Yes, I too am a matzos ball eating, hook-nosed pot stirrer

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For purpose of full disclosure, let me say first that I am full-blooded ethnically Jewish. My mother Ashkenazi and my father Sephardic (both have since passed). Religiously I am a Christian convert.

Now give me a second as that inoculation kicks in ......... OK there ... ready to continue!

For centuries, Old Europe relegated most usurious activity to Jews. Though oddly, most admonitions against usury are found in the Old Testament, whereas in the New, Jesus mentions usury as a natural fact of doing business and nowhere does he particularly rail against it per se. Thus Christians eschewed usury and forced it to the Jews, based on admonitions found in Jewish scriptures. One of many contradictions in that long and stormy relationship.

Thus European Jews played a critical role in the capitalization of those societies that contributed greatly to their economic vitalities. And for their thanks they were paid back with Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice - a parable about the Old Law vs. the New Faith, with Shylock as the embodiment of Jewish cruel-hearted stubborn adherence to the faithless Letter. This fiction centers around the unpleasant response of Shylock, the Jewish financier of three Christian merchant ships that met with tragedy on the seas. Never mind the hundreds of Jewish-financed ships that reality deliverd safely, to the great enrichment and betterment of European society, the public fixated on the mythical ships that fate never delivered, and the A1 SOB response that they came to belive is part of Jewish character.

But these notions are deep-rooted. The idea of "let the Jew do the financing" is ingrained deep in our European-based culture. Very often the hundreds of ships that do arrive safe will get the Jew little more than resentment for his profits, which are perceived as lecherous. But when the ship runs aground, and bankruptcy proceeding begin, the Jew gets it even worse, cast as the money-grubbing hooked-nosed vulture who loves nothing more than to take food from the poor Christian widow's mouth. The ruin of the Christian, the play tells us, is the Jew's delight.

Now fast forward to our Federal Reserve bank created in 1913. This is a horrible, secretive institution, not owned by the people (it is a private corporation paid for by the banks), not Constitutionally provisioned, that has carte blanche powers to control (or influence) our money supply and to set interest rates. And today it is running amok parking trillions of dollars to prop up failed institutions that have fleeced the American people. Indeed our mess traces directly to the Fed, that more than did it's part in making sure ridiculously cheap and never-ending credit blew up a housing bubble. They essentially blew up a housing bubble to try and mitigate the damage of the dot com bubble bursting, instead of letting the system run that crisis through, tough medicine though it would have been. Now the Fed is working overtime applying the same ponzi scheme solutions that got us into this mess - borrowing trillions from future generations to hide losses and sustain the unsustainable. The Fed is a dangerous institution, with powers that unambiguously should not exist. Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution plainly says that Congress shall have the sole authority to "Coin money and regulate the value thereof."

But Congress is more than happy to kick this political football over to the Fed, and turns a blind eye to it's secretive doings.

So where do the Jews come in? Well, most of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve have been Jewish. Most, sometimes all of it's board of governors are Jewish. But when the ships are coming in, everybody likes it this way. It gives them a sense of solidness to have that ancient race of the coin at the helm of this financial ship. But what about when the ships don't come in? Well, that's when everybody starts to "perceive" that when society is in chaos, and matters are getting all churned up, look close enough and you'll see a Jew stirring the pot.

Now my people have undeniably produced many a pot stirrer. Jesus, all his disciples, Einstein, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and many others. Some have stirred for good, some for bad. Whole thought systems, governances, economies, ways of life and theories of all kind have a substantial, if not total, Jewish root. But when the ships run aground, and the people take to the streets, as they may very well do soon right here in US, it won't be long until first the ugliest parts of our culture (which is already happening), then sooner or later the greater parts, start tearing themselves up searching for how we got into such a mess. And like always, standing there with a big wooden spoon will be a Jew, guilty as usual of stirring the pot.

But society delegated that role to him. Utterly abdicated it to him and loved him for it when times were good. And if a Jew has stirred the pot for the worse, how dare we forget all the times when the Jew stirred the pot for the better. And for centuries, we put the spoon in his hand, and made him do the work that Christian culture wouldn't or couldn't. Not to mention many hands are on the spoon, most not remotely Jewish.

