Pornographic Past Vs Murderous Present

“Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust?” asks Melissa Katsoulis on mainstream British media outlet The Independent (1).

Katsoulis has recently published a book about the history of literary hoaxes. She is interested in particular in a unique fictional genre; namely ‘the Holocaust hoaxers’.

On the one hand, she confesses that “special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe.” She is even willing to accept Elie Wiesel’s peculiar take on ‘truth and fiction’, that “some stories are true that never happened.”

On the other hand she says, “those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren’t ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy.”

Katsoulis suggests that perhaps what “readers seek in trauma stories is akin to what people look for in pornography: something edgy they have never seen before, followed by a spectacular resolution”. Very much like the case of pornography, the dedicated audience of Jewish pain “want to identify (safely) with what they are reading; to try on someone else’s crisis for a while and see how it compares to their own.”

Katsoulis’ reference to ‘pornography’ is indeed interesting bearing in mind that, at the time of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1960’s), a new genre of S&M pornography namely Stalag emerged in Israel. It was a short-lived, highly sexualised fictional magazine that drew its imagery from Nazi exploitation of inmates in prisoner camps.

However, Katsoulis’ reference to ‘pornography’ may raise some questions. While pornography consumption can be realised as an attempt to seek libidinal pleasure through the imagery of others celebrating their symptoms, one may wonder, what kind of satisfaction anyone might seek from the repetition of a holocaust memory? Do we look for satisfaction? And if we do, what kind of satisfaction are we after exactly? What are the symptoms that are celebrated by the story tellers, and what are our symptoms consuming them?

Instead of a culture hooked on recycled images of degradation and suffering, I would actually expect a moral lesson to surface from the Shoa. I would hope for a genuine search for mercy and compassion. Evidently, this has never happened. Putting aside Israeli barbarism in Palestine, the West and the English speaking empire have never stopped igniting wars in the name of fake values driven by the Holocaust (democracy, liberalism, ‘universal’ human rights and so on).

Katsoulis stresses that the ‘hoaxers’ “had difficult childhoods but, feeling that their truth was shamefully small, they sought the grand signifier of the Holocaust to attract the compassion that they desired.” I urge you to read Katsoulis and if you have a spare moment, check out the comments that are no less revealing.

I myself recently saw two short videos that left me puzzled.

The first was an ABC News televised interview with Herman Rosenblat,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j30sWIOMIak&feature=related

“The twinkly-eyed American pensioner who came forward with a story so magical that it lifted the heart of every cynic in New York,” was nothing but that of a compulsive liar. Once Rosenblat was confronted as a hoaxer he told the camera.

“It wasn’t a lie. It was my imagination. I believed my imagination, I believe my mind, I believe it now”

“But you know it wasn’t true” he is challenged by the ABC interviewer. “Yes”, he answers, “But in my imagination it was true”.

I guess that no one can argue with such an advanced post modernist argument.

In another video clip; Irene Weisberg Zisblatt, whose testimony is showcased in Steven Spielberg’s documentary film The Last Days, is caught lying to the camera at least twice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DHx5DnwlWk

I am not judging Zisblatt’s dishonesty or her tendency to exaggerate. It is more than likely that this woman went through hell on earth. But I do challenge Stephen Spielberg who, for some reason decided to exploit this woman in his Holywoodian attempt to archive and depict what he calls the ‘truth’ of the holocaust.

The question we are left with is why. Why does she lie? Why does he lie? Why does anyone lie? And if they lie and are entitled to believe in their figment of imagination, where can we learn about the truth? What can we learn about the truth? What is truth? Is there any truth? And if we can ever be lucky enough to find the truth or even just ‘a truth’, can we announce it without being at risk of social exclusion or even losing our freedom?

Katsoulis exposes a perverse tendency in the midst of our Western discourse. It is proved beyond doubt that our freedom to speak, and even to think, is under severe assault. I would take it one step further and argue that the Holocaust religion is the biggest current assault against humanity and humanism. First, it stops us from revisiting and revising our own living memory. Second, it stops us from drawing a universal ethical lesson from history and third, it leads to more and more genocidal crimes.

Instead of a revenge-driven doctrine, what we really want is grace and compassion.

Rather than a singular monolithic belief system promoting a deceptive notion of freedom centred on Jewish pain, what we really want is real pluralism and tolerance that would accept more than just one truth and encourage belief systems to respect each other.

In fact, the Jews, should have been the first to grasp it all. As Emmanuel Levinas suggested after WWII, Jews should have located themselves at the forefront of the battle against evil and racism. Despite there being a handful of Jewish ‘self haters’ who are committed to the exposure of the Zionist crime, this never happened. Not only did it not happen, the Jewish state is the ultimate example of a racist nationalist terrorist state.

