Adapt To Nature Not The Other Way Around

Looking at the state of our planet no one can deny that the self proclaimed social engineers in our midst have made a mess of it. And as if this were not enough, the same clowns are now trying to peddle the idea that the calamities they created have so far been a great achievement. And it is on top of this achievement that they want to stand and to further engineer, as they say, the technologies of the future in order to improve on the planet even more. And they call their effort "being green" as in natural green, the color of clean living on this planet of ours.

And the clowns, together with those who cheer them in the Congress and in the media, want to accomplish all this not by adapting technology to make it work in harmony with the laws of nature but by doing things the other way around. They want to convert the products that nature has created through its own processes into products that will live in harmony with their own twisted fantasies. To illustrate how they want to do this, I pick and bring into contrast two projects -- one good and one bad – from among those that are being considered for future implementation or future expansion.

The bad project is the electric car which represents the saddest chapter in this whole saga because it was put together under a pressure brought about by the unholy marriage between the mighty and the mightily ignorant. As for the good project, it is the one proposed by T. Boone Pickens, a well thought out plan that is based on a genuine understanding of the laws of nature and a healthy respect for them.

The lesson that will come out of this discussion will be to the effect that if you can accomplish something using a form of energy in its natural state, you must not convert the natural resource you have into another form of energy or else nature will punish you by exacting a percentage of that energy. Therefore, you must adapt technology to work with nature rather than bend nature to make it work for your vision. But this is what you will be doing if you attempt to convert the natural resource you have and try to harmonize it with the fantasy that is bubbling inside your head.

To see and to grasp the background that is necessary to assimilate all this, let us look at the following example. The kitchen of an Italian restaurant runs on natural gas where the chef uses 7 cubic feet of it to cook his daily pot of pasta. One day, the owner of the enterprise decides to modernize the place so he renovates the kitchen and makes it run on electricity. The chef now uses 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity to cook the same pot of pasta; and this raises the question: Which method is better for the economy and by extension for the planet?

Ignore how much money 7 cubic feet of gas cost today or how much 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity cost because several extraneous factors determine these prices; and they change from place to place and from time to time. What is of interest to us is which of the two methods uses less units of energy as this must be the ultimate determining factor.

The conversion table says that the natural gas utilized to cook this much pasta amounts (in round figures) to about 7,000 British Thermal Units (BTU) and we do not question that. But when it comes to electricity, the conversion table which says that a kilowatt-hour is worth a little under 3,500 BTUs does not tell the whole story as demonstrated by the efficiency measurements taken and published all the time. And so we look for an explanation as to how and why the discrepancy occurs.

As it happens, the power plant supplying the restaurant with electricity runs on natural gas so we pay the folks down there a visit to see how the gas is converted into electricity. To our surprise we learn that water is brought to a boil by a hellish fire - not to cook pasta like at the restaurant - but to make steam and to maintain it under pressure. A conduit channels that steam to a turbine which is attached to a generator of electricity.

The steam is unleashed with ferocity at the turbine causing it to rotate which is what drags the core of the generator; and this is how electricity is produced. The juice, as electricity is now called, goes into a step-up transformer to the high voltage power grid; and from there to several step-down transformers distributed one each in the districts of the city. And out of the transformers comes the electricity that is delivered to the end users - the restaurant being one of them.

So we ask: If it takes 7 cubic feet of natural gas to boil enough water to cook the chef’s pot of pasta, and if it takes 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity to cook that same amount of pasta, how much natural gas is used at the power station to produce 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity? Is it the 7 cubic feet that the conversion tables say it must be or is it more or is it less?

Fortunately for us, the power plant has a resident scientist who studied a subject called thermodynamics. He explains that every time you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some of it because you can never be 100% efficient. Thus when the natural gas is converted into a flame which boils the water which becomes steam which converts into the rotational motion of the turbine which produces electricity, you are down to a third the quantity of energy you started with. Thus 7,000 BTUs of natural gas will convert into about 2,350 BTUs of electricity.

