians. Not one Afghani attacked us on 9/11 but still, this was seen as being 'strong'. The GOP even told us to do two things: go shopping and to not ask why someone attacked us.

Bingo. Today, we are going bankrupt. We charged all our shopping on our credit and now are deep in debt. And we still won't ask, why these attacks are happening to us or how we set ourselves up for these things. We pour money into the Middle East, yet we refuse to understand the economics of this or the social facts we face. We invade the Holy Land while denying it is an invasion, pretending that all this is a 'return' which is pure fiction. The US people, beset by a media which lies about fundamental facts, cannot understand the dilemma we are in. So they imagine Rambo will beat up the Vietnamese for us and we can then strut and fret on the world stage and not be assassinated.

The White House Is Stockpiling Oil! The Question Is, "Why?"

Since August, the Bush administration has been adding 50,000 barrels a day to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — the nation's emergency oil stockpile — with plans to kick up the pace to 70,000 barrels a day by the end of January.

That U.S. oil tank of last resort now contains 695 million barrels of oil — enough to keep the American economy running for just 56 days if imports were suddenly cut off.

The federal government has been aggressively buying up the world's supply of light sweet crude at a time when crude is selling for over $90 per barrel.

And this binge buying has added as much as 10% to the price of crude, an oil consultant told a Senate panel recently. What's more, in the recent energy bill passed by Congress, President Bush asked — and received — authorization to DOUBLE the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The US is preparing for war. The war with Iran is still on the table. The wars we have launched have caused oil prices to shoot up and now are at nearly $100 a barrel. This is destroying the economic health of many American families. I was out in the woods today, chain sawing apart dead trees because frankly, I can't afford to heat my house any other way. I use firewood and coal. The average American family is now facing massive energy bills and winter has barely begun to flex its cold muscles. January is around the corner.

The hoarding by our government isn't for us, it is for the military. They figure, the US people can do what we always do during wars: rations. Or long lines. I have been through both. Generally speaking, when a powerful country ends up in economic trouble, they start wars. Argentina took the Falkland Islands when the junta put in power with the blessing of the CIA, did badly on the economic front. England, in the same sort of doldrums, happily engaged in this war. Argentina lost and the generals were deposed. Thatcher was in triumph. When Reagan had financial problems, he invaded poorly-armed Caribbean islands. War is a balm if one wins. And the US is desperate to 'win' the wars we are now in and we need to invade ALL the Muslim lands in order to find 'peace' which equals 'total dominance'. Indeed, the icons, pictures and words of the neo cons running our military all point to this as the desired outcome: total dominance.

Riots Erupt Across Kenya as Rivals Declare Victory

With the results from Kenya’s closely contested elections still up in the air and evidence growing of election mischief, riots erupted across the country on Saturday.

Columns of black smoke boiled up from the slums ringing Nairobi, the capital, as supporters of Raila Odinga, the leading presidential challenger, poured into the streets to protest what they said was a plot by the government to steal the vote.

This mirrors Pakistan. Only we have little interest in all this. I happen to remember Darfur. The US and Israel wanted us to thing about Darfur, not Palestine. The media in the West hammered on and on about Darfur. No one did much of anything. Africa is wrestling with the business of how to turn tribes into nations. This is often looking more like a doomed process. Frankly, I don't see how this can be done. Belgium can't seem to do this! And they are part of the European Union! Belgium is still struggling to make a government! And so we want to get violent with countries created by British bureaucrats? Time to go off to Iran to see what is going on there. Are they expecting war?

Leader Calls for Muslims' Vigilance

Addressing thousands of people in a ceremony to mark the feast of Eid-ul-Ghadir here on Saturday, Ayatollah Khamenei warned the Islamic Ummah (nation) against enemies' efforts to "inject the virus of discord and difference among Muslims".

"Campaign against difference and discord is the great lesson of Ghadir and to practice this crucial lesson, followers of Islamic faiths should avoid aggression and insult to each others' sanctities and provocation (of sentiments) over sensitive issues, and as (I) mentioned in the message released on the occasion of Hajj (pilgrimage), they should stage vigilance and unity to defuse the plot of the arrogance which seeks to sow religious discord and conflict between the Shiite and Sunnite (Muslims)," the Supreme Leader reiterated.

He further said that the Islamic Iran could gain victory by showing vigilance and keeping an open eye to enemies' tricks and plots, describing "faith and trust in God, feeling a responsibility for being present in all the scenes and full vigilance against the enemies" as the key to Iran's triumph over arrogant powers in the last 29 years.

Now that the Shi'ites know they will eventually control Iraq, they are doing diplomacy for once. In a rather crude way. But they are gradually making headway. The US and Israel are grinding their fangs over this. The game plan was to isolate Iran and force them into a corner and then make them lash out. Instead, bit by bit, the Iranians are expanding diplomacy and talking to their rivals. This is because the US is losing power very rapidly. Everyone can read the data, see the news, it is easy to track our trajectory...downwards. All the oil pumping nations can see our government is hoarding oil even though this causes the price of oil to shoot upwards. They know we itch to attack. The sophistication of the Iranians will be put to test here. Will they resist the lures and traps being set at their feet? Will they figure out the road to wisdom rather than the descent to hell?

Personally, I believe they have figured us out. And are engaged in a new game. One we can't win if we are violent.

US Should Redeploy Troops From Iraq to Fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Congresswoman Says

The United States should redeploy troops from Iraq, allowing the military to focus on terrorist threats in Pakistan and Afghanistan, New York Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand said Saturday.

"Congress is challenging the administration's strategy in Iraq in favor of a better one that will effectively combat terrorism and create stability in the Middle East," she said during the weekly Democratic radio address. "Time and time again, we voted for a strategy to redeploy troops out of Iraq to leave policing the streets to Iraqis and to focus our mission on anti-terrorism, and we won't give up."

Gillibrand's comments were taped a week earlier, before the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto was killed Thursday when a suicide attacker shot at her and then blew himself up as she left a campaign rally.

The Democrats have read the polls. Gillibrand is my representative. She knows which lobbies to pay attention to. The talk of war is always there. The idea that we must mess around with Pakistan and Afghanistan is part of the 'feed the fear' game going on. I remember when Saddam used to pay suicide bombers in Palestine. This is one of the hidden reasons why we had to go in and kill him. Never is talked about, of course. The belief back then was, there would be no more suicide bombers. This was a false hope. And far from being done, they are growing in numbers. And the more we fight them in Pakistan, the more there will be...somewhere. Anywhere. The assassins of the 19th century plied their dark art until 1914.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Pakistan's Instability Is Part Of Western Imperialism

12/27/2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As the US gets deeper and deeper into the swamps of insurrections across the Muslim world, we must examine this closely for the engine of destruction here is partially made in the USA. Some parts of this is very ancient and has been re-ignited by the flood of wealth pouring into these places coupled with a very high birth rate. Much of the West is seeing declining birth rates with Europe and Japan sliding into negative growth. So the Muslim world is seeing rising dynamics while the West wants to keep the Euro-centric status quo imposed on the world. We must try to understand the forces at work and to figure out how to co-exist with Islam. The spiritual revival of Asia is not done, the Chinese rulers fear this force. If it surges in dynamic China, this could cause all the present systems to change suddenly.

U.S. Troops Kill 11 in Mahdi Army

American soldiers raided a neighborhood in the southern Iraqi city of Kut early Thursday morning, killing 11 members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to hardline Shiite cleric Moktada Sadr.

Leaders of the Sadr movement, which has abided by a ceasefire for several weeks, condemned the operation but said that they would not conduct any reprisal attacks.

Eyewitnesses said detonations, thumping helicopters and bursts of automatic weapons-fire echoed through the neighborhood of Al Jameea for at least three hours as United States forces fought Mahdi militiamen. At least four people were injured during the clash.

“The American helicopters shelled our neighborhood for three hours,” said Jameel Mohammed, a 27-year-old construction worker. “Dead bodies were scattered here and there. Houses and cars were set on fire, and people were scared and running all over the place.”

Our religious war rages onwards. Sadr is being forced back into the shadows. The ethnic cleansing the US unleashed upon Iraq is finished and now the new puppet rulers must impose order again. The US imagines this New Ottoman Empire we are creating will be beneficial for us in the long run. We will bribe the rulers to give us the trade advantages we need so badly and in turn, we will be the mercenaries supporting various pashas and sheiks as they suppress their own populations.

Systems like this can run a long time. Of course, this is a great way to bleed an empire to death. This is because it is not capitalist, it is very anti-capitalist. The more energy that has to go into floating a corrupt banana republic dictatorship, the more this corrupts both the capital of the empire and the more expensive it gets over time. Resentments build and when the empire doing this suddenly finds themselves in trouble like the British did in WWII, the provinces erupt into rebellion or they passively allow invaders in to attack their masters. This is why such things weaken the home state running these empires.

Our Founding Fathers worried about this. The reason why they did not want a powerful executive branch was simple: they didn't want the new nation to become a massive empire. This is why the push to the West, the conquest of the Indians and the theft of their lands, was never turned into 'provinces' but rather, states with the right to vote in Washington, DC. In no fashion, are we going to make any of the lands where we have established military power, states that can vote in DC. This is the entire problem: we want to conquer and control the world but we will NOT let anyone control us politically in the fashion we supposedly set up 200 years ago. They can't vote on ANY policies that effect them.

Indeed, as we see with Japan, Europe and Israel, these colonies all have set up things so they can corrupt our politicians to the point, they no longer even bother with the fiction of representing their home states, instead, they work for foreign entities that use the lion's share of our 'defense' budget. We are in hock to all of these place occupied by our troops and we pay for this occupation while gaining little or nothing for it.

The corruption that pervades our democracy is directly tied to our desire to militarily occupy much of the planet in the false belief, this makes us stronger and protects us at home. The Europeans and Japanese both run huge trade surpluses with the US while not paying for our troops and navies that protect them and allows them to focus on trade, not losing money running a huge military overhead.

A number of my readers have suggested that my understanding about the churning mess in the Muslim world is naive. This is due to many Americans trying desperately to talk themselves out of understanding bin Laden and how he has managed to insert himself right where it has the most leverage against the US empire. He isn't out to take over any one country, he is fighting a religious war over who controls both Mecca [Makkar] and Jerusalem.

For the last 150 years, as Europe chopped up the Ottoman Empire and destroyed systematically, all Muslim outposts across the planet from the Mediterranean Sea to the China Sea, as the Ottoman Empire rotted and fall apart at the seams, the need to go in and hammer religious strongholds has been an ongoing operation. Up until the invention of the machine gun, it was difficult for the Western powers to control mobs. Barely armed by armed by conviction, masses of people would storm European colonial outposts and individual firearms were little use. But with the invention, first of the Gatling Gun which was used on American Indians fighting on horseback in the Medieval style on the Great Plains, then the invention of the airplane using a machine gun to straf and then drop bombs on natives, the Europeans finally made some headway in subduing Muslims. To this day, the contemptuous West likes to refer to the 'Arab street' while snorting about how helpless and useless they are as they rage against the rules set up by the West to dominate them and to keep them 'in their place' which is several steps below the West that rules them.

Enter Bin Laden: the West, fighting communism, would tell the rulers who were nearly all puppets of the West, they must fight communists or they would be killed by communist Muslims! So the Saudis and the Shah of Iran and others worked with the colonial empires to suppress any expression of political organizations in the classic 'revolutionary' mode which is very un-religious. Or even, anti-religious. To fight 'communism', the West armed and trained religious fanatics who were willing to die suicide deaths rather than let any communists step into Islamic lands.

As the Russian tried to continue their historic progression into Muslim lands which began long ago, about 500 years ago, they invaded Afghanistan under the banner of human rights and freeing the people from the chains of medieval feudalism, right when the US had to go to China to get help, withdrawing from Indochina. At this same time, Israel greatly expanded their own borders and prepared to settle into a long struggle to see if they could ethnically cleanse Palestine without being accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. The Arabs caught in this death-trap tried to rally other Arabs in defense of the Holy Land but failed. This was due to the death of King Faisal, murdered, yes, assassinated by a nephew. Right on the heels of my parents leaving Saudi Arabia.

We knew the King. Quite well, I may add. My father talked to him about the far future. The King wanted to explore solar energy and the use of alternative fuels because he wanted to restrict the pumping of oil for several reasons. One was, he didn't want to deplete Saudi Arabia's oil all at once. Secondly, he didn't want to support the seizure of Jerusalem. He wanted to see it turned into an international city. He didn't need to push all the Jews out of the lands they were seizing, he was willing to make a deal so long as Jerusalem was kept separate and Muslims would have equal access and right to build and hold property there.

Today, the ferocious racist system set up by European and American Jews will not give building permits to Muslims and this tool is used to prevent Muslims from building anything or expanding. Other laws that look like the sort drawn up by the Nazis or in the Deep South of Jim Crow forbid the sale of property to anyone but the racists running Israel for Jewish benefit, only. This is, of course, a major thorn in the side of the Muslim world and a very destabilizing thorn it is! The present king of Saudi Arabia who I dubbed, 'The Evil Uncle' long ago back in the 1970's, runs Saudi Arabia and bin Laden's ultimate goal is to overthrow this noxious man who I didn't like from day one, I assure everyone, this is for me, rather personal.

The King of Saudi Arabia is not admired at home. Indeed, in private, more than one person has compared him to a dog. Like Tony Blair, who I called a 'poodle' before anyone else did [yes, to a BBC reporter who said, 'Can I use that?']. This King hopes to use the West for his own ends but of course, there are many forces at work here, some religious, some ancient, some modern. The economic firestorm that is right below the horizon will flare up suddenly the minute a match hits the oil. Already, today, the price of oil is shooting up. The news that we are fighting Shia forces in Iraq is not good news in context of what is going on. It means we are being sucked ever deeper into religious conflicts we cannot ever hope to control.

US concerned about escalation of Turkish attacks: White House

The White House Wednesday said it had expressed concern to Ankara over the possible escalation of Turkey's attacks against Kurdish PKK rebels inside northern Iraq.

"We've also made it clear to the Turkish government that anything that could lead to escalated concerns or civilian casualties; we have concerns about those steps," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters aboard Air Force One.

The comment came amid new attacks early Wednesday by Turkish bombers on positions inside Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the third round of such strikes in ten days confirmed by Ankara.

Note how the West that uses Gatling guns or nuclear bombs on civilians, is all touchy-feely about Turkey killing anyone. The insurrection that Turkey has been fighting has been ongoing for generations. On top of this, the West has sponsored these battles on the behalf of every sort of insurgent when France and Britain wanted to chop up the Ottoman Empire. Few people want to think about the Ottoman Empire. But the dismemberment of this empire has triggered more than one world war! It is right smack in the center of the dark heart of the agony of Western Imperialism.

Right now, Russia and Europe as well as America are in a showdown over another sector of this former empire: Kosovo. Yes, this is in the news, too! Serbia, backed by Russia, is demanding control of Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing has ravaged Kosovo and this is all part of the strange mix of noxious wines that feeds the churning mess that is sucking in the entire world into yet another world war. The US cannot pretend we are disinterested bystanders in this developing world war. We are the the chief engine of it.

