yuck – it´s Friday, 13th – Open Thread …
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August 13, 2004
Paraskevidekatriaphobics
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Robert Feldman: Geology, Statistics, and Economics — What Are Markets Saying About Oil? Part I, Part II
the world oil market has entered the Crisis phase of a CRIC cycle — the cycle of Crisis, Response, Improvement, and Complacency that characterizes the interaction of structural reform and economic performance. In a nutshell, the oil market is giving the world a swift kick in the pants, in order to stimulate exploration, substitution, and — the only long-term solution — innovation.
Posted by: b | Aug 13 2004 13:27 utc | 2
LARRY KING Interview with Bush: Transcript
G. BUSH: When I travel the country, and I’ve been traveling a lot, there are thousands of people who come out and wave, and they are — you know, they respect the presidency. Sometimes they like the president, but I have this — I don’t have a sense that there’s a lot of anger.
…
KING: What did you think of the [9/11] report?
G. BUSH: I thought it was a great report. I read it.
Posted by: b | Aug 13 2004 13:30 utc | 3
Friday 13th – unlucky for some
Explosion at BP US oil refinery
Posted by: Nemo | Aug 13 2004 13:55 utc | 4
among other things….salt and garlic, use lots today.
Posted by: anna mist | Aug 13 2004 16:42 utc | 6
On November 3, 2003, the United States was among 190 of 191 UN General Assembly members to co-sponsor and adopt a Greek-submitted resolution entitled “Building a Peaceful and Better World Through Sport and the Olympic Ideals,” the key component of which was the truce.
The resolution “urges the member states to observe, within the framework of the Charter of the United Nations, the Olympic Truce, individually and collectively, during the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad to be held in Athens, Greece, from 13 to 29 August 2004.”
Perhaps ironically, the US ambassador to the United Nations at the time was John Negroponte who is now Washington’s top diplomat in Iraq, the lone UN member not to sign up to the truce because it was then under a US-led occupation government and not represented at the world body.
Anyone think like me in that Kofi Annan is a waste of space?
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 13 2004 16:55 utc | 8
Come on Bernhard, we need an Olympic Thread. Blair is in the favourite’s position of being the most insincere, lying, murdering bastard ever to lead the Labour Party.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 13 2004 17:04 utc | 9
The U.S. trade deficit soared to a record $55.8 billion in June, the government reported, coming in far wider than economists had expected as climbing oil prices led to a record level of imports.
Trade gap soars to record
If July hits $60 billion the US$ will tank.
Posted by: b | Aug 13 2004 17:33 utc | 10
Speaking of the Olympics…do you suppose Americans are going to be booed indefatigably?
And on the podiums, when the anthems are played, will we be hearing: Oh_say_can_you_boo rocketing over the top of Oh_say_can_you_see?
If so…
Will we have to see yet more editorials in the papers on “Why do they boo us?”
[Suggestion to editors: recycle the ones titled: “Why do they hate us?”]
My own prediction: American athletes will not be made excessive scapegoats… save for a few rogue instances here and there.
Posted by: koreyel (anti-triskaidekaphobist) | Aug 13 2004 17:35 utc | 11
I watch the show on the BBC. Michael Johnson is the guest for BBC, a great athlete and an American.
As for the Boos, Greece is probably the most anti-American country in the EU. Let’s wait and see.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 13 2004 18:06 utc | 12
What, Greece, the birth place of democracy?
Why would they boo the contemporary standard bearers of their sacred child?
Posted by: Juannie | Aug 13 2004 19:22 utc | 13
Judith effing Miller is back!
“….Oil industry experts told Security Council members and Secretary General Kofi Annan’s staff that Iraq was demanding under-the-table payoffs from its oil buyers….”
Now, I don’t wanna be an apologist for Mr. Annan but, holy crap, how the hell can Bill Keller possibly let Ms. Miller run with unnamed sources once again?
Is it possible that Keller is actually a NewsCorp mole whose mission is to take down the NYT for good?
Posted by: RossK | Aug 13 2004 19:24 utc | 14
Watching the procession of countries, the Greek Alphabet did my head in.
