Lehman and the Collapse of the Shadow Banking System

It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.

Nouriel Roubini - let me elaborate in much detail on these issues…

Executive Experience

This morning's NYTimes does a big story on Gov. Paling - Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes;

Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Paling is a reformer. Not a typical Washington spend, corrupt, feather your own nest politician. Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal. You can take THAT to the bank.....,

McCain: Palin Is Top Energy Expert In US, Understands Russia

Preacher's Kid Syndrome

It is a challenge to raise a family in the public eye. Sometimes our kids demonstrate negative behavior, and it brings a form of shame to our ministry. How we respond makes all the difference in the world—and in what we are modeling for the child-raising parents of our congregations.

Our children require a great deal of love and attention from us, and often we feel the demands of church and ministry are overwhelming.

Through observations made in over 22 years of children’s ministry, my wife and I have found that when young children act up in public, it is usually because they are experiencing a lack of love and attention in the home. PKs and their parents have experienced these problems since Bible times. Read between the lines when studying the accounts of Absalom and David (2 Samuel 18:33), or Hophni and Phinehas and their dad, Eli the priest (1 Samuel 2:12–34). Think about the lack of child raising that brought about such tragedies. We have all seen the fallout in our day: The pastor whose grown daughter calls every weekend in a drunken stupor; the district official who, unable to sleep, goes out to a lonely field late at night and cries out to God for the life of his drug-dealing child.

There can be no doubt—our children require a great deal of love and attention from us, and often we feel the demands of church and ministry are overwhelming. Some pastoral families have dual-working parents; some pastors’ wives are also employed by the church. Church committees, ministry programs, and church office work take her time. How can we strike the balance between home and church that we advocate from our pulpits?

Perhaps taking a different approach will help. Most of us would agree that our children are on loan to us by God. They are not our possessions; we do not own them. We are to invest in them, and then disburse them into the kingdom of God. Like Jesus’ parable of the profitable and unprofitable servants, we are to invest that which He has entrusted to us for the growth and blessing of the Kingdom.

Our children are searching for love and attention. This means spending time with our children. The investment of time with our children pays rich and long-lasting dividends. When we are convinced that the investment of time in our children will pay these dividends—peace, joy, harmony, and clarity—we will take the steps necessary to achieve it.

Robb Dunham is an Assemblies of God family and children’s evangelist with a nationwide ministry called SuperKidz 4 Christ. He lives in Denver, Colorado. You can read more on this subject at the Assemblies of God USA Enrichment Journal.

Oxycontin Addiction?

The National Enquirer knows no bounds and shows no restraint in going after Gov. Paling's children;

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Sarah's oldest son, Track, was addicted to the power drug OxyContin for nearly the past two years, snorting it, eating it, smoking it and even injecting it. And as Track, 19, heads to Iraq as part of the U.S. armed forces, Sarah and her husband Todd were powerless to stop his wild antics, detailed in the new issue of The ENQUIRER, which goes on sale today.

THE ENQUIRER also has exclusive details about Track's use of other drugs, including cocaine, and his involvement in a notorious local vandalism incident.

“I’ve partied with him (Track) for years,” a source disclosed. “I’ve seen him snort cocaine, snort and smoke OxyContin, drink booze and smoke weed.”

The source also divulged the girls would do anything for Track and he’d use his local celebrity status to manipulate other guys “to get them to steal things he wanted.”

“He finally did what a lot of troubled kids here do,” the source divulged. “You join the military.”

And as Gov. Palin has billed the state of Alaska for various expenses related to her children, as reported by The Washington Post, The ENQUIRER's investigation reveals that she was so incensed by 17-year-old Bristol's pregnancy that she banished her daughter from the house.

Another family friend revealed pre-prego Bristol was as much of a hard partier as Track was.

“Bristol was a huge stoner and drinker. I’ve seen her smoke pot and get drunk and make out with so many guys. All the guys would brag that the just made out with Bristol.”

When will this ferocious lambasting end? Is there no basic decency remaining in the zero-sum theatrics of American politics? What next, indecent scrutiny and reckless eyeballing of John McCain's physical limitations?

a culture of ethical failure?

WASHINGTON: As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal - including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

The culture of the organization "appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program," one report said.

The director of the Minerals Management Service, Randall Luthi, said in a conference call with reporters that the officials implicated in the reports had violated the public's trust.

