Greetings of the Season

I am a vendor of the unorthodox and usual. I respect your methods of piety and observance. I am however quite in tuned to this. Give it a listen.

Here are the lyrics.

The Rebel Jesus

as performed by Jackson Browne
on The Chieftans, The Bells of Dublin

All the streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants' windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
As the sky darkens and freezes
Will be gathering around the hearths and tables
Giving thanks for God's graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus


Well they call him by 'the Prince of Peace'
And they call him by 'the Savior'
And they pray to him upon the seas
And in every bold endeavor
And they fill his churches with their pride and gold
As their faith in him increases
But they've turned the nature that I worship in
From a temple to a robber's den
In the words of the rebel Jesus


We guard our world with locks and gun
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus


But pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgement
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and of earthly toil
We have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus

I bid you good cheer no matter how you celebrate.

I AM

Lantern Bearer

Please, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.

You have no business to believe me.

I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself. . .

If you have not a critical mind, your visit here is useless.

G.I. Gurdjieff

MILF - Money is Levereged Finely

Does a free market economy include allowing theft by deception?

The savings and loan blowup of the 80s was like a practice session for the the games and scams that are being run today while "regulators" are kept at bay.

Enron was the first spark of the new fuse that is now burning. It is fortunate that the ethanol debacle is now being seen for its shortcomings and not as a panacea. Arbitrage and hedge funds today are the kin of the Credit Mobilier mess of the late 1870s. The trusts and Big________ (insert an industry) owned government. The strangle hold today is by a financial industry that is going for blood. To whom will the banks, trusts and holding companies sell the houses that have been swept into their holdings by foreclosure. Surely it cannot be those who were foreclosed upon. Will the power of the landlord come roaring back. There is already a sub-industry of buy-on-contract in my area that is replacing the sub-prime scheme.

Conservatives in business and government know that an orderly market is needed to have a real sense of business as usual. Radicals do not care for an orderly market. The turn over in an orderly market is so . . . how shall we say . . . arcane.

I once held an IT job in a small insurance company that put together very complicated schemes that were built around whole life policies. The objective was to allow for cash heavy individuals to get in on the scheme with big cash inputs up front, a backing of a whole life policy in which the scheme directors and managers had a piece of an insurance payout and a slush stream of cash by way of a complicated web of annuities. All this required a computer. The guy who wrote the software was doing time and the genius who wired the required bit of interface turned out to be a cryptographer who was fired in disgrace from his government job. He missed Leavenworth by the skin of his teeth. I parted company with them all before it all came apart. I did have to testify.

With that said, lets look at todays complications.

Paul Krugman wrote of it yesterday - oooppsss, there go the radical apologist. See ya!

[QUOTE]Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The financial crisis that began late last summer, then took a brief vacation in September and October, is back with a vengeance.

How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.[/QUOTE]

[URL="http://tinyurl.com/2tqsr5"]Follow on here.[/URL]

Keep saying to your self, "An orderly market is a conservative market." Only liberals understand conservatism. The radical mess we have today is not conservative. Those who try to call it so are ignorant, unschooled and subject to being told what and how to think. They are the intern Brownshirts of a dead end W_administration.

We may dismiss anything they say or write because, freedom of speech is about truth and not some damn "Swifter" (product that does a job with dirt) ideation devoid of truth or good intent.

The last thing any of these want to say is, "(MY) President is a woman. Too bad. It's their turn in the barrel. They made it so. What comes around goes around.

The survivors in the competition of life are smart, flexible, morally well centered and are breeding right at this moment.

I AM (as serious as a vascular blowout)

Live long and prosper.

Follow along with what I read and save on de.li.ous on the right hand side of the site page.

Please, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.

You have no business to believe me.

I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself. . .

If you have not a critical mind, your visit here is useless.

G.I. Gurdjieff

What does the quiet in Iraq mean?

We are seeing a slow down in hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So here is the premise. There seems to be a slowing of attacks by the jihadis in Iraq. I had made some predictions and an appraisal of that and how the hostilities would begin again and in what approximate order. I had a nagging thought in the back of my mind about the tactical value of this to the various al Quaida elements, the tribal and ethnic insurgents, the Sunni and the Shi'a elements. We find that the Sunni are now aligning with the US as much as possible. We also find that the Shi'a are gravitating to the protection of their Iranian supporters. All Islamist insurgent activity has taken a down turn. It is much like the events of a stand down by the US Army to allow for some rest, resupply, changing tactics and rethinking strategies. That is essentially what seems to be happening with the Islamists now.

Here that Islamist stand down has a name in a Letter to the Editor of the St. Petersburg, FL Times.

Re: A time for thanks in Iraq | Nov. 22. David Ignatius column

Know the Enemy

On Thanksgiving Day, David Ignatius "suspects" the Iranians new policy of accommodation is a tactical shift. If he used (sic.) his library card, he would know it for sure.

Sulh is the jihadi term for interim peace. For centuries sulh was a diplomatic tool used by the supreme commander until the political balance became favorable once again for war. The logic of jihad is to wage fatah (invasion/occupation) when possible, conclude sulh when needed, and go back to jihad when conditions are right again.

In the Islamists' (sic.) ideology, they cannot accommodate a peace movement in principle. In their thinking, they are allowed to accept an interim cessation of war and work in sophisticated ways to stop wars they cannot win. Based on 1,400 years of history, that is what is happening.

Americans once understood the lethal language of our ideological foes: blitskrieg, kamikaze, arbeit macht frei.

Gary Harrington, St Petersburg

This is a good piece for information. The composition and grammar are a little stilted but it is still readable. We tend to lump all Islamists into an Arab mold. That is far from helpful in understanding just how such an insurgency directed at the US is to be understood. The US has a history of holding out a hand to movements that seem to be in pre-democratic modes and in the end those movements are sold out and left to struggle with local repressive governments with the US going over to the repressing side.

It happened to the Iranians in 1953 with help from the CIA. It most recently happened in Iraq when various elements of Iraqi tribalists, both Sunni and Shi'a rose up against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War.

So. We may say then that this laying low is a structural and systemic agreement by the various insurgent elements in concert. We have driven them apart in Sunni Anbar Province, from the previously insurgent friendly tribal elements. We may also draw on observations, that the Shi'a in Basra and along the Iranian border are drawing themselves together and preparing for a possible attack on Iran by US Naval and Air Fosrce elements. The Shi'a would then be in position for a counter stroke against any cross border incursions by US ground forces and US friendly (albeit, Sunni Arab) elements. Islam not withstanding, Arabs and Persians have no love lost on each other. Just as the Arab W'ahabist have no love lost on fellow non-Arab Muslims. They will come together in the face of a common enemy, the US, but otherwise they have their own private ancient vendettas and infighting going on.

There is so much more to explain and flesh out but there is so much in the news and on the web that is crafted for a particular point of view and expectations of outcomes. The best prepare combat arms units I was ever around in the field were always adjusting and preparing for combatants to pop up out of flat ground. The VC and the NVA both were very good at frustrating the best preparations made by any unit in the field. We may expect that the very fluid Islamists will come back in ways we never expected. The US must be prepared for any event. It is not time to rest on the laurels of quiet. We must be very liberal in our thinking and prepared to move as the situation dictates. To resort to a conservative set of limitations of SOP, what has worked before, or what is in the budget is to fail as we have never before failed.

Lantern Bearer

Please, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.

You have no business to believe me.

I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself. . .

If you have not a critical mind, your visit here is useless.

G.I. Gurdjieff