This means you must begin with a quantity of natural gas containing 3 times the energy you intend to produce as electricity. In our case, we would need 3 times 7 or 21 cubic feet of gas to produce the 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity at the output of the generator. This is bad but is this the end of the story? No it isn’t because you still have to step up the voltage, transmit the electricity and step down the voltage before you can feed the electricity to the restaurant. And each one of these steps will waste still more of the energy which means that you must start with more than 21 cubic feet of gas at the power station to deliver the 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity that will cook that same pot of pasta at the restaurant.

It is to be noted that the transmission of electricity from the station to the end user wastes another 15% of the juice approximately. Therefore, when all is taken into account, you will need to convert about 24 cubic feet of natural gas into electricity to do the job with an electric stove that 7 cubic feet of the same gas will do when fed directly to the restaurant and utilized with a gas stove. And this is because whichever way the chef is asked to cook the pasta, he will need those 7,000 BTUs under the pot to boil the same quantity of water and do the same work as before.

You conclude that converting energy from one form to another is a waste that must be avoided whenever possible. And this is something you can do by converting the existing technology to run on the available energy in its natural state rather than do something foolish. And this would be to convert the energy to suit the technology that someone has drummed into your head as being cool or hot or the in-thing or sexy or whatever as you listen to the social engineering clowns talk about that which they know little or nothing at all.

And so, it shall remain a truism that no matter what is said or done, the worst example of a project now considered to render the planet green is that of the electric car which has been called cool, hot, the in-thing, sexy and what have you but not the useless thing which is what it deserves to be called. It is extremely inefficient to drive a car powered by an electric motor than to drive a car powered by an internal combustion engine using gasoline, natural gas or diesel fuel and no clown will ever change this.

Standing in contrast to the uselessness of the electric car is the example proposed by T. Boone Pickens which would convert the engine of trucks to run on natural gas instead of running on diesel fuel. Since the intent here is to reduce the reliance on imported liquid fuel, and rely instead on domestically produced natural gas, the right approach was taken. Nothing cool or hot or in-thing or sexy in this case, but the plan is intelligent, useful and workable because it adapts technology to nature and not the other way around. This is how people with an elevated IQ define "being green".

But are they listening in the Congress and in the media or are they too dumb to hear a simple message? There is a difference between being green because you’re following the dictates of the latest fad, and being green because you know what you’re talking about. Indeed, there is a time for the clowns and a time for seriousness. Give the clowns time off and let them study the subject before returning to the stage. And no matter what their point of view will then be, let them show they have learned enough to contribute to the debate, not learned so little as to mess up the planet more than they already have.

To Borrow Or To Print Is The Question

When the government needs more money than it collects, it has three options by which to get its hands on additional moneys. It can borrow from lenders abroad, borrow from its own citizens or it can print the money. As always, however, there are advantages and disadvantages associated with each option but the purpose of this discussion is not to survey all these. Rather, it is to look at the effect that each option may have on the generations to come given that they will be affected by the decisions taken today.

To be clear what is involved here, we must understand that when the government borrows, it does so in the name of all the people under its jurisdiction. Therefore, while the lenders may differ from time to time, the borrowers remain one and the same. They are the people who live in the jurisdiction today and those who will inherit the place and make it their home tomorrow. So then, what will be the effect of today’s decisions on these people?

First option: When a government borrows from abroad to finance its current operations, to pay the interest on loans taken earlier, to redeem notes that have matured or to do all of the above, such government acquires a liability that will most likely last a long time. As a result, future generations will be saddled with a financial burden that will restrain their development at a time when many others, including the lenders, will most certainly be progressing.

Second option: When a government borrows from its own citizens, it widens the gap between those that have much and those that have little. This is because those that have much do most of the lending. The principal of the money remains intact because what is lent to the government remains the most secure loan in the jurisdiction. And to it will be added the interest which the government will pay out from taxes imposed on everyone, including the have not. Moreover, when the government borrows, it competes for the available funds, pushing the interest rates higher and hurting everyone in the process.

Third option: When the government prints money, it dilutes the value of the currency and makes everyone suffer as a result. These are the citizens who live in the jurisdiction and the foreigners who hold the currency but live abroad. Everyone pays the price, pays it in full and pays it now but that will be the total effect of this option because what is handed to future generations will only be a devalued currency and no obligation. However, as we shall see in a minute, a condition must be fulfilled for things to unfold smoothly and make this option the best one to take.

