Has the U.S. Administration Considered Reinforcing Lawful Middle East Governments?

Instead of building up another guerrilla army to fight another guerrilla army the U.S. administration could contemplate working with existing Middle East governments to draw-down conflict and try to embargo weapons and training to insurrection groups in the region. Kurds as a kind of regional government of Iraq might be strengthened and their oil field assets held by ISIS retaken. Perhaps the Sunni of Syria might be encourage to have a portion of Syria independently and remain affiliated with Syria while the U.S. Government encourages the Assad Government to remain in control of Damascus and traditionally Alawi-Shi'a-Christian areas.

The U.S. administration has often mentioned the Assad government 'killing its own people' as a justification for its removal. Yet it is difficult to view the Middle East through an American filter of Union (albeit in a developing age of fracture) and non-sectarianism realistically. In a sense the Muslims and Muslim Brotherhood of Syria are not Assad's people at all. The allies after the First World War created Syria and Iraq through disparate and even antagonistic groups together within new national boundaries. France, the original colonial supervisor has agreed to help bomb ISIS in Syria and Iraq while Britain has demurred (Iraq was it's colonial nephew). With the vicissitudes of history it can take a long time to sort out.

We ought not to exacerbate the conflict with insensitive interventions even if driven by fear of ISIS attack upon  homes of the rich or Wall Street in the U.S.A. At least ISIS hasn't taken out an ad campaign to enlist mufsidoonists offering recruits an opportunity to kill the broadcast media.

U.S. policy has intensified the spiral of revolutionary and fundamental terrorist violence in the Middle East with its fractured logic and partial historical competence. These are matters that intelligent planners might deal with more effectively. It is also plain that the U.S.A. is playing a kind of Russian roulette with its unsecure Mexican border. There should be just a quarter million immigrants to the U.S.A. annually from all sources. Fifty thousand should be given residence for intellectual excellence and the remainder for being poor.

American interventions in the region do not historically exhibit a substantial awareness of the reality of how social groups align along ethnic and sectarian lines rather than as national citizens allegiant to abstract constitutional principles.

It seems to me that it is a bad policy to increase the number of weapons and weapons training of the Muslim world if one expects to work toward anything besides continuing civil strife egressing toward fundamentalism, terrorism and populism through sectarian lines producing dictators.

What Moderate Parties in Middle East Revolutionary Politics?

There is a certain pundit-political point of view that moderates might be found to support in the Syrian civil war that would be of benefit to American or western interests. That politico-centric viewpoint has little reality corresponding to it. President Assad may be the moderate. Dictator Saddam Hussein led the most secular party in his Ba’ath party that was started in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood is a parent organization of most Middle Eastern terrorist groups that are Sunni. So what are Washington D.C. theoreticians to do in order to intervene to stop the further establishment of a radical Caliphate carved out of Syria and Iraq?

Besides just reinforcing the present legal government of Syria and building up a little Kurdistan as an associate state of Iraq to fill the void, American war planners could consider the larger historical politics of the middle east and decide if making Damascus a Sunni town purged of the Alawi and Christians would not be a sort of fundamental change in the balance of power in the Middle-East. The United States probably built up Saddam Hussein a little too much with some sort of encouragement to attack Iran in revenge for Iran’s taking our embassy personnel hostage in the process of revolting against the Shah whom had returned to power with the help of a U.S. supported coup. Now the U.S. seeks to remove the Assad government as it removed the Hussein government and it will probably have the same results of general regional destabilization.

American strategic planners seem to want to establish a universal Sunni state in the Middle East and the Caliphate have jumped the gun. In some way Washington liberal-moderates believe that Sunni coreligionists have a moderate nature in which a few fundamentalist extremists swim to wreak terror and havoc upon soft, lovable westerners. Removal of Assad-the moderate British educated dentist, would usher in an age of Aquarius-another Arab Spring fulfilling Nasser’s concept of a pan-Arabic empire of one nation for all Sunni without trouble of Shi’a mosques or Christian churches. With moderate Sharia law the death penalty for converting to another religion could be allowed to slide. Just ostracism and petty persecution could result and moderate Muslims might decide to permit homosexual marriage.