Go Greece, have a great Olympic games. But I worry about the terra threat and manipulated terror attacks.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 13 2004 20:17 utc | 15
Hello everyone. On CounterPunch there is an article by Stan Goff “There He Go’s Again: Kerry’s Energy Plan” He go’s through a series of old theories about the creation of societies, Malthus, energy use, blah, blah, blah. He fails to say that population in developed countries is actually dropping. Russia, and Europe continue to loose population of native population due lack of child bearing. Only through immigration are western countries keeping even, including the US.
China is worried that not enough females are being born and are incentivising female births. While Goff has many valid points, his premises don’t apply thinking out of the box to problems we face. We are a technology driven society and technology can improve ways of making energy, and the lives of people. Will capitalism solve the energy needs of the future? Goof says no, and I must agree. Government will have to be at the forefront of cutting edge technologies, and currently no-one in public office has the will to spend the money needed. It’s easier the pillage other countries in the short run. What I don’t agree with Goff is that capitalism doesn’t have a place. Capitalism, as always, will take the creation of government and be able to mass produce it for the masses driving down cost of any cutting edge technology.
I’d provide a link, but I’m not that swift.
Posted by: jdp | Aug 13 2004 22:06 utc | 17
Juannie: What, Greece, the birth place of democracy?
My current read is Will/Ariel Durant’s slim little gem of a book: The Lessons of History.
It is one of those books that is so rich in ideas it leaves you feeling poor.
What I mean by that is: there has been two dozen moments where they have addressed issues near and dear to my au currant heart.
I’ve decorated the margins in ah-ha’s and filled up index cards with vague scriblings.
Anyhow…
Here is the quote from the book that my mind linked to your comment:
“In his Republic Plato made his mouthpiece, Socrates, condemn the triumphant democracy of Athens as a chaos of class violence, cultural decandence, and moral degeneration….By the time of Plato’s death (347 BC) his hostile analysis of Athenian democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history. Athens recovered wealth, but this was now commercial rather than landed wealth: industrialists, merchants, and bankers were at the top of the reshuffled heap. The change produced a feverish struggle for money, a pleonexia, as the Greeks called it–and apetite for more and more. The nouveaux riches (neoplutoi) built gaudy mansions, bedecked their woman with costly robes and jewelry, spoiled them with dozens of servants, rivaled one another in the feasts with which they regaled their guests. The gap between the rich and the poor widened; Athens was divided, as Plato put it, into “two cities: … one the city of the poor, the other the city of the rich, the one at war with the other.”
And so it goes on and on….
One of those slim little tomes that makes one feel terminally unread.
Well…
At any rate…
We have much to learn…err…
I mean…
Relearn.
Which is all to say… I’ve been humbled and re-humbled by this book.
Posted by: koreyel | Aug 13 2004 22:46 utc | 18
Boo!
We are being played like a violin, The two Muslim men, who were nabbed following an Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raid on a mosque in Albany, New York, showed no interest in buying a shoulder-fired missile…it was all made up…
Hows that for a friday 13th?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 14 2004 1:38 utc | 19
@Uncle:
Good News.Better than the freaking alternative.
Posted by: FLASHHARRY | Aug 14 2004 1:53 utc | 20
@ Uncle and FH,
Ya, and don’t forget the lawyer in Portland….
Why should we believe anything these people say, ever?
Posted by: RossK | Aug 14 2004 2:00 utc | 21
koreyel
Amazing
I had just finished reading Chapter II “Aristotle” before coming over to my laptop and reading your post:
…and a few months leaving Athens (322 B.C.) The lonely Aristotle died.
In the same year, and at the same age, sixty-two, Demosthenes, greatest of Alexander’s enemies, drank poison. Within twelve months Greece had lost her greatest ruler, her greatest orator, and her greatest philosopher. The glory that had been Greece faded now in the dawn of the Roman sun; and the grandeur that was Rome was the pomp of power rather than the light of thought. Then that grandeur too decayed, that little light went almost out. For a thousand years darkness brooded over the face of Europe. All the world awaited the resurrection of philosophy.
History repeating itself?
