The “New Breed” of Christian Fashion

A couple of weeks ago, while I was surfing the net for articles to include in the Email Brigade News Report, I came across a piece entitled “Provocative Clothing Company Creates Tees to Help Christian Girls be ‘Playful’ for Jesus.” For obvious reasons the headline grabbed my attention.

Featured in the article is a picture of an attractive young woman in a sexy pose seated on a bed wearing a tank top with the words “God knows my secrets.”

From the Christian News Service story:

A California-based clothing company is targeting professing Christian girls who seek to be provocative and “playful” in the way that they dress, all in the name of Jesus Christ.

The company Heart OMG says that its line of clothing for girls is “heavenly inspired” and is “a delightful mix of fun, fashion, faith and love.”

“At Heart OMG, we believe in sharing our faith and love through fashion, while embracing our fun and characteristic lifestyle, as well as giving back to the ones in need,” the clothing company’s website states. “Every single irresistible Heart OMG piece is wonderfully made to complement those playful and fashion forward individuals who celebrate life, and are eager to make their faith and love a true influence to the world.”

If you visit Heart OMG’s website (although I don’t recommend it) you’ll discover the story of “New Love and True Love”:

Once upon a time three lovely girls found a new love in Jesus Christ.

God had gifted each girl with a special talent.  They gathered their gifts and became the worship crew at church.  Through music they expressed their faith & love.  This love grows stronger every moment.

The girls soon realize that this new love is definitely the “True Love” they had been looking for.

It all starts on a sunny Sunday morning.  Scroll down the page and you’ll see photos of the trio sitting in a convertible in front of a church.  Two girls are wearing off the shoulder t-shirts and, it appears, nothing is worn underneath.  On the front of one of the shirts is the graphic “Worship Crew.”

Another photo shows the titillating trio decked out in short shorts, four inch heels and a pound and a half of makeup on their faces as they stroll up the walk toward the church…looking like hookers.

Further down the page the girls are now lounging on a bed together in suggestive poses.  One of them is sporting a pink night shirt with a large graphic of an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top. “Sweet Jesus” adorns a purple cup.

Under the heading “When New Love Becomes True Love” one of the girls is reading a Bible (hopefully 1 John).  The shirt she’s wearing has a graphic of two large red apples.  You can guess where the apples are purposely placed.  What does this tell you about the creative minds that designed a whole collection of “Christian” t-shirts?

Another photo shows the trio in church perched on what appears to be the edge of the stage, hands clasped in prayer.  The girl wearing the “Worship Crew” shirt has an open Bible on her lap.  Two of the girls are wearing off the shoulder shirts that are, well, way off the shoulder…in church.

If the trashy apparel Heart OMG produces is “heavenly inspired” like they claim, I’m the Angel Gabriel.

As I investigated the website I discovered this tidbit in the “About” section:

EVERY SINGLE IRRESISTIBLE HEART OMG PIECE IS WONDERFULLY
MADE TO COMPLEMENT THOSE PLAYFUL & FASHION FORWARD
INDIVIDUALS WHO CELEBRATE LIFE, AND EAGER TO MAKE THEIR
FAITH & LOVE A TRUE INFLUENCE TO THE WORLD.

If the advertisements/photos on the site depict the fashion trend for the “new breed” of Christian women, then the visible Church is in far worse shape than I thought.

Before I move on I need to make something clear.  I’m not saying that the girls in the photos are Christians.  I came across an acknowledgment at the bottom of the page stating only that they’re models.  But that’s neither here nor there.  The fact of the matter is that whoever owns Heart OMG has hired models who presumably are Christians.  Certainly the girls who visit the site think they are!  And let’s not forget that a photographer is involved and perhaps a marketing person as well.  I’m going to presume these people are professing Christians.  And if that’s indeed the case, my question to them is, why do you choose to participate in pushing a clothing line that dishonors God?

For years I’ve reported on the ways Hollywood and the liberal elite have made it their goal to sexualize young girls (here, here, here, here and here).  However, this is the first time I’ve dedicated an entire article to so-called Christians who seem bent on sexualizing teens and tweens.

I first wrote about tawdry church attire in 2006 and conveyed how the pastor of my former church handled a sticky situation:

The church I attend once held outdoor services during the summer. Not anymore. The reason given by our pastor–with no apology–is the “inappropriate way people dress.” When it’s hot outside some folks show up pretty much undressed, and I am not prone to exaggeration. Women attend services dressed in short shorts, low-cut clingy tops, or crops. In some cases skintight low-rider jeans are worn as low as they go so that permanent artwork (tattoos) etched into backs and hips can be viewed by all. Excuse my bluntness, ladies, but exposing your butt crack in church is unacceptable, even if you’re sporting a Rembrandt across your back.

I also objected to the clothing worn by young guys, the ones who aren’t the least bit concerned with their grungy appearance.  But my point here is that Bible believing, God honoring Christian females mustn’t wear flashy, flamboyant, tight fitting, low cut, sexually explicit clothing to church – or anywhere else!  Being uninhibited and unreserved may be A-ok with “Sweet Jesus.”  But being “too sexy for my shirt” is not A-ok with the Jesus of the Bible.

In 1Timothy 2:9, 10 Paul reminds women:

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness [modesty of appearance and manner] and sobriety [self-restraint].

Likewise, Peter had something to say to women in the early church:

But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. (1 Peter 3:4)

Jesus Christ gives His followers this command:

As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance: But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy. (1 Peter 1:14-16)

Getting back to my’06 article, I pointed out that one of the problems with trying to be cool is that, followers of Jesus aren’t supposed to be cool; they’re supposed to be holy. But few pastors preach on holiness these days. Even though we serve a holy God and are called to be holy as He is holy, the message of sin and repentance has been diluted to appeal to the “felt needs” of today’s self-absorbed audience. People want to leave the church feeling good about themselves. No one wants to hear anything “negative” anymore. “That’s what liberalism is,” says Gene Edward Veith, “changing your theology to fit whatever the culture is.”  (Source)

Our younger generation is being preyed upon by adults that will do anything for a buck. Adults are the ones who peddle the raunchy products that hyper-sexualize the culture.  Young people, especially, are demeaned and exploited for profit.  A word of warning to sleaze peddling “Christians”: God deems what you’re doing a grave sin. Repent!

Back in 2008 I penned a piece entitled “Hyper-sexualizing girls.” In it I described how even professing Christians are participating in this terrible offense against God.  I asked,

And what, pray tell, is the Church doing to put a stop to the madness? The sad fact is that many Christians have yielded to the culture. And those that have are just as complicit in hyper-sexualizing youngsters as liberals are. So I pose this question to followers of Jesus Christ: Why do you suppose the world doesn’t believe what Christians have to say?

The answer is that Christians don’t live what they say they believe. Instead they live like the world.

“The Christian life,” says Warren Weirsbe, “is not a playground, but a battlefield.” [Read Eph. 6:11-12] Those who commit to follow Jesus Christ have got to get off the playground and make haste to the battlefield. Your children’s future is at stake. And I’m not talking to you nominal Christians. I’m talking to those who are serious about their commitment to Christ. Yes, fighting the culture is an uphill fight. But we can win some battles! “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). (Source)

In closing, I’ll restate what I said above. Bible believing Christians who really want to glorify God must steer clear of the “new breed” of Christian fashion and dress modestly.  Believers must pray that so-called Christians who are promoting trashy clothing to impressionable girls will have a change of heart.  What can change hearts and minds? The Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Recommended reading:
Should Christians “judge” others? You betcha!—By Marsha West

Hypocrisy of Gun Control In A Land Where War And Violence Are Sexy

Solving problems with violence is as American as apple pie…

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has become public enemy number one amongst left-leaning Americans since the most recent incident of random shooting. Is blaming the NRA a convenient way for Americans to avoid some necessary soul searching: a refusal to address the deeply-rooted cultural problem of violence being the preferred method of conflict resolution and most popular source of entertainment in areas that include sports, movies, TV, and video games? In essence, violence provides the backdrop to nearly all aspects of life in the United States. The government has glamorized violence by conducting endless wars, maintaining a gargantuan prison system, and keeping the death penalty legal. The US economy has increasingly become a war economy since 2001, and the business of death is booming. Recruitment centers for the US military are popping up in every high school and shopping mall. Television and cinema advertisements for the Marines have the slick and sexy look of Hollywood trailers. “Be all you can be!” says Uncle Sam, who carefully omits from his sales pitch that the main requirements for the job are the willingness to kill and get killed.

Can one blame the NRA when the US president runs a kill list from the White House?

A couple of days after the assassination of , president Obama’s approval rating jumped up more than five percent. Mr. Obama was proud and excited to take responsibility for the extrajudicial killing: “shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda.” Everywhere, newspaper headlines shouted “We took him out!” and the US public glowed from the pleasure of doing away with their favorite bogeyman. Killing people for the US federal government has become a quite simple affair that can even be done remotely, as in a video game, with drones that reach anywhere in the world from Yemen to Pakistan. The countless innocent victims of these drone attacks are called “collateral damage.” Most people in the US could care less about them, the understanding being that it is all right to kill people who had the bad luck to go to a market, mosque, or wedding at the wrong time.

So a man loses his job and kills his boss and numerous colleagues at his place of work.  This has become so common that it is called “going postal,” or more politely, “workplace violence.” Every year, more than 10 Americans on average are gunned down in such workplace killing sprees. The enemy is quite close, especially for women. For example, of 429,729 homicide FBI files examined by evolutionary psychologist David Buss, 13,670 (or 3%) were cases in which a husband killed his wife. Thus, in their more intimate roles as jilted lovers or unloved sons, a small fraction of men murder not only their mates or parents but also everyone else who happens to be nearby at the wrong time.  Why should collateral damage be solely the purview of the President? After all, he is considered to be the country’s ultimate role model. And why should Americans be surprised by an endemic violence problem when their role model, their foremost example of what one does with power, runs an assassination program directly from the White House?

Guns and America: A love affair

One week after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. Wayne LaPierre broke the NRA’s silence with a press conference. LaPierre argued that only more guns in the hands of “good guys” could stop America’s killing spree.

“I call on Congress today to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation. Innocent lives might have been spared if armed security was present at Sandy Hook. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre. Besides this “good guy with gun” versus “bad guy with guns” argument, reminiscent of a John Wayne Western movie cliche, LaPierre blamed the mass shootings on popular culture like “vicious, violent video games” such as ‘Bulletstorm’, ‘Grand Theft Auto’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ and ‘Splatterhouse’ and on movies such as ‘American Psycho’ and ‘Natural Born Killer’ for “portraying life as a joke and murder as a way of life. In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing on ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes,” added LaPierre.

The supposed adverse effect of popular culture on vulnerable minds is a perennial argument that gets brought up after each shooting, although the details vary. But this argument is about as sound as blaming a flood on the movie “Waterworld.” Violence is ubiquitous in American life, and it is quite natural that it should pervade American fantasies and popular culture.

Who are LaPierre’s “good guys?” Might they be the policemen who routinely criminalize and kill innocent black youths in urban centers? Might they be part of the growing security sector? Or could they be the teenage students who meet a life-size cardboard cutout of a machine-gun toting soldier at the entrance to their high schools every day? One moment of impatience about growing into full adulthood is all it takes for them to sign away their lives. Thus the dear children survive elementary school, junior high school, and finally high school, only to be sent off to kill people in places like Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan. There they learn not to distinguish those who are defending their countries from invasion from those who either cannot fight (like children and the elderly) or choose not to fight. The cost is their very soul. Many return hollowed out and suicidal.

A culture of death

By far the most violent practice of the US is capital punishment, in which a person is made completely defenseless and then killed in cold blood by the state with the collusion of its citizens. The shooters, who are well aware of this, typically conclude their sprees in a quick suicide, thus depriving the state of the sadistic process involving a protracted stay on death row and numerous appeals. The practice of the death penalty is all the more gruesome for its discrimination based on race and the innocence of many of those killed.  An Innocence Project study in 2011 discovered that, of 230 individuals exonerated in the US by DNA Testing, 17 had been sentenced to die.

For US presidential candidates, the support of capital punishment has become a rite of passage: the ultimate proof of their willingness to kill the innocent so as to support an expansion of US wars and weapons sales. Former US President Clinton suspended his presidential campaign so he could return to Arkansas to make sure Ricky Ray Rector was executed. Rector was so mentally impaired and clueless about his fate that, before his execution, he asked the guards to save his pecan pie “for later.” On the evening of George W. Bush’s inauguration as Governor, the state of Texas executed Mario Marquez, who was brain damaged and had the skills of a seven-year old; later, when Mr. Bush was a presidential candidate, he mocked Karla Faye Tucker in an interview a year after her execution. On November 6, while Mr. Obama celebrated his reelection with an elated public by hugging his wife, mentally-ill Oklahoma inmate Garry Allen, who had been watching the election with great enthusiasm, was executed.

The violence of the state, domestically and abroad, is pervasive. It is celebrated: even sexy. Violence breeds more violence and, in a sense, we have become collateral damage.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one, two, three and seven by . Photographs five and six by.

By Dady Chery and Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

Shadow Forces Behind Government

Let no man or woman dare speak of a shadow government. The crony corruptocrats that make up the ruling elites of the world must maintain the illusion, that elected governments are based upon willful consent and have the legitimate authority to establish rules of conduct that their citizen are obligated to obey. For those regimes that maintain their grip of power by undemocratic means, the apologists for the international community give a wide berth of acceptance in order to maintain the appearance of individual national sovereignty.

In the essay, There Is No Conspiracy – Only Official Policy provides a study in power politics when a banana republic dares defy the moneychangers.

“The lesson for world leaders is you don’t cross the masters of power. But for Americans it is that a world run by the IMF never benefits us, the people. The enactment of the FTAA is just one more element in the grand scheme of global rule. There is no need to dapple in extraordinary theories; it is all in the open for everyone to see. The policy is clear – the nations of the world are mere colonies to the interests of the ruling elites. Citizens of countries and their elected leaders are mere subjects of the international community. Not exactly the revered Republic that we all owe allegiance, is it?”

The pattern of retribution against any tin horn leaders that refuse to succumb to the boot of the World Bank or the IMF is in plain sight. Just ask the mutilated and deceased Muhammad al-Gaddafi for testimony of the enforcement treatment one can expect for opposing the world financial plutocracy. While the imperium empire of drone warfare, targets governments that oppose the global hegemony, the behind the screens discord among varied vying factions often goes unnoticed.

 The Constitution Society sees the nature of The Shadow Government differently from most popular interpretations of the power elite.

Some of the best indications that the Shadow Government is not centered in the financial sector are the things it has to do to finance itself. Shadow Government is expensive. We can identify the main sources of its revenue:

(1) Black budgets. This is the core of its operations, but is not enough to secure its control over the country and the world.

(2) Drug trade. It has seized control of the major part of the illegal traffic in addictive substances, in part by using the organs of law enforcement to eliminate competition, and by gaining control of the money and the ways it gets re-introduced into the economy.

(3) Raiding financial institutions. This is what was done with the S&Ls, and is being done, more slowly, with the banks. It involves several aspects: diversion of the funds, seizure of smaller institutions by a few large ones under Shadow Government control, with the seizure financed by the taxpayers, and acquisition under distressed prices of the assets of those institutions, many of which are well-positioned business enterprises that give the Shadow Government both control of the key enterprises in most business sectors and sources of revenue. The Savings & Loan raid was used to finance a major expansion of the Shadow Government. However, it is not a method that can be repeated.

(4) Public authorities. These are quasi-governmental enterprises that control substantial assets, often taxpayer-subsidized, without effective accountability. They include housing, port, energy, water, transportation, and educational authorities. To this might also be added various utilities, and both public and publicly-regulated private monopolies, like local telephone and cable companies. They are also a major source of government contracts.

(5) Government contracts. Major source of diverted funds, but must often be shared with others involved.

(6) Arms trade. Another major source of funds, both direct and diverted. But requires payoffs to local officials.

What this viewpoint ignores is that the tactics of subversive operations frequently demand undercover execution and plausible deniability. The methods of covert operations conducted by black bag operatives avoid the question; who really controls the intelligence agencies? It is a fatal error to reject the prevalent role of the money center institutions and central banks in the unified network of financial control and global integration.

A more perceptive breakdown by Richard Boylan Ph.D. offers a structural analysis of the secret “shadow” government.

In the Shadow Government five branches may be identified. These branches are: the Executive Branch, the Intelligence Branch, the War Department, the Weapons Industry Branch, and the Financial Department.