If a Sunni state were established in Syria there would be a drive to expand in Lebanon as well. One might create a Muslim domino theory with Iran in opposition to Sunni expansion, Lebanon under assault and a substantial increase in trans-Mediterranean terror ops.

One must wonder if a Syria that does business with the Russians is not a little moderate. Market fundamentalists viewed the Soviet state in a bad light of course and probably carry over that bias against Syria and Russia now that the cold war is over. It might be recalled though that the Soviet communism was viewed by most as leftist and atheistic. Those policies would be somewhat moderating of right-wing fundamental extremists that are popular in some circles.

Yet one might ask when do racial groups seeking to survive amidst a sea of hostile adversaries have moderation? Moderation can be suicidal in defense situations where the foe is determined to kill and/or conquer. The Assad government working with Russia to combat Sunni extremism might be of more help than harm in containing and rolling back the establishment of a Caliphate in the Middle East.

The Syrian government maintains a careful crossroads balance between Iran and its Shia, the Sunni world and the west. I would think the politics are somewhat Byzantine perennially as they seek to defer attacks from upon themselves perhaps to Israel. Certainly Hezbollah has long been a foe of Israel and yet they have no possibility of ruling Israel in any circumstance. They may be a function of the Shi’a-Sunni-Western balance of political and social philosophy.

Perhaps 70% of Syrians are Sunni. They make up the cadre of the Syrian Free Army. They can talk about democracy in order to receive support from starry eyed moon calves in D.C. If they get in power they will probably be taken over by the most radical of Sunni terrorists because that is the dynamics of the Middle East. The need to partition Syria may exist because those groups don’t live together well. Some of the may dream of when the Ottoman Empire Sunni ruled everything in the Middle East and there was a Mufti in Jerusalem who supported Adolph Hitler. Others included the Orthodox faithful of Serbia may hate that idea. The Shi’a and Israelis probably wouldn’t like any sort of Sunni restoration of Empire or Caliphate either. D.C. has a lot to think about before just dropping some bombs for peace.

There is no moderation in Shi’a-Sunni relations. Neither allows mosques of the other sect in their territory. The Kurds also have nearly sectarian level political and ethnic interests that could have been settled after the First World War and were not. They can be built up perhaps in part of Syria and Iraq while leaving the Assad government in power over Damascus and the Alawi and Christian population. Better theories need to arise in D.C. Simply dropping bombs can’t solve the social problems alone, and neither will the myth of moderate terrorists or governments of revolutionary Sunnis. The most effect secular force in the Middle East was the Ba’ath party of Iraq. Perhaps D.C. will seek to re-establish the Ba’ath in a moderate form in a third state associated with Iraq carved out of part of Syria.

Why Market Fundamentalists Can't Solve the Perennial Low-Cost Housing Shortage

Market fundamentalists drive up the price of housing rather than down. Capitalism does not low home costs through mass production or streamlining of design. It does not produce a two-bedroom hard shell sprayed on for $19.95. The median cost of homes increases and reflects the prevailing high-end middle class ability to pay as a maximum capacity of salary. There is no separate housing market for the poor and middle class that only the poor can buy in. If the poor can’t afford that middle class lifestyle then they must pay rent to the rich or perhaps go to a for-profit prison so the rich can collect rent on their bodies. This is an essay about finding remedies to the perennial shortage of affordable housing for the poor.

Unregulated market dynamics creating investment opportunities work against the manufacture of quality low cost housing affordable to the poor and lower middle class. Hence there is a perennial housing shortage created by capital concentration on Wall Street forever seeking new profit watercourses to flow in. If a dynamic housing developer were to create a national franchise of low cost, super-insulated, simple high-tech three-room dome homes on modest green lots for $30,000-a super value. Instead of 50,000 poor people moving in to low-interest, government-guaranteed financed homes investors on Wall Street recognizing the value would throw down money and take them for-themselves. Then the home plunderers might flip the homes for a profit or just rent them out to the poor. Concentrated capital can buy up and spoil any sort of private sector mass housing programs intended to benefit the poor or lower middle class-that’s just the way it is.