Posted by: Juannie | Aug 14 2004 3:26 utc | 22
The Greeks might not be so keen on their ideological stepchild for a few reasons, not least of them US support for the brutally repressive dictatorship under which the Greeks suffocated for a decade or more…
Greece
During one of the perennial disputes between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, which was now spilling over onto NATO, President Johnson summoned the Greek ambassador to tell him of Washington’s “solution”. The ambassador protested that it would be unacceptable to the Greek parliament and contrary to the Greek constitution. “Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador,” said the President of the United States, “fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good…. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.”
I mean, that should make them feel all warm and fuzzy about the US forever after, no?
Cyprus? – Ah a sovereign state, right?
More Elephants’ Trunks
Posted by: fuimana bella | Aug 14 2004 7:30 utc | 24
b and jdp, I think Goff is right and you’re optimists 🙂
crystal balls are dangerous toys, but in 10-15 years we’ll see who was closer to the mark.
@CP There is no end to this crap, is there?
Also relevant: UKUSA=Echelon, and then there’s this quote:
Cyprus has been a major launching pad for most of the past half century’s US-British military interventions into the Arab world. In the 1950s, US military involvement in Lebanon and Jordan was initiated from the British bases on the island.
So, basically, this is simply a continuation of policy that has existed for at least half a century. Should we expect an agressionist government who has been unchallenged (leader of the free world) in its ability to build out its foreign policies for this long, to feel threatened by loose alliances of Mujaheddin?
If the Jihadists receive some significant funding and coordination we’re really witnessing a battle of the Titans. In any other case, these interesting times are by design.
Keep peeling off those onion skins…
@et al. Geoff has a decent sense of scale, but why does he have to be so longwinded? Maybe I’ve got ADD, someone give me Ritalin, quick!
This was worthwhile though:
It must be a movement that fully recognizes the inextricability of energy use and social relations, and therefore it must consist of people who are committed to fundamental social transformation. It must be an insurgent movement that jealously guards its independence from and maintains a fundamentally adversarial relationship to the current dominant interests and institutions of that very system, because its inexorable goal is the obliteration of that paradigm.
And yet: the enlightned ones are only capable of opening their drawing book and connecting the dots, while the great majority takes solace in another sip of the Kool-Aid.
Am I being too harsh?
Posted by: fiumana bella | Aug 14 2004 8:47 utc | 27
I just watched Bill Moyers address to the Inequality Conference at NYU in June on Link TV. He is exactly right that there is a blatant assault on the middle and lower classes by government, the rich and corporations. This has been taking place since the early 1970s and continues today.
I am pulling my money from the stock market, and, anyone with any since, unless you are a very suffisticated investor, should pull their money from stocks and mutual funds and go to interest bearing instruments. That giant sucking sound you hear is hedge funds sucking the wealth and hard earned money from 401k plans on a massive scale. Further, when they suck the money out, they are investing in foriegn markets.
We must start class warfare against the rich and powerfull. Because at the moment they in class warfare against the middle and lower classes.
The religous right is complicit in this scam because they believe in the law and order bullshit. So, this allows legislators to legislate further controls on what people do and say. We need a dramatic backlash against the fundies. They must wake up.
I am completely disheartened by our current situation in the US. The sheeple must wake up. There a an assualt going on and it isn’t the terrorist that are the ones pursuing this war.
Posted by: jdp | Aug 14 2004 14:15 utc | 28
There is a little girl, Raghda, from northern Iraq, now living in Baghdad, who will be thirteen years old tomorrow, August 15th. She has a blog where she posts a few of her thoughts – remember she is only 13 so it is not a source of political information – and pictures of her greatest love, cats. In her own little way she is trying to reach out to the world and she loves getting ‘visitors’. If anyone has the time to drop in on an Iraqi girl to wish her well and a happy birthday it would be one tiny bridge across the world….
Raghda – Baghdad Girl
Posted by: Nemo | Aug 14 2004 14:46 utc | 29
@ Nemo..
Thanks for the Raghda link.
Visiting her site was the best thing I’ve done all week!
Posted by: RossK | Aug 14 2004 15:54 utc | 30
@jdp
I am pulling my money from the stock market, and, anyone with any since, unless you are a very suffisticated investor, should pull their money from stocks and mutual funds and go to interest bearing instruments.