Before we go with this discussion to another level, we must develop an understanding of the concept of money. However, instead of giving a formal, dictionary-like definition of the word, I shall give a definition that highlights the relationship which exists between money and economic activity because the purpose of money is to facilitate these activities. And the best way to do this is to tell a story, so here is one.

Surrounded by subsistence farmers like yourself, you are a peasant living with your family on a plot of land in a far off kingdom. Since no one can grow the variety of the all the foods that a family needs, you each specialize in a limited number of items and you exchange among yourselves that which you have in surplus for that which you do not have. This is called barter.

One day, you realize that you need to establish a standard that will give your barter consistency, predictability and fairness. Since butter is the most cherished item of all, you make a pound of butter the unit against which the value of everything else is measured. Thus, if a goat is deemed to be worth the equivalent of 25 pounds of butter, and a cow the equivalent of 75 pounds, you exchange with your neighbor one cow for 3 goats, and so on.

Years later, commerce grows in your neighborhood so much that it outgrows the system of exchange you have enjoyed up to now. You are no longer satisfied with the fact that the items you wish to exchange are not always available at your closest of neighbors, that all the items do not come in season at the same time and that your needs vary depending on the composition of each family and the preferences of its members. Therefore, you decide to upgrade the system of exchange so as to make it more flexible and more universal.

At first, you and your fellow citizens of the neighborhood give each other personal IOUs that can later be exchanged for what you will need rather than barter on the spot what you have at the moment. Of course, for this to happen you must be trusting of each other, which you do, because you are neighbors.

But as you widen the neighborhood, new people who are mostly strangers to you, come into your sphere and make commerce even more complex. You set up a bank that prints the IOUs, a move that renders them even more impersonal. From now on the bank guarantees the IOUs, heretofore called banknotes, and the trust which used to exist between individuals now exists between the bearer of the notes and the bank itself. Welcome to the world of financial modernity.

The notes take on the name of money and those who have it can buy from anyone, do so anywhere in the jurisdiction and do it throughout the year. Appropriately enough, the unit of this money is called the "Pound" as in a pound of butter, it is printed in several denominations and minted in fractions thereof. Your system of exchange has now reached maximum flexibility as well as maximum universality. Welcome to the world of financial heartaches.

Now this question: Since trust is at the basis of the ancient IOUs and the modern money, what happens if someone learns to print exact counterfeits of the bank notes? Well, you must be aware that such acts do exist, that they create problems of trust but that the authorities take measures to guard against them.

This is reassuring but the reality is that the system may grow so complex it runs the risk of operating more on counterfeit money than real money without anyone noticing the transformation. This can happen, oddly enough, because of something called credit which comes from the Latin word meaning trust. And this word was chosen because to give someone credit is the same as to advance them money based on trust alone. What follows are two stories that further illustrate this point.

When in a small town the breadwinner of a family falls ill and stays out of work for a while, the store owners extend credit to the family so that they receive the goods and services to which they were accustomed. The courtesy is maintained until the breadwinner gets well and goes back to work. No IOU or banknote is printed or given out here but money is created nevertheless because trust was extended to be exchanged for goods and services as if money was used to complete the transaction.

Similarly, when in a big city, a jobber ships a million dollars worth of goods to a department store and sends an invoice to be paid in 30 or 60 days, the jobber trusts that the store will pay the money in due course. The invoice itself is not money but the trust that the seller exhibits in the buyer’s ability and willingness to pay constitutes the creation of new money. Some people prefer to call it liquidity but it is money by another name.

Thus, trust which is an elastic emotion varying in size with the amount of goodwill that exists inside an economic jurisdiction, is the currency by which the modern system of finance is made to work. And the more trust there is among the public, the more credit there will be in circulation. But like real money, an abundance of credit can cause the value of goods and services to rise thus forcing the stock of the companies producing them to inflate. And when things go too far in this direction, they create economic bubbles that end up in a burst.

