TSA, Teabag Muzak, Traffic and Max Keiser's desire to crash the market

I love Jon Stewart, love his-middle-of-the-road-why-don't-we-all-get-along-message.  It rings positive, moderate and decent, it feels like the America I grew up in; safe, secure, gorged with opportunity and upwardly mobile. I listened to his interview with Rachel Maddow last night, they discussed themselves, mainstream media, it was nice.
For texture, I also made time for Max Keiser. Max is less moderate, very interested in driving social media traffic and how financial 'truth' is shared.  Max is a US expat living in Paris, film-maker, broadcaster, former broker and options trader who hosts On the Edge, a news and analysis show hosted by Iran's Press TV.' 

Whenever Max visits Infowars/PrisonPlanet, he valiantly tries to provide Alex with perspective on Europe. This proves challenging because Alex is a gun toting, christian constitutionalist patriot who thinks the 'globalists' are slowly killing us all by design. Oh, and Alex is from Texas. Alex lives, huffs and puffs CONSPIRACY. He's partially insane, slightly dangerous, sincere and immensely entertaining and boasts the largest radio audience on the planet, which he thinks a prison, hence the name of his show. 
Today, Max tried to guide Alex back to sanity by offering his take on how Glenn Beck (mainstream) and Matt Drudge (alternative) are hy-jacking Alex Jones (hard core alternative) material but Alex is not convinced, not to worry, Max has an idea. 
Max began by discussing Europe's recent protests. He thinks local groups are beginning to focus their anger and direct it toward the banks.  He's calling it the battle between savers and speculators.  The savers are simply people who want to work, make a decent living and have enough left for holiday, enjoy a trip to Spain perhaps, this kind of thing. 
The bankers, the speculators play against the 'savers'  interests. The bankers want their interest rates kept near zero so they can borrow money for free, speculate and make wild bets and make tons of money.  Fair enough, but when they lose, which they do every now and then, they don't want to suffer the consequences.  They're savvy enough enough to get government to bail them out which in turn means someone must suffer and it's probably going to be the savers who must agree to accept austere measures and work until the day they die in order to pay off the speculator's debt. Such as it spins in the orbit that is Max Keiser.
Max feels strongly this financial 'truth' is destroying lives all over the world hence the rioting in Ireland, Paris, Greece, etc. Alex agrees and this makes him mad. He's already really, really mad to begin with and he really, really wants Americans to quit drinking the flouridated water which he insists makes then dull, drunk and way too apathetic. This is but one conspiracy in a million that are well documented and live in neat stacks all over Alex's desk which must be very, very large indeed.  
I personally, never get to see these much vaulted stacks because I prefer to leave the rant in the background, on my iPhone on the windowsill, kinda like teabag muzak, while I'm on my knees trying to find the fur Colette and Godot left the day before, mysteriously lurking in some new corner...what am I but a valet.
Max, on the other hand insists America is only slightly behind the times and will soon catch up with those across the pond. Max says, yes, Americans still enjoy the benefits of the greenback being the reserve currency but this will change as well as the artificially low price of gas and food, but boy, when they skyrocket, and they will, according to Max, America will face their own economic reality and its citizens will riot, big time. I have my doubts.  About all of this, hence the Jon Stewart/Max Keiser 'blend'.
However, in the mean time Max has an idea.  He asked Alex to do something he's been doing for several weeks, but with a nifty spin. Alex has been asking his audience to drive traffic by identifying a 'favorite phrase', then making his millions of listeners frantically type in his 'favorite phrase' over and over again which they do like good christian soldiers, connecting them and others to a specific link, highlighting one of the many conspiracy theories that live amongst the many stacks scattered across his desk. So far, everytime, his 'favorite phrase' has hit #1 on google.
The whole TSA thing is proof Alex Jones is driving traffic, but who is wagging whom, still seems sort of up in the air.
Allors, back to Max's idea. All he asks is that Alex get 100 million Americans to buy a silver coin and they will, by power of his 'Favorite phrase', buy 100 million silver coins and voila, JP Morgan will crash. Simple. As. That.
Doesn't sound so simple to me, and I've no idea how radicial this idea is, how practical, no idea other than I'll be somewhere when it does, yes, that much is certain.

The Magic of Leaves...

 

along Lake Garda, Tyrol...

Hanging out in the Austrian Alps

Der Spiegel outlines how fragile America's success has become

Der Spiegel's 6 point article pretty much covers the issue that is US.

• Part 1: Is the American Dream Over?
• Part 2: The Ownership Fetish
• Part 3: America's 'Perfect Storm'
• Part 4: The New American Nightmare
• Part 5: A Brighter Future?
• Part 6: The Danger of Currency Warfare

Yep. That's our boy Bush.

The Guardian, The Independent of London, The Telegraph and the rest of the English press are having a field day, offering "FULL COVERAGE OF MEMOIR" daily, basically going berserk over Bush's new book. The articles and analysis offer little assistance into our presidential phenomenon, but the comments section, priceless.
Won't even try and isolate the best bon mot but the absolute acrimony, the sheer animosity and utter annoyance, the fanatically antagonistic behavior of the oft literate, cerebral and physically funny british git whisking their own 'memoir' is worth a glance. 

