Copyright © 2006 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org. May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution to author and website. (4 July 2006; minor edits 13 July 2006, 17 July 2006)
Contents
Miscellany: Commentary on Recent Events and Reading. 1
On Neale Donald Walsch’s Home with God. 2
Middle-East Tourism in Indonesia. 13
Israel and Palestine – Will It Ever End?. 15
Israel Will Not Negotiate with Terrorists – Now That’s a Laugh! 16
The Cruel Practice of Exporting Labor 18
The Dutch “Get Smart” about Immigration. 22
Lip Service to Saving the Environment – Another Case of “Nero Fiddling while Rome Burns” 27
Pollution of the Atmosphere by Jet Airplanes – Full Steam Ahead! 31
Bikinis Celebrate Sixty Years. 33
Round Up Illegal Immigrants? – Not Just Impractical, but Quite Unnecessary. 36
The 2006 Australian Psychic Expo. 39
I arrived in Bali on June 30, and my flight back to the US does not leave until July 6. I have been using this “dead time” to catch up on some reading. One of the books that I spotted in a local bookstore was Neale Donald Walsch’s new book, Home with God in a Life that Never Ends (Hodder Mobius, London, 2006). I have enjoyed reading other books of Walsch’s in his “Conversations with God” series, and so I purchased it.
As in his other books, Walsch presents some interesting metaphysical views. He does not cite the source of his material, but it appears to be speculation, drawing on various “New Age” sources (e.g., Jane Roberts’ Seth books, such as Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (Amber-Allen Publishing and New World Library, 1972, 1994)). I do not believe his material to be “revelation” or “channeling” from a high spiritual source, since I have too many disagreements with it. After I read the first three books of the Conversations with God series, I wrote a brief review, relating his views to some of my own, with particular reference to my environmental concerns and planetary management. Some time later, I wrote an essay exploring the difficulty of applying Walsch’s “relative morality” to a personal life. A portion of that essay was pornographic, however, and I have never published it.
In this brief article, I will not summarize Home with God, but simply cite a few of Walsch’s views and comment on them.
Walsch’s ontological view holds that three important aspects of existence are Knowledge, Experience, and Emotion. His “Knowledge” corresponds roughly to my term “Universal Consciousness,” and his “Experience” corresponds roughly to my term “Physical Existence”, in my recent article, “On Symbols.” Walsch writes: “[Walsch] What is the purpose of life on earth, from the soul’s point of view? [God] I can tell you in four words. Your soul is seeking to experience what it knows. Your soul knows that it never left God, and it is seeking to experience that. Life is a process by which the soul turns Knowing into Experiencing, and when what you have known and experienced becomes a felt reality, that process is complete. Home, it turns out, is a place called Completion. It is the Complete Awareness of Who You Really Are through the Complete Knowing and the Complete Experiencing and the Complete Feeling of that. It is the End of the Separation between You and the Divine. This Separation is an illusion, and your soul knows this. Completion can therefore be defined as the moment when Separation ends, the moment of your reunification with Divinity.”
I do not agree with Walsch at all on this point. In his view, souls are set apart from God in some fashion (individuated), and their objective is to “get back to” or reunite with God. Lots of people share this view. In my view, however, the purpose of life is to experience, to feel emotions, as someone (Walsch, perhaps?) once put it, “for God to experience being ‘not God’ (i.e., sense existence in a physical world filled with barriers and limitations).” Soul individuation and reunion with the “essence” of God may be a part of the process (cf., Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls books), but it is not at all the purpose, the objective, the goal.
Walsch believes that whatever problems or challenges are faced in a person’s life must be satisfactorily addressed, and that if a person avoids facing them, e.g., via suicide, he must return in another life to address these same problems. He writes (God speaking): “Then you will do the most ironic thing. You will give yourself another physical life in which to deal with what you did not deal with in your most recent one…. Suicide is the use of death to escape, but it creates the same life all over again, with the same challenges and experiences.” From this point of view, life is a “gauntlet” to be run, and if we do not “get through” it, we must try it over and over again until we do. That view is not only terribly depressing, since life is viewed as a contest or course we must pass to go on, rather than an experience, for which completion / fulfillment occurs simply by having it, whatever it is. In Walsch’s view, if a person fails to “deal with” the challenges of a life, then he is forced to try again – in essence, he is punished for his failure to deal, by having to “take the course over.” In my view, the person who simply cannot cope with a miserable existence and “checks out” has selected one path, one set of experiences, for dealing (or not dealing, if you prefer) with the problems and challenges he faced. In this case, refusing to deal with the problems was the experience he chose, and that experience is “complete.”
Michael Newton’s views on the journey of souls seem more reasonable. Some souls are “timid souls,” who reincarnate seldom, if ever. Such souls may be satisfied to simply “preview” a life or perhaps “hitch a ride” on a physical creature’s mind for a brief time, rather than “melding” itself to a human brain for a lifetime, with no escape until the death of the body. Other souls relish physical experience, and can’t wait to “get back in the game” (such souls are “risk-seekers”; they live intensely and tend to die young). Some souls wish to experience a full range of physical experience, from “Conan the Conqueror” to “Mahatma Ghandi,” and they have every opportunity to do so. Some souls, at least at certain stages of their development, are attracted to excitement and violence, whereas others are attracted to the attainment of peace and serenity.
The key concept here is action. If a soul incarnates and simply chooses (and is able) to “sit in the corner” for this life, then he has essentially wasted that life, although that modus operandi is certainly, in its own way, an experience of sorts. The “full” life is one that is filled with a rich, physically and emotionally stimulating variety of experience, which is realized through action. It does not matter, however, what that experience is, or even whether you have it at all – it is not at all necessary to keep coming back into physical existence (i.e., reincarnate) until you “get it right.” You don’t ever have to come back at all. All lives represent paths through physical existence back to spiritual existence, but some are much more exciting than others. Walsch’s view, or characterization, is that some paths are more “arduous” than others, not more “exciting” or “fulfilling” than others. His view is that certain challenges must be faced in some acceptable fashion in one life, before the person is allowed to go on to a new life. Newton’s view is that a soul previews alternative lives, selects one (or does not select one), and then “binds itself,” or “melds” to the brain, for the duration of that lifetime. The soul knows quite well what it is getting into, in each human life (role) it chooses to play. This concept is essential to absolving “God” from blame for the suffering of life, because each soul sees a preview of the life and chooses it (and, in exchange for the privilege of the “ride,” must stick with it until the brain-death of the human host). The shortcoming of this point of view is that the soul and the physical human body are (may be viewed as) distinct entities, and each experiences suffering – the human being as the principal actor and the soul as an observer. While the view of having the soul select a life on the basis of a “preview” may absolve “God” from blame for suffering of the soul (since the soul chose it), it does not absolve Him of the blame for the suffering of the physical body, which is “separate” (may be differentiated from) the soul. Gazelles die horrible deaths, as many human beings do. God – the universe – is totally responsible for this. Pain and suffering are endured (or, at least, risked) by physical life, which would be meaningless without them. It is rather pointless to try to absolve “God” from blame for pain and suffering, since they are essential ingredients of material existence, along with pleasure and joy. When you are tempted to “blame God” for your misfortune, it may be helpful to recall His remark to Job when Job complained of his harsh and undeserved treatment: “Where were you when I created the Universe?” Some things we do not fully understand, from our physical-existence point of view.
