35-year-old Liu Bolin, from Shandong, China, manages to camouflage himself in any surroundings, no matter how difficult they might be.
Liu works on a single photo for up to 10 hours at a time, to make sure he gets it just right, but he achieves the right effect: sometimes passers-by don’t even realize he is there until he moves.
The talented Liu Bolin says his art is a protest against the actions of the Government, who shut down his art studio in 2005 and persecutes artists. It’s about not fitting into modern society. Despite problems with Chinese authorities, Liu’s works are appreciated at an international level.
This is not the change we hoped for. President Obama rose to power on the basis of his early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. But after a year in the White House he has made both of George Bush’s wars his wars.
Speaking of Iraq in February 2008, candidate Barack Obama said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” The following month, under fire from Hillary Clinton, he reiterated,”I was opposed to this war in 2002….I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don’t be confused.”
Indeed, in his famous “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow” speech on the night he clinched the Democratic nomination, he also proclaimed, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that . . . this was the moment when we ended a war.”
Now he has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to keep the war in Iraq going for another 19 months, after which we will have 50,000 American troops in Iraq for as far as the eye can see. If McCain had proposed this sort of minor tweaking of the Bush policy, I think we’d see antiwar rallies in 300 cities. Calling the antiwar movement!
President Obama’s promises are becoming less credible. He says that after all this vitally necessary and unprecedented federal spending, he will turn his attention to constraining spending at some uncertain date in the future. And he says that he will first put more troops into Afghanistan, and then withdraw them at some uncertain date in the future (”in July of 2011,” but “taking into account conditions on the ground”). Voters are going to be skeptical of both these promises to accelerate now and then put on the brakes later.
The real risk for Obama is becoming not JFK but LBJ — a president with an ambitious, expensive, and ultimately destructive domestic agenda, who ends up bogged down and destroyed by an endless war. Congress should press for a quicker conclusion to both wars — and should also remember the years of stagflation and slow growth that followed President Johnson’s expansion of the welfare state.
To close out 2009, I decided to do something I bet no member of Congress has done — actually read from cover to cover one of the pieces of sweeping legislation bouncing around Capitol Hill.
Hunkering down by the fire, I snuggled up with H.R. 4173, the financial-reform legislation passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives. The Senate has yet to pass its own reform plan. The baby of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the House bill is meant to address everything from too-big-to-fail banks to asleep-at-the-switch credit-ratings companies to the protection of consumers from greedy lenders.
I quickly discovered why members of Congress rarely read legislation like this. At 1,279 pages, the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” is a real slog. And yes, I plowed through all those pages. (Memo to Chairman Frank: “ystem” at line 14, page 258 is missing the first “s”.)
The reading was especially painful since this reform sausage is stuffed with more gristle than meat. At least, that is, if you are a taxpayer hoping the bailout train is coming to a halt.
If you’re a banker, the bill is tastier. While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises.
In the weeks and years immediately following September 11, 2001, many Americans succumbed to the attractive yet fictional idea that all people in the United States share the same interests, goals and values. This idea of a mystical “unity” among all Americans took widespread hold as a natural human reaction to an attack by foreigners on American soil. With a dangerous cocktail of fear and anger coursing through their veins, and prodded on by the docile and unquestioning American political-media establishment, it was easy and emotionally satisfying to imagine that “we” were united together in a quasi-spiritual bond against an evil and maniacal foreign enemy. Members of America’s political class were not oblivious to the fact that they could exploit this idea for their own personal gain, and they pounced at the opportunity to pass legislation aimed at controlling and subduing Americans themselves – in the name of protecting them, of course. Seeking to distract Americans from the obvious fact that the U.S. government had both provoked the attack and failed to stop it, a bellicose vanguard of the political class pounced at the opportunity to make real their dream of sending American soldiers into far-away deserts and rocky mountains in order to spread “democracy” to the savages of the world.
Everything seemed to be going brilliantly for the dominant political class at the time. Their plans for a greatly expanded and powerful domestic state and exhilarating, democracy-promoting foreign adventures had all become realities. Then, to the dominant political class’s chagrin, things started to go badly. First, on the foreign adventure front, it turned out that the people in the deserts and rocky mountains that American soldiers were “liberating” were not as excited about being ruled by majorities of other ethnic groups as the American political class had hoped. Nor were they particularly excited about having tens of thousands of highly armed foreigners marauding around their countries and dropping bombs on their neighbors. It had been many years since the American Karzai had “unified” the United States through murder,taxation, and conquest, and the political class in Washington had forgotten that proud and independent people are not always thrilled about the idea of having far away people control their lives.They had also forgotten that war always involves death, suffering, and destruction, not ticker-tape parades, peace, and love.
