A Meditation on The Day Of Atonement - 2010

As we approach Yom Kippur, we are encouraged to examine our lives, perhaps improve them, and ask those whom we may have wronged for forgiveness. This year I thought I'd change my habit, and recognize a few people who performed acts of remarkable good.

We're getting on to two years since I was operated on for removal of a brain tumor. It's a curious experience. When you see the diagnosis on the sheet of paper that you're carrying around from one doctor's office to the next, things become clear. At first, that critical diagnosis block said xxxxoma, or some such. Then, one day, sitting in the neurosurgery clinic at Georgetown University Hospital, my eyes wandered over the latest sheet to be clipped to the outside of my medical record. There, with a clarity that any non-medical person could grasp, was the new term: “brain tumor.” How much easier to comprehend. The term comes with its own particular sets of meanings, family history, and, if I'd been so inclined, fears.

It took months, and a second hospital and surgeon, laboriously located through my wife's intrepid searching, before I came upon the surgeon who was confident that he could actually remove the tumor without doing me in. While the previous doctor had seemed a bit dismayed at the possibility of operating on my tumor, this fellow seemed to view it as routine. He ticked off what could go wrong, but he did it as if just going through formalities. Part of that was inspiring patient confidence, no doubt, but you can't do something really difficult if you don't believe in your ability to do it. And this, my friends, was really, really difficult. He spent nine an a half hours doing it. Later, I asked all three of his residents how much he let them do. The told me that he did it all. His name is Dr. Aaron Dumont. He's THE man, and he's got all the chips he needs on the positive side, as far as I'm concerned. If my wife hadn't found him, I suppose that I'd be dead or paralyzed now, since I probably wouldn't have bothered looking for him myself. If he wants to drop by on little or no notice, with his family, for a cookout, or to learn to tie flies, he shouldn't hesitate. My door is open

Doctors, of course, are in the business of repairing us. What about people who don't actually know you that well, and don't have command of quite so impressive a set of technical skills? When I got home from the hospital, I was in need of near constant care for more than a little while. Two members of our congregation spent hours, or more likely days, at a kitchen facility, cooking meals for us, which they then froze, labeled, and stored in a freezer in one of their garages, where my wife could fetch them, as needed. We're not talking about a few TV dinner-like items. We are talking about full scale, delicious meals – serious productions. It's difficult to express just how welcome something like this is when you require constant attention whenever you are on your feet. We didn't ask these ladies to do this. They just did it. It was a mitzvah that we couldn't measure. That behavior reminded me of my father. He never waited to be asked.

Last year at this time I wasn't able to deal with the mental and physical debris of the operation. My body was still so impacted by the after effects of the operation that I preferred to make every day as close to normal as possible, as if nothing had ever happened, so I didn't give much thought to those who had done so much for me.. It wasn't a very effective strategy, but fortunately, that phase is over. The other day I was digging for something in a corner of my workshop, and came upon a big sheet of heavy foil that I'd saved to use on this year's scare crow. It was a cover from one of those meals that had been prepared for us. I'm not likely to forget the preparers, Diane Dietz and Cindi Reiss, any time soon, either. Nobody asked them. They just did all that cooking.

So, along with considering what we might have to atone for this year, we might consider debts that we owe to others. Those debts frequently can't be repaid, but they should be remembered.

Further Reflection On The Recent Turkish Sponsored Attempt To Break The Gaza Blockade - And The Aftermath

Eventually, the crew of the blockade runner, M/V Marvi Marmara, returned to Turkey. They were met at the airport by... who else, senior members of the Turkish cabinet. There were reportedly tears and hugs all around. The Turkish charity that sponsored the mission is known in Turkey as a government sponsored non-government organization. How curious. The Turkish Islamist government continues to make its bones within the Islamic world. The irony of this same government being a NATO member seems lost on the western press, which is most interested in figuring out how the West can appease Turkey. While Turkish apologists deny it, apparently the Erdogan government is also using wide spread surveillance, including wiretaps, to ensure that no serious opposition develops. The question is, will serious electoral opposition be permitted to develop? That would be un-Islamic.