The stock market will go lower. We are now in phase two of a secular bear market. After the top of the bubble that ended 2000, a bear market started and went down until October 2002, where a “Secondary Reaction” liftet the market until the beginning of this year. Now comes phase two of the bear market and the Dow will loose some 50% in real value over the next 3-5 years (which means probably 30% loosing in points and 20% through inflation). Thereby the market is following classic patterns as analysed through Dow Theorie by Robert Rhea around 1930. If one still wants to invest in the stock market use funds that are carrying high dividends: utilities, oil and water companies only.
If you move your money to interest bearing instruments you have to protect yourself from inflation. One could do his by buying US TIPS by buying foreign bonds, if possible from countries with many commodities. The Dollar will go down and in world scale you will loose money in nearly any US investment (Buffet agrees with this).
You could buy funds that have strategies that protect/win in bear markets (like Prudent Bear Fund) if your 401(k) supports these, you should be fine with them.
That giant sucking sound you hear is hedge funds sucking …
Most hedge funds did loose in value this year and I don´t undertsand why you think the hedge funds are the problem for the market. There was a big bubble and so far it didn´t loose enough air, but it will hedge funds or not. The US in general did overconsume the last 10 to 15 years and will have to underconsume for some years to get back on a sustainable path.
In other points I agree with you.
Posted by: b | Aug 14 2004 16:48 utc | 32
Nemo,
Your link to Raghda touched me. It’s wonderful to see past all the shit and into some real lives occaisonally.
I will definately wish her a Happy Birthday tomorrow.
Thanks for another blessing but of a different flavor.
Posted by: Juannie | Aug 14 2004 17:38 utc | 33
I do like and admire Goff but approached this piece warily (thanks for the reference) thinking it might not be a topic for him.
I agree with Goff that Kerry is as full of shit as a Christmas turkey on energy. But energy is not a separate issue: Kerry’s energy policy is an addend, a brief appendix, to his Iraq policy. Knowing the one, it is easy to imagine the other — so easy that it is hardly worth reading Kerry’s green-grovelling spiel on energy.
Goff’s pessimism is in a large part based on ’empirical’ facts that derive from Malthusian – Marxist viewpoints and Physical Science laws (he manages to meld these nicely) – e.g. carrying capacity, the fact that you can’t fly an airplane with coal, etc. In this way, he falls into the trap he himself describes, and neglects Gould, for example. His description, or if one likes, interpretation, of the present world situation (iraq invasion, etc.) rests on a social epistemology that is neo – Darwinian, and can thus be seen as correct as that is presumably the short-sighted and narrow underlying view that is held by the powerful actors (Bush, Putin..) who shape world events, pulling the sheep along.
So Goff describes accurately, but does not analyse, and like all of us, cannot take the topic of system change on board, as jdp said as well. Cornucopians, technotopians, zero growthers and conservationists (even radical ones like Goff who believe in the thermodynamic cliff as he calls it) are all alike at heart, and quarrel within a certain frame.
As for capitalism, one can make some kind of relation between it and the sorry mess we are in now, as Goff does, but besides that, I think the contribution -positive or negative- of capitalism is overrated, and not really worthy of more than a brief mention in such a discussion. The USSR was a ‘developmental’ (Goff’s word) society and utterly rapacious, and managed fantastic industrial growth in a very short span of time – it was not capitalistic.
It is so, of course, that anti-socialism (or -communism) as embodied by ‘capitalism’, the ‘free market’, and increasingly ‘democracy’ serve as code-words to designate the ideologically correct, that is, the fit (the agressors and therefore survivors) amongst the unfit.
But outside the box (see jdp) capitalism does not in itself provide any answers, tools or methods. Nor does it block them, should such arise.
A soft landing is a possibility. (Taking it that possibilities are hypothetical!) What I would like to see is a complete plan for that soft landing, a thorough elaboration of the best-case scenario. The result would surely be awfully surprising.
Bit of a ramble…Wishful thinking, really: I want that plan!
Posted by: Blackie | Aug 14 2004 18:00 utc | 34
@Blackie
Thanks for the Goff link, will take awhile to digest this , but agree that Kerry (&GWB (hopeless) needs to lay out some comprehensive overall direction for energy/enviroment policy.