An analysis of the overall purposes of these five branches suggests that the overall purpose of the Shadow Government is to exercise covert control by:

1. Collecting comprehensive institutional and personal information

2. By establishing national and international policy independently of the established Government

3. By developing high-tech arms and equipment, and, with these, establishing small, specialized, highly mobile, elite military units to effect these covert policies, when need arises, without having to rely on the official (and “unreliable”) Armed Services, (whose subservience to the Shadow Government is reasonably suspect)

4. By developing an armed capability to repel any threat to the status quo, (including the uncertain ontological, social, and economic impacts of any revelation of the reality of UFO and extraterrestrial presence) through the development of a Star Wars/BMDO ground and space-based surveillance and SDI weapons network

5. By denying information compromising to the Shadow Government from all those outside “need-to-know” policy-making levels

6. By exercising control on the money supply, availability of credit, and the worth of money, through policy decisions made outside of the official Government

The essential political planetary threat that faces humanity is rooted in the globalist drive to accelerate their NWO plans for a neo-colonial feudal hierarchy. The New World Order Feudal Enslavement System outlines the plot. However, the elements that comprise the surreptitious functions and assignments of shadow government missions need to maintain a clandestine secrecy to be effective. Stealth practices often foster perpetual public ignorance.

 

Contrast this with maybe the best example of the most visible globalist institution that is used by the shadow elites as their private administration tool for worldwide compliance. The John Birch video presents the argument that Americanism is incompatible with the international community of collectivists that the United Nations is based upon.

The interminable public feuding in General Assembly sessions are sheer spectacle for the uninformed. The real dirty work is done behind the scenes through coerced implementation of programs like Agenda 21.The best way to come out of the shadows is to strip back the curtain. Effectiveness dictates that the banksters and corporatists use the dark art of intrigue and subterfuge to manipulate the systems of governance, which they put in place, to serve their own interests.

The destruction of the unique American experiment falls upon the treason of the ruling class. Human Depravity, James Madison, and The Founding Fathers explains the nature of the existential internal threat that destroyed the essence of the old Republic. Madison wrote:

“If we were all like angels, blameless and freely able to exercise perfect control, we would not need rules or regulations. Why, then, do we have so many laws and statutes? Because of man’s wickedness, for he is constantly overflowing with evil; this is why a remedy is required.”

When the shadow government usurps the stated original limited authorities and separations of powers, the citizens of the country are relegated to a menu entrée on the feasting table of the power elites. The globalism agenda is the objective of the shadow government. Participates need not be spooks or machinates. Those who influence the operations of the sub-rosa establishment may wear the garb of Illuminati or use the signals of secret societies, but most are pure button down internationalists.

The populace is viewed as useless eaters to the elites, who labor to drive a wedge between government and the ordinary man. The privileged oligarchs see themselves as the ennobled in the entitlement enslavement society of their creation. Keeping the masses dependent until the ultimate elimination of dissenters is the objective.

The specter of the shadow government has always been part of the inner conflict for national integrity. The difference at this time is that it is all pervasive. The United States has become a global empire designed to impose an internationalist monitory yoke around the neck of subservient serfs.

The money machine of shadow banking practiced by the Bank for International Settlements on Big Banks is a prime component of the definitive ruling elite comradeship. Governments are no longer sovereign entities. They function as subsidiaries of the global satanic New World Order conglomerate. The crony corruptocrats bury deep their crimes and give new meaning to being above the law. Without a widespread public awakening, the forces of wickedness will triumph.

Less we forget . . . “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12

America R.I.P.

During the second half of the 20th century the United States was an opportunity society. The ladders of upward mobility were plentiful, and the middle class expanded. Incomes rose, and ordinary people were able to achieve old-age security.

In the 21st century the opportunity society has disappeared. Middle class jobs are scarce. Indeed, jobs of any kind are scarce. To stay even with population growth from 2002 through 2011, the economy needed about 14 million new jobs. However, at the end of 2011 there were only 1 million more jobs than in 2002. http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm 

Only 426,000 of these jobs are in the private sector. The bulk of the net new jobs consist of waitresses and bartenders and health care and social assistance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the 9 years, employment for waitresses and bartenders increased by 1,188,000. Employment in health care and social assistance increased 3,087,000. These two categories accounted for 1,000% of the net private sector job growth.

As for manufacturing jobs, they not only did not grow with the population but declined absolutely. During these nine years, 3.5 million middle class manufacturing jobs were lost.

Over the entire nine years, only 48,000 new jobs were created for architects and engineers.

In the 21st century the US economy has been able to create only a few new jobs and these are in lowly paid domestic services that cannot be offshored, such as waitresses and bartenders.

The lack of jobs, especially high value-added, high productivity jobs, is the reason real median household income has declined and the distribution of income has worsened. Without rising real household income, there cannot be a consumer economy.

In the early years of the 21st century, the Federal Reserve substituted a rise in consumer debt to drive the economy in place of the missing rise in consumer incomes. Low interest rates drove up housing prices, and people refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity. The Federal Reserve kept the economy alive by loading up consumers with debt that housing prices and consumer incomes would soon be unable to support.

When debt and real estate prices reached unsustainable levels, the bubble popped, and the ongoing financial crisis was upon us.

The cause of all of the problems is the offshoring of Americans’ jobs. When jobs are moved offshore, consumers’ careers and incomes, and the GDP and payroll and income tax base associated with those jobs, go with them. When the goods and services produced for American markets by offshored labor are brought into the US to be sold, the trade deficit rises, and downward pressure is put on the dollar, pushing up domestic inflation. (On October 12, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that “third-quarter wholesale inflation jumped to an annualized 6.2%.”)

Jobs offshoring is driven by Wall Street, “shareholder advocates,” the threat of takeovers, and by large retailers, such as Walmart. By cutting labor costs, profits go up.It is that simple. However, as a result of sending American jobs to cheap labor countries, US consumer incomes go down. The end result is to destroy the domestic consumer market. What would have been US consumer income growth becomes instead profit growth for US corporations.

Keynesian economists use in their textbooks the example of how the aggregate effect of individual saving could be the opposite of the effect intended by the individuals. Whereas each saver seeks to improve his position by building wealth, in the aggregate saving could exceed investment, resulting in a decline in aggregate demand and a fall in income for all. Offshoring has the same logic. Each corporation can expect to gain more profits from moving US jobs offshore, but the aggregate effect is a fall in American consumer incomes and a reduction in the American consumer market.

I have told this story many times. But policymakers, the media, and economists seem unable to connect the dots.

Jobs offshoring has substantial implications for Social Security and Medicare. The US has the least adequate social safety net of any developed country. The two major components of the US social safety net are Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. Social Security and Medicare are financed by a payroll tax. The combined tax is 15.3% of payrolls. For the past quarter of a century the Social Security portion of the payroll tax has built up a surplus of over $2 trillion. Recently, the Medicare portion began running in the red.

Right-wing Republicans, free market ideologues, and the left-wing have all indoctrinated themselves with incorrect beliefs about Social Security and Medicare. The right-wing claims that a safety net financed with 15.3% of payrolls is a “Ponzi scheme” and an “unfunded liability.” If that is the case, then so are veterans benefits, military pensions, and federal pensions, all of which are financed by the income tax, the basis for the payroll tax.

The left-wing claims that the rich do not pay high enough payroll taxes, because the income subject to Social Security payroll tax is capped at about $110,000. But the benefits are also capped. Social Security is not supposed to be an income redistribution scheme from rich to poor, and it is not supposed to be a pension system for the rich. The pension paid is supposed to correlate with the pre-retirement income level of the retiree. Those who had higher wages or salaries and consequently paid more in payroll taxes receive a larger Social Security check than those who had lower wages and salaries and paid less payroll taxes, although there is favoritism toward the lower income earners who receive proportionally more in respect to their payroll taxes than higher income earners.

There is no cap on income subject to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax. Moreover, Medicare charges a Medicare Part B premium that is deducted from the Social Security monthly check. In addition, there is a further Part B premium based on retirement age income. For example, someone working beyond retirement age and making $250,000 per year pays about $3,800 in Medicare Part B premium in addition to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax of about $7,500. The annual premium he pays for his “free” Medicare for which he has paid all his working life with a payroll tax is about $11,300.

Moreover, Medicare by itself is insufficient coverage. To actually have medical coverage, those covered by Medicare have to purchase a supplementary private policy to cover the large gaps in Medicare. Depending on the range of coverage, a supplementary policy costs approximately $100 to $300 per month.

As the person making $250,000 per year is likely to go for the most coverage, he will be paying about $14,900 (excluding deductions and co-payments) per year for his “free” Medicare. This is despite having paid the Medicare payroll tax each year of his working life. A person who made $250,000 in taxable income per year for 30 years would have paid $217,500 into Medicare at the current Medicare payroll tax rate.

The right-wing’s notion that Social Security and Medicare are handouts, part of the welfare state’s bread and circuses, and the left-wing’s idea that the rich get a free ride are equally untrue.

(Note: $250,000 is the politicians’ dividing line between the rich and the rest of us. For a person making $50,000 a year, an income five times larger can seem rich. However, a $250,000 annual income leaves a family or person far distant from the lifestyle of the rich. Upper middle class incomes are generally associated with high-tax, high-cost urban areas in states with high income taxes. After federal income and payroll taxes, state income and sales taxes, and property taxes, what appears to many as a large income disappears. In New York City, the federal income tax will take about 25% of the $250,000, New York state will take about 9%, and New York City will take about 3.65%. The combined city and state sales tax is 8.875%. The property tax is high. The conclusion is that in New York City a $250,000 income is reduced to $125,000 or thereabouts. Those who claim “the rich don’t pay taxes” are not talking about $250,000 incomes.)

Social Security and Medicare have served the country well. They protect the individual from his own mistakes, from crooked and incompetent money managers, and from financial crises, and they protect society from the moral dilemma of confronting large numbers of fellow citizens who through fault or no fault of their own cannot provide for their livelihood and medical care. After the financial scandals and crisis of the past five years, it is a stretch to believe that any but the astute can manage their personal wealth, whether small or large, in today’s situation of unregulated financial markets, zero interest rates, currency uncertainty, and highly complex investment instruments with computers programmed with mathematical models dominating equity trades.

The argument that conceptually a person could do better by investing his payroll taxes in the stock market is a poor basis for old age security policy. The person can do better as long as he or she doesn’t fall into the hands of a Bernie Madoff or a Goldman Sachs, doesn’t receive zero interest on his bonds because the Federal Reserve has to bail out the “too big to fail banks,” doesn’t experience a decline in currency value due to monetization of enormous federal deficits, and doesn’t experience a bear market as he approaches retirement.

The right-wing ideologues who try to scare old age security out of existence go on and on about rising medical costs, about an aging population living longer, declining birthrates and a worsening ratio of workers to retirees, about people learning to rely on handouts rather than their own means, and about Washington’s rising unfunded liabilities.

Scare projections are designed to scare, and most are untenable. For example, longevity was a product of rising incomes, good diet, and antibiotics. Today only the upper crust have rising incomes. Antibiotics are wearing out from abuse and rising immunity of bacteria. Diet is compromised in ways still poorly understood as a result of GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, pumping chicken, pork, and beef full of antibiotics and hormones and feeding the animals GMO grains and also possibly infected animal byproducts, and pumping our water full of fluoride. A variety of destructive activities and behaviors are causing ecological damage. Longevity might have been a short-term benefit of irreproducible conditions considering the mounting ecological damage and the rise of superbugs, stress, and tainted food and water production.

The projection of an aging population might also be wrong. Clearly, the post-World War II baby boomers are aging, but do the projections take into account the legislated 1965 immigration increases plus the illegal influx from Mexico and points south of young people with high birth rates? How can it be that a country with allegedly 30 million illegal immigrants, whose children born in the US are citizens, has a declining birth rate? How do we know that the illegal population will not continue to increase?

There are so many Spanish speaking people in the US today that if a person calls any of his utility companies, whether telephone, Internet, water, electricity, TV, or any of his credit card companies, or his bank, he has to select English or Spanish. Obviously, as
anti-immigration sites make clear, the US population is changing in its national origin, and there appears to be no sign of an aging Hispanic population. How many old Spanish speaking people do you see in the US compared to the young?

When confronted with this apparent fact, the response is: “why will the Hispanics pay for the aging white population?” The answer is: because they are in the same payroll tax system and the taxes will be withheld from their wages and salaries just as they are from everyone else’s.

It is possible that if Hispanics in the US have suffered years of hostility, accusations, and hatred from “the ice people,” once Hispanics are sufficiently numerous to control the legislature, assuming one still exists, or to take over the executive branch, the only seat of power, they may in retribution cut off the aging whites. But if so, the whites will have brought it on themselves.

Whatever the scare projections that are mustered to undermine the public provision of old age security, the real financial danger is never mentioned. The only significant financial danger to Social Security and Medicare is the offshoring of American jobs and GDP. A country without a job base is without a payroll tax base. If the only jobs that the 21st century “world’s only superpower” economy can create are for waitresses, bartenders, and health care and social assistance (hospital orderlies and practical nurses), payroll tax revenues will be less than if the US still had 20 million workers and rising in well-paid manufacturing jobs instead of 11 million.

Regardless of Medicare’s financing, the death knell for the elderly was the legality of abortion. If the yet to be born are an insufferable burden, imagine the cost of the elderly. As far as the state is concerned, once you stop producing income and payroll tax revenues for the state, it is time for you to die. Washington would rather enact euthanasia than to pay back the $2+ trillion in the Social Security trust fund that Washington spent, leaving only non-marketable IOUs in the account.

Readers might think that Americans would never stand for death by injection for the elderly once the qualified age is reached. But why would they not? They have accepted millions of aborted babies, and Americans, including the elderly, have stood for Washington’s murder, maiming and displacement of millions of Muslim men, women, and children in 7 countries over the past 11 years and are yet to show any signs of remorse for their complicity in mass murder. Next month tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mitt Romney who believes Obama isn’t killing Muslims fast enough.

The new “Obamneycare” health legislation does have “death panels.” They are not called that, and they do not make formal decisions to terminate lives. But it comes to almost the same thing. Various panels, committees, or bureaucratic departments are empowered to make decisions about “effective care.” It has long been known that most health care costs are associated with the last year of life. Cost and age will be elements in determining standards of care. The greater the weight assigned to cost, the more care will be withheld. In effect, the “effective care” panel is a “death panel.”

Prior to the advent of the new “health care” system, Medicare and or hospitals are already shifting costs to Medicare patients. To avoid penalties and fraud allegations for “medically unnecessary hospitalizations,” rather than formally admit Medicare patients as inpatients, hospital administrators classify them as outpatients “under observation.”
According to a Brown University analysis of Medicare records in 2007, 2008, and 2009, the ratio of Medicare observation patients to those admitted as inpatients rose by 34 percent.

Being classified an outpatient under observation eliminates medicare coverages, especially for post-operative or post-accident rehabilitation care, leaving Medicare patients with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars (AARP Bulletin, October 2012).

Other costs are being shifted to doctors and to hospitals. Medicare pays fixed prices for each covered procedure or test, and these prices can be as low as half of the billed prices. During a period when costs incurred by providers of health care have been rising, Medicare has been cutting the amounts it pays providers.

As the payroll tax is commingled with general tax revenues, Social Security and Medicare payroll tax collections can be diverted to other purposes and, thus, are always subject to competing budgetary demands, such as the previous 11 years of gratuitous wars and the bailouts of “banks too big to fail,” or to deficit reduction demands as the government consistently overspends all revenue sources.

A national health service is the only way to control health costs and provide the population with health care coverage. A national health system takes the many levels of profits out of the system and also reams of compliance and liability costs. A national health system can coexist with a private system for those who can afford it or whose employers are sufficiently profitable to provide it.

As Jarad Diamond reveals in his book, , societies fail, if not because of their moral bankruptcy, then because their rulers are only capable of short-term thinking. The future is beyond their interest. The US offshored its economy, because it worked short-term for corporate executives (rewarded with multi-million dollar performance bonuses), Wall Street (rewarded with profits), shareholders (rewarded with capital gains), and politicians (rewarded with corporate and Wall Street campaign contributions).

Incompetent free market economists confused jobs offshoring with free trade. They said the country would and was benefiting by giving its manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs to China and India, that the US was ridding itself of “dirty fingernail jobs” and would soon be flush with highly paid high-tech jobs and highly paid financial service jobs.

None of these promises or predictions were true. Nowhere in the government’s jobs statistics are there any of these promised replacement jobs. The economists who provided cover for the destruction of the US economy were rewarded by the corporations with speaking fees, grants for their university departments, and newspaper columns paid for by corporate advertisers. Those few who told the truth were expelled from the corporate media that Bill and Hilary Clinton allowed to be monopolized (for campaign contributions, of course).

The future of old age security in the United States has been lost, because the job base has been given away to foreigners in order to maximize incomes in the short-run for the few decision-makers.

The misrepresentation of jobs offshoring as free trade has destroyed the prospects of cities, counties, and states along with those of unions and millions of Americans who once had a secure future. It has destroyed the prospects of class after class of university graduates burdened with student loans who expected to step into the jobs that have been offshored or filled by H-1B visa holders from abroad.