U3 and let 'em eat cake

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If Marie Antoinette were alive today, she'd be down with the U3 method of calculating unemployment. This method of calculation is cold-hearted, soulless and a downright infuriating insult to the American people. For it declares some of the worse off among us, those that have exhausted unemployment benefits and have given up looking as non-persons unceremoniously tossed out of numerator and denominator.

Perhaps economic calculations should indeed be soulless, but they shouldn't be Satanic, and the U3 calculation is.

It's simply a way to gin up a better looking number to report, by creating an ever-shrinking "eligible employment base," down to almost 59% of adults these days, from a high of 65% just a few years ago. This measure simply tosses those folks out of the base and recalculates. Poof - through modern day statistical witchcraft, hoards of our fellow Americans disappear. A potion no less offensive than that of the witches of Macbeth, whose brood called for "liver of blaspheming Jew."

By the end of 2009, 1.5 million Americans will be thus cooked out of the sauce. Look for some of theses government-declared non-people to be taking to the streets in food riots by Christmas.

Our government needs to stop hiding the truth in statistical chicanery. The closest measure we have to an apples-to-apples measure of comparison to the way we calculated unemployment during the Great Depression is the U6 method. The U6 method adds back in the discouraged lookers and those who have had to settle for crappy part-time work to put some food on the table. Even that measure does not adjust for the millions of people who are working but have had their hours and pay slashed, sometimes dramatically. By the U6 measure, unemployment isn't far from 18%, and is up in the low twenties in some cities. This is flirting with Great Depression territory, and our government and media needs to start being upfront about this. True, the U6 number is released every month, but it's the U3 that gets all the attention. A number that actually ticked down a tenth of a percent in July, even as 247,000 more Americans found themselves out of a job.

Let's start reporting honest numbers, using methods that would please a Teddy Roosevelt or Thomas Jefferson, and leave cold-hearted Marie, whose thoughtless inconsiderations have already been judged, to the ash heap of history where she belongs.

McCain down the drain

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How often does one find himself critically positioned to effect history for the better? When the financial crisis exploded onto our attentions in 2008, John McCain was so positioned.

Hank Paulson wanted 700 billion dollars to prop up failure. To bailout the very bankster crooks who got us into this mess. All eyes were on McCain as he suspended his Sarah-rejuvenated campaign. Now was his chance to do the very kind of thing he had done throughout his career - take the maverick position against monumental waste and unfairness. Instead, he goes to Washington, sheepishly says "aye," and so co-opened the floodgates to Bailout Nation. As we began a course of not addressing the fundamental imbalances in the economy, but trying to ponzi scheme our way out of it. This time generational in scope - robbing future generations to prop up and bailout Modern Banking Nobility. Feudal lords of our land and coin, who through decades of psychological trickery have positioned their foot upon the American neck.

Not only was a "no" the right thing to do, but politically it would have been perfect. Who cares if a legacy-panicked George Bush was for it, W was a pimple in the polls anyway by that point. And Obama's whole campaign was about gluing Bush and McCain at the hip. And yet a McCain "no" would have left Barack Obama on the side of George Bush! Defending the absolutely indefensible. And Bailout Nation would then be Obama's albatross.

But at that critical juncture, when everyone was shell-shocked, looking for leadership, looking for someone to stand up and say "no way!" to the sick raping of the American people and lavish rewards to their rapists, and McCain was uniquely positioned to be that person, he tosses it all away. He had first and ten, and chose to punt! He had his chance to turn the tables on those money-changing rapscallions, and cast them clean out of our once sound Temple. Instead he invited them over for tea.

That was your chance Senator. Thanks for nothing, and enjoy Bailout Nation.

Predictions 9/1/2009 - 3/1/2010

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I want to get these on the record now, calling them like I see them.

1. The American economy will recover nicely. The only problem though, is that the American economy is no longer here - we shipped it over to India and China. The fairytale fiasco we have left here will fall off a cliff. Bubble Blowing Ben Bernanke will ponzi around funny-money, keeping the GDP and markets puffed up for a bit, but the whole ponzinomics shell-game will fall on our heads. Look for a big stock market drop by mid-October and food riots by Christmas. Christmas sales will be the worst on record.