The first casualty resulting from this development is the widespread loss of trust. To overcome it, the central bank and the treasury flood the system with real money, each using the tools available to it. If, instead of borrowing money, the government chooses to print it, one of two things will result: Either the government will drain the system of the excess liquidity it has created which will bode well for the economy or it will continue to print money which will have the effect of counterfeiting it. And this will trigger a hyperinflation and the inevitable economic collapse.

Thus, while the third option is the best one to take because it does not involve paying interest, its success rests on draining the money from the system once the emergency for which it was printed no longer exists. The trouble is that without the restraint of having to pay the money back and pay it with interest, the door is flung wide open for the politicians to keep printing money like counterfeit artists. And so the onus will be on the public to put pressure on the politicians to prevent them from turning the country into another Zimbabwe.

Lessons From A Decade Never Lost

In the wake of what is happening to several economies in the world today, the question to ask is whether or not the Japanese experience known as the "Lost Decade" of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties was a similar phenomenon. There is no doubt that the tendency to deflate has been a common factor to the Japanese economy of then and to the economies of today, but do the similarities go beyond that?

It seems to me we are making a mistake painting everything with the same brush, and here is why. What hit the Japanese economy was a combination of the situation that exists in China today and the one that exists in the United States. Like the Chinese of today the Japanese had a high rate of savings, and like the Americans of today they had an asset bubble that affected real estate and the stock market. But neither the Chinese nor the Americans now suffer from the two phenomena at the same time.

The result for the Japanese people, the corporations and the government has been that they continued to enjoy a near full employment; and their income levels remained healthy enough to continue saving at a high rate. So then, where was the problem? To answer this question we need to identify who may have suffered from the apparent deflation. Well, it was the speculators who suffered the most but no Japanese or foreign tear was shed on their behalf and no heart ever bled for them.

In fact, the Japanese crash which undoubtedly happened by accident may well have been maintained afterwards by design. The deflation certainly came at the right time for the country because the world was developing in a manner that threatened to leave Japan far behind; thus the country’s need for a jolt to make it take a drastic turn and set itself on a new course.

What was happening were the emerging tigers of Asia. Some were fully revved up by then such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore while others were beginning to rev up such as Malaysia and Thailand behind whom trailed the promising economies of India, Indonesia, Philippine and Vietnam.

All the while, Japan was becoming an ageing society which, by culture and by tradition, did not take in the immigrants that could have rejuvenated the population and invigorated the economy. Anyone could see therefore that within a generation or two, Japan was going to become not only the sick man of Asia but a walking geriatric corpse preparing itself for burial.

And so, before getting there, the Japanese decided to put the wealth they had accumulated into a kind of trust fund that will serve them as they go through the upcoming phase. They invested in the emerging economies that threatened their dominance and where the American competitors were investing already even though the latter did not expect a fate similar to the one looming over Japan.

For their plan to succeed, the Japanese needed a regime of easy credit that could be sustained for a decade or more because it takes this long to establish a foothold in a foreign country and longer to cement a lasting presence. To have easy credit for an extended period of time you must maintain a deflated economy and this is what the Japanese had during the time they needed to have it which raises the question as to whether the deflation was maintained by design.

To see that this is not just a rhetorical question but one that has standing, we must realize that the Japanese had an alternative to this course, that they tried it but that it failed. The alternative was for their country to become the hub of scientific and technological innovation not only in Asia but the whole world. Japan could then age graciously and still maintain a dominant economy.

However, it was recognized at the time that because of the nature of their culture, the Japanese were not driven to innovate as much as the Americans whose society was built on the shoulder of the risk takers that came to it from around the world. And so the Japanese lived and prospered for a long time by taking the American scientific breakthroughs and adapting them to make products they could sell to the American consumers and to the rest of the world.

Then came the big change, or so said some Japanese enthusiasts. They said the country succeeded in developing a generation of non-conformist youngsters who were thinking outside the traditional Japanese box and were now ready to take on their innovating counterparts in America. In fact, said the enthusiasts, the country was developing a Fifth Generation computer that will make the super computer of the time look like the abacus of antiquity.

But as predicted then by yours truly, despite the fact that American experts from academia were visiting the research centers in Japan and coming back with glowing reports, things did not work out for the Japanese. When all was said and done, they had not developed the generation of computers to dwarf everything before them nor did they develop the scientific base to leave everyone else light years behind. In fact, the accompanying claim they made which was that they were adapting the American breakthroughs and creating a new product every single day turned out to be short-lived if not a bogus claim altogether.