Apparently our boy can really reminisce, so full of sunny insouciance, or so he would have us think and yet both he and Blair appear so baffled by the world's opinion of them. Does Bush have any regrets? No, not really. He's so effortless, in both endeavor and review. Like people that need to exercise complete control his laugh sounds utterly manufactured but provides a unique signature.
"Heheheh, they thought I couldn't read a book, let alone write one"...of course he didn't write the book, but that's irrelevant, Memoir, for today's political figure, who is in fact today's celebrity, is all about rehabilitation. It's about getting on the couch and conquering their inner conflict, the fight within, a battle that must be one over their true nature. Their beliefs and emotional investment are so severe in their situational morality there's scant room for anything other than their own world view.  

Democrat, Republican, Libertarian

A new take on political ideology as an evolutionary psychologist proposes a new framework for understanding the root causes of our political beliefs
"The implication — presumably unintentional, but still stinging to some — is that conservatives are somehow emotionally impaired, and vaguely inferior to the more open-minded people on the left.
Is there a way of explaining these differences that doesn’t suggest one side or the other is wrong or aberrant? Perhaps so. Jacob Vigil, an evolutionary psychologist based at the University of New Mexico, has come up with a fresh framework that links political orientation with the way we seek to fulfill our most fundamental human needs.

“A lot of the literature is morally loaded,” he says. “It’s easy for people to gravitate to language that fits into their predisposition. [In my framework] nobody’s right or wrong. It’s just that we’re using different behavioral strategies, all of which exist for a reason.”
His thesis, in a nutshell: Conservatives, being more oriented toward dominance, tend to acquire a larger group of friends and associates than liberals. They are more sensitive to potential threats because there are more people in their orbit, and thus the danger of their being hurt by a duplicitous person is greater. Liberals, being more inward-oriented, have smaller, tighter social groups and thus feel less threatened, which in turn allows them to be more open to unfamiliar experiences.

Klimt, Schiele and the fearless Ms. Frida Kahlo

Vienna means music and history to many, but to me, I hear only whispers of Klimt and Schiele, Klimt and Schiele. These two masters moved me so deeply the first time, Vienna always sounds like Klimt and Schiele...
Gustav Klimt, the teacher, the senior, puts me in a trance, wrapping his goddesses in symbolic divinity, decorative costume, celebrating everything that is nurturing and compassionate and powerful about women.
While Schiele shocks with nudity, Klimt calms the viewer down with clothes made of silver and gold, metal so soft, almost a balm, a loving maternal figure, offering secrets into our universe.  Amazing how one can do that with paint and placement...Klimt proves it can be done, so beautifully, naturally.
And then there's Egon Schiele, he and his women, both stripped down to expose bones, their fragile ribs, bare and vulnerable, a  delicate elegance. Schiele, a protege of Klimt, a shocking boy wonder who's presence could not be denied yet recognition received late in their artistic roulette.  There is this wall in the Albertina Museum, with 5 Schiele's, all small, sensual perfection, lined up quietly underneath a very grand chandelier... this wall put me under its spell over a dozen years ago, though its Klimt that makes me sit for long spaces of time, falling into 20 ft high scenes of tranquility depicting women so uniquely with death lurking, often, as it does in life....The Kiss is the most famous but by no means my favorite, so sweet to be kissed like that and to be able to paint a kiss that feels like that... The Albertina introduced a section of Klimt with Freudian text, maybe to emphasize the dream like elements, elaborate the earthly fantasy and intense sense of contentment. Klimt lives so well in Vienna, like seeing Degas @ Musée d'Orsay, Klimt and Schiele thrive in Vienna, the present married forever to its past, quiet, refined, civilized yet explosive in its own self-contained way.  Austria...
And what a perfect time to be here, Vienna boasts a fantastic exhibit of Picasso at his most political, Michelangelo at his most natural, strolling around all those sketches, having grown up with copies drawn by artistic siblings in our home in Seattle, reminding me of times long ago when life was simple, death hadn't arrived to take away a brother, my beloved mother, there was enough love to go around, when it was just the 7 of us, a middle class clan, a benign tribe, loving parents, 5 pretty easy going kids who smiled easily in their photos because they felt like it, so long ago, when America was like that, when my America was like that...
Allora, must come back to the present, to Vienna, to the piece di resistance, Signora Frida Kahlo.
This woman kinda blows my mind; all passion and sadness, fears and desires painted in primary colors mostly, again, symbolic, expressive.  Those challenging eyes and brow, that beautiful hairline, tutoring herself to embrace her own innate talent, becoming a master among few. I was surprised by how moved I became, overwhelmed by her ability to project multiple cultures, industry after simplicity, moving from Mexico to N. America.
Those photographs of Frida, so fierce, unrelenting, insisting she be exactly who she could be, master of her own world, wanting her men to stay and not stray, so much wanting in that women, I'm grateful Frida wanted so much, she moved me as much as Klimt and Schiele, maybe even more...