ON PUBLIC EXECUTIONS

First, I’m always amazed that the ‘pro-life’ group is virtually the same group that supports the death penalty. Huh?

When I was in high school, we had debates over the death penalty. The argument for the penalty always boiled down to ‘deterrence’. If potential murderers know that they will be put to death if caught, they may think twice before killing someone.

I don’t think that the deterrence argument is valid in practice. A potential murderer doesn’t think he will be caught and executed. For this and other reasons I am strongly against the death penalty.

However, if you give the ‘deterrence’ folks their due, it seems to me that any executions should be public. It makes no sense as a deterrent to kill a criminal in secret. The public has got to see with their own eyes the consequences of killing someone. I’m sure that a lot of people will attack me as barbaric for supporting public executions, but so be it.

Hegseth wants not only a public execution, but death by firing squad. Why not have an execution by lethal injection, where the murderer simply falls asleep into death? A firing squad seems a bit barbaric to me.

Cruel or unusual punishment?

I have always questioned that word ‘unusual’. If ALL criminals were shot by firing squads, that punishment would be almost daily and far from ‘unusual’. I think the framers of the Constitution goofed on that one.

Is a firing squad cruel? Perhaps. It could at least be gory, if blood flowed from the gunshot wounds. If the marksmen were not too accurate, it might take the criminal some time to die in agony. Therefore, a firing squad is potentially cruel, so I would vote against that. Again, lethal injection seems the humane way to go.

On the other hand, a public execution should have spectator appeal. Lethal injection clearly does not. Other methods like hanging or electrocution, or even the guillotine are pretty barbaric and cruel. Maybe a well-trained firing squad would cause instant death, and would therefore be humane but still entertaining to spectators.

Politically, the death penalty is highly discriminatory against poor people and minorities. That is another reason that I oppose the death penalty. Public executions would make the process even more political and discriminatory, as public authorities must decide which executions of which kinds of people carries their political message. Already, it looks as though the current criminal up for execution is a Moslem. That is already a political statement. I doubt whether a white Christian would be publicly executed.

In sum, I am strongly against the death penalty but IF it is permitted, in order to have a deterrence effect, it should be public. The only question then would be what is the most ‘humane’ but still deterrent form of the death penalty.

The above discussion is far from what I’m hearing in the media today.

RAPE IS NO BIG DEAL?

Ask anyone in the United States, “Is child rape OK?” 100% will say “no.” And yet, 40% of Americans approve of Donald Trump. If you ask them how this is possible, the answer (probably fudged and hemmed and hawed) is that Trump is doing so many wonderful things for the country, like deporting criminal immigrants, policing crime-ridden cities, and fighting communism, that rape can be overlooked. Trump has successfully distracted the country from the Epstein files.

The answer of all MAGA culists is therefore, “Rape can be condoned and tolerated because other factors are more important.”

What are the some of the factors that MAGA considers more important than rape? We can list them pretty clearly:

                             Banning transgenders on girls’ sports teams

                             Banning gay marriage

                             Detaining, torturing, and deporting to Africa brown-skinned immigrants.

A candidate who has raped children but who vociferously opposes transgenders will win the election.

The real issue, however, is power – especially white nationalist and Trump power. Keeping Trump in power overrides all other considerations. It’s hard for even MAGA cultists to deny that Trump is a child rapist, but that, along with the Epstein files, can be overlooked. MAGA cultists can disagree with Trump’s policies, but they must keep him in power, no matter what.

I keep hearing these interviews with Trump supporters on social media. I’d guess that most of them have no idea what Trump’s polices actually are, or sometimes they can spout Trump’s litany of lies, like his stopping 8 wars. When asked to name one war that Trump stopped, they almost always fail.

Meanwhile, the anti-woman culture continues to grow apace, led by rapist-in-chief Trump and Supreme Court Justice Cavenaugh. The Cornell 7 case sparked outrage, but text messages suggest that such gang rapes were the norm at the Chi Phi fraternity house. Victims of gang rape are afraid to speak out, because they know that their complaints will be swept under the carpet, and that they themselves will be subject to smear campaigns and even death threats. After the Cornell 7 outrage fades from the news cycle, it will all go back to normal.