Katsoulis is far from being a Holocaust denier. She believes that the Holocaust happened, yet she writes about the robbery of its memory. “When a writer stands before other survivors and gives as scripture what is stolen from the memories of real witnesses, they can expect little sympathy.” Katsoulis offers some criticism of the “unregulated Holocaust “industry”, where victimhood is rewarded by money and fame.”

However, I would like to extend Katsoulis’ quest. I would maintain that in fact we are the witnesses of an ongoing holocaust in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We also witness Israel preparing itself to nuke Iran in the name of Jewish history and the Holocaust in particular. In front of our eyes we see the emergence of evil on a colossal magnitude, and we are somehow paralyzed by a historical chapter that, in comparison to contemporary Israeli crimes, has less and less significance or relevance.

Rather than being subject to an idolatry of an untouchable past, we better start to be concerned with the HERE and NOW, with the genocides that are committed in our names and under our nose by Israel and its supporters around the world.

(1) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/why-would-any-writer-make-up-stories-about-the-holocaust-1803275.html

The U.S. Creeps Closer to a Police State

When word first arrived that the G-20 would be meeting in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, activists began organizing protest demonstrations. Events like this are what freedom of speech is made for. What better occasion to protest than a meeting of the world’s 20 top leaders — most of them deservedly hated — where they will be imposing policy on billions of people worldwide?

The majority of protesters consisted of labor and community groups; they encountered an army of police…literally. The New York Times paints an intimidating picture:

“…the police were out in force, patrolling on bicycles, foot and horseback, by river and by air … protesters trying to march toward the convention center…encountered roaming squads of police officers carrying plastic shields and batons. The police fired a sound cannon (a new weapon) that emitted shrill beeps … then threw tear gas canisters that released clouds of white smoke and stun grenades that exploded with sharp flashes of light.” Rubber bullets were used in a separate incident.

And:

“Riot fences lined the sidewalks. Police helicopters, gunboats and Humvees darted to and fro. City officials announced they had up to 1,000 jail cells ready after county officials freed up additional space last week by releasing 300 people who had been arrested on minor probation violations.” (September 25, 2009).

What threat required such a military-like response? None was given. The New York Times article and many like it imply that the mere existence of marching protesters warrants a colossal reaction. Of course the presence of “anarchists” is used to further scare readers into accepting such foolishness, as if this breed of protester is especially lethal (the vast majority of anarchists are like all protesters — they do not attack the police or anybody else, though some protesters respond aggressively when being confronted with the above mentioned police weapons).

The G-20 police presence is not a terrible surprise to anyone who has attended a legitimate, community-organized protest over the years. Non-provoked usage of brutal weaponry is becoming commonplace; the police-enforced use of “free speech zones” at protests — small areas surrounded by fences in some cases — is nothing new.

But the staggering police presence at the G-20 confirms that the stakes have been raised. Two turning points that deserve special attention — since the mainstream media continues to ignore them — are last years Democratic and Republican National Conventions. In both cases incredible abuses of police powers were witnessed, with the Republican Convention (RNC) showcasing the most extreme cases of state repression.

At the RNC the unlawful tactic of mass arrests were used when, in separate incidents, a public park and bridge were surrounded by police, trapping everyone in the dragnet. The documentary, Terrorizing Dissent, has excellent footage of both episodes (www.terrorizingdissent.org). Police brutality was also a regular occurrence at the RNC — including much unnecessary usage of pepper spray and tasers — while occurring alongside an even more troubling episode.

The group now referred to as the RNC 8 consists of eight community organizers potentially facing years in jail for helping organize protests at the RNC. The original charge was the Orwellian Conspiracy to Riot in the second degree in Furtherance of Terrorism (other terrorism-related charges were later added). These terrorism charges were the first ever usage of the Patriot Act toward political activists. And although the terrorism provisions of the charges have since been dropped, due to public pressure, the attempt to equate terrorism with activism has incredible, non-accidental implications for the future.

When the Patriot Act was first enacted, there was no shortage of writers and activists warning about the potential of misuse. These predictions have been fully confirmed. Both the Military Commissions Act and the Patriot Act have created what many believe to be the framework for a full-fledged police state, with the initial flurry of abuses creating a series of dangerous precedents.

One famous precedent is the so-called Telecom scandal, where tele-communication corporations colluded with the Bush-controlled National Security Agency to illegally spy on an unknown number of innocent people. No one has gone to jail for this. Indeed, as a Senator, Obama was one of many Democrats who supported Bush’s telecom immunity bill, which excuses those who broke the law while creating new powers to make spying on Americans legal.

Equally outrageous is the Military Commissions Act, created under Bush to destroy a fundamental democratic right: habeas corpus, or due process. This right says that the government cannot jail a person unless there is proof of crimes committed, while also giving that person a chance to challenge these charges in a legal court with a jury.