The US unleashed the Kurds when we attacked Iraq with no provocation. There were no WMD anywhere in that blighted land. There was one unexploded bomb: religious warfare. This one keeps on blowing up, every day, day after day. As soon as we think it is done, it blows up some more. It is a very expensive bomb. It has driven our finances right off the cliff. We need Turkey as an ally against Russia. But we can't get Turkey as an ally if we demand they look the other way while Kurds attack them within Turkey's borders. Just like we used to cross over into Mexico, chasing natives who fought our conquest via Gatling Gun, of the American West.

4 Sharif supporters killed in shooting near Islamabad

At least four supporters of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif were killed Thursday when unidentified gunmen fired at his party's procession in the outskirts of Islamabad, local press reports said.

Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), was due to address election rallies in the eastern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, some 30 kms south from Islamabad.

A procession was taken out to welcome Sharif when unidentified gunmen opened fire from a house at Karal Chowk on the main Islamabad airport road, the PML-N said.

Around 16 other supporters were also injured in the attack. Seven are listed as critical condition, the PML-N was cited as saying.

According to reports from local media, Sharif blamed supporters of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q) for the violence at Karal Chowk of Rawalpindi.

I will note here how Pakistan resembles the Wild Wild West. The structures of 'democracy' can't work in an environment where the outcome of any 'elections' are up to the passions of the people involved. We in the 'West' can't point fingers here. The US, for example, not only has a very fractured electoral system that can't even legally count votes in disputed elections, much less, have any sort of uniformity for voting methods or the arcane rules for jiggering the votes to create 'Presidents'. Lassitude and cynicism abound in the US and a bare majority of the voters can barely be bothered in most elections, to cast ballots.

In Muslim lands, the problem isn't interest in voting, the problem is preventing that interest in expressing itself politically. Namely, voting for someone. Suspensions of elections, coups and other anti-democratic measures are used ruthlessly to prevent expression of political will of the people. This is true in South America and Central America. If there is any chance of anyone getting into office that is not on the US approval list, suddenly elections fail or coups and assassinations are ruthlessly carried out.

Even in recent years as the US parades about the planet, talking about bringing democracy to Muslims, we can't do it at all. When the Palestinians voted for the wrong party, the West used the UN to crush the winners and to this very hour, are enabling Israel in literally starving the Palestinians in a punishing session of ethnic hostility not seen since 1940. This infuriating need to prevent any Muslims from choosing either leaders or a course of action is what is fueling the fires of rebellion. Bin Laden would have zero appeal to anyone if the people of Muslim lands had any say in their own affairs. Instead, we have the tragic propaganda game of calling the most vicious rulers on earth, the despotic King of Saudi Arabia and his ilk, 'moderate' since they love our support of their brutal rule!

Pakistan is not some backward backwater. Like Egypt, it has a lot more sophistication than, say, Afghanistan. Yet it is falling into the same chaos as Afghanistan. The US and Europe, after invading Afghanistan after 9/11, far from rebuilding the place and bringing peace and prosperity, have turned to trying to control everyone's lives there while pretending to be allies and friends. We dare not allow a vote with the simple question, 'Should the foreigners leave?' We can't have a vote in Iraq on the topic of removing our expensive troops! No, we have to go on with this farce because we need to bend the will of the people to our own ends.

For once Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif wishes that he could come up to President Pervez Musharraf’s expectations.

LAHORE, Dec 20:

Thursday’s newspapers had the president revealing a nexus to destabilise him among Mr Sharif, Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan and the deposed chief justice of Pakistan, Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. Playing host to Lahore-based newspaper editors at his Jaati Umra residence later in the day, Mian Saheb said that this was one intrigue he would happily have indulged in and wouldn’t mind to be a part of any time. But he added that those who say that he has bankrolled the pro-judiciary movement that has been going on in the country since March are actually insulting the participating lawyers.

The meeting was Mian Saheb’s first sitting with the editors in a group in his hometown since his return from exile last month. The idea might have been to let the mediamen have a close look at the change the man has gone through over the last nine years that he has been away from the scene, seven of them spent abroad.

He chose to speak in an even more deliberate manner than was the case in the past, and allowed his intellectual guests the ultimate satisfaction of him humbly seeking their advice. There were moments when one genuinely believed that the man was capable of engaging in light-hearted Lahori conversation of his own, but given the tough realities of the day, he held back his laughter.

In 2000, our own Supreme Court interfered with vote counting and stopped a queer election and then Congress and the courts refused to fix anything at all and we are stuck with the same, lousy, unfair system we had back then. The Democrats hope to manipulate the voting in the future so they kept this crummy, useless, hodgepodge system and note how badly things are going already, this time around.

Like Pakistan, some of our voting potential is eaten up by assassins. We can't point fingers to them in this regard. In Pakistan, the dictator simply got rid of the Supreme Court when he disagreed with the Chief Justice. Then he turns around and plays some silly games about not wearing the uniform he has worn since his CIA-backed coup. The West, alarmed at his declining ability to hold back extremists, has tried to get Bhutto and Sharif to be a counterweight but the unfolding violence which includes gunmen shooting supporters of both parties, shows us that this dream is a deluded nightmare.

In the US, we saw armed goons trying to prevent anyone from showing signs of dissent, for example. If anyone shows up at anything wearing T shirts with anything on them, they get arrested or beaten. The crude behavior here mirrors Pakistan pretty closely. Indeed, the chaos there will be mirrored here. We had, in the last Presidential election, two Skull and Bones Yale frat brothers steadfastly ignoring the real issues of the day with the help of the media. There was no discussion of free trade, the budget and trade imbalances were totally ignored and it ended in yet another near-tie despite the utter lack or perhaps due to the utter lack of choice in the candidates.

This election sees the media refusing to treat all candidates fairly and has lots of subterranean stuff like the media refusing to cover the AIPAC convention, for example. The religious factors in our own elections keep bobbing to the surface and there is tremendous unease right below the surface. This is dealt with by having the media assist in lying about religious matters such as when they pretended Bush was a devout Christian, for example, or Reagan, for that matter.

The danger of all this to the US is quite obvious: if we must prevent Muslims from ever electing anyone they want then the same people running things here will do the same to us. Just like we buy off the dictator of Egypt to keep his people under police control, often quite brutally, so do the Chinese hope to keep us under the thumb of whoever they pay to control us. We imagine we will be always the guys with the money and thus, the control. But we are going bankrupt. And we delude ourselves if we imagine this is a one-way street and we are walking in the right direction.

Pakistan Default Risk Rises Most Since July on Bhutto Killing

Pakistan credit-default swaps, which rise as concern over credit quality increases, soared to 505 basis points today from 405 basis points on Dec. 21, according to Phoenix Partners Group in New York.

Some readers here claim that the brutal assassination of Bhutto isn't important. If Pakistan goes bankrupt, this is important. The US spends most of its money in two places: directly to Israel or some lesser sums to neighbors of Israel to keep them quiet and to prevent democracy from arising via revolution or other means. We then spend a lot of money holding down Iraq and Afghanistan but 90% of this goes into the pockets of profiteers in the West who are stealing from the public purse with both hands, stuffing their own pockets.

The US can spend more money on Pakistan, of course, but this has to come from somewhere. Bush just signed a $555 billion aid package for warlords in the US and elsewhere. We must sell at least $300 billion in bonds to pay for this and so why not add on another $10 to $100 billion and ask the Chinese to foot the bill? Then Pakistan won't go bankrupt. We will.

Either way, we will be hammered at home by all this. For this reason alone, the average American should be up in arms about our entire program for the Muslim world. If we truly want WWIII, we can have that, too. But I don't recommend this at all for obvious reasons.

Crude passes $97, about $2 from all-time high, after former Pakistan prime minister is assassinated and crude supplies fall again in the United States.

Our policies cause high oil prices. The more we try to suppress Muslims, the more we pay out of our pockets at the pump. This game can go on forever or until we go bankrupt. Why we want to continue this way baffles me. We gain nothing at all by any of this. I suppose people can't see the connection. At dinner parties, when people complain about gas, I merrily tell them to impeach Bush and stop harassing Muslims at home and they practically clap their hands over their ears. The inability to understand how we are punishing ourselves is a classic case of blind imperialism. We think, all we need to do is take a Gatling gun and kill the natives.

This British story illustrates how sad this all is, how we really want Islamic leaders who will kill off the religious forces welling up from below:

In fact officials from her Pakistan People's Party were less than complimentary about the security arrangements that had been put in place by General Pervez Musharraf, the country's current military dictator, whom they suspected of not being overly vigilant in preventing the attacks because he was less than enthusiastic about entering into a power-sharing arrangement with Miss Bhutto.

But it was not just Miss Bhutto's commitment to democracy that attracted strong support from her Western backers, which more recently included the Foreign Office and the White House. Miss Bhutto, whose commitment to Pakistan's Islamic legacy was as strong as her support for the democratic process, was seen as a reconciler, the one mainstream political figure who could transcend the awkwardness inherent in an Islamic state forging a close strategic alliance with the West following the September 11 attacks.

Writing shortly before she left London for Pakistan, Miss Bhutto declared her commitment to "the reconciliation of the values of Islam and the West and prescription for a moderate, modern Islam that marginalises extremists, returns the military from politics to their barracks, treats all citizens and especially women equally and selects its leaders by free and fair elections."

Her tract was so on message that it could have been written by any one of the seemingly endless procession of Foreign Office diplomats who visited her Edgware Road headquarters in the months that preceded her departure for Islamabad.

The radicalization of Islam was a slow process. Only after repeated betrayals where they figured out, the real scheme was to marginalize them or worse, destroy their entire cultures and customs while at the same time PREVENTING ANY REAL REVOLUTIONS, given no choice at all except to be powerless and helpless, once the West slammed the door shut on radical leftist activities, the people instinctually turned to their conservative leaders. Who then stood up to the invaders! Bhutto wants modernism without worker's collectives or unionization and other disorders that happen when people at the bottom struggle against the ruling elites. Iran was an ideal place for such action but the leftists elected to office were...killed. With the full approval of the US who wanted no Maos or Ho Chi Minhs running around, organizing workers and peasants!

Dilettantes like Bhutto want to lead but not organize. Her party is more akin to fascists or rather, Vichy-type of politics rather than patriotic appeals to resist invaders or foreign powers. Unlike Mao or Ho Chi Minh, she didn't go off to a cave in the hills and fight. And this is exactly what went wrong here. She didn't bring salvation, she just wanted Pakistan to zoom into the 21st century without any internal struggles. Indeed, in the US itself, we want to ignore the cries of the religious right while zooming into the future where we all have McMansions and inground pools and good jobs that aren't unionized.

The craving for modernity stops at the doors of the workers. This sort of faux liberalism has plagued politics for centuries. The men who wrote some of the finest words about liberty, justice and the rights of man were slave owners. The Christian movement in ancient Rome was brutally suppressed for several centuries because it was an anti-slavery movement at its core. Only when slaves were turned into serfs and the working class turned also into serfs, did the emperors embrace Jesus. The people embracing revolutionary Islam are the same class of people who embraced Christianity back when the Roman Empire was collapsing due to bankruptcy.

The failure of Christianity, the failure to protect the working class, was an opening for the Islamic revolution which swept most of the places hit by the revolutionaries as they used both the book and the sword to spread their new ideology. When the Mongols attacked both Christians and Muslims like a whirlwind in 1250 AD, there was an equal chance of them being converted to either Christians or Muslims. In the Middle East, they settled on Islam because they liked the parts about fighting for Islam. The more passive Christian message was not so appealing.

Unlike Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's other mainstream political figure, who has openly campaigned against Islamabad's close alliance with the West, Miss Bhutto was seen as a politician who could facilitate the country's return to democracy while remaining a staunch supporter of the West.

The dramatic death of Benazir Bhutto brings both those long-term goals into question. In the current political climate it now seems highly unlikely that the country can proceed with the elections scheduled for next month. And if, as seems likely, Islamic extremists were responsible for Miss Bhutto's murder, then Islamic hardliners will have successfully demonstrated that they pose as much threat to the future stability of Pakistan as they do to the West.

The only reason they can 'destabilize' both Pakistan and the 'West' is because they have organized themselves into a force of resistance. This means, the harder we push them, the harder they push back. In Iraq, we try to co-opt everyone so they stop pushing us around. Then we hope to demoralize them and get them to forget we are there sort of like how we did it in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia before we got blown up, big time. This time around, we built the world's biggest, nastiest fortress in Baghdad. In this, we will lurk while the rulers of Iraq obey our orders and we get our oil.

In Pakistan, we have a huge embassy, too. Out in the desert, surrounded by military. We shoot and kill anyone who dares approach. In turn, we hope to subdue the tribes who are resisting us only the cities are resisting us, too. The death of Bhutto complicates this because we wanted her to charm them so we can continue lurking in the heart of Pakistan and ruling it secretly from behind the curtains and we hope no one will notice us. Russia and China are probably amused by all this. They move in with either total force or they stay out. Only the US or England try this half-way method.

The worry that Islamic radicals will destabilize Pakistan is also rather queer. Pakistan's creation was destabilizing in the first place. When the West encouraged rebellion and insurrections and splitting off from the Soviet empire, this destabilized all the 'stan' nations between Pakistan and Russia. Our goal has been, for years, to DESTABILIZE this part of the world. This is why it is called 'The Great Game.' We are not a force for reconciliation and democracy, we are chopping this place up as fast as possible and then putting as many troops in there as possible. And this further destabilizes the area as well as international relations across the entire planet and is directly responsible for Russia going to China and forming an alliance that wants to destroy US power in Asia and Central Asia as well as the entire world.

Our attempt at controlling that part of the world by destabilizing it and establishing military control over some of the most potentially militant people on earth...against their wishes!...is pure insanity. It gained us dire enemies, not control. It created alliances against us that we should have never allowed to form. Our actions in this case has made our situation more precarious, more dangerous. And if all this comes back to the US to haunt us, we should not be surprised. When Bush told the CIA they could do assassinations again, I was not surprised but very disgusted. This is one area where 'blow back' is very literal.

On top of this, watching the West denounce assassinations while PRACTICING IT THEMSELVES, is about as disgusting as this can get.

38 U.S. Senators Demand Freedom For Pakistani Advocate Aitzaz Ahsan

Barrister-At-Law Aitzaz Ahsan - an eminent Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP); former federal Minister for Law, Justice, Interior, Narcotics Control and Education; ex-MNA; former Senator; ex-MPA; former Punjab Minister for Information, Planning, Development, Culture and Tourism; and human rights activist - was illegally kidnapped, unlawfully arrested, illegally tortured and unlawfully detained in a dungeon jail of Pakistan in November 2007 by the tyrannical and mercenary Army-Police of General Musharraf, a corrupt, terrorist, tyrant of the Pakistani Army.

Yes, we assassinate Muslims as well as kidnapping them and torturing them. From day one, after 9/11, I was shocked and very upset by all this. We flew into Afghanistan and kidnapped a host of people who we still torture at our anti-constitutional concentration camp in Cuba, a country we are boycotting because we want to replace the government there. A land led by a leader we tried to assassinate in the past.