Based in suburban Denver and modeled to operate like a private-sector energy company, the decade-old royalty-in-kind program sells oil and gas on the open market. Its employees are subject to government ethics rules, such as restrictions on taking gifts from people and companies with whom they conduct official business.

One of the reports says that the officials viewed themselves as exempt from those limits, indulging themselves in the expense-account-fueled world of oil and gas executives.

No Gas Gauging in Seattle...,

This just in from Big Don; Dealers up here apparently haven't figgered out yet what they can get away with. These pix are 30 minutes old, lowest we've seen here since before the four-dollar era started...

Being in Base Denial

Imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations… Well, they were often something to behold -- and they still are[...]

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.

And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here. For the rest of you who want to know more - read on here Being in Base Denial - at tomdispatch.com.

WaMu RIP....,

Since the quasi-nationalisation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last, investor attention has now turned to Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers, with many questioning their ability to survive at their current capitalisation. Their problems have been compounded this week as investors have deserted them. By midday Thursday in the US shares in Washington Mutual had halved over the week. Its share price fell from $4.12 at the opening bell on Monday to $1.89. The bank’s 52-month high on 19 September 2007 was $39.25.

If Washington Mutual goes into administration I don't believe the Federal deposit system has enough funds to rescue it. In this morning's Chicago Sun-Times;

Investors remained wary about buying financial stocks in a climate where the spiraling credit crisis already has felled one major investment bank, Bear Stearns Cos., and brought another, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., to the brink of a possible fire sale. In addition, 11 retail banks have been seized by the government.

''Every time we have these types of financial crises, you have casualties,'' said Dan Veru, co-chief investment officer of Palisade Capital Management in New Jersey. ''You get rid of the weak players and at the end of the day the strong players are stronger.''

Wall Street is contemplating WaMu's future after the nation's largest savings and loan pre-released some third-quarter financial metrics in an attempt to reassure the market late Thursday. The shares ended the week down 36 percent.

The bank insisted it has adequate capital to fund its operations even as it announced another multibillion dollar write-down on bad mortgage loans. But ratings agencies Moody's and Fitch cautioned that WaMu may not be able to raise additional funds.

First IndyMac, now the nations biggest S&L out there in killaCali. Looks like the California wing of the U.S. financial system is going to fall into the ocean first and take the rest of the system with it...,

Russians Not Impressed.....,

In Pravda - The Devil in Disguise. The candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States of America, whose experience in small town politics, mothers´day dos and the local hockey club is her claim to fame, threatened to open the gates of Hell by attacking Russia in the event of another invasion of Georgia in a televised interview on ABC (shown today). One question for this self-opinionated upstart: Do you know what a nuclear holocaust is?

Sarah Palin, Mrs. Nobody know-it-all shreiking cow from Alaska, the joke of American politics, plied with a couple of vodkas before letting rip in front of incredulous audiences while McCain coos in the background, cuts a ridiculous figure as she strives to be taken seriously.

How can anyone whose husband is a member of the Alaska Independence Party and who is running for the Vice Presidency of the Union be taken seriously? How indeed can the Republican Party be taken seriously for not vetting this female, or have they not yet discovered the skeletons in her closet? We have.

So Sarah Palin, Mrs. Hockey Mom housewife-cum-small-town gossip merchant and cheap little guttersnipe, suppose you shut up and allowed real politicians and diplomats to do their work? Threatening Russia with a war is perhaps the most irresponsible thing anyone could do at this moment in time. Have you any idea what a nuclear holocaust is? Have you any notion of the power of Russia’s armed forces? Did you know that Russia has enough missiles to destroy any target anywhere on Earth in seconds?

And have you not forgotten, you pith-headed little bimbo from the back of beyond, that small detail about the slaughter of Russian citizens by Georgians, which started the whole debacle? So next time suppose you keep your mouth shut and while you’re at it, make sure the members of your family keep their legs shut too. Your country has enough failed mothers as it is.

Gov. Palin's Worldview...,

In today's NYTimes;

It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.

What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.

The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.

One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.

The interviews made clear why Americans should worry about Ms. Palin’s thin résumé and lack of experience. Consider her befuddlement when Mr. Gibson referred to President Bush’s “doctrine” and her remark about having insight into Russia because she can see it from her state.