The American work force has been forsaken by the corporations and by Washington, and this means that Social Security and Medicare have also been forsaken.

As I predicted in the early years of this new century, “the United States will be a third world country in 20 years.” We might get there even sooner as Washington exhausts what little is left of American wealth in gratuitous wars in service to Israel and the US Military/Security Complex, in unaffordable military buildups in futile hopes of establishing hegemony over China and Russia, and in negative interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s effort to drive up the book value of debt instruments on the balance sheets of financial institutions.

In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelly forecast America’s future:

“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
On the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Writing in the October 15 online CounterPunch, John V. Walsh, relying on charts prepared by economics professor Mark J. Perry at the University of Michigan and blogger John Hunter, concludes that it is a myth that US manufacturing is in decline.

Walsh says that the loss of US manufacturing jobs is due to automation, not to offshoring. Think about this for a moment. Perry’s graph on which Walsh relies shows the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment to be a 21st century experience. However, automation has been around for a long time. The notion that its effect on employment only showed up recently needs an explanation that is not provided. The steep drop in US manufacturing employment that began in 2000 does correspond with the date at which jobs offshoring began to bite hard.

Why does automation not also affect Chinese manufacturing, especially as most of the Chinese manufacturing technology came from the US as US corporations offshored their production for the US market? If Chinese manufacturing is not up to date with automation, like the US is assumed to be, how do the Chinese, even with cheap labor, undersell US automated factories? How did Chinese manufacturing employment increase in a mere four years by an amount equal to the total manufacturing employment in the US?

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows only 11.2 million full time US manufacturing jobs in 2010. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 11.7 million US manufacturing jobs in 2011, down from 15.3 million in 2002.

In contrast, China, an industrial and manufacturing backwater for most of my life, had 112 million manufacturing jobs in 2006. In a mere four years (2002-2006), the increase in China’s manufacturing employment was as large as today’s total employment in US manufacturing. As long ago as 2006, China’s manufacturing employment was about 10 times the current US manufacturing employment. The Chinese population is about 4 times larger than the US population, but China’s manufacturing population is proportionately greater–10 times larger. Indeed, Chinese manufacturing employees almost equal the total number of employees in all occupations in the US (Manufacturing and Technology News, December 15, 2009).

Obviously, something is wrong with Walsh’s article or the graphs on which he relied.

America’s manufacturing prowess cannot be found in the statistical data. The US is primarily an exporter of Agricultural commodities. The US imports almost twice the amount of manufactured goods as it exports. Indeed, according to the US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the US http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1308.pdf US imports of manufactured goods are 5.5 times larger than US imports of crude oil and 4 times larger than all imports of mineral fuel. Yet, we hear about energy dependency, not manufacturing dependency.

As of 2010 the “superpower” US economy still had a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts and a small $6 billion surplus in scientific instruments, but that is about all.

In ADP equipment and office machinery, the US exported $22.2 billion in 2010 (latest information at time of writing), down from $44.6 billion in 2000. US imports in 2010 of ADP equipment and office machinery were $113.5 billion, or 5.1 times exports.

The US cannot even make its own clothes and shoes. In 2010 footwear imports are 28.7 times exports. Clothing imports are 24.6 times exports.

Electrical machinery exports were $77 billion; imports were $120 billion.

Exports of power generating machinery were $33 billion; imports were $42 billion.

Exports of television, VCRs were $21.5 billion; imports were $137 billion.

US exports of vehicles was $88 billion; imports were $179 billion.

US news reports of thousands upon thousands of discharged US workers never cite their replacement by automation. The news story is always that the plant is being closed and the jobs moved abroad. Any review of America’s former manufacturing centers verifies this. Boarded up plants and cities and towns in decline are the remains of America’s formerly world dominant manufacturing economy.

The loss of the US post-war trade surplus in manufacturing has left the US with a huge trade deficit. The charts on which Walsh relied left him unaware of the fact that China has a large trade surplus with the US, and the US has a large trade deficit not only with China but with the world.

The fact that the US has to import not only manufactured goods, but also high-technology products from China, an inconceivable outcome during the second half of the 20th century, is powerful testimony to the decline of the US as a manufacturing powerhouse.

It took some doing to obscure the facts and to present the US as a rival to China in manufacturing prowess. How did it happen?

The fault might lie in the way statistical information is collected and presented. Apple, for example, is a US corporation. It reports its worldwide earnings to the IRS. Its manufacturing is counted as US manufacturing as it is a US corporation. However, Apple doesn’t produce a single computer in the US. They are produced in China. The employment that Apple reports is in China. The Chinese are employed by an American company, but they are not Americans. The Chinese incomes that Apple provides do not support the American consumer market or provide the tax base for cities and states. The Chinese incomes do not provide ladders of upward mobility or careers for Americans.

The wages Apple pays are in China. The consumer incomes and GDP that it generates are in China. When Apple’s computers come back to America to be sold they come in as imports. But Apple’s manufacturing and employment are reported as the output and employment of an American company.

When statistics and the methods by which they are compiled were put into effect, countries did not offshore their production for their domestic markets. Foreign investments were made for selling abroad, not for selling in the home market. With the advent of offshoring, counting the employment and output of US firms that are producing abroad for their domestic market as an indication of the strength of US manufacturing is very misleading. Apple, for example, has done more to boost China’s GDP than to boost America’s GDP. This is true of every US corporation that offshores its production for US consumers.

In recent years the percentage of the work forces of large US corporations that is foreign sourced has risen rapidly. Some of the overseas hiring reflects traditional foreign investment in which a company builds abroad in order to sell abroad, but much of the hiring reflects offshored production for US markets.

The US has been able to survive the large trade deficits produced by jobs offshoring, because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. Being the world reserve currency, the US does not have to earn foreign currencies with exports in order to pay for its imports. However, as these trade deficits persist and the buildup of foreign holdings of dollar paper assets rises, there is a diminishing willingness of foreigners to trade real goods and services for financial assets denominated in a fiat currency whose value is diminishing with the ever-growing supply.

Thus, the basic notion of globalism–that a country’s corporations can produce goods and services in any country for home markets–is false.

Walsh is correct that China is not to blame for the decline in US manufacturing. Offshoring is to blame, and, thus, the blame lies with US corporations, policymakers, and the economists and financial media who shill for “globalism.” The decision was made to sacrifice the US economy to the short-term profits of the few. A country so poorly led can do nothing but decline.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Riots Over Rotten Apple Mania

You may know someone who is part of the rampage. It could be a neighbor or even a family member. Even in some circumstance, you yourself might be part of the wow rage. No, we are not talking about dunking for apples or eating from the forbidden fruit. This riot is all about living a virtual life in the ether zone of personal numbness, disguised in the appearance of being cool. Life without an iPhone to these cutting end “Efficiency Experts” is not worth living. This is the new economy and progress dictates that connecting to the world of texting is the most important function of daily existence.

So when the reports appeared that China Apple factory riot: Foxconn workers riot suspends work at facility, the main concern for Apple devotees is the risk of a delivery delay of their newest toy.

“The company that makes Apple’s iPhones suspended production at a factory in China on Monday after a brawl by as many as 2,000 employees at a dormitory injured 40 people.”

Little empathy for the hordes of workers laboring in confined opulence. The globalist model of manufacturing provides an advance version of “benign neglect” for all the willing slaves that assemble the latest in personal communication instruments.

Production resumes quickly and the threat of ‘Mass suicide’ protest at Apple manufacturer Foxconn factory, evaporates as the tech world avoids their latest threat to digital nirvana.

“Around 150 Chinese workers at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, threatened to commit suicide by leaping from their factory roof in protest at their working conditions.”

Apple fanatics are a breed to themselves. Cost of the products is insignificant, when viewed within the doctrinal scriptures of the computer cult that enables, Apple to become most profitable company ever.

“In CY12, we believe Apple is poised to generate the highest annual net income of any publicly traded company ever,” White wrote. “On average, we estimate Apple’s net income in CY12 will be over 6x higher than the three tech companies on an individual basis (when at a $500 billion market cap) or 1.9x the aggregate profit of these three companies combined. When including all five companies, we estimate Apple’s net income in CY12 will be 4x higher than the average.”

The obvious outlay savings of using overseas companies like Foxconn to frame the components and build the products is duplicated by most manufactures. So, the huge success that Apple enjoys rests not solely on squeezing out the greatest productivity at the lowest expenditure, but is realized by selling at the highest mark up to the widest rabid consumer market, possible.

In a fairytale economic analysis of business enterprise, one might conclude that the consumer reveres innovation and jazz more than competitive pricing and extensive open source applications. The facts, when viewed by a balanced and well-adjusted, technology user, concludes that Apple products are purchased more for style and craving than for utilitarian function and value. Furthermore, the Apple customer, emotionally invested in a brand as a badge of self-worth, cannot be denied.

The psychological desires of buying Apple devices has more to do with making a statement of technological superiority as a reflection of the purchaser’s transcendency from mere mortals. With a little effort, observing the crowds in an Apple store reveals the traits and behavior of a sect of society that incorporates a value system that is often at odds with the majority of the population.

 

Liberalism is a common mindset of Apple users. While this same bias exists with most left coast marketing programs of other tech companies, Apple is notable for their counterculture presentations. The irony of the , satirizes the totalitarian world view, while the 2012 Apple business prototype exemplifies the very essence of the surveillance society. Liberation of personal computing does not survive in a cloud.

The foreign workers at Foxconn and other offshore facilities seek employment, even at the lowest of scales. However, much of the technology used in the design and integration of the roving observation device surpasses the internal security monitoring at any Chinese factory.So many Americans are enticed into voluntarily surrendering their privacy rights for the fleeting pleasure of being connected to the smart phone high tech matrix. Next on the horizon is the Apple TV. Sadly, the capacities of the intrusive home monitoring system will be one more step to the suicidal society of servitude and misery.

The rotten apple that Steve Jobs left should not be assessed by technological standards of ease of use or options of applications. The legacy needs to be measured by furthering the desensitization of an escape into a false idealism. The only thing smart about an iPhone is when you remove the battery.

Technology can be useful and even safe to use when backdoors are purged from the operating system and embedded chips. Moreover, low-tech devices still offer a security that has long been eliminated from the current generation of all electronic gear. The anticipated result of the nanotech appliance age offers task recording and mapping of your every action. How does this enhance your quality of life?

The phrase, business is business, applies to the Apple franchise. People being what they are will be duped into buying expensive gimmicks as a substitute for interacting with flesh and blood individuals. Apple became a money machine by assimilating into the national security complex. As a company, Apple is very different corporation from the early purity of Steve Wozniak’s workbench.

People being consistent with their nature, will continue to flock to the Apple brand because of their own inadequacies. Texting or talking on a cell is not thinking. As long as consumers choose to pay for unlimited wireless plans, the country will continue to waste productive energy on trivia and irrelevancy. Get back to serious business and use communicative methods for productive ends. When you have a rotten apple in the barrel, the human interaction goes bad.

Licenses And Morals

A Nation In Decline…

Stories of citizens being assaulted by TSA (Transportation Security Administration) employees are common internet fare. There are numerous groping complaints, little old ladies are forced to remove their diapers and nubile young women are patted down and ogled by X-ray, knives are confiscated, liquids are poured out, shoes are removed, and time is wasted; all without noticeable results.  TSA guru, Janet Napolitano, supports the TSA in the same way police chiefs support errant policemen. When governments write the law they often consider themselves immune to it.  Policemen are seldom held accountable for their actions.  Agents of the government regularly pillage private property, harass citizens, and even commit murder, all without retribution.

During the 1940s, when I was in high school, the older brother of one of my friends had established a dental practice in a small Northern Illinois town.  My friend described his brother’s work as a “Racket” and said he was making piles of money.  At that time I had a mouth full of fillings skillfully inserted by a neighbor who was also a relative.   My parents paid for the work which though relatively cheap was expensive in the depression days of the 1930s.  There was, however, more kindness during this era and service providers felt an obligation to provide care to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

When the government gets involved in licensing members of any profession several things eventually result.  1) License restrictions limit supply and costs go up.  2) Participants collude, and 3) become arrogant and self serving.  4) They devise methods of extracting the maximum amount of money from the public.  5) Their egos grow; they take on god-like qualities and look with disdain on customers whose urgent need of their services supports the inflated cost.

Many Americans travel to Costa Rica where they are able to pay for transportation and stay at a four star hotel with the money they save having their dental work done there.  Occasionally an unlicensed dentist learns the mechanics of the trade and establishes a lucrative practice.  Read about one here. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2196959/Fake-dentist-performed-root-canals-dental-surgeries-hundreds-illegal-immigrants-home-office.html

American dentists are very expensive.

With a mouthful of bad teeth and an unwillingness to be overcharged my experience with dentists has been dismal.  Several dentists maintained that fillings were not reliable and refused to put fillings in my teeth.  Reluctantly I allowed three teeth to be capped.  Because I complained about the cost of each procedure and was dubious about what I was being told dentists did not enjoy my presence.  Finally, I was shuffled off to a dentist who liked to do fillings.  His personality was as dismal as mine but he was a good mechanic.  Belying what several other dentist had told me he filled my mouth with mercury fillings.

During my last visit for a six month cleaning, I turned down an X-ray.  Past X-rays had added to the cost and had not produced anything of value.  I considered his request that I sign a release paper a form of intimidation and refused to sign it.  Though I had been a patient for several years and had contributed several thousand dollars to his coffers he dismissed me for refusing to sign.   It is my money and that of other patients that support this dentist but it is government created exclusivity and collusion that sustain blunt arrogance.

Collusion allows dentists to ration their services by presenting a universal wall that closes out the uncooperative patient.  Being ushered into a dental chair, opening the mouth and having an assistant begin a set of prescribed procedures without discussion is oppressive and leaves the patient without input.   It discourages talk about fees and allows them to avoid competition.

Following the rude dismissal by the mercury filling expert, I visited another dentist who advertised for new patients.  I was put through the regular expensive set of procedures that go before the appearance of the Mighty One.   His dental assistant took X-rays, measured gum loss, and cleaned and inspected my teeth.  These preliminaries often cost $200 or more.  When all this was finished the dentist inspected my teeth giving his assistant coded remarks about each tooth.

I explained to him that I was almost 83 years old and that I had one tooth that needed to be removed and that I wanted to keep the remainder of my teeth in workable condition for as long as I could. Following a brief examination the dentist disappeared and his assistant arrived with a computer generated treatment sheet recommending several thousand dollars worth of dental work.  I was referred to a dental surgeon for the bad, loose, single rooted tooth which he claimed might break.  It was obvious he paid no attention to my brief request and when the assistant asked that I sign a form indicating receipt of his recommendations I refused.  With predictable arrogance he sent his assistant to tell me I was dismissed.  Rejected patients receive a formal letter confirming the rejection.

It is difficult to break through the wall that screens out competition and uncooperative patients because dentists collude and all present the same competitive barriers.

Cutting a man’s hair and filling a tooth both take technical skills and similar amounts of time; the barber gets $10 to $15 while the Dentist gets $200 or more; educational status, the artificial leverage of government licensing, and collusive practices work together to support high fees.

If you have never experienced the God-like demeanor that allows doctors and dentists to dismiss a patient with a formal letter as if partaking of their service is a privilege rather than a high priced sale, you have probably never confronted one of these demigods.  Rather than seeking to provide a needed service to society at an affordable price the touchy plutocrats seek to be treated with divine deference.

Young people who begin working at $10.00 an hour (common here in Florida) will work a week and a half (sixty hours) for what a dentist earns in an hour or less.  Many young people cannot afford dentists and live with poor dental hygiene   Senior citizens whose life span is almost complete can spend several thousand dollars on dental work that death renders useless.

Patients have a vested interest in having their teeth cleaned but despite the heavy padding it is a nuisance to dentists.  They maintain their upper 1% status by gluing on crowns and doing root canals. A root canal takes about an hour of the dentist’s time and costs between $600 and $1000 (Sometimes more!).  When a crown is added fixing a single tooth might cost $2000.  My experience seems to indicate that when a dentist see $10,000 work in a person’s mouth he will take a little guff and might even negotiate but when only cleaning is involved he is quick to dismiss.

Altruism has been wrung out of medical and dental care.  The Hippocratic Oath may still be administered in some form but in practice it is as dead as Christianity in the church.   Today medical and dental professions are businesses conducted by individuals who have fulfilled educational requirements in order to harvest a bumper financial crop.  Ministering to patients is a means of making money and if there is no money to be made or if the patient cannot pay, the relationship is quickly severed.  For the patient who fails to pay, the credit rating is ruined and harassing bill collectors are marshaled.

Dentists and doctors have succumbed to the advancing brutality that has infected our culture.  It began with the Revolutionary War, advanced during the Civil War; was inflicted on the indigenous Indians, on the civilian population of the Philippines, on the Germans in WWII, on the Vietnamese, it is now ravishing the Arabs in the Middle East and is pervasive in our culture.