 In the neo-totalitarian corporate state theory predominates over practical democracy. In totalitarian theory no place should exist in the U.S.A. whereby a soul can exist without paying rent to the rich. They might prefer that no one breathe for free either. They want no place where the unemployed or the Son of Man could lay his head without subjugation to totalized geo-political-financial power of the corporate state. Servitude, subjugation and tyranny by the corrupt is the basic effort of the housing paradigm squeezing out the little wealth of the poor and middle class to flow upward to the rich.

A better theory would envision every American owning their home with none renting. Obviously some renting would exist simply because of the advantage in being able to have temporary housing to many. Home owning should be a basic right of all Americans and that should be rationally supported in Democratic policy. Sorting out many of the practical social difficulties created by Americans with housing problems and relieving the poor of existing in a totalized state whereby pressure to compel rent-paying to the corrupt that can even effect political liberty as pressure by the corrupt rich can be placed down the ladder to silence political opinion and free expression of it through economic and housing/ pressure would be a useful way to move from the claims of totalitarian control or all American real estate to a democratic society.

Housing for the poor that is affordable produced purely through the market is as unsatisfactory and ineffective as public housing at solving the never-ending housing problem. Because the corrupt wish to collect rents from others those with the power to end the problem don’t really want to. 

Designing practical low cost private homes easily affordable for the poor and middle class would require sophisticated sociological, environmental, urban and suburban syntegrity. New forms of contractual financing that guarantee affordability and home owning security would need to arise. The homes could not be allowed to be ‘flipped’ or even resold buy a buyer for several decades. A home owner that must relocate could trade the standard home contract to someone elsewhere for an equal home. If the home owner prospers he could keep his basic home and buy more or larger housing on the free market, yet he could not sell the home before three decades have passes although he might rent it out. So many practical problems of movement and material are created by homelessness that it ought to be avoided.

I write here from personal experience. After several years of directed public radio harassment I sold my lot at Wrangell Island Alaska intended for retirement after working down south a few decades. So with homelessness I struggled along with the standard problems of no electricity, short ours of light and so forth. Finally in my 40^th anniversary of arriving in Juneau I got a trespass-eviction notice at a remote place in the forest a mile from nice homes owned by prosperous state workers, professionals, etc. With some substantial effort I packed my stuff away and left the forest looking green and verdant as if no one had been there. This may be regarded by some as the aryan consolidation season in Juneau. In sanskrit arya means 'noble' (as in aristocrat). Perhaps I look like a nigger to the advantaged; who can say. When I was a poor member of the Alaska Army Guard I learned respect for the wild though I never got a paycheck from the state before I left the guard for active duty.

I wonder how it is possible for the poor to extract themselves from poverty with honor. My University of Alaska-Juneau associate degree was of no value in finding work here or elsewhere. I think of it as less valuable than toilet paper. Since the semester I made the chancellors list they did not publish the chancellor’s list and began the process of changing the college name to the University of Alaska-S.E. I might have guessed the degree was a substitute for Charmin.

Still, the forest tent was a good place to work on a graduate course in theology. I was writing a paper on ecclesiology when the eviction notice was posted, yet with seven days to move I was able to work through the notice and look ahead to the eschatology paper. That brief eschatology paper may lead me into an entire course in eschatology. I should stipulate that I tend to be one who believes that realized eschatology is the right interpretation of matters of the Bible. However the kingdom of God is within you while temporality surrounds you and includes your beingness as a human. One may be alive when certain prophesied real events occur in future history yet that is incidental. A Christian always has one foot in the kingdom of God as it were. Though one might need to have two dollars in a pocket to afford bus fare to move their worldly goods there is no cost for transportation to the kingdom of God. I had planned to leave Juneau later this year or early next anyway. It is a fact that when one plans to leave the devil seems to act though people to attempt a last minute trim-it’s kind of weird yet not uncommon.