There is an attitude out there that males have an uncontrollable urge to have sex with any woman, and therefore they can be excused if their hormonal urges get out of control. A typical example is the phrase “boys will be boys”. I have always felt that the Moslem countries are on to something, by keeping their women completely covered up in public. If the women uncover, males might lose control of their hormones and rape them.

Would a man be tempted to rape this?

Most men are constrained by social norms to refrain from sexual abuse, but men in power feel that those constraints no longer apply, and they can give full rein to their hormones. In fact, rape becomes an instrument of power. Trump’s famous statement about ‘grabbing them by the p***y’ actually  goes further; “And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. […] Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything.” This is a statement about power, above all. The Epstein files are filled with powerful men, who are exercising and demonstrating their power by committing egregious acts with impunity.

In summary, it’s not that Americans support rape; rather, they consider it so unimportant that many other issues supersede it. The elite and powerful commit rape as power trips, mostly just because they know they can get away with it.

WHY DO BUDDHIST MONKS CHANT?

We just had the monks’ house-blessing ceremony for our new house. It raised many questions.

monks chanting at our house-warming

It was positively medieval and other-worldly. Of course, that’s the point: to perpetuate the continuity of traditions that date back at least a thousand years. Also, religious ceremonies in general are designed to transport people from the day-to-day profane world into the sacred universe beyond our sensory physical world.

Some of the ritual acts can be interpreted in the same way that they are in almost all religions. For example, the monks sprayed us with holy water. Obviously, this is a purification rite. They also showered us with flower petals. I suppose this relates to the abundance of life, fertility, etc.

Many religious ceremonies mark ‘rites of passage’ which are breaks in day-to-day time to mark certain spiritual mileposts – marriage, births, death, etc. Moving into a new house is a similar rite.

Most religious ceremonies are similar, and follow the prescriptions outlined above. Buddhism, however, has some odd quirks, because Buddhists don’t pray to gods.

Buddhist ceremonies are known for their chanting, maybe half in the ancient Pali language, and half in the local Khmer language, so that most people don’t really know what the monks are talking about. In Christianity and other religions with gods, chanting asks the gods to ‘bless’ (whatever that means) the house and its occupants. This can’t be the case with Buddhist monks, who don’t worship gods as such, nor can it be a petition to the Buddha, who was not divine.

Rather, it would seem that the chants are themselves magic words that somehow affect the house and the residents. Many religions believe in the magic power of words. Burning the Quran is blasphemy, not because it burns some paper books, but because it destroys the sacred written words therein.

But why, then, couldn’t the householders chant their own magic words? Who needs the monks?

Recall that, during the Middle Ages in Europe, the priests prayed on behalf of the commoners in Latin, which the commoners could not understand. In most religions, the priests are the go-between between the gods and the people. Through their rigorous training, the priests learn to communicate with the godhead, and to transmit messages in both directions between the gods and the people.

Buddhist monks appear to fulfill a similar role, but there are no gods to communicate with. Rather, the monks have access to the spiritual world outside our physical world. The words of their chants reflect ‘meaning’ in the spirit world, which is an intermediate communication between the spirit world and the people, who themselves are unable to access the spirit world.

When I was in university, I had to read Mircea Eliade’s ground-breaking book, The Sacred and the Profane. Eliade argues that religion is based on a sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane. According to Eliade, for traditional man, myths describe “breakthroughs of the sacred (or the ‘supernatural’) into the World”—what he calls hierophanies.

In this way, the monks’ ceremony, with all its chanting, symbolism, and magic, is a typical hierophany, in which the sacred breaks into the profane world. No gods are necessary for this religious experience.

A NEW, SELF-SUFFICIENT WORLD

Trump’s tariffs, the oil blockade, etc. have destroyed what was left of the interconnected world economy.