Congress will pass 'feel good' declarations while funding despots who do these things. I would suggest they cut the budget for the CIA and the Pentagon instead. This will go a long ways towards helping these lawyers in Pakistan.

Murderer Musharraf Should be Tried and Hanged for Lal Masjid Massacre: Qazi

Muttahida Majlis-e-
Amal (MMA) President Qazi Hussain Ahmed on Sunday demanded that [pro- MQM Terrorist] Pervez Musharraf be tried for the killing of "thousands of innocent women and children" in the Lal Masjid [Red Mosque] operation. "Only [Criminal] Musharraf can be blamed for the killings.

He ordered the massacre to please his Western masters. Hence, he must be tried and handed down the severest punishment [hanged to death] under the law," Qazi told reporters during a visit to Al-Khidmat Foundation Information Center, a non-government organization established to guide parents of Lal Masjid students who went missing in the [unconstitutional and illegal military] operation. MMA Plans to File Murder Case Against Terrorist Musharraf: Baloch

99% of America is totally unaware about this massacre. If we became aware, we would applaud it. This massacre was done at the behest of the US government. Musharraf has been making all sorts of cosmetic or violent moves designed to please the US and each of these weakens him at home. It is bad enough that our own government ignores us, note the rage in Pakistan as its government ignores its people. Should we be shocked? The US Air Force Academy in Colorado has been taken over by the Christian Taliban Jihadists who are running the place like it is the Red Mosque. These guys are far more dangerous than bin Laden or anyone in the Middle East. They can start WWIII very easily, very easily.

Red mosque: Massacre condemned, dialogue should have continued - PAS

Other PAS leaders present during the hand over were treasurer Dr Mohd Hatta Ramli, foreign bureau chairman Syed Azman Syed Nawawi, former bureau member and former ambassador Datuk Yeop Adlan Che Ros and youth chief Salahudin Ayub.

Kamaruddin said such a brutal attack would only strengthen the image that Musharraf's government was "being used by enemies of Islam".

"Therefore it is incumbent upon the Pakistani government to dislodge itself from the American pressure and influence in order to restore confidence in the Muslim world that Pakistan is one of the Muslim countries committed towards the Muslim cause," he said.

Met later after the memorandum hand over, Kamaruddin expressed disappointment that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi, as a leader of a country that chaired the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), was not seen as being firm to ensure that Muslims image was not undermine by the incident.

Mohd Hatta meanwhile expressed disappointment that the High Commissioner himself was not available to receive the memorandum personally on such an important matter. –Saadon Aksah/ES

Back when Musharraf had his troops storm the temple, I was aghast. This was worse than the Branch Dravidians in Texas. And like that event, has repercussions. Ordinary Pakistanis would dearly love to have a peaceful society but this will not happen unless true liberalism is introduced and this means, unleashing the power to organize within the workingclasses who are presently leaderless and have few options. Indeed, here in the heart of the world's biggest empire, we are slowly losing liberalism, losing ground, we are not gaining power but losing power both imperial as well as domestic power. This is probably why there is a resurgence in fabulous, childish beliefs. Note that Huckabee, a man who has no ability to understand modern liberal societies or simple scientific facts, is now at the top of the GOP race. Because of these horrible traits! There are plenty of Americans who are incapable of living in the modern world or understanding what is happening to them.

Indeed, Huckabee is, unlike the Bushes and Reagan, a REAL 'End of Times' person who wants WWIII to consume all Jews and Muslims as well as Hindus or communist Chinese, everyone who isn't in love with his madcap god, Jesus. When Bush Jr hung out with Osama's older brother, the one who died in a Bush-owned aircraft, how often did he hear Bush joke about manipulating the Christians in America? During this time, at the beginning of the Reagan administration, Osama was learning about the world and he socialized with the most cynical family on earth, the Bush clan. Did Bush joke with the elder brother about the black magic the Bushes practice? This is why I am certain that acts inspired by bin Laden always happen on magic number days. This is due to his correct reading of his foes: they believe in all this and practice this, themselves. So he merely amplifies this tendency, pushing it further forwards. All of his actions have 'expanded' our reach but each one of these expansions have actually destroyed our future prospects. What looks like a golden opportunity to Bush and his ilk are actually a series of traps set up to suck us into conflicts we can't win, by definition, all of which are hideously expensive and detrimental to our own home base here in North America.

Bin Laden isn't a wild man in a cave, he is an internationalist who grew up jet setting with the top jet setters on earth. He isn't an outsider, he is an insider, with a vengeance. The image of him being a warrior is his costume but he really is a thinker, not a fighter. He is physically a weakling but mentally, a giant. He figured out some time ago, around when Faisal was assassinated, any Islamic leader that rises up will be destroyed and replaced with fat, nasty, corrupt gamesters seeking personal gain at the expense of the people living under their rule. This is why Bin Laden is a true revolutionary. The leaders in the US Christian movement have all been corrupted by power and money due to our imperial powers so they are now frantically searching for some leadership which has settled on Huckabee right now. So it is within Islam only the search is deadly. All eyes are focused on the possibility that someone might lead. And whoever this is, will be killed by a host of assassins.

Iran, Turkey Most Significant Regional Powers

A Turkish parliamentary delegation headed by AKP MP and foreign relations committee chairman Murat Mercan met with a number of senior Iranian officials here in Tehran this week.

The Turkish legislators met on Monday with Alaoddin Buroujerdi, head of Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee and Ali Akbar Aghayee, chairman of Turkish-Iranian parliamentary friendship group.

On Wednesday, the delegation met with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel and with former President and head of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

And Turkey is trying to pick its way through this minefield. They are by far, the most liberal of all the Muslim nations. They are very worried about the Islamic rebellions broiling up all over the place. They are determined to build their own military back up and not be a puppet of the West. They tried to join Europe but have been rebuffed. So now they are taking a page from the Chinese book, 'Diplomacy for Dummies' and are working to re-establish working relations with neighbors who surround Iraq. This is why they have this 'Friendship group.' China makes these things all the time, they use them as diplomatic tools for strengthening ties and as listening posts in foreign governments.

Far from being increasingly isolated, Iran is finally building up a secure diplomatic base so they can form alliances with former foes. This is what diplomacy is all about. The winds are definitely shifting in the Muslim world and old conflicts seem to be set to be resolved, one hopes. But this is the great fear of the US empire! We want them to depend on us and hate each other.

Abbas, Olmert put aside settlement fight

Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed Thursday to put aside a dispute over Israeli construction in a Jerusalem neighborhood and get down to work on a final peace agreement, according to participants in the two sides' first meeting since relaunching peace talks at a U.S.-hosted Mideast summit last month.

The two-hour meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas appeared to break an impasse that has clouded the renewed peacemaking, clearing the way for next month's visit by President Bush.

As Abbas surrenders more and more, 'peace' seems to be at hand. This isn't going to end with the Palestinians packing their bags and vanishing into some concentration camp, never to return. The battle over Jerusalem will not vanish but grow more likely as the Jews successfully steal more and more Palestinian lands. The Muslims perhaps think, they will allow all the Jews to collect there and then the Christians will start WWIII and kill everyone. Who knows? I am disgusted by how hard everyone seems to be working towards this end. In the US, instead of talking about all this, we don't. Even as the GOP gravitates to a man who has every reason to start WWIII, as the entire GOP outside of the Ron Paul contingent, seems bent on WWIII, it would seem to me to be a top topic of conversation, not ignored. The peace talks in Palestine are simply a prelude to the annihilation of the Jews in WWIII as both Christians and Muslims attack them and each other.

This is why the events over there matter and can't be swept under a rug. If nothing else, the Palestinians, once they are all gone from there, will want to see this war happen just to get back at the Jews! So too many people have great motivation to let this happen. This is why I don't want to see the Western colonization of the Holy Lands continue.

Unholy dust-up at Nativity church

Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic priests were sweeping up at the church following the Christmas rites of the Western churches earlier in the week.

Reports say some Orthodox faithful encroached on the Armenian section, prompting pitched battles with brooms.

Intense rivalries at the jointly-run church can set off vicious feuds.

The basilica, built over the grotto in the West Bank town that is the reputed birthplace of Jesus Christ is shared by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian religious authorities.

The media had all sorts of happy-talk stories about how the brutal suppression of the Muslims in Palestine made Bethlehem safe for Christian tourists. But right below the surface lies this violent beast. I cannot imagine going to Bethlehem to love Jesus while stomping past starving Palestinian children in rags. The contradictions in all this are intense. And part of the mess in Pakistan, is connected to all this.

Diplomats to leave Afghanistan as new 'Great Game' played with tribal leaders

The expulsion of Michael Semple, an Irishman who is acting head of the EU mission, and Mervin Patterson, a Briton who is the third-ranking UN official in Kabul, has shed light on the murky world they inhabit in the search to bring peace to a trroubled land.

For spies, diplomats and soldiers in Afghanistan are playing the Great Game today as much as their forefathers ever did.

Six years ago some military commanders believed they could beat the Taliban and stamp harmony on Helmand by force – but not any more. Titanium-plated Apache gunships, designed to fight the might and military sophistication of Soviet Russia, can still annihilate ragtag gunmen hired to fight for a few dollars a day. Heat-seeking javelin rockets designed to hit T72 tanks tearing across Europe are very good at finding insurgents cowering in compounds. Marines call it "throwing a Porsche at them", because the missiles cost £65,000 a pop. But there is a profound realisation in Afghanistan that victory will never be achieved by fighting alone. "We are going to have to sit down and do business with people who we don't like, and who don't like us," said one diplomat.

Bin Laden's plan was to bankrupt us by the very simple method of forcing us to use very expensive weapons destroying mud huts, tents and killing sheep. He knew how our corrupt empire does business, he watched this when tagging after his dad who became a billionaire, playing these games with the US in Saudi Arabia! He knew that the US would want to charge all of this to the US taxpayers and the taxpayers would refuse to pay so very penny of this is being charged to our future bills and handed off to our enemies in the Muslim world as well as China and Japan. This weakens America further and the more we do this, the weaker we get. Since I see no sign of this stopping short of bankruptcy, I have to say that bin Laden reads us like a book and his game with us is working much better for him than for us.

Nonetheless, diplomats have been travelling to far- flung corners of the country to meet influential tribal characters for months, if not years. A few days before going to Helmand, Mr Semple was meeting former mujahedin fighters on the Pakistan border. The intelligence that officers glean from the talks lets allied power-brokers decide which warlords to smash and which ones to engage. The recent British-led battle for Musa Qala – the Taliban's last major stronghold in Helmand – began after a leading commander switched sides. Mullah Abdul Salaam, who controls thousands of men in the area, met President Hamid Karzai ahead of the battle – with British help.

In other words, we meet with former foes who direct us to their own foes which we then kill for them and in return, they will do what? HAHAHA. The Great Game is something these guys have played for the last 3,000 years which is why most sane rulers decline trying to run these mountains! Note how betrayals are seen as good things as we rejoice when they stab each other in the back, using us as their knives. This makes everyone there more and more contemptuous of us and also shows them that we are fools, easily manipulated. We also don't hold grudges and they live off of grudges. Note how our battle with Osama has collapsed long ago. They know we are not serious players in their eternal games.

Hindu extremists burn down village churches

Hindu extremists attacked Christians celebrating Christmas in eastern India, ransacking and burning at least six village churches. One person was killed.

Four hundred and fifty police were deployed to quell the violence in the remote district of Orissa state where the churches – most nothing more than mud and thatch houses – were attacked. The violence had eased by yesterday.

India has been fighting a series of their own religious wars for the last 200 years. The untouchables were civilized people conquered by hordes of chariot-riding fighters several thousand years ago. They have been forced into perpetual semi-slavery and they are ripe for a spiritual awakening. And this is causing great violence with the status quo. The battles between the former Mongol invaders who joined the Islamic revolution nearly 2,000 years ago also broils over here. Pakistan and India aren't fighting openly lately only because of the Pax Nuclear Bombs stand off. But this has caused terrorist attacks to resume. Both sides can't reconcile and the British solution of splitting apart all of this when the empire collapsed didn't work, either.

Indeed, the split up of the Indian subcontinent coupled with the destruction of the Ottoman empire from the outside, not the inside, is at the heart of today's tensions. And will stay this way for the foreseeable future.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Al Qaeda Assassinates Bhutto

12/27/2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Whenever I write the date on my stories in numbers rather than words, this is due to them being 'magic number' days. Today is just such a day and usually, when the Master Magicians are at work, they do it on these days in particular. I have been attacked by assassins in the past but since I have disappeared from public attention, no one bothers me anymore. Alas, Benazir Bhutto bravely chose to face the fury of the Storm and went forth to battle the Demons in public. She sensed that she would eventually be attacked, yet she still did her best. The world is at a breaking point, and Pakistan is one of the key pieces to this puzzle. They have nuclear bombs and the Magicians who launched us into these wars are interested in these nuclear bombs. Bin Laden only strikes on magic number days.

Benazir Bhutto killed in attack

Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.

Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb.

At least 15 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.

President Pervez Musharraf and his government called on people to remain calm so that the "nefarious designs of terrorists can be defeated."

Many people online have convinced themselves that Bush and his bumbling gang blew up both World Trade Center buildings because the idea that some guy using few tools and a lot of strange powers couldn't do this, is very appealing. We all want the world to be logical and not magical even as we all want to believe in magic. The idea that there can be magic and reality at the same time baffles most people who think, magic is about levitating things or bending spoons!

There are subterranean forces that move in the dark in history. And this is what Freud tried to call 'The Id.' It is the older parts of our brains, the parts connected with the poorly-understood dream world. Half of our time is spend in this subterranean world! And there, magic rules!

Some people can cross that barrier and carry things from one side to the other. We call this 'creation' and it can be both good or evil depending on what one wants from that realm. No human can escape from the effects of this collective dream world! We are all subject to it.

The forces of history are moved on a sea of blood. The horses that history rides trample all underfoot. The blood of history flows in all our veins and we are also subject to the possibility of sudden death. If a human has a dream and talks about it in public and then rallies others to join them and then works to make this dream possible...can be shot in the head. The collapse of the 'good' side of Civil Rights was due to both assassins and corrupting the survivors by making them part of the ruling elites. If someone is too disruptive for the ruling elites, they unleash assassins who then kill them. Or, such as in the case of Kennedy, they ignore obvious assassins and allow them to approach or reach their targets.

Then there is black magic. All assassins operate in the darkness. They spring from the darker forces within our collective consciences. They have various goals and various means but the mainspring is to turn the Wheel of History via murder. The desire to kill in this fashion is very strong because the pay-offs are huge compared to the efforts involved. For example, American history would be different if we had no assassinations. The fear of assassination is one reason why many people won't appear in public, working for things the rulers or the magicians don't want.

Our own ruler, Bush, is extremely paranoid. He is surrounded by his military Praetorian Guard who protect him from unknown assassins. Yet the 9/11 conspiracy was carried out a mere few miles across from the secret island where the Bushes have their Florida hideaway where they do things like talk to Geronimo's skull and their Chinese kung-fu master who is a ghost. Oh, what are these?

