Compelling Words

Read an interesting post on suzie's comedic blog about the N-Word. I picked it up on Digg. It got my interest because I happen to be Black myself and I must confess that the word may be part of a subconscious compulsion that draws me in as it does others. There were over seventy comments to that article that the moderator allowed! After reading the post I didn't think it was particularly useful. It didn't solve anything. The word is still the word.

The Bible in John describes the word as God. Maybe that is why we become so obsessed with them. But I don't see any intrinsic power in words at all. The only power to be derived from words is the power we give them. We are the power. Name-calling in particular is demonstrative. The particular word criticized has a history of pejorative connotations. So I guess the history of a word has a lot to do with how people perceive them. If I called you a name the has no traditional connotation how would you receive or interpret that word. For instance, if I called you a "giraffe", how would you receive that and interpret. My guess is that you would not receive it at all refering to you. You would most probably end up ignoring it. But, if the media, say through entertainment, had prepped you to believe that there was some kind of embarrassing, humiliating, shameful, or negative connotation associated with being called a "giraffe", getting called a "giraffe" would might indeed offend you.

This is the key to the whole dilemma. Your life is your own and yours alone. It is for you to define for yourself. You can not project something that does not exist within you to project out. Whatever you project is still yours. It does not affect anybody else. If it happens to offend someone else you just harmonized with some one on your same wavelength. What you project out only hurts you. If you concentrate on experiencing your life, you couldn't be concerned about defining others as you would be busy defining yourself. That is what is between you and The Creator.

The Quest for Comedic Stardom: My Reaction to the N-Word

The Quest for Comedic Stardom: My Reaction to the N-Word

Air Express Lane

Today President Bush announced he would make available restricted military airspace for airline traffic along the East Coast. On its face, this act would seem like the best domestic administration this regime has come up with since its inception 7 years ago, to solve a domestic problem. Most critques say this manuever will not contribute anything to relieve airline congestion. It sounds good though that somebody is doing something. We should all be very dubious of what The President says. This man does not have a conscious and he could care less about inconviences of the average middle class American. I really do believe this is a maneuver to set us all up for a "false flag" operation during The Holidays. This Holiday Season is one of the last chance windows that can provide cover for a "false flag" operation to initiate war with Iran. Most airline commuters are so glad to hear that The Presient has proposed them some relief, they are not focused on the dangers that is posed by this evil man. This is a time for a terror alert indeed.

New Attorney General

Bush had Michael Mulkasey sworn in publically as Attorney General of the United States. He had already had his private Jewish based swearing in lqst week. You know Jews don't actually have to honor their pledges under their religious oaths. Anyway conspicuously absent from the ceremony were: Diane Feinstein; Joseph Liebermann; Chuch Schumer; and Arlan Spector, all Jews instrumental in getting this torture enabler confirmed as Attorney General. All Recent Republican Attorney Generals were present at the ceremony except for Alberto Gonzalez. However Bush mentioned Gonzalez prominently during his ceremony speak. This is a crazy place!

Busting the Stranglehold on the World

There is a wonderful new article that I found http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=193604. It sheds a whole new light on the motives behind the push for war with Iran. The article was written by Ellen Brown, JD and posted at her blog and website http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/war-with-iran.php. I am reprinting it here for convience but I recommend highy her website. She is a smart woman. I am not so much endorsing this article because of its Islamic based anti-usery solution to finances, but because it is anti-userious. Usury is condemned by both Christianity and Judaism. That pretty much leaves it as a tool of the devil. Please read.

BEHIND THE DRUMS OF WAR WITH IRAN:
NUCLEAR WEAPONS OR COMPOUND INTEREST?

Ellen Brown, November 10^th, 2007
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/war-with-iran.php

Post your comments here

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On October 25, 2007, the United States announced harsh new penalties on the Iranian military and its state-owned banking systems. Sanctions, bellicose rhetoric and the implicit threat of military action are goads for another war, one that critics fear is more likely to ignite a nuclear holocaust than prevent one. The question is, why is Iran considered such a serious threat? The official explanation is that it is planning to develop nuclear weapons. But the head of the UN watchdog agency IAEA says he has "no concrete evidence" of an Iranian weapons program.¹ And even if there were one, a number of countries have tested or possess nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including Pakistan, North Korea, India, and probably Israel; yet we don't consider that grounds for military action. Iran would just be joining a long list of nuclear powers.

