In a trap of their own making...

I have to honestly say that I watched the whole debt debate with a mix of both horror and sadness.

However, I can't think we can honestly talk about our debt crisis without talking about the country that's one the largest holders of our debt.  This country is of course, China.

Lots of people have argued that this puts China in a strong position, however, I think it's quite the opposite.

Here's why...

China has for years now, devalued their currency while simultaneously buying our debt.  Their market competitiveness is based entirely on being the cheapest.  It also means that they've consistently had to deal with internal inflation because of this devaluation.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but during most of our debt debate, China was quiet and then got quite vocal about how we need to get our financial house in order without raising the interest rate...

Raising the interest rate in this country would cause every dollar to be worth a bit less.  This causes two things happen in China.  Firstly, their pile of US dollars is worth less, and secondly the distance between their currently and the US dollar shrinks.  As China, what do you do?  Do you continue to devalue your currency causing additional inflation?  China's citizens are already rather pissed about that...  Since China's economy relies on exports, letting their currency catch up means they're less competitive.  China's talked about developing their domestic market, but with inflation so high and wages staying low, unless you're ultra rich, you may work in a factory making big screen tv's but you'll never be able to afford one.

China could threaten to sell some portion of their T notes.  What would that get them?  Suddenly flooding the market with say 500 billion worth of US currency would do nobody any good.  It would have the same effect as increasing the interest rate.  Plus it would hurt the other large holders of U.S. debt and could quite likely cause an inflationary death spiral where more countries would try to offload their t-notes before they become worthless, driving the price down, etc.

What are the solutions to this problem?

One thing is that China could allow their currency to slowly appreciate in a controlled way thus slowing their inflation.  This however would make them less competitive globally, but it would prevent explosive inflation.

Another thing we could to is slowly increase the interest rate, while working with the Chinese to revalue their currency.  They come up, we come down and we meet in the middle.

However, this being America, we're not big on protectiveness.  We'll wait until we can't hold out any more and then we'll flood the market with cash and/or raise the interest rates and screw everybody.

Cry me a river!

I hope that you, like me were completely disgusted with the performance that the oil companies put on in Washington.  Seriously, they weren't even trying!

Let me get this straight.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans are out of work.  Gas is at four dollars a gallon and oil companies are raking in huge profits... Yet those guys argued that cutting the billions of dollars worth of subsidies is un-American?

I REALLY hope that wasn't from a prepared statement... I just would like to hope that they had a Sarah Palin moment and stupid just fell out of their mouth.

Otherwise, what the fuck.  Are they that crass?

Let's not forget that BP wrote off $10 Billion of the money it put aside as a tax credit...That's right... they pollute the shit out of the Gulf and then push a portion of the cleanup on to us...thanks assholes.

Though I suppose you have to see it from their perspective.  They've been on the government dole for so damn long they don't know what it's like not to be partially subsidized by the government.  To them it seems very un-American to take away something that they practically consider their right... namely to fuck us black and blue coming and going.

What's probably even more flabbergasting to them is the notion that for all the money they've spent putting the people into congress who were gonna tow the line have suddenly gotten all independent and starting listening to their constitutes (the voting one's, not the big oil money one's)

All I can say is "Cry me a river!"

Bin Laden's dead... *shrug*

So finally after a trillion dollars, two endless wars and a whole pile of bullshit, we managed to kill Bin Laden.  Whoopee.  Quite frankly I'd forgotten about the old fuck a this point.  No big surprise he was in Pakistan.

As for disposing of his body at sea, that make sense.  A body, grave, pictures all that stuff turns the guy into a martyr.  I'm not sure that this generation of jihadists really care that much about the message of Bin Laden anymore.  I think the pictures of the Iranians shooting their students in the street when they asked for basic rights pretty much spelled the end of the idea of any other state turning into a theocracy.

You don't have to look far in the papers to see that your average Muslim has taken a hard long look at their governments and said "This is bullshit!".  The governments got the guns but they've got the numbers.  I'll place my bet on the numbers any day.

Libya... Seriously?

The issue I have with Libya is the fact that I don't see how we're not going to get involved in mission creep (and by us I mean the coalition).

Right now we're bombing the shit out of anything that looks even remotely military.  Which is to say, I'm sure Gadhafi is packing every tank/APC and truck with civilians so when we bomb them he'll have a pile of dead civilians he can point to and say "See, They're killing us!!!"

The question I have is in the near future, when suddenly this ragtag group of rebels try's to take back some of the places that they've been pushed from and then we start providing air support for them... then we're no longer providing no {fly/drive} zone coverage. To make sure we don't accidentally bomb the rebels who look exactly like the pro-Gadhafi forces we'll have to put forward air controllers on the ground to direct the air strikes.... you see where this is going.

Pretty soon this will stop being a limited no fly/drive zone and turn into providing air cover and tactical support for the rebels, who for the most part have shown themselves to have plenty of guts, but little or no military training.

The other question, I have is... Who exactly are these rebels and are they people we really want to be consorting with?  Honestly, nobody is really sure (that I can tell).  Since Libya is basically a whole pile of different tribes, quite likely these are the tribes that were um... disenfranchised by those tribes who got in with Flynn with Gadhafi.  Also, since there are zero democratic or social institutions in Libya, quite likely we're going to help the rebels depose one dictator they hate so they can install a dictator that they like... Who will quite likely hate America just as much as Gadhafi only won't be nearly as charismatically crazy and/or capable of holding the country together. 

While were on the topic of African nations... Why Libya and not the Ivory Coast where the current president (who was defeated in an election that was widely viewed as being fair) is refusing to leave power and has instead started to raise an army to massacre the supports of the guy who was fairly elected?