Brutality has driven out mercy and justice and fertilized the lawless avarice of pagan Capitalism.  John Adam said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Injustice is rampant and mercy is scarce.  Our people are religious but immoral.  As a nation we have forsaken God’s Law and opted to live under a human standard of justice.

Morality is impossible without law and justice is impossible without God’s Law. Sinful men and women cannot write just law. Those that claim to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through the redemptive work of His Son, The Christ, have drifted so far away from their God that His Laws are repugnant.  Even some who should know better delight in the heresy of Dispensationalism  denying the efficacy of God’s Law favoring law devised by the evil minds o of men.  Death by stoning sounds like cruel and unusual punishment because death by losing the lower half of a human body to an explosive device is hidden and never pictured in our deluded minds.

We live in a sanitized society; hiding grotesque brutality so we can considering ourselves civilized.  Aborted babies are seldom seen.  Pictures of the slaughter of their tiny bodies are unpopular and in some cases banned.  War is advertised as altruistic and soldiers are urged to sign up and see the world.  The returning caskets and the maimed participants are not public fare.  An aberrant press and media fail to mention that for every soldier killed nine civilians die.  The pillage and wreckage of Iraq is kept from the public.  In spite of the brief publicity around Abu Grave torture continues as a weapon.

We have lost our fear of God.  When there is no fear of God there is no active religion.    If stoning did nothing else, it might renew our fear of God

In his lengthy indictment of the Jews Martin Luther wrote, “For every country, if it is to endure, must have these two things: power and law. The country— must have a lord, a head, a ruler. But it must also have a law by which the ruler is guided— For wherever sheer power prevails without the law— there is no government, but tyranny.” (Excerpted)

God admonishes us in Proverbs, “My son, keep my words, and treasure my commandments within you.   Keep my commandments and live, and my teaching as the apple of your eye.  Bind them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart.”  Chapter 7; 1-3

As our government continues to impose tyrannical laws and procedures on the United States, patriots and Christians approach the coming election with the usual chronic insanity, repeatedly seeking the culprit as the remedy.  Though many of our older citizens have lived through many of these same charades they still participate with vigor. The human mind is easily distorted and often incapable of reaching sound conclusions.  Elections are rife with empty promises and mendacious accusations. Popularity is manufactured by the press and voting is often controlled by the counter rather than the voter.  When the wicked process is over the winner may initiate some minor social changes but the planned shrinkage of American wealth and power continues as it has now for several decades.

It is tragic that good men sell their souls in order to become marionettes on the stage of government. Ron Paul maintained his stance for many years and seemed to be mostly above the evil pragmatism. Nevertheless, he was summarily shoved aside and though he may have siphoned a few votes from the Mormon King he accomplished very little.  Powerful forces mute the policies that might remedy our downfall and the soulless empty suits we have elected value their jobs more than their character.

The transformation of our doctors and dentists from responsible contributors to the well being of our society to avaricious wealthy craftsmen is a small matter compared to the complete downfall of civilization.  It is, however, a symptom and without confrontation it continues its downward spin along with that of the nation.

Indian Christian intellectual Vishal Mangalwadi has used the clear vision of a Godly man in a newly published book entitled “The Book That Made Your World”.  He speaks to Americans in general and Christians in particular about the overweening influence of the Christian Bible on our culture.  In the Forward he writes, “It was above all, a civilization in which truth was understood to be real, where the collective pursuit of virtue shaped behavior, and the redemptive work of God in the person of Jesus Christ provided a radical and historically verifiable transforming response to the abyss of human selfishness, corruption , and sin.”  Pg.17

Unfortunately, he writes in the past tense.

Parking Offshore Profits Hurt The Domestic Economy

Conducting commerce internationally is not a crime. However, the lack of reinvesting domestically provides an inevitable drag on a viable internal economy. Publically traded companies operate under a set of rules that confuse the average investor. Most privately owned businesses are well aware that paying taxes on profits is the price paid to transact trade. Transnational corporations park extraordinary sums of money offshore to avoid a tax rate that most ordinary businesses pay routinely. Such discrepancies act as negative incentives that plague a feeble employment record.

Bloomberg makes the following points in the article, Repatriation Bill to Tax Overseas Profit at 8.75 Percent.

“Corporate repatriation legislation proposed by Senators Kay Hagan and John McCain would let U.S. businesses bring home offshore profits at an 8.75 percent tax rate.

The rate on repatriated profits would drop to 5.25 percent if a company’s payroll expanded during 2012, according to a summary of the bill released by Hagan’s office. The current top corporate rate is 35 percent.

Independent studies showed that when a tax holiday was last offered, in 2004, the lower tax rate for returning profits spurred little hiring or domestic investment. Most of the money was used to buy back stock. Democrats have said they are concerned that could happen again with a tax holiday.

Under the Hagan-McCain proposal, if a company repatriates profits and then reduces its staff, it would be required to add $75,000 to its gross income for every position eliminated.”

The apparent question is why these domestically chartered companies are not paying a uniformed tax. The U.S. has long taxed the individual on worldwide income. Why enable foreign branches avoidance loopholes to keep huge caches of liquidity overseas? Forbes provides this analysis in, Bringing Overseas Corporate Profits Back To US Not Necessarily A Job Booster.

“All of Western Europe allows for its multinationals to repatriate billions of dollars back home without paying the statutory corporate income tax rate. They enjoy a much lower rate, in the single digits in countries like Japan and UK, where corporate tax rates are similar to that in the U.S., with American companies falling in the middle of the two. In theory, the tax break avoids double taxation on corporate profits filed in other countries, but the trouble with that is that a portion of those profits are being booked in tax havens that have no income tax.

In many cases, these corporations have already accrued profits tax-free using techniques that shift reported income to tax havens anyway, like Google, to avoid an enormous amount of tax.”

Both of the Bloomberg and Forbes accounts see little expansion in domestic jobs just because a conglomerate might get a tax break to bring the money home. While all taxation is punitive and a caustic burden on commerce, the sophisticated tax dodging available to accounting departments of mega-corporations offer some strange strategies.

America is GE’s tax haven author David Cay Johnston provides an example of a different experience.

“GE’s disclosures show that over the last decade it paid much lower tax rates in America than offshore, just the opposite of the Washington political mantra. Even more puzzling, the U.S. corporate giant chooses to take more of its profits in other lands despite the higher tax rates there.

Given that GE has a roughly 1,000-person tax department dedicated to paying as little as possible in taxes, what the disclosures show is that something other than tax policy is driving GE’s business decisions.

The law gives companies a great deal of latitude in deciding how to arrange where they report profits from multinational transactions. GE won’t elaborate on why it takes so much of its profit in higher tax jurisdictions offshore.”

Even the fable king of the corporate cult plays tax games. How Apple’s Phantom Taxes Hide Billions in Profit illustrates stashing money offshore is a trend here to stay.

“On Tuesday, Apple is set to report financial results for the second quarter. Analysts are expecting net income of $9.8 billion. But whatever figure Apple reports won’t reflect its true profit, because the company hides some of it with an unusual tax maneuver.

And just like other corporations, Apple leaves cash overseas. If it brought it home to the U.S., it would have to pay federal income taxes on the money (though it would get a credit for foreign taxes already paid). In Apple’s case, those overseas accounts have grown to a staggering $74 billion – equal to the market value of Citigroup Inc.”

Off-shoring business activity, a cannon of operation for the internationalist multinational, is deleterious to the domestic economy. Keeping after tax profits in foreign banks virtually guarantees that future expansion or acquisitions will be seeded in overseas jurisdictions.

Now many proponents of globalism will defend this practice. However, the harsh reality is that the American market is systematically being dismantled. The motivation behind stripping away an independent industrial based economy is to make domestic consumption reliant upon foreign supplies. This fact is indisputable and, arguably sinister.

Rational protective tariffs are demonized as anti free trade. Yet all that the destructive free trade scheme has produced is widespread poverty within our own borders. Creating the incentive to abandon the domestic manufacturing domicile is tragic. The importing of products or services priced to reflect slave labor costs or deferred before tax capital, is suicidal.

Accumulating huge profits offshore on sales within foreign lands may be more palatable. But allowing domestically incorporated companies to conduct trade under the auspices of U.S. law should demand a legitimate price to be paid for that protection. The trade game, as it currently plays out, is a license to steal from the domestic consumer, while the corporate lobbyist bribe officials and game the system for favorable tax considerations.

Repatriation of profits stored in offshore banks is secondary to re-establishing domestic employment. The link between selling the products and services within a market where they are made, requires a balance and synergism that does not currently exist. This standard certainly applies to the rebuilding of American industry. The tax and duty laws need to correct the methodical destruction of the domestic economy.

Licensing regulations tied to employment requirements are a positive technique to compel transnational companies to fulfill their civic responsibility for the opportunity to operate in the United States. International trade can be beneficial, but a sound domestic economy secures survivability.

Advantages of Chinese Trade Policy

“The Chinese may take risks far more than average Americans do, thanks to advice from traditional proverbs.”

The saying “At a good bargain, think twice” is pretty risk-averse. On the other hand, a typical Chinese proverb such as “Seize an opportunity and make good use of it” shows how risk-taking is ingrained in Chinese culture.

Much of the coverage on the imbalance in global trade focuses on Chinese imports into the U.S. In order to understand these disparities, a short review of the International Viewpoint list is helpful, from an Asian perspective, why China is the world trade leader.

There are seven great advantages of China.

First, she has a more developed and balanced industry than many developing countries.

Second, China’s very strong and effective state machinery has been an effective tool for mobilizing resources for modernization.

Third, the sheer size of China – a huge country with a population of 1.3 billion – greatly magnifies the advantages of effective state-led growth and sophisticated manufacturing.

China’s fourth great advantage is the legacy of land reform.

The fifth element of China advantage is deep-rooted nationalism.

The sixth advantage of capitalist China is her absolutely atomized labor in face of an absolute state.

Last but not the least, China has a unique advantage in the big leap forward to embrace global capitalism, namely the unique factor of having Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan as her door to the world.

This point of view may explain Chinese Proverbs on business, but absent in the equation is an admission that the world trade system is slanted in favor of the Globalist model, at the expense of domestic commerce.

Even the predisposed transnational New York Times in a report, China Uses Rules on Global Trade to Its Advantage, admits that the playing field is not level.

“China is engaged in a two-pronged effort: fighting protectionism among its trade partners and holding down the value of its currency.

To maximize its advantage, Beijing is exploiting a fundamental difference between two major international bodies: the World Trade Organization, which wields strict, enforceable penalties for countries that impede trade, and the International Monetary Fund, which acts as a kind of watchdog for global economic policy but has no power over countries like China that do not borrow money from it.”

Ostensibly, this NYT conclusion is the mainstream assessment. However, a comprehensive analysis needs to take into account the complicity of design used by the Globalists to transform international trade into a non-competitive vehicle for the establishment of a controlled New World Order.

A hint on the nature of the problem is cited in an Op-Ed published in the LA Times,

This ominous forecast is partially correct, but needs to include an entire additional level in order to understand that the trading system is not solely a conflict between risk taking Chinese “seizing an opportunity”, and timid American corporatists abandoning domestic prosperity.

“The most potent of China’s “weapons of job destruction” are an elaborate web of export subsidies; the blatant piracy of America’s technologies and trade secrets; the counterfeiting of valuable brand names like Nike and Chevy; a cleverly manipulated and grossly undervalued currency; and the forced transfer of the technology of any American company wishing to operate on Chinese soil or sell into the Chinese market.

The second myth we must expose if we are to ever reverse the job-killing trade deficits we now run with China is the idea that free trade always benefits both countries. That doesn’t hold true if one country cheats on the other. Instead, when a mercantilist China uses unfair trade practices to wage war on our manufacturing base, the American economy is the big loser.”

The abandonment of a “deep-rooted nationalism” by most American public companies causes a sellout culture that even Apple cannot gloss over.

Producing their overpriced devices using slave labor, may be dandy for profits, but lacks the foresight to continue a vibrant national economy. Illustrating similar examples over the decades, that the perverted Free Trade fraud has been in place, only proves that the loss of an independent manufacturing base is no coincidence.

The Globalists are in partnership with China. The Chinese system of serfs produce an “atomized labor force” is the framework for the NWO economy.

The technological innovations and intellectual ingenuity, long the hallmark of the American genius, is now routinely transferred into Chinese custody, as the price of doing business with the Communist regime.

This madness goes on continuously with only a whimper of concern, from the multinational executives that export our economic independence for a fake independency.

Chinese advantages in trade policy are mostly tactics and methods of extortion, under the guiding hand of a cabal of international debt created capital. The invisible hand of Adam Smith is replaced with complot Maoism in place of a free market. The Proletarian Cultural Revolution has yielded into the central bankers’ paradise of indentured servitude. The primary product from the “so called”, – effective state-led growth – is centralized control. The financial reserves of the Globalists and their Chinese cousins accumulate consistently under the protection of their unfair trade policies.

Under Free Trade schemes, America looses on all levels. These pecuniary policies designed to replace the entrepreneurial alternative; with corporatist distribution, has the goal of eliminating competition.

The sentiment of the master monopolist David Rockefeller is revealing, “Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

The biggest advantage the Chinese Marxists have is that their Western plutocrat admirers are joined at the hip and plot world hegemony through a financial and economic conjugation. While trade is important for commerce to spread, it must be fair and balanced. China fails this test.

Crash Alert

As you might have noticed, the stock market is falling like a stone. As of 9 AM PST, the Dow Jones has dropped 172 points while all the other indices are down sharply. German 2-year debt (bund) has dipped below 0% this morning at auction, signalling an acceleration in the bank run taking place in southern Europe. Depositors in Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, etc would rather take a loss on their investment, then risk not their money back at all. The European Central Bank (ECB) does not guarantee deposits, so people are withdrawing their money en masse and getting out of Dodge pronto. What we’re seeing is a real-time panic.

The ostensible trigger for the panic is known, but you won’t read about it in the financial media where the news is dumbed down to the point of incoherence. What’s really going on is that the German central bank (The Bundesbank) has indicated that it’s ready to pull the plug on Greece which means that future bailouts will probably not be forthcoming. That’s bad. It means that Greece will run out of money some time in June; their banking system will implode, and the “birthplace of democracy” will be reduced to 3rd world status overnight. Here’s a blurb from the Bundesbank’s communique:

“Current developments in Greece are extremely worrying. Greece is threatening not to implement the reform and consolidation measures that were agreed in return for the large-scale aid programmes.

This jeopardises the continued provision of assistance. Greece would have to bear the consequences of such a scenario. The challenges this would create for the euro area and Germany would be considerable, but manageable given prudent crisis management. By contrast, a significant dilution of existing agreements would damage confidence in all euro-area agreements and treaties and strongly weaken incentives for national reform and consolidation measures. In such circumstances the institutional status quo comprising liability, control and individual responsibility of member states would be fundamentally called into question.

When the Eurosystem provided Greece with large amounts of liquidity, it trusted that the programs would be implemented and thereby ultimately assumed considerable risks. In the light of the current situation, it should not significantly increase these risks. Instead, the parliaments and governments of the member states should decide on the manner in which any further financial assistance is provided and therefore whether the associated risks should be assumed.”

Okay. So German central bankers don’t want to wait until the June elections in Greece to decide whether to provide more money or not. They’re throwing in the towel now. No more money. No more bailouts. No more Mr. Niceguy. End of story. But what does that mean? Does it mean that the whole global financial system is headed back into the shitter again like after Lehman Brothers?

No one knows for sure, but there’s bound to be a few bumps in the road, don’t you think? Take a look at this from Bloomberg today (Wed):

“Europe’s banks, are sitting on $1.19 trillion of debt to Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, are facing a wave of losses if Greece abandons the euro. While lenders have increased capital buffers, written down Greek bonds and used central-bank loans to help refinance units in southern Europe, they remain vulnerable to the contagion that might follow a withdrawal, investors say. Even with more than two years of preparation, banks still are at risk of deposit flight and rising defaults in other indebted euro nations.” (Bloomberg)

Can you really slash a trillion bucks out of the rotting corpse of the EU banking system and still keep things running smoothly?

Don’t bet on it. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

“The ECB’s unprecedented provision of 1.02 trillion euros in three-year cash in December and February helped calm financial markets in the first quarter by removing concern that banks unwilling to lend to one another would run out of cash. Lenders in Spain and Italy also used the funds to buy sovereign debt, reducing government borrowing costs….

Lenders probably would need another 800 billion-euro liquidity lifeline from the ECB to help stem contagion from a Greek exit, Citigroup analysts estimated in a May 17 note….” (Bloomberg)

That’s right, the EU banks were gifted over 1 trillion euros 3 months ago, and they’re still too undercapitalized to weather the storm of a Greek default. Nice, eh? So, the whole system is just an empty gourd, right? They’re broke, so the ECB will have to print up another 800 bil just to keep the house of cards from collapsing in a heap.