But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.

Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”

Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”

Call Me a Cynic...,

Backpeddling Blizzard of Moronic Mendacity...,

Palin defended a previous statement in which she reportedly characterized the war in Iraq as a "task from God."

Gibson quoted her as saying: "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God."

But Palin said she was referencing a famous quote by Abraham Lincoln.

"I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side."

All My Questions Have Been Answered....,

The following excerpts are from the ABC News exclusive interview with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in Fairbanks, Alaska, conducted by "World News" anchor Charlie Gibson on September 11, 2008.

Some of it simply has to be read to be believed. Just to make sure you that you actually heard what you thought you heard. Like Charles, I too got lost in a blizzard of vaccuous, ignorant verbiage.

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard…

“The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even a mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second or third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

—H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920 (hat tip to my man rembom)

Obama and the Palin Effect

Thanks to my man Sub, I've been made aware of Deepak Chopra's political blogging. Apparently, Dr. Chopra has been mulling over the psychological implications of the presidential election too;

Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses . In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Incidentally, "paling" is dutch for eel. It refers to the slithering, serpent-like movement of the eel....., I posted something to this effect a couple of weeks ago. My concluding thought to that post remains mostly unchanged today; And that my friends, is exactly the way it is. Not that I believe the popular mandate and the selected manager of federal executive branch operations is the final arbiter and shot caller, but as a windsock for public opinion - he ABSOLUTELY serves a critical role for TPTB who must guage, assuage, and ultimately co-opt the political will of the masses. I might expand on that notion a little by adding that what America next expresses about itself - "our" intentions and meaning - will be embodied in this upcoming presidential selection. The world is waiting to see what America's intentions will be....,

Fish Wrapped in Paper is Sexist Too....,

In this morning's edition of Crappy Hour, Megan Carpentier joked:

Anyway, what I want to know is how come since Obama's next line was about stinky rotten fish, no former female Massachusetts governor is calling out Obama for making inappropriate comments about the smell of Sarah Palin's vagina? Huh, Jane Swift? Did you miss that? Because I really think commenting on vaginal odor is, like, totally worse than saying she looks pig-like, not that he said that either but if this is taking-fake-offense day, that's the fake offense I'm taking.

When I read this earlier, I thought to myself, "Ha ha! Good one, Megan! That would indeed be THE STUPIDEST THING IN THE WORLD." But I'm not laughing anymore! Because "fish in a wrapper" is precisely the fake offense the McCain camp is faking being offended by now! Marsha Blackburn, in the course of going on MSNBC and making not a lick of sense at all, took up the very line of attack that Megan was satirizing, telling Tamron Hall:

BLACKBURN: It's what women of America are beginning to see. Because Senator Obama had the choice of Senator Clinton or Governor Sebelius to go in the number two spot on that ticket. He passed over them. The comments he made last night. He followed the lipstick on a pig comment with talking about old fish wrapped in paper. Senator Obama is a smart man. And he is very highly educated. And I think that it was unfortunate. He knew what he was speaking, the words he was speaking.

Yes, that's Marsha Blackburn, attempting to make something serious out of a point that Megan Carpentier satirized, mere hours before. Jason Linkins advocating for increasing retaliatory craziness from the Obama campaign in the Huffington Post.

Big Don's Library

"We have an excellent library here. You can use your viewer to zoom in on the titles. Turner Diaries has a hallowed spot on the top shelf next to The Bell Curve."

this picture is worth all the words I could ever muster, and well, some things you just can't make up and must be seen in order to be believed......, (click on the image to view detail)

on the next Jerry Springer.....,

Newsweek covering Sarah Palin's Troopergate scandal;

An Anchorage judge three years ago warned Sarah Palin and members of her family to stop "disparaging" the reputation of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, who at the time was undergoing a bitter separation and divorce from Palin's sister Molly.

Allegations that Palin, her husband Todd, and at least one top gubernatorial aide continued to vilify Wooten—after Palin became Alaska's governor and pressured state police officials to take action against him—are at the center of "Troopergate," a political and ethical controversy which has embroiled Palin's administration and is currently the subject of an official inquiry by a special investigator hired by the state legislature.