Bush created a separate category of person called an “enemy combatant,” which he claimed was too dangerous to be treated constitutionally. An “enemy combatant” can be tried in a military court with secret or no evidence; or they can be jailed forever without even the symbolic military trial. Of course, it is only a hop and a skip away for political activists charged with terrorist crimes to be considered “enemy combatants” or “domestic terrorists.”

Obama continues to uphold Bush’s destruction of due process. Obama has said publicly that many so-called enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay will be held “indefinitely” without being tried for their alleged crimes. Supposedly, they are “the worst of the worst.” If this is true then evidence should be produced to prove it, since anyone can accuse anybody of the most heinous crimes. Without evidence, however, such accusations correctly fall on deaf ears. But no more. Now, accusations of “terrorist activities” warrant life sentences. No crime need be committed, only a vague intention — even if such intentions were formed by the suggestions of an FBI informant and are impossible to implement. The media blares these absurd “terrorist plots” as facts, and the rationale behind the destruction of civil liberties is re-enforced.

It must not be forgotten that many of the “crimes” Guantanamo Bay inmates are being accused of are merely acts of resistance to the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, something they have every right to do.

The grossly illegal Guantanamo Bay is not being closed down like Obama promised, but moved. The equally illegal Bagram air base in Afghanistan is getting an upgrade, this according to the Independent:

“The air base is about to undergo a $60 [million] (£42m) expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.” (February 22, 2009).

Not only will Bagram continue to be an institution of terror, but also some analysts estimate that there remain 18,000 people held worldwide in foreign U.S. facilities — so-called black sites — with no legal rights. The absence of even Red Cross observation at these prisons insures that “harsh interrogations” (torture) will remain a regular habit.

The above abuses of the Patriot Act have trickled down from high-profile terrorism cases (some who have made confessions under torture), to regular usage against alleged gang members, drug dealers and immigrants.

For example, one section of the Patriot Act gives police the power to search people’s home secretly without notifying the homeowner — called “sneak and peeks,” a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. The logic again was that “special powers” were needed to track down “terrorists.” The Huffington Post reported, “Only three of the 763 “sneak-and-peek” requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases… Sixty-five percent were drug cases.” (September 23, 2009).

The illegal entry and searching of immigrant’s homes — or anyone suspected of being an immigrant — is widely known by the Latino community and continues to include the terror-inducing tactics of pre-dawn raids with guns drawn.

Once anti-constitutional behavior is applied to alleged terrorists, and extended to immigrants and people suspected of being gang members or drug dealers, such police behavior becomes normalized, and can then be easily expanded to all people accused of being “criminals.” Police are widely known to consider political activists, protesters, and striking workers as criminal types, beliefs encouraged by the mainstream media.

Which brings us to why? Why does the destruction of democratic rights that accelerated under Bush continue with Obama? With every political “why” question one must first answer: who benefits?

In this case the benefiting parties are the giant corporations that dominate politics in the U.S. The people steering these companies had good foresight: they saw that the global capitalist economy necessitated a race to the bottom for workers’ living standards. As U.S. corporations faced stiffer competition abroad for international markets, wages and benefits for U.S. workers would have to shrink, especially when U.S. corporations were investing heavily in emerging economies — China, India, etc., — for their slave wages.

U.S. corporate executives also understood that China became a police state out of necessity, so that its dollar-a-day workers could be brought into line (U.S. corporate investment rose sharply after the Tiananmen Square massacre). The trend of U.S. workers’ wages leads logically to similar conclusions.

The creation of NAFTA to extend the dominance of U.S. corporations to Mexico and Canada would also have predictably negative effects on workers’ living standards. Now, with two unpopular wars taking place and a third on the way (Pakistan) to further extend the profit margins of U.S. corporations, a breaking point is nearing.

Public money is being used to bail out banks and wage foreign wars while the recession continues to destroy jobs and drive down wages. This unpopular policy is viewed as a necessity for U.S. corporations, and Obama has no intention of reversing course. The police-state foundation created by Bush and continued under Obama is a stern warning to the U.S. working class to accept our fate or face dire consequences. It is already a fact that many people are too afraid of police repression to attend a protest, just as some workers are too afraid to be on a picket line during a strike.

Ultimately, a real democracy cannot function where there exists tremendous inequalities in wealth, where large sections of the population are in poverty. This is why democracies are not viable in poor countries: the super-rich use their power over the state — including dictatorships and mass repression — to crush social movements that challenge the status quo, as we are witnessing today in Honduras. The same dynamic is being created in the United States, where the vast majority of people are clamoring for real change, while those in the two-party system are using all means available to keep their rotten system in place.