Private housing should be available for all Americans at a low price. It is of course silly to expect older people or poor people to pay a quarter million dollars for a home even if given a flippy contract from the deep pocket lender flipping the contract in little pieces all over the world. Packaging high quality, low cost housing for the poor and middle class should become a standard government program that as a contract-franchise for production could be fulfilled by many builders. Profit for a builder would be very modest yet with the housing designs and land issues solved ahead of time the development costs would be lower too. It would be necessary to restrict home purchases in the program to those actually poor or lower middle class in order to deliver the product to those that need it.

Houston Beat Down of D.C. / R.G. III 17 to 6

Houston completely stuffed R.G. III and the Washington Redskins by a score of 17 to 6 Sunday.  Robert Griffin the Third not only has to overcome solid knee injuries, he needs to overcome the name of the team that is currently in popular in Boston and other liberal centers of protest against inappropriate symbolism. Houston's all-pro defensive genius tackle  J.J. Watts led the tough Texan defense to stuff the D.C. entry into the brain battering league. That issue raises another point.

Why do colleges and the N.F.L. continue to give scholarships to good football players that aren't motivated by academics and will at best read graphic novels after they graduate? That policy deprives good students of scholarships and promotes an alumni of thugs and anti-intellectual bureaucrats yearning to repress intellectuals any way they can think of.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/redskins-self-inflicted-wounds-in-a-17-6-loss-in-houston-ruin-jay-grudens-debut/2014/09/07/7ab190d4-36ca-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html

R.G. III could use a good runner to relieve him of the pressure to run for-himself so much. When a quarterback leaves the pocket except on an occasional roll out he is exposing his throwing arm and muscle coordination onto the dice table. A pure passer should be a smooth operator with machine-like accuracy instead of a brain-damaged O.J. running over and around opposition who might throw the ball inaccurately now and then.

Coaches shouldn't seek to make defensive lines look good. They are a Maginot line to the coordinated blitkreigs of the N.F.L. staffed with balanced air and ground attack.

Ten Days to Go in 2014 England vs. Scotland U.K. Cup Election

In just ten days Scots will go to the polls to cast their dolts onto the important matter of should they cast their subjugation to England aside and become free. If the Scots give up their prostration to the Thames gang where will they go? 

In times like these one might ask themself; what would Mel Gibson do? Since the diaspora of Scots to engine rooms across the globe Scotland has become weak. America has Rowdy Roddy Piper, not Edinborough. Those highland flings to foreign shores have allowed British fish and chips to usurp the natural Scottish batters and fish. Scots use the British currency-whatever that is...something written with the face of Allen Greenspan on it I think.

It is said that just 50,000 Scots pay more in taxes than they receive in tax benefits from the central government so one would expect loyalty to the Thames gang to trump the vote for independence. The proud brogue of broad Scots has a natural disaffection to the London twang with the  money dialect. Scotland as a free people at last able to vote in the U.N. will be able to take charge of the British Open and have its own force de frappe. Bingin good show!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-independence/11080618/Ten-days-to-save-the-Union-with-Scotland.html

                                                               

Another J.F.K.- Big Oil Conspiracy Theory

In the latest episode of an account of the J.F.K. assassination Texas oil men have been plotting to gain power, wealth and jobs by replacing J.F.K. with the apposite V.P. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

-photographer unknown-J.F.K. Library L.B.J. had given the K.B.R. legacy a boost up as a congressman with a special contract to build the Lake Travis dam. As a proven friend of the K.B.R. thread, evil oil and construction planners search for a dupe to get the wet work done; to kill President Kennedy-a proven New England Yankee and replace him with a good ole boy of the south who will kick back federal money in construction contracts. The opportune selection was Lee Harvey Oswald who came up in a C.I.A. data bank of Americans who had visited the Soviet Union and could shoot.  Oswald is positioned by handlers to be in the right place at the right time perhaps as the shooter-perhaps as a cut out, and sanitized later by Jack Ruby who then died of a heart attack.