Until recently, a car assembled in the US, for example, contained hundreds of parts from all over the world. A vast web of arrangements allowed parts to be shipped from one country to another. We really had a global economy.

The world has learned that all that cooperation was just an illusion. It didn’t take much to destroy the trading network.

Trump thinks that a tariff levied on, say, Canada, is a punishment on Canada. It’s really a punishment on US companies and consumers, who must pay the tariffs, leading to higher prices. Trump’s tariffs, therefore, are shooting himself in the foot. Canada’s only loss is that, with higher US prices, people will not buy as many of their products. Too high a tariff, and Canada will not sell ANY products.

Even after Trump has left, and his crazy tariffs withdrawn, the world will remember just how easy it was to destroy the entire global trading system. They will remember how trust was broken, and treaties revoked. They will hesitate to rush into new agreements that may be broken.

The world will realize that Americans elected Trump, twice. Thus, Americans can and will elect officials who will break agreements. It will take many years for America to regain the trust of other countries, who will mistrust America and American voters as a whole, not just Trump and his cronies.

According to the classical economist, David Ricardo, free trade is beneficial to both trading partners. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage states that if one country, say Brazil, is good at producing one thing like coffee, and another country, say Canada, is good at producing something else, like maple sugar, then both sides benefit by trading those products if they focus on producing what they are good at. Without such trade, consumption of those products would be impossible, or at least more expensive.

I lived for 4 years in Lesotho, surrounded by apartheid South Africa. In those days, the entire world was boycotting South Africa. The boycott forced South Africa to become amazingly self-sufficient. That included even being the only country in the world to be able to produce gasoline from coal. [They had plenty of coal, and no country would sell them oil.] South Africa had the geographical and climatic diversity to produce just about anything on their own.

The apartheid South African example may signal the future of the world economy. If no country can depend on trade with another country, because of war, tariffs, etc., then countries will retreat into protectionism and self-reliance. Life will become much more expensive, and many products will disappear from the market. Americans cannot produce coffee, so a ban on trade with coffee producers will result in a ban on coffee in America.

Be prepared for a world of self-reliant countries, where many products will not be available at all, while others, manufactured within the country, will be much more expensive.

SHIVA IN CAMBODIA

I was taking my morning walk in the gardens behind Wat Kandal in Battambang, when an Indian-looking guy came up to me saying “Shiva, Shiva”, and pointing to a remote corner of the gardens. There I found a new statue of Shiva, complete with his identifying symbols of the trident, the third eye, and especially the linga. It didn’t look like the typical Khmer style of statue, so I figured it was placed there in the past month by the local Indian community.

It struck me that Shiva statues are rare in Cambodian pagodas these days, but I realized that it hadn’t always been this way.

In fact, in early Cambodian Hindu times, Shiva was perhaps the most important of the Hindu gods. By the time of Jayavarman II (770-850) on Phnom Kulen, Shiva had reached such importance that the king developed the concept of deva-raj, or god-king, in which Jayavarman II believed himself to be the incarnation of Shiva. The amazing carvings in the streambed at Kbal Spean were largely about Shiva, so that the stream became known as the ‘valley of the 1000 lingas.’

Lingas at Kbal Spean

The website hdasianart.com describes the linga as:

Simple in form yet vast in meaning, the Khmer linga represents both the cosmic principle and the spiritual foundation of kingship, fertility, and divine presence. https://www.hdasianart.com/

At the heart of each state temple—such as Phnom Bakheng, Baksei Chamkrong, or Pre Rup—stood a linga consecrated with the name of the reigning monarch, effectively identifying the king with Shiva.

This practice, known as the Devaraja cult (“god-king”), transformed the linga into a cosmological anchor:

Shiva remained the most important god to the Khmers for another two centuries. Banteay Srey temple near Angkor Wat was built by two royal courtiers (but not by any king) in 967, and was dedicated to Shiva.

Shiva linga at Banteay Srei.

Suryavarman II dedicated the well-known temple at Preah Vihear to Shiva in the 11th century, although later it was converted to a Buddhist temple.