$20 Per Gallon: Change Before Crisis Hits

Part 3: Waiting until you’re in the crisis…

Christopher Steiner, author of $20 PER GALLON, paints a sobering picture for our civilization. He’s not alone. You may view this 86 minute compelling film “Blind Spot” by Adolpho Doring and Amanda Zackem: http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/blind_spot/

I couldn’t take my eyes off the movie as I watched it three times. Once you see that documentary, you will understand exactly what Steiner, Bartlett, Catton, Tainter, Brown, Bradford, Steinberg and other top experts have tried to tell this society for 30 years. You will understand how we combine energy use and population increases to drive this civilization toward a tenuous future.

Yet, many continue thinking “Peak Oil” remains a myth. Others condemn this series with promotion of men like Stanley Meyer who created a car that runs on water. www.happymileage.com Somehow, Meyer died of food poisoning after he drove across the USA on 22 gallons of water. His secret died with him.

Another reader, Allen Miller, Klamath Falls, Oregon said, “You really should do some research on “abiotic oil.” Peak oil is a myth and an outright lie. I have been studying this for years. The Russians proved that if you drill deep enough you can find oil anywhere on the planet. Oil is made deep in the Earth and percolates up.”

If you investigate www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, you may educate yourself beyond the rhetoric, myth and hearsay. We teeter on the edge of an abyss of profound and inevitable energy dilemmas. We will experience massive dislocation as we press against all resources. The definite lack of water will become our Waterloo more than oil.

In Chapter $12 a gallon, “The tide of gasoline prices will shift Americans from the burbs to the cities,” Steiner said. “If civilization is to march forward, however, a couple of acres simply won’t be an accessible or realistic part of most Americans’ lives, nor, with high energy costs, will a huge house and yard be a desirable way to live. Our cities will regroup, renew and grow denser.”

That, in my experience, creates a kind of urban mass insanity stemming from compacting human beings into 10 million person cages not built into our DNA makeup. If you look at our major cities today, you see the highest forms of aberrant behavior, huge police forces, endless mass psychosis, murders, violence and other problems. Steiner may be too optimistic!

At Chapter $14, small towns will take revenge on big box stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s.

“The sound of Wal-Mart falling will be one that all of us hear,” Steiner said. “Wal-Mart tallies $400 billion annually. It employs 2.1 million people. About 80 percent of Wal-Mart’s suppliers are from China. The makers of the cheapest stuff, the commodity junk, such as pens, clothes and house wares, will be hardest hit. Only the U.S. can inhale that much junk. In the U.S., 10,000 ghost boxes will serve as giant rotting gravestones for the era of mass globalization and merchandising. ‘Made in China’ won’t be the ubiquitous moniker marking our goods that it is now.”

At or before $14 gallon, plastics will change from oil to corn. We will develop biodegradable plastics from corn that will return ecological balance to the world.

In Chapter $16, “Many American farms faced with high gasoline costs will go local again,” Steiner said. “Rising gas prices will be the incorrigible gorilla that trashes our complex weave of food producers, shippers and wholesalers, ultimately changing the equation for good at $16 per gallon. Ferrying Central California’s bounty to New York will be economically unsavory.”

As Americans build hot houses, vegetables will grow and sell locally. Instead of Monsanto pouring herbicides, pesticides and damaging fertilizer all over our food, you can expect healthier produce. Personally, I think Monsanto, makers of the weed killer “Roundup”, should spray it over themselves for ultimate extinction! Ah, but I digress!

In Chapter $18, hang on to your seat belts! “The advent of a true high-speed train network in America will be the ultimate sign that our world has adapted to oil’s scarcity. Its existence would signal our country’s collective recognition that the world has changed forever according to energy’s terms.”

What will cause trains to become the dominant mode of long distance transport? You guessed it! The inevitable price of gasoline at $18 a gallon! “Stagnant societies tend to stay stagnated; vibrant ones adjust, adapt and move forward,” Steiner said. “We’ll see trains flying toward their destinations at 215 miles per hour.”

IT TAKES A CRISIS TO MAKE AMERICANS CHANGE

U.S. House member, Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), said, “If you wait until you’re in a crisis, your options are limited.”

“It will take a panoply of reasons why it will take a very high price per gallon to change how our government funnels our transportation dollars,” Steiner said. “The Pentagon will not cease to be a force in the world with gas priced at $18…that’s why the military is actually ahead of many other sectors of the government when it comes to looking toward a future of high gas prices.”

“Our energy future: hydro aperitif, wind appetizer, nuclear entrée,” said Steiner. “Electricity will become the fuel of choice.”

Steiner talks of the consequences of burning coal. Humans dump 33 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year—causing horrific damage as we acidify our soils and oceans. We cannot continue that kind of environmental destruction.

In the final analysis, Steiner promotes nuclear as the safest, cleanest and most abundant energy source.