The K.B.R. legacy  (I use the term K.B.R. legacy throughout this account inn order to not take the time to detail the history of how and when Halliburton, Kellog, Brown and Root associated and separated) becomes the largest builder of U.S. bases in Vietnam after L.B.J. escalates the war. Donald Rumsefld is an early visitor to tone of the largest bases-Cam Ranh Bay he bases as a young congressman. Later a Texas oil man and former C.I.A. chief-President George H.W. Bush would appoint Rumsfeld to be head of the C.I.A.

In the second installment of the called history repeats itself, after President H.W. Bush is besmirched in his re-election campaign by Pat Buchanan's weird homosexual insinuation ad campaign and loses to the British Oxford trained Bill Clinton who gets besmirched by getting blow jobs from a student intern and makes it difficult for his V.P Al Gore to get elected, President George W. Bush (the younger) is elected,  appoints a former head of Halliburton-K.B.R. to be his V.P running mate and then a disaster occurs-the 9-11 attacks. The 9-11 attack financed by Osama Bin Ladin by a son of the biggest construction-engineering firm of the largest oil producing nation in the world at the time-Saudi Arabia, who had a relative that was an investor-partner in George W. Bush's Texas oil company provided President George . Bush the opportunity to invade Iraq and give huge non-competitive contracts to Halliburton-KBR. That was the history repeating itself episode. Like the Vietnam War the war in Iraq would last more than six years and cost trillions of dollars. 

If there are lessons to this conspiracy theory I am not sure what they are, perhaps it is that many people write something about the J.F.K. assassination but that doesn't mean there is any sort of coordination in that.

At Helsinki Accord Ukraine Was Part of Russia-What Changed?

Western claims to have honestly expropriated Ukraine from Russia have used a few historical whoppers for pseudo-legalistic assertions of a right-of-annexation of Ukraine and Crimea to independent/western-affiliated status. The 1975 Helsinki accord that included the agreement between N.A.T.O. and the Soviet Union to not change national borders through force is an example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords#Signatory_states

When the Helsinki Accord was signed Crimea and Ukraine were Russian as they had been with a few intervals for centuries. After decades of sanctions and Star Wars the Soviet Communist government bit the dust. All were glad that President Gorbachev’s glasnost and Perestroika started a cascade of commercial and political changes to end the Stalinist variety of communism that most hated everywhere except for select establishment organizational persons benefiting from the power of tyranny, and the end of the Evil Empire occurred mostly bloodlessly, yet the transition to a post Soviet new-Russian order was difficult with uncertain course.

Governing institutions and establishments affiliated are generally reluctant to change modus operandi or modus vivendi. The cold war establishment roles were well known-the west found it easier to return to a cold war role model inherited from prior generations than to evolve a good working relationship with Russia. After digesting the eastern European nations that were given up at the end of the Soviet Union the west’s appetite for more of weakened Russia looked toward Ukraine and Crimea.

It is an historical point that gaining a Pyrrhic victory that ends up costing more than staying out of conflict is better avoided. Conflict with Russia over Ukraine-especially Eastern Ukraine and Russia’s vital Dnepr River barge traffic corridor for transport of commodities (one barge is worth 200 truck loads)-can harm the west’s commercial and security interests significantly. Finding new ways to have mutual peace and prosperity is a political method the west avoids to its monomaniacal drive for litigation and conflict as litigation through other means.