Suitable for nailing to an appropriate door near you…
agora (1) – n. A place of congregation, an ancient Greek marketplace.
agora (2) – n. A market free of forceable regulation, taxation, and government
(The) Agora – The aggregate of all such markets of any size.
95 Theses
1. Free, unregulated, untaxed, and unmonitored trade is the natural right of all human beings
2. In a voluntary trade, both parties receive more than they give up, otherwise neither would trade.
3. Nobody gets taken advantage of through mutually voluntary trade.
4. Taxation forces people to pay for things that aren’t worth the cost
5. Government regulation forces people to abstain from trades they would otherwise voluntarily make.
6. Markets collect, organize, and distribute information more rapidly, accurately, fairly, and efficiently than any central authority could ever do, even with superior resources.
7. Prices are information.
8. Force distorts market information. 9. Governments’ only means of action is force.
10. Governments operate blindly because they only see information distorted by force. The more information they gather, the less clear their vision becomes.
11. Aggression is a reaction to unpleasant or unwanted information. It’s motto is “kill the messenger”. 12. A market is smarter than any of it’s participants. A government is stupider than most of it’s participants.
Bart Hinkle makes some interesting observations in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the unfortunate similarities between neoconservatives and progressives. Progressives, he says (and of course they’re not really for progress, so they might better be called left-liberals), spent the Bush years criticizing “bullying,” “heavy-handed meddling,” and even “neoconservative theories of social engineering.” They preferred “soft power.”
Yet turn the subject to domestic policy, and what happens? Progressives eagerly embrace the use of coercive hard power to achieve their aims. Force industry to adopt a cumbersome cap-and-trade policy to reduce carbon emissions? Check. Force the country to adopt a health care “public option”? Check. Threaten people with fines and even prison to impose an individual mandate? Check.
So much for the concern about “social engineering” and well-intentioned but “heavy-handed meddling.” When it comes to domestic policy, progressives are just as eager as neocons are to embrace “expansive dreams” and “gargantuan plans.” Just as hopelessly romantic about what the threat of force can achieve. And just as arrogant about the rightness of wielding it.
After some more critical analysis of the inconsistency of the left, Hinkle concludes:
Of course, everything that has just been said about progressives could be turned with equal validity against conservatives of the talk-radio right — many of whom think Americans should push the rest of the world around, but leave one another the heck alone
If only there were an alternative to heavy-handed liberals and heavy-handed conservatives…
As I see it, booms and busts are a natural part of human social behavior. Cycles appear throughout history and are part of the dynamism of humanity of which Butler Shaffer so eloquently writes. If this is so, then what role do central banks play in the modern world?
The magic of central and fractional reserve banking, fiat money and deposit insurance artificially enables improvident rationalizations about credit and debt, and generates false price signals throughout an economy.
By definition, in a fractional reserve system a small amount of debt is pyramided into vast purchasing power, driving up prices for goods and services and/or assets. When it flows into assets it is not generally recognized as inflation and is initially applauded as people feel wealthier, until optimism peaks, only after which is the bubble recognized.
Some have likened the Fed to supplying the punchbowl at the party, but this is the wrong analogy. The party and hangover would occur with or without the Fed; the Fed’s role is to supply methamphetamines whenever the revelers appear to be running out of energy, staving off the hangover and near-term sobriety. This prevents periodic economic readjustments and creates the illusion of “full employment” and “economic stability” over longer periods of time.
If you don’t think Americans can be pulled off the streets by a secret police for having controversial, and anti-establishment views, then think again. Search warrants are a thing of the past. And if you think the people will object against illegal arrests, then you have learned nothing from the last eight years. In poor societies that are on the verge of economic collapse it is more often the case that neighbors turn against neighbors, and any sense of community is restricted to intimate friends and family.
Every news headline out of Washington suggests America is a full-fledged police state. The kleptocratic government is hoping that Americans will squeal on each other, by encouraging distrust in communities, and advancing propaganda that serves the weakening of public morale. It is not outlandish to think that some Americans will tattle to the authorities about what they view as ’suspicious behavior’, if a sizable amount of money is offered. And there’s a lot of money to go around within the American government. Especially for pretty much anything intelligence or police related, making it very likely that Americans will seize on this economic opportunity in hard times, even if it means betraying their countrymen, and their own conscious.
RT – Russia Today television…YEP! I guess you have to watch Russian television to see a U.S. congressman speak out against these insane wars! Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher has to tell it like it is…on Russian television. The corporate owned U.S. media (the false liberal media) has too much conflict to show anti-war congressmen because other arms of their corporations are making too much profit off the wars. This is why I chucked the “liberal media” a long time ago. It’s not liberal, it’s a sham. Corporations own the media and since when are corporations liberal?