The Bushes have talked about their kung-fu master. They joke about him and how they use his powers in the dark realms below the surface. They won't talk about Geronimo's skull, of course. This is one of the many strange, subterranean stories that occasionally breaks to the surface and then rapidly is gone again. Prescott Bush Sr. raided Geronimo's grave and took his skull and parts of his saddle. The reason he did this was so they could use it in magic spells. Geronimo was hit by lightning in his past and therefore, had 'great powers'. As a person who has been hit, I sometimes worry about this. Heh.

The US is led by a man who refuses to return Geronimo's skull to the Apaches. They, in turn, feel that Geronimo, having powers of the lightning bolt, will do whatever unhappy ghosts do in the Afterlife: destroy the living. So we have this bizarre situation where the Skull and Bones coven at Yale that has infiltrated the CIA as well as our government, using stolen skulls of 'magician's in order to tap into the Powers of Darkness. The entire CIA is very heavily tilted towards the subterranean world that runs below the surface. They want to understand the human dream world and how it works and they want to go there to find power. They want to 'see' into the future and 'see' into human souls. This is why they had to destroy the torture tapes: it shows the CIA's demonic side.

The people running our nation believe in magic numbers. All one has to do is ask either John Kerry or Bush about '322', their personal magic number. They will NOT talk about it. Both will deny they even have this! But they do. And their refusal to talk about this is treason. They have secrets within secrets and some of these have to do with Black Magic and Death. On top of all this, Bin Laden is waging a massive war with these people IN THAT REALM. Namely, they 'throw spells' at each other and BOTH use HUMAN SACRIFICES!

And this is what Benzair Bhutto is: a human sacrifice. I knew that this murder was an Al Qaeda operation due to the magical significance of the date.

1979 - The Soviet Union seizes control of Afghanistan and Babrak Karmal replaces overthrown and executed President Hafizullah Amin.
1985 - Palestinian guerrillas kill eighteen people inside Rome and Vienna airports.
1996 - Taliban forces retake the strategic Bagram air base which solidifies their buffer zone around Kabul.
1997 - Protestant paramilitary leader Billy Wright is assassinated in Northern Ireland.
2002 - Two truck bombs kill 72 and wound 200 at the pro-Moscow headquarters of the Chechen government in Grozny, Chechnya.

Al Qaeda feeds off of the ongoing tragedy of the Holy Lands. The US, pushed hard by the Arab kings, decided to pretend to do something about the Jewish crushing of the Muslims in this arena of death. Of course, all that came out of these negotiations were more Jewish colonial settlements on Arab lands, higher walls and more starvation and death for the people locked in the reproduction of the Warsaw Ghetto. This is one of the fountains of poison that are flowing into the ground and reemerging elsewhere. The Muslim battle for the Holy Lands is not an overt process with screaming hordes rushing into Jerusalem. Rather, Jerusalem is like a great churn, it is the eye of the hurricane, it is the pole around which many things circle. And one of these many things is severe religious conflicts.

Pakistan: Al-Qaeda claims Bhutto's death

A spokesperson for the al-Qaeda terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the death on Thursday of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.

It is believed that the decision to kill Bhutto, who is the leader of the opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP), was made by al-Qaeda No. 2, the Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri in October.

Death squads were allegedly constituted for the mission and ultimately one cell comprising a defunct Lashkar-i-Jhangvi’s Punjabi volunteer succeeded in killing Bhutto.

Al Qaeda was hatched deep inside the darker corners of the CIA. The CIA was founded by people who strongly believe in Black Magic and who want the powers of the Lightning Gods and who believe they can tap into this via religion. The founders of the CIA prayed to Geronimo's skull while drunk, at Yale, after all. They feel that they have the power to tap into the deepest roots of 'native' religions and use them for their own purposes which is to rule the world and exploit all the world's resources so their satanic spawn can join the Skull and Bones and eat with Hitler's silver ware.

The Jews working within the CIA and the Pentagon as well as the ones controlling our foreign policy at all levels from top to bottom, have their own religious agenda. They have allowed the End of Times Christians take over our air force. But they run our diplomatic machinery. And their religious dogma dovetails with the Christians taking over our air force: they want to own all of the Holy Land and to control the Muslims once and forever. The Christians running our air force want to not only nuke all Muslims to death, they want to force all the Jews to bow to their bloodstained god, Jesus. Ignoring this is fatal. The US government, instead of rooting out all the religious fanatics that infest our systems, has encouraged this process. The needs of these fanatics fuels our election process. They are the central force at work in the US and their goal is the Apocalypse on the part of the Christians or World Domination by the Jewish fanatics.

Into this comes the Muslims who are just as involved in creating a new World Order out of all this mess. They, too, are in a critical crisis where they feel they must fight for this New thing and they, like the others, are focusing increasingly on using nuclear weapons for this purpose: to blow up everything and start over again. Only the Jews don't want to blow up everything, only their rivals. Of course, the logic of all vortexes is, they suck in everyone and everything. The Jerusalem vortex is a major portal to this all-consuming darkness which is where Death lurks. Unlocking the portals that lead to the Apocalypse requires magical powers which we call 'religion.' In this, if one lines up the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars and then combines it with violent moves in the real world, one gets much greater forwards motions than if one does random acts.

This is why al Qaeda likes magic number days. They know this amplifies the effects of their actions. If they have their actions coincide with other, similar acts and if these are somehow attached to the Palestinian People, they feed the vortex. They turn the churn. The whole cosmic system which is the ultimate underpinning of all major world religions is the relative position of the stars with the earth. The earth does not turn on a secure axis but is tilted relative to the sun. And due to a wobble in this tilt which is because of the moon and the sun pulling our crooked planet slightly off-center, we don't see the same Zodiac stars rising in the East at critical times like now, when the Winter Solstice happens. All religions like to bury their astronomical origins but whenever the stars rising in the East shift to a new House in the Zodiac, we see religious outbursts. Old gods die and new ones take their place.

These changes are not friendly, they nearly always cause lots of chaos and uncertainty and take hundreds of years to play out and the forces released by this usually lasts for over 2,000 years each time it happens. Remnants of previous religious conversions due to star shifts can live on for many thousands of years. For example, the sanctity of the Bull continues in India long after Taurus ceased to rise at the Vernal Equinox.

The US today has taken the religious bull by the horns of dilemma and we are now involved in a multi-layered war with billions of Muslims over the meaning of this new epoch: the Age of Aquarius. The CIA cynically thought we could fool the Muslims and use them as a cat's paw against both Russia and China while at the same time, defying them as we colonize very brutally, the Middle East's Holy shrines of the Arian and Piscean ages. The Muslims and Christians moved across the planet for 2,000 years, spreading their peculiar religions via sword and book. Now, they prepare for yet another confrontation and this time, both are armed increasingly with vaster and vaster weapons. And unlike all the previous battles, the Jews have nuclear bombs, too.

The UN refuses to even discuss ANY of this. Indeed, in the US media or many places, this is a forbidden topic. Discussing how the Apocalypse can come into terrible being via nuclear war is simply not discussed until Iran decided to talk openly about all this. Of course, Iran was accused of making this happen even though Iran has no nuclear bombs. The parties which do have them have side-tracked the desperately needed talk about this looming nuclear catastrophe into the issue of whether or not Iran should be allowed to defend themselves or have nuclear power plants.

US to expand military presence in Pakistan

EARLY next year, US special forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counter-terrorism units, according to American defence officials involved with the planning, reports Washington Post.

These Pakistan-centric operations will mark a shift for the US military and for US-Pakistan relations. In the aftermath of Sept 11, the US used Pakistani bases to stage movements into Afghanistan. Yet once the US deposed the Taliban government and established its main operating base at Bagram, north of Kabul, US forces left Pakistan almost entirely. Since then, Pakistan has restricted US involvement in cross-border military operations as well as paramilitary operations on its soil.

But the Pentagon has been frustrated by the inability of Pakistani forces to control the borders or the frontier area. And Pakistan’s political instability has heightened US concern about extremists there.

According to Pentagon sources, reaching a different agreement with Pakistan became a priority for the new head of the US Special Operations Command, Adm Eric T Olson.

Olson visited Pakistan in August, November and again this month, meeting with President Pervez Musharraf, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Gen Tariq Majid and Lt Gen Muhammad Masood Aslam, commander of the military and paramilitary troops in northwest Pakistan. Olson also visited the headquarters of the Frontier Corps, a separate paramilitary force recruited from Pakistan’s border tribes.
Now, a new agreement, reported when it was still being negotiated last month, has been finalised. And the first US personnel could be on the ground in Pakistan by early in the new year, according to Pentagon sources.

US Central Command Commander Adm William Fallon alluded to the agreement and spoke approvingly of Pakistan’s recent counter-terrorism efforts in a recent interview.

“What we’ve seen in the last several months is more of a willingness to use their regular army units,” along the Afghan border, Fallon said. “And this is where, I think, we can help a lot from the US in providing the kind of training, assistance and mentoring based on our experience with insurgencies recently and with the terrorist problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we share a lot with them, and we’ll look forward to doing that.”

Prior to Ms. Bhutto's assassination, Pakistan has been rocked by bombs going off all over the place including the capital. Today, three US soldiers were blown up in Iraq but the US ignores this. We think the fighting there is over but it merely shifted. As bin Laden said long ago, he wanted us to rush to one place, then another, overthrowing or intimidating the corrupt Muslim rulers who oppress Islam. The US has this policy of pandering to Muslim leaders while betraying them at every possible turn. They, in turn, use us for their own ends. None of which benefit us in the long run.

The US wants to control Pakistan so they we can control Jerusalem. There is no other purpose to our being there. At least, no rational reason. The lack of rationality is what is so frightful here. Pakistan was created by the very same people who gave Jerusalem to the Jews: the British government. Indeed, the British empire took a number of old empires and cut them to pieces and then used these as bargaining chips or tools for world domination. When the Brits needed funds for WWI, they handed over the Vortex to Jewish financiers. They, in turn, opened this Pandora's box to Zionists within the Jewish community. They, in turn, formed the present alliance with Christians seeking the end of all Jews in a huge fireball called the Apocalypse.

Turning back to bin Laden: people mistake who he is. He is a magician, not a religious leader. Like a magician, he lives in caves and he uses magic numbers and he explains magical processes so others can carry them out. He is the Designer, not the Leader but the Explainer. He carefully explained how the only way the Muslims can free themselves of the Jews in Jerusalem is to bankrupt the countries supporting this colonization and control effort. Namely, Britain and the US. This is his main target and he knows that he can't do this alone, he needs the help of any passing dragons or mermaids. In other words, he needs to understand the ultimate goals of other powers and then apply leverage to various points in time and people as well as places and strike there so that the US does the worst possible things which will lead to bankruptcy.

For example, Santa Claus is bankrupting the West. I always have been amused by the Dark Side of Santa. He is not a nice creature, quite frankly. If one considers that Christmas is supposed to be about CHARITY. Seeing it turn into this mad orgy of self-spending so one can live in some sort of luxury and creature happiness, to see how it has warped our basic economy and destroyed our ability to pay our bills or live within our means, the Santa Christmas is a destructive force. The media, for months, was focused on 'Did we see lots of wild spending? We better see lots and lots of wild spending! We spent like fiends!'

The 'good news' will be 'people spent like crazy even though they can't afford this.' This is all connected with the death of Bhutto, of course. The US and the West has been spending like fiends ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Using mass-manufactured weapons, we overran the older Muslim and Asian empires as well as North and South American continents and all of Africa. The western empires grew very rapidly while fighting each other like devils. These wars have raged across the planet. In 1600, Islamic armies could menace Vienna but by 1800, they were on the run for they didn't have mass production like the West had.

Now, mass manufacturing is no longer a monopoly of the West. All nations can now be capitalist as well. The bin Laden revolution is actually a reactionary attempt at turning back the clock. He wants a pre-industrialized society. The impulse for this isn't trivial: it is all over the place. People love mass manufactured goods but the satanic mills are disquieting, to say the least. Factories are dangerous things. Environmentally as well as socially. A great deal of the unease of the last 200 years has come out of the industrial revolution. Also, the danger to humanity that we may destroy our planet, is directly connected to our industrial revolution and the revolution on warfare represented by the nuclear bombs.

And connected to all this is Black Magic: the collective death wishes of humans frightened about the change in star clusters rising in the East. As we saw with Naziism, horrible death cults can arise very rapidly out of the mix of religions and manias. No nation is immune to this sort of mental madness. Not least, the Jewish nation of Israel.

Bin Laden understood this. He knew that his followers would not be destroyed by US power but empowered. He knew that the death wish would bring him many suicide bombers and many believers. They will stalk the earth, waiting to strike. And time is on their side. Each day, the US does things that brings the much-desired confrontation, the one that will eliminate most humans. The US never disarmed when Russia fell, the US refused to understand what was wrong with bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two most Christian cities in Japan. The US will not understand that stealing olive trees from Palestinian farmers is a crime.

Failing in this, we fall into the magic number grid set up by bin Laden at the Gates of Death. I have said in the past, he is more dangerous dead than alive. He no longer has to use his human voice or hands to move the Wheel of Fate or turn the churn at the Vortex. His merest breath will do it for him. The only way out for the US is to renounce ownership of the Holy Lands and to reaffirm true liberalism, the parts about all humans being equal and all beliefs, private and not public. But then, Egypt wants to make the use of the Pyramids copyrighted so we will need Egyptian permission to use our dollar bills with their magical, mystical pyramids!

Culture of Life News Main Page

China And Japan: Ferocious Diplomacy Pays Off

12/27/2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Today's diplomacy is tomorrow's history. As the major powers of the planet work day and night to rebuild and renew the status quo, they are also busy building a new status quo. Understanding how this process works is of great interest for within it lies the key to understanding how empires collapse. Interestingly, Russia showed the fatal flaws of collapsing quietly into bankruptcy: the other empires ripped Russia apart and even today, refuse to treat Russians respectfully. The US still wields, at tremendous cost, great power but like with Russia, this is proving to be a liability rather than a benefit.

Japanese prime minister starts China visit

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda arrived here on Thursday afternoon for the start of an official visit, which runs until Dec. 30.

On Friday, Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Wu Bangguo will meet with him, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will hold talks with him, a key part of his four-day visit, which has been widely portrayed as a trip to warm up ties.
*snip*
Addressing the East China Sea issue, Qin said that China and Japan did have differences but "China was willing to resolve the issue appropriately as soon as possible, based on the consensus reached by leaders of the two countries and the principle of putting aside disputes and seeking joint exploration."

China hoped that the two sides would take a "substantive" step forward in joint resources development in the East China Sea, Qin said.

The weather on our planet is fueled by the interaction between the air, sea and land. Land changes or moves very slowly but as it moves, it changes the flow of the currents in the oceans and this, in turn, changes the climate. The sun can change very suddenly and capriciously and the output of energy from this very old star has a very great impact on our weather. So if one wishes to understand the history of the earth and how life evolved as well as planning ahead on a personal level, one needs to rely on interpreting the information scientists have collected about these things, namely, the earth's land, sky and seas as well as the sun and stars.

