[than schwe] man behind the myanmar madness

It just takes one man such as this ...

General Than Shwe, 74, is the main force behind the bloodshed, forced labour, rapes and all the rest of it.

Like virtually all dictators, he's a sick man with impaired judgement, given to grandiose titles and lavish wealth, fearing his own people, escape routes in place for his spoilt family.

Let me put it another way - he is mad. Or yet another way - he is possessed and can't backtrack. Same thing.

...to produce a situation like this ...

How many times must we see the warring madness come into men's minds like this, consuming them? Why does this happen to leaders? The all-consuming desire for power and then, with it, the descent to madness and evil?

From where does this force for monumental indifference to humanity emanate? This blogger suspects he knows from whence it comes.

... which finally results in this.

[currency] and the system of credit

Paul Warburg, the European brought in to rewrite the current system of credit issuance - America, Britain and the Finance owe him a lot.

You might just possibly imagine Gordon Brown, George Bush or the Lizard Queen making this as a campaign speech but could you imagine them actively and genuinely pursuing these policies?

… We see that in many things … life … is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men.

But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient.

We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.

With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,' while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.

We have itemized the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items:

A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency system … perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all its sides … limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country … watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine.

This was Woodrow Wilson at his inauguration on March 4th, 1913 and a fascinating aspect, now secretly hidden from the public eye was that in those days it was nakedly open for all to see and presidents concerned themselves with these issues - a time long past.

He went further, in his 2nd Address to Congress, June 23, 1913:

Our banking laws must mobilize reserves … And the control of the system of banking of issue … must be vested in the Government itself, so that the banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative.

Wilson was naïve. Elected on a platform of breaking big business [continuing the Roosevelt thrust] but in favour of expanding small businesses, he didn't think on further that small businesses would need finance and so, in terms of the total credits issued, the situation hardly altered.

The banking interests were more than happy to cajole him into signing the legislation setting up the Fed - a series of 12 banking houses who, far from being the "instruments", established the machinery for becoming the "masters".

It hardly mattered, for the ultimate goal was war and the profits that that entailed - not unlike the years 1929-45 and 2007-18.

One of today's exponents of the Warburg art

[blogrolls] unreciprocated visits and culling

There are three bloggers I've just noticed, with alarm, in the last 100 visitors, whom I haven't visited in return. As this is the first day I've really looked at referrals, it worries me.

In my case, the total blogging time is apportioned this way:

# Doing the mail, which includes comments to my sites and responding to those;

# Dealing with Blogpower issues;

# Following up MyBlogLog visitors who have recently come in;

# Preparing and posting, which takes a fair amount of time;

# Doing maintenance and updating things;

# Spending the remaining available time visiting one of the rolls - for example, today was Purple; yesterday was Blogpower and White; tomorrow is Maroon.

Visiting other sites, of course, takes up an inordinate amount of time. I have a total of 208 bloggers on my rolls but a breakdown of the last 100 visits here in the past few hours reveals:

# 33 Blogger visits [but about 20 returning multiple times]

# 23 Unknown or miscellaneous

# 19 Google Searches

# 15 Google Images

# 6 Blogger Navbar visits

# 4 Technorati

On a weekday it might be different but still - there are vastly more on the rolls than are visiting. I think almost noone would begrudge time spent when there is some sort of return on it. So posting interesting posts on a variety of topics seems productive, in terms of non-blogger visits.

Visiting other sites is where the problem is. What does it give back? Well, with a small proportion, it is friendship and camaraderie; with a wider circle it is learning new things and seeing new angles. But does visiting beget visiting?

The major bloggers are a mixed bag. With DK, Mr. E and some others, it is certainly friendship. But with many of the others, it seems highly unproductive. They're not saying anything DK or Mr. E aren't and yet they don't even acknowledge our existence.

One [now major] blogger told me a year ago that there was hardly any point being on a particular superstar's roll because he might have three referrals from there in the week - it was a bit like Google ads. People generally go to the Big Boys to see what they have to say, not to get into dialogue with fellow visitors or to hit the sidebar blogrolls. Generally.

I often look down 50 to 60 comments and am amazed that there is virtually no communication between the commenters themselves, except someone attacking the blogger and another commentator defending him. Eyes are generally lifted upwards and the commenter is seeking the attention of the major blogger or else just making his erudite point and going.

Is that an unfair summation?

Yet a sidebar link is a sidebar link and it helps with the Technorati. Again - is that ranking so important in the scheme of things? If I culled my blogrolls to a maximum of 50, excluding Blogpower, [and I don't intend to], it would kill many links back to me and therefore my "authority" with Technorati but would it kill my overall readership [including through a Reader] or linking from other sites?

How much do you use other people's sidebars, in other words?

Would it have that great an effect in any day - maybe a 40 to 50 drop in visits - and could the time saved visiting be used more productively in wider general reading, better posts and more quality visits to blogfriends, thereby resulting in more traffic anyway?

I suppose the chip on my shoulder is that I hate wasting time. I hate wastage of any kind but wasting someone else's time is a major crime in my book. Is it a waste of time running a big blogroll or is that the engine room of a blogger's blog?

[memo to the birds] winter cometh

Baht At is not enamoured of birds on a wire when they are sparrows [which birds are yours, Mattie Wardman?]:

Where are all the birds? Jumping up and down on my sodding phoneline it seems!

This feeder seems easy enough to construct ...

However, Mutterings and Meanderings notes, concerning swallows:

Swallows are, I think, my favourite birds. I love everything about them: their first appearance, swooping low over the fields, signalling that summer’s around the corner; their cream chests and rosy cheeks; the athleticism of the adults in their aerial arcs; the cherubic babies with their wide mouths in an ever-present grin.

But this ridiculous hotchpotch of weather has conned some couples into breeding again, leaving it dangerously late for their brood to build up the strength for their long journey to Africa.

... but I like this one a bit better and might construct it.

In the North, we had lots of bluetits and I loved putting the orange netting bags of nuts outside the window for them to come and peck at, even if they did peck the bag to bits and fight each other for a place.

Here's an account of someone else who likes them too.

Now, over here in the fSU, little birds often come to my balcony window and I'd dearly like to put a bag of nuts out there again or some sort of feeder but where to buy such things? Maybe I can make one.

[blogburst] and other remunerative schemes

Would you trust this man?

Longrider draws our attention to a worrying scheme:

If you are a blogger who is keen on getting more exposure, then you may well be interested … On the downside, some of the early criticisms still stand. The first is remuneration.

Intellectual property rights is next in the licensing scheme:

… you grant to Pluck and its affiliates a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display and disclose the Work …

Little bloggers, for whom this post is intended, are not into this stuff and may not fully understand it. They might see $1500 and think how good that looks. My comment at Longrider's was:

This needs to be read carefully. On the face of it, it’s a good idea but signing away intellectual property rights is self-actualizing, as they know.

If you’re not much chop as a blogger, it won’t matter all that much but if you are good, then you’ll get exposure and you’ve signed to them so they reap the benefit without any legal obligation to remunerate.

In short, it’s a wnak [excuse my French].

[sackerson] a little off theme

Sackerson, at Bearwatch, has to be one of the best bloggers around and how he's not in the Top 200 I don't know. Don't necessarily judge by this off-theme post. Here are some other posts to peruse:

A light post on how much money we need; but this one is far more his bread and butter.

Sackerson would be embarrassed by this slightly OTT rap, as you'll glean form his tone but I care not - I know a good blog when I read one.