When Suryavarman II moved to the Angkor area, he built Angkor Wat in the early 1100s, but this temple was dedicated to Vishnu, not Shiva. From then on, Shiva was relegated to a minor role, especially when Cambodia became more predominantly Buddhist.

It has been widely discussed how Cambodia could be a Buddhist nation and still retain the Hindu gods.

Sadakata’s explanation is the fact that Buddhist cosmology has become, spiritually speaking, irrelevant. More precisely, he says: “Buddhist cosmology is a spiritual legacy of the past, yet it remains a force capable of stirring the imagination of people today. Like old ceremonial garments no longer worn, it retains an attraction for us and can transport our minds to the spiritual world of ancient and medieval people” (Sadakata, 1997: 177).

[Nowadays, Vishnu — the preserver — is the most common god in Cambodia. His image is found in homes and at city gates, as a protecting spirit.]

In this way, a statue of Shiva in Buddhist Cambodia is more a monument to the glorious Khmer past than it is an object of devotion or prayer. However, to Hindus from India, the statue is indeed an object of veneration and prayer.

TRUMP IS GOD

Many people view Trump as God in the same way that most religious people view their gods. However, my explanation of the common perception of God is not the normal one, so let me start with that.

For most people, shit happens. That is the default. Things normally go wrong. But once in a while, something good happens. That is when people shout “Allah Akbar”, and “God is good, always.” That one good thing in a sea of horrors is proof that a good God exists.

My favorite example of this was that airplane that crashed and killed some 200 people, but they found that one baby survived. The world media was full of “Praise God!” and “God is good”.  But wait… God just murdered 200 people. People didn’t even see that; the 200 victims can be ignored. The one surviving baby was enough to reassure people of their religious beliefs. I don’t think I heard anyone claim that the 200 deaths were just part of God’s mysterious plan. No one cursed an evil God for His 200 murders. No, the deaths were just ignored as background noise.

Another example is the patient in hospital with terminal cancer, and with all his relatives praying for his recovery. Normally, he dies, and no one blames God. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. But if he miraculously survives, it’s “Praise be to the all-benevolent God, who answers prayer!”

Now let’s compare this attitude with MAGA cultists’ attitude towards Trump. Trump can rape young girls, steal billions of dollars, and kill thousands of children, but that’s all default background noise as long as he can satisfy his cultists with a couple of things they like.

There are thousands of law-abiding immigrants in the US, but if Trump can catch just one brown-skinned illegal committing a crime, and if he can torture, detain, and deport them to some ‘shithole’ country, MAGA will be exuberant and will praise him to the skies.

He can bomb a school and kill 168 Iranian girls, and his followers just ignore it, but he can make a simple (meaningless) executive order ‘banning sharia law’, and his cultists jump for joy.

Similarly, there are thousands of transgender people in the US, leading normal lives, but if Trump can prevent just one of the small handful of transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports, he is praised to the skies by MAGA.

The media keep crowing “Trump hits New Low in the Polls!” That’s actually false. Realclearpolling.com compiles all the latest polls and calculates their average. That average has hovered around 40% approval for months. There may be an outlier or two, either to the positive or negative side, but the results are consistent. 40% of the American population supports Trump, no matter what he does or what horrors he commits. Those 40% represent the religious cultists who think he is God and cannot err.

If we ask, “How horribly can he act before his base abandons him?”, we must conclude that there is no red line that he cannot cross. His followers simply ignore the horrors. Just as there are no horrors that God can commit that will cause His followers to abandon Him. Cult followers will accept anything, no matter how awful.

A.I. and DIGITAL BANKING

Everyone is talking about the future of AI these days. Most of the discussions I read or hear center around the loss of millions of jobs, as AI can do tasks that most human employees now perform. However, there are dozens of other ramifications, each more frightening than the last.

Today I saw an interview between Tucker Carlson and economist Richard Werner, that chilled me to the bone. Werner mentioned that the current digitalized financial system will become centralized to government control.

