JFK and Iraq

Being cute, popular and dating Marylin Monroe while married to Jackie is but a sexy media image. Action speaks louder than any PR strategy.

In 1963, the Kennedy administration backed a coup against the government of Iraq headed by General Abdel Karim Kassem, who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. The CIA helped the new Baath Party government led by Abdul Salam Arif in ridding the country of suspected leftists and Communists. In a Baathist bloodbath, the government used lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the CIA, to systematically murder untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. The victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.

Saddam's party was installed but no one else but adorable JFK, it turns out.

Do Actually Liberal Populations Exist?

So the gay marriage ruling has just been overturned in California. The state that presents itself as the bulwark of liberalism turns out anything but.

I am very positive that if this day gay marriage and any gay tolerance laws were put to public voting in Holland, they would be overturned just the same by a landslide. The matter of fact is that general Dutch public have never been asked what they thought of their homosexuals. In the country where tolerance traditions include a 300-year Catholic ban, a wholesale sellout of the Jews to the Nazis and a wholesale demonization of all Muslims, liberalism is a thinnest rainbow film on the surface of a deep pool of dyed-in-the-wood redneck narrow-mindedness.

The world-famous Dutch laws on gay marriage, soft drugs, euthanasia and abortion were adopted during the short period in the 90s when the Dutch cabinet was predominantly left. The bills were put forward by the hundreds-strong elite of former student extremists, so called provos (from provocateurs) who also happened to belong to the Dutch upper class. When they grew out of the protest phase, they all made it to the higher echelons of power in the Netherlands. That is how the country ended with a corpus of ultra-liberal legislation. Just a few years later Pim Fortuyn pulled down the 60-year-old taboo of inciting racial and religious hatred self-imposed as the penitence for the Dutch collaboration with the Nazis. That has effectively unleashed the true pent-up feelings of the Dutch burger and farmer, who nowadays gleefully vote CDA - the Dutch equivalent of Southern Baptist Republicans.

The point I am trying to make it that liberal ideas require good education and urban environment. They do not survive in the hicks or among the unenlightened masses. What is true for Holland applies to any human society. Even to Amsterdam which is full of what I call Amsterdam Rednecks (a good name for a baseball team!) - fresh arrivals from the Dutch countryside who moved to the capital for work together with their Bible Belt mentality.

As for ruining the sanctity of marriage and the whole moral values shebang -- leave it to heterosexuals to do it in, they have been doing a pretty good job.

Is Our Lovely Barack Really Up To The Job He Applied For?

So, the cute skinny mixed (he's not Black, idiots, he's half-Black, half-White!) dude has become the US President. Like millions of others I am totally smitten with his gift of glib, charisma and perfectly tailored suits. Hip-hip-hooray!

However, there is a gnawing suspicion in the back of my mind. I have seen this so many times before: Yeltsin and Yushchenko, Taksin and Blair. Eloquent and sexily presented youngish hopefuls swept their nations off the feet with a promise of change only to show that there is little substance or integrity inside the shiny package. They all started on the shoulders of cheering crowds but ended up despicable displays of the ugliest traits of human nature, utter political failures that ruined the lives of millions.

Barack is taking over a shattered country: loathed in the world, on the verge of bankruptcy and split along so many fault lines. The 10-trillion-dollar officially recognised federal debt is, no doubt, just the tip of the iceberg. Is he up to the tough job ahead of him. We shall see.

Exercise Your Free Will To Stay In His Fold

God is bigger than your Bible studies teacher's ideas of Him, God is bigger than Christianity. Everybody gets God to the level of their understanding, you don't need anyone to impose theirs on you. Make all discoveries yourself. Believe me, it is the best thing you can do in your life ever. Everything then will just unfold the right way.

God never turns away from you. He's always there (everywhere actually) wanting you to have joy and meaning in life. However ,your soul is a battlefield and the prize is you. If you give in to the negativity, stay stuck in unhappiness and suffering, obey the voices that keep telling you to destroy yourself, Devil's mission is accomplished. Your life is wasted. If you turn to God, let him fill your heart, so that there's no place left for darkness, your life will be full of His light and, trust me, there's nothing better than that. You just need to soften up inside, trust and believe, open your eyes and accept Him. You will be amazed how everything else will start falling into place. Just make that commitment and pray.

In my time, I would have kept repeating "God help me out of my disbelief!" day in, day out - until the first glimpse of His grace. You will know when it arrives and you will know then what it is all about. Belief is not to be tested by reason and logic, belief is about exercising your free will. It's an entirely different realm form what we call science but it is none the less real.

For me, my practice of Vipassana and kundalini yoga is such an exercise of free will. It is my small step towards God, and he makes ten giant ones towards you in return. You need to make your choice and show your commitment, do your part. We have the freedom to choose, we are not mere puppets. But the great thing is, our part is the easiest. God does the hardest part. "His yoke is easy, His burden is light". All is needed from you is to make your choice and follow it. You actually make just the first step and His Amazing Grace greets you right there. The rest is much easier when you know (not that somebody told you, but you know from your own direct experience!) what you are in there for. Just keep persisting on your way to Him.