Court records obtained by NEWSWEEK show that during the course of divorce hearings three years ago, Judge John Suddock heard testimony from an official of the Alaska State Troopers' union about how Sarah Palin—then a private citizen—and members of her family, including her father and daughter, lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten with the state police. The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were "not job-related," and that Wooten was being "harassed" by Palin and other family members.

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character. "Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse," the judge told a settlement hearing in October 2005, according to typed notes of the proceedings. The judge added: "Relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives."

Remember that this case sheds light on the pettiness and vindictiveness of Palin who has already demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the well-being of her own teenage daughter and infant son takes a backseat to her personal and political ambition.

A theocrat is a theocrat...,

Prof. Juan Cole writing in Salon asks - What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists?

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy." But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist?

Lipstick.

m e a n i n g i s l i k e t e l e p a t h y

Continuing from the same McKenna talk given in 1987;

Our cultural crisis is deepening. Deepening mainly because we have very poor connections among our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures -- within ourselves as individuals and within ourselves as a society. Our whole problem is that we can't communicate with each other, we can't express intention. Yet the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to unify us, to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention. To carry us forward into a realm of appropriate cultural activity, which is to my mind, the realm beyond history. Beyond history lies effortless and appropriate cultural activity. And nature has proceeded us, as it always does, by laying out models that can be followed to realize this.

As an example, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of history, and there was a whole focusing on the horse archetype. Which in the 20th century, gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high-performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals.

In thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species, I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey, which when you think about it, is the American symbol. It was also the symbol of the Third Reich. A lot of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey, when Alleric the Visigoth burned Eleusis, it was the crow that fluttered on his battle standard as the greasy smoke swept by. These dark birds have been ever with us.

In looking for a new titulary animal and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean, I was drawn to look, strangely enough, at cephalopods, octopi. Because I felt, first of all, they are extremely alien. The break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree, and the mollusca, which is what a cephalopod is, is about 700 million years ago. Nevertheless, and many of you who are students of evolution know, that when evolutionists talk about parallel evolution, they always bring out the example of the optical system of the octopi. Because, isn't
this astonishing? -- it's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely independently. This shows how the same set of external factors impinging on a raw gene pool will inevitably sculpt the same organs or attain the same end, and so forth and so on.

Well, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing. What interested me was their linguistic organization. They are virtually entirely nervous system. First of all, they have eight arms in the case of the octopods, and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods. So coordinating all these organs of manipulation has given them a very capable nervous system as well as a highly evolved ocular system.

But what is really interesting about them is that they communicate with each other by changing the color and texture of their skin and their physical shape. You may know that octopi could change colors, but you may have thought it was camouflage or something very passive like that. It isn't that at all. They have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes, merging pastels, herringbone patterns, tweeds, mottled this-and-thats, can blush from apricot through teal into dove gray and on to olive -- do all of these things communicating to each other. That is what their large optical system is for. It is to be able to see each other.

The other thing which octopi can do -- besides having these chromatophores on the surface of their skin --they can change the texture of the skin surface: can make it rugose, papillaed, smooth, lobed, rubbery, runneled, so forth and so on. And then, of course, being shell-less molluscs, they can hide arms, and display certain parts of themselves and carry on a dance.

When you analyze what is going on here, what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from natural history, begins to take on a more profound aspect. Because it is an ontological transformation of language that is going on in front of you. Note that by being able to communicate visually, they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary. Rather, they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity because each octopus can see what is meant -- this is very important -- can see what is meant. And I think that this heralds, or could be made to herald, a transformation in our own definitions of language and communication.

What we need is to see what we mean. It's not without consequence or implication, that when we try to communicate the notion of clarity of speech, we always shift into visual metaphors: I see what you mean, he painted a picture, his description was very colorful. It means that when we intend to indicate a lack of ambiguity and communication, we shift to visual analogies. This can in fact be actualized. And in fact, this is what is happening in the psychedelic experience. There we discover, just under the surface of human biological organization, the next level in the organization of language: the ability to generate some kind of acoustical hologram that is manipulated by linguistic intent.

Now don't ask me how this happens, because nobody knows how it happens. At this point it's magic. Nevertheless, the fact is it does happen -- you can have this experience. It represents a synesthesia in the presence of ongoing communication. It is, in fact, telepathy. It is not what we thought telepathy would be, which I suppose if you're like me, you imagine telepathy would be hearing what other people think. It isn't that. It's seeing what other people mean. And them also seeing what they mean. So that once something has been communicated, both parties can walk around it and look at it, the way you study a Brancusi, or a Henry Moore in an art gallery.