Your debit card or QR code already controls you to a certain extent, when you receive messages like, “purchase denied – you have exceeded your daily $1000 limit,” or “your account has insufficient funds for this purchase.”

When (not if) governments use AI to control your cards and QRs, awful things will happen:

“Your card has been blocked because you criticized our glorious leader Donald Trump. You can re-instate your card with a ‘contribution’ of $500 to the President.”

Or telling you what products you can or cannot buy:

“You are not permitted to purchase that product, because it was made in China.”

Or they can limit your travel or even your residence:

“Your card is no longer valid outside a radius of 10 km outside Columbus, Ohio. We suggest you move there.”

Since their AI has every single piece of data about you, you can be blackmailed or extorted. The government can control whom you associate with, or even whom you marry, simply by controlling your debit cards or QR codes.

______________________

Once you let your mind start conjuring up scenarios, the picture is downright mind-boggling – making 1984 and Brave New World and other dystopias look like free societies.

THE LACK OF FINANCIAL NEWS

The world is teetering on the brink of a financial crisis. Mainstream media are not covering this all-important story, probably because the situation is complicated and would not be understood by most viewers. When the US debt reaches 40 trillion, this is a number that almost no one comprehends. It is 40,000,000,000,000. Hard to get your head around that one.

 I follow the financial news, and I am confused by what appear to be contradictions in policy, especially regarding the recent moves in the bond market. Let me first describe sources of my confusion, in terms of questions that the media are not addressing.

  1. A) Last week the United States bailed out the Japanese yen. Japan was on the verge of selling US Treasuries to buy yen and prop of the yen. The US wanted to prevent the sale of US treasuries, because that would hurt the bond market, so they sold euros to Japan instead.

B) Then this week the US declared that it would sell long treasuries, in order to lower long-term interest rates. This would encourage Japan to buy US treasuries. This move would appear to contradict the policy of the previous week. What is going on? I’m confused.

2. Japan is the largest holder of US treasuries, owning some 1.19 trillion dollars in US debt. That makes it the largest creditor nation. However, when I looked up Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio, I found that Japan’s ratio is about 250%, making it one of the largest debtor nations in the world. How can one country be the largest creditor and the largest debtor at the same time? The media have not addressed this issue.

I turned on CNN today to see whether they had any explanation for these phenomena. Yesterday, their lead story was Michael Cohen’s conversation with Trump, and today it was all about Natalie Swan. Not a word about economics.

I turned to Yahoo News on my computer. Of late, Yahoo News has become more of a touchy-feely magazine rather than a news outlet. Most stories are either about Hollywood celebrities and their love-lives, or else stories about cute pet dogs or cats doing cuddly things.

The real reason for this post is therefore to discuss not the world economy, but rather the abdication of the media from reporting the real news. There is a war going on in Iran, but you’d never know it from watching CNN or Fox. People want happy news, not reports of the US losing a war to Iran, and certainly not a confusing story about the collapse of the US dollar and the world economy.

Internet posts about the bond crisis always must start by explaining to viewers what a bond is. Viewers may not understand that when the price of a bond goes down, its interest rate goes up.

Trump is the leading epitome of Dunning-Kruger among the economic know-nothings. He understands nothing about the bond market or interest rates. His go-to solution for everything is to lower rates. His over-simple logic is that this will allow people to borrow money more cheaply, so they can spend more and help the economy. This simple logic appeals to his MAGA cultists. What he doesn’t understand is that increasing all this borrowing injects more money into the system. That’s the classic cause of inflation. That’s why the Fed, in its battle against inflation, is reluctant to lower interest rates. Trump can’t figure that out.

Where can I find the important news about what is happening?

CATERING TRUCK FOLLOW-UP

Trump is telling the press that the CIA decided to sneak him off AF1, and he just did what they told him to do. This is apparently another total Trump lie.

The CIA didn’t take the Israeli report of a threat very seriously. Rubio was aware and decided that AF1 was not in great danger, so he got on the plane.