2. Very long, bitingly cold Winter in the East. At least 2 big Noreasters. This will make the swine flu particularly bad in the East. It will be bad nationwide, but nothing like 1918. Still, it will make the upcoming flu season about 3 times as deadly.

3. There will be no healthcare bill. We're due for a national "Oops" moment, when it falls on our heads that we're quarreling about healthcare with another Great Depression unfolding all around us. Healthcare will get put on hold.

4. The world will "decouple" from the US. A new world currency will be formed. The US, Britain will have a severe depression, Japan and Russia will a severe recession , Canada, Australia, Germany and France will have a medium-sized recessions, China and India will slow somewhat but maintain growth by expanding their domestic economies. The dollar will be in crisis, near worthless.

5. Widespread civil unrest will take place the second half of 2010 and accelerate in 2011, the next 6 months will lay the groundwork.

6. Look for a Republican "walkout" on Barack Obama at the Jan 20, 2010 State of the Union speech. This will be drummed up as racism by the media, and a cultural explosion will ensue.

Of pubes and radio

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When I was 15ish, me and a friend would get stoned in this room off his bedroom called "The Studio." His dad owned an advertising agency, and the room was filled with cool surplus AV equipment.

On one such occasion, my friend brought the little rug that was in front of the desk, up on the desk and started inspecting it for pubes. He was in bliss, and it was a very funny occasion as he would pluck off pubes and separate them into little piles by name. There was the Linda pile, and the Denise pile, and I forget all who else pile. All the victims of his sexcapades since the last vacuuming were diagnosed and sorted. My friend preferred diversity, so there was a wide array of colors, lengths and thickness to aid the sorting process. Looking back now, it's a good thing for him that all his girlfriends weren't Chinese, or it would have been a very long afternoon, but I digress. But it was a funny thing for two stoned 15 year-olds to be doing.

Except deep down inside I was hurting. Because I had no rug with pubes. Well, my own. The dog's. And perhaps some renegade pube that blew in from another room, but that was about it. And I was embarrassed that this exercise in pube identification was the closest I had come to a real life pube other than the afore mentioned.

But this post is not about pubes, or my friend, or childhood wishes unfulfilled, or any of that, it's about me wanting to do a little night radio show. So far it seems like anything but that, but I'm getting there.

In my 20's I started getting a little bit of confidence, and the "I can do it too" thought started to crystallize within me. My niece was dating a very bight British engineer named Simon. I liked Simon, and we frequently chatted about events of the day whenever he'd visit with my niece at various occasions. But I found many of Simon's insights and opinion on certain subjects to be not as well-formed as my own. Around this time is when I started to grasp that engineers, mathematicians, chemists, you name it, don't have to be these "smart people" I need only gawk at, but I too could be one of those people. So I began school, and 6 years later (now near 30) I received my master's degree in mathematical statistics, a field I have now been working in for 16 years. So I did reach a point in life where I did not just have to live vicariously off of someone else's pubes, but started to get a few of my own.

Now I find myself at another "me too" moment in life. I'd really like to get my voice out there. I have a great gift of gab and grasp of issues that can stir people up in a conservative/populist kind of way. I'd love a little radio show, but radio is something only "other people" do.

But pubes and college degrees and careers were something that only "other people" did, yet over the years I've come to have my own fill of these things. With pubes I mean my own of course, but hey, a fill is a fill. But life keeps going, and after one meal we find ourselves hungry yet again.

And I know that if I step up to the plate, I can always be one of those "other people" myself. But part of me thinks radio might be a stretch too far, and doubt can be a killer. Is radio something I can really do, or is it just more of someone else's pubes? Is this whole quest a pube too far?

I need some inspiration. Perhaps I should call Simon, or maybe go back to The Studio and get stoned. Maybe there's even a time-forgotten fossilized pube or two still laying around to remind me from whence I came, and how far I've traveled.

Oh Soviets, we hardly knew ye

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When they were called Mujahideen, we idolized and romanticised them. Rugged, well leathered Afghan resistance fighters, coming down from the mountains to bloody the Soviets, then like gear-laden-billy-goats they'd retreat back up the slopes into the mysterious tough-as-iron world from which they were forged

Heck, we even had America's #1 beefy-bone-head, Sylvester Stallone cast them as freedom-loving brave-hearts in the shamefully overlooked by the Academy masterpiece, Rambo III. But that these same Mujahideen would form the core of the Taliban, that they were Shariaists who represented a brutal shudder-inducing theocracy was something we absolutely did not know.