Unable to redesign and construct a Japan of tomorrow that will be distinguished by continued progress in science and technology, the Japanese adopted the principle of "if you can’t beat them join them" and so they did by investing in the emerging markets they once thought were a threat to their dominance. In retrospect, they were wise to choose this path rather than engage in a losing battle against their fate sustained only by idle fantasies.

If there is a lesson for America in all of this, it is that economic miracles can happen to an individual that wins a lottery, a prospector that hits a gusher, a speculator that makes one lucky trade or a small nation that discovers it is sitting on a natural resource very much in demand. But such miracles cannot happen to a large country with a population the size of the United States.

There was a time when science and technology in the hands of one country could make a difference. It was a time when you could use breakthroughs to secretly develop weapons that would subjugate underdeveloped societies sitting on vast reserves of natural resources. You would colonize these societies and plunder their wealth to build up your own society. But this era is now gone and has been since America’s back was broken in Vietnam, dragged there by the colonial French, and broken again in the Arab World, dragged there by the never quitting Jewish Establishment.

Consequently, those who are in charge of pulling America out of its current economic slump must recognize that in a large country, the service part of the economy exists only because it stands on the goods producing sectors of the economy. Take the latter away and the former dies a slow death; and you end up with an economy that looks like the Third World. This is beginning to happen to America because the country’s natural resources have almost been depleted and because manufacturing has been neglected for some time now.

Also, innovation is not going to create resources out of nothing nor will it manufacture in America the kind of products that no one can manufacture elsewhere. In fact, everything that is manufactured in one place can be outsourced to another place and will be if not looked after. Thus, America must now view itself as a somewhat underdeveloped manufacturing economy, different from the other underdeveloped economies only in the sense that it does not need outside help to redevelop.

What America needs now is the political will to embark on a massive program to rebuild its industrial base. To do this, you bear in mind two things. First, the best futurists who came armed with vast amounts of knowledge in math, science, technology, industry and economics were never able to accurately predict the future. Second, you build an industrial base from the bottom up and not the other way around.

Thus, the government bureaucrats in charge of industrializing America must stimulate the labor intensive, capital preserving low tech industries such as food processing, leather, furniture, building materials, home appliances, home entertainment and the like, all of which represent more than 90% of the products consumed in an economy. This will require prior negotiations with the trading partners so as to avoid a trade war, a subject discussed in previous articles.

In the meantime, the innovations and the high tech products will be taken care of by the private sector because when government supports the low tech industries, it creates the framework for new industries to come to the fore and be chosen or rejected on their merit by the marketplace. The product applications that will come out of this will then be developed and put to use without government input or oversight which is as it should be.

Unfortunately, there are factors sapping America’s political will, preventing her from doing what needs to be done. One factor comes in the form of clowns who command a few smart Aleck remarks but smack of illiteracy when it comes to math, science, technology, industry and economics. They write columns in prestigious newspapers and show up on television to spew superficial views about inventing America’s way into a new high tech industrial base that will thrust the nation forward at warp speed and place her ahead of everyone else. And the sad part is that these people are being aided in their fantasies by hosts that should earn a living doing anything but journalism.

Convinced that they are talking economics and not rubbish, these people describe situations in geopolitics that are as infantile as the twisted ideologies that spawned them. And they do nothing to help America manufacture a kitchen table or a scrap of the food that families work hard to put on it. In short, those idiots of the box have created a politico-journalistic Ponzi scheme that even the US Congress, which ultimately disposes of the economic ideas developed during the debates, consistently fails to recognize as the fraud that it is.

Therefore, the time has come to mothball these one-dimensional characters and to outsource them to the flatland of which they are fond; and where their effect on the civilized world will be reduced to a minimum. The day this happens will also be a happy day for America where progress will begin to be made in proportion to the destructive noise that is eliminated from the debates and the useful work that will be done as a result.

