by Philip Henshaw

Economic theory is based on the observed regularities of the past. Some are considered as general principles, or “natural laws” that are expected to never change. From a systems view, though, such laws are emergent properties of the complex system they are regularities of, and prone to change as the system changes form.

Growth systems, for example, invariably change form when they climax, but the present laws of economics describe a complex system that has perpetual growth that never changes form. The question is partly how to tell when such changes might be appearing. Complex systems may vary a great deal without indicating a change in the form of the whole system. What would raise the question are events of kinds that are never supposed to occur at all.

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Mantiq al-Tayr

1. No, I am not talking about legalizing Marijuana – that would upset the Islamofascists who own all the liquor companies in the US and its suburb, Canada. And I am certainly not talking about legalizing gay marriage, I wouldn’t want to piss off Donald Trump.

Let me digress for a second. So Miss California gets sacked for believing what any good Torah following Zionist Palestinian-hating Rabbi would believe about marriage and she’s stripped (pun intended) of her crown by Islamofascist Donald Trump. But it is perfectly okay for her to appear in beauty pageants walking up and down a long isle in a bikini while every single male looking at her is thinking long and hard about only one thing. Well, not every male, since lots of gays were probably just trying to see if they could imitate the way she walks, but every straight male who she believes should only marry a woman is looking at her and is thinking only one thing – and he isn’t thinking about his wife, I’ll tell you that. Anyway, that’s all perfectly okay. Speaking what you believe in is not. Is this a great country or what? But I digress. (I bet some you guys are pissed I didn’t link to photos of her, aren’t you.:-)

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Andrea Freiboden

There are several reasons why Obama has won over many Americans, but I shall consider two. There are two kinds of Obama supporters. There is the genuinely duped, the kind of people who really look at him as the messiah of CHANGE and HOPE for whatever pitiful reason–ignorance, sappiness, guilt, fear, anxiety, etc. But, there is also the duplicitous, the kind of people who know exactly who and what Obama is and feel that they know the Grand Game Plan. It is the combination of images of radiance(for the duped) and of radicalism(for the duplicitous) that has fueled Obama to power. Unless one understands this duality, one cannot grasp the essence of the Obama phenomenon.

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Mary Pitt

Don't look now but your base is slipping! You may ask anyone involved in the Katrina disaster how important those few little grains of sand sliding off to the side can be. Nobody seemed to notice when the levees that held back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain began deteriorating but we all now know that they were the precursers to calamity.

In the same way, a few of your supporters were disgruntled when your first cabinet appointees were simply re-treaded from the Bush and Clinton administrations. We can appreciate that you needed a few key people with experience from Day One but, rather than they adapting to your point of view, you appear to have accepted their influence to shift your own views to coincide with that of the leaders for whom they previously worked!

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saifedean

As Iranians go to the polls to repudiate (it seems) some of the most pernicious aspects of Ahmadinejad’s rule, America’s Iran point man continues to make Ahmadinejad look like a reasonable peacenik.

The newly released book by Dennis Ross, President Obama’s special adviser on Iran, reads like a how-to manual for launching a war on Iran, marketing the war successfully, and making sure the Iranians cop all the blame for it. Ross will have none of Bush’s incompetent warmongering on flimsy pretenses of democracy and WMD’s; when Ross launches his illegal war on Iran, it will be stage-managed to within an inch of its life.

“Tougher policies – either militarily or meaningful containment – will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion,” writes Ross.

Note that there is no way to read this sentence but to see that the goal is to attack Iran. America trying to diplomatically resolve its differences with Iran is not a goal in itself; it is merely a means to more easily sell war and sanctions.

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eileen fleming

Occupied East Jerusalem, June 13, 2009- Over thirty CODE PINK activists met with a few of the soon to be 1,500 homeless residents of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, located minutes away from the Temple Mount and the Al Aqsa Mosque.

On June 8, 1998, under the cover of darkness, members of the fundamentalist nationalistic settlement group Elad [a Hebrew acronym for: To the City of David] entered four Palestinian homes, threw out the furniture and raised Israeli flags on the property.

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Roland Michel Tremblay

At this time we cannot state that this world is moral, just or ethical, whatever the area of society: political, religious, corporate and even people taken individually. Life is more like a struggle and a fight to survive than anything else. We have reached an all time low. What can society expect of its citizens, if all they ever encounter is pettiness, selfishness, unfairness and punishment? Well then, we should expect war at every turn, and this is what we witness everyday everywhere. But there is hope for humanity.

There is always a larger picture to everything, to any situation, to any debate or attack, no matter how small it is. Should there not be some sort of ideal world we could all live in, where everyone would be allowed to find happiness, or at least some sort of compromise which could make it all acceptable and liveable?

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Allen L Roland

There is a strange lull in our present economic recession wherein the Administration's economic advisors are saying that the worst is over while consumers are beginning to feel the leading edge of a major depression:

The current cheer leading by some economic leaders, that the worst is probably over, sounds vaguely hollow in light of a Wall Street top down stimulus package that left out Main Street consumers ~ who paid for this massive infusion of capital and who increasingly want their money back.

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Allen L Roland

America is living on borrowed time as the credit clock time bomb approaches midnight. The Obama administration still doesn't get it with its top down stimulus plan ~ Americans are in survival mode. They are broke, their credit cards are maxed out, they only spend for necessities wherein food and rent take precedence over credit card purchases or payments: Allen L Roland

The Obama administration is still trying to reinflate the credit bubble that just burst with the same cast of characters who initially inflated it ~ and it is about to blow up in their face.

On June 30th, 2008 I wrote a column HUGE CREDIT CARD CRISIS NEXT FOR AMERICA in which I said that many Americans are living off their credit cards but be forewarned ~ that bubble is about to burst as more Americans are using high-interest credit card cash to pay at least part of their mortgages. http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/06/30.html

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James Petras

In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands. Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.

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