Another theory says the push for war is all about oil; but Iran supplies only 15 percent of total Persian Gulf oil exports, and its oil is already for sale.² We don't need to go to war for it. We can just buy it.

A third theory says the saber-rattling is about defending the dollar. Iran is threatening to open its own oil bourse, and it is already selling about 85 percent of its oil in non-dollar currencies. Iran has broken the petrodollar stranglehold imposed in the 1970s, when OPEC entered into a covert agreement with the United States to sell oil only in U.S. dollars. As Dr. Krassimir Petrov explained this suspected motive in a 2006 editorial in Gold-Eagle.com:

As long as the dollar was the only acceptable payment for oil, its dominance in the world was assured, and the American Empire could continue to tax the rest of the world. If, for any reason, the dollar lost its oil backing, the American Empire would cease to exist. Thus, Imperial survival dictated that oil be sold only for dollars. . . . If someone demanded a different payment, he had to be convinced, either by political pressure or military means, to change his mind.³

An interesting theory, but it still fails to explain all the facts. In a March 2006 editorial in Asia Times Online, William Engdahl noted that war with Iran has been in the cards as part of the U.S. Greater Middle East strategy since the 1990s, long before Iran threatened to open its own oil bourse.⁴ And Iran is not alone in wanting to drop the dollar as its oil currency. To curb currency risks, Russia is planning to open an Energy Stock Exchange in St. Petersburg next year to trade oil in rubles, something that will have significantly more impact on the dollar than Iran's oil bourse. Central bankers in Venezuela, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates have all said they will be investing less of their reserves in dollar assets due to the dollar's weakening global position.⁵ When those countries switch to other currencies for their oil trades, will the United States feel compelled to invade them as well?

These theories all have some merit, but none of them seems sufficient to explain the war drums. What is so special about Iran? Here is another possibility: Iran poses a serious threat, not only to oil and the dollar, but to a secret financial weapon that keeps a global banking empire in power. . . .

Compound Interest:
Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction

Around 1980, when interest rates were soaring, Johnny Carson quipped on The Tonight Show that "Scientists have developed a powerful new weapon that destroys people but leaves buildings standing – it's called the 17% interest rate." Compound interest is the secret weapon that has allowed a global banking cartel to control most of the resources of the world. The debt trap snapped shut for many countries in 1980, when international interest rates shot up to 20 percent. At 20 percent interest compounded annually, $100 doubles in under 4 years; and in 20 years, it becomes a breathtaking $3,834.⁶ The devastating impact on Third World debtors was underscored by President Obasanjo of Nigeria, speaking in 2000 about his country's mounting burden to international creditors. He said:

All that we had borrowed up to 1985 was around $5 billion, and we have paid about $16 billion; yet we are still being told that we owe about $28 billion. That $28 billion came about because of the injustice in the foreign creditors' interest rates. If you ask me what is the worst thing in the world, I will say it is compound interest.⁷

What bankers call the "miracle" of compound interest is called "usury" under Islamic law and is considered a crime. It was also a crime under Old English law until the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther redefined the offense of "usury" to mean the taking of "excess" interest. Modern Islamic thinkers are not averse to a profitable return on investment when it takes the form of "profit-sharing," with investors taking some risk and sharing in business losses; but the usurer gets his interest no matter what. In fact he does better when the borrower fails. The borrower who cannot afford to pay off his loans sinks deeper and deeper into debt, as interest compounds annually to the lender.

The debt trap that snapped shut in 1980 was set in 1974, when OPEC was induced to trade its oil only in U.S. dollars. The price of oil then suddenly quadrupled, and countries with insufficient dollars for their oil needs had to borrow them from international lenders. By 2001, enough money had flowed back to First World banks from Third World debtors to pay the principal due on their original loans six times over; but interest had consumed so much of those payments that the total debt had actually quadrupled.⁸ In 1980, median income in the richest 10 percent of countries was 77 times greater than in the poorest 10 percent. By 1999, that gap had grown to 122 times greater. In December 2006, the United Nations released a reported titled "World Distribution of Household Wealth," which concluded that 50 percent of the world's population now owns only 1 percent of its wealth, while the richest 10 percent of adults owns 85 percent. At interest compounded annually, the debts of the poorer nations can never be repaid but will just continue to grow.