People go to school for many years to learn about these things for the knowledge is not easy at all but rather, it is difficult. It took humanity thousands of years to figure out basic facts about winter/summer cycles and how the planet is not fixed in the scheme of things but rather, has interesting wobbles and is tilted at an angle to the sun due to some terrible crash long ago when the solar system was forming. Tracking the relative position of the stars against objects on the earth like standing stones or pyramids, ancient people began to figure out how the earth's orientation to the stars shifted over thousands of years and not just the simpler yearly cycle.

So it is with history! Every day, we write our histories. Each human has a history and some take care to write down their history so they can pass it on and others go to great lengths to hide or control the writing of their own histories. Dictators, in particular, are anxious to elevate themselves to god status while at the same time, frantically hiding or burying their own histories. Empires are proud about their own histories except the parts of the past they want to hide. The conflict between the writers of history and the makers of history is ancient. Writers of history want information. Makers of history want secrecy.

On top of all this, we see history through our own biases. We all have bias and we can't help this. Thucydides may be the only historian to experiment with the concept of having no point of view. His cold, dispassionate chronicle of the disastrous wars between mainly Sparta and Athens. a turning point in history, does have a philosophy more so than, a bias. He spends the first chapters, explaining Greece's checkered past as best he could. He even used archeological evidence to back up his 'modern' interpretation of the Trojan War. He felt he could not write about the ongoing events of his day unless he first grounded them in the past. So it is today for all of us.

Everyone writing about diplomacy and the affairs of state have an inner vision of what the world should be or should operate on. Some people watch only the sun, some, the land and a few, the seas. But of course, one must look at everything at once. If one is ignorant, for example, about economics, one cannot understand diplomacy. If one is ignorant about anthropology, one cannot understand customs that drive diplomacy. If one cannot see the dark, subterranean forces that cause sudden earthquakes and volcanoes which we call 'wars' and 'economic collapses', one cannot predict where they will happen or why they happen.

I have been involved with China is a rather subterranean fashion most of my life. This is the result of major upheavals in world history that moved my father from a potential life as a quiet scientist to the innermost circles of the evolving US empire during WWII and after that war. Being a very obnoxious and difficult child, I actively spied on my father's activities and went to the lengths of even slipping into his office and taking the typewriter ribbons and stretching them out, reconfiguring what was written. I opened hidden boxes and examined the contents, too. As well as retracing his steps across the earth, questioning adults about his activities.

This way, I got to know a lot of secrets. Oh, I also devised a way to listen in to telephone conversations. I loved spy books and detective stories and used them as guide books. Over the years, I got involved, with the blessings of the US government which thought I was stupid, to meddle very deeply with Chinese affairs. For years and years, I flitted in and out of this field, mostly doing things for my desire to see if I could influence world history while being totally obscured from all powers. At all stages of my work, I told Washington, what was going on and my interpretation of my own activities. At all times, they sneered at me or ignored my messages. Every time something I was watching or knew about, blew up in everyone's faces, I would re-emerge and explain what was going on and they would tell me to go to hell and on and on it has gone.

One major sudden eruption that surprised everyone but didn't surprise me too greatly was the Tiananmen Square challenge to the Communist dictatorship. This had a lot of similarities to the student actions of 1968, something I was deeply involved in while a student in Europe that year. I quickly moved out of the shadows and into the international eye when the Chinese students gathered around me as I helped them demonstrate in front of the UN for a whole month. A curious thing then happened: even as world leaders were stopping by to say hello to me and as major Senators, the Mayor of NYC and others stopped by right in front of the press and they all argued with me in a personal fashion since we knew each other, the media kept me totally hidden from view. In other words, I didn't become a celebrity. Indeed, when Phil Donohue came by and negotiated with me, to have all this go on national TV, when I got out of his limo at the TV studio, he rushed out to me and yelled at me to go away.

HAHAHA. I must thank the CIA here. When I was supposed to address the world after a huge rally, I was barred from the stage by our government. My speech was read, by I was not allowed to appear in public. Even as I was in the public eye. This invisibility used to irk me tremendously. When Abbie Hoffman's wife, Anita, had to hide from the public eye, she lived with me. It was easy as pie. No press, no questions, dead silence. She marveled as to how this could be. I laughed and said, I could go outside naked and it would be wiped out of the news instantly.

The news of the world is full of such subterranean things. We call them, 'The Ruling Elites.' Some of them are in the eye of the public but not. For example, the Queen of England is very much in the public eye but she appears only when cloaked so we can only see the real Queen in tiny glimpses. Poor Princess Diana tore aside this curtain only to be killed by the maniac media which is like an out-of-control puppy. Even with the spectacular crash of the British Royal Icon due to Diana's openness, I saw in British news, this Queen yapping about happy families and how we should have them, minus irritating daughter-in-laws and other annoyances.

I digress. Heh. As usual. Back to history: I have a front seat view of history thanks to my family connections and the happenstance as to how and where I was born and what I did in the past. When I started this news service here, I knew I would be focusing on Asia and Asia's relationship with the US. And I knew that this would not be merely political or merely economic but would be about the shift in power from one side of the planet to the other. Religion is yet another element in all this and religion is the ultimate cloaking device for we are supposed to not talk about various mysteries and religion is directly attached to our darker natures, the nightside of humanity, our dream world. And in this world lies the central vortex: humans do certain things because we evolved to do these things. And the forces that make us do things is very powerful. Very.

Things are happening very swiftly in the subterranean areas where all the forces of history lurk. History can limp along with few things happening and then, with no warning except in retrospect, erupt. We are at such a stage right now. The attempt at sustaining and strengthening the post-WWII status quo is collapsing. But it is not finished, not at all. China is not trying to cause the status quo collapse...yet. They, like the post-WWII US empire, have gone to great lengths to keep the status quo stable. This mostly involved the purchase of US debt so we would continue to overspend our budget. Content with this, the US has stupidly gone along, refusing to understand why China is bankrolling our wild spending or contemptuous about this. The subterranean thinking about this debt is, our government plans to repudiate this debt. We imagine the Chinese don't know this desire even as the neo-cons who talk about this openly, are tracked closely by the Chinese.

The Chinese track me, too. And they fear/love what I have to say. Namely, they like hearing about the weaknesses of the US position but fear that I will convince the US to change course and NOT support the status quo. The US present position is a disaster. Of all nations, we can afford our present status quo the least. It is damaging to our future prospects. This message is not getting through to DC nor the parties playing the present game. None of them actually understand the forces of history even as they make history happen. They imagine, the pretty stories they tell each other, is history. But the subterranean forces are the real history and tracking these is very important. Just as ancient sailors learned to read the sun rises and sun sets to detect distant storms, people moving nations forwards must do the same.

Alas! One of the things that seems to cripple empires the most is, they cease checking the weather, measuring the seas or plotting their course by triangulating with the stars! They sail on merrily into iceberg infested seas and ignore this but instead, throw parties and have fun in the First Class while the workers shovel coal into the furnaces below. I do not chart America's course. My influence on America is vanishingly small even when I did some very big things that shook the President, himself. So I sit here today, once again, pointing out what I think is very obvious but is totally obscure to our rulers and leaders as well as 99.9% of the press and an awful lot of online commentary.

Everyone knows, deep inside, that China's sun is rising and our sun is setting. Even the Japanese know this. Japan has hitched itself to our sun after we used the power of nuclear bombs on Japan, displaying our demonic natures and our willingness to kill an infinite number of civilians, Japan surrendered. They also studied us closely and their culture underwent a huge change. Not always for the better. The Japanese resentments are very subterranean but like all such forces, very powerful. Indeed, the deeper some resentment or feeling is, the more it grows and the darker it gets. And if it rises to the surface, the more explosive it is. The US imagines the Japanese admire us and want to be like us. And indeed, since we are the empire and we have power, they do want to share our various traits and passions. But the resentment is always there. As it should be. Refusing to understand this is childish but that is how all empires work. They become childish because no one can stop them from regressing.

The Japanese and Chinese went through a recent bad relations sequence. This was triggered by historical forces. Japan, emboldened by the US never punishing them for rewriting and even outright lying about WWII, began a big project to eliminate all their war crimes and make the villains out to be the US and China, not Japan. Step by ruthless step, the LDP worked on this subterranean scheme. But China caught wind of it and began diplomatic protests. These rose in volume all the way up to riots in China directed at Japan. Fearful of a second Tiananmen Square event, the communist Chinese terminated these riots.

Every time the Chinese protested, the Japanese would send their Prime Minister to the US to get petted. Instead of backing the Chinese, the US stupidly joined Japan and allowed them to rewrite history. The rage of the Chinese is hard to express. They recently had a series of ceremonies concerning the Massacre in Nanjing. The Japanese, on the other hand, issued text books claiming the Imperial Forces of Japan did NOT force civilians to commit mass suicide. My father-in-law was there when this happened, by the way. He was not outraged by this outright lie when it happened this last year. He felt nothing because our government said nothing and our media said nothing and I must have been one of only a tiny handful of Americans even aware of all this in the first place!

Asia forced Japan to stop doing this. Not the US. Asia! The US is seen universally by Asians as a foolish giant too stupid to see when a supposed 'ally' was poking out it's giant eye! We are the laughing stocks of Asia, not admired or loved. The Chinese were mocked here in the US for being so angry about the Yakusuni
Shrine but the Japanese took the protests seriously when China turned it into an economic matter. Imagine if the US began to harass Toyota over these visits? Instead, a smirking Koizumi was escorted about the US and visited Elvis Presley's shrine! But look at today's news. The Japanese are now actively courting China.

This is SIGNIFICANT NEWS. This doesn't mean Japan is ditching the US, it is triangulating due to a reasonable belief that the US is going down while China is rising. Japan doesn't want to be caught on the wrong side here. If the US power is in decline, Japan wants to be able to cope with China, not be overrun by China. Hanging onto the US for as long as possible is important to Japan but ONLY if this makes Japan stronger and keeps them on TOP of the US, not used by the US to confront China.

The Japanese need to undermine and control the US has fatally weakened the US and an China is not going to fall into the same trap as the US for the simple reason, they can understand the Japanese plans and take countermeasures. The US, on the other hand, thinks Japan is an ally and not a very dangerous trade rival. This is a mistake the Chinese will never make since the Japanese tried to enslave them in the past. The US, instead of understanding how history works, thinks that when we win something, no one will ever undermine us or challenge us in the future. For example, England was very nasty about the US Revolution and before that, the US was founded by people chased out of England in the first place. Yet we fell into a trap with England, when they went bankrupt, they used us for their own ends and have tried repeatedly for the last 100 years, to translate our power into their own empire for their own ends, not for anything good for us.

Both France and England tried to use us as cover as they tried to expand their empires after WWI. Then, after WWII, they did this a second time! During all this, their ethos corrupted our own and we ended up imitating them. And imitating imperial Germany and Japan. This process is still at work and is part of our failures today. Germany and Japan as well as any major empire, refused to do 'diplomacy'. That is, the art of negotiating things so everyone is satisfied and works together without using brute force. Brute force is expensive, diplomacy is cheap.

My favorite example is simple: the Chinese leadership knows that making the US slowly go bankrupt, one tiny nibble at a time, working with Japan to bankrupt the US, will win them global power. They don't even fear the US refusing to pay its huge debts to China, both the FOREX reserves vanishing or the US bonds becoming worthless, they think that spending even $2.5 trillion for the US bankruptcy will be a cheap purchase of global power. Any modern war costs more. The pathetic wars we are waging in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which we are losing, will cost us at least that much!

Knowing this, the US should not be tempted to go bankrupt. That is stupid. But I fear, this is the plan. Japan gains NOTHING if the US goes bankrupt. Thus, the unease in Tokyo. But Japan benefits from the present status quo which is bankrupting the US. This is what we call, 'The Horns of Dilemma'. The Japanese love the present status quo but it will, in the end, cause them to collapse, too. Unless they triangulate.

The present leader of China, Hu, appeared to be a colorless character when he took over but he had one major thing: a historical view of China's position in the world. His library of books which he has consulted or read closely is remarkably similar to my own library and this isn't accidental. He had the wit to read and understand the message being hammered into heads by historians. Namely, the artful use of diplomacy coupled with strengthening one's home base and living within strict financial realities can propel a nation to the top ranks of world leadership. At every step in this amazing man's career, the Western press has mocked him. When he visited the US last time, the President, our monkey-king-in-chief openly abused, mocked and literally yanked Chairman Hu about. Throwing rotten eggs at him, metaphorically speaking, the US press claimed 'He lost face' as we shoved him back out of our dying empire.

Hu's amazing diplomatic efforts merely continued. When he gathered all the African leaders at a Beijing summit, the Western media erupted in cat calls and sneers while totally forgetting the ugly and ongoing history of abuse, enslavement and looting of Africa by Western powers. Each of our frontal attacks on Hu's diplomatic efforts have backfired! Instead of understanding why, we simply sneered that we could have a united front with our G7 buddies including Japan.

I was aghast. Japan is not a buddy. Japan is a deadly rival. Unable to comprehend this, the US spend the last 2 years, clinging to Japan and telling Japan all our plans for China. We cannot understand, even when Japan once rushed over to China to alert them to a secret protocol at one G7 meeting, we cannot understand that every word our stupid diplomats say in private to Japanese leaders can and often do, end up being whispered to the Chinese! When it suits Japan. This is what 'triangulation' is all about! Right now, Japan's top leader is conspiring with China's top leader, one of the smartest, savviest and darkest leaders on earth, a man that scares Putin, even, with his cold-blooded appraisal of facts and sensitivity to the flow of power and history, Fukuda is meeting with Hu in private! And Hu is very, very intent on this Japanese ruler. He knows we are at a turning point in history. The status quo has collapsed and can only work if he can get Japan to work with him on the proper aspects of the status quo.

Namely, the ones that will cause our economic collapse in the future. After China gathers enough strength and power to replace us as world rulers. Japan knows this and they also have finally figured out that they will never control the world because they are dying. They are puzzled about this death and unable to stop it but I suspect they hope to turn it aside in due time, in the future. They are torn in two. The rulers love the status quo but they also sense that this is not going to last much longer.

FM spokesman: Chinese President Hu Jintao to visit Japan next year

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Beijing on Tuesday that President Hu Jintao will visit Japan next year.

The date for the visit, however, will be set by the two sides through diplomatic consultations, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters at a routine press conference.

China and Japan share common understanding on maintaining and enhancing high-level visits and exchanges, he said.

President Hu's Japan trip will be the first visit by a Chinese head of state in a decade.

This visit will not be like the one Bush subjected Hu to last year. That visit disgusted me. Our arrogance was feeding the dark side of Hu and it made him stronger, not weaker, at home. It made ordinary Chinese angry for they correctly sensed that our contempt and rude manners were racist. The US doesn't mind looking at the Chinese as if they are cheap labor, servants who kow tow to us, feeble reflections of our greatness, cringing or hysterical, all yang and no yin. But misunderstanding the Chinese who represent one of the world's oldest continuous empires, is going to be fatal.