At the book’s end, Steiner creates a future world where ‘Bill citizen’ doesn’t own a car, but travels by train everywhere in the USA. Airplanes faded from the skies years ago. He boards nuclear powered ships for vacations in Europe. He monitors his electrical usage. He eats foods grown locally. Only one of his friends owns an electric car, but it proves expensive on toll roads. He finds life less hectic and more fulfilling at slower speeds.

I found this book highly informative, well-written and extensively researched. No question our civilization heads into a sobering, if not worrisome future. What we face will not be a cake walk! To compound our eventual transition to electrical mass transport and nuclear power, Steiner omitted one factor in his ‘rosy’ view of the future. The United States expects to add 100 million people by 2035. Another 100 million on top of that by 2065 and another 100 million on top of that before the turn of the century! It’s that one factor that will magnify other shortages other than oil: water and resources. That 300 million added Americans will magnify environmental destruction, climate destabilization and a host of calamities already devastating China and India.

It will be interesting to see when an American author will write the progressive calamities titled Chapter 100 million more Americans; Chapter 200 million more Americans; Chapter 300 million more Americans. For your information, one writer has written such a book: America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans by Frosty Wooldridge. Obtain a copy: 1 888 280 7715

Lockerbie & the CIA

Mainstream documentary that looks at the various scenarios surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. Was a CIA heroin trafficking operation compromised, allowing a bomb to be placed on board?

Sky Television – Conspiracies: Lockerbie & the CIA

Empty Cradles, Demographic Destiny and the Death of the West

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction. With Greece’s fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1 — “big” is not a modifier demographers would associate with today’s Greek families. In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding.

Worse still, Greece is no anomaly. Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it’s now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures. In fact, while it may seem counter-intuitive to those weaned on the stuff of Malthusian nightmares, the West is facing a population implosion of historic proportions. And the statistics are staggering. As I wrote when reviewing the documentary Demographic Winter last year:

. . . the number of children in the world is already declining . . . . Birthrates are now below replacement level . . . in approximately 70 countries; in Western Europe, the figure is 1.38, and in northern Italy and parts of Spain it is below 1. As a result, Europe’s 65-year-olds now outnumber her 14-year-olds, and one German province had to close 220 schools in 2006. Children were present in 80 percent of U.S. households a century ago; that number is now 32 percent.

Although pondering demographic malaise conjures up the image of sterile Western swingers, note that this phenomenon is, in a measure, manifesting itself worldwide. Take Eastern Europe, for example. Russia, with its birthrate of 1.4 children per woman, is experiencing a population decrease of 700,000 a year. With an even lower birthrate of 1.22, some Lithuanian officials are concerned about the eventual disappearance of their population. And this is mirrored in other Eastern European nations; Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and the rest are all turning in similar numbers.

The picture is no better in developed Asian nations. Although they’re still stuffing people into Tokyo subway cars like sardines, Japan’s rapidly graying population contracts with a birthrate of 1.22. South Koreans may have far more reason to bring children into the world than Kim Jong-il’s captives, but their 1.2 still can’t match the latter’s 2.0. And Hong Kong, not to be outdone — but perhaps soon undone — comes in second to last in the world with a birthrate of 1 even (only Macau ranks lower).

Even more surprisingly, the developing world is now following our lead. For example, Uruguay, Kazakhstan and Algeria have birthrates of, respectively, 1.94, 1.88 and 1.82. And while millions of illegal aliens still stream across our sieve-like southern border, believe it or not, even Mexico’s birthrate is plummeting muy rapido. As professional demographers have been telling us since the 1970s, the whole world is poised to experience a demographic winter.

Yet, isn’t this good news? Aren’t we dodging a real-life Soylent Green scenario of cramped, elbow-to-elbow living, strained resources and wilderness existing only in memory? This certainly has been the prevailing view for quite some time now, but there is another, more ominous side to this story. To quote demographer Phillip Longman, “The ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century.”

Let’s first discuss economic implications. Normally, a civilization can be represented with a population pyramid standing right-side-up, with the youngest people at the bottom and the age increasing as you move up (okay, we’ll forget pharaoh buried underneath). So the aged would be at the very top, with lots of youngsters down below to do civilization’s heavy lifting.

When birthrates collapse, however, this pyramid is turned on its head, with the elderly outnumbering the very young. This usually means hardship, as the young often have to care for their elders. Specifically, though, in our nation it means that the burden of paying an ever-increasing social security bill will fall on ever-dwindling young shoulders. Worse still, it can create a vicious circle: as the young pay progressively higher taxes, the financial strain makes it even less likely that they will have children. It’s a recipe for the winding down of a civilization toward the nadir of non-existence.