To Save The Soul Of America

When in the future they will surf the pages of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) looking at the first draft of history, December 29, 2008 will represent a day of journalistic infamy to some people but a gold mine to other people. It is not that the second group will miss detecting the infamy but that it will have made an important discovery. It will have discovered that the infamy was the reason why the superpower that was America turned into the sickly joke that it became in less than a generation.

Three pieces, two of them editorials, were published on December 29 in the WSJ, and they made allusion to the undercurrents that sweep our world today. The pieces make the allusion not because the authors meant to describe the events that shape world history but because the authors are using the events as a stepping stone to construct their own fantasies.

In so doing, the authors are demonstrating that they have become the only story there is to tell in America as they have managed to make their fantasies the foundation upon which America shapes her own history. And this became the new reality when the authors rendered America deaf and blind to everything that is not their own, then trained the nation to march to their drumbeat and theirs alone. Thus, the authors and their kind became more pertinent to the fate of America than all the forces that move the rest of the world today.

The first infamous piece in the WSJ is an editorial that came under the title: "Israel’s Gaza Defense". Right at the outset, the editors of the Journal complain about the international denunciation heaped on Israel’s acts of savagery, acts that can only be described as biblical in their proportions. The editors then quote Barack Obama’s comment that went this way: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing."

What the editors of the WSJ failed to mention was that the sleeping daughters who were maimed and killed have always been the Palestinian children and their mothers who came under the relentless fire of the Israelis, fire that was produced by the most sophisticated of America’s weapons. When Mr. Obama hinted he would do everything to stop that, he may well have signaled his intent to end America’s military aid to Israel.

And so, one would hope if not assume that the editors of the WSJ only missed the drift of this sophisticated and subtle pronouncement in the same way that they failed to realize Israel had been blockading Gaza for nearly three years now, an ongoing act of war that gave the Palestinians the right to do everything they can "to stop that." And this is in addition to the fact the Israelis violated the terms of the cease-fire more than a hundred times and murdered dozens of women and children from the air in the middle of the night, again using American-made weapons.

In any case, to bolster their argument, whatever it was, the editors of the WSJ introduced the second piece which was written by Michael Oren and Yossi Halevi under the title: "Palestinians Need Israel to Win". It may as well have been: "Rape in the Name of Virginity". Let me digress for a moment before I go further. Sometimes a writer would hit on an idea so grand it is called a tour de force because it has the potential to become a game changer. A sickly parody of a tour de force that is no game changer is called an act of intellectual self-massage (this is to avoid using another word.)

What Michael Oren and Yossi Halevi do in the article is intellectual self-massage of the most Talmudic kind, as this sort of talk has come to be known. Just look at this representative sentence: "If Israel was guilty of acting disproportionately, it was in its willingness to seek any means, even at the risk of its citizens' lives, to resolve the crisis diplomatically." Using this kind of atrocious and convoluted language, the two guys and the editors of the Journal undoubtedly fantasize that the readers will come to believe Israel bombed its own citizens disproportionately to play the diplomatic game. Well, there is only one thing to say to that: Stop what you’re doing, guys; it’s getting too pornographic to watch you operate as you do.

That statement of the authors actually reveals more than meets the eye. It says that they and their editors have been conditioned to instinctively attribute to themselves the virtues they see in others, and attribute to others the evil they see in themselves. And this leads to the conclusion that if you want to interpret them correctly, you must reverse what they say completely. This is the "rule of reversibility" as it has come to be known, and applying it to what they say is a surefire approach that leads to their thinking.

So then, what do we make of a sentence that came in paragraph 6 of the Oren and Halevi article? Speaking of the Palestinians, the two men say this: "The thousands of rockets and mortar shells … represented more than a crude attempt to kill -- they were expressions of a genocidal intent." Apply the rule of reversibility to this statement and you hear the two men confess that Israel’s intent is to wipe out the Palestinian people by creeping genocide. In fact, as far back as when Golda Meir was Prime Minister of Israel, she repeatedly said in the name of all Jews that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people.

Is there something else in the Oren and Halevi article that will further corroborate this charge? Yes, there is. Look at this passage in paragraph 11: "Israelis will rightly perceive a two-state solution as an existential threat". You see, dear reader, having operated on the principle that the Palestinians should not exist, these two Israelis now say there is no place for them and for the Palestinians in Palestine because there can be no two-state solution.