In the end, we must accept our new status. We have to relearn how to do simple diplomacy again. We have to look at all our relationships in a new light. Right now, we have ignored our trade deficits, for example, fatally. We have allowed all our allies to flood us with goods and even have enabled our dire rivals who we claim, we fear, do the same! This madness has not ended, indeed, deep inside the talks between China and Japan is the issue of how to prevent the US from protecting ourselves from Asian imports and Asians buying out the remains of our native business and financial structures.

Also, since both China and Japan are competing to sell to the new Sovereign Wealth nations like Saudi Arabia, they have to recapture their purchases of oil via sales of other goods from Asia. They know that if they block the US from doing this, their power will grow. Japan can't do this without first repairing relations with China. Japan stood aside and joined the other G7 in attacking Putin year after year while China stunningly made friends with Russia. Japan is now in the alarming situation whereby North Korea, South Korea, Russia and China and even Vietnam will be joined against Japan!

They very much want to change this. And going to Hu, the Dragon of China, is the first step. Hu will be gaging the Japanese reception closely and the army of servants working for the Chinese diplomatic corps will handle this with very close attention to every nuance of gesture, voice and choice of materials and words spoken. Unlike the crude US diplomats who can't figure out hardly anything even when it is shoved in their faces, the Chinese need to use their wits and they will.

The US peace talks [sic] in the Middle East are merely digging our imperial graves. It advances absolutely nothing that will help us in the end. Israel is building even more 'settlements' with US money and the Iranians continue to expand their feeble diplomatic reach despite their ineptitudes because of the Dragon of China and the Russian Bear are interested in balancing US power via the Iranians. And both are triangulating with other Arab powers. Playing a very complex game with some of the most irritable people on earth.

Gates sees division in Chinese actions

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that recent military incidents involving the U.S. and China indicate troubling signs of division between Beijing's military and the nation's communist political leaders.

China's refusal to permit U.S. Navy ship visits to Hong Kong last month and a provocative anti-satellite weapon test in January are prompting U.S. intelligence agencies to worry that the Chinese military is not under the control of the civilian government in Beijing, according to other defense officials.
*snip*
After the Chinese military's successful January test of a missile against a weather-satellite target, China's Foreign Ministry "didn't seem to understand or know what had happened" and indicated "confusion" over the test, he said.

This man is running the Pentagon. He ran the CIA. He never listens to me, never will listen to me. But listen to him! What a fool! How can anyone be this stupid? Eh? The Chinese, when handling the clueless American empire, simply brush us off. 'Say, what? Our military did what? I didn't see anything,' is them giving us the contemptuous brush off, not them being clueless. We are the clueless ones here! Anyone who imagines that Hu, the Dragon, will tolerate ANYONE in the military messing with him, is nuts! Bush, who is also a dictator, regularly pushes out critics in the Pentagon. He intimidates the CIA. Anyone who crosses him gets the Valerie Plame treatment and is driven out.

I track the Chinese closely and when they vaporized the satellite it was as a warning to the US. They were signaling to us that our Star Wars protections were useless and we should cease the nuclear bomb waving which was going on at that time. The US was talking wildly about nuking North Korea and the Chinese had to force us to negotiate with North Korea. So long as we thought we could nuke Asia, we refused negotiations. Right after this Dragon's fire display, the US quickly let China run the negotiations and finish them to China's satisfaction. The US press, instead of understanding all this, pretended that Americans did all this. A ridiculous view but typical of a blind empire refusing to understand power and diplomacy.

Gates, not I, has been at the very apex of American power where it interfaces with the rest of the world. His stupidity is becoming legendary. Eisenhower refused many imperial adventures because he did not want to bankrupt the US. He constantly had his eye on the economic ball and didn't cut taxes while entering the Vietnam war, for example. He refused to let the Pentagon spend like crazy, he did strengthen our home defenses. The US was spared economic collapse due to Eisenhower's intelligence.

But since then, we went crazy. Spending on our military while not paying for it, we have dug our own grave. Far from protecting the US, our adventures have bankrupted us. Which is the aspect that interests the Chinese the most. Bush just signed a $555 billion military bill that is already in arrears and will require another $200 billion in supplements in the future. The money for this comes from China for the US will peddle its bonds to the Chinese! Does Gates yell about all this? No?

He is a fool. And if China and Russia agree with me [hint: they do] then letting this man speculate so stupidly in public weakens America. We cannot afford to have our top rivals think we are stupid. That is dangerous. Alas, if this were some trick cooked up by the CIA to fool our rivals and have them underestimate us, this is stupid, too. Because we let Japan spit in our eye over the issue of history books lying about WWII.

Overall Sino-U.S. ties stable in 2007

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States opposed Taiwan's bid to join the United Nations at a year-end press conference last Friday, or December 22. She called the referendum a "provocative policy" that "unnecessarily raises tensions in Taiwan Strait and it promises no real benefits" for the people of Taiwan on the international stage.

These remarks of hers are the latest statement made by a US official of the highest rank so far in recent months on Taiwan's U.N.bid, and they reflect in a very emphatic way the high attention the US side has paid to the situation in Taiwan strait and pose another warning to "independence forces" in Taiwan Island.

On December 22, or last Saturday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed its appreciation to the American side for what it has voiced on the Taiwan question.

Condi Rice is the worst Secretary of State since Kissinger and he was pretty nasty. At least, he could pull a rabbit out of the Israeli hat! She can't pull out even a frog. The US is trying to keep the status quo. This means, Taiwan has to pretend to be part of China but not be part of China. Eventually, they will be part of China because China can force this one way or another. Taiwan's present leaders are alarmed about Japan's sudden friendliness with China. But then, Taiwan is one of Japan's biggest trade rivals in the world so they have little reason to be friendly. They looked at the figures on their ledgers and noticed that the Chinese bought far more Japanese goods and did much more trade with Japan than Taiwan. So they will kick Taiwan to the curb if this makes Japan stronger.

The weakness of the US is on full display here. We have to kow tow to the Dragon and do things the Dragon wants. We imagine the Dragon will be fooled and not ask us to step aside as they retake Taiwan. We think we can double cross them in secret. This is part of the subterranean movements that can erupt in war. Japan doesn't want war and feels that the present configuration between China, led by Hu, and the neighbors of Japan, is very dangerous and the only clear way out is to move straight into negotiations with China about nearly everything BEFORE the US completely collapses. I have said in the past, Japan cannot pay for the US by itself. Our military costs are now nearly unbearable for Japan who holds, by far and away, more US government bonds than any entity on earth.

Senior CPC official meets Venezuelan foreign minister

Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of of the Communist party of China(CPC) Central Committee, met here on Thursday with Nicolas Maduro Moros, foreign minister of Venezuela.

Li said the cooperation between China and Venezuela had expanded in recent years and the two countries had coordinated in international affairs.

China would like to maintain high-level contact with Venezuela and deepened the reciprocal cooperation and cultural exchanges to push forward the strategic partnership, he said.

The smooth Chinese machinery at work. Note that it is right where our government wants it the least. Yet we will be forced to go hat in hand, to China, for our funds to run our own government! The defeat of Chavez's raw stab at expanding his powers were wisely defeated by the good people of Venezuela. But China's interest here is for increasing stability as well as expansion of their influence. They don't want coups or uproars in Venezuela. Not in the least.

Sino-Swedish relations will be more prosperous: Chinese Ambassador

Here is another example: China is continuing to move about the planet, increasing contacts. The G7 nations tried briefly to have a united front against China. Laughably, over the issue of the yuan being too weak! Of course, we can see that both the yen and the dollar have been rapidly declining against the euro and the Europeans were too stupid to figure out that they can't have a joint front with two trade rivals, the US and Japan, on this issue since both are in the same boat as China!

China's intelligence service gained access to a secret National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii through a Chinese-language translation service, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

"There can be no higher target for an intelligence service, and that includes China's MSS and 2 PLA, than gaining access to an adversaries' codes and electronic intelligence," he said, because it is the ultimate in "foreknowledge" advocated by ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu.

Getting U.S. electronic intelligence and codes would give China specific information on what is known and allow Beijing to take defensive measures "based on knowledge, not supposition," Mr. Smith said, adding that "it also allows for disinformation to be done with confidence and it basically gives the intelligence service every advantage over the enemy."

Bush started his queer and pointless Presidency by tangling with China over our open spying on China. China spies on us and we certainly spy on them! After all, from day one, this has been true! This is how I got involved in Chinese politics and got to influence China. The US was desperate to know what the Chinese were thinking. So the asked me to let the Chinese move in with me! HAHAHA. They did, I got to know what they were thinking and the CIA told me to shut up and not tell them what the Chinese were thinking so we can now go about pretending we have no idea, what is going on, despite all our spying and prying and peering into the murk.

Actually, the sun shines on China's enterprises!

Culture of Life News Main Page

Bush Loses Another Round To Iran Kitty

December 4, 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Well, it looks increasingly like Iran Kitty has won yet another round with Miz Liberty. Either way, the US has lost. Either we commit global economic suicide or we lose face as we back away from the flailing claws of the cat. We lost face in Asia big time this last month and now we lost whatever face we still have, in the Middle East. Projection of power means avoiding pies in the face. Clowns get plastered with pies, not great leaders. The US is causing considerable financial havoc still thanks to our moronic need to fight with the Cat. And this is causing increasing problems for our allies in Asia and Europe not to mention, ticking off the Chinese Dragon who doesn't want high oil prices and embargoes. On the other hand, this has pleased Putin no end. Mother Russia is much richer, thanks to these fights.

An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.

An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.

The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses — will be felt in endless ways at home and abroad.

From day one, I have been outraged that the world's nuclear powers who also happen to have been or are, giant empires, have been using vicious methods to disarm other nations who happened to be previous victims of these same empires in the past. The disarming of Iraq and then invading and destroying the place, killing millions and turning more millions into refugees, was an international war crime. The UN is guilty of assisting an unprovoked invasion on behalf of one of the biggest empires in history.

I was 100% against disarming Iran for these reasons. No nation buth the USA has nuked civilian populations. Americans hate to think about this but how many babies dies in Hiroshima? How many children under 16 years old? 100,000? 200,000? We had sufficient guilty feelings over this to stay our hand from doing this more than twice. But we and only we have done it at all! And this is very, very significant! Of all nations, the US cannot demand disarmament unless we first lay down these terrible weapons and walk away from them for good.

Aside from the issue of Bush being a war criminal over the illegal invasion of Iraq, the long, hard push for more wars, the neo-con plans to attack Iran have finally, I pray, hit a brick wall which even the Washington Post cannot ignore. Even they admitted the plans to strong arm the UN and the world into another major war crime has now vanished.

Oil Prices Drop Again

Crude futures fell again Tuesday in New York as traders declined to make upside bets ahead of the upcoming OPEC meeting.
The jury is still out as to whether the world's largest oil-exporting group will raise output or leave it unchanged, but after several days of speculation, the answer is now just a few hours away.

For the session, January light sweet crude fell 99 cents to $88.32 a barrel, and natural gas lost 6 cents to $7.16 per million British thermal units. Reformulated gasoline was fractionally higher at $2.25 a gallon, and heating oil was also slightly better at $2.51 a gallon.

This American news outlet claims the price of oil fell because of the impending OPEC meeting. This is utterly silly but typical of American commentary on world events. Many cannot connect even the most painfully obvious events to understand cause and effect. Let's go to Europe now and see if they figure out the obvious.

Oil prices slide on Iran report

Oil has fallen below $88 a barrel, losing ground after a US report downplaying Iran's nuclear ambitions had eased geopolitical concerns.

I have said long ago, there is a direct relationship connecting Bush's saber rattling and the price of oil. I drew a cartoon showing Iran Kitty explaining this connection. Yet it is NEVER made explicit in US news. It baffles me, how the US can possibly run a global empire while utterly incapable of even the simplest and most obvious analysis of cause and effect. The BBC is a last remnant of the old British Empire; it has to cover the world and for much of my life, first on short wave radio then through public radio here, I used the BBC to get information. This willful blindness is not charming. Pretending to be naive while we go about the planet, kidnapping people, assassinating leaders and supporting despots as well as launching wars, we can't do that and be terminally stupid.

The US is sliding rapidly into a mega-monster of a recession/depression and this has been partially triggered by rising global oil prices and we and only we are responsible for this. We gave ourselves our own sucker-punch to our own stomachs. We can't undo all this by ceasing threats of war. It is now too late.

Europeans See Murkier Case for Sanctions

But they added that they were struggling to understand why the United States chose to issue the report just two days after the six powers involved in negotiating with Iran — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — had decided to press ahead with a new Security Council resolution.

“Officially, we will study the document carefully; unofficially, our efforts to build up momentum for another resolution are gone,” said one European official involved in the diplomacy.

Geeze, Europe just might stop this silliness? ABOUT TIME. The only reason they did this at all was so they could continue to have a huge trade surplus with the US. Now that the dollar is dying and we are doing nothing except strangle it further, there is less reason to support boycotts that hurt Europe. The leaders of Germany, France and others, fearful of the Muslims who have a hyper-birthrate while Europe's collapses [like Japan] happily consorted with US anti-Muslim actions that destroyed ancient enemies.

But enough Europeans make money off of selling things to oil pumping nations. And it makes no sense to cut out a whole sector of world economic activity just so the US can bully someone. Rising irritation with our psychotic needs is rapidly reaching a boiling point in both Europe and Asia.

Bush: No change in Iran policy

"Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush told his first White House press conference in nearly seven weeks.

The Democrats could have saved some of our collective 'face' if they only tried to impeach this very unpopular monkey king. No one on earth wants him swinging from the candelabras anymore, not even his wife. When he indulges in this sort of childish, petulance, it is time to send him to his room and lock the door. The world won't stop him if the US won't even try. Nixon, while in trouble with Watergate, still went about the planet, doing successful diplomatic missions. But Bush, unmolested, can't fathom even the slightest subtlety in nuance of international interfacing. He just blunders ahead, destroying our nation's future standing in the world.

Boycott of Tehran Hits German Coffers

Germany's Finance Ministry is estimating that the current business boycott against Iran has already led to a triple-digit million shortfall in the federal budget. If additional sanctions are imposed, the figure could soon swell to a few billion euros.

The German government's efforts to intensify sanctions against Iran could soon hit taxpayers if the government is forced to pass expected budget shortfalls on to them. Under pressure from Washington, the European Union could place Bank Melli, an Iranian business responsible for the majority of Germany's trade with Iran, on its embargo list.
The German government backs domestic exports to Iran with so-called Hermes export credit protection, and if Iran doesn't pay for the exports, the German government would be forced to foot the bill to German businesses.

Experts at the German Finance Ministry have estimated that budget losses in 2008 alone could amount to €700 million ($1.03 billion) to €800 million euro. In the medium-term, however, that figure could swell to €2 billion.

