Rag Hand

Someone accused Americangoy of being an anti-Semite based on one of his blog entries titled: Dual Loyalty? The case for dual loyalty of the Jewish Diaspora.

You can read his defense of his statements concerning American Jews and their influence in American politics in this blog: Is Americangoy an anti Semite?.

On the whole, judging by what I have read on his blog, he tends to group the American Jews into a single entity. –Insular, well off, and influential.

Does this make him an anti-Semite? I read his blog with some regularity and I don’t believe he truly qualifies. He doesn’t appear to be a “Jew Hater.” Instead I believe his anger is primarily aimed at the movers and shakers that form real world policy, who, at this point in history, happen to include the AIPAC and a number of Jewish neocons.

Unfortunately it is virtually impossible to separate these groups from their supporters within the Jewish community and Israel itself. Therefore his comments tend to expand to cover a much larger segment of the population.

In this country, saying anything negative about the influence of Israel will get you labeled an anti-Semite by a small but sometimes vocal segment of the population. And painting any community with a single broad brush will, with certainty, get you labeled a bigot.

Is he an anti-Semite? — I don’t think so, but read his stuff and decide for yourself.

Do I think he put his foot in his mouth? Oh yeah. All the way to his kneecap.

Biodiesel Magazine says that bio-diesel burns cleaner and will reduce greenhouse gasses and so on. According to their article, “It’s a shining example of an immediate, visible health benefit to using cleaner burning biodiesel”

What they fail to mention is the growing, transporting and processing creates more gases than the trucks produce without it and the increasing demand will require ever more bio-mass.

Science Magazine released this report titled “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change.” In which they state: “By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.”

The clearing of forest for the production of crops yielding the requisite oils creates excess gasses, destroys endangered species, and adversely affects the food supply in both price and available quantity.

Because of the increase in the cost of corn, the poor of Mexico are protesting the cost of tortillas.

The cost of livestock feed is increasing and therefore the cost of meat is increasing at a time when inflation is out of hand.

Barring a major change in the entire chain from growing to processing the oil, the inevitable long term cost will be the massive increase in greenhouse gasses, the destruction of forests, the destruction of species and the ever rising cost of food.

I have no doubt that like so many things this was a well intentioned idea, but now it shows itself as just one more scam being promoted by the people who profit from it with no regard for the actual cost.

– If it looks too good to be true, it is. –

‘Tis the season. — After a long run up the real politics begin.

The McCain campaign is getting around the McCain-Feingold limits on funding.
Why yes he sponsored the bill. That doesn’t mean it applies to him.

Obama has endorsed FISA and given the President almost unlimited authority to spy on international communications as well as giving a degree of immunity to the telecoms for past actions.

Wasn’t he the one who said:
“I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty. There is no reason why telephone companies should be given blanket immunity to cover violations of the rights of the American people – we must reaffirm that no one in this country is above the law.”

The continuing hypocrisy of politicians is a fact of life. For as long as there have been politicians they have made back room deals.

The Republicans said they would fix what was broken and broke it even more.

Now we threw the bastards out because the Democrats said they would change the way things are done in Congress… They promised and they meant it, right up until they got the power.

There are people on both extremes who believe every word their parties favorite says and whether they are right wing or left wing they’re wrong.

Politicians serve only those who can afford to help them get elected.
Their world is run on compromise, or more correctly “let’s make a deal.” “What will you do for me if I do this for you?”

If a politician stands up for what he believes in and says what he thinks he will never get a bill through congress.

Ron Paul is the favorite of many of my friends but there’s no way in hell he could single-handedly carry out his promises and there’s no way he could get the support of the majority of either house.

There are no good guys, no bad guys, they’re all just guys. They take money from the big corps because no one else can afford to support the enormous costs of running for office.
They all owe favors and they all make deals.

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
-Thomas Jefferson

Did you ever get the feeling you’re being played?

The cost of fuel is not just a matter of supply and demand. It’s more a matter of speculators grabbing a profit wherever there’s a chance.

Like the investors and the mortgage fiasco, where huge investment funds were buying what they had to know were bad investments, knowing full well that the government (meaning the taxpayers) would bail them out when the market fell. —Care to wager on whether or not that the same thing will happen in the energy field.

June 9 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil fell more than $4 a barrel in New York after Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, called for a meeting of oil producing and consuming nations to discuss how to deal with record prices.

“The increase in prices isn’t justified in terms of market fundamentals,” the Saudi government said today in a statement distributed by the Saudi Press Agency. Oil climbed $10.75 on June 6, its biggest gain ever, because of a weakening dollar and threats of supply disruptions.

Pump prices in the U.S. passed $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend. Regular gasoline, averaged nationwide, rose 1.8 cents to a record $4.023 a gallon, AAA, the nation’s largest motorist organization, said today on its Web site.

May 20 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil rose above $129 a barrel in New York for the first time after billionaire hedge-fund manager Boone Pickens said oil will reach $150 a barrel this year because supply isn’t keeping up with demand.

Producers are “running out of oil,” Pickens, the founder and chairman of Dallas-based BP Capital LLC, said on CNBC today, reiterating comments he made to Bloomberg News on April 29. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG also said in the past month that prices would rise.

