STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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July 20, 2010
We have long held that the war is being waged specifically and obviously against the Pashtun. But given that the two great tribes of this region both seem unfavorable to continued Western intervention, the West is likely unable to bring the war to a successful ...
July 19, 2010
We have no idea how the Wall Street Journal came up with this blog singing the praises of Bernanke. But we have excerpted the article above and used its rhetoric as an example of a specific trend. It shows once again how the elite seems immune to opposing viewp ...
July 19, 2010
From our point of view the Afghanistan War is another dominant social theme that is failing. While some in the alternative news community maintain that the Afghanistan war is merely another phony war cooked up by CIA blowback, we don't think it is nearly that s ...
July 17, 2010
In this article we will briefly explore the collision between the Internet and the powers-that-be, and how it is changing the American political process - and thus the economic and investment climate. This is an ongoing process that has not yet reached a critic ...
July 16, 2010
We do not believe that blaming the bankers gets it "just right." In fact, it is the most common of all dominant social themes – that economic downturns are the fault of big, powerful private interests. This sort of populism has been cultivated by the power-el ...
July 16, 2010
The larger conversation encompasses a forthright and basic dominant social theme: "Capitalism is prone to error, and government corrects." How in the 21st century anyone can still subscribe to this formula, having seen the damage that government has wrought on ...
July 15, 2010
The whole system is perverse. It has been set up by a power elite for purposes of consolidating wealth and control in THEIR hands, not for creating better and more prosperous civil societies. In normal, healthy societies, money is a tool of commerce not a metho ...
July 15, 2010
In several previous articles we've examined the possibilities of the US opening a third (or fourth) military front with Iran. Certainly the US and its allies seem on track to do this and from our point of view the examination of this possibility, combined with ...
July 14, 2010
When is a report a dominant social theme and when is it reality? And when, perhaps (we wonder) is it both? These are serious questions to those who believe the Western world is manipulated by a power elite that wields dominant social themes as a way of further ...
July 14, 2010
It is of course possible that Big Science will yield some conclusive and surprising results – perhaps all five God Particles, or even more. Equally feasible, it may yield inconclusive results that will be held up as conclusive because of all the vested intere ...
July 13, 2010
Articles such as this one set the scene for the unthinkable – a three-front Middle East war. The US is embroiled in Iraq, no matter what proponents of the "surge" say. The Afghanistan war, as we have covered it, is getting larger without getting any better fr ...
July 13, 2010
In retrospect, blaming the Great Depression on tariffs was a soft-libertarian solution. What do we mean by soft libertarian? We mean that proponents could make government the culprit without delving deeply into the real causes of the Great Depression. In a sens ...
July 12, 2010
The Anglo-American power elite provides the Western world with dominant social themes. In the past, certainly in the 20th century, these themes worked wonderfully well. But today, many of these memes are under attack. When the elite muscles them forward nonethe ...
July 12, 2010
As we pointed out in today's other article, we may be reaching a point where the elite's attempts to continually reinforce dominant social themes actually begin to be counter-productive. This may be seen in recent downward moves by the gold market. There are pl ...
July 10, 2010
We have written previously of Internet censorship and have often pointed out the difficulties of making censorship stick with the current technology. Recently, the Internet has been hit with a spate of articles explaining how censorship is being implemented aro ...
July 09, 2010
This is very interesting news. Ann Coulter never met a Republican president or a Republican politician for that matter about whom she couldn't find something nice to say. Coulter is the kind of public intellectual that works in America, a polarizing figure with ...
July 09, 2010
Obviously the austerity meme has served its purpose. The world's central banking wise men seem far more worried now that, left unattended, the West will continue to struggle with deleveraging and price deflation. We have predicted this all along, running a seri ...
July 08, 2010
O, the horror! ING has issued a report that apparently concludes the break-up of the Economic and Monetary Union of Europe is simply unfathomable. The idea is that the pain and suffering that would be caused by its demise would spin the Western world into the l ...
July 08, 2010
We thought this was an interesting article from the Associated Press because it shows so clearly how the power elite's dominant social themes operate. The Federal Reserve itself is an immensely destructive economic force as are central banks generally. By print ...
July 07, 2010
Sometimes, as we have pointed out before, news is just news and information is just information. The power elite's dominant social themes are pervasive, but in order to maintain the credibility of mainstream news organizations, a good deal of real information m ...
July 07, 2010
It should be fairly clear to most who patronize the "alternative" media that there is a vast divide as regards health care and medicine. Many writers, speakers and researchers in the alternative 'Net media find mainstream medicine no more convincing than mainst ...
July 06, 2010
Two brand new dominant social themes in a very short space of time, or at least that is the way we see it. The state has come under tremendous attack in the 21st century and we believe the powers-that-be are pushing back. (Why wouldn't they?) In aggregate, the ...
July 06, 2010
For many people, the idea that NASA's mission is now essentially diplomatic rather than technological is, well ... weird. NASA is supposed to put astronauts in space and it would seem that the funding, infrastructure and professional talent that NASA has acquir ...
July 05, 2010
The power elite, it has emerged in the era of the Internet, keeps control of Western institutions and authorities via dominant social themes. These fear-based promotions literally seem to organize society and ensure that people's energy and ambitions are channe ...
July 05, 2010
We have written many articles about the Afghan war recently because it has turned into something of a defining moment for Western hegemony. During the Cold War, the Anglo-American version of Western regulatory democracy could not be spread around the whole worl ...