It is instructive in this context to review the meaning of the word “karma” (which Walsch does not use in this book, by the way). The American Heritage Dictionary defines karma as: “The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny.” From this definition, it is clear that the emphasis is on action, much more so than on destiny or fate. The actions taken in a life define the life. They are in fact the destiny or fate. The medium is the message. The destiny or fate is not some sort or reward or punishment. You do not have to “do it over until you get it right.” The action is the destiny. The destiny is not some reward or punishment for “getting it right,” nor even Walsch’s “Completion” – it is simply the action.
Walsch’s exposition is very confusing at times. He defines three levels of experience: the conscious, the subconscious, and the superconscious (and a fourth level, the supraconscious, which represents experiencing all three previous levels simultaneously). The conscious level is our usual level of waking consciousness. Walsch continually speaks as if the conscious level (our physical being) can make choices (such as the timing of death), and can “create,” when he is in fact referring to the superconscious (the soul) (or perhaps, to a force beyond or above the soul). Physical human beings cannot create anything at all (except, perhaps, mental images such as thoughts, dreams, daydreams – but even those may be from (ascribed to) an external source). They are not “co-creators,” as many New Age authors, including Walsch, like to say. All that they are capable of doing at this level of existence is moving matter around and directing energy (or causing the conversion of matter to energy by crashing fissionable material together). If you (the conscious “you”) are stricken with paralysis from a severed spinal cord, there is nothing that you (the physical you) can do about it but die. You cannot “choose” to get rid of the paralysis. Moreover, souls too have very limited powers of control or creation – they can “latch onto” bodies as observers, and experience what the body experiences, but that is about it. They may communicate a sense of presence to the physical body, but they cannot control it.
As a physical human being (third-density being, in Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s terminology), you possess certain physical powers, and you appear to have free will, but you have no ability to create. Walsch’s dialogue seems to be directed toward helping the conscious being (physical human being) deal with death, but almost all of his discussion is oriented toward the superconsious being (soul). Forget the soul. It is hardly a factor in your physical existence. The essence of your physical existence is just what you perceive in your waking state. A soul may be along for the ride (melded to your brain), but it is not controlling you. At most, it represents a voice of conscience (or voice of temptation), or a “presence.” To some extent, the relationship of your physical being to the soul melded to your brain is symbiotic, but the essence of the relationship is that it is more in the nature of a parasite, like a lamprey or limpet or remora, along for the ride.
When you think of your physical existence, relate it to the existence of other physical creatures, such as gazelles or lions, which are considered not to have individuated souls (but rather, like whales and dolphins, “group” souls). They experience many of the same emotions that you do. The gazelle experiences sheer terror as the lion sinks its fangs into its throat and chokes the life from it. The lion experiences the satisfaction of a good kill and a delicious meal. Your physical life is very similar. The only difference is that you are highly intelligent, and that an intelligent individuated soul has melded itself to your brain. But that soul is just along for the ride. It is not directing your life. It is simply sharing, or feeding on, the physical experiences – the physically based emotions – that you undergo. The essence of your physical being is just what your five senses are telling you.
Some authors (e.g., Laura Knight-Jadczyk, David Jacobs) refer to our bodies as “soul containers.” From the point of view of the soul, that characterization may be on the mark, but it diminishes their true character. In the absence of souls, human beings would be just as exciting and wonderful as other mammals, such as gazelles and lions. They would not be, as some have claimed, “soulless robots.” With their high intelligence, physical human beings make nice bodies for intelligent, sentient spiritual beings (souls) to “ride.” (“Possess” is not the right word here – the soul does not “possess” or “control” our bodies – it simply attaches itself (melds to our brain) and experiences what we experience.) Our bodies are not just “soul containers.” They may be that, but they are also much more. They may be viewed simply as containers by souls, who are just seeking well-matched bodies to ride, and are just using us to provide them gratification that they cannot find in the spiritual realm. Souls are, in fact, simply parasites (The American Heritage Dictionary defines “parasite” as: “An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.”)
When physical creatures die, they are gone. When the gazelle and the lion die, they are gone forever (from this “timeline,” but not from Akashic memory). When you die, your physical body ceases to function and disintegrates, as does your personality. The conscious you – the “you” you experienced – disintegrates and is gone forever. (I am being a little loose with terms here, since “time” as we perceive it does not “really” exist, and so such time-related concepts as “eternity” and “forever” and “the next reincarnation” are nothing more than artifactual semantic fictions.) The soul departs, and continues to exist, and will perhaps meld itself to some other physical human being. But “you” – the “you” that you feel, your sense of identity, your sense of existence – are gone forever. Gone like the leaves on the trees. “Gone like the knock on the door. Gone like yesterday and before.”
(The preceding discussion relates to a physical lifetime in a single “timeline.” The nature of time is different for spiritual beings from what it is for physical beings. As physical beings, we are “stuck” in a timeline or “time loop.” From a higher-density perspective, our physical plane exists “simultaneously,” so that we are not really “gone forever” after we complete a life in a particular timeline. Rather, we “exist forever” in an instant and an infinity of timelines, any or all of which may be accessed – or modified as new time lines – individually or simultaneously, from a “supra-time” perspective.)
You were used by the soul, and perhaps you got a little out of the relationship – a vague sense of accompaniment, a few pangs of conscience or temptation. Your physical body, like that of the gazelle or the lion, is a fabulous machine, a piece (or a pawn) in the exquisitely exciting game of life. A soul may have attached itself to you while you played (or were played, depending as whether you consider your thoughts as your own), but you are the player. The soul is just an accompanying observer. There is very little difference between you (the physical you) and the gazelle, except for the fact that you are accompanied by an intelligent, sentient soul, and the gazelle is not. You are a vehicle for a soul to experience physical existence (one experience of many, if it reincarnates often – and one soul of many, if your lifeline is “played” over and over again). But when you die (and the soul departs), you die just as completely as the gazelle – only the soul lives on. (Actually, the soul may depart before the body ceases all of its physical-life functions and decomposes, such as in the case in which a brain-dead person is kept alive by mechanical life-support equipment. In such cases, the soul has departed the body and the physical being has lost its sense of awareness and identity. At this point, it is nothing more than a blob of protoplasm, useless to all except the lawyers and health-care professionals who keep it “alive” for purposes of monetary gain.)
