For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived

While there are a lot of other comments I probably should make, my favorite one is that there are a few individuals who seem to me might benefit from a mild exorcism, even though they happen not to be Catholics.

Perhaps the Holy See can do some dispensation for outreach, in these kinds of cases.

RE THROWING FREE TRADE OVERBOARD EDITORIAL NYT

I suppose it is better late than never.

It seems to take a non-Democrat-non-Republican

to see something long obvious like that.

CYRIL FALLS' INAUGURAL LECTURE EXCERPT

"INDEED, ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES OF OUR COUNTRY HAS BEEN THE FACT THAT IT IS AS RESISTANT TO UNPALATABLE ADVICE AS A BIRD'S FEATHERS ARE TO RAIN."

This was a rather nice lecture, back in 1946.

Re Back to a Gold Standard?

See comment re Mark Thoma's Editorial, Economist's View blog:

"Gold During The Depression"

He, they, claims that without floating rate currencies,

economists lose the chance to control domestic economies.

Hello, in a globalized world, a bubble world largely enabled by floating fiat currencies, economists have created a situation where economists can no longer control 'domestic economies'

anyway.

Re Throwing The Bums Out Editorial NYT Nov 6

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07kennedy.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

He draws a great thumbnail sketch of the Gilded Age, and shows a lot of material from which a thinking person might conclude that some fundamental reforms in the American system have long been desperately needed, but not a breath of such a thing passes his lips.

re NYT EDITORIAL TODAY

Countries See Hazards in Free Flow of Capital.

The next step will be nationalization, a process that has been surreptitiously going on, in international intellectual property, for decades now, anyway.

A Real, Property Rights hold up........

Now that's what I call big big 'property rights'.

American property rights advocates identify 'strong property rights' with free (the Casanova hand) trade.

This article: Just another tell tale sign of

GAME OVER.........

RE NYT TODAY EDITORIAL KOREA TRADE 'DEAL' TRADING AMERICAN INTEREST TRADING PLACES AGAIN AND AGAIN

"This is an opportunity that we can’t let lapse, for economic growth in our country and also for a long-term presence in the region, particularly as it relates to China,.."

You figure out what this might really mean.

Re David Kaiser's current post

He refers to previous losers in national crises, business interests and white southerners, in a previous post from 6 years ago:

"How did We Come so Far? The Meaning of Tuesday's Election"

Interesting reading.

RE Where Do We Go From Here?

See David Kaiser's current post.

This is perhaps my favorite phrase "...they have become more and more detached from reality--...."

I have been reading Hanna Arendt, Origins, on and off, and she has some very interesting passages, mid book, Ch. 11 especially sec. II, on themes I see as somewhat similar, what I would call the 'plasticity', as it were, and mediatedness, of political reality.

RE NICHOLAS KRISTOF SUNDAY EDITORIAL BANANA BONOBO REPUBLIC PYRAMID OF EXPERTS PHILOSOPHERS AND YES SLAPSTICK LAISSEZ FAIRE

'Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.'

This QUOTE could be the caption below

for a lone bonobo totem pole, pictured with the familiar three bonobos in a zigzag pyramid. These might each have a different expertise written in block capitals across their chests, Economist, Think Tank, Philosopher, Asia Expert, etc

There need to be actual banana peels all around the pyramid, and them each eating one with one hand.

A fourth bonobo is slipping down on a peel while running by. He might be labelled Europe.

THE CAPTION ABOVE

SLAP STICK LAISSEZ FAIRE

RE THE DEFINING PARTNERSHIP FOR THE 21ST CENTURY MISE EN SCENE WEST SIDE STORY G20

We show an elegant ballroom.

The President and Premier Singh are dancing the tango together, both in suits.

However, the President is the male partner for this particularly dramatic moment in the dance.

There are one or two other identifiable pairs on the dance floor, looking on, with various expressions of emotion.

There are about G20 individuals on the side lines.These should be arrayed in groups or cliques based on ethnic, national, or racial characteristics. Think West Side Story.

Certain groups can be snapping their fingers, facing one direction, etc., in unison........

They eye each other with suspicion, etc., etc.

The caption above

EAST SIDE STORY

The caption below

The Defining Partnership For The 21st Century.

Zoellick Pushes Gold Standard Debate

Thestreet.com article today.

Zoellick Pushes Gold Standard.....

Me too. If you can't carry out needed policies without debasing a currency as part of that process, give it up. Fiat money sanctions cutthroat devaluations.The currencies themselves are backed by nothing verifiable.

There are other ways to accomplish policy while keeping an objective standard for a currency. Claims that fiat money are needed to stimulate, or retard, or something else, are specious because other mechanisms can be used. You can have runs on banks because the deposits do not stand for specie, but rather stand for claims to fiat currency. 'Finance', and speculative investments, divorced from specie discipline, are a big part of what got us here.

We weren't following a strict gold standard, even until 71.

RE KRUGMAN'S DOING IT AGAIN

He has the best advice, from an economist, but our status now does not seem open to mere Keynsian efforts like those begun shortly before WW II.

Additionally, I would point out that Bernanke's speech 8 years ago re Friedman's claim perpetuates a false account both of the causes and 'cure' for the Depression, and of the role and capacity of the 1920s Fed, or the 2010s Fed.

Many other causes played into the Depression, causes not directly susceptible to mere Fed manipulation, even back then. It's a long list.

Similarly, but perhaps more so, today.

Realecontv the situation from an Asian perspective

http://www.realecontv.com/page/667.html

MISE EN SCENE BUS STOP MAVERICK EXECUTIVE MARILYN FREE TRADE HUMAN RIGHTS HOLD UP AND UGLY PHILOSOPHERS

We show the Maverick in his cowboy get up, dressed for the rodeo, with six shooters strapped on, ten gallon hat; Uncle Sam goatee. He has dismounted an older mare. He is wearing a prominent Sheriff's Badge with pointy ends.