Yet there are problems even when social programs are removed from the equation. The young and vibrant are the worker bees; they are the inventors, innovators and creators of wealth. They drive the economy. Of course, the elderly may take jobs out of necessity or boredom, but they can match the economic engine of a peak-working-years population little more than they could match it on the athletic field. This is part of the reason why famed economist Adam Smith taught that decreasing population correlates with economic depression.

Now we come to the death of the West. Many of you know that Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, the face of 1980’s terrorism, has been relatively well-behaved for nigh on 25 years now. Of course, this may be because Ronald Reagan effected a bomb-induced attitude adjustment in 1986. Yet, such punitive action, while sometimes necessary, seldom yields a permanent change in behavior without a permanent change in vital signs. It didn’t scare Saddam Hussein or the Taliban sufficiently, that’s for sure. (Of course, they don’t wear dresses, either.) But is faint-heartedness on the part of Gaddafi the reason? Or is there another factor? Well, a clue can possibly be found in something he once said:

“There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquest. We don’t need terrorists, we don’t need homicide bombers. The 50 million Muslims will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Is this Gaddafi wearing pragmatist’s clothes? Perhaps he realizes that the West is voluntarily committing civilizational suicide, and all he need do is stay out of its way.

If so, he simply notes what civilizations from the good to the bad to the ugly always have understood, that their success largely hinges upon their ability to replenish that invaluable resource: people. For example, the ancient Romans at one point became obsessed with the idea that they weren’t creating enough babies; Joseph Stalin, hardly a pro-lifer, outlawed abortion; and the Nazis had their Lebensborn program. And even today governments are taking note of the problem. To name a handful, Russia, Poland, France and an Italian town are offering citizens substantial monetary incentives (i.e., cash and sometimes tax breaks) to be fruitful and multiply. Yet it isn’t working — and for good reason: a cultural problem cannot be solved with a political solution. Why, even demographically correct Augustus Caesar, who wielded absolute power, could not remedy the birth dearth among Roman nobility.

This almost universal concern is warranted because a people is like a species: a failure to reproduce leads to extinction. Now, this doesn’t mean that neutron bomb-like cityscapes lie in the West’s future. More likely is that its peoples will be dominated — and supplanted — by other cultures. Oh, its new master may not be Islam; it may be China, India or, even more likely, different groups in different parts of the West. The point is that while the Third World and Asia are following in our footsteps, they are far healthier demographically and may be able to recover. But we may soon be at the point of no return.

Now the question is, does this matter? If you listen to the left, our demographic demise is something to be ignored when possible and applauded when not. As Kathryn Joyce did in an incredibly snide and stupid article titled “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies,” the concern about the West’s baby bust is often chalked up to just “old-fashioned race panic.” The left’s implication is that cultural suicide is our civilization’s comeuppance.

The irony of this is that the people extinguishing themselves are leftists, people who aren’t enlightened enough to understand that their “enlightened” values will die with them. Whether tomorrow brings us a Chinese hegemon, a worldwide caliphate or, more likely, a bipolar or multi-polar world, it may be a place ruled neither by the virtues of Christendom nor the values of those crucifying her. For when the people who birthed political correctness disappear, they won’t be able to reproduce it any more than little baby libertines. Of course, also true is that the West’s glorious triumphs, such as its unprecedented respect for human rights, would also fade into history.

And this is something mature people consider. Would the world be a better place with China as the dominant force? If you have trouble with that one, ponder how the Chinese are currently raping Africa as they zealously exploit the continent’s resources. They are making European colonialism look beneficent.

Mature people also do something else — they acknowledge facts. And what bothers me about the current debate over population is the steadfast refusal to do so. If you believe that man is a pox upon the planet, be forthcoming. If you think he needs to cut his numbers by 90 percent, make your case. If you want a “Planetary Regime” to control world population — which Obama’s science czar John Holdren wrote about — stand and be counted. But, as liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Before debating where we should go, there must be an acknowledgement of where we are.

And where is this? It’s a phase civilizations have seen before, eerily illuminated by setting suns of their own design. For example, even 2000 years ago, Greek weddings weren’t all that big and fat. As Greek historian Polybius wrote circa 140 B.C. when lamenting his civilization’s decline,

“In our time, all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and general decay of population . . . . This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to the passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life.”

When I ponder our materialism, promiscuity, frivolity and selfishness, our abortion-mill archipelago that churns with Nazi-like efficiency, it occurs to me that perhaps the leftists are right — just not for the reasons they think. It’s not sins of our past that haunt us but those of our present, and maybe the euthanizing of Western civilization is, after all, our comeuppance.

Blind Spot: Save The Planet And Live On It!