Pickens’s BP Capital Energy Equity Fund fell 14 percent in the first two months of the year amid soaring prices for natural gas and crude oil. He told CNBC on Feb. 21 that he was short on both oil and natural gas. –He went short and now he’s trying to drive the market to make up his losses.

The folks who say it’s just supply and demand point to China and the increased demand, but China capped fuel prices to limit inflation. Which begs the question: How much of this high priced oil will the government of China be willing to subsidize?

They point to Russia and their reduced output. They have no shortage, they simply reduced their output to punish the former Soviet Block States for trying to join NATO, and you can expect their output to remain down until they can get a pipeline deal to deliver product directly to Europe.

They point to a possible strike in Nigeria.
According to the DOE:
During the 16 months preceding the election, militant activity in the Niger Delta (especially near Warri and Port Harcourt) has severely impacted Nigeria’s oil production potential by shutting-in an estimated 20 percent of total production. —If this has already happened, why do the speculators point to The possibility of strike sometime in the future as one of the reasons for an an increase in the price of crude?

Heating oil for June delivery climbed 9.99 cents, or 2.7 percent, to settle at a record $3.775 a gallon in New York, after reaching $3.792 a gallon, the highest since trading began in 1978. Some traders use heating-oil futures to hedge purchases of diesel and jet-fuel, which are chemically similar.

“Worries about Middle East supply have increased because of Israeli reports about U.S.-Iran policy,” said Bill O’Grady, director of fundamental futures research at Wachovia Securities in St. Louis. “Outside of a war it’s difficult to see how these price gains can continue because at some point the economy will implode.”

Well stated. “The economy will implode,” meaning those of us that are working stiffs will be unemployed or underemployed. The cost of things like food will rise to the point that we will buy nothing but the necessities. Our consumer driven economy will fall into full blown recession / depression. And the taxes paid by those of us that still have jobs will go to bail out the next “Morgan Stanley” that made bad investments in oil.

The scary part of his statement: “Outside of a war.”
Given King George and his Court Jesters’ ties to the oil market, and their repeated statements about Iran and all the “Axis of Evil” bullshit, it might be a good time to start giving credence to the probability that the Neo-cons will get their war with Iran before the next President takes office.

Here is a link to the proposed Jamiel’s law. (Which I agree with)

This was written with excerpts from the LA Weekly:
Jamiel Shaw Jr. was killed by an illegal immigrant named Pedro Espinoza, 19, an illegal immigrant and member of the 18th Street Gang.

Now Shaw’s family is trying to get Special Order 40 overturned.

Special Order 40 is a police mandate that originated in 1979 by former Los Angeles Police Chief Gates and the L.A. City Council to prevent police from inquiring about the immigration status of arrestees.

The grieving Shaws, including his mother, who was serving in Iraq when her son was murdered, reject any suggestion that he was in a gang. On KTLA Radio, Jamiel Shaw Sr. insisted his son was making a peace sign in one apparent gang photo, and mimicking “Mork and Mindy, from Star Trek [sic]” in the other. Sergeant Anita Shaw insists that she taught Jamiel the splayed-finger Star Trek sign used by Leonard Nimoy when he was 5.
(I saw the picture, that was not from Mork and Mindy or Star Trek.)

One thing became clear last week, when details in media reports depicted the slain 17-year-old football star as throwing up gang signs, claiming “IM A Tru G SABG” (True Gangsta, Second Avenue Bloods Gang) and threatening rivals (as a “Crip Killer,” “18 Street Killer,” “Rollin 30’s Killer”): Jamiel Shaw Jr., allegedly slain by an illegal immigrant and then elevated to the status of clean-cut young black man, as Angelenos engaged in a wrenching debate over Special Order 40, in fact saw himself as a Blood.

“To me, he’s a gang member,” says retired Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Sergeant Richard Valdemar, a gang expert. After reviewing Shaw’s MySpace antics, he says, “He’s throwing up a two with one hand and a zero with the other, so that’s [Rollin’] 20’s. Then he’s crossing out the C’s and E’s, those are rival gangs, the Crips and the Eighteens (18th Street). So crossing out C’s, wearing red and throwing up 20 — that’s a gang member.”

Murder suspect Pedro Espinoza, 19, an illegal immigrant and member of the 18th Street Gang, was released from the Los Angeles County Jail one day before Shaw’s shooting. Since the 18th Street Gang has been in a bloody 12-year war with the Rollin’ 20’s, that battle has been suggested as a motive behind Shaw’s slaying. Street sources are now alleging that Espinoza has “B” and a “K” — which matches the common street abbreviation for “Blood Killer” — tattooed on his neck, but police have not confirmed the claim.

From the things I have read, and captures from his MySpace page, I believe he was a banger but I also believe that his family is in complete denial.

Read all you can, understand that almost everything written on the subject is written by someone with an agenda, then make up your own mind.

As a last thought:
If he was a Blood or not is unimportant, he was, or pretended to be a banger and someone from a rival gang killed him because of this.
–If it walks like a duck………