He has stopped a stage coach (the large old kind, seen in Westerns; 'Wells Fargo' painted somewhere) in a desert landscape; small circular sign, atop a waist-high pole stand, nearby says BUS STOP; tall cactus etc. We could also show a 'bonobo' Indian Totem Pole 'Pyramid of Experts' somewhere, three bonobos tall, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, just to add the recent philosophers' and experts' dimensions to the scene.

We see the coach relatively close up, from the side, so that we see inside windows on each side of the open stage coach door in the middle.

The coach is full of disparately dressed individuals.

He has already got one of them out of the coach and is standing next to the coach brandishing a six shooter at this unarmed individual, and has him by the scruff of the neck with the other hand. The Maverick has a Clint Eastwood type cigar stub in his mouth as he is talking.

This passenger might be a plump Arab, Mexican, Asian, or Indian-looking 'business man', 19th Century garb. He might also be Gandhi; Nehru jacket etc. He looks real scared. He is weighed down by two large, heavily stuffed, 'carpet bags', one in each hand.

A Marilyn Monroe figure, dressed in tight jeans and a tight white open blouse, as in The Misfits, is standing at the stop, holding a furled umbrella at arm's length pointed down smartly at an angle to her booted foot. Her blouse reads across the bosomy front, in block capitals 'I LOVE PHILOSOPHY'.

The caption above

Enforcing Human Rights and Free Trade 'In the Territories'

The caption below, he is saying

(

Think of 'Dusty''s voice from Tales of The Cowboys, Garrison Keillor.)

:

Mister, Stick 'Em Up! (Or: Stick Em Up Shorty!)

Don't give me that

'no direct investment' mambo jambo.

That jabber's for city slickers.

Gimme All Yur Free Trade, Now,

and Nobody'll Get Hurt: That's Yur Human Rites.

RE OBAMA INVOKES GANDHI FOR AGGRESSIVELY DEVELOPING INDIA

Nice thot.

But, unfortunately, Hitler, Stalin, and others we shall not name,

would have made very short work of Gandhi.

RE THE REAL GLOBALIST 'FREE RIDERS'

These are the regimes which have to globalize, and stay ever greater globalized, imperialize in the words of some analysts, in order to ostensibly try to maintain basic internal political stability.

This strategy, oddly utopian in its economic aspect and origin, yet starkly realist in political history, has been doomed, in the long run, as an inherently self-defeating politico-economic-military program.

RE EXPORTING OUR WAY TO STABILITY THE LAZY FARE WAY FREE RIDERS BEGGAR THY NEIGHBOR THE REAL ROAD TO SERFDOM

The President's essay. A noble exposition. A continuing exhortation, in its way, of the 'real' lazy fare "Road To Serfdom" which we have been following for a long time now.

Unfortunately, exporting and importing, and foreign direct investment,have been the engines of slowly gathering impoverishment, not prosperity, for developed nations, for the past 50 years. Terms like 'excess capacity', including labor capacity, spring to mind.

Because our 'system' turned on it major corporations only moments after having abandoned its average citizens, those corporations, now MNCS with largely foreign constituencies, have long since abandoned the domestic economy they were originally incorporated, state by state, to serve.

It used to be common among economists, and politicians aped them, to trumpet notions like 'free rider', to decry so called 'beggar thy neighbor' policies of protectionist developmental states like Japan and China; when they were perceived to be merely small lazy fare parasites on the 'free' world economy.

Only a few years later, they are recognized to be not only not merely parasites, but the second or third largest economies, by these techniques. Of what, of what is left, can they meaningfully be said to be 'free riding'?

US Presidents' foreign policies, including the current one, are largely responsible for what has gotten advanced nations into the power morass they have now been in for a while.

Producing is great, rather than consuming, but stability has to be based primarily on domestic industrial and commercial policies, not on 'economics', and not primarily on trade; nor will long term prosperity come from that direction, particularly for developed and declining advanced economies which embrace lazy fare.

Further, and this really shows where the ball has been dropped, military power, and security, still have to be based largely on a strong and socially coherent domestic social and political base, not primarily on diplomatic/strategic/trade negotiations, on deals bargaining access to markets, or on a compartmentalized, and mercenarized, military paradigm.

Trading commercial for OSTENSIBLE, AND FRANKLY, ILLUSORY, military or diplomatic advantage has been a fool's paradise for 5 decades now. One's partners turn into, at best, one's commercial adversaries, in short order.

Re Barry Blitt image re security umbrella Middle East Shield of Achilles

He has, under his Hoo Haw section, an image of Marilyn Monroe, covered over, but above the subway vent, with skirt spread umbrella-like.

Why not show this as an image of a security umbrella for the Middle East, with this type of image descending, similarly to Mary Poppins in others I have described, from say 10 feet above the ground, over a desert landscape, with date palm trees at an oasis, plus a spring, at near right or left.

The caption above:

Middle East Security Blanket deploying.

The Caption below:

The Shield Of Achilles

RE CARTOON MIS EN SCENE SECURITY UMBRELLA STATUS NOW

This is a take off on previous posts, re Lear as Uncle Sam.

It might be good to continue with President Obama in drag as Cordelia.

At least he is shown in that role as faithful to Old Glory.

Other parties' notables could be suitably, and threateningly, arrayed.

We could show a scene in the play where Lear is mad,

it is raining, pouring, he is wailing,

think of one of Daumier's better dynamic 'rain scenes',

he needs a shield, a large, picnic table size, umbrella,

call it 'The Shield Of Achilles',

or something,

and is offered a small, delicate, and true, parasol,

by Cordelia.