It is an error in perception to refer to the soul that is melded to your brain as “your soul.” It is not “your” soul at all, any more than a passenger in a car is “owned” by the car. You are, in fact, the soul’s temporary, erstwhile body (“container”). Your body is, in fact, just one of many that a soul may, if it chooses, take along its sequence of reincarnations on its “way back to Nirvana.” While your physical existence is just as significant and meaningful as the existence of a gazelle, to an accompanying soul your physical existence – your physical body and your mind – is of no more significance, after it has used you, than a worn-out suit of clothes that you just threw away, or a worn-out car that you just left at the junkyard.
For physical existence to be meaningful, death of the physical being must be final. When two gladiators enter the ring, it is essential (for the contest to be exquisitely exciting for all involved) that they know that if they are killed, they have lost everything – all of physical existence, their mind, personality, and body – forever (in this timeline, which is the only one of which this physical existence is aware). If you are killed in a duel, then you are gone forever (from this timeline). In order for the duel to be meaningful and exciting, you must know that it is really a matter of life and death, and that if you are killed, “you” are utterly destroyed for all time – you cease to exist. (Once again, I am being “loose” with terms. All of existence – the collection of all experiences – “exists” simultaneously and forever. I am referring here simply to our view of existence as viewed and experienced from our unique timeline.) All that remains is the “memory” stored in the Akashic records. What would be the point to your physical existence continuing? There would be no purpose in “saving” all of the leaves on all of the trees, after they died. Or in “saving” all of the fish, or gazelles, or lions. Or in saving physical human beings. They served their purpose – making emotions (feelings), making memories, or maybe just serving as part of a “backdrop” in someone else’s more exciting game – and they are no longer needed.
As a physical human being, you have the (apparent) power to move matter, but that is about it. If you have a crippling disease, you cannot heal yourself. The “universal consciousness” may choose to do so, but you cannot do so of your own will. If you are asleep, or in a coma, you cannot wake yourself. You are like a light that is switched off. Some other force must throw the switch to awaken you. You may think that you (the physical, conscious you) are in charge of your life, your thoughts, your actions, but you are largely controlled by another force – universal consciousness. Contrary to Walsch’s assertion, you do not “control” your birth, your life, or your death (although you may be viewed as having some influence over them). You do not choose your life, or your parents, or any other aspect of the physical you. Your soul does not control this, either. All it controls is whether it wants to ride you (meld to your brain) for the term of your physical life. You are not controlled by your soul – it is just along for the ride. You are nothing more than the particular “roller coaster” that it decided to ride in this fling through the amusement park of life, the “wild horse” or “bucking Brahma bull” that it decided to ride in this rodeo of life.
Walsch makes much of a person’s ability to create and control. But “you” (the physical human you) cannot create, and you have only limited ability to control. You can control by moving your body and moving physical objects. But you cannot create anything – not even the thoughts and ideas that are placed there by universal consciousness. Your relationship to the soul that occupies you (i.e., your physical body) is similar to the relationship of your toenail to the rest of your body, or to your mind. Your toenail (like your physical body) has certain functions, but your conscious mind (analogous to the soul) has little control over them. Also, even though every cell of your toenail contains the DNA that defines you, it cannot create anything. It cannot perform the functions of other organs, such as the liver or lungs. It can simply do what it was designed to do, and that is it. Analogously, your soul has virtually no control over your body and what it does. It is simply along for the ride, like a person in a roller-coaster. And although the soul may have more advanced powers of control and ability to create than you do, it has virtually no control over the physical you. That is not part of the “deal.”
So do not concern yourself with the fate of your soul. It is not “your” soul – you were “its” body for a while. When you die, you are gone. Your soul, having enjoyed / experienced your lifetime, will move on to enjoy other bodies or other soul experiences (see Newton – contemplation, reunions, life reviews). You have nothing to do with that. You were created as a physical entity, and when you die you will have served your purpose and be gone, like an apple on a tree, like a clipped toenail, or a worn-out automobile ready for the junkyard. You are not your soul. You were simply a vehicle that it used for a thrilling ride, and when the ride is over, you – the vehicle – disintegrate and disappear. The soul that rode you lives on to ride another day, but you (the conscious you) are gone.
In summary, human beings can’t create (external objects) – other than “creating” experiences and memories. Souls can barely create. Both physical human beings and souls are in a sense “physical” entities, but at different “density” levels (using the terminology of Laura Knight-Jadczyk). Souls are a higher density, and they “persist” (live on and continue to develop / evolve for a long “time”) whereas human beings are transient (grow old, die, and disintegrate very quickly). Human beings are mortal. The “gods” (e.g., souls) envy our mortality, since it gives profound meaning and significance to life, but they can never experience it directly – only vicariously as “riders” of human beings. When an interesting person dies, it is often said, “When he died, they broke the mould.” I’ve got news for you – when everyone dies they break the mold (the physical human body, including the mind and personality). Except for experiences (emotions, feelings), you cannot create anything, not even a single thought or idea, and certainly not anything physical. The thoughts and ideas that you experience are all placed in your mind by universal consciousness. You (the physical you) are, in fact, just a “container,” whether for the emotional feelings of the physical you or the emotional feelings of an accompanying soul. Of the apparent creator/created duality (in the unitary universe), you (and your soul) are the “created” component, not the “creator” part. Sorry about that.
To a growing number of people, it is becoming increasingly evident that the human species is now being replaced on planet Earth (see David Jacobs’ The Threat and Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s Transcripts from Cassiopaea for more on this). Human beings are being abducted in large numbers and their DNA is being modified to be a better match to a different race of souls from Homo sapiens. As soon as this process is complete, human souls will have lost their planetary home, and will never reincarnate on Earth again.
Here follows an article from the front page of The Jakarta Post, 1 July 2006.
VP says Mideast tourism remarks misunderstood.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla stated Friday that he did not support the use of women to attract Middle Eastern tourists, saying his recent off-the-cuff remarks were not meant to be taken seriously.
“My message at that time was that we should seek other alternatives to lure Middle Eastern tourists to Bali, Yogyakarta and Sumatra by trying to change the image that Puncak is always a destination for them,” Kalla said of remarks Tuesday at a seminar on tourism promotion to the Middle East.
“I never said that I support the use of women (to attract Arab tourists). I am just trying to encourage the use of other ways of attracting tourists, than what is practiced by people in Puncak.”
Puncak is a West Java mountain resort where some local women engage in short-term relationships with foreigners, many of them businesspeople from the Middle East, after taking informal religious vows.