By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal, and substituting the concreteness of the visual image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be temporarily overcome. And the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality is a much richer notion of ego-death than the kind of white-light, null-states that it has imagined to be. Because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality has political consequences. The political consequences are that one can love one's neighbor, because the commonalty of being is felt. Not reasoned toward, or propagandized into, or reinforced, but felt.

i n t h e b e g i n n i n g w a s t h e w o r d

In Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature - Terrence McKenna sez;

In fact, nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem, right down to the DNA. DNA working as it does, with nucleotide sequences that code -- that means arbitrarily assign association -- code for certain amino acids. It means that organic objects are essentially utterances in three dimensional space and express of some kind of universally distributed linguistic intent. This is what it means when it says, "In the beginning was the word." Nature is that word. This infinitely self-adumbrating, fractal, syntactical hallucination with an infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding.

And having said all of this, I might invoke here Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which as I'm sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics where he showed that the possible set of true formal statements generated by any formal system exceeded the possible set of true formal statements which the rules of that system allowed. He showed this for simple arithmetic. And what this means, friends, is that what was called truth up until the beginning of the twentieth century, is absolutely impossible. That's what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem secures. It shows that there is no ultimate closure in an effort to describe a formal system.

And so in a way, my take on nature, and culture, and man, is that human language is a meta-linguistic system, generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature. Nature is a self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally predicted by its constraints and rules. There's a symmetry break there, and a so-called emergent property comes into view. This emergent property is our unique ability to provisionally code sound to meaning so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the world. We imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication. The analysis that I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it because we are complicated enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of metasystem. A metasystem that is very important for the emergence of new order out of nature.

The fact that it is contrived, provisional, is very interesting. It doesn't arise out of the gene structure. Rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness. Since individuals are replaced, the language is much more in flux than the genome. The genetic component of an organism is a physical structure stabilized by atomic bonds -- possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like room-temperature's superconductivity. In that the way nature works is to conserve the genes. Molecular machinery has evolved to do that. But there is no mechanism in nature with the same kind of binding force that conserves meaning. Meaning is some kind of freely-commanded, open-ended, self-evolving system. The rules are that there are no rules.

Meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than the genes. The genes basically repeat themselves, over and over. Almost like Homeric poetry, where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated. And that's what sexuality is about: memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story. But the epigenetic domain is different, the creation of linguistic systems, where meaning can be freely commanded, allows very rapid evolution of cultural forms.

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

Wired Magazine sez - Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life;

What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like RNA or another nucleic acid.

Szostak's earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water (see video). One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it's attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic. When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.

These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others.

That opens the possibility that one day, in the distant past, an RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating. That random event, through billions of evolutionary iterations, researchers believe, created life as we know it.

Palin's Churches

Sarah Palin has refused to acknowledge belonging to any specific denomination or any particular religious stream. However, it is now well documented that she spent her youth in an Assembly of God church and has regularly attended another AoG church, as well as two Independent Churches. At least three of four of these churches have close ties to prominent organizations and leaders in the Third Wave movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

This is a worldwide movement so completely ignored by the press that there is no single accepted term that has been coined for the identification for the group. In addition to Third Wave and New Apostolic Reformation, it is also referred to by the names of some of its more extreme theologies, such as Joel's Army and Manifest Sons of Destiny. Its roots are in a revival of the manifestations and beliefs of the New Order of Latter Rain which has been repeatedly condemned by the General Council of the Assemblies of God since 1949.

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave Part One (Background on Third Wave)

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave - Documenting the involvement of Palin's specific churches in this movement.

Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp was a documentary about the "Kids On Fire School of Ministry," a charismatic Christian summer camp formerly located just outside Devils Lake, North Dakota and run by Becky Fischer and her ministry, Kids in Ministry International.

The film focused on three children who attended the camp in the summer of 2005—Levi, Rachael, and Tory (Victoria).

The film cuts between footage of the camp and a children's prayer conference held just prior to the camp at Christ Triumphant Church, a large charismatic church in Lee's Summit, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City.

Eurasian Alliance Against the U.S.