Getting worried yet?

US Treasuries are also rallying big today. In fact, the yield on the 10-year –which hit a record low last week–is on its way back down indicating that investors are freaking scared-out-of-their-minds. In real terms, investors are now socking money into 10-year Treasuries knowing that (inflation adjusted) they’ll get LESS money back then they put in.

How do you like them apples? That’s what I call a full-blown panic! And yet, you ain’t hearing a blasted thing about it on the news, right? Why would that be?

Here’s a little icing on the cake from Bloomberg:

“Greece may have only a 46-hour window of opportunity should it need to plot a route out of the euro.

That’s how much time the country’s leaders would probably have to enact any departure from the single currency while global markets are largely closed, from the end of trading in New York on a Friday to Monday’s market opening ….

“I am completely convinced they could not orchestrate an orderly exit,” said Erik Nielsen, chief economist at UniCredit SpA in London. “This is a country that can’t implement laws, so how in the world are they going to secretly agree to print money, control the banks, control capital flows and think this is going to be orderly? It’s completely impossible.” …

“There is no reason to think there won’t be riots and violence,” said Lefteris Farmakis, a strategist at Nomura International Plc in London. “It would be a pretty disastrous situation. People have no understanding of the consequences of a euro exit.” (“War-Gaming Greek Euro Exit Shows Hazards in 46-Hour Weekend”, Bloomberg)

Riots, street violence, skyrocketing unemployment, grinding poverty…the whole schmeer. And what’s the most likely scenario for Greece after all that?

Well, probably another military coup backed by President Hopium and his band of CIA merry pranksters, right?

Okay, my bad. I don’t want to polarize all the Obama fans, but, Geez Louise, things are looking mighty grim for the poor Greeks, don’t you think?

Of course, it all could go smoothly “without a hitch”; no credit crunch, no bank runs, no flight to safety, no crashing stock markets, no decades of struggle and social unrest, no splitting up of the eurozone, no ethnic animosities, no uber-nationalism, no right wing fanaticism, no border skirmishes or armed hostilities, no revolutions, no depression, no rise of fascism…just a smooth transition to a new, slimmed-down version of the EZ. After all, that’s what Germany is expecting. And they could be right.

But, probably not.

The Facebook IPO: The Last Great Wall Street Party

The Facebook IPO is kind of like a graduation party – everybody comes together for one huge blowout to celebrate the end of an era before going their separate ways.  Unfortunately, most people on Wall Street do not understand how bittersweet this moment really is.  A tremendous amount of pain is ahead for Wall Street in the next few years, and we will probably never see anything like the Facebook IPO ever again. But the Facebook IPO sure has been fun to watch.  Facebook is one of the largest companies to ever go public in the United States.  According to CNN, 247 million shares of Facebook exchanged hands in the first 45 minutes of trading.  The Facebook IPO was nearly ten times larger than any other Internet IPO in history, and the amount of money being made by some people on this deal is absolutely amazing.  For example, it is being reported that Bono will make more money on the Facebook IPO than he has from being part of the band U2 for the past 30 years.  Sadly, this euphoria is not going to last for long.  The next wave of the global financial collapse is rapidly approaching, and once it strikes there will not be much for anyone on Wall Street to be smiling about at all.

During the IPO process, Facebook sold more than 420 million shares and raised about 16 billion dollars.

Those are incredible numbers.

At 38 dollars per share, Facebook would have a market cap of about 81 billion dollars.

So is Facebook worth 81 billion dollars?

Of course not.

But most stocks are tremendously overvalued at this point.

Yes, Facebook has 900 million users and it made about a profit of about a billion dollars last year.

But that does not add up to an 81 billion dollar company.

Not even close.

A recent article by Jay Yarow explained this in more detail….

As good a business as that is, it’s not Google good. It’s not Apple good. And at the current IPO pricing, Facebook has to be a much better business in the near future.

In fact, Yarow says that Facebook is going to have to dramatically improve in order to justify the current valuation….

So, what’s the bull’s case for Facebook? Unfortunately, it comes down to faith. You have to have faith that Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the rest of the executives at Facebook will discover a magical money making product that will justify its valuation.

Unfortunately, there are already signs that the growth of Facebook is slowing down.

Advertising revenue during the first quarter of 2012 was only $872 million.  That was a decline of 7.5 percent from the previous quarter.

And eventually someone will come along and topple Facebook just like Facebook toppled MySpace.

Remember MySpace?

Facebook did not even exist a decade ago.  Right now there are young kids tinkering around in their college dorm rooms trying to figure out how to create something that will be even better than Facebook.

The truth is that Facebook is operating on borrowed time.  It is not going to remain “hot” and “trendy” forever.

But for the moment, there are a whole lot of people out there that want a piece of Facebook.

Hey, I am not in the stock market at all, but even I am half-tempted to buy a few shares so that I can introduce myself as a “part-owner of Facebook”.

After all, who doesn’t like Facebook?

Yes, government agencies and big corporations use Facebook to spy on all of us.  If you don’t believe this, just check out this article, this article and this article.

But there is an incredible upside to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter as well.

They have given average people the ability to communicate directly with each other on a massive scale.

In the past, the big corporations pretty much had a monopoly on mass communication.

If you wanted to get your message out independently of the big corporations, you could hand out fliers, you could send out mass mailings (very expensive) or you could try to get a book printed.

But today something that you post on Facebook or Twitter could be seen by thousands (or even millions) of people within a few days.

The Internet is filled with a whole lot of garbage, but it can also be used as an incredible tool for good.

Sitting at home behind your desk, you have the potential to touch the lives of people on the other side of the globe through the Internet that you would probably never have a chance of influencing any other way.

So I am very thankful for Facebook.

We should use tools like Facebook to wake people up while there is still time.  Our world is becoming increasingly unstable and we might not always have the opportunity to freely share our thoughts with the entire globe like this.

Just try to imagine a world without Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Internet forums.

All of those things have only existed for a relatively short period of time, and there is no guarantee that we will always have them.

Instead of wasting our lives away in front of our televisions, we should be taking advantage of these tools to help change the world.

Every single day, hundreds of people are directed to my website from Facebook.  I am hoping to eventually increase that to thousands of people per day.

A great economic collapse is coming to this world.  People need to keep their eyes on the financial crisis in Europe and on the derivatives market.  The coming financial tsunami will likely be even worse than the crash of 2008.

People are going to be looking for answers.

Now is the time to be a light shining in the darkness.

Not everyone has the time or the knowledge to be able to set up a website or make YouTube videos, but nearly everyone is capable of setting up a Facebook account or a Twitter account.

If you make even a small effort, you could end up touching the lives of thousands upon thousands of people.

Yes, there are a lot of negative things that can be said about Facebook, but at least for today let us celebrate it for what it has given us.

It has given us the opportunity to make a difference on a massive scale, and that is a wonderful thing.

Source: The Economic Collapse

Report From The Front Lines In Riverside, California

Today in Riverside Superior Court, Department 8, I attempted to execute a citizen’s arrest of an attorney.  Toni Eggebraaten, the attorney for the Family Trust for which I am a beneficiary, filed an accounting in which she attempted to obscure her embezzling thirty thousand dollars. Alarmed at the accounting, I had contacted a lawyer who surveyed  the accountings and confirmed for me that she had, indeed,  embezzled thirty grand and had attempted to hide her crime.

The court opened for business at 8: 30 this morning. Probate Judge Thomas Cahraman announced he was going to shuffle the order of the docket and call the Phelan case first. He began by complimenting me on my writing ability, saying, “You must have some education.”  He began to wax on about the cadence and lift to my writing style. He then noted that I had filed no objections to the petition by Eggebraaten.

Correction, I said. I wrote in my pleading that she embezzled thirty thousand dollars and that there is absolutely no point to my filing objections.  I wrote that you always find against me, no matter what I present to the court.

That’s not true,  protested the judge.  “I have made many decisions in your favor.”

Not a single one, I replied truthfully. And then I switched into high gear. “Toni Eggebraaten has embezzled thirty thousand dollars and I am therefore executing a citizen’s arrest. Bailiff, take Ms. Eggebraaten into custody.”

The judge began to rattle on, ignoring what I had just said. “Excuse me”, I said, “I am executing a citizen’s arrest.  I am exercising my legal right to do so. Bailiff, please take Ms. Eggebraaten into custody.”

“If you keep on this way I will revoke your right to appear by court call”, said the judge.

I repeated that I was executing a citizen’s arrest.

“Nothing you file ever has legal merit,” cried the judge.

“Really?” I said.” Look at my current  filing. I have attached as an exhibit proof that the Trustee is attempting, through her accountant, to affix liability onto me for the taxes on the income to the Trust. This is a violation of Title 26 Section 641 of the US Code. Is that also lacking legal merit?”

“I am terminating this hearing,” said Cahraman and hung up on me.

The pleadings in front of the judge delineated a number of laws violated in this case, including embezzlement, deprivation of rights under color of law and violations of the IRS code. By so obstructing my efforts to execute a citizen’s arrest on Toni Eggebraaten, the judge committed misprison of felony and obstruction of justice. He could also be considered an accessory after the fact to the thirty thousand she illegally pocketed.

The citizen’s arrest of Toni Eggebraaten will be taking place at a later date. There will also be an attempt to execute a citizen’s arrest of Judge Thomas Cahraman for his part in this pretense of justice.

One can play nice only so long. Like so many who are attempting to exact justice out of a turnip court, I have gone to court over and over only to be deprived of my rights to due process  and of my rightful inheritance. The fact that at the core of this case lies a murder, the murder of my mother, Dr. Amalie Phelan, who was under a conservatorship overseen by this court, takes the issue to another level.

Title 18 Section 242 of the US code, Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law, may mandate the death penalty for a judge who so violates an individual’s rights. The deprivation of rights by a Riverside Superior Court judge resulted in my mother’s death. Also potentially invoking the death penalty is a murder committed in the course of another crime, such as theft.  The continuing efforts by the court to cover up  this murder and also to whitewash  the   theft of funds, which have gone to pay off Judith Phelan for her part in the murder of her mother, escalate this case into a death penalty matter—for the involved judges and the lawyers who are stealing to pay off matricide. Judith, by the way, has changed her name to Anna Bloom in order to mitigate  unwanted attention since she made off like a bandit. Judith/Anna  is now  residing in the San Francisco Bay area.  http://elder-abuse-cyberray.blogspot.mx/2011/04/judy-phelan-makes-deal-with-devil.html

Her are the closing remarks in the pleadings that were in front of the judge today:

“At some future date, historians will look back on this period in the United States as the equivalent of a Dark Ages in terms of political oppression, evidenced in part by  corruption of the legal system. Indeed, some authors, such as Morris Berman and Chris Hedges, are already so declaring this. The actions by this particular court in this specific case aptly demonstrate the genteel brutality of a Pretender Court, a court  which is operating in violation of the Constitution of the United States of America. It is a court of privilege and abuse, of murder and theft, not a court of law. 

I declare under penalty of perjury that this court is rogue and is not operating as a lawful, unbiased and honorable court of law. Its decisions and actions do not reflect the law of the United States of America or the State of California.  The proceedings are sham proceedings. The theft and abuse, however, are quite real.”

The time has come for the citizens of the United States to rise up against judicial oppression.  I strongly suggest that community groups come together and start executing citizens’ arrests of judges, magistrates and commissioners who violate the Constitution. The time  is long past for pleadings and prayers to courts which are hell- bent on murder and theft.

Class Warfare Is Being Used To Divide America

At a time when America desperately needs to come together, we are becoming more divided than ever.  The mainstream media and most of our politicians love to pit us against one another in dozens of different ways, and right now class warfare has become one of their favorite tools for getting us to hate one another.  If you are struggling in this economy, you are being told that “the wealthy” are the cause of your problems.  If you have money, you are being told that the poor hate you and want to tax you into oblivion.  Class warfare has already become a dominant theme in the 2012 race for the White House, and there will certainly be endless speeches given along these lines by politicians from both major political parties all the way up to election day.  Class warfare will be used by both sides as a way to divide America and get votes.  And the frightening thing is that it is clearly working.  There is more hatred between the poor and the wealthy in America today than at any other time that I can remember.  But hating people because of how much money they have or don’t have is not going to solve anything.  Instead, it is just going to cause more problems.

The other day, Yale economics professor Robert Shiller told CNBC that the globe is already in a state of “late Great Depression“.  The United States is heading into unprecedented economic and financial problems and we desperately need to pull together as a country and solve these problems.

But instead, our leaders are tapping into the politics of division in a desperate attempt to get elected in the fall.

Rather than focus on real issues and real solutions, our politicians attempt to make “the wealthy” or “welfare recipients” the focus of our debates.

Well, you know what?

Most people that are rich and most people that are poor are not purposely trying to abuse the system.  Most of them are hard working people that are trying to do the best that they can in a world that is increasingly going crazy.

These days, the Occupy Wall Street crowd loves to talk about how evil the “1 percent” is.  But most of the “1 percent” are people that have worked really hard and that have been fortunate enough to get some really good breaks in life.

Yes, there are some among the “1 percent” that do some really bad things.  The too big to fail banks and the big money managers on Wall Street should be held accountable for the crimes that they have committed.

But most wealthy Americans are not trying to oppress the poor.  Most of them are just trying to do the best that they can for themselves and their families.

Neither are most poor people trying to abuse the system either.

Yes, without a doubt there are some that do not want to work and that want to live on government benefits indefinitely.

But that is a minority.

Most Americans that are receiving government benefits today would rather be working good jobs that would enable them to provide for their families.

Most Americans understand that government handouts can never provide dignity and hope for a better future.

But if you don’t demonize the poor and you point out the decline of the middle class, many Republicans will call you a “liberal” or a “socialist”.

And if you don’t demonize the rich and you don’t blame them for all of our economic problems, many Democrats will call you a “pig” or a “fascist”.

Unfortunately, playing the blame game is not going to get us anywhere.

The number of Americans living in poverty increased dramatically under George W. Bush and it also increased dramatically under Barack Obama.

Our country is drowning in debt, millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas, the middle class is shrinking at an astounding pace, and the Federal Reserve continues to destroy our financial system.

Getting angry at the wealthy or the poor is not going to fix those problems.

But it will distract us from the reality that both major political parties have been doing a horrible job.

Sadly, Americans seem to really enjoy blaming one another these days.  Just check out some of the slogans that have been seen on various signs at Occupy Wall Street protests….

“They Only Call It Class Warfare When We Fight Back”

“Eat The Rich – Feed The Poor”

“The Rich Are Wrecking The Planet”

So will destroying the lives of the rich solve our problems?

Of course not.

The truth is that we should want millions more Americans to be prosperous.  We should be cheering for one another instead of tearing one another down.

But that is heresy to many on the left.

On the right, it is heresy even to mention that our tax system is fundamentally flawed and that it has thousands of loopholes that are being abused by the very wealthy.

In a previous article, I detailed how many of the largest and most profitable corporations in America get away with paying absolutely nothing in taxes.

There is something very wrong with that.

Our income tax system should be abolished altogether, but if we do have to pay income taxes, then it is fundamentally unfair for some people and businesses to be able to pay little or nothing while the rest of us get absolutely obliterated by taxes.

But if you try to say that to many on the right, they will look at you in horror.

The other day, there was a New York Times article that detailed the extreme measures that Apple takes to avoid paying taxes.  It turns out that Apple sets up shell offices all over the globe in order to evade taxation….

As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

That same article talked about how Apple has become a model which hundreds of other companies have followed.  To giant corporations such as Apple, tax evasion has become an art form….

Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.

So what is the solution to all of this?

Raising income taxes won’t work too well because the tax lawyers are always several steps ahead of our politicians.

The truth is that when taxes get raised it is always the middle class that gets absolutely clobbered and the wealthy always find more ways to reduce their exposure.

Just take a look at Mitt Romney.  He made more than 42 million dollars in 2010 and yet Romney had an effective tax rate of only 14 percent.

If I could find a way to have an effective tax rate of only 14 percent I would be jumping up and down for joy, and so would millions of other Americans.

Our tax system is deeply, deeply broken and needs to be thrown into the trash can.

Abandoning the current tax system would not solve all of our problems, but it would be a start.

Unfortunately, neither political party is willing to even consider this.

Instead, the Democrats want to raise taxes a little bit and the Republicans want to lower taxes a little bit.

But neither alternative will do much of anything to solve any of the real problems we are facing.

Our economy is dying and it is not producing nearly enough jobs for all of us.  When Barack Obama took office, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in America was 2.6 million.  Today, it is 5.3 million.

At this point, an astounding 53 percent of all college graduates under the age of 25 are either unemployed or underemployed.

So where is all of the “change” that Obama promised?