As reported by this newspaper Wednesday, Kalla referred to Middle Eastern visitors seeking janda – the Indonesian term denoting either widows or divorcees – in Puncak.
Kalla’s media and press advisor Muchlish Hasyim said the Vice President apologized if his remarks were offensive to some people, but they were meant to show the reality of the situation.
[End of The Jakarta Post article.]
When I worked in Egypt in 1991 and 1992, Arab tourists to Egypt operated in a similar fashion. Of the four wives allowed them by Islam, these Arabs would take only three at home. The position of fourth wife was kept open until the man visited Egypt. He would then marry an Egyptian girl on Friday, debauch her over the weekend, divorce her on Monday, and return home, without sin. This practice not only makes a sham of the institution of marriage within the religion of Islam – it makes a sham of the religion itself.
I get so tired of the domination of the news, both in the US and around the world, by the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. Why is the endless friction between these two pipsqueak countries afforded so much news coverage? Is it because the media are controlled by Jewish interests, and that Jewish interests benefit from this intense coverage? There is no other case of conflict between two small countries in the world that gets this level of headline attention, day after day, year after year.
If it were up to me, which it is not, I would just let them “slug it out” and get it over. Of course, such a resolution – or any resolution – is not in the interests of US business, which is delighted to see the region fester and thereby generate profits from the sale of arms to both sides (and, through the endless instability, access to oil from the Arab nations that we “protect”). The length to which the US goes to keep this conflict continuing without a resolution is incredible. At the time of US President Jimmy Carter’s “Camp David” accord, Egypt and Israel were each offered three billion dollars a year to stop active (large-scale) fighting. This amount was taken from the US foreign assistance budget, with the immediate effect of dramatically lowering the amount of US aid to other countries of the world (as I recall, the donation to Egypt and Israel was six billion out of a total budget of 13 billion). And, of course, this amount was just the “domestic” assistance – military assistance was additional (and comparable in amount).
The handout to Israel and Egypt, although comparable is size for each nation, was somewhat of an affront to Egypt. The three billion was given to Israel with “no strings attached,” whereas a team of eleven accountants was reportedly sent along with the three billion to Egypt, to make sure that it was “properly” spent. It was my understanding that President Mubarek had accumulated a fortune of many billions of dollars from foreign assistance. It was rumored that he staked his claim to a share of the military assistance, and let his political cronies squabble over the domestic assistance. It would be nice to know exactly what the deal was.
On the BBC news yesterday (4 July) I heard an Israeli official state that Israel would not negotiate with the Palestine government (Hamas) over the release of the abducted 19-year old Israeli soldier, since Israel “did not negotiate with terrorists.” Boy, is that a laugh! The kettle is calling the pot black. The modern state of Israel was founded on terrorism. Many of the early leaders of Israel had terrorist blood on their hands. To turn around a few years later and sanctimoniously declare that it will not negotiate with terrorists is blatant hypocrisy.
Modern Israel honors the memory of ancient Israel well, by its ruthless land grab in the Middle East. It is not just that the Israelites, under Moses, stole the “Promised Land” of Canaan from its erstwhile inhabitants. If you read the Old Testament, you will read story after story in which the Israelites were commanded by the Lord to attack a tribe and commit total genocide against it. Sometimes, God instructed them to kill not only every last man, woman and child, but all of the livestock as well. Once, when a general took it upon himself to spare a few donkeys, the Lord smote Israel with a terrible punishment.
The Jews have applied genocide as a matter of policy time after time after time. That is their modus operandi, their preferred “rules of engagement” for dealing with other people whose land they want (as it is by many other successful peoples as well, such as the Romans in Carthage, the Costa Ricans, and the Argentineans). Is it any wonder that genocide has been applied against them, in return? Turnabout is fair play – the fact that a partial and localized version of genocide was imposed on the Jews in World War II, after their countless total genocides against whole tribes, has a ring of karmic justice. If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. It is not only the case that the Jews have never apologized for or renounced their genocide-filled history / religion as shameful, but they in fact sanctify their genocide against other peoples as a glorious fulfillment of the will of God. It is hardly fitting of a people to sanctify a thousand-year history of genocide against others, and then complain when that policy is used against them.
As Machiavelli observed, there are three ways to possess a conquered land: (1) kill everyone presently there; (2) make a contract with the former leaders of the conquered people to administer a “puppet” regime; or (3) go to live in the conquered country in large numbers (as the British did in North America, and the Chinese are now doing in Tibet). Historically, the Israelis have preferred option 1 – the “genocide” option. It is certainly the most effective, since it eliminates the intractable “problem” of the previous inhabitants (such as the Native Americans in the US, the blacks in South Africa, or the Aborigines in Australia – or the Palestinians in Israel). Sensitive to world opinion (and US financial support), they have been reluctant to exercise this option in the current situation, but they have not attempted to exercise either of the other two options, either. They have not selected any of Machiavelli’s three options, and that is why the Israel/Palestine conflict goes on and on, without resolution. Why have they not chosen any of Machiavelli’s ways? The answer is that it is good for US business – and Jewish business interests as well – to keep the region unstable and the conflict alive. Choosing one of Machiavelli’s options would resolve the conflict, and that is not in the interest of the oligarchic plutocracy that rules the world at the present time.
(It is noted that the reason why the US lost the war in Vietnam, and is now losing the war in Iraq, is the same reason the Israeli-Palestine conflict continues without resolution – none of Machiavelli’s three methods of conquest were applied.)
Update 17 July 2006. A reader sent me the following comment on the above, expressing his view that Israel has in fact employed Machiavelli’s option 2 in its conquest of the United States: “…America (USA) has been conquered. It is now a vassal state of Israel and its agents. It cannot act independently in many crucial areas, including foreign policy.”
In today’s economic view of the world, labor is simply a commodity, to be transferred across borders whenever and whenever it serves economic interests. The Philippines government has a policy of massive labor exportation. You can see this around the world, where Filipinos are actively engaged in doing jobs that local peoples do not wish to do, for pay that they would not accept.
In my recent assignment in East Timor, I worked with a Filipina lady, and I expressed to her one day my revulsion to the practice of exporting labor. It is an inhumane practice that roots poor people from their land, their culture, and their families. I was perhaps thoughtless in expressing this opinion to her, since she was Filipina and since there was little that she could do about the situation.
Evidently I am not the only person who has this low opinion of trafficking in human labor, however, for I read the following editorial on the Opinion page of The Jakarta Post, 5 July 2006.
Provide Filipinos with jobs at home, not abroad
By Neal Cruz, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Asia News Network / Manila
When President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her party of junketeers return from Spain, one of the “achievements” they will claim in the availability of “100,000 jobs” for Filipinos in that country. Big deal! Those jobs are for caregivers, who will take care of old people.