The Private Global Banking Scheme

It is this debt scheme, with its lethal weapon of interest compounded annually, that has allowed a small clique of financiers to dominate the business of the world. In Tragedy and Hope, Professor Carroll Quigley wrote from personal knowledge of this financial clique, which he called simply "the international bankers." Dr. Quigley, who was Bill Clinton's mentor at Georgetown University, said the aim of the international bankers was "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole," a system "to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements."⁹ The key to the bankers' success was that they would control and manipulate the money systems of the world while letting them appear to be controlled by governments.

Most countries have now been brought into this private global banking scheme, with most of the world's money being created by commercial banks in the form of interest-bearing loans. In the United States today, the only money created by the government consists of coins, which compose only about one one-thousandth of the total money supply. Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) are created by the Federal Reserve, a private banking corporation, and lent to the government. The vast bulk of the money supply, however, is created when commercial banks make loans. They do this by double-entry bookkeeping: the sum of the borrower's promissory note is simply credited as a deposit to the borrower's account and offset with a matching liability on the bank's side of its books.¹⁰ Money creation is now a private affair in most other countries as well. Even where the central bank is technically state-owned, as in the United Kingdom and Canada, the central bank creates only the paper currency of the nation, leaving most of the money supply to be created by commercial banks as compound-interest-bearing loans.¹¹

The alternative to this independent "central bank" system is what used to be called "national banking." A state-owned central bank issued the national currency as an agent of the government, and the government spent the money or lent it into the economy for internal development and public needs. The "seigniorage" on this money -- the difference between the cost of creating it and its face value – accrued to the government, which got the money debt- and interest-free. The goal of the international bankers was to privatize this system and bring it under their control. The central bank would still create the national money supply, but it would lend the money to the government, leaving the government with a massive debt on which it owed interest. Once caught in the debt web, the government could then be induced to privatize other assets, making them available for purchase and control by international finance capital.

At a 1968 meeting of the secretive globalist group known as the Bilderbergers, a U.S. official named George Ball spoke of creating a "world company." Ball was U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The "world company" was to be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military coercion. The "company" would extend across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.¹²

Before World War II, the head of this private global banking system was in England; but it moved to Wall Street with the economic ascendancy of the United States. Under the Bretton Woods Agreements, the U.S. dollar became the world's "reserve currency" along with gold. In 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, and the dollar became the world's reserve currency without that tether. U.S. lenders could create and lend dollars to whatever extent the world could be induced to borrow them. To insure that the lenders got their interest, in the late 1970s the World Bank and International Monetary Fund began imposing "conditionalities" on loans to Third World debtors, requiring them to open up their capital markets, slash spending on social programs, and privatize their industries. Meanwhile, speculative attacks on local currencies that had been left to "float" in foreign exchange markets without the tether of gold caused radical currency devaluations, allowing foreign investors to pick up these privatized assets at bargain basement prices.

When Dominoes Won't Fall

Iran was among the few nations to have escaped this global privatization scheme. Iran had its own oil, and it managed to avoid the trap of speculative currency devaluation by imposing foreign exchange restrictions and price controls on its currency, something it could do because it had adequate foreign exchange reserves from its oil sales.¹³ Iran's state-owned oil industry has allowed its economy to perform well, despite economic sanctions and rumors to the contrary.¹⁴ A "reformist" movement toward increased privatization ended with the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a "populist" who has promised to redistribute Iranian oil wealth more expansively and has committed the government to funding public-sector projects and charitable investments.¹⁵

Islamic scholars have been seeking to devise a global banking system that would serve as an alternative to the usury-based scheme now in control internationally, and Iran has led the way in devising that model. Iran is characterized as a democratic Islamic republic, which enforces Islamic principles not only morally but legally and politically. The American-backed Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, ending 2,500 years of monarchical rule. All domestic Iranian banks were then nationalized, and the government called for the establishment of an Islamic banking system that would replace interest payments with profit-sharing. Iran's state-owned central bank issues the national currency, with the seigniorage accruing to the government rather than to private banks.¹⁶ The Iranian government is among the few to have very little foreign debt. It uses its state-owned banks to make loans and credits available to industrial and agricultural projects. The most unique feature of the Iranian banking system, however, is that it follows the Islamic proscription against usury. That means loans are made interest-free.¹⁷