Things just keep getting worse.

Since Obama has been in the White House, 14 million more Americans have gone on food stamps, and more than 25 percent of all American children are enrolled in the program today.

How will class warfare help those people?

Will blaming the wealthy make things better for them?

They are already receiving government handouts.

Will increasing those handouts a little bit more fundamentally change their lives for the better?

Of course not.

What those people need are good jobs.

But instead, both the Democrats and the Republicans continue to pursue the same job killing policies that have been destroying American jobs for decades.

Without good jobs, the number of Americans dependent on the government is going to continue to grow.

In a previous article, I detailed the explosive growth of social welfare benefits that we have seen under both Republicans and Democrats….

Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages.  In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages.  Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.

The goal should not be to rape the rich and give out even more social welfare benefits.

Instead, the goal should be to develop an economy that creates good jobs.

We need have an economy that empowers individuals and small businesses.

Instead, we have an economy dominated by big government and big corporations.

We have an economy that funnels the vast majority of the economic rewards to a tiny elite while most of the rest of us struggle.

Just consider the following statistics….

*Back in the 1970s, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States brought in about 8 percent of all income.  Today, they bring in about 21 percent of all income.

*The following is how income gains in the U.S. were distributed during 2010….

-37 percent of all income gains went to the top 0.01 percent of all income earners

-56 percent of all income gains went to the rest of the top 1 percent

-7 percent of all income gains went to the bottom 99 percent

*In America today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

*According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.

So what is the solution to that problem?

Is it to attack the rich and take away all their money and give more government handouts to the poor?

Of course not.

Rather, we need to change the rules of the game so that individuals and small businesses are empowered to succeed.

We need to decentralize economic power and dramatically reduce the undue influence that big government and giant corporations have over our economic system.

We need to create an environment where almost anyone that has a good idea and that is willing to work hard can succeed.

But instead of focusing on real solutions like shutting down the Federal Reserve, converting to debt-free currency, eliminating the income tax, shutting down the IRS, massively reducing the size of government and getting rid of thousands upon thousands of unneeded regulations, the mainstream media and our politicians are going to continue to try to get Americans to blame one another for our problems.

The efforts to divide America are working, and hatred is growing to unprecedented levels in this country.

Eventually this will lead to mass rioting in our major cities and that will make our problems far worse.

Hatred and division are not going to bring us a better future.

They are only going to destroy us from within.

We don’t need hate.

What we need is more love and more solutions.

Unfortunately, our leaders are leading us down a very dark path, and we are heading for a future that is going to be a complete mess.

Source: The Economic Collapse

Apple: Why Doesn’t It Employ More US Workers?

The electronics giant assembles its gadgets in China. But, according to new research, if it moved its production home, it would still be hugely profitable and create thousands of jobs.

An old rule states that you are a mere six degrees of separation away from anyone else on the planet. For some people, however, the world is even smaller. So let me propose an amendment: you are only one relative, friend or acquaintance away from one of the late Steve Jobs’s creations.

You may be browsing this on a new iPad, one of the 30m Apple sold last year. Or perhaps you’re viewing it on an iPhone screen – which would be unsurprising, since the market analysts at Mintel say that the iPhone 4 is the most popular handset in Britain today. Maybe your children are reluctantly putting away their iPods, of which Apple sells 5m worldwide every three months (a remarkable figure, but half the 10m Jobs and his colleagues were shifting each quarter in 2008 and 2009).

And if you’ve really never done any of those things, rest assured your prime minister has. “The cool thing is that I now control my iMac from the iPad, to play out through the speaker,” David Cameron boasted to the Telegraph a few months after moving into No 10. It was one of those canny-to-the-point-of-irritating references the Old Etonian used to specialise in; a flash of his real-world accreditation.

As Cameron knows, Apple is a byword of everyday sleekness. Yet there is another way of viewing the company. Focus instead on the way it does business, and all those iPhones, iPods and iPads aren’t just exemplars of design and user-friendliness: they are devices that destroy western jobs. And they do so needlessly, because if the California-based giant manufactured its goods in America rather than China, it could still make profits that would be the envy of every other US business.

This is, I know, an unorthodox position. When journalists or politicians discuss the way that western companies make goods in China, or anywhere else in Asia, they almost always start from the premise that this is how business is done nowadays. This is the commonly accepted logic of globalisation, which enables companies to keep their costs down, which allows the ordinary American or Briton to spend less money shopping, and which also offers poorer nations in the east to develop their economies. Expensive shirts might still be made in Italy; high-end kitchens might be assembled in Germany – but the future of mass production inevitably lies in China.

Apple has both made and benefitted from that argument. In January, the New York Times ran a lengthy investigation of the technology firm’s manufacturing processes, which began by disclosing a conversation in 2011 between Jobs and Barack Obama. The president asked why Apple products could not be made in the US. The most admired man in Silicon Valley was reportedly blunt: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

Very few people argued with that assessment. In other ways excellent, the New York Times’ piece had an elegiac tone, conveyed by the headline How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work. And the following commentary went on in this it’s-not-you-it’s-me vein. It wasn’t Apple’s fault it didn’t hire Americans to make its goods: it was America’s. US workers weren’t skilled enough; not enough of them were trained in engineering.

All this should be familiar to anyone who’s followed the Westminster debate on globalisation, where prime ministers from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron have agreed that if Britain is to attract employers, its workers need to shape up. Students need to brain up and get degrees, adults need to retrain or sharpen up their attitudes. Even then, the British have to prepare for a post-industrial future, where they do the design and marketing and the Chinese (or the Indians, or the Vietnamese) make the goods.

Such national self-abasement has the merit of at least feeling like a policy; but it’s debatable whether on its own it really will pull in big employers. Apple, after all, used to base its manufacturing in the US. Jobs used to boast about how the Mac was “a machine that is made in America”. And according to new research given exclusively to the Guardian by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), it’s clear that it would not only be affordable for Apple still to make its goods in America, it would remain hugely profitable.

Using a mix of Apple’s own filings and industry data, the academics broke down the cost of making one product in particular: the wildly popular 4G iPhone. Assembled in China, the total cost of putting together just one phone was $178.45. Compare that with a sale price (including downloads) of $630 and Apple makes $452 on each phone: a whacking gross margin of 72%.

Chinese labour accounts for a tiny proportion of the company’s costs: $7.10 for each phone, which accounts for about eight hours of assembly. So what would it cost to make the same iPhone in America? The Cresc team took the average wage in the US electronics industry of $21 per hour and calculated that the total production cost would increase to $337.01. That is a big jump – but it still leaves Apple with a gross margin of 46.5% on each iPhone – a level that Cresc’s Sukhdev Johal estimates would probably still make it the most profitable phone in the world.

So: two models of making one of Apple’s most popular products, and two models for distributing the profits. The made-in-America model still leaves the California giant with a profit margin that most companies can only dream of, but would create hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US to boot. That may strike you as laughably naive, but it’s more akin to enlightened self-interest: just think of the way Henry Ford raised wages so Ford workers could buy his cars.

The made-in-China model, on the other hand, has carried no such social benefits, either in Apple’s home country or in the People’s Republic. Last year, Apple built up cash reserves of $100bn – more than the US government. Indeed, it was so much money that the company was stumped how to dispose of it. Tim Cook, who is now CEO of Apple, announced a few weeks ago that he would begin buying back shares and paying dividends to investors. Among other people who benefited from this arrangement was Cook himself, who was awarded $376.3m in Apple stock when he took over last year. That pile of shares is now valued at around $634m. The people who win from the made-in-China model are big investors and top executives.

In the case of Apple, outsourcing manufacturing is not about keeping costs to customers down – they are still paying huge prices for the latest handset or tablet computer. Nor is it about the company’s survival: it would still do tremendously well were it to bring those factories back home. No, in the case of Apple, moving jobs offshore has become a way of directing ever more money to those at the top of American society.

This is not just my conclusion, or that of the Cresc team; it is backed up by the Asian Development Bank. In a 2010 study of an earlier model of the iPhone, ADB researchers concluded: “It is the profit maximisation behaviour of Apple rather than competition that pushes Apple to have all iPhones assembled in the PRC.”

This division of labour has certainly not helped China very much. Foxconn, which makes those iPhones, has to work to an incredibly tough contract with Apple that forces it to keep all costs to a minimum. This surely helps account for why Foxconn, whose client list is almost a Who’s Who of the smartphone sector, has had repeated troubles with its workforce, including at least 18 suicide attempts by workers in 2010 alone. After that, and the terrible publicity that followed, Apple put pressure on its subcontractor to raise workers’ pay and improve conditions. But it didn’t take the most obvious route of doing so, which would be: pay more to Foxconn, and direct it to use that surplus to increase wages.

The reason for concentrating on Apple in this fashion is not because it’s a terrible company, but because it’s an exemplary one. It has become the business success story of our age: the firm others want to emulate, and prime ministers want to name check. And yet there is a paradox here. For all the stylishness and sleekness of its products, the Apple business model is an unattractive and, over the long term, possibly an unsustainable one. It subcontracts work that offers the Chinese little prospect of economic development, while at the same time selling to Americans and others products they want but increasingly don’t have the jobs or incomes to buy so readily.

Apple’s rise to primus inter pares in the business world has coincided with a wider social trend: a general anxiety about the decline of the west. Some of the reasons for why America, Britain and others are on the slide are large and abstract. But some of the factors are smaller and closer to hand, like the iPhone in your pocket or the Mac waiting for you at home.

Source: The Guardian

They Can’t Stop Building Walls

How many walls will secure the Zionist regime in Palestine?

It may be that researchers would want to examine as long ago as the period from the 3rd century BC until the beginning of the 17th century in order to find a regime so frenetically building walls and barriers in a hopeless quest to hold onto stolen lands as we in Lebanon may soon witness in the south of the country.  It was back in 221 BC that in order to protect China from the land claims of the Xiongnu people from Mongolia, the Xiongnu tribe being China’s main enemy at that time who sought the return of lands they claimed the Chinese had stolen, that the emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the construction of a wall to guard China’s territorial gains.

Lots of walls have been built throughout history to preserve occupied lands. The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall in England to keep the Picts out and the East Germans built the Berlin wall to keep the people in. But no regime in history has built, in the span of six decades, the number of walls as the paranoid regime in Tel Aviv has erected. And it plans at least five more “anti-terrorist protective walls” including one slated to begin soon along the Lebanese-Palestine border at the Lebanese village of Kfar Kila. And that one may present a problem.

The decision to build a wall “to replace the existing Israeli technical fence” along the Blue Line near the town of Kfar Kila was announced last month by Tel Aviv.  The announcement followed a meeting between the Israel military and UNIFIL and both are keeping fairly mum about what it knows about this latest wall but UNIFIL spokesman Neeraj Singh hinted to this observer that the first section will be about half a mile long and approximately 16 feet high.

Some south Lebanon residents are strongly objecting for among other reasons that the high wall will block the scenic views into Palestine.  Others are ridiculing the reasons for the wall expressed by the US-Israeli lobby that will ask the American taxpayer to pay for it.

Israel firster, David Schenker, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, set up by AIPAC, told a Congressional hearing recently: “South Lebanon is obviously a very sensitive area [for Israel], being so close to Metula and the possibility of infiltration by Hezbollah and Palestinians is a legitimate concern. The Israeli government believes that a this wall will prevent terrorists from launching direct line-of-sight firing of things like RPGs and mortars. Even the throwing of stones which some tourists visiting the area are in the habit of doing.”

Local observers, UNIFIL officials and experts like Timor Goksel, who worked as UNIFIL’s spokesman for 24 years along the blue line, expressed surprise at why Israel is claiming that Kfar Kila is a particularly dangerous area that needs a wall.

In point of fact the area has not been a particularly hazardous or “sensitive” one historically, even when the PLO controlled the area in the 1970’s.  Goksel explained; “In my 24 years’ experience, there were never any attacks there because it’s adjacent to a Lebanese village, so any attack there will make life for the Lebanese difficult. I don’t think anybody has ever thought of doing anything there. Moreover, even if you cross into Israel at Kifa Kula there, you’re not going to come across an Israeli position for a long time, so it doesn’t make sense for anyone to attack from there. What are you going to attack? There’s no target.”

Some local observers are speculating that the real reason Israel wants the barrier in Kfar Kila might be to stop its troops from bargaining for drugs in exchange for weapons and classified military information, as the IDF’s drug problem among its “northern command” soldiers has escalated since the battering it took in the July 2006 war.

Israel’s newest frontier wall will follow the one being erected along the 150-mile boundary between the Sinai and Negev deserts.  That wall building project is due to be completed by the end of this year of 2012. Once the Kfar Kila wall is finished, Israel will be almost completely enclosed by steel, barbed wire and concrete, leaving only the southern border with Jordan between the Dead and Red Seas without a physical barrier. But that too, may be walled in the future according to Shenker. He testified that the reason was due to the uncertainty in Jordan and its increasingly wobbly government.

Yet another wall, approximately seven miles from the Mediterranean along the southern border will meet the fence Israel has already been built around Gaza.  This wall runs for 32 miles, with a buffer zone, which Palestinians are forbidden from entering, and extends close to 1,000 meters inside the narrow Gaza Strip, walling off more prime Palestinian agricultural land. This   “security war” has caged Palestinians inside Gaza but did not prevent the cross-border capture of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006.

Along the Palestine-Lebanon border, a barrier built by Israel in the 1970s along the boundary was reconstructed, after Israel was forced out of Lebanon in 2000 following a 22-year occupation. This barrier did not prevent Hezbollah in a cross-border ambush in 2006, capturing two Israeli soldiers in order to negotiate a prisoner exchange. Nor did it prevent Hezbollah from firing of thousands of rockets during the ensuing 33-day war in retaliation for Israeli bombing much of south Lebanon.

And the “protective walls”  rise like mushroom after a summer rain.

Further east from Lebanon, an Israeli barrier has been constructed on the ceasefire line drawn at the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, running between the Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally occupied for nearly 45 years, and Syria.  It was here that hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators entered occupied Palestine last May, in the Golan and along the Lebanese border. More than a dozen people were killed and scores injured when Zionist forces opened fire on the unarmed civilians.

A crossing at Quneitra, now operated by the UN, does allow some movement of UN personnel, truckloads of apples, a few Druze students and the occasional Syrian bride in white.

A few miles north of Quneitra is Shouting Hill, where Druze families in the Golan yell greetings across the barrier to relatives in Syria.

Moving south through heavily mined fields and hills, the 1973 ceasefire line is bordered by Israeli military bases and closed military zones, and shells of tanks from past battles, until it connects with the border with Jordan. It then joins with one of Israel’s first walls, constructed in the late 1960s, which now stretches almost from the Sea of Galilee down the Jordan Valley to the Dead Sea. Most of this line is not Israel’s border, but rather a barrier separating Jordan from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Around a third of the way down this stretch, the barrier joins the infamous huge steel-and-concrete West Bank wall. This runs along or inside the 1949 armistice line, swallowing up tracts of Palestinian agricultural land, slicing through communities and separating farmers from their fields and olive trees. As with its other 18 walls and barriers, the Zionist regime claims it is simply a security measure, but many believe it marks the boundaries of a future Palestinian state, consuming an additional 12 per cent of the West Bank. Approximately two-thirds of its 465-mile length is complete, mostly as a steel fence with wide exclusion zones on either side. According to the current route, 8.5 per cent of the West Bank territory and 27,520 Palestinians are on the “Israeli” side of the barrier. Another 3.4 percent of the area (with 247,800 inhabitants) is completely or partially surrounded by the barrier.

Two similar barriers, the Israeli Gaza Strip barrier and the Israeli-built  7-9 meter (23 – 30 ft) wall separating Gaza from Egypt(temporarily breached on January 23, 2008), which is currently under Egyptian control, are also widely condemned by the international community.

Returning to the subject of the latest wall project, increasingly the Zionist regime opposes discussions, hearings, visits, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, and even the viewing its garrison state from south Lebanon.  Cutting off a view that people throughout history have marveled at represents a continuation of its isolation and xenophobia.

Following the joint meeting at Kkar Kila noted above, UNIFIL Major-General Serra said: “The meeting was called to assist Israel in putting in place additional security measures along the Blue Line in the Kafr Kila area in order to minimize the scope for sporadic tensions or any misunderstandings that could lead to escalation of the situation.”

In fact, the opposite with likely happen.  In a recent visit to Ahmad Jibril’s Palestinian camp in the Bekaa Valley, and in discussion with salafist groups in Saida, it’s plain the wall will likely become an object of target practice and strain further UNIFIL and Hezbollah efforts to   keep theborder calm.

In a scathing commentary in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper, defense analyst Alex Fishman recently wrote: “We have become a nation that imprisons itself behind fences, which huddles terrified behind defensive shields.” It has become, he said, a “national mental illness”.

