As several barflies, MoA and Whiskey Bar commentators, join with me today for some new years eve celebration, there’ll be no time left to put up an elaborate piece.

But let me say thanks to all of you, dear readers and commentators, for the thoughts, ideas and links you have given here over the past year.

My very best wishes to you and the world for the new year.

Cont. reading: On The New Year

Saddam Hussein was hanged. There are no tears left for him.

Let’s see if justice is available for others too. It’s time for this headline:

News & views …

After some fifteen years of internal fighting with various external support for this or that side, the Somali people had just had enough of it. Some folks came up with a uniting idea. They proposed some strong measures, banning drugs, banning usury and banning internal fighting and they implemented those by quite strict measures. They found followers and soon the CIA financed warlords in the underdeveloped but resource rich country were in retreat and very likely to lose.

Cont. reading: Another Mission Accomplished

Billmon:

"That’s all Folks!"

J. Keane and F. Kagan think at least 30,000 troops for at least 18 month "or so" should do the job in Iraq that can not be done.

Pat Lang says 4 Army brigades and 2-3 Marine regiments – some 15,000 troops will evntually be send – a drop of water into hell.

Meanwhile a careful selective translation of a  letter by Saddam Hussein got published and is distributed through the US press. So what did he say? Here is the media interpretation:

Saddam Hussein urged Iraqis to embrace ”brotherly coexistence” and not to hate U.S.-led foreign troops in a goodbye letter.

This followed by the quote that is supposed to support that interpretation:

”I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking," 
…
”I also call on you not to hate the people of the other countries that attacked us,”

My interpretation of those quotes is: "Keep a cool head and don’t fight the home base of those troops, but concentrate on the troops themselves"
That does not sound to me like a call to NOT to fight and hate U.S.-led foreign troops.

But then – the interpretation of news editors is following the party line much more than the facts on the ground or a realistic interpretation of Saddam’s words (if those are his at all).

Could anybody please provide a real translation of the whole letter?

Thanks.

by slothrop

What interests me, though, are the structural causes (if any) of the steady decline in savings and investment rates in the industrialized countries – and why those trends have saddled the global economy with such enormous imbalances. So that will be the subject of the next installment in this series.
billmon: the chicken and the egg ii

what follows is my own contribution to the political economy of capitalist globalization., invited by billmon’s failure to answer his own question in the unwritten third installment of his “chicken and egg” entries.

now, i’m basically an english major who has read a few macro-econ books. this is not so much a proviso needed to excuse a bad analysis, but a defiance that any social science can be accounted for by those of us willing to step into the rhetoric the dismal science uses to justify itself.

Cont. reading: the chicken and the egg iii

News & views …

Just got back from my brother’s. So what’s the news of the day?

Checking World News headlines on Yahoo I find these:

AFP:

1. Christmas sermons urge peace but Mideast violence rages on
2. Ethiopia to use ‘any appropriate means’ against Somali Islamists

Reuters:

1. Worship God not technology, Pope says on Christmas
2. Ethiopian jets strike Somali airports

AP:

1. Pope offers Christmas prayers for peace
2. British troops kill 7 gunmen in Iraq
3. Ethiopian jets bomb Mogadishu airport

So who did the Pope threaten with excommunication today? Did I miss something?

by Monolycus
lifted from a comment

We live in some stupid times. I’m not saying there haven’t been
other stupid times in the course of human history… countless
witnesses have attested to that. I’m just saying that the present times
have their own peculiar flavour of stupid, and human beings are, by and
large, products of their culture and environment (if you’ll forgive me
for taking such a dreaded… *shudder*… anthropological viewpoint).

That is my lens, though, and while a society is nothing more
than a collection of individuals, those individuals are shaped and
guided by their physical and social environments in exactly the same
way that a squid or a whale is shaped and constrained by the ocean they
live in. A steady diet of absurdity will produce only a more or less
absurd creature. This has been amply demonstrated to us over and over
again, however, like a bottom feeding catfish feeling its way through
the murky silt of its home, we are unable to see the obvious through
what it is that surrounds us.

Cont. reading: Stupid Times

News & views …

Billmon:

Does Condi understand how many deaths, mutilations and wrecked lives lie behind her "investments" and "birth pangs"? Undoubtedly. Does she care?

Rates of Return

The Moonbat Sonata or Whiskey Barflies Retreat is about to take place next week.

Some eight to ten Moon of Alabama commentators will meet in Hamburg on the 31st. Anyone who wants to join anonymously you can meet us at the Cafè Buenos Aires on the evening of January the 3rd, or in Berlin on the 4th and 5th.

You can still join! For traveling and accomodation details please contact me via MoonofA _at_ aol _dot_ com (Hamburger & ASKOD please contact me in any case.)

Currently females are a bit overrepresentated in the event. So I would appreciate if any of the gents care to get off their asses and help me out.

No, nononono, not what you are thinking. Global orgasm day is today. Next week the task is to look after drunk and hangovered ladies …

Billmon:

Winners and Losers

THE PRESIDENT: A recent report on retail sales shows a strong beginning to the holiday shopping season across the country — and I encourage you all to go shopping more.
Press Conference by the President, December 20, 2006

Billmon:

If nothing else, though, the Whiskey Bar archives prove to my satisfaction that it was possible, even for a nonspecialist (which is all I’ll ever be in the fields of foreign policy or military affairs) to see at least an outline of the disaster as it started to unfold. What was lacking in the corporate media was not the opportunity, but rather the insight, the courage and the independence to say what needed to be said — at a time when the both the powers that be and the paying audience were unwilling to listen.

An Iraq Retrospective

by b real

At counterpunch on wednesday is a piece that fits in w/ what our compañero r’giap reminds us is one of the primary functions of this site – remembering.

the article is a remembrance of & rumination on the recent passing over of the seneca activist scholar john mohawk, John Mohawk and the Power to Make Peace. mohawk was an editor & reporter at akwesasne notes, the largest native american newspaper at the time & which was right there to capture & contribute to much of the revived american indian activism in the late-60’s thru the 1970’s. he was later a columnist at indian country today. he also contributed a lot to the seminal volume basic call to consciousness, a classic work, part of which can be read  here. (indian country today’s obit)

the counterpunch article brings up the role of the peacemaker & the parallel to today’s sitch, which is a connection i made in the autumn whispers thread. and it also reaffirms one of the themes of the text that i laid out there.

Cont. reading: Remembering

If you don’t comment, … well, guess what …

Billmon:

Split personality disorder can be a terrible thing.

A Problem With Pronouns

Billmon:

[O]ver the years I’ve become progressively less certain what the ultimate decision would be — and whether and when the American military would flinch from the implications of that choice.

Total War