To put this in the right perspective, this image shows the Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - Russia, China, Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and the observers countries - Iran, Pakistan, India, Mongolia and the Moscow-friendly Belarus.

Russian nationalist advocates Eurasian alliance against the U.S. - Aleksander Dugin, a popular theorist in hard-line circles, advocates an alliance between the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. He says Georgia crisis could be start of a real conflict with U.S.

Writer, political activist and father figure for contemporary Russian nationalism, Aleksandr Dugin is the founder of Russia's International Eurasian Movement and a popular theorist among Russia's hard-line elite. He envisions a strategic bloc comprising the former Soviet Union and the Middle East to rival the U.S.-dominated Atlantic alliance. The Times interviewed Dugin this week at his Moscow office, a room draped with flags bearing the slogan "Pax Russica." The following are excerpts. Megan Stack in the Los Angeles Times.

t h e b r a i n i s a c t u a l l y a l a n g u a g e

Tractate 36:

In summary; thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements - change - in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize.

We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it - i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

Tractate 37:

We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside.

So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language.

Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the world "idiot" is the word "private." Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

Seeing and Hearing is Believing...,

Some folks are bound and determined not to believe that the GOP is staging a pure identity politics campaign. Others clearly recognize it for what it is and accept it as part of the ugly necessity involved with winning an election. Lobbyist and McCain campaign executive Rick Davis spells out what they're doing in no uncertain terms. Chris Wallace does an astonishing job of trying to hold Davis' feet to the fire here. Something has changed in the climate of consciousness at faux noise....,

Elite Consensus

Joe Bageant dropped another gem from the APC titled Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus. Well worth reading in its entirety as a Rosetta Stone to the current presidential election.

It is important to understand that elite consensus itself is not static and can shift in moderate degrees, but it has definitive boundaries of which you can not cross and still be a viable player within the electoral system. These boundaries exist to the left and right within that consensus, but the institutional bias of the system is much harsher towards any moves to the left. This is because in its essence elite opinion is anti-populist and primarily concerned with protecting the fundamentals of the established economic order.

Every national campaign is in fact a dual conversation, one targeting voters while the other is directed towards the political, media, and economic elites. The purpose of the message targeting the first group is to win votes. The messages to the latter group is designed to form elite consensus, first for it not to correlate against you and secondly to have it help you win and eventually govern.

Surviving the contradictions of these dual dialogues is the primary element that makes a successful national campaign.

Should be very interesting to see how the three senators jockey for advantage around the sweet spot of elite consensus on the political talk shows this morning, and no wonder why the "girl from the hood" is being kept under wraps.

Missing From Action this Morning?

I can't wait to see Gov. Palin hold it down on one or more of this morning's news talk shows. Wait, there must be some kind of mistake;

As is The Ticket's custom, a post listing the entire roster of appearances on this Sunday's interview programs will pop up Saturday at noon PDT (3 p.m. EDT).

But here's an advance heads up, in part because of who WON'T be found on any of the chat shows.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin campaigning with the top of the Republican ticket, John McCain Three of the four now-official candidates on the major-party presidential tickets are scheduled to sit down for questions: Democrat Barack Obama on ABC's "This Week," his running mate, Joe Biden, on NBC's "Meet the Press" and Republican John McCain on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Absent from this list, of course, is the GOP's star of the moment, the not-so-long-ago obscure governor of Alaska who is McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin.

Since she was thrust onto the national stage a week ago, her appearances on it have been tightly regulated by the McCain campaign: a few side-by-side campaign stops with him and, of course, her big speech to the GOP's convention Wednesday night.

Today, top McCain aide Rick Davis indicated the campaign isn't in any hurry to slot Palin for a Sunday show appearance -- and will do so only if he and other strategists determine it serves the ticket's purposes, not because some may view it as a required initiation for a major political player.

But we all have so many questions for the veepee select. Surely she's ready to drill, drill, drill - here, there, and everywhere to give us deeper glimpses into her vast wealth of experience and subject matter expertise in economics, foreign affairs, national security, energy and so forth - you know - all those pressing issues the electorate needs to mull over in order to arrive at a fully informed decision.

Letter About Palin Goes Viral

All Things Considered, September 5, 2008

This week in Wasilla, Alaska, a woman named Anne Kilkenny sent a letter to some college friends about her former mayor, Sarah Palin.