Our pretty little saber rattling is now going to cost the German taxpayers more euros? And is killing commerce? This is most dangerous. Germans will make sacrifices but only if there is something for themselves. But they now realize that if we start a war, the oil will NOT flow, the price will NOT go down. And they see a recession looming and Bush is pushing them all off the cliff. The only one smiling about all this is Putin. As he adds to his giant FOREX reserves and prepares for the next round of 'The Man Who Would Be Czar.'

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Pax China

December 3, 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

We are seeing a sea change in international politics. China, the country that wants stability and power, has gradually moved to center stage where they contrast themselves with the belligerent American diplomatic [sic] powers. Recently, they managed to not only disarm North Korea, they also encouraged North and South Korea to drop hostilities and slowly begin the integration process. Now they are making good relations with a very nervous Saudi Arabia that doesn't want more turmoil on their borders. So they will force Iran to disarm and start the diplomatic process. One thing though, China has no intention of allowing the US to attack or invade anyone else. The ultimate goal is to disarm the US.

Beijing backs fresh sanctions against Iran

China has for the first time indicated clear support for a new package of United Nations sanctions against Iran, breaking months of deadlock inside the UN security council over how to respond to Tehran's nuclear programme.

In a move that will boost expectations in western capitals that a new UN sanctions resolution could be agreed within weeks, Beijing signalled over the weekend that it was prepared to back measures that will hit Iran's banking and business sector, while also prohibiting more senior Iranians from travelling abroad.

Like North Korea, Iran will now have to back down. Long ago, I said that China wants to inherit an intact earth, not one blasted to smithereens by nuclear war or any major war. The Chinese have had quite a bit of warfare in the last 100 years and they enjoy peace. On top of this, they have no hostile intentions in the Gulf of Persia. They don't care about any of the irritable, self-centered egotistical gods spawned in that region. The disputes and hatreds caused by these entities are of no interest to the Chinese. The oil, on the other hand, is very interesting to the Chinese. They need it and want it.

For a while, they did business with Iran because Saudi Arabia had an exclusive contract with the US and Europe. But bit by bit, these ties have frayed badly. And one great cause of this is the fondness Europe and the US have for stealing stuff. The recent 'new' negotiations over the terms of surrender of the Palestinian olive trees and huts to the European and American invaders has been restarted because the US sees Saudi Arabia slipping out of our grip. No longer frightened by the Chinese, the Saudis and the more cosmopolitan Abu Dhabi sheiks are now responding to active Chinese courtship. The Chinese foreign service has been rebuilt totally under the Hu regime and works quite smoothly using some very highly educated Chinese specialists to develop astute game plans.

Saudi Arabia is scared to death of Iran and wants desperately to be protected. Seeing how military displays and moving our navy in and out of that region had no effectiveness, the Saudis quickly responded to China's overtures. We all saw how the US navy has been repeatedly snubbed by China this month. We can see how ineffective it is in intimidating people. Absolutely everyone can see that we are in a race with time here. The US is in financial trouble. China doesn't mind us going off a cliff. They do not want us to solve this with a major world war. Also, they earn points if they appear to be imposing disarmament and peace on a dangerous planet.

Pax China.

Iranian president: nuclear issue closed

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Monday that the disputed Iranian nuclear issue was "closed" from Iran's perspective and that his country had the right to develop new energy.

Speaking at a press conference on the sidelines of the 28th annual summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Ahmadinejad said "In our opinion, the nuclear issue is now closed."

Iran does not feel threatened at all and any pressure on Iran concerning the issue is useless, he said, adding that "we are prepared for any conditions."
*snip*
Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian president invited to attend the gathering of the GCC, which groups the world's six top oil exporters, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The GCC has always called for a nuclear-free Gulf while keeping a close eye on the developments of Iran's nuclear case.

Of course, a nuclear Iran is very destabilizing. On the other hand, the US has menaced Iran repeatedly for many years now. Iran needs protectors but being still quite revolutionary, it is hard to put down their guard or to behave diplomatically. They are learning, though. The Chinese were very much like this long ago. When my own family began interacting with them, it was very dangerous and difficult. They had many habits that were very rude. Sometimes, we had to be rather crude about things like slapping hands away, or physically shoving them out of our airspace. Once, when the Chinese guarding my parents wanted to hear a conversation but my dad was running water to defeat their attempts at electronic eavedropping. So they burst into the bedroom and tried to listen through the bathroom door and got a bit of a shove for this. I once had to eject one secret service officer physically from my house.

The Iranians can be just as irritating. Like the North Koreans. And eventually we hope to bring them out of this. But then, the Saudis were the same way, too! They actually drove my parents out of the country due to their inabilty to tolerate nearly anything outside of very narrow limits. I suspect the Chinese are capable of dealing with both Saudi Arabia and Iran because of this. They remember how they used to be, too.

It's time to talk about Israel's nukes, and ours, too

Many months ago Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, let slip a reference to Israel's nuclear weapons. While it embarrassed him, it was no surprise to the rest of the world. It has been known for decades that Israel has nukes. Estimates are that there are probably as many as 200 in the Israeli arsenal, including thermonuclear (hydrogen) ones.

What is surprising is that there is almost never any public discussion in the United States, and certainly none in the White House or the Congress, about these weapons. Is there any understanding between Israel and the United States, its principal source of military aid, about their use? If so, does the understanding cover "no first use," similar to the policy advocated in the United States at the height of the Cold War? What would the United States do if Israel were ever under an attack that might lead it to a nuclear response? Has the United States ever talked with Israel about its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? For Israel, are the weapons more of a danger to its security than a defense?

I think it is quite clever for the Chinese to agree that nuclear disarmament is a good thing. The Chinese know they can prevail without nuclear bombs. But the US cannot. So we cling to nuclear power just like the former empires of Britain and France, both of whom have no reason to have nuclear bombs at all. China is very anxious no other Asian nations have nuclear bombs and they are quite irritated with India and Pakistan getting them. Israel is, of course, the biggest hypocrites on earth. Building nukes, refusing to cooperate with any UN agency or anti-nuclear bomb treaties, they hide behind the US and egg us on into wars.

Saudi Arabia wants Israel disarmed. Again, the meetings this week in Maryland are our frantic attempt to prove to Saudi Arabia that we can bring some peace there. But the Israelis have no reason to cooperate and they are so assured of their powers, they feel they can be even more belligerent and we won't stop them since they control Congress and much of our media. Indeed, I was stunned to see an editorial in an American paper talking about Israeli nukes. The more the US supports this and enables this, the more China can appear as the peace maker, the good guys. So they won't stop us.

But anyone thinking they are supporting our pressure on Iran because they are our allies is fooling themselves. They are doing this because they are triangulating and will eventually tame the Iranians the same way they tamed baby dragon of North Korea. And perforce, draw them under Chinese protection once the Iranians figure this all out.

Iran presents 12 proposals at PGCC summit

Following is a summary of the proposals:

(1) An economic cooperation organization tasked with promoting cooperation in the areas of industry, agriculture, energy, and transportation should be established.

(2) Visa requirements for the citizens of Persian Gulf littoral states should be waived in order to strengthen friendly relations and boost economic and cultural cooperation in the region.

(3) Citizens of the littoral states should be permitted to buy real estate in each country in the region. This will promote long-term investment in regional projects.

(4) Bilateral and multilateral investments in oil and gas projects should be promoted.

(5) A plan for free trade among the littoral states should be outlined. The Islamic Republic is prepared to set up free trade zones through joint investments.

6) Oil and gas should be supplied to meet the region’s needs. Iran is prepared to provide Persian Gulf states with the oil and gas they require.

(7) The North-South Corridor should be activated. The Islamic Republic is ready to activate the North-South Corridor and to facilitate the utilization of its roads and railways.

(8) Tourism should be promoted. The littoral states should make efforts to introduce their tourism attractions and encourage their citizens to visit other regional countries.

(9) Islamic countries and poor countries should be helped. Persian Gulf countries should transfer some of their money from Western banks to the Islamic Development Bank or any other joint regional banks in order to eradicate poverty in the region and sponsor regional projects.

(10) A security cooperation organization should be established and a security agreement should be signed in order to eliminate all tension and any possible insecurity in the Persian Gulf region.

(11) Educational, scientific, and technological information should be exchanged. In view of Iran’s great accomplishments in the spheres of industry, agriculture, medicine, health, energy, and advanced technology, the Islamic Republic is prepared to share its expertise with neighboring countries through training their scientists and specialists.

(12) Collective efforts should be made to protect the ecosystem of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman

Interesting that they offered this up at the recent meetings. They also talked openly about the dollar's decline. There is growing pressure for the US to protect the value of the dollar. All our allies want this, very badly. Badly enough to get angry and do something. The glue that holds our entire alliance together is the trade surpluses all these nations have with us. When that stops, all pretense at being buddies will vanish. Some of the Iranian proposals are funny. Encouraging tourism? This is code for Shi'as moving about more freely. The Sunnis hate this idea. But in the end, it will have to happen.

This is where Pax China steps in. They don't care about any of this. Being utterly neutral, they can devise solutions and set up safe systems whereby the explosive and ancient confrontations in the Middle East can be rendered harmless over time. The US, alas, stupidly became one-sided on behalf of either Europeans wishing to colonize the area or kings who oppress their people. I will note that the revolutionaries have faded into the woodwork ever since oil prices began to rise rapidly. The money spent by the kings to keep domestic peace is very great. And they will have to expand social services if they wish to rule any longer. Even now, they have to break up terrorist cells that pop up occasionally. On the other hand, if the value of oil drops due to a potential massive collapse of US economic activity, the terrorism will shoot up again.

At least Iran is making a stab at some sort of diplomacy. I said long ago, the Muslim world would have to figure out a way of healing these old religious wounds and the best way is to grow more tolerant, not more doctrinaire and vicious. The jailing of a teacher over using the name 'Mohammed' for a mascot toy bear was incredibly unpopular as well as dangerous. But then, I remember racism here. When I was a child in the South, in order to buy property, on the deed, you had to say you would never let a 'Negro' into the house to sleep or eat unless they were servants! And you couldn't sell to them, either. Indeed, Europe had horrible religious persecution just 70 years ago, with Hitler. This sort of intolerance and unthinking viciousness is global and of course, dangerous as well as stupid.

U.S. report: Iran stopped nuclear weapons work in 2003

A declassified summary of the latest National Intelligence Estimate found with "high confidence" that the Islamic republic stopped an effort to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003.

The estimate is less severe than a 2005 report that judged the Iranian leadership was "determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure."

Slowly, the wind for war is no longer puffing out US sails. Of course, the US knows only one kind of diplomacy: vicious retaliation and a show of shock and awe as we slam into everyone. The whole world knows there were no WMD in Iraq when we invaded. And they know Iran has no nuclear bombs. The preparations for an attack still continues but this simply will be yet another nail in our coffin as the Chinese click their tongues and sigh, 'Look, they are being bad yet again.' And we lose more ground and the Chinese gain status. Whatever geo-political power we may get will vanish if it costs us any money at all. We cannot afford another trillion dollar fiasco.

Japan, China vow cooperation
But high-level talks fail to resolve gas-field dispute

Although the meetings marked a new willingness to move beyond divisive disputes that have chilled relations over the past decade, there were still no breakthroughs in Japan's chief issue — China's exploitation of a gas field that straddles a contested part of the East China Sea.

Komura urged Wen to exert his leadership to resolve the dispute.

No significant progress was made in talks between foreign ministers on Saturday, so Komura mentioned the issue again in his meeting with Wen, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mitsuo Sakaba said.

Sakaba said he hoped the issue would be resolved by the time Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda visits China, either by the end of the year or early next year.

"Time is very limited now," Sakaba said. "We have one month more for solving this issue. So it's a very tough situation."

This is going to be fun, watching these two tango. Japan and China are top level rivals. And both are each other's biggest trade and cultural partners. Neither side will give up anything easily. China holds the upper hand here due to their growing size, dynamism and clever diplomacy. Japan's diplomacy has rotted a bit, spoiled by interfacing with Americans who are easy to fool But now they will have to use all their wits to match the Chinese and this might wake them up and sharpen their skills.

One thing is certain: the Japanese won't get the Chinese to give up anything that is energy-related. They can buy this from the Chinese but not control it. I feel that this is true in the Middle East. China won't let us control the oil there. They want to preserve the nations there so they can do business with each one. They want to have OPEC be beholden to them, not in the US back pocket.

President Hu pledges to step up Sino-Japanese ties

Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged here on Monday to step up the sound and stable development of Sino-Japanese relations.

Sino-Japanese relations have taken on a positive outlook, and both sides should seize the hard-earned opportunities and do more to push the development of bilateral relations, Hu said in a meeting with the visiting Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura. Peace between China and Japan leads to mutual benefits, and rivalry is damaging to both, Hu said.

What a contrast from the Japanese article! The Chinese, as always, hold out an olive branch while warning about the alternatives. Taiwan is in a quandary here: they depend entirely on US military power to keep afloat as well as the US economy. They are probably quite alarmed about Japan's sudden Chinese diplomacy and worry about how Japan will triangulate this. In the past, whenever China was ready to spring a change on the world, they did this with absolute speed and with the full backing of the US who act equally fast. These diplomatic and trade shifts are literally overnight. One day, it is one shape, the next minute, it is the reverse. The Japanese have been caught off guard by this several times in the past. Now they are aware of this possibility.

China is willing to let the US have some nice prize but ONLY if they do this in return. We know that China wants Taiwan. Not instantly, but they expect the US to withdraw from Taiwan. So the trade off has to be valuable to the US. We can all see what this is leading up to.

China vies for a piece of Alaskan gas project

China Petrochemical Corp is among companies including TransCanada Corp and ConocoPhillips competing to build a pipeline that would allow the first commercial production of natural gas from Alaska's North Slope.

Five companies have applied to build the pipeline, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said in a statement on Friday, without providing details of their plans.

The Chinese intend to be players in the energy field. The earth is large. They already have begun to persuade a number of Muslim nations, it would be a good choice to use Chinese skills to tap in energy projects. I suspect they don't expect to win the Alaskan contract but they need to make a proposal, anyway. It shows penetration and power. They are expanding outwards and in fields we used to dominate.

China, EU sign joint statement, to jointly face climate change

According to a China-EU joint statement issued here Monday, China and the European Union will continue to strengthen cooperation on responding to climate change.

The joint statement of the 10th China-EU Leaders' Meeting said leaders of both sides stressed in their meeting the great importance they attached to the issue of climate change, and their willingness to strengthen cooperation to jointly meet the serious challenge of climate change.

"China and the EU are committed to the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate interference with the climate system, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities," said the statement.

It said the leaders reviewed the bilateral cooperation under the China-EU Partnership on Climate Change and called for progress to be made, including on research of near-zero emissions of coal power generation technology through carbon capture and storage, as well as development of concrete cooperation projects to strengthen China's participation in the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism.

The sudden turn around by China concerning Iran has a lot to do with several secret meetings they had with a number of top Europeans. The Europeans want to control the Middle East while China's desires there are more subtle. Did they make a tit for tat deal? To pressure the world's biggest other polluter to change? And to allow Chinese penetration of European markets at a certain level? Or to gang up on the US and force the value of the dollar back up and thus, bring back the legendary trade surpluses Europe is addicted to?

