Two great (really, no exaggeration) TV segments were aired tonight.

"Wall Street Week with Fortune" had an interview with George Soros; I  can only hope many people heard and understood what he was saying.   He has been talking about the need for higher levels  of public morality, and the need for public morality to restrain the "amoral market" for some years; at the height of the boom he was sharply criticised for this by rightist and anarcho-libertarian apologists for greed.  (Dangers of an unfettered market: George Soros interview, Sept. 20, 2002)

One of the other guests on WSWF, Rudolph-Riad Younes, was the first financial pundit I have heard who is telling the truth, IMHO, about current P/E ratios - they are still too high.  Most of the talking heads claim the fat has been wrung out of prices, based on consensus forcasts of earnings for the next two years.  Problem:  These are the same nummies who led us into the current mess, there  is NO reason to believe their consensus forecast for earnings.  Younes thinks  actual earnings will be roughly half those of the consensus forecast.   So the P/E ration is roughly double what pundits are saying it is, based on expected earnings.  And US stocks are  still very expensive, with large downside risks.    (I cannot but wonder  what  the former Fox TV newsreader making up half of the team replacing Louis Rukeyser on WSWF thought of Soros and this guest.  But it may be possible that Karen Gibbs' employment with Fox News was not because her politics fit with that outfit's rightist slant.)

The  second segment was Bill Moyers' "NOW" interview with Arundhati Roy.  If only there were more like her.  She sees what is happening,  and says it so clearly.   I have  no words to say how impressed I was with her vision, and the clarity, precision, and soul of her words.   Bill seemed overwhelmed by her; despite his brilliance and wide experience I sense truly understanding her would require a shift in the  basic structure of his understanding of the world.

The quote:  "Wall Street Journal December 1st, 2000 page 1: " 'Madame Butterfly' Theresa Le Pore wasn't always an embattled Palm Beach ballots chief.  In the 1980s she moonlighted as a flight attendant on private planes owned by Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a middleman in Reagan administration arms sales to Iran."

There is more:  Pamela Churchill Harriman's son by Randolph Churchill, Winston,  allegedly was involved with Soraya Khashoggi, the former wife of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.  Dodi al Fayed's father  married Khashoggi's sister Samira, who gave birth to Dodi (of Princess Diana fame) in 1955.   Richard Taus, former FBI agent, claims al Fayed and Khashoggi were both connected to the Iran/Contra scandal through Castle Securities.

Princess Diana's Dodi was thus  a cousin of Adnan Khashoggi, a CIA asset involved in sales of arms to Iran, and Theresa LePore was a former stewardess for Kashoggi!  (When Miami-Dade sold its famed butterfly ballot voting machines, it was reported (unverified) that "Dawn G. Lepore,  48, has served as a director of eBay since December 1999.")  Well, there are only a couple of hundred people in the world, so one can expect connections like this, right?

But were links to original sources for all this informationprovided?  Not many which were useable.  The paranoid  who sends this stuff out also does not format or paragraph what he writes.  So it is nearly unreadable, as well as unverifiable.  Sheesh!.  (It's not that I think he is wrong, I do not.  I think he knows too much history, which will get you paranoid in a hurry.  Just wish he would organize his stuff, and give more valid sources.)   Links  were provided for:

Colin Powell is  related to the late Princess Diana and  Bill Clinton is descended from a thirteenth-century Earl of Leicester;

The long history and strength of ties between the Saudi royal  family and the bin Laden Group are startling.

Getting links onto the main page will wait until I have decided upon a "map" or structure for the site that limits both the number of links (link clutter) on each page, and the length of the path that must be followed (click overload) to reach a page.

The peaches are ripe, and have been shared about 50/50 with the racoon(s).  Lots of peach butter now, really good, and some fresh ones on the counter, ripening.  But last night that coon got some of the largest ones, which I had thought were out of his reach in the tree.  Should have picked them at dusk, when I checked to see if they were ready.

News is not good today, as our Scalia appointed pResident  proceeds with his perpetual war.   Markets are down, scandals continue.  Yet he and his (distant) cousin Dick Cheney have  successfully, so far as is visible, distracted the press and public from "the enronomy".   Not good.