A “caregiver,” if you still don’t know, is the polite word for people whose job is to wipe the behinds of people too old to do it themselves, bathe them, oftentimes in their beds, feed them and clean up the mess afterwards.
Spaniards and people of other Western “progressive” and rich countries don’t want to do this disagreeable job, which is – no matter how you try to “deodorize” it – the most menial, the most humiliating job of all.
It is lower even than a laborer’s or servant’s job. So there are no takers for this job there. So Western countries import “caregivers” from dirt-poor countries like the Philippines to do the job for them. That is why there are many openings for caregivers in these countries.
Unlike here in the Philippines, where family members take care of their old people at home until they die, families in Western nations dump their senior citizens in nursing homes, to be cared for by caregivers – in most cases, poor foreigners – who have no attachment at all to their “patients.”
There are many such nursing homes in Western “modern” countries because the proportion of their senior citizens to their young ones is increasing.
Nursing homes are depressing places. In there, you see mostly catatonic, infirm, old people ready to keel over and croak. Every morning, the corpses of those who died during the night are carried out.
Nursing homes try to make life cheerful for their wards. This they do by holding parties and dances and games, but the old people know that their days are numbered. They are only waiting for their time to go.
This depressing atmosphere affects the caregivers and in due time they become emotional wrecks themselves.
Few people are willing to become caregivers, but for poor people, like many Filipinos who cannot find other employment, a caregiver’s job is a lifeline for their families. That is why caregivers come only from the poorest of the poor countries; they are people who are forced to accept the job because there is no other job available for them. Kapit sa patalim (clinging on to a sharp knife), as we say in Filipino.
Why am I saying all these? Because I am sure GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) and her spinmeisters will boast that by visiting Spain, she was able to generate 100,000 jobs for Filipinos. I just want to inform Filipinos what kind of jobs these are.
In due time, we will be known all over the world not only as a nation of domestics, laborers and prostitutes but also as a nation of caregivers or, as the more unkind foreigners label it, “ass-wipers.”
Why have we sunk this low, a nation of heroes and freedom-lovers reduced to “wiping other people’s behinds”? Because our government is so incompetent and corrupt it cannot provide jobs for its countrymen here at home. So Filipinos are forced to seek jobs in other countries, lest their families starve.
The Philippine economy is kept afloat only by the earnings sent home by those overseas Filipino workers. Without them, our foreign currency reserves would disappear because public officials and rich businessmen, who fatten themselves on the sweat and tears of poor Filipinos, squander foreign exchange on junkets such as the one the GMA party just embarked on. (Imagine how many millions of pesos in taxes have just been spent for the junket to the Vatican and Spain. How many hungry Filipinos would that money have fed?)
Filipino workers die working for foreign employers in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, they are beheaded in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, they fall from high-rise apartments in Singapore, they are raped by their employers in chauvinistic countries.
That is because there are no jobs in their home country and they are forced to leave their families at home to earn a living in foreign shores.
GMA should provide jobs for her countrymen here at home instead of sending them away to take on humiliating jobs in other countries, and then living it up on the earnings they send home.
[End of The Jakarta Post article.]
I consulted in the Philippines during 1978-81. At that time, the population of the country, as I recall, was 51 million. I asked my Filipina colleague in East Timor what the current population is. She told me that it was now 82 million. Whenever a country’s population reaches the point where it exceeds the solar-energy carrying capacity, its population must turn to environment-destroying technology to provide the food that it needs to survive. The Philippines passed that point long ago. At one time, a few decades ago, it was actually importing rice, when the so-called Green Revolution (i.e., the development of high-yield varieties of rice) occurred. Following the Green Revolution, the Philippines was self-sufficient in rice (its staple food) for a while, but they have now squandered the “breathing room” that the Green Revolution provided, by massively expanding their population. They are now so desperate that they must send thousands of their citizens abroad to work.
It is axiomatic that human population always expands to match the available food supply. Following every Green Revolution, there will always be a subsequent surge in the population to match the food supply. More is never enough. Through its policy of massive population growth, the Philippines government has doomed its population to poverty and exporting of labor.
The following article about current Dutch immigration policy appeared on the back page of the 1 July issue of The Jakarta Post.
Immigration minister at center of political row
By Agence-France-Presse, the Hague
Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, who was a the center of the political row that led to the resignation of the Dutch government Thursday, is nicknamed “Iron Rita” for her tough stance on immigration.
A former prison warden, Verdonck is both celebrated and despised for her “rules are rules” attitude and decisive manner.
The 50-year-old mother of two is a latecomer to Dutch politics and joined the rightwing liberal VVD only in 2002.
In 2003, Verdonk was named Immigration minister and her no-nonsense attitude personified the answer of the established political parties to the rise of grassroots populist parties in the Netherlands.
Verdonk soon set herself apart from other ministers by her decisiveness and straight-talking manner.
“For too long our society believed that (asylum seekers) were to be pitied. That is no the case. They make a conscious decision to come here and must bear their own responsibility,” she said last year.
“If we treat them as if they are needy they will act like it. I hear stories of people just begging out on the couch waiting for people to take care of them.”
The traditionally tolerant Netherlands, shaken by the brutal murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a young radical Muslim in 2004, under Verdonk maintained an increasingly tough stance on immigration and integration in Dutch society.
Among the policies championed by Verdonk was the expulsion of 26,000 failed asylum seekers, some of whom had been living in the Netherlands for over 10 years, before 2007.
Se also ruled that homosexual asylum seekers from Iran could be sent back to their country despite the fact that homosexuality carries the death penalty there.
Internationally, Verdonk is best known for introducing a test for aspiring immigrants to prove their knowledge of Dutch culture and language before being allowed to stay in the country. Germany now has a similar test and France is also following the Dutch initiative closely.
The minister also publicly spoke about imposing a ban on wearing a burka (an Islamic garment that covers a person from head to toe) in public and suggested that towns should introduce a code of conduct stipulation that only Dutch could be spoken in the streets.
She greatly disappointed Dutch football fans when she refused a request to grant citizenship to Salomon Kalou, born in the Ivory Coast, so he could play for the Dutch squad in the World Cup because she ruled he was not properly integrated into society.
“They say I am the toughest woman in the Netherlands, who takes barbaric measures,” the minister said in 2004.
Over time Verdonk, who has a degree in sociology and criminology, grew more confident in her role as minister and swapped her severe black suits for more colorful pink and red outfits.
“Rules are rules” is Verdonk’s mantra which she readily repeats in the many debates that her proposals always provoke.
Her political style causes people to either love her or hate her. In December she was even voted most popular Dutch politician in a poll of 21,000 people who lauded her straight-talking manner and reliability.
In the same poll, Verdonk also came third in the list of most unpopular politicians.