War Porn: The New Safe Sex

The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the “war on terror” – which was interpreted by many of its practitioners as a subtle legitimization of United States state terror against, predominantly, Muslims.

This was also a war OF terror – as in a manifestation of state terror pitting urban high-tech might against basically rural, low-tech cunning. The US did not exercise this monopoly; Beijing practiced it in Xinjiang, its far west, and Russia practiced it in Chechnya.

Like porn, war porn cannot exist without being based on a lie – a crude representation. But unlike porn, war porn is the real thing; unlike crude, cheap snuff movies, people in war porn actually die – in droves.

The lie to finish all lies at the center of this representation was definitely established with the leak of the 2005 Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British MI6 confirmed that the Bush administration wanted to take out Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by linking Islamic terrorism with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So, as the memo put it, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

In the end, George “you’re either with us or against us” Bush did star in his own, larger-than-life snuff movie – that happened to double as the invasion and destruction of the eastern flank of the Arab nation.

The New Guernica

Iraq may indeed be seen as the Star Wars of war porn – an apotheosis of sequels. Take the (second) Fallujah offensive in late 2004. At the time I described it as the new Guernica. I also took the liberty of paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the Algerian War; after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them. To quote Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there were bodies, bodies everywhere.

The Francisco Franco in Fallujah was Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim premier. It was Allawi who “asked” the Pentagon to bomb Fallujah. In Guernica – as in Fallujah – there was no distinction between civilians and guerrillas: it was the rule of “Viva la muerte!”

United States Marine Corps commanders said on the record that Fallujah was the house of Satan. Franco denied the massacre in Guernica and blamed the local population – just as Allawi and the Pentagon denied any civilian deaths and insisted “insurgents” were guilty.

Fallujah was reduced to rubble, at least 200,000 residents became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed, in order to “save it” (echoes of Vietnam). No one in Western corporate media had the guts to say that in fact Fallujah was the American Halabja.

Fifteen years before Fallujah, in Halabja, Washington was a very enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam, who used them to gas thousands of Kurds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time said it was not Saddam; it was Khomeinist Iran. Yet Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, just like the US in Fallujah.

Fallujah doctors identified swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, as well as “melted bodies” – victims of napalm, the cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Residents who managed to escape told of bombing by “poisonous gases” and “weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud … and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them.”

That’s exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The United Nations banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.

Fallujah also provided a mini-snuff movie hit; the summary execution of a wounded, defenseless Iraqi man inside a mosque by a US Marine. The execution, caught on tape, and watched by millions on YouTube, graphically spelled out the “special” rules of engagement. US Marine commanders at the time were telling their soldiers to “shoot everything that moves and everything that doesn’t move”; to fire “two bullets in every body”; in case of seeing any military-aged men in the streets of Fallujah, to “drop ‘em”; and to spray every home with machine-gun and tank fire before entering them.

The rules of engagement in Iraq were codified in a 182-page field manual distributed to each and every soldier and issued in October 2004 by the Pentagon. This counter-insurgency manual stressed five rules; “protect the population; establish local political institutions; reinforce local governments; eliminate insurgent capabilities; and exploit information from local sources.”

Now back to reality. Fallujah’s population was not protected: it was bombed out of the city and turned into a mass of thousands of refugees. Political institutions were already in place: the Fallujah Shura was running the city. No local government can possibly run a pile of rubble to be recovered by seething citizens, not to mention be “reinforced”. “Insurgent capabilities” were not eliminated; the resistance dispersed around the 22 other cities out of control by the US occupation, and spread up north all the way to Mosul; and the Americans remained without intelligence “from local sources” because they antagonized every possible heart and mind.

Meanwhile, in the US, most of the population was already immune to war porn. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out in the spring of 2004, I was driving through Texas, exploring Bushland. Virtually everybody I spoke to either attributed the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to “a few bad apples”, or defended it on patriotic grounds (“we must teach a lesson to “terrorists”).

I Love A Man In Uniform

In thesis, there is an approved mechanism in the 21st century to defend civilians from war porn. It’s the R2P – “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This was an idea floated already in 2001 – a few weeks after the war on terror was unleashed, in fact – by the Canadian government and a few foundations. The idea was that the concert of nations had a “moral duty” to deploy a humanitarian intervention in cases such as Halabja, not to mention the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s or the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

In 2004, a panel at the UN codified the idea – crucially with the Security Council being able to authorize a “military intervention” only “as a last resort”. Then, in 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed a resolution supporting R2P, and in 2006 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1674 about “the protection of civilians in armed conflict”; they should be protected against “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

Now fast-forward to the end of 2008, early 2009, when Israel – using American fighter jets to raise hell – unleashed a large-scale attack on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.

Look at the official US reaction; “Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people,” said then-president Bush. The US Congress voted by a staggering 390-to-5 to recognize “Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza”. The incoming Barack Obama administration was thunderously silent. Only future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We support Israel’s right to self-defense.”

At least 1,300 civilians – including scores of women and children – were killed by state terror in Gaza. Nobody invoked R2P. Nobody pointed to Israel’s graphic failure in its “responsibility to protect” Palestinians. Nobody called for a “humanitarian intervention” targeting Israel.

The mere notion that a superpower – and other lesser powers – make their foreign policy decisions based on humanitarian grounds, such as protecting people under siege, is an absolute joke. So already at the time we learned how R2P was to be instrumentalized. It did not apply to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not apply to Israel in Palestine. It would eventually apply only to frame “rogue” rulers that are not “our bastards” – as in Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. “Humanitarian” intervention, yes; but only to get rid of “the bad guys.”

And the beauty of R2P was that it could be turned upside down anytime. Bush pleaded for the “liberation” of suffering Afghans – and especially burqa-clad Afghan women – from the “evil” Taliban, in fact configuring Afghanistan as a humanitarian intervention.

And when the bogus links between al-Qaeda and the non-existent WMDs were debunked, Washington began to justify the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq via … R2P; “responsibility to protect” Iraqis from Saddam, and then to protect Iraqis from themselves.

The Killer Awoke Before Dawn

The most recent installment in serial episodes of war porn is the Kandahar massacre, when, according to the official Pentagon version (or cover up) an American army sergeant, a sniper and Iraqi war veteran – a highly trained assassin – shot 17 Afghan civilians, including nine women and four children, in two villages two miles apart, and burned some of their bodies.

Like with Abu Ghraib, there was the usual torrent of denials from the Pentagon – as in “this is not us” or “we don’t do things these way”; not to mention a tsunami of stories in US corporate media humanizing the hero-turned-mass killer, as in “he’s such a good guy, a family man”. In contrast, not a single word about The Other – the Afghan victims. They are faceless; and nobody knows their names.

A – serious – Afghan enquiry established that some 20 soldiers may have been part of the massacre – as in My Lai in Vietnam; and that included the rape of two of the women. It does make sense. War porn is a lethal, group subculture – complete with targeted assassinations, revenge killings, desecration of bodies, harvesting of trophies (severed fingers or ears), burning of Korans and pissing on dead bodies. It’s essentially a collective sport.

US “kill teams” have deliberately executed random, innocent Afghan civilians, mostly teenagers, for sport, planted weapons on their bodies, and then posed with their corpses as trophies. Not by accident they had been operating out of a base in the same area of the Kandahar massacre.

And we should not forget former top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who in April 10, 2010, admitted, bluntly, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people” who were not a threat to the US or Western civilization.

The Pentagon spins and sells in Afghanistan what it sold in Iraq (and even way back in Vietnam for that matter); the idea that this is a “population-centric counter-insurgency” – or COIN, to “win hearts and minds”, and part of a great nation building project.

This is a monumental lie. The Obama surge in Afghanistan – based on COIN – was a total failure. What replaced it was hardcore, covert, dark war, led by “kill teams” of Special Forces. That implies an inflation of air strikes and night raids. No to mention drone strikes, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, whose favorite targets seem to be Pashtun wedding parties.

Incidentally, the CIA claims that since May 2010, ultra-smart drones have killed more than 600 “carefully selected” human targets – and, miraculously, not a single civilian.

Expect to see this war porn extravaganza celebrated in an orgy of upcoming, joint Pentagon-Hollywood blockbusters. In real life, this is spun by people such as John Nagl, who was on General David Petraeus’ staff in Iraq and now runs the pro-Pentagon think-tank Center for New American Security.

The new stellar macho, macho men may be the commandos under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). But this a Pentagon production, which has created, according to Nagl, an “industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine”.

Reality, though, is much more prosaic. COIN techniques, applied by McChrystal, relied on only three components; 24-hour surveillance by drones; monitoring of mobile phones; and pinpointing the physical location of the phones from their signals.

This implies that anyone in an area under a drone watch using a cell phone was branded as a “terrorist”, or at least “terrorist sympathizer”. And then the focus of the night raids in Afghanistan shifted from “high value targets” – high-level and mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban – to anyone who was branded as helping the Taliban.

In May 2009, before McChrystal arrived, US Special Forces were carrying 20 raids a month. By November, they were 90 a month. By the spring of 2010, they were 250 a month. When McChrystal was fired – because of a story in Rolling Stone (he was competing with Lady Gaga for the cover; Lady Gaga won) – and Obama replaced him with Petraeus in the summer of 2010, there were 600 a month. By April 2011, they were more than 1,000 a month.

So this is how it works. Don’t even think of using a cell phone in Kandahar and other Afghan provinces. Otherwise, the “eyes in the sky” are going to get you. At the very least you will be sent to jail, along with thousands of other civilians branded as “terrorist sympathizers”; and intelligence analysts will use your data to compile their “kill/capture list” and catch even more civilians in their net.

As for the civilian “collateral damage” of the night raids, they were always presented by the Pentagon as “terrorists”. Example; in a raid in Gardez on February 12, 2010, two men were killed; a local government prosecutor and an Afghan intelligence official, as well as three women (two of them pregnant). The killers told the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command in Kabul that the two men were “terrorists” and the women had been found tied up and gagged. Then the actual target of the raid turned himself in for questioning a few days later, and was released without any charges.

That’s just the beginning. Targeted assassination – as practiced in Afghanistan – will be the Pentagon’s tactic of choice in all future US wars.

Pass The Condom, Darling

Libya was a major war porn atrocity exhibition – complete with a nifty Roman touch of the defeated “barbarian” chief sodomized in the streets and then executed, straight on YouTube.

This, by the way, is exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before the fact. Gaddafi should be “captured or killed”. When she watched it in the screen of her BlackBerry she could only react with the semantic earthquake “Wow!”

From the minute a UN resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya under the cover of R2P, it became a green card to regime change. Plan A was always to capture and kill Gaddafi – as in an Afghan-style targeted assassination. That was the Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.

Obama said the death of Gaddafi meant, “the strength of American leadership across the world”. That was as “We got him” (echoes of Saddam captured by the Bush administration) as one could possibly expect.

With an extra bonus. Even though Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those dimwits at NATO (roughly $2 billion), it was still pocket money. Anyway, it was still awkward to say, “We did it”, because the White House always said this was not a war; it was a “kinetic” something. And they were not in charge.

Only the hopelessly naïve may have swallowed the propaganda of NATO’s “humanitarian” 40,000-plus bombing which devastated Libya’s infrastructure back to the Stone Age as a Shock and Awe in slow motion. This never had anything to do with R2P.

This was R2P as safe sex – and the “international community” was the condom. The “international community”, as everyone knows, is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), plus the House of Saud in the shade. The EU, which up to extra time was caressing the helm of Gaddafi’s gowns, took no time to fall over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a “buffoon”.

As for the concept of international law, it was left lying in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner (he ended up on YouTube as well). Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan (no YouTube – so many don’t believe it). Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination. They are The Three Graceful Scalps of War Porn.

Sweet Emotion 

Syria is yet another declination of war porn narrative. If you can’t R2P it, fake it.

And to think that all this was codified such a long time ago. Already in 1997, the US Army War College Quarterly was defining what they called “the future of warfare”. They framed it as “the conflict between information masters and information victims”.

They were sure “we are already masters of information warfare … Hollywood is ‘preparing the battlefield’ … Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable … Our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures … Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating.”

Post-everything information warfare has nothing to do with geopolitics. Just like the proverbial Hollywood product, it is to be “spawned” out of raw emotions; “hatred, jealousy, and greed – emotions, rather than strategy”.

In Syria this is exactly how Western corporate media has scripted the whole movie; the War College “information warfare” tactics in practice. The Syrian government never had much of a chance against those “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties”.

For example, the armed opposition, the so-called Free Syrian Army (a nasty cocktail of defectors, opportunists, jihadis and foreign mercenaries) brought Western journalists to Homs and then insisted to extract them, in extremely dangerous condition, and with people being killed, via Lebanon, rather than through the Red Crescent. They were nothing else than writing the script for a foreign-imposed “humanitarian corridor” to be opened to Homs. This was pure theater – or war porn packaged as a Hollywood drama.

The problem is Western public opinion is now hostage to this brand of information warfare. Forget about even the possibility of peaceful negotiations among adult parties. What’s left is a binary good guys versus bad guys plot, where the Big Bad Guy must be destroyed at all costs (and on top of it his wife is a snob bitch who loves shopping!)

Only the terminally naïve may believe that jihadis – including Libya’s NATO rebels – financed by the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, also know as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are a bunch of democratic reformists burning with good intentions. Even Human Rights Watch was finally forced to acknowledge that these armed “activists” were responsible for “kidnapping, detention, and torture”, after receiving reports of “executions by armed opposition groups of security force members and civilians”.

What this (soft and hard) war porn narrative veils, in the end, is the real Syrian tragedy; the impossibility for the much-lauded “Syrian people” to get rid of all these crooks – the Assad system, the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syrian National Council, and the mercenary-infested Free Syrian Army.

Listen To The Sound of Chaos 

This – very partial – catalogue of sorrows inevitably brings us to the current supreme war porn blockbuster – the Iran psychodrama.

2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq; and whatever the highway, to evoke the neo-con motto, real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran non-stop.

Perhaps only underwater in the Arctic we would be able to escape the cacophonous cortege of American right-wingers – and their respective European poodles – salivating for blood and deploying the usual festival of fallacies like “Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map”, “diplomacy has run its course”, “the sanctions are too late”, or “Iran is within a year, six months, a week, a day, or a minute of assembling a bomb”. Of course these dogs of war would never bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency is actually doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the 17 US intelligence agencies.

Because they, to a great extent, are “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties” in terms of corporate media, they can get away with an astonishingly toxic fusion of arrogance and ignorance – about the Middle East, about Persian culture, about Asian integration, about the nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about the global economy, about “the Rest” as compared to “the West”.

Just like with Iraq in 2002, Iran is always dehumanized. The relentless, totally hysterical, fear-inducing “narrative” of “should we bomb now or should we bomb later” is always about oh so very smart bunker buster bombs and precision missiles that will accomplish an ultra clean large-scale devastation job without producing a single “collateral damage”. Just like safe sex.

And even when the voice of the establishment itself – the New York Times – admits that neither US nor Israeli intelligence believe Iran has decided to build a bomb (a 5-year-old could reach the same conclusion), the hysteria remains inter-galactic.

Meanwhile, while it gets ready – “all options are on the table”, Obama himself keeps repeating – for yet another war in what it used to call “arc of instability”, the Pentagon also found time to repackage war porn. It took only a 60-second video now on YouTube, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, released only a few days after the Kandahar massacre. Just look at its key target audience: the very large market of poor, unemployed and politically very naïve young Americans.

Let’s listen to the mini-movie voice over: “Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair – with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can’t help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time.”

Maybe, in this Orwellian universe, we should ask the dead Afghans urinated upon by US Marines, or the thousands of dead in Fallujah, to write a movie review. Well, dead men don’t write. Maybe we could think about the day NATO enforces a no-fly one over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi’ites in the eastern province, while Pentagon drones launch a carpet of Hellfire missiles over those thousands of arrogant, medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes. No, it’s not going to happen.

Over a decade after the beginning of the war on terror, this is what the world is coming to; a lazy, virtually worldwide audience, jaded, dazed and distracted from distraction by distraction, helplessly hooked on the shabby atrocity exhibition of war porn.

Source: Asia Times

High Altitude Adventure – Skiing At 13,000 Feet

“We pushed forward about 30 yards at a clip.  Then caught our breath!  Hammered another 30 yards! Stopped to breathe!  Always, we looked up to the prize at 13,000 feet.   Don’t let me kid you; it takes guts, gumption and hard core determination to slog up a mountain peak—especially in winter.  Could we die?  Sure, we could meet our maker.   But heck, living full-out until we die is more fun.  Is it cold?  Sure, but we layer up.”  Journal entry, 3/22/12 FW

Under a rising sun and blue sky, we turned into the Crane parking lot at the head of the 10th Mountain Hut trailhead just down from 10,400 foot Tennessee Pass in the Colorado Rockies.  Around us, lodge pole pines grew thick to the west of us.  Eastward, aspirin white snows covered the valley, which featured a frozen river meandering southward.  Beyond it, enormous mountains pierced the sky.  A brisk wind greeted us upon opening the car doors.