By week's end, the letter was pinging around the country and Kilkenny's phone was ringing off the hook. Waiting for the mainstream media to vet this person may be about as productive as waiting for the Alaskan legislators to issue their report on troopergate.

Why squatter cities are a good thing

Rural villages worldwide are being deserted, as billions of people flock to cities to live in teeming squatter camps and slums.

Stewart Brand says this is a good thing.

Why? It’ll take you 3 minutes to find out.

Stewart Brand's TED talk on squatter cities.

Girls in the Hood....,

Any carefully observant person watching Sarah Palin's body language during her speech reading performance at the GOP convention probably noted a lot of telltale signs of serious moral malfunction. There was the sneer, the wrinkled lip, and the evident malicious glee with which she cast aspersions.

Like “yeah, I said it”. Arrogance and hatred are not leadership qualities.

Anyway, it looks like that other shoe, you know, the one accompanying troopergate, illegitimate OOW pregnancy, earmarks, budget busting, separatism, and rank opportunism - dropped very loudly on friday. Didn't take very long either.

Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean”

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

Before you ask, "well really a little bit after my man Rembom asked" here's the accompanying backstory from the original story's author, Charley James.

Alas, more often than not, the reality is that in a highly-explosive story such as my piece about Sarah Palin published here on Friday, granting anonymity may be the only way to get a source to agree to be interviewed.

So I am not surprised that a number of readers who wrote comments about the article raised questions about my sources. It has happened before, especially when I tackled a subject that raises a lot of dust, and it will happen again. Although I won’t reveal any sources – I honor promises of anonymity – let me explain how the story unfolded and sources came to my attention as I did the reporting.

Only time will tell, but at this juncture, in light of everything else that has emerged and in consideration of what I witnessed with my own eyes, I'm highly inclined to believe that Mr. James and his source Lucille are on the level.

This Sucks....,

Infectious, test tube-produced prions can jump the 'species barrier' - Researchers have shown that they can create entirely new strains of infectious proteins known as prions in the laboratory by simply mixing infectious prions from one species with the normal prion proteins of another species. The findings are reported in the September 5th issue of the journal Cell.

This new insight has profound implications for public health, according to the researchers.

"One of the scariest medical problems of the last decades has been the emergence of a new and fatal human prion disease--variant CJD--originated by cross-species transmission of BSE from cattle," the researchers said. BSE has also spread to other animals, including exotic cats, other primates and domestic cats, after they ate feed derived from diseased cows.

Keep it on the Down Low.....,

WASILLA, Alaska — Shortly after taking office as governor in 2006, Sarah Palin sent an e-mail message to Paul E. Riley, her former pastor in the Assembly of God Church, which her family began attending when she was a youth. She needed spiritual advice in how to do her new job, said Mr. Riley, who is 78 and retired from the church.[...]

One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less “extreme” than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God, which practice speaking in tongues and miraculous healings.

“A lot of churches are about music and media and having a big profile,” Ms. Morgan said. “We are against that. That is why it is so attractive to politicians because they can just sit there and be safe.”

Say what you will, as far as I'm concerned, It Speaks For Itself and I quote here; I believe Alaska is one of the refuge states in the last days.., while I have no qualms about religion or religiosity -the intersection of politics and eschatalogical dominionism is cause for tremendous concern - as I've previously documented.

If you elect to believe that Palin is an American Cinderella story, you may also want to consider who specifically her fairy godfathers are...., particularly given the extent to which Obama has been charged with "hanging out with radicals". From what I can see, the Palin klan is about as radical as they come - so there may be a fair amount of projection going on with regard to Baraka....,

Dominionist Stalking Horse?

Sarah Palin is found to have some very interesting and very disturbing connections - among them, being potentially the first Assemblies-linked VP candidate and having a number of links to dominionist groups targeting kids via "bait and switch" evangelism.

Sarah Palin's connections that McCain doesn't want you to know about

There are quite a number of extremely troubling links between Sarah Palin and neopentecostal dominionists--enough that, in truth, she may be ultimately as much of a "dream candidate" for the dominionist movement as Mike Huckabee was. Even worse, she's running in a manner that has been frighteningly successful for dominionist groups since the early 80's--specifically, as a "stealth candidate".