[End of The Jakarta Post article.]
I was interested in Verdonk’s view of the burka. When I worked in Egypt in 1991-92, we saw a number of women wearing burkas. Some were totally covered, including gloves on their hands and dark sunglasses covering their eyes. They were commonly referred to as “Darth Vaders.” The situation in Egypt was so very different from that in Turkey (which we visited while we lived in Egypt), where Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) introduced western alphabet, dress, and customs, and raised the status of women, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
I know personally the ire that taking a stand against traditional Islamic customs can evoke. In 1997, while I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina, US Air Airlines told a Moslem employee that she could not wear a scarf while dealing with the public. She could continue to work for the firm, just not in the “front office” dealing with the public. She protested vociferously, claiming that her “rights” to practice her religion were being violated, and that the Koran required her to cover her head hair with a scarf.
Upon reading the news coverage on this in the Charlotte Observer, I wrote a letter to the editor. I stated that I had read the Koran from cover to cover (twice, actually), and that there is absolutely no requirement for Moslem women to wear scarves, or even to cover the hair on their heads. The only passage that I found dealing with dress is one that admonishes women to “cover their adornments.” Since the only parts of a woman that differ from a man are her breasts and genitalia, I assumed that this passage meant that a woman should cover her breasts and genitalia. Men and women both have hair on their heads, so the passage could not possibly refer to that.
You would not believe the caustic response to my e-mail by other contributors to the Observer’s editorial page. The Observer published one that I recall that said something like, “Who is this guy Joseph Caldwell? What does he mean by sticking his nose in this?” It was, like all of the negative responses to my views, an ad hominem attack on me personally, saying absolutely nothing about my view, position or argument.
The Dutch are finally waking up to the fact that they have been destroying their culture by mass immigration. America has doubled its population in the last 50 years by mass immigration, admitting about 150 million people admitted from alien cultures all over the world. America’s leaders are a “ship of fools,” who are willing to destroy American culture for the almighty dollar. It is a shame that they cannot see, as the Dutch have realized, that mass immigration destroys our culture and environment and destabilizes our nation. All of the 9/11 terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center were Moslem immigrants. Immigrants kill many other American citizens every year. They often refuse to learn English, or convert to Christianity, or even wear Western clothes. They crowd dozens of people into houses built for a family of four or six. They send money back to their home countries. They sponsor new immigrants who further degrade our environment and destroy our culture. They create “anchor babies” to assist their obtaining US citizenship. They engage in the “marriage scam” to obtain US citizenship through marriage. When will our leaders see what they are doing? Perhaps they already do, and are afraid to say anything that would offend the wealthy oligarchs who own the country, and who profit from mass immigration, caring not a whit that it is destroying our environment and our culture.
It is axiomatic that nothing will be done to protect the environment that impedes economic development. The government will pretend that it is taking steps to protect the environment, when in fact all that it ever does is pass measures that temporarily reduce or slow environmental damage. They will never do anything that results in a significant overall or permanent reduction of economic activity or development. In fact, most of the measures that they impose, such as the use of “scrubbers” on smokestacks, actually increase gross domestic product and wealth for the wealthy. They will never allow any environmental action that causes a net reduction in economic activity or material wealth. [By the way, I am fully aware of the fact that the violin (“fiddle”) was not invented until long after Nero’s reign.]
Here follows an article that exemplifies this fact. It appeared in the 3 July issue of The Jakarta Post.
Thesis shows danger of Jakarta peri-urban areas
By Adianato P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post / Jakarta
The outer areas of Jakarta, where shopping malls stand next to rice fields or slums, have always been interesting subjects for photography. When these areas were built, though, few realized their existence, coupled with poor land use planning, would further damage the environment of the capital.
Mediana Johanna Hendriette Uguy’s doctoral thesis in the environment program at the University of Indonesia argues that Jakarta’s peri-urban areas emerged spontaneously, without proper spatial planning, to handle a massive outflow of people from Jakarta.
Peri-urban areas, which exist in several cities in Asia, are characterized by the intermingling of urban businesses such as supermarkets and industry with rural activities such as agriculture.
While the Jakarta administration has no control over peri-urban development outside its borders, Mediana said, the sprawl has serious consequences for the city.
“It leads to the elimination of green areas, conservation areas and productive land, and also destroys natural and social environments,” Mediana explained last week.
“The root problem is with governmental policy, which can’t keep up with the dramatic and fast-moving transformation of these areas.”
Her thesis is based on her research on Cimanggis subdistrict in Depok, south of Jakarta.
She said the high cost of living in Jakarta coupled with limited land for expansion had prompted a massive migration of the city’s residents to Cimanggis.
Cimanggis, with a total area of 5,354 hectares, is designated as a conservation area under a 1999 presidential decree.
The decree also names 19 subdistricts in Bogor, Cianjur, Depok and Tangerang as conservation areas to ensure the supply of ground and surface water to downstream areas, including Jakarata.
Industries that use up groundwater are not allowed to operate in the conservation areas.
Since then, the population of Cimanggis has grown about 6.3 percent per year, far higher than Jakarta’s growth of 1.4 percent or Bogor’s 3.8. [This observation seems to be unaware that as population shifts, the rates of change of small-population places will naturally be much larger than for large-population areas.]
“The rapid growth is due to the presence of housing complexes, which numbered 57 in 2002 compared to 32 in 1992. This is followed by the construction of economic facilities such as supermarkets and turnpikes,” Mediana said.
The housing complexes mostly occupy land that was previously used for plantations, rice fields, forests or water catchment areas.
Seventy percent of the residents living in housing complexes, and 55 percent of those who don’t live in housing complexes, work in Jakarta.
Unfortunately, physical development in these areas was not followed by public services. This led to knotty problems such as floods, traffic congestion and social conflicts.
Mediana said that the dependence of Cimanggis residents on Jakarta can be reduced by the administration’s efforts to promote local economic sectors, such as the agricultural sector.
She added that the local administration had not yet made the environment a priority in its city planning, or boosted economic growth to increase the budget. Instead, the area relied heavily on real estate development to balance its books.
“For example, the Depok administration set a target of raining Rp 11 billion [9000 Rupiah (Rp) = one US dollar, so this amount equals a little over a million dollars] from building permits this year,” she said.
To create sustainable peri-urban areas, she argued that the government should adopt the so-called urban-ecosystem approach.
“The city must be viewed as an ecosystem. They must apply spatial integration; balancing human activities with environmental conditions,” Mediana concluded. “People must have an obligation to maintain the environment.”
[End of The Jakarta Post article.]
Unfortunately, no government will take any action to save the environment that means that the total population or the total gross domestic product must decrease. And so the human population will continue to increase, economic activity will continue to increase, and the destruction of the environment caused by large human numbers and industrial activity will continue to increase, until the system collapses catastrophically. And that, my friends, is just around the corner.