July 03, 2010
This is a rare event. It is like watching a dormant volcano come to life. Or an island being raised in the ocean from resultant lava flows. It is a one-of-a-kind opportunity. We are bearing witness to the creation of a brand new dominant social theme. It is a m ...
July 02, 2010
This is a truly remarkable little story because it indicates the confusion that the mainstream media is facing when it comes to preparing and presenting dominant social themes. In the excerpt, above, we see a report that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Gre ...
July 02, 2010
Just yesterday, inspired by the nomination of Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court, we focused on how the Western legal system had increasingly departed from the sensible roots of common law. Now comes this Telegraph story about blood feuds in Albania, which is ...
July 01, 2010
We have remarked many times before on the fiscal and regulatory emphases that comprise the "free-market thinking" of the mainstream Western media. This article is a good example, excoriating the high-ticket gymnastics of the Obama administration when it comes t ...
July 01, 2010
Will Elena Kagan be a good Supreme Court Justice? The spectacle of Supreme Court nominations goes on with most mainstream media queries being devoted to the dangling questions of whether Elena Kagan's personal views will have an impact on her judicial decisions ...
June 30, 2010
Yesterday we covered Cameron's calls for austerity in Britain, believing it was perhaps part of a larger dominant social theme sweeping Europe and eventually America. The fear-based promotion in this case is that governments are over-extended and that ruin awai ...
June 30, 2010
We don't mean to point fingers at Stratfor specifically in the upcoming analysis but only to point out that faulty analyses lead to faulty conclusions – and thus acceptance of the elite's dominant social themes or at least an inability to properly confront th ...
June 29, 2010
We write a lot about the alternative press, but when it comes to analyzing the dominant social themes of the power elite, we try to take excerpts from mainstream publications to show how these fear-based memes are disseminated and the ways the are positioned by ...
June 29, 2010
As we have reported before, this austerity seems part of a larger dominant social theme. In the US, President Barack Obama is quoted as speaking about the need for "painful" choices. In Europe, a whole slew of Southern European countries are even now in the mis ...
June 28, 2010
This potential move gives the deflation versus inflation debate a new perspective. We have written in the past that we had questions about the Great Depression based on conflicting opinions of Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman et. al. Living through the "Great R ...
June 28, 2010
This is startling news. We will explain. First of all, the reality of Al Qaeda is fairly tenuous. It may stem from a "list" of Arab militant activists that the CIA kept in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, without state funding there cannot really be an Al Qaeda. It ...
June 26, 2010
One of the hoariest dominant social themes or sub themes promoted by the power elite is that government can create jobs. It is possibly a sub theme because the dominant theme is simply that "government can do it all." In fact, the only things government can do ...
June 26, 2010
We have written about Rand Paul in the past expressing some hesitation about the race he is running. We wondered if he would have done better to use his hard-fought platform as a bully pulpit to educate the public about free-market themes instead of apparently ...
June 25, 2010
The more arcane the language, the more opaque the actual stimulative occurrences, the less people understand. That's the point of course. The average person should know only that tremendous and substantive efforts are being made by extremely intelligent people ...
June 25, 2010
On the surface it seems shocking that a nation would sell off parts its physical environment because of public sector debts. But this has been going on for a long time in impoverished nations. First profligate nations are lent a lot of money by private sector b ...
June 24, 2010
This fits into one of our observations – that the EU has been using the threat of deflation as a way to promote "austerity," which is actually a way of further impoverishing and controlling what is left of the European middle classes. But we have also observe ...
June 24, 2010
Will it be OK now that McChrystal has been replaced by Petraeus? Will the war be won by the determined Anglo-Saxon axis? We're not sure. But we are aware of course, that the effort is not only determined, it is one of great sophistication as well. We know this ...
June 23, 2010
Well, of course it is, and for your own good, too. Or maybe not. We have watched with interest as government attacks against the Internet have become more formalized in China, the UK and, of course, America. The Chinese attacks are obvious and known in aggregat ...
June 23, 2010
It is hard, in fact, to write a dominant social theme that includes this book because we don't think this book is part of a power-elite promotion. We don't think this guy went and put himself into an Afghan jail just to increase his credibility. No, we think it ...
June 22, 2010
The Chinese miracle plays on. Around the world, the yuan pushed up against the dollar now that Chinese leaders are letting the yuan float. Chinese stock markets are soaring. Meanwhile, Senator Joseph Lieberman has launched legislation to specifically grant the ...
June 22, 2010
So gold is in a bubble, eh? How many times are we going to read this statement in the mainstream media? And as many times as we ask this question, we point out that the same media never state that stock or bond markets are in a bubble. It is taken for granted t ...
June 21, 2010
For the last umpteen months, beginning with sightings of "green shoots," the powers-that-be have been trying to gin up a recovery. It is a kind of dominant social theme of course, the idea that after a painful "recession," economies begin to rebound and life gr ...
June 21, 2010
Several months ago we wrote about UK Prime Minister David Cameron's adoption of Phillip Bond's idea of neo-communitarianism. Since at the time Cameron was struggling to redefine himself and his Tory party, the idea of political devolution probably seemed quite ...
June 19, 2010
More talk about global currencies. Medvedev has announced this ruble-reserve push with great fanfare in advance of the lastest G20 meeting, and the news is splashed all over the Internet. From our point of view, this statement is no accident and may have as muc ...
June 18, 2010
With such a weak (jobless) recovery in the States, and in Europe, too, central banks are apt to leave money in the system far too long. The end result: stagflation, a combination of a sluggish economy and increased price inflation. First price deflation, then i ...