Elite Fundamentalism - The Fellowship's Gospel of Capitalist Power

The Family (or the Fellowship as it is also known), is a shadowy organisation founded in the United States in the 1930s to promote a gospel of theocratic capitalist power and American empire.

Like a Protestant version of Opus Dei, the Family is best known for founding the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC in the 1950s, and its invisible network has not only penetrated the highest levels of political power in the United States but wherever in the world America has political or economic interests.

On ABC National Radio - Audio and Full Transcript

Fannie and Freddie Seized

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are expected to be taken over by the government as soon as this weekend in a bold move designed to protect the mortgage market from the risk the companies could fail, a person briefed on the matter said Friday night.

Some of the details of the intervention, which could cost taxpayers billions, were not yet available, but are expected to include the departure of Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron, according to the source, who asked not to be named because the plan was yet to be announced.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and James Lockhart, the companies' chief regulator, met Friday afternoon with the top executives from the mortgage companies and informed them of the government's plan to take over the troubled companies in a process known as conservatorship.

The news, first reported on The Wall Street Journal's Web site, came after stock markets closed. In after-hours trading Fannie Mae's shares plunged $1.70, or 24 percent, to $5.34. Freddie Mac's shares fell 95 cents, or almost 19 percent, to $4.15.

China’s Central Bank is in a Bind

It has been on a buying binge in the United States over the last seven years, snapping up roughly $1 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Those investments have been declining sharply in value when converted from dollars into the strong yuan, casting a spotlight on the central bank’s tiny capital base. The bank’s capital, just $3.2 billion, has not grown during the buying spree, despite private warnings from the International Monetary Fund.

Now the central bank needs an infusion of capital. Central banks can, of course, print more money, but that would stoke inflation. Instead, the People’s Bank of China has begun discussions with the finance ministry on ways to shore up its capital, said three people familiar with the discussions who insisted on anonymity because the subject is delicate in China. Full Monty in today's NYTimes.

Money

Too Volatile to be POTUS

McCain said "fight" 29 times and "change" 10 times last night....,

Politics is the Problem, Not the Solution

Paul Chefurka brings a carefully argued essay with an altogether too optimistic conclusion. I like Chefurka's writing and I definitely consider him a "reality aware" oasis of good faith and good intentions. I believe, however, that he would profit by spending a little time contemplating the Hypertiger Wisdoms....,

Guardian Institutions
Over the centuries an interlocking system of guardian institutions has grown up to protect and defend the two key ideas of growth and hierarchy.

• Our economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn't make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core belief it guards is always the same one.
• Our educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it, while at the same time training them to see this as the only possible way the world can work.
• Our communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both through overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
• Our religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that we should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural – just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
• Our legal institutions enforce the norms of hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
• Our political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to legalized violence to defend those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.

At the base of the hierarchy, supporting it all, are an ever-diminishing number of farmers who apply ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, technology and petroleum to ensure an ever-expanding supply of food. Because at the core it is their food that makes the whole edifice possible. (sounds exactly like Hypertiger)

So where does this put us in relation to the array of wicked problems we listed at the beginning? Simply put, every one of those problems is the result of unbridled growth. They are the logical results of the continual exercise of the first precondition of modern civilization, the drummer of growth we have been marching to for ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture. (I believe that Hypertiger would point us toward the extortionate control of agriculture by the TOP - otoh - as the preconditioned mechanism undergirding *civilization* as we experience it)

Politics is the problem, not the solution
In light of this analysis it should be obvious why we are repeatedly failing to address any of these wicked problems. The only permanent "solution" to any of them is the secession of growth. That idea is anathema to our guardian institutions. And as the occupants of the pinnacle of power, our politicians have every reason to derail efforts in that direction, no matter how small.

Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all politics is to manage power, and power is always managed for the benefit of the holders of power. It doesn't matter whether the power managers are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a military junta. They all fulfill the same role in service of the same beneficiaries.

In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions – the economic, industrial, legal. religious, educational and communications organizations. Together they create, maintain and guard a noetic milieu (a globalized intuitive, non-rational consciousness) in which any values that challenge the two fundamental preconditions to modern civilization are seen as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane. Since the primary value system these guardians protect is the paradigm of continuous material growth, the most dangerous of all radical ideas are any proposals to limit, halt or reverse that growth.