A drive to modernise the old Silk Road city of Kashgar has obliterated whole stretches of old Uighur neighbourhoods, even as the government tries to win over residents wary of Chinese rule.
A year after riots engulfed Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang region, the razing of old Kashgar is a prime example of how China’s modernising campaigns can come at the expense of local sensitivities.
Brick-fronted shops on main streets hide from view acres of ochre dirt—all that remain of swathes of the old city at the centre of Kashgar, heart of southern Xinjiang on China’s frontier with Central Asia.
Jim Puplava talks to James Turk about the central banks dirty tricks to artificially support the dollar and collapse the prices of commodities
recorded on October 17th 2009
PPI = Producer Price Index measures average changes in prices received by domestic producers for their output.
CPI = Consumer Price Index is a measure estimating the average price of consumer goods and services purchased by households.
TOCOM = Tokyo Commodity Exchange regulates trading of futures contracts and option products of all commodities in Japan.
The Tokyo Gold Exchange, the Tokyo Rubber Exchange, and the Tokyo Textile Exchange merged in 1984 to form TOCOM.
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Two years ago, when I was last in Afghanistan, soldiers complained to me off the record that there weren’t enough of them to properly fight the war. This time around, in similarly candid moments, I heard a more fundamental complaint: The war doesn’t make sense.
To get the caveats out of the way: This post is based on an unrepresentative sample, drawn from what fewer than a dozen soldiers, airmen and contractors told me at this sprawling military base (and only here). There’s some anecdotal evidencethat troops stationed on megabases are prone to greater despair than those serving in more spartan conditions. Most of my interlocutors sought me out to vent; none of them wanted speak on the record, fearing command reprisal. And I’m factoring out the typical (and understandable) deployment gripes. Your mileage will vary around the battlefield. I don’t mean to suggest there’s a groundswell within the ranks against the war. But it would feel irresponsible if I didn’t report the skepticism I heard at Bagram about the course of the Obama administration’s strategy.
Now it can be told: a CIA analytic team assessed in February that the recent spate of homegrown terrorism could have unpredictable foreign-policy consequences for the United States. And if not for the controversial transparency organization WikiLeaks, we might never have known that the CIA can occasionally bore policymakers to tears with its time-wasting obviousness.
WikiLeaks recently published a trove of 77,000 frontline military reports from Afghanistan, earning it the ire of the Pentagon. Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He warned that the group might have “blood on its hands” for disclosing the names of Afghans who’ve worked with the U.S. — people whom the Taliban have vowed to target and kill. But with this latest disclosure, WikiLeaks has swung to the opposite extreme: irrelevance.
The equities markets are in disarray while the bond markets continue to surge. The avalanche of bad news has started to take its toll on investor sentiment. Barry Ritholtz’s “The Big Picture” reports that the bears have taken the high-ground and bullishness has dropped to its lowest level since March ‘09 when the market did a quick about-face and began a year-long rally. Could it happen again? No one knows, but the mood has definitely darkened along with the data. There’s no talk of green shoots any more, and even the deficit hawks have gone into hibernation. It feels like the calm before the storm, which is why all eyes were on Jackson Hole this morning where Fed chairman Ben Bernanke delivered his verdict on the state of the economy on Friday.
WOW!!!…Gee haven’t we kinda had it with the sexual inudations to discredit someone throughout the history of time…Give us a break…at least be a little more imaginative…How dumb do you really think we are???It’s become predictable…
~jude
While the White House and Pentagon worry over the coming disclosure of another 15,000 classified documents on Afghanistan by WikiLeaks, the organization’s leader Julian Assange finds himself swirling in accusations of sexual impropriety.
What is the truth behind the allegations? What effect will they have on WikiLeaks? Is this a “dirty tricks” effort by intelligence agencies to discredit, disrupt and destroy the whistleblower threat?
It is far easier to translate Bernanke than Greenspan. Both men had this task: to deceive the public. Greenspan adopted verbal obfuscation as his technique. Bernanke has adopted boredom.
I hope this exercise will help you understand his speech of August 27.
CHALLENGES AND DAUNTING CHALLENGES
People who are unfamiliar with Bernanke’s strategy of downplaying everything, in good professorial fashion, may miss the significance of what he said.
On the whole, when the eruption of the Panic of 2008 threatened the very foundations of the global economy, the world rose to the challenge, with a remarkable degree of international cooperation, despite very difficult conditions and compressed time frames.