But Trump, afraid for his life, decided that he must not fly on that (to his mind) dangerous plane. He could have just ordered that AF1 be grounded for security’s sake. But no, he opted to put all those people at risk of death just to save his own neck. He meant for AF1 to be a decoy target for Iran missiles. He figured they might all be killed.

Interesting choice of people he chose to sneak off with him: his personal attendants, who would take care of HIM, regardless of strategic choice. He would gladly sacrifice all those others as a decoy, just to save himself.

This mindset is Trump’s ego-centeredness in a nutshell. Throw anyone under the bus just to protect himself. No loyalty to Rubio or Bessent. In fact, Karoline Leavitt was also on the decoy plane, and Facebook accounts are suggesting that she resigned partially because Trump was ready to let her be killed by the Iranians.

Trump’s attitude towards the United States is the same. He’s out to enrich himself, at the expense, and perhaps the demise, of America, or even the world economy. He thought he could get his hands on Iranian oil, at the risk of thousands of lives and the destruction of the world economy. He doesn’t give a damn about oil prices or the American people. He wants the oil, the same way he took and hid Venezuela’s oil (the 13 billion dollars cannot be located at present).

And did you hear his own explanation of why he put all those people at risk? He claimed that his smaller, secret plane was in greater danger than AF1, simply because he was in it. Typical Trump BS, with no meaning or substance. You mean he snuck off AF1 and hid in a catering truck in order to put himself at greater risk? Huh?

TRUMP’S CATERING-TRUCK STORY DOESN’T ADD UP

Like most of the official stories coming out of the Iran war (i.e. ‘excursion’), the stories of the catering-truck episode raise a whole lot of questions.

First, Trump was transferred from Qatar1 to the old AF1. The initial explanation, and the first lie about this was that Trump wanted to show Qatar1 to people in the UK. However, after the New York Times blew the cover off that lie, the Trump camp admitted that there was a security threat and the old AF1 had more anti-missile security.

Trump didn’t want this security threat known, and he threatened to subpoena the NYT journalists who reported the story.

But then Trump was secretly transferred from AF1 to the catering-truck. My question is, why didn’t they transfer him directly from Qatar1 into the catering-truck? Using AF1 as an intermediary doesn’t make much sense.

AF1 and the catering-truck

While Trump snuck out of AF1, the remaining big-wigs, reportedly including Rubio, Bessent, and Miller, were left on AF1, which the Trump team obviously deemed in imminent danger of being shot down by Iran. So Trump was prepared to sacrifice the lives of his team of VIPs to an Iranian missile. In fact, he sent them up there as decoys or as bait, i.e., target practice to attract Iranian missiles.

By the way, if Trump wasn’t on the AF1 with all those people, didn’t some of them notice that he wasn’t there, or maybe suspect something was fishy when they were asked to pull down their window shades?

Both AF1 and Trump’s secret plane arrived in the UK. At that point, the danger was over, and they could have just admitted the stunt they had just pulled off. However, they secretly transferred Trump back onto AF1 To make it look as though he had been there all along. There was no need to do that.

The ruse was never admitted, until the Washington Post revealed the catering-truck stunt. Why was it all kept so secret, especially in light of Trump’s penchant for bragging about escaping assassination plots?

I think that the reason for the secrecy was that Washington didn’t want to reveal that someone had leaked the report of an Iranian attack. In fact, it now appears that Washington got the message from Israel. What Israeli spy learned from the Iranians that they would attack? That is sensitive contact information that must be protected. Now that the public know about the Iranian plot, there may be an Israeli spy who will be executed by the Iranian government.

Is it possible that Netanyahu simply invented the threat in order to goad Trump into attacking Iran? After all, there was no attack on any of the planes. Maybe the whole security threat was all a fake from the beginning, and Netanyahu just fooled the Trump team.

There’s a lot we don’t know. Was the Iranian threat real or just invented? Why all the secrecy, lies, and cover-up? Why was AF1 involved at all? We certainly can’t expect Team Trump to come clean about this anytime soon.