How about Yemen and Bahrain where they've dropped all pretense and have just started firing into the protesters?  Oh wait... the 5th fleet is stationed in Bahrain and Yemen is "helping" us in the war on terror... What's it going to take in those countries?  When the security forces roll in the tanks and start firing grape shot at point blank range that we'll finally take a stand (and by take a stand, Mrs. Clinton will pen a strongly worded letter?!?)

I'm suspecting that we'll only get interested in Ivory Coast once it turns into a Rwanda like genocide that we'll suddenly take an interest... maybe... we've got a pretty poor track record...  We howled a lot about Darfur but we didn't really do a thing.  We'll just sit back and let the Africans slaughter each other.

So here we are...

So the Republicans have taken back the house of representatives.  They're claiming that they're going to cut 100 billion out of the budget without touching any military spending.  Apparently they've already decided that's too ambitious and are only go for 50 billion.

I know I'm approaching this with marked skepticism.  I've just heard a hell of a lot of rhetoric without any meaningful policy discussion.

Case in point, healthcare.  So they're going to repeal it.  Once that fails, they'll just not fund it.  Okay... What's on the table to replace it or improve it in a way that'll make these people happy?  I guess I just don't understand they're stance.

"This is tyranny that when Americans have a medical emergency they're not completely bankrupted!"
or
"Why should my tax dollars go to supporting a system where someone whose already sick should get insurance, this is an abomination!"

To me they're stance is just so insane and undefendable I don't even know where to start.

I'm going to stop right here, but I'll add on to this post later...

Wikileaks is a good thing

As you turn on the TV, you are bombarded with silly hyperbole about how Assange could, might possibly be a terrorist!?!  What you're actually seeing is the status quo in full damage control.  Wikileaks changes the playing field in a fundamental way, it actually makes entities accountable.

I don't see how this is a bad thing, if you're a citizen.  If you're a government that's been acting in a way that's less then transparent, it's horrifying.  If you're a corporation that's been misrepresenting itself or doing things that you'd rather not have the government, shareholders and/or the general public knowing about, Wikileaks is a threat.

Clearly, these entities understand the idea that the control of knowledge is power.

What I also find interesting is that there's been no shocking revelations as of yet.  There are no smoking guns.

What have we learned so far from Wikileaks?
* Iraq and Afghanistan are the ugly messes we all thought they were...
* Pakistan's ISI has been involved with the Taliban
* Pakistan's leaders while publicly condemning drone strikes, have given tacit approval of them because it means it doesn't cost them any troops.

I could continue to list "revelations", but we all get the idea... It's all stuff that without being outright said, we'd pretty much all deduced at this point.

While as an American citizen it's interesting to actually get some insight into the inter workings of one corner of my government, I can only imagine what other countries who have governments that are entire opaque suddenly getting some insight (albeit through our state department) into their governments, now that'll interesting!

This of course is bad news for those involved who have secrets they'd rather not talk about, so they'll attack Wikileaks, baring that they'll go after it's infrastructure.  When they can't stop Wikileaks they'll go after Assange.  When that doesn't work, they'll then try to argue about the validity of what's been released.

Now when this latest freak out over, I see a number of things happening...

Firstly, everybody possible will try to enact draconian laws which will be shot down by the judicial branch.

Secondly, the State Department and the DoD are going to make it impossible to get anything out of their networks. As an IT guy, why it's was so easy to get this information off the network in the first place boggles my mind.

Manhattan Mosque brouhaha

I don't have an issue with a mosque being built two blocks from site of the WTC.

The people who attacked the United States on 9/11 did so as an act of hatred.  Religion was and still is nothing more than a means for justification, period.  Just as the people who attacked the United States on 5/19 (Oklahoma City bombing) did so as an act of hatred.

What's the difference between the 11 hijackers and the two people who perpetrated terrorist attacks on this country?  Nothing.

Both groups of people took their hatred of the American government out on innocent people.  Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sihk, it didn't matter to them, their goal was to punish the United States and therefore it's people. 

So I ask this question... Would people have an issue building a church two blocks away from the site of the Alfred P. Murrah building?  I bet not.  I don't even think it would make it into the papers

As American's we seem to have a collective blind spot when it comes to the aftermath of 9/11.

While 9/11 was a tragedy for the United States, it was a unmitigated catastrophe for the followers of Islam.  Since 9/11 more than 1 million Iraqi's have died.  For every person who died on 9/11, 447+ people have died and that's just in Iraq, that doesn't include Afghanistan. Our use of deleted uranium munitions has ensured that parts of Iraq will continue to have cancer and birth defeats rates higher than anywhere else in the world, thus multiplying the tragedy. 

Keep in mind that none of the hijackers were from either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Only a few of the masterminds of 9/11 have ever been caught and we've never been able to get our hands on Osama Bin Laden, despite spending trillions of dollars.

I'd also like to address the absurd analogies that people have been making.

Comparing 9/11 to The Holocaust is insulting to the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocost.  9/11 was an single act of terrorism that cost the lives of 2,985 people. As for the number of jews killed the scope was so large that people can only estimate it was ~5.59 to 5.86 million.  At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone ~1,400,000 jews died.  If my memory serves me correctly Germany was one of the proponents for the creation of Israel.

The other comparison I hear all the time is "What if the Japanese wanted to build a shire near Pearl Harbor!?!"  Actually, the Japanese have built a Shinto shire near Pearl Harbor.  People would do well to stop parroting Rush Limbaugh, he is an idiot.

What I don't understand is this.  IF the world trade center is hollowed ground then shouldn't be treated as a cemetery?  Why are we going to build some new building there?  We should cover the whole thing with a granite capstone and make a memorial out of it.  Tear down every building in a three block radius and turn the whole thing into a park that's managed by the national parks service.