Another fiction used by the west is that of Soviet or Russian history in occupation of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states at the end of the Second World War. The false impression is commonly given that naked Soviet aggression took those states through force-and that is a perfect lie. The Soviet Union captured Eastern Europe in counterattacking against the Nazis who had invaded Russia/the Soviet Union. The Russians/Soviets kicked the Nazi butts all the way to the Baltic-all the way to Berlin and it cost them tens of millions of dead Russians. The Russians liberated the Balkans from the Nazis to in long, bloody war. The battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad were famously epic, bloody things of which innumerable movies and documentaries have been made. If the United States had experienced that sort of conflict, how soon would the United States give back those captured territories and trust their former enemies or their political cohabitants?

It took the Soviets/Russians about 50 years to give back Eastern Europe and let it become independent. The United States had built up a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons with multiple reentry warheads with a slight advantage over the more numerous Soviet-Russian warheads in quality though the Soviets had more ICBMs overall. After the Helsinki Accords and S.A.L.T. tacks the United States continued on development of new weapons technology debatably flanking the A.B.M. treaty that limited anti-ballistic missile development to basically just Moscow and Washington D.C. (we should have selected Pittsburgh instead). That was a lot of force to apply to the Evil Empire to change its borders.

When the cold war ended with the Soviet Empire disappearing by a signature of Boris Yeltsin there was no lawful government following it up. There probably should have been some sort of conservatorship applied by an international power to secure integral Russian lands such as Ukraine and Crimea in order to plainly differentiate them from lands that formerly were independent powers and not part of the Soviet sphere of influence until 1945 or later. It is notable that the Soviet Union never formerly annexed those Warsaw Pact nations it had captured from the Nazis in 1944-45.

Plainly promulgating confusion and historical falsehood putting Ukraine and Crimea into the same political category as Poland and Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Czechoslovakia in order to justify the expropriation of formerly integral parts of Russia is disingenuous. With such ordinary ignorance of history in America and perhaps Europe of Russian history the inertial characteristic of incapability of viewing historically objectively-contemporary history included, is strong. That ignorance seriously damages western political veracity and competence in addressing real political issues that would find a righteous settlement to contentious issues, such as Ukraine.

Assuring Russian right to navigate the Dnepr River and have barge access from its heartland farmlands to the world is a basic, non-negotiable point. It is also well known that Britain has had a problem with Russia since Ivan the Terrible kicked out Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor after they sailed to Murmansk in the first British voyage around the Kola Peninsula. John Paul Jones worked for the Russian-not the British navy, after the American Revolutionary War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Chancellor

Muslim fundamentalism, Market fundamentalism and Socialist fundamentalism are all threats to democracy and free enterprise globally. Each ism seeks global power. Capitalism differs from democracy as royalty differs from Islam’s dar al Islam. Cessationism is another point to consider-I acknowledge it has good and bad connotations regardless of one’s opinion about it.

America’s Republican and Democrat parties are two sides of the coin of corporatism. Democrats take the queer, abortionist side of corporatism while Republicans are the military, fake conservative branch of corporatism. Neither are moral conservatives obviously, and the media including Rush Limbaugh fall into those two corporatist sects. Market fundamentalists are superficial and non-objective on historical reasoning while the Democrat branch thinks international relations are best accomplished with drone shots and queering things up.

 

Britain has for hundreds of years been involved with European land battles to expand markets. That is as natural as breathing for them. British interest in the Ukraine would be antipathetic to any Russian sovereignty over it. President Bill Clinton-an anglophile Rhodes Scholar who lived at Oxford with Hillary smoking dope but not inhaling, interacted substantially with Boris Yeltsin and in the year the U.S.A. was launching cruise missile and aircraft sorties on the former Yugoslavia got the weak Boris Yeltsin to sign away the Ukraine in a deal no subsequent Russian President would ever accept. It was a bridge to far-a part of Russia removed like it was a formerly independent nation of Eastern Europe that would be a bone of contention and a divisive wedge to destroy the peaceful development and trust between Russia and the West that would grow for decades. Allowing the wedge to develop, that rift to widen would harm the economy and security of the west for decades, especially as it could end the cooperation of Russia and the west in the battle to contain Muslin political expansion through terror-a fundamental component of the Mohammedan creed.