Documentary movie review: part 2 of 2

Hundreds of responses poured into my computer concerning the movie documentary, BLIND SPOT, www.blindspotdoc.com. It’s amazing how millions can look at a steam locomotive bearing down on them and continue walking on the tracks away from the train so they won’t see it when it runs over them.

And so we find ourselves in our own Blind Spot as a civilization. Since it’s not happening to us right now, such as Hurricane Katrina hasn’t reached shore yet, so we continue building sand castles on the beach.

Again, I urge you to place this DVD video into the hands of our president, governors, senators and House reps of Congress.

In the most important, brilliant and electrifying documentary film of the 21^st century, “Blind Spot” by Adolfo Doring, Randal Wallace and David Gill–they conduct interviews with men and women studying human impact on this planet.

“Most assumptions we make to run our society today are false,” said Dr. Bradford, scientist. “The assumption is that we can keep growing. That is irresponsible! But our culture reinforces that we can get more.”

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, said, “It’s easier to lie to people when they welcome the lie of unending cheap oil.”

For me, a world traveler who has seen what’s headed our way, I find it particularly interesting that our whole society continues on a suicidal path when they see dramatic symptoms occurring worldwide in Africa, Asia and South America. The amount of denial at the highest and lowest levels of American society remains breathtaking.

Dr. William Catton said, “We are creating an environment on earth in which we cannot exist. The question remains will we change our population or will nature do it for us. Do we want to preserve our planet that we inherited? If so, we must change our use of energy.”

Dr. Elke Weber, Columbia University, said, “We must change our habits. A blind spot is something we don’t pay attention to because it doesn’t threaten us immediately.”

Most of us know that blind spot while driving our cars in our outside rear view mirror that didn’t catch the car coming up on us and we either hit it as we pulled out to pass or barely escaped an accident by jerking the car back into our lane. That ‘blindspot’ faces us with accelerating speed in the 21^st century.

Dr. Wolf, author of Decade of Triumph 1990s, said, “There’s no one driving the train. We don’t even know where the tracks end.”

Dr. Albert Bartlett said, “My trust in the government that it will fix things was misplaced. We need a national dialogue on what our future can be and come down with some policy statements.”

As to energy, no amount of conservation will help us escape our energy crisis. Dr. Joseph Tainter said, “Energy efficiency will not get us past our energy crisis. Jevans Paradox means that when you increase efficiency, you drive more use.”

Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over, said, “Population is the worst problem we have in the world today. As it grows, it wipes out everything we do. The earth is finite.”

Dr. Korton said, “We continue as a dominator hierarchy by violence, extreme violence.”

This profound film propels viewers into the future of what we face as a civilization. It mesmerizes and I found myself unable to stop watching it. I played it a second time and I will watch it again a third time.

We as a civilization think we can ‘get away’ with unending growth, unending oil burning and unending expansion into the natural world and our oceans without pause. We think that the current ‘ecological footprint’ for an American at 12.6 acres destroyed for every person added to support that citizen can continue without end? Can it? No, it cannot!

I invite you to watch and act on this brilliant documentary. You will be educated, inspired and activated. Send it your friends. In all great social change, it takes citizens to educate others to create a ‘consciousness shift’, which leads to a ‘critical mass shift’ and finally, to a ‘tipping point’ where the civilization moves toward a viable future.

This documentary educates, inspires and activates. You become the linchpin.

Obtain DVD: www.blindspotdoc.com

How Can You Kill A Planet? And Still Live On It!

Documentary movie review: part 1 of 2 parts

As human beings continue their destructive rampage around the planet, they find themselves facing accelerating dilemmas on every continent. No one can deny quickening traumas facing humanity in the 21^st century. Humans spew billions of tons of toxic air into the atmosphere while they plasticize the oceans, cut down the forests and tamper with nature’s environmental balancing systems.

A full third or two billion people lack adequate drinking water daily. Over 3.0 billion humans suffer from malnutrition. Over 18 million human beings die of starvation or starvation related diseases annually. Rainforests burn away and thousands of species suffer extinction annually. A laundry list of humanity’s assaults on Mother Nature encompasses 27,000 square mile dead zones in the oceans at the mouths of major rivers to three million ton floating plastic dumps swirling in the Pacific Ocean known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

In the last few years, this planet commenced speaking to us in ever sharper language with her displeasure of our actions. She hurled “Hurricane Katrina” at the United States. She’s breaking up the ice at the Arctic and the Antarctic. She will double her annual human starvation death rate in years to come. Mother Earth shrieks louder with each passing year, “You’ve got a choice. You’re messing up my surface. You can fix it or I can fix it for you. If I fix it, I will toss everything you’ve created away…including you humans.”

In the most important, brilliant and electrifying documentary film of the 21^st century, “Blind Spot” by Adolfo Doring, Randal Wallace and David Gill–they conduct interviews with men and women studying human impact on this planet. Those educators introduce humanity’s stark future if we continue on our current path. I urge every U.S. Congress politician, governor, mayor and citizen to take an hour to watch, and then, take action. I especially urge someone to bring this video to Barack Obama for personal viewing.