Translation: (1) “The world rose to the challenge.”Hank Paulson nationalized the mortgage market unilaterally. He let Lehman Brothers go bust, so as to catch Congress’s attention. Then he got Congress to bail out AIG and the largest banks. I cooperated. The FED swapped liquid Treasury debt at face for heavily discounted promises to pay that were held by the largest banks for which there was no market.
Then the Financial Standards Accounting Board reversed itself on FAS 157. Banks would not be required to list their assets at market value. This kept them solvent.
Then other central banks and politicians imitated Paulson and me by bailing out their largest banks. We set the pattern. They followed suit.
(2) “Despite very difficult conditions and short time frames.
Notwithstanding some important steps forward, however, as we return once again to Jackson Hole I think we would all agree that, for much of the world, the task of economic recovery and repair remains far from complete.
Translation: Everyone knows the economy is slowing. The two stimulus packages totalling $1.5 trillion barely reversed the recession, assuming it reversed at all. Meanwhile, the pantywaists on the National Bureau of Economic Research committee that decides when recessions end decided in April not to decide. That left me holding the bag. So the FED has declared that it ended in April 2009. Like it or lump it.
A long awaited update, or new video.
This is one of my favorite commentaries of him.
I personally typed it off his book “All Things Censored” it was written in the early 90′s so maybe you won’t know the allusions he makes.
…
American mass media is a marvel of technology. It is whiz-bang, sparkle, glitter, and satellite wizardry. It is a master plan of methods to communicate, and a paupers worth of substance. With such technology, how are people so woefully misinformed? The average American neither knows nor cares about the vast world beyond the nations border. The average American student knows little math, no history, and very little geography, and nor does he or she want to know. Americans have computers in school, dozens of TV stations, and the most aggressive news media on earth. Does that mean theyre better informed?
Hardly.
On November 2, 1995, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly—117 to 3—to condemn the United States for its continuing blockade of Cuba.* The international community called the United States blockade a flagrant act of aggression and a blatant violation of international law. That the UN vote was reported at all in American media is amazing, for such news is more often than not passed over entirely by the American press; but where was information about the blockade itself, the effects suffered by the Cuban people, in-depth comments form the United Nations delegates and leaders around the world? For a more substantive report, on had to listen to the BBC World News Service, for the rest of the world takes note of events the U.S. prefers to ignore.
American media is a business, and it has a mission; not to inform Americans, but to entertain them. Every media enterprise in America reports the drivel that Marcia Clarke and Chris Darden are secret love birds, but the vote of a global assembly condemning the U.S. actions received only scant coverage at best.
Why?
The media is a source of titillation more than information. The mission of the media is to please, to comfort, and primarily to sell. When TV was developed, it was promised that every American would learn about the world in his living room. When computers were developed, wasnt it said that they would be invaluable learning tools and that children would learn more, faster? Nation scholastic tests show otherwise, as kids master computers as toys, and learn splendid hand to eye coordination, but little else.
The media paints false pictures of the nation and the world, pictures designed to serve corporate masters and to make America look good. This feel-good media approach serves the American delusion of white supremacy but it does not inform. When the New York Times echoes Star magazine, what can the world media mean?
How could millions people be surprised at Minister Farrakhans enormous influence among blacks unless the media wasnt doing its job? How could they look at a million and count less than half that number?
The major media, like its racist projections, is to be rejected, not consumed. For your very patronage gives it life.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration will give away nearly $6 million of American tax dollarsto restore 63 historic and cultural sites, including Islamic mosques and minarets, in 55 nations. See the State Department document here. The latest taxpayer givaway includes $76,000 for a 16th century mosque in China, $67,000 for a mosque in Pakistan, $77,000 to restore minarets in Nigeria and Mauritania, and $50,000 for an Islamic Monument in India…
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL & CULTURAL AFFAIRS CULTURAL HERITAGE CENTER
U.S. AMBASSADORS FUND FOR CULTURAL PRESERVATION 2010 AWARDS
Africa
1. Comoros: Restoration of the 18th‐Century Sultan Palace of Ujumbe in Mutsamudu
2. Congo (Democratic Republic of): Documentation of Traditional Pygmy Music
3. Kenya: Restoration of the Early 19th‐Century Fort at Lamu