“Yow! It’s a tad chilly,” said Al.

“No kidding,” I said. “It may be worth it to add some layers.”

“Looks like Steve and Eric started out on another trailhead,” Al said, talking about our friends that would meet us for this hut trip. “We’ll bump into them at the cabin.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said as I hauled my 45 pound pack out of the car.  “Let me get these skins slapped onto my skis and I’m ready to go.”

“I’ve got my snow shoes laced up,” Al said. “This pack seems to get heavier every year we take this hut trip.”

“You gotta stop bringing two pounds of cookies and five pounds of chips and salsa,” I said.

“Yeah, right!” Al said, smiling.  “Let’s get moving.”

We hiked up the road about a half mile to where an arrow pointed toward a mountain meadow filled with seven feet of snow.  Pines surrounded us and grew thicker as the mountain sloped upward.

“Let’s do it,” Al said. “Hey, look up above you.”

“I’ll be darned,” I said.  “A stellar jay looking for a handout.”

We stepped into our gear and headed up the mountain.  Not far into the woods, a squirrel jumped from branch to branch while he chattered at us like a repeating record.  He didn’t like us invading his territory.

My friend John Muir said, “How many hearts with warm red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining?  A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours.”

We pushed past the chattering squirrel with our eyes searching for the blue markers that denoted the trail.  While we carry compasses and topographical maps, it’s nice to see the blue diamonds showing us that we are on the right path.  Within a half mile, we reached a frozen lake.  We crossed it as the sun blazed overhead.

As Al pushed ahead, I noted the deep forest around us.  I reveled in the silence, the quiet of the snow and the slight breeze rustling through the evergreens. Something about that “sound” that calms my soul and uplifts my spirit.  I love leaving the car behind, the pavement and the cacophony of civilization.  It’s been said that the Great Spirit, as the Indians referred to Him, created snow to fall softly on the ground to give a blanket for all creatures to find solace from winter winds.  Above it, nature’s motions illustrate the circulation of life, of spirit and of energy pulsing throughout the wilderness.

As the slope pitched steeper, I noticed my breath quicken and my heart beat faster.  I felt the clean mountain air coursing through my lungs.  A mountaineering trip lets a man’s body know it’s alive. I think Thoreau said, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of humanity to elevate itself by conscious endeavor.”

As we drew deeper into the wilderness, we undoubtedly elevated ourselves as we climbed from 8,500 to 9,000 feet and upward still.
The trail led us through hard packed snow.  Soon, we reached a bridge over a frozen stream.  On the bridge, the snow rose over four feet deep. Other backcountry skiers had packed it down.

“Let’s take a picture,” Al said.

After the shot from the “Shutter bug of the Rockies”, we began climbing hard up a steep grade.  My breath drew deep drafts of life-giving oxygen into my heaving lungs.  It’s moments like this that I am grateful for my existence, for my body and for my ability to ambulate through this world.  I am thankful for the slowness and exertion.

We slogged upward until we hit a ridge that snaked through the trees.  Unexpectedly, it dropped down into a depression, but quickly regained itself.  We worked our way through an aspen grove with more squirrels chattering at us. Above, a hawk soared across the treetops on his morning breakfast patrol.

We stopped for a rest in a quiet glen.  Unshouldering the packs gave a sudden relief from the weight on our bodies. A long swig of water quenched our thirst and slicing up an apple gave us renewed energy.

Thoreau said, “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air; drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each. Let them be your only diet, drink and botanical medicines. Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.”

“Let’s get this show on the road,” said Al.

“Let me hoist this torture chamber back onto my shoulders,” I said, “and let’s get going.  I figure we can reach the cabin before nightfall.”

Once again, the trail climbed steadily upward. We followed it through a tunnel of pine trees.  My skis swished over the ice crystals and Al’s snowshoes crunched down on the white carpet with every step.

As we climbed, high mountain peaks jumped up in front of us.  The pines thinned with the altitude as we crossed over 10,000 feet and on to 11, 000 feet.  Big open glades featured burned-out trunks from long ago.  Ahead, 13,209 foot Homestake Peak made its presence known.  It cut like a giant shark’s tooth into a cobalt sky.

Two more hours later brought us into wide open fields of glistening snow.

“Another mile should get us to the cabin,” Al said.

“We’re standing inside a huge mountain basin,” I said. “That big old 13er can’t wait to see us standing at the top tomorrow.”

“I’m ready for some hot chocolate and a nice fire,” said Al.

“Let’s do it, dude,” I said.

Late in the afternoon, the heavy packs took their toll on our bodies.  We felt the fatigue of pushing into the high country.
After rounding a stand of lodge pole pines, we saw the cabin set up against the mountains at 11,200 feet.   We punched over the snowy land until we reached the cabin.  Amazingly, it stood empty.  We pulled our gear off and unloaded the packs from our shoulders. We unlocked the door and entered.

The cabin featured a full kitchen with dishes, glassware and silverware on plentiful shelves.  A 100 year old cook stove stood in the middle of the kitchen. Two picnic tables made up the dining area.  At the far end, a black stove with plenty of wood awaited. Upstairs, sleeping area for 18 people in wooden bunks.  One could watch the stars while falling asleep as windows surrounded the entire upstairs.  On the walls downstairs, pictures of 10thMountain soldiers in full ski gear.  Around the entire cabin downstairs, huge 4’X 4’ windows.  A huge deck out front featured log benches for watching sunsets and stars.  Out back, two outhouses.

“Home for the next two days,” Al said.

“I’m cooking up some water for hot chocolate,” I said.  “It looks like Steve and Eric are still on their way.”

We lounged around the cabin.  Several gray jays perched on the railings around the deck expecting possible handouts.  West of us, out the big bay window, we saw Homestake Peak rising into the blue sky.

“It’s going to be a great climb tomorrow,” Al said.  “I hope the weather and temps are as good as today’s.”

Within an hour, we watched Steve and Eric emerge from the woods on the high side of the mountain.

“Dudes,” I said. “Glad to see you.”

“Great trip up,” Eric said. “Nice to finally get to this cabin. I’m tired of pulling this sled all day.”

“I like your idea of pulling a plastic sled rather than humping a heavy backpack,” Al said.

They unpacked and made themselves comfortable.  We fired up the main stove and warmed the place.  Eric, ever the baker, brought his own cheesecake protected in a plastic container.  Steve, a college instructor, fire fighter and engineer who had traveled to Antarctica, also enjoyed culinary talents of a top flight chef.

“I have never turned down a good dinner,” he said.  “Food is the foundation of happiness.”

“Wasn’t it Ben Franklin who said that God made beer so men could be happy?” I said.  “Maybe you are the 21st century answer to Ben’s wisdom.”

“Why not?” said Steve.

That night, the fire burned brightly as we sat in a horseshoe circle around the fire place.  Outside, without any moon, the stars twinkled against an ink black sky.  A quick stepping out onto the deck allowed us to see major constellations such as Orion, the Big Dipper, Andromeda and Aries.  Saturn twinkled and we think we saw Jupiter taking its spot in the night sky.  Without any light pollution from cities, the night sky became very personal.

At the same time, it becomes so vast, it defies a person’s imagination.  As I stood on the deck looking, I felt a profound energy at being able to see the universe before my eyes.  Further, for this brief spark of time, I am a living entity in this vastness.  I am a part of the march of humanity.   I will continue to squeeze every drop of living from my time on this planet.

My friend Jack London said, “I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor; every atom in magnificent glow—than a sleepy and permanent planet.  The proper function of man is to live, not merely exist. I shall use my time.”

Looking up at the dark outline of the great mountain before us, I knew that tomorrow would bring challenge and triumph of summiting a peak in the dead of winter.  We turned in early knowing that we needed our energies to climb the 13er before our eyes.
Morning breaks quietly in the high country. First, the night sky surrenders to a glowing horizon punctuated by mountain peaks. The first light of the sun brightens the snow peaks from the tips until it moves down the flanks.  Soon, the sun touches the tips of the trees and finally, the grand finale of light spreads its rays across the entire landscape.

“Good morning,” said Eric.

“Mornin’” Al and I said.

We ate breakfast.  Because of cutting a large blister in his heel on the way up, Steve decided the pain would be unbearable trying to climb Homestake Peak.

“I’ve got to opt out today,” he said. “I don’t need to make this blister worse.”

A half hour later, Eric, Al and I slapped on our skis and snow shoes along with our light day packs.  We cut northward toward the mountain range and veered west toward Slide Lake in a large basin that carried us toward the south end of the mountain.  The journey carried us for nearly two miles along the flanks of the mountain chain. At tree line, we pushed across 10 foot deep snow pack.

“There’s the starting point beyond that canyon,” I said. “Let’s keep high on the ridge so we don’t lose altitude.”

“Here, let me get a couple of shots of you guys,” Al said.

From that point, we made our way to the south side of the mountain where it began a slow and steep climb to the summit.  We cut switchbacks up the steep grade.  From there, the wind freshened to 20 miles per hour. Ahead, we saw nothing but white windblown snow and ice.

If I could describe what I saw before us, we stood at the bottom of a giant slide leading upward with a blue outline of the sky on the top and both sides.  But in this case, we couldn’t walk around and step up the ladder of the slide. We must climb up the slide to the very top which was probably two miles to the summit.  Along the way, all manner of winter obstacles faced us.  The wind strengthened.  As we climbed, we also faced less and less oxygen in the air at high altitude.

We pushed forward about 30 yards at a clip.  Then caught our breath!  Hammer another 30 yards! Stop to breathe!  Always, we looked up to the prize at 13,000 feet.   Don’t let me kid you, it takes guts, gumption and hard core determination to slog up a mountain peak—especially in winter.  Could we die?  Sure, we could meet our maker.   But heck, living full out until I die is more fun.  Is it cold?  Sure, but we layer up.
To my right, Eric pushed upward.  To my left, Al continued his quest.  I followed them.  Suddenly, I found Eric and Al to my left as we slogged ever higher onto the mountain.  But as they pushed forward, the canyon below dropped four to five thousand feet.  As that happened, another jagged monster snow-covered mountain rose up behind them on the other side of the canyon.

“Hey you guys,” I yelled. “Let me get a shot of you. That mountain back drop is incredible!”

They stood still for the shot.  Mind-bogglingly beautiful!  What I am seeing at this moment can only be seen on the nature channel.  I am seeing mountain majesty just like the folks who climb Mount Everest.  It doesn’t even seem like a smaller scale when a person climbs to these heights.  I am a mountaineer with no comparisons.

Onward we pushed up that colossal mountain.  The sun burned over head.  The sky dazzled with its brilliant blue.  The higher we skied, the more intense the mountains grew—like a line of sharks teeth ripping at the sky all around us.  I don’t know what Al and Eric were feeling, but I felt a sense of inner awe at what the universe provided me that moment.

At the same time, I sucked huge lung-fulls of air into my body.  I needed to keep every muscle oxygenated in order to keep pushing.  I skied up close to Eric.

“Man,” he said. “This is an enormous pile of amazing sights.”

“You got that right, dude,” I said.

As we drew nearer to the summit, more and more large rocks cut dark spots into the vast snowfields before us.  We continued our 30 yards of slogging, then resting for several minutes, then forward again with dogged determination.  After another hour, we reached a false summit.  Beyond it, the true summit awaited another 300 meters ahead.  Icy winds pulled at our bodies.

At 200 meters from the top, I encountered so much rock that I pulled my skis and stuck them into the snow.  Al pushed on with his snowshoes.  Eric cut further north along a ridge and found a path where he continued skiing.  I carried my poles and pushed further up the mountain as I hopped from rock to rock.  Within 100 meters of the summit, Eric pulled his skis and locked them to his backpack.
He intended to ski off the peak.

At mid day, Al reached the summit.  I followed.  Eric arrived several minutes later. We high fived and whooped it up for a few minutes.  Eric jumped into a handstand. Not bad at 13,209 feet on a freezing winter day at the top of an icy peak in the middle of the Colorado Rockies.  We took pictures of ourselves.  We spun around to see outrageous mountain ranges all around us.  The Gore Range, Mount Holy Cross, Never Summer Range, the Collegiate Range and Mount Elbert at 14,455 feet.

As we stood at the top, the wind blew, the sun smiled at us, but the cold started to creep into our bodies because we were no longer climbing.

“Time to get off this peak,” Al said.

“I hate coming down off a peak when it took so much to get up here,” I said.  “But, I don’t want to turn into an icicle, either.”

To reach the top of a mountain, my mind soars with bliss.  I can’t help my ear to ear grin.  The moment elevates me into such a joyous mental state. Sharing it with my friends makes it a celebration of life, of spirit and fellowship.

Moments later, Eric locked on his skis and jumped over the edge.  He made four quick cuts on the crusty, icy, hard packed snow.  To his left, a cliff dropped at least a thousand feet. One missed turn and he would become a tumbling tumble weed down an icy couloir.

Al stepped over the edge and made his way down. I plugged in my ski poles to brace myself for the descent from rock to rock, rock to snow, snow to rock and downward until I reached my skis.

Finally, I picked up my skis and slapped my boots into the bindings. I carefully worked my way over the hard pack.   Once again, I looked west to see the scenery change as I descended.  With each minute, I made my way from 13,000 to 12,500 to 12,000 and kept descending.  As I worked my way through the snow and rock, I saw where some of the tundra melted through to the surface of the snow. As the snow melted from the extreme sunshine, it formed an ice glaze that clung to the rocks and blanketed over the tundra like an icy spider web.
Exceedingly interesting and a visual delight as the sun played off the sheet ice.

Nearly to the bottom, we stopped to eat lunch.  Al caught up with me and we sat down on some big rocks to enjoy oranges, peanuts, energy bars and swig on some water.  After 20 minutes, we finished our lunch on that high altitude table with a view unlike any most folks could ever dream of from their own kitchen.

I jumped back onto my skis and made my way down a couloir.  At the bottom, I saw Eric making a run toward me. He made some great cuts and got caught up in his own powder blasts from the skis.  Finally, at the bottom, he crashed in front of me.  He fried his thighs!

Al left his perch and made his way slowly down the side of the mountain.  Later, we connected for the trek back to the cabin.
While I chose to circle back the way we came, Eric and Al dropped into the valley.  Later, they climbed back up.

About an hour later, we reached base camp at 11,200 where Steve greeted us.  We pulled off our gear and stepped in front of the fire place.  Al curled up in the corner and Eric dozed near a window.  I wrote about our high altitude adventure.  As you read these paragraphs, I hope I got it right. I hope you felt the climb and the triumph at the top.  I hope you enjoyed the journey with us.

In the evening, Steve cooked up some fabulous chicken steaks with rice and vegetables.  We sat at the table with wide grins and all sorts of stories. After stuffing ourselves, Eric brought out the “piece de resistance” with his homemade cheese cake.  Steve offered a bowl of hot blue berries for a topping.  Each of us enjoyed two pieces of cheese cake.

Let me tell you, I savored every single delicious, scrumptious, mouth-watering bite.  I let each fork full melt on my tongue and allowed the blue berries to soothe my taste buds and run down the back of my throat like a summer stream full of enchanting sensations.

“Bless you for this incredible cheese cake Baker Eric,” I said.

“Same for me,” said Al.

That night, we washed a lot of dishes. Ironically, no other back country skiers arrived, which left the entire cabin to just four men.  We read books about 10th Mountain soldiers, shared stories and stoked the fire.  Outside, the sun set and the night sky once again featured majestic constellations.

We hit the bunks early with tired bodies ready for some recuperation at high altitude.  Before I fell asleep near the window, a shooting star ripped across the night sky. It seemed to place a dramatic exclamation point to a most amazing day.

Next morning, we awoke with the sunrise. It lit up the high peaks and spread its glowing charms across the high country.  After breakfast, we washed more dishes, cleaned up the bunk room and brought in more wood.  We filled the water pot with more snow and loaded our backpacks.  Steve and Eric decided to stay for a few more hours.

“Dudes!” I said.  “Thanks for a great time.  Heal that heel, Steve.
Thanks for the cheese cake Eric.  Let’s do this again.”

“You can count on it,” said Steve.  “We loved every minute of it.”

We stepped outside into a brisk morning.  With the sun shining, it felt like a day at the beach.  “Snow beach!”

We shouldered our packs, just like the 10th Mountain soldiers. We buckled into our skis and snow shoes, just like the 10th Mountain soldiers.  We headed into a world of white at high altitude, just like the 10 Mountain soldiers.  We thanked them for their service to America.

As we headed down from the high altitude on our way back to civilization, we smiled at each other.  My friend Al and I enjoyed an exceptional adventure.

I am reminded of sage words by Henry David Thoreau, “We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”

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