Many things are changing now. The dollar is dying, US leadership is degrading and China is Pax.

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Japan And Saudi Arabia Triangulate With China

December 1, 2007

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As I predicted in the past here, Japan is now going to triangulate with China because they know the US is a sinking ship. They can see, the US can't project power. They saw how the US gave up on the baby dragon, North Korea, and how China fixed everything except for one issue Japan wanted fixed. They can see clearly the writing on the walls and it isn't 'Mene mene tekel peres'! China and Japan are now openly having friendship meetings that will resolve many differences. Will they discuss the yen and yuan, too? You bet! The US loses even more face with China over ship dockings. And Russia gets restive.

China, Japan Say They Can Overcome `Differences'

China and Japan can overcome their ``differences,'' foreign ministers of both nations said today at the beginning of a two-day summit of six ministers from each side in Beijing, the first of its kind since both nations resumed ties in 1972.

``I believe through mutual effort we will have a successful dialogue,'' Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in welcoming his Japanese counterpart, Masahiko Komura, to a meeting at China's Foreign Ministry. ``We hope we can discuss future relations and how to push for more progress in our relations,'' Komura said in reply.

Japan and China have been holding secret and open meetings a lot since the West began to have its banking crisis! Indeed, the reversal in rhetoric since 7/17/7 has been quite remarkable, hasn't it? The EU, UK and USA are still barking at the Chinese dragon but Miz Japan has fallen silent after a series of swift challenges and dares. When Japan boasted that they could flood China's markets with funny money from the carry trade black hole in the Bank of Japan, when they boasted they would drop the yen to 130 to the dollar by October, the world's entire international bank-to-bank system seized up and the dollar began to nosedive.

China let everyone know, they would play hardball with anyone who crossed them. After whacking a couple dozen balls out of the ballpark, Japan looked at the score board and saw how many runs China scored and how the US struck out every time and the yen was getting stronger every day. Starting with mid-September and the secret visit of the head of the Bank of Japan to the head of the Bank of China, Japan has been slip-sliding sideways to the Chinese. The Chinese simultaneously has rebuffed the US on every possible front while cocking an eye at the Japanese who were carefully slithering ever closer.

Now the ninja moves are done and they are openly embracing each other WHILE China continues to insult the USA. We are at a historic moment here, everyone. This is a true shift in international politics every bit as big as when Russia suddenly lurched away from the US and EU and suddenly rushed to Beijing to be entertained by the Dragon.

Politics and money are like love and marriage: a bloody affair requiring religious priests before sex and lawyers after sex. And we all know that these people like to be paid, first. So money is required. The USA thought we could go about this planet, begging for money and then haul out our navy and air force and then shock and awe everyone. Only we are dressed in rags, we can't sail for 5 days without first asking for a loan from either Japan or China! This is a massive loss of face. How can we negotiate or intimidate if we have to first ask for money? This is like a 13 year old girl spitting at her mother and then demanding an allowance so she can go off to parties and not clean her room.

Japan didn't mind bankrolling us so long as we obeyed them. But the Chinese and Arab kings have bought a bundle of US debts and are swiftly outstripping the Japanese ownership. And the US has become a mess and can't intimidate bin Laden much less, Hu and Wen. When Bush boasted to the world, he would get bin Laden, 'Dead or alive' and then later, said, 'Who cares if he is in a cave with a door open or a door closed? He doesn't matter anymore.' We lost face. Aside from the bizarre idea that caves have doors.

Our ruler can audition for a role in 'Planet of the Apes' but not as one of the gorillas. Maybe as a lab specimen. His shortcomings have increased as his popularity ratings here have collapsed. All world leader know that they can ridicule him, defy him and run circles around him and he would remain clueless. Right now, we suspect the US is still going to attack Iran kitty, that irate feline who scratches our economy to the point that we are bleeding to death.

Since we are insisting on doing stupid things to the kitty over there, the Asian giants have decided it is time to directly deal with each other. China has one thing it wants above all else: Taiwan. Japan will trade on that issue since Japan wants China to join them in preventing the US and Europe from closing markets or if they close or go bankrupt, China and Japan need a Plan B. Which is to form a Chinese version of a Co-Prosperity Sphere. Neither countries are blocking out the US or Europe, both love selling to these destinations.

But they have to protect themselves from a potential US collapse. This is a bad sign for us. It may mean our situation is worse than we thought. Enforcing silence within the US financial community, the biggest players especially Goldman Sachs have been able to confine talk of a collapse to the 'bear' community online. Barely a whisper of the real mess is making the mainstream news. Perhaps Bloomberg News is one of the few who give the unadulterated truth about 50% of what is really going on.

But the Japanese and Chinese top officials can read charts and graphs! They know what is going to happen next, Japan, after all, is still dealing with the 1991 blow-up. So they have a good idea, what is in store for us. And I suggest, we will be buying a lot less Asian goods in 10 years.

Japan and China will try to do so before Japan's Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda visits Beijing, an official from Japan's Foreign Ministry, who declined to be identified, said today. The timing of the visit hasn't yet been set.

``Generally speaking, we had a good discussion before Prime Minister Fukuda's visit to China,'' Komura said.

Note that the Japanese are no longer insulting China. No more visits to the Yakusuni Shrine! No more demands that China disarm. No more demands of any sort. The last two months, China has driven the yen up and up and the Japanese can't stand this any longer. I consider these negotiations to be classic Japanese: when they surrender, they embrace and don't let go.

Just a year ago, relations were quite bad. Koizumi wanted very close relations with Bush and on top of that, openly insulted the entire US army, navy and air force by openly and repeatedly worshipping war criminals. I warned the US to condemn this and demand an apology but instead, Bush had lots of fun with Koizumi afterwards. This was a fatal overlooking of an obvious insult. We lost face. Badly. The Japanese have various ways of signaling a change in direction.

Recently, we have been watching a Japanese anime which was on TV this year called Siunkoku Monogatari' which is about an empire similar to medieval China. The Chinese government ordered a big cutback in Japanese animation shows when relations soured last year. Now that is being rescinded and it is no surprise to see a show which flatters the Chinese, airing on Japanese and at the same time, on Chinese TV.

This show starts out being a classic love story but ends up actually being mostly about diplomacy, negotiating business treaties and organizing research centers hosted by the government but paid for by interested businesses! How modern is that? I watch this show with a lot of fascination as it veers deeper and deeper into modern international relationships and government initiatives clashing with merchant's needs to make a profit. I believe this show and others like it, are a signal that Japan is shifting its stance and is now triangulating with China and the US. A historic change.

Japan is China's third-largest trading partner and second- largest source of foreign direct investment, China's Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan said today. Zeng, as the first Chinese official speaking at the economic dialogue today, noted problems in bilateral economic ties, including slowing trade growth, obstacles in technology cooperation and ``fluctuations'' in Japan's investment in China. He didn't elaborate.

``China's development is not a threat to Japan but an opportunity and Japan's development will also help China's sustained economic growth,'' Zeng said.

Ah! And here it is! He doesn't need to elaborate, the complex dance is just beginning and he won't spoil it by explaining what is, to both himself and the Japanese envoy, something painfully obvious. I am curious about the 'fluctuations' in investments. I have noticed that Japan has tried to move things to India and Vietnam lately. Perhaps, this is what the Chinese are addressing. The last sentence seems to me to be the olive branch held out to Japan. I can't wait to see what Hu will hammer out later. Hu never has visits unless he has some contracts to sign! Except with Bush.

China to allow foreign governments to issue yuan bonds

China is mulling to allow qualified foreign governments to issue yuan-denominated bonds on domestic capital market, the country's Finance Minister Xie Xuren said Saturday.

"We are actively doing researches on bond issuance of foreign governments in China," Xie made the comment at the first China-Japan high-level economic dialogue held in Beijing.

China allowed international development organizations to issue yuan-denominated bonds on the domestic capital market in 2005.

If we take this story and put it next to the above story about the Japanese/Chinese lovefest, we can see that the Chinese are now inviting foreign funds into China. This is bad news for the US. We need a flood of foreign funds to come here to offset our gigantic trade deficit with Asia and the oil pumping powers like Canada. China is also beginning to use the yuan as an international currency. I suppose they will try to get the Japanese to do the same. We shall see! The wrestling match between the yuan and yen are now showing signs of being resolved.

Chinese beauty Zhang Zilin took the crown in the final round of contest of the Miss World Pageant 2007, which concluded Saturday in Sanya, a tourist resort of south China's island province Hainan.

And China is winning beauty contests! Oh no. Another diplomatic triumph. I couldn't resist this one. Definitely, China is emerging from its shell. My parents went there in the early 1970's and everyone had to wear ugly uniforms and the women had to clip their hair and it was very dreary, one big, ugly prison camp. If you wanted to grow flowers, they were dug up and the gardener declared a criminal. Now, they are going back to their long history of appreciation of beauty. Of course, the standards change over time. No foot binding, thank heavens, this time around.

China-Arab dialogue on civilization opens in Riyadh

Officials and scholars from China and Arab countries met here Saturday for the second seminar on China-Arab relations and a discussion on civilization.

Chinese delegation head and former Foreign Minister Yang Fuchang said at the inauguration ceremony that strengthened cultural exchanges between China and Arab countries will play a significant role in promoting China-Arab friendly cooperative relations and in helping maintain peace and stability in the Mideast region.

Saudi Culture and Information Minister Iyad bin Amin Madani said the China-Arab discussion on civilization is conducive to deepening understanding. It is essential for both sides to strengthen communications and cooperation in various fields to jointly prepare for the challenges brought about by globalization, he said.

The Saudis can see clearly how bad off we are. After all, they sit on the Board of Directors of many major banks, investment houses and businesses in the US and England! They just rescued Citigroup yet again! So they know who the real boss is. And we irritate them. The Chinese don't care what religion they are, where they bow, what they want in the Holy Land. China just wants to make money. No matter what. Slowly but surely, China is edging us out. The US thought, all we had to do was corrupt the kings and sheiks and they would be our bitches. We didn't care if everyone else hated us.

Well, here we are yet again, trying to 'solve' the mess in the Holy Land. And it won't be solved. It will continue to fester. But we don't see raging mobs so we think, we have won. We got our olive trees and mud huts from the poor Palestinians. They will be banished and we can laugh. Only this is deceptive.

Return to Aden, without Mad Mitch

Colonial Aden expired under a state of emergency. British civilians like me were given revolvers because of the risk of assassination.

The heart of the insurgency was Crater, an Arab town nestling in the hot embrace of an extinct volcano.

It was here that a mutiny by the British-trained Aden armed police in mid-1967 led to a massacre of British troops.

British troops reacted forcibly to demonstrations in 1967
As the British high command and London government hesitated, a controversial colonel named Colin Mitchell seized the initiative.

He re-occupied Crater with his Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders - earning the nickname Mad Mitch - and in Fleet Street's judgment he restored British military honour.

This is a little reminder as to why the EU/UK/US coalition to colonize and control Muslims is doomed to more failures. After being kicked out of one Arab country after another, after the triumphant allies of WWII struggled to keep the third world chained to the old, creaking imperial war machines, they always professes shock and surprise as natives fought them off. As always, we beat up unarmed demonstrators. The British were famous for that. They often used tremendous violence, shooting people dead like in Ireland or India. There is little to be proud of here. Tony Blair and Bush are now trying to bring 'peace' again in the Holy Land which means to kill or steal more stuff, of course. We will not go away.

They are watching us. Everyone can see what will happen next. Slowly, as we slide off the economic cliff, they all watch with bated breath. The Chinese know this which is why they are now poking around, suggesting everyone triangulate with them. And the answer is 'yes.' The Iraq war has weakened us politically, economically and diplomatically.

PRC denies entry to more US carriers

The saga over China's refusal to allow US warships to enter Hong Kong took another twist on Friday, when it was confirmed that Beijing had rejected more US requests for a holiday visit and a consulate support flight to Hong Kong.

Beijing told Washington on Nov. 22 that it was rejecting a request for a New Year's visit by the USS Reuben James, Pentagon East Asia public affairs officer Stewart Upton told the Taipei Times.

That was the same date that Beijing told Washington it made a mistake in rejecting a request by the USS Kitty Hawk and its battle group to visit Hong Kong for Thanksgiving. But by that time, it was too late, and the group sailed back to its Japanese base.

At the same time it rejected the Navy frigate Reuben James' visit, Beijing also nixed the flight of a C-17 cargo plane to Hong Kong for its scheduled quarterly support mission for the US consulate, Upton said.

The Chinese might as well throw a pie in our faces. After all, we decided to be Clarabella the Clown! Why on earth are we sending ships there in the first place? We should have stopped doing this the day the Kitty Hawk was sent off, tail between its legs. Instead, we demanded an explanation. China gave it in private. . We lied about this and China repeated it in public. More pie in our faces only we threw it into our own face this time. So now what? Will we go whining to the rest of the world which is laughing at us? Go to Japan? HAHAHA. Back, meet knife.

Putin signs measure to suspend Europe arms treaty

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed into law a measure that will suspend the nation's responsibilities under the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty [text; backgrounder]. The Federation Council of Russia, Russia's upper house, unanimously approved the measure earlier this month following a unanimous vote in the State Duma [JURIST report] in favor of suspending the CFE. The Russian government first threatened to temporarily withdraw from the treaty in June, amid tensions between the US and Russia over US plans for an anti-missile defense shield in central Europe, which Russia perceives to be a threat to Russian national security. The measure legislatively reinforces a presidential decree issued by Putin in July.

The US shouldn't be playing these games in Europe. We gain nothing from it. Eastern Europe wants to spit in Russia's eye. This endangers the US so we should not help them. But we think this is the Cold War and are happy to have yet another confrontation we will lose. Europe has been yelling at Russia to not use energy as a diplomatic tool and Russia has simply tightened the screws. How tight does Europe want them? Do they imagine, when the US goes bankrupt, all will be well? They should ask Japan about triangles.

NY Pols Assail Proposed Anti-Terror Cuts

A Bush administration plan to slash anti-terror grant programs by more than half would threaten the safety of U.S. cities, several New York politicians charged Saturday.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer blasted the Bush administration's plan to eliminate some port and rail security programs and cut Homeland Security grants for states and cities from $3.4 billion in the fiscal year 2007 to $1.4 billion in 2009.

``To say, no port security, no transit security, when we know that our ports and transit lines are targets for terrorists makes no sense if you want to protect America,'' said Schumer, D-N.Y.

What can we make of this? We are going bankrupt trying to hold down Iraq and we saw clearly on 9/11 that the US military is utterly incapable of protecting us. The only thing I can think is, the guys running our country into the ground want us to be vulnerable to attack. This is so they can herd us again. And we will be attacked! If we are stupid and have stupid diplomacy, the chances that someone will attack us is very high! How stupid is that?

Time to threaten Iran Kitty with annihilation. By the way, I strongly suggest Chuck Zionism Schumer cut all of Israel's US funds, there is $10 billion sitting there which can be tapped! Then he can use it to protect New York City. How about that? And that will never happen. Never.

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