Posted by: anna mist | Aug 14 2004 18:53 utc | 36
“Damn it all Rove! Can’t you get anything right?”
Rival militias clash in Afghanistan
Posted by: Nemo | Aug 14 2004 19:04 utc | 37
I have fished for bass at night in its once beautiful rivers, and I have played stink finger with its young Southern girls who wear no panties on August nights by the light of its many moons. I have grown what can almost be called old now, with its earth beneath my feet and its legends in my eyes. And now a bunch of cheap murderous cocksuckers have hijacked the place that made me what I am and are busily turning it into one vast capitalist gulag. Stealing my children’s’ dreams… everything I ever experienced and cared about has become irrelevant. I don’t care about my own experiences disappearing into the void so much as I care about the blackness now descending. I am here right now to tell you that America is a rogue nation and the greatest threat afoot to civilization. That doesn’t mean that every American is Hitler and it doesn’t mean that there is no hope. But we gotta cop to what is going on. When a nation refuses to acknowledge the need for world tribunals for ethnic cleansing and refutes the Kyoto agreements, and murders tens of thousands to keep its stock market afloat, then that nation must be called malignant upon this earth. An Interview with Joe Bageant
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2004 1:23 utc | 38
Arnold Schwarzenegger sets sights on a little Oval Office intern action
Schwarzenegger – debate letting foreign-born serve as president
It can only get worse Uncle $cam…
Posted by: Nemo | Aug 15 2004 2:05 utc | 39
b,
Hedge funds are the problem. My broker is from Smith Barney and I specifically asked him what hedge funds are doing. And, they are doing just as I said. Many of the more successful hedge funds, have a Million dollar minimum to invest.
What you fail to understand or maybe you do, is that millions of americans are investing in 401k every paycheck. The market has been flat for four years. Where is that money going? Fat cats with large investment portfolios and inside info are stealing from mom and pop.
The average 401k invester has been told they to can be a winner in the high stakes game of playing stocks.
My stock portfolio has been flat for four years and I have gold standard stocks, stocks everyone is told to have. You tell me why these stocks aren’t jumping.
The problem is everytime the sheeple start getting ahead, the oligarchs steal their short off. In the meantime, pensions have been taken away. Man, don’t you get it? Joe sixpack is being suckered. It’s like the Enron people who had their pensions taken out from under them, only on a more massive scale.
We need wealth re-distribution bad.
Posted by: jdp | Aug 15 2004 2:24 utc | 40
Hey jdp et al.,
Maybe a hedge primer/discussion post/thread on the the annex is in order?
If you need author privileges just ask Oakie, his address is there on the bottom of the sidebar and he’ll give ’em to ya….
____
@U$ (Gary Bonds)
Thanks for Bageant int’view got my blood pumping, feels good….
Posted by: RossK | Aug 15 2004 2:45 utc | 41
Ah Bageant. Thank you, Uncle…
This:
AP: When do you think the slide towards a fascist totalitarian state started?
Bageant: Immediately after World War II, when that much-deified dickhead druggist Harry Truman set in stone the intelligence and military industrial complex that had been established during the war.
(italics are mine)
How very excellent to find people who see.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Aug 15 2004 3:02 utc | 42
@Kate Storm:
Truman was a haberdasher. and a Pendergast Machine cog.
And Bageant is just another one of those crazy-assed Southerners.
And Uncle probably scared NEMO to death with all of this.
And I’ve got to go nappy.
Posted by: Eric | Aug 15 2004 3:16 utc | 43
Nemo,
Thanks for the tip about the Iraqi girl’s 13th birthday. I sent her a b’day greetings email.
b and jdp,
You are depressing me. I only wish my stocks had been flat for the past 3-4 years. I’ve lost about 60% of my retirement, and will be working til the day I die! My broker tells me to stay in the market. I have no idea what to do.
Uncle Scam,
Great interview with this Joe Bageant. Do you know where we can read his stuff on the net?
Does anybody know if the smear campaign against Kerry’s military record is having a negative effect on voters?