The “ploy” by governments of letting the environment be destroyed by developers, and then claiming that it is too late to do anything, is in widespread use around the world. On a personal level, I was affected firsthand by this practice. In the early 1980s I lived in Tucson, Arizona, in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains, on the north side of town. Tucson had been a sleepy little western town of about 40,000 people at the time of the Second World War, when the US Air Force built the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base just south of town. The aviators who trained there in WWII liked the place a lot, and so, after the war, people started migrating there. By the time I moved there in 1981, the population had exploded to 450,000 people, and another 1,000 people were moving there every month.
In the “Foothills” where I lived, the land had been declared a 100-year “flood plain.” This meant that there might be a flood on average about every 100 years in that area. But Pima County did nothing to prohibit massive development in the area, so the 100-year flood plain soon became a 1-year flood plain. My house had a “wash” (or “arroyo” – a stream that flows only intermittently) running through the front lawn. This wash was always able to handle the flooding, until a developer – quite illegally – erected a development of two-story apartments some distance above the location of my home. As soon as that development was up, and the rains came, and I experienced massive flooding – the water overflowed the banks of the wash, and came to my front door. I was not the only one adversely affected by the massive flooding problem that our area now had, directly due to the new development. It was pointed out to county officials that the development was completely illegal – that no two-story buildings were allowed in that area. The response of Pima County was that “it was too late” to require the buildings to be taken down. That will always be the response of the government to environmental destruction, whether it be at the local level or the global level. It will recognize the problem “too late” for anything to be done about it. When the planet’s biosphere has been destroyed by global warming, the government will simply declare that “no one realized what was happening,” and it is “too late” to do anything about it.
You read a lot nowadays about the fact that the pollution of our atmosphere by jet planes is increasing rapidly, because of the constant and rapid growth of aviation. The Economist magazine reported recently that before long, airplane exhaust would account for a total of 15 percent of total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
Naturally, nothing of any significance will be done to stop the growth of transportation, so nothing meaningful will be done to reduce emissions from cars, busses, trains and planes. Oh, yes, they will be made more efficient, so that the amount of pollution added per passenger mile will decrease. But the number of passenger miles will continue to grow and grow and grow, as long as this insidious system continues, so that the total amount of pollution from tourism will be unlikely to decline, and probably grow as well.
In my recent trip from the US to East Timor, I was struck by the fact that most airline passengers nowadays appear to be tourists, many of them teenagers or in their twenties. They seem to far outnumber the “business” customers, at least on the route I took (through Bali). All of this travel is “discretionary.” If world leaders were serious about reducing atmospheric pollution, it would put an instant halt to this needless source of pollution. But will it do anything that might reduce mass tourism? Of course not. Allowing a hedonistic orgy of tourist air travel generates much economic activity and wealth for the planet’s wealthy elite. Tourism and air travel will proceed unabated until the oil runs out.
I read a travel book on Bali a few weeks ago, that referred to the fact that the Indonesian government had worked hard over the past several decades to develop tourism in Bali. They have succeeded strikingly – in transforming a once-beautiful, idyllic tropical island into an urban slum. Development, tourist destination, urban sprawl, urban blight, urban slum – it doesn’t matter what you call it. The fact is the same – the conversion of an idyllic functioning ecosystem into a “dead zone.”
I heard on the BBC World channel a few days a go where the bikini bathing suit was invented by an automotive engineer who worked part-time in his mother’s ladies-wear store. That is really interesting! There has been a flurry of news articles in recent days on the fact that the bikini was invented sixty years ago. Here follows an article that appeared on the 2 July 2006 issue of The Jakarta Post.
Bikinis still abreast of fashion 60 years on
By Jo Biddle, Agence France-Presse / Paris
Sixty years ago the bikini exploded onto the world, and a trip to the beach has never been the same since. Once banned in several countries as indecent, today few women’s wardrobes are complete without it.
And if women today are covering up more, it’s more out of fears over the dangers of long-term exposure to the sun rather than out of any lingering coyness, with the last itsy bitsy shreds having been discarded long ago.
One week after the first U.S. post-war nuclear tests on the South Pacific Bikini atoll, French designer Louis Reard launched his two-piece swimming costume on the public on July 5, 1946.
Made of three triangles of material held together with ties, the bikini was considered so shocking that Reard had to use a nude dancer from Paris’ famous Lido nightclub to model it, French fashion historian Olivier Saillard told AFP.
“It was banned in a lot of places at the time by countries and by several mayors in regions in France before imposing itself due to the power of women, and not the power of fashion.
“The emancipation of swimwear has always been linked to the emancipation of women,” he said.
Two-piece costumes existed before Reard’s creation. Early Greek mosaics appear to show women wearing two-piece costumes, but they were probably designed for sports not swimming. And U.S. Olympic swimmer and actress Esther Williams also appeared in two pieces in her 1930s films.
But to a bikini, size makes all the difference.
Reard’s version was smaller and lighter (small enough to be passed through a wedding ring) and most controversially stopped below the navel.
The first costume, which was made of cotton printed with images of newspaper headlines was named after the Bikini atoll, because Reard “knew it would cause a bombshell in the fashion world.”
Although Reard’s costume caused a sensation, it was not an immediate hit in a world struggling to recover from World War II with little time or available money for frivolous visits to the beach.
But by the end of the 1950s, it had become a fashion item de rigueur, thanks in part to Hollywood and star power.
“I think it was the precursor of all swimming costumes. In fact the bikini is the simplest and the most minimalist of all swimming costumes,” said Saillard, an exhibitions planner from the Museum of Fashion and Textiles in Paris, and author of the French book Les Maillots de Bain.
Some experts have dated the bikini’s phenomenal successes back to U.S. singer Brian Hyland’s 1960 summer smash hit song, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” which had American girls rushing out to the shops.
The invention of lycra in the early 1960s also revolutionized swimwear, replacing cotton, scratchy nylon and even soggy wool as the bikini’s material of choice.
Another milestone was passed in 1964 when Sports Illustrated first used a bikini-clad model on its front cover, says American writer and socialite Kelly Killoren Bensimon who has written The Bikini Book, laden with pictures celebrating the bikini’s 60th birthday.
Since then the bikini and its wearers have passed into legend, becoming iconic images of 20th century culture.
“This bikini made me a success,” said Ursula Andress, with a huge amount of understatement, of her role in the 1962 James Bond classic, “Dr No” in which she slinks from the waves in a white bikini, a knife slung casually round her hips.
And who can foret the sensual Brigitte Bardot in her bikini in the legendary 1956 film And God Created Women, or Raquel Welch’s wild little fur number One Million Years B.C. in 1966, which turned her into a best-selling poster girl.