The G20 Conundrum - Let 10,000 Bloggers Flower

The Blogosphere at large is abuzz with comments and paroxysms over the closing declaration from the recent G20 meeting. Real economists, such as Paul Krugman, and many simple hand wringers, are adamant in stating that the United States must continue to stimulate its economy. President Obama, and his Treasury Secretary, say yes, so I guess the answer must be yes. For most of the other G20 attendees, the answer is no (for now). So except for the U.S., those running large budget deficits will tame those deficits, and do so in the near term. Dr. Krugman is nearly apoplectic at this. He writes in the June 28 New York Times that such a policy will ensure a "third depression." I'm not sure whether Dr. Krugman is a Keynesian or not, but he sure isn't afraid of deficits, or a rapidly growing U.S. sovereign debt.

Obama, Geithner, Krugman, and company don't seem to get a fundamental truth, to wit: the greatest impediment to continued economic stimulation, i.e., continuing to print money, and taking on government debt, is the EXISTING government debt. It's true that Keynesian theory calls for using government debt to stimulate economies, but it also calls for accumulating budget surpluses in prosperous years in order to have funds available to support those lean year deficits. We forgot that the necessary accompaniment to the lean year deficit is the fat year surplus. It's as old as the Book of Exodus.

At this point, stimulation means wholesale printing of money, which typically leads to inflation. We think that, because we haven't experienced inflation since the Vietnam era, we cannot do so again. I've actually heard supposedly credible journalists suggest that inflation has been permanently tamed, as if it were a living thing, instead of a phenomenon based on mathematical and physical factors. Tamed? According to David Einhorn, of Greenlight Capital, "government statistics are about the last place one should look to find inflation, as they are designed to not show much. Over the last 35 years, the government has changed the way it calculates inflation several times. According to the web site Shadow Government Statistics, using the pre-1980 method, the Consumer Price Index would be over 9 percent, compared with about 2 percent in the official statistics today." Inflating the money supply leads to inflation. No matter how you cook the books, eventually it will happen. The only thing holding it back right now may be our hollowed out industrial infrastructure, and the fake figures.

Mr. President, your counterparts in the G20 are telling their people that they aren't going to be able to have cake and ice cream every night anymore. On the other hand, Mr. Obama, and his acolyte, Treasury Secretary Geithner, are saying "yes, yes, we know, no more cake and ice cream, but we can't stop quite yet. In fact, we're not sure when it's safe to stop. We'll get back to you. Trust us." It's quite true that it was George W. Bush and Company that jacked up the deficit over a trillion dollars, insisting that anything less would bring the country to its knees, but Bush is gone, and suddenly we're projecting trillion dollar deficits out as far as there are meaningful budget figures. How did that happen? Was this a "Bush did it, so we should be able to do it too" moment? How did a one year stimulus turn into a permanent expansion of government? More frightening yet is the fact that all this debt doesn't include the coming unfunded Social Security bomb. It's Armageddon, and the bill is no longer going to our kids, it's coming due in OUR lifetimes.

I hear tell that there's an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who is tired of non-economist bloggers writing about economics. OK. Here's the deal. I'll stop writing this stuff as soon as the Fed cleans up its act. Fair is fair.

Peace and love...

My Letter To Mr. Thomas Friedman Concerning His 27 June 2010 Column In The New York Times

On Sunday, 27 June, Mr. Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times titled "War, Timeout, War, Time, ..." The column suggested that it was time for Israel to offer "a daring and assertive political initiative to the Palestinians." While I agree with Mr. Friedman in principle, there are a few wrinkles that the international press could help with. My letter explains.

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Sir, I read your Sunday column, and heard you reprise it on CNN. It seems to me that there is a fallacy at the core of your assumption about what Israel should do with respect to the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. You've given the Palestinians a free pass. Yes, the Palestinian English language media sounds pretty reasonable, but you know what their Arab language media says. I'll bet you know what their text books say (especially their geography books). Do you remember the deal that Arafat walked away from in the late 90's? He said that he had to do it, because he would be assassinated if he took it. What he was essentially saying was that he could only settle for 100 per cent (his chunk of Jerusalem, right of return for everyone, to wherever they said they were uprooted from). If so, then there really isn't any negotiating to be done, is there? We're just waiting for Israel to give the Palestinians everything they want. The amount of negative, anti Israel, and anti Jewish activity on the Palestinian side is extraordinary, but it's only in Arabic, and Israelis appear to be the only ones who know about it. It's not AIPAC or West Banker propaganda, but the West appears afraid to talk about it, for fear of upsetting the Palestinians. Is Palestinian governance that fragile? This behavior runs from the unauthorized, and destructive digs on the Temple Mount, through the blatant Palestinian attempt to "prove" that Jerusalem was never a Jewish city, and right into the hate and bogus history fed to Palestinian school children. In the face of this, how exactly is an Israeli Prime Minister supposed to take on HIS radicals? It would be nice to see a little unbiased, consistent light shined on these items. Could you you stand the heat of writing a series of columns on this subject?