There may be falls and setbacks, but the point is that once you're on the right path, you're moving in the right direction.A step to the left, a step to the right, a pause or even a step back don't matter much. The beauty of it all is that God never turns away from you, as long as you keep him in your mind, in your heart's sight, you will never fall out of His Favour, it will always stay with you. It is really up to you, your commitment and your exercise of free will whether to stay within his fold or fall out of it.

There may be all wrong kinds of reasons, occurrences and influences that keep you in your existence of suffering, out of His fold. Fear is, probably number one. Fear to leave your comfort zone, fear of the unknown, fear of having to work hard, fear to try new things or meet new people. Fear does not come from God, it comes from your Enemy. If you keep listening to it, you are bound for self-destruction. Overcoming your fear is the first step in exercising your free will.

Life's Discoveries: God

God is not the angry white-bearded man up in the sky. He is not supposed to meddle in everything keeping us, powerless puppets who wouldn't know better, from committing follies and crimes. He is not the boogaboo that priests around the world for centuries have tried to scare us with. God wants this, God does not want that. God hates this, God love that. There is no need for interpreters because God is accessible to everyone. It can be a long path to get to that point though.

He is more like Allah or the one from St. John's Gospel. Or like the Chinese Tao (Dao). He's omnipresent in the sense that He is both everywhere in the outside world but He is also inside of you.

Believing in God only means tuning yourself in to the right vibration/beat/groove, otherwise you will be out of tune and nothing will be right.

God (Tao, Universe, Positivity, you name it) always loves us, we only need to turn towards Him and stay within His fold. Then nothing bad can happen to us. That amazing state is called Amazing Grace. Things will keep happening around us but nothing will afflict us.

Life's happenings are half God-given opportunity, half up to our free will. We need to exercise it and make the choice. If we go the right way, then everything is fine. His yoke is truly easy, His burden is light, indeed. It is also the God of Japanese Jodo Shinshu. , He is the one who

His presence is real and He is truly alive in the very utter sense of the word. If you open up your heart, you can feel it with you entire being.

On the Financial Crisis

World's leaders and the financial community seem flabbergasted: "We have been bloating something out of nothing for so long and just when it was going so well it went bust. Why?" I can't believe this wide-eyed naivete is not feigned but it seems it actually is real. The old boys really thought it would go on forever.

Last year I was in communication with a City man who I studied with in Japan some time late last century. I said that this big boys' worldwide game with the money that does not exist is none better than poor people juggling their debt between more and more credit cards -- sooner or later you are going to have to pay up. The more you put it off, the more interest you are going to pay. He accused me of negativism and ignorance of how it all works. His stance was: the present financial system is very good, it provides money for big projects. In response I pointed out to the US federal debt closing in on 9 trillion dollars at the time (it's over 10 now so they are one digit short on the clock) and that means that world's largest economy is in fact a humongous negative equity waiting to implode and take the rest of the world down with it. My party wrote it off as anti-Americanism, so typical from a Russian man like myself.

Well I don't know what kind of euphory-inducing drug they inject people in their overpriced MBA in Finance courses but one thing for sure they immunize them against all kind of moral concerns. As long as tweaking spreadsheets and clocking up sheer digits in bank computers makes profit, it's all good fun. To hell with thinking who is going to fork out the bill when the buck stops passing.

Just a month ago the public got frights from the patently dumb rumour that the CERN's collider would create a black hole that would suck the Earth in it. Little did we know the real Black Hole has been in the making in New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong last few decades. It may leave the physical reality as it is but, no doubt, the economic reality will never be the same when the implosion is complete.

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P.S. In the not very likely event that the US Government's assets are really to be liquidated to pay off its debts, Japan, China and UK will get more than a half while Russia - almost 3 percent.

Balance in Love

Balance is everything, it's the Middle Path of Buddhism. It's like riding a bicycle - seems impossible at first but once you the knack of it it's not hard at all although you need to keep pedalling not to fall down.

Human love needs balance too.

On one hand, what could be more foolish than to hinge all your happiness on the fickle and human nature. We don't even know for ourselves what we are going to feel the next minute but we expect the other's affection for us to last "for ever"!

However, that kind of expectation comes from the need to have our void spaces and imperfections to be filled in and made good for by someone else. That's true avidya, ignorance, because that's a patent mission impossible. We look for a relationship needy and unhappy seeking to take something from it. When the other one is full of the same needs, it is a recipe for disaster.

The balance in relationship is not achieved by using the other one like a crutch, it needs to come from within. When you are happy inside and truly love yourself, you will naturally feel the need to share that abundance. You can then pour this overflow onto others - in a variety of ways - and you can also find someone special onto whom you can pour it in a special way.

"Relationship is not about what you can take it from but about what you bring to it."