Why Obama Should Tell Bibi Netanyahu to go Bugger Himself

Ah, good times. A time to throw red meat to the Neanderthals parked round their infotainment centers. A time for former house painters, CBS flunkies, and mean reverting oxycontin addicted Top 40 radio station DJ's to cry "Ecce Homo" - yes behold the Man-President who would trash the Zionist-American relationship. Throw in the Mormon whose college career consisted in dropping out of a Christology class at Yale Divinity School and the zoo keepers shine forth in all their populist 'fair-and-balanced' integrity and concern for Israel.

What the rabid right shares with Osama Bin Laden is the view that the President is somehow an apostate Muslim. Just look at that name for Chrissake. Yet this is important. It is an ingress for us into Girard's Mimetic Theory of Violence - a characteristic of which is that the antagonists increasingly resemble each other and mirror the others' hatred. One of my reservations about the Girardians, however, concerns how little space they've devoted to comparing the similiarities in the bizarre love/hate triangle of the three great monotheistic faiths - except to hint at some vague triumphalism for Christianity and its concern for the victim.

On first glance at the picture above it would perhaps be easy to mistake it for one of Al-Queda's 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania or Kenya. In fact, it is a picture of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem after it's bombing by the Irgun in 1946 with the tacit knowledge of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency. Irgun and the JA would of course, produce two Israeli Prime Ministers - Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion, the former actually being in on the plot and the latter having knowledge of it. Yet Americans could gnash their teeth and wring their hands over the likes of Arafat, who merely mirrored Begin's and Irgun's 'freedom fighting' tactics. Incidentally, the King David Hotel bombing still has the distinction of being the single deadliest act of terrorism inside of Israel, and it was committed by Jewish terrorists. But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, as Bibi Netanyahu was still eager to point out when he attended a 60 year anniversary of the bombing in 2006 and sought to morally differentiate the Irgun, Israel, himself, from equivalency with the Palestinean (as in ARABS) 'terrorists'. Bibi and all the rest of the Irgun apologists truly think they did nothing wrong. By the logic of Irgun and Israel, which commemorates the site with a plaque not as a tragedy, but as a stepping stone to Israeli statehood two years subsequent, every Palestinean (ARAB) act of terrorism that might eventuate in a Palestinean state is LEGITIMATIZED. If Obama is to be an honest broker, he must rub Netanyahu's face in the shit-stew no less than Hamas or the figment that remains of the PLO.

An Exasperating White Dwarf

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven of afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark."
Stephen Hawking (2011)

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships...having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they might reach."
Stephen Hawking (2010)

I get it. In Stephen Hawking's worst dreams anthropomorphized aliens engage in acts of terrorism equivalent to British Soldiers handing out smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans. How scientific. We must brush aside Paul's seventh heaven and make elbow room for Hawking's umpteenth universe. At the same time, like a little child, he is half afraid of what he might find out there in dark.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Bomb

Sure, I wouldn't run my household finances that way, but I don't have the ability to borrow money from foreigners for thirty years at 4.27%. As usual, Americans got it bass ackwards, they have their panties in an uproar, they have a wild hair up their ass, their right hand doesn't know what their far right hand is doing, they don't know where their children are, they can't see the forest for the trees, etc etc etc. They piss into the wind and complain when it sprinkles their Reeboks, they shit in the river and complain its too polluted to swim in, they are bigger drama queens than Hamlet, and not half as well spoken.

What about our children? We can't leave them all that debt.

Sure we can. We've been doing it for thirty years. If you owe a bank ten grand and you can't pay, you're in trouble. If you owe a bank a million dollars and you can't pay - the bank is in trouble. Old Wall Street adage. Adjust numbers to your heart's content for inflation. Their future monetary hegemony is assured with each incremental increase in the national debt. We are the terrorists, and we have a debt bomb.

The Chinese and other foreigners own so much of our debt. So what. Are those T-Notes, bills, and bonds secured by real property? No, just the full faith and credit of the US government. Was the phrase caveat emptor ever more appropriate? Nobody is being fooled here. If they want a real return of less than 200 basis points for loaning us money that doesn't have to be paid back for thirty years, well, then let them have at it, and let us spend it on Social Security, Education, Medicare, Universal Healthcare, National Public Radio, etc etc etc. The Federal government is not required to balance its budget like the states, and that is its virtue. Unfathomable for a nation that threw itself a back to back stock market and housing bubbles to suddenly behave like pikers.