At least, that is true in principle. To make their system work with the prevailing scheme, Islamic economists have had to come up with some creative definitions of "interest." Assuming Iran can develop a workable alternative model, however, it might well threaten the usury-based banking system that now dominates international finance and trade. If governments were to start doing what banks do now – advancing "credit" created out of nothing with accounting entries – they could sidestep the hefty interest that is the principal cost of most government programs today. It has been estimated that eliminating interest charges could cut the average cost of infrastructure, sustainable energy development, and other programs in half.¹⁸ Third World economies might finally escape the iron grip of the international bankers, bringing a 300-year global banking empire crashing down.

The size of the stakes was suggested by Tarek El Diwany, a British expert in Islamic finance and the author of The Problem with Interest (2003). In a presentation at Cambridge University in 2002, he quoted a 1997 United Nations Human Development Report which said:

Relieved of their annual debt repayments, the severely indebted countries could use the funds for investments that in Africa alone would save the lives of about 21 million children by 2000 and provide 90 million girls and women with access to basic education.

El Diwany commented, "The UNDP does not say that the bankers are killing the children, it says that the debt is. But who is creating the debt? The bankers are of course. And they are creating the debt by lending money that they have manufactured out of nothing. In return the developing world pays the developed world USD 700 million per day net in debt repayments." He concluded his presentation:

But there is hope. The developing nations should not think that they are powerless in the face of their oppressors. Their best weapon now is the very scale of the debt crisis itself. A coordinated and simultaneous large scale default on international debt obligations could quite easily damage the Western monetary system, and the West knows it. There might be a war of course, or the threat of it, accompanied perhaps by lectures on financial morality from Washington, but would it matter when there is so little left to lose? In due course, every oppressed people comes to know that it is better to die with dignity than to live in slavery. Lenders everywhere should remember that lesson well.¹⁹

That could explain the big guns trained on Iran, and the tightening of economic sanctions against it. Dominoes that won't fall into the debt trap must be pushed. Like in the brutal attacks in Lebanon in July 2006, the military targets in Iran are liable to be economic ones – ports, bridges, roads, airports, refining infrastructure.²⁰ The threat posed by Iran's alternative economic model will be obliterated by blasting it back into the Stone Age.

Putting Up Dukes

Read the handwriing


In his post at http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/, the cowboy laid out the case of US miscalculations in its proposed war with Iran. Apparently, Russia and China are not going to just sit on the sidelines and allow the US to drop bombs on the Persians. Russia and China's own energy interest are at stake in the matter. The Cowboy points out that America may not be quite prepared to take on these twin behemoth's along with Iran. I'd say that is quite the understatement to, say the very least. I think however that what we are up against, if our leaders are stupid enough to attack Iran, is far worse than we can imagine.

America is the most evil country in the world as evidenced by the fact that we remain the only country to drop nuclear bombs and fire bombs on civilian people. The world has never forgotten that. The people of the world have been preparing since that day to get even with America. People hold grudges for centuries. (Witness the controversy over the Congress designating the Turks responsible for the Armenian Genocide from almost a hundred years ago). They may not articulate their animosity towards the United States openly, but believe me, its there. Put yourself in their shoes.

You can be sure that both the Germans and the Japanse deeply resent America. They have organized their economies to support their complete redemption from their ignominious humiliations of WW2. Both countries have developed warfare technologies that exceed our own. If you haven't been paying attention, you should observe that Japan is the leader in autonomous robotics to the point they could easily convert their expensive "toy" robots to mechanical soldiers. It is no telling what type of technologies the ingenious Germans have developed secretly that they have not shared with America. Remember how quickly they ramped up during the war.