A Short Comment On The Departure of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal

This will be very short. The boy was insubordinate. He had to go. Anything more would be blather. Have a nice day.

More Fiddling As

On 15 June 2010, Mr. Thomas Friedman published a column in the New York Times titled “Letter From Istanbul.” Mr. Friedman is worried that we are “losing” Turkey. He places some of the blame on the Christians in the European Union, who apparently haven't made good on their promise to invite Turkey into their midst, after promising to do so, and on weak United States foreign policy. Tom Friedman should be smarter than this, but ever since his “The World is Flat” franchise began to fall flat, his judgment has seemed pretty poor. Let me get this straight, Tom. You went to a country that's actively building an alliance with the barbarians ruling Iran, Syria, and the Hezbollah organization. Turkey is a country led by a prime minister who sponsored a run against the Israeli blockade of Gaza, then stocked the lead vessel with radio coordinated thugs, ready to attack the Israeli borders with pipes and knives, then claim the Israelis brutalized them. Now, you ask this country's prime minister why he's so busy setting up a common command center with all these thugs and international criminals, and the answer is something to the effect that the EU has made it clear that it is for Christians, so Turkey is turning its attention elsewhere. Do you really believe anything that comes out of this guy's mouth, Mr. Friedman? What possible reason would an Islamist have for wanting to unite with a Europe that would not want in its midst an Islamist state? Mr. Friedman thinks that Turkey spent the last four years jumping through hoops, trying to qualify for EU membership. Gee, if Mr. Erdogan, the buddy of Iran and Syria, says so, it must be so, but let's try this. Erdogan spent the last four years purging the armed forces of professionals, replacing them with politically reliable Islamists, and otherwise solidifying his party's position.

Mr. Erdogan's Islamist party changed its name to “Justice and Development” after being disqualified from elections under Turkey's secular state laws. It was a name change, only – a sham. Now that he's in power, Mr. Erdogan has invited most of the Muslim world's monsters to Ankara to play, including the criminals running Iran and Sudan. No, Mr. Friedman, nothing the EU could have done would have changed what has happened in Turkey. Nothing. From the moment the Islamists took power, it was clear that Turkey was on the path to an Islamic state. That means that another state might be full of mass murderers, but it can be a good friend of Turkey, simply because it is “Islamic”. How charming. Mr. Friedman can now go back to his laptop, where he can prepare subsequent columns, lecturing us on how we in the West could have prevented Turkey from slipping away into the Islamic camp, if we had only offered it the right enticements, just as, throughout the ages we in the West failed to offer just the right “enticements” to the Nazis, Soviets, North Koreans, Palestinians, Iranians, Sudanese, Serbs, and the rest of the butchers whom we've let march through the world because we just didn't give them the one last thing that really would have made them behave. The West always screws up and sets off the bad guys who really wanted to be good.

The day the Justice and Development party won election, Turkey's path into the Islamist camp, with all the radicalism that entails, was set. Q.E.D. Now Mr. Friedman, having gotten a shot at putting Mr. Edrogan on the journalistic couch, can begin writing what western intellectuals write best – why the western democracies are responsible for everything bad that happens. If all international murderers will line up single file on the left, Security Council personnel will be passing out free passes to all who need them.

There's an interesting bit of irony at work in Turkey. Turkish authorities have blocked access to Google and Wikipedia, because it's possible to find information with these sites that is demeaning to Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. Such information is unlawful in Turkey. Simultaneously, the Turkish government is dissolving the secular state that Atatürk created. These information controls help isolate the population, facilitating the change. China has shared with Iran the software that it uses to isolate it's population from “harmful” Internet content. Perhaps Iran can now share this software with Turkey, to help preserve the facade of he modern Turkish state. Watch this space.

Freedom, Liberty, Permissiveness

This post is in the form of a quote from Alistair Cooke. At this point in our existence, it is a cautionary note worth considering. We are currently much more interested in fine tuning our rights than our responsibilities. Enjoy:

"As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality."
-- Alistair Cooke