“The bikini is a snapshot of fashion in the second half of the 20th century, at once scandalous and forcing women to become ever thinner,” said Saillard.
“The bikini transforms women into an object of seduction and desire, such as garage pin-ups. Buton the other hand it shows that women are becoming increasingly independent and masters of their own bodies.
“In fact the biggest gesture by women to prove their independence is when in the 1970s they throw away their bikini tops.”
Today fears over skin cancer as well as the changing use of the beach as a place for sport, rather than for tanning, means topless is out and women have several costumes and bikinis to suit all occasions.
[End of The Jakarta Post article.]
The July 9, 2006, issue of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal presented an article by State Representative James E. Clyburn on the issue of illegal immigration. At one point, Mr. Clyburn states, “Common sense tells us that it will be impossible to round up and deport the millions of undocumented workers currently living in the United States. Those who have been allowed to remain in the country for years should be allowed to undertake a transition to legality or citizenship that is transparent.”
What utter foolishness! If the US were the least bit interested in removing the illegal aliens, it could do so within a few weeks. All it has to do is make illegal immigration a capital crime, and hang an illegal alien each day. Within weeks, most illegal aliens would have fled the US, and “deported” themselves. There is no need to “round up” anyone.
Here follows a quotation from my book, Can America Survive?, written in 1999.
The $100 Solution to the Immigration Problem. The immigration problem in the US could be solved in about a week, at the cost of about one hundred dollars. How: simply make illegal immigration a capital crime. All that is required is a coil of rope for a noose and some wood for a gallows. Then, each afternoon, hang an illegal immigrant, in public. For maximum effect, the hanging could be in the original British way, with no broken neck, so that the condemned wriggles and writhes. Very quickly, illegal immigrants would “get the message,” and go back home.
Will this be done? Of course not. Americans are now too squeamish to lose lives or take lives, even in war. (See The Economist, January 22, 1999, p. 28 for further discussion of this development.) This proposal would in fact save many American lives. Illegal immigrants are criminals. The federal prisons are flooded with them. Even if it is assumed that the murder rate for the illegal immigrant population is the same as for the general population (currently about 8 per 100,000 per year), they are responsible for about 400 murders per year (8 x 5 million / 100,000 = 400). That is more than one a day. Even if an illegal immigrant is hanged every day for a year, that is only 365 executions a year. By doing this, and getting rid of the illegal immigrants, the lives of 400 Americans would be saved, every year. Ask any mother whose child has been killed by illegal immigrants whether she thinks illegal immigration should be a capital crime.
There are other ways in which immigration could be stemmed. Exile any businessman who hires an illegal alien to the alien’s country of origin. Require anyone who sponsors an immigrant for citizenship to trade places with that person, and to emigrate to his country.
The preceding examples may seem extreme and convulsive, but the eventual result of uncontrolled immigration – civil war – is also convulsive, and on a much grander scale.
The alien invasion is a war against America, but America is not fighting back. In the words of Malcolm X, it is necessary to fight back “by any means necessary” if it is desired to win.
[End of quote from Can America Survive?]
The only thing that needs to be changed in the above text is the numbers. Instead of the five million illegal immigrants the US had in 1999, it now (2006) has over 11 million. The murder rate this year is about 6 per 100,000. This means that illegal aliens are murdering about 660 people a year in the US, or over two a day. By hanging one illegal alien a day for a few weeks, and promptly motivating all illegal aliens to quickly go back home, we will in fact be saving the lives of about 660 US residents each year from murder at the hands of the 11 million illegal aliens. By its policy of allowing 11 million illegal aliens to remain in this country, the US government has committed itself to a policy of murder of 660 US residents per year. What our leaders won’t do for money!
The introduction and enforcement of capital punishment for the crime of illegal immigration would quickly solve the problem – and reduce the US murder rate by 880 per year. So would such an effective method be considered? Of course not. Illegal aliens are here because the US economy is addicted to population growth. Immigration – legal or illegal -- generates lots of wealth for the oligarchs who own the country (through construction of infrastructure (e.g., roads, buildings, homes, schools, hospitals) and the sale of consumer goods), and they are not about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The fact that each immigrant to this country causes the destruction of one acre of natural land (by converting it to roads, parking lots, and space for buildings) is not a consideration. The fact that the US population increase of 150 million since 1950 – mainly due to immigration – has caused the destruction of 150 million acres of natural land is not a consideration. The fact that immigrants from poor countries consume ten times more commercial energy in the US than they did back home, and thereby make global pollution and global warming far worse than had they remained in their home countries, is not a consideration. The fact that overcrowding in the US is now severe, and that the quality of life has been severely degraded for the American middle class, is not a consideration.
During the period in which I was recently evacuated to Darwin, Australia, from East Timor, the 2006 Australian Psychic Expo was held at the Mirabeena Resort, a few blocks from my hotel. The Expo lasted for nine days, from June 10 through June 18. There were about a dozen psychics from all over Australia, and some Reiki practitioners. Each day, three free courses were given on a variety of psychic subjects.
I attended a few of the lectures, and had readings from three of the psychics. One of them was particularly specific in her readings. She “saw” my wife, and said that she had blue eyes and that the first initial of her name was a “J.” She was right on both counts (my wife’s name is Jacquelyn). Another psychic saw that I had three sons, one of whom was crippled. She told me that one of my sons would die, and that came to pass.
I attended the lecture on psychometry, in which one person “picks up” information about another person from physical objects that have been possessed by that person. At one point in the lecture, the lecturer asked each attendee to give some possession of his to someone else in the audience. I passed my wedding ring to the fellow sitting in front of me, and he passed me his car keys. The lecturer asked each of us to contemplate the object for a few seconds, and then describe what we saw.
What came to my mind was a scene involving a yellow-colored pickup truck. The pickup truck was on a dusty road, along the sides of which were tall trees. The dust was billowing as the truck moved along. The gentleman who owned the keys was quite impressed. He said that I had once owned a yellow pickup truck (which he called a “ute,” for utility vehicle), and he recalled the scene that I described quite well – it was a road he had traveled a number of years ago, about an hour north of Alice Springs.
FndID(97)
FndTitle(Miscellany 27: On Neale Donald Walsch’s Home with God; The Dutch Get Smart about Immigration; Lip Service to Saving the Environment; Round Up Illegal Immigrants; The 2006 Australian Psychic Expo)
FndDescription(Miscellany 27: On Neale Donald Walsch’s Home with God; The Dutch Get Smart about Immigration; Lip Service to Saving the Environment; Round Up Illegal Immigrants; The 2006 Australian Psychic Expo)
FndKeywords(Neale Donald Walsch; Home with God; Dutch immigration; environmental cost of mass immigration; Australian phycics)