And shame on us for not knowing it. And we must never forget the lessons of not knowing it - that the world is full of ironies we don't understand. All we wanted, me too at the time, was for the Soviets to get bloodied. We couldn't see past the Cold War. So Carter started arming the Mujahideen and Reagan accelerated it. Then the world sat back aghast (and this even before 911) at what the Taliban actually were. We watched them blow up 1,500 tear-old carvings to Buddha, literally destroying irreplaceable national and world treasures because it supposedly went against their religious creeds. Women were not allowed to be educated and religious death squads were formed, enforcing Sharia law with an iron fist.

Now it wasn't the Taliban directly that perpetrated 911, but they welcomed Bin laden and his terrorist camps into the country with open arms. And we're left with the supreme irony that a Soviet-style Communist Afghanistan would have actually been more in our national interest than was the post-Soviet Taliban. One take-away from this is that we really don't always know what our national interest is at the time, although we think we do. Another is that we don't understand foreign people, their societal factions, their cultural and religious institutions and proclivities the way we think we do.

This lesson was solidified further in Iraq. Which, by the way, I actually thought we were going to just knock off Saddam Hussein and leave. Not caring what they did next, but just making it clear that governments who may do us harm will get harm done to them first. When it became clear we were actually going to stay to build a Jeffersonian democracy, then we began to understand what we didn't understand. For instance, there never was 1 Iraq, there were 3 Iraqs. The Kurdish north, Sunni center and Shiite south. Apparently, Saddam permitted opposition Shiite clerics to exist. I would have just though he would have had them all killed. But there they were, El-Sadr and the like. What a mess.

I'm tired of these parts of the world. We only need to do what we need to do, both home and abroad, to keep crazies from flying planes into buildings. Let's do no more, and never get caught not knowing what we don't know ever again.

Turn down the noise, I can't hear myself implode!

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Imagine a room with 10 radios blaring, each tuned to a different station. If one station was more important than the others, you would need the extraneous stations tuned off so you could listen to the important one. When they're all playing, it's just gibberish.

Such is the state of our nation today, too many noisy and pointless programs playing all at once. All that matters is the economy. there is no recovery, and there are no green shoots.

The stock market has been puffed up by TARP funds the banks are laundering in through the back door. Money borrowed from future generations to cover bank losses, snuck into the market through the back door. This is Bernanke's Generational Ponzi Scheme - the idea was to recapitalize the banks, while a run-up in the market would induce media green-shoot-gasms that would seduce consumers into spreading wide their wallets.

Instead, the consumer is tapped out and didn't budge. The banks will be withdrawing from the market soon, parlaying 2 trillion into 3 trillion. The additional trillion plundered from your 401k contributions, as the system continues to siphon from the bottom and feed the gangsters at the top. And Don Bernanke sits in the big chair and is gets his ring kissed over the whole affair.

But by mid-October the market will be in free-fall. The commercial real estate, consumer debt, and bailout bubble that Bernanke blew up to hide the housing bubble will be popping in full force. Real unemployment will be near 20%, and though the news media will likely still be going over to Japan to import green shoots, the American people will be crushed.

This is the only radio station that should be playing. We'll never even get to healthcare. The economy will exploding before both Houses have a reconciled bill on the President's desk. And the nation will have one giant "Oops" moment, as we collectively realize that all this time we should have been talking about nothing else but the meltdown.

The idiotic channels that must be turned down so that we can hear ourselves implode are:

1. Healthcare, as mentioned.

2. The junk-science lunacy that is Global Warming.

3. The world ending in 2012.

4. The much ado over Obama's birth certificate.

5. Illegal immigration.

6. Antidepressants.

7. All things Karl Rove and Dick Cheney

8. All things GM

9. Every and all stories about Obama painted as The Joker.

I leave the door open for Swine Flu if it gets serious, Afghanistan and Gitmo. But only when our main station is in commercial.