In the last 100 years, the human race grew its numbers six times more than in 1900. It added six billion people in the blink of a century. How? Oil, coal and natural gas increased humanity’s ability to produce more food that allowed more population. It’s known as the age of energy, yet that age slips quickly into our rear view mirrors. For those arrogant enough to think that energy won’t be a problem, I offer you the reality of our limited water supplies to be just as dangerous!

Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything, said, “We face a completely different way of living. In the past, machines took care to make food. We’ve gotten used to it. Oil impregnates everything in our lives.”

Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0, www.worldwatchinstitute.com , said, “Oil is the life line of the global economy, but reserves are shrinking and declining. Peak oil could happen next year or within five years, but it’s going to happen. It will change our world radically. It will change everything we do. When historians write about it, they will refer to it as Before Peak Oil and After Peak Oil.”

Dr. Ted Caplow, energy expert, said, “The energy crisis becomes the food crisis because biofuels compete with food production.”

Dr. Roscoe Bartlett, research and development, said, “We’re good at responding to a crisis, but not preventing it. To mitigate consequences, we should have started 20 years ago. We shouldn’t wait until we’re in the crisis.”

Dr. Albert Bartlett, author of Getting Malthus Right , “In general, people are inumerates, which means they are illiterate in terms of their understanding of peak oil. Societies have grown beyond their ability to produce food. It’s common sense that we should prepare for peak oil but this society rejects any actions.”

As I watched several of the world’s top experts educate in this movie as well as the visuals that complimented their dialogue, I sat mesmerized at their certitude and veracity. At the same time, I had seen with my own eyes through my world travels most of what they discussed. I witnessed firsthand the ‘dead zones’ around the world in the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and off the Yantze River on the coast of China where humans spew so many chemicals into the ocean that most life cannot survive. I’ve breathed the toxic air over Mexico City, LA, Shanghai, China, San Paulo, Brazil and elsewhere. It hits home more when you’ve seen what most cannot see.

Dr. Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, “Societies become complex beyond what can be sustained. When I see the U.S. society, I see decaying infrastructure, high military costs; solving problems in the short run do not solve the problem. We face loss of standard of living as well as social and political unrest.”

Dr. William Catton, author of Overshoot, “We haven’t noticed that humans are more numerous and more voracious. We changed from the species “homo sapiens” which means “man the wise” to “homo colossus” which means “too big an impact or race of giants.”

Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything, added, “There’s nothing normal going on in America today. Fossil fuels are finite and we’re drawing down that stock at a phenomenal rate of speed. This is the most serious problem to face the human race since we became humans.”

We consume, devour, gorge and destroy just about everything in our path. Americans burn 20 million barrels of oil daily. Worldwide, 84 million barrels daily! Every added American destroys 12.6 acres of wilderness habitat to support his or her life. We add 3.1 million humans to the USA annually. Within 26 years, we expect 100 million added which translates into 1.26 billion acres of destroyed habitat. We might call ourselves “homo gargantuan consumptous.”

Matt Savinar, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net , “There’s no way we can continue consuming oil. No one seems to care. How could we be this dumb? Answer: politics and lies. People rather enjoy and covet those that lie to give comfort in the short term.

In the second portion of this documentary, I found myself unable to divert my eyes from the ongoing movie while listening to the words of the spokespersons. Each one wove a different color into the fabric of our undoing, into the future of our children, into the very essence of life on earth.

Derrick Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe, “We make believe that we can have infinite human growth and the age of oil will last forever. We have to make believe that we can kill a planet and still live on it.”

Part 2: Harsh realities humans face in 21^st century

Obtain DVD: www.blindspotdoc.com

Red Oil

This True Stories documentary unravels the tangled tale of Venezuela’s oil industry, which was taken into state control by President Hugo Chavez in 2002. Filmed in the style of a Latin American telenovela, True Stories: Red Oil asks if a multinational oil corporation can deliver President Chavez’ socialist dream. This revealing film explores the greed, power and passion behind Venezuela’s State Oil corporation.

Mediaco-op / Majade – Red Oil

The Assassination of Russia

A documentary looking at terrorism against Russia.

Afghanistan – Taliban Country

Winner of the Walkley Award; IF Glenfiddich “Independent Spirit Awards” Finalist

This week’s documentary is a disturbing expose of American actions in Afghanistan. Journalist Carmela Baranowska spent three weeks embedded with the marines. She then returned in secret to document what was really happening. It’s a story of prisoners abused and villagers humiliated. This report prompted a US inquiry.

Warning: This video contains explicit language.

Next Page »