Posted by: Sassybelle | Aug 15 2004 3:41 utc | 44
And Uncle probably scared NEMO to death with all of this.
Gosh, I hope I didn’t…lol
While, I haven’t been a southerner for almost 12 years I did grow up there, and southerners do have a way of handing you a nice refreshing tall glass of Iced tea on a hot day…along with your ass…lol
For those that enjoyed JB…
more Joe Bageant served hot!
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2004 4:10 utc | 45
Opps, lets try that again, shall we :
more Joe Bageant served hot!
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2004 4:15 utc | 46
Two More Essays From Joe Bageant (pdf’s) served hot! And believe me these are worth reading…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2004 4:26 utc | 47
grrrr sorry folks here: Two More Essays From Joe Bageant (pdf’s) served hot!
Even with a preview button…geez…lol
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2004 4:27 utc | 48
Sorry to be such a pain folks, you’d think with a preview button and everything one wouldn’t do such things, Guess that what happens after three or four shots of rum and a few bong hits…lol
Anyway, to get your appetite wet:
The Dominion Of The Leash
Lynndie England never had a chance. Abu Ghraib, or maybe something even worse (an RPG up the shorts, for instance) was always her destiny. Nearly half of the 800 Americans killed in Iraq to date came from small towns like hers, like mine. Forty-six percent of the American dead in Iraq came from towns of less than 40,000. Yet these towns make up only 25% of our population. Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead end jobs like Lynndie had at the chicken processing plant.These so-called volunteers are part of this nation’s de facto draft – economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring clasess. Thirteen hundred a month, a signing bonus and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken’s ass. And there are those big bucks for college later. Up to $65,000. Lynndie was supposedly going to college after her enlistment to become a “storm chaser,” like in the Helen Hunt movie “Twister.”
and
Son Of A Laboring God
My home town is one of those slowly rotting East Coast burgs that makes passers-through think to themselves: “What the hell is this? Mayberry USA on crack?” The town’s 250-year old core is a blighted clot of ramshackle houses carved into apartments and cheesy businesses. Its outer rim is the typical ugly gash of commercial hell, a assortment of mindlessly jammed-together tire dealers, grim asphalt, slurp and burps, and car dealerships of the type that make the U.S. one of the ugliest nations on earth. A sign in the median strip of this gash proclaims Winchester an official “All-American Town.”To its credit however, the town does have that special kind of seediness found only in the U.S. South. It might even be considered weirdly colorful in an America studies sort of way, with its hard-faced characters straight out of Grapes of Wrath and spooky and well-scrubbed Bible thumpers. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, our local Chamber of Commerce calls it “Historic Winchester, Virginia.”But many of us who grew up here call it Dickville; if you were born and raised here you were probably dicked from the beginning. Faced with life in such a town, there is only one solution. Beer.
Both of the above can be found at:
Coldtype (Writing worth reading from around the world) If you know anything about Joe Bageant: he is no sellout, and tells it like he sees it; he is the proverbial escentric and doesn’t care what anybody thinks, I think he is a modern day Mark Twain myself… 😉
” I don’t mind being called an escapist on a planet that is looking more and more like a Black Iron Prison”- Robet Anton Wilson
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2004 4:43 utc | 49
Damn $cam,
You $et up the jackpot for u$.
Here’$ to Joe & Mark & Robert Anton & of cour$e, Uncle $ him$elf.
Bong, bong, bong!
Posted by: Juannie | Aug 15 2004 8:11 utc | 50
Here some information about the number 13. Western Kabala includes a system called Gematria. In this system Hebrew words are added up according to the numerical values of their letters, however not all Hebrew words are used. The Hebrew words that add up to 13 are Achad, unity and Ahevah, love. These words are also connected to the Tarot card number 13 called Death. This card implies transformation and any transformation is a form of death. Change is an aspect that is scary to most people and many try to avoid it. Fascinating, as someone (I don’t remember who) said: ‘the only thing in life that always stays the same is that everything always changes’. The idea of this card is that the outcome of transformation finally adds up to love and unity. A concept also known in Yoga. So the number 13 could actually be also considered a lucky number.
Posted by: Fran | Aug 15 2004 17:47 utc | 52