The Chinese are a different story. They have fought us to a draw in two wars in Vietnam and Korea. Now we have given them all our basic technology which they have the option to improve on. We are practically totally reliant on their "cheap" labor for almost everything we use and consume. They can easily peer into almost every aspect of our industry via the American based internet, while at the same time we have practically no access to their industry because the internet has not infiltrated into the inner recesses of China as it has in America. China has over 1.5 billion people that we know about. We don't even know if their census is reliable. That is five times more people than we have to fight a war. At the minimum they have five times more engineers than we do, five times more workers, five times more physicists, five times more soldiers, etc. etc. etc. There is no way our intelligence services can monitor and analyze everything that's going on in this world against us especially while we are busy with middle east wars.

For years China has had to listen hypocritical haranges from US diplomacy vilifying them, before they developed the vast economy that they now have. And similarly for the Russians.
Putin is not playing at all. We really need to wake up and smell the coffee and chart a new course.

The problem with our leaders is they are more afraid of the American people than they are of our foreign enemies. The 'powers that be in America' are afraid to share technology readily available, for fear it will empower the individual American too much and they won't be as easily manipulated. 'The powers that be' found out with the internet empowering Americans takes away some of their own power. Since the internet its pretty damn near impossible to keep any secrets again. Even foreign intelligence agencies are leaking American secrets on the internet when before they were able to totally control the dissemination of information. If for instance, American people realized that there is truely such a thing as "free energy" easily available and that we don't need oil from the middle east, it would take from the so called authorities a significant portion of their power over the masses. 'The powers that be' in America maintain a reliance on oil to keep the American people dependent on them providing it and paying them to provide it. The only value American money has is a function of how much oil it can buy. A probem has now developed because the foreign owners of the oil are wising up to realize there is nothing they want to buy from America. We don't produce anything of value anymore- just abstract values like democracy and freedom and equities, etc. The best cars are produced in Asia and Europe; and that's why everyone in the world want yen and euros. The only really productive company in the US is Apple computer and they should be designated a national treasure.

Economics

True Value

Money is supposed to be a reflection of true value. Ina real sense, the only thing of real value are materially real things. Abstractions do not have any value. What are real things? Commodities represent real things So do any derivative of the earth itself. That is why gold and the precious metals; and crystals represent the highest values in monetary terms, even though for the most part they have no functional significance except for their rarity. If you scan the planet to find out what it is people value, on a practical level, it is not money. Rather it is the things that you can exchange for with money. For example, food, transportation, water, environment, clothing, and other things significant to sustaining and perpetuating life itself are the things that we truely value.

This understanding leads to the obvious conclusion that the most valuable thing there is, is life itself. Each individual life is the holder of all true value. All other real values are derived from the effort to survive and perpetuate life.

Our Constitution recognized this when it codified the power to create money, which is a reflection of The People's value. The Preamble begins in stating: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." In Section 8 of the Constitution it states that "The Congress shall have Power To... coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." The Constitution does not give the power to create money to anyone else, nor does it give the power to give the people's authority to anyone else. In fact the Constitution establishes that money shall be based on some amount of Gold! So it appaers that the right to create money is derived from the people and invested in the Congress. On its face it would make it appear that the Federal Reserve, which is a private Bank is unconstitutional. There is no provision in the constitution for the Congress to delegate Constitutionally granted authority to a private corporation, no more than there is Constitutional authority to grant the right to exclusively create money to any single private individual. If it were the case that a private individual was invested with that power then 'We the People' would all become the slaves of the individual who could create money. No less is true for a corporation that has that type of power, as it is manifested in the Federal Reserve Bank. Thus we are the slaves of the owners of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The whole trick to it, is that anybody can promise the grantors of the power to print money, anything they might desire, while they become unaccountable for their granted priveleges to 'We the People'. That is what has precisely happened with Congress. The Congress has unconstitutionally given the Federal Reserve 'We the People's' power to create money, while the Federal Reserve rewards individual Congressmen whatever they might desire. It is a total sellout of The People.

If anything, it is 'We the People' who should be paid to use our money creating power and not just for our representatives to be compensated. We should be compensated directly based on th amount of circulating money, much as the Federal Reserve levies interest and taxes on The People.

Who should be required to pay us? Well, other than the people, you have corporations and other fictitious entities that have no value in and of themselves. All fictitious entities that utilize the People's money should have to pay 'The People'. Its a simple economics model! That means that all these corporations, trust, foundations, etc would have to pay the people for use of their value in the commercial markets. That would reverse the circumstance wherein the people are slaves to the corporations and make the corporations slaves to the people.