So then, what is the solution? Genocide, of course, since the Palestinians will not leave on their own accord. And this is what the Israelis are doing at this moment using American bombs and American missiles. Of course, there was a time when they openly said God gave Palestine to the Jews, and He said there can only be one people inhabiting the land. And to make their point clear, they used to run around and chant: Kill the Arabs, kill the Arabs. Now they don’t do the chanting themselves but let their moral slaves in the editorial rooms of America do the chanting as they free themselves to do the actual killing.

All what is needed now to complete the Journal’s sickly fantasy of a situation that is one of good-versus-evil is an editorial to cement the notion that Jews are good and the Palestinians are evil by nature. How to do that? Well, Palestinians are Arabs therefore the editors of the WSJ can again use the rule of reversibility to attribute to the Arabs what they see in themselves and in their friends.

And this is how they did it in the third piece they published on December 29, 2008. Under the title: "Sudan's Slaves" and the subtitle: "Adding to the list of crimes in Darfur" the Journal had this to say: "Women and girls are … forced into marriages … They used us like wives in the night and during the day time we worked all the time, [said] one woman."

This argument is so weak it does not deserve a response, but what must be tackled here is the game that America’s Friends of Israel are playing in Africa. And when you say Friends of Israel you cannot escape recalling the image of the one who calls himself Pastor John Hagee. This is a guy who goes on television and tells his flock that every Jew is a God and that every American must pick a Jew and worship him or her as they worship Jesus. Not exactly a master-slave relationship but one of Lord and his obedient slaves.

What about the teachings of John Hagee and those like him? Well, it all goes back to the time when an African American professor discovered that the Jews were as responsible for the enslavement of Africans as anyone else, and said so. The rule of reversibility kicked in and a group of self-designated Jews in collaboration with the Friends of Israel in America tried to make it look like it was the Arabs who wronged the Africans. They failed to find something in history upon which to build a credible argument so they turned to the likes of John Hagee who recruited a group of self-designated Christians to do the dirty work for them.

This latter group went to Africa, shot footages that proved nothing to implicate the Arabs, so they made a documentary anyway in which the narrator explained there was proof that the Sudanese Arabs were engaged in slavery. Later on, a whistleblower from among the group had a crisis of conscience and admitted that the self-designated Christians were missionaries who actually bought a Black child so as to attribute the crime to the Arabs.

Being who I am and having studied film and theatre rather than journalism, I was approached many times by the Canadian Jewish Establishment to do as they say, and see myself get off their blacklist then move on to where my talent will take me. One of those moments came when I was approached to participate in making a film about slavery in Southern Sudan even before Darfur had become the big story that it is today. I declined the lucrative offer that included an Oscar and possibly a Nobel Prize, and I told my contact the story of the missionaries who bought a Black child to frame the Sudanese Arabs. I explaining to her that the circles which created the Biafra horror a few decades ago when oil was first discovered in Nigeria were preparing to unleash a horror of the same magnitude in Sudan now that oil has been discovered there too.

One thing led to another as I discussed the subject with my contact, and this is when my memory reached back decades into the past to a time when I was a student taking film at York University. It was there that I met filmmakers from Africa who were invited to come and talk about their works. Given that I had spent a few years of my childhood in Africa where I met a few good missionaries, I was shocked to learn a terrible truth from one of the filmmakers. Talking about the missionaries, he said: They say they come to do God’s work but they are deviant people. He went on to explain that they become sexually aroused watching the footage of dying Black children with puffed up bellies, and they are not shy about engaging in self-massage in your presence as they watch the footage if they think you will keep the secret.

I said this to my contact and told her I was not interested to make films that will entertain a depraved bunch of trash made to look like human beings. She took my response to those who tried to tempt me into selling my soul as did the Hagee friends of Israel and the editors of the Wall Street Journal.

All I can do now is to publicly ask the editors of the Journal to step back from this road because whatever they believe the payment will be for selling their soul to the devil himself will not be worth it because what they will give away together with their soul will be nothing less than the soul of America.

Now They Want No Laws And No Cops

Here we stand at the start of the year 2009 as bewildered as ever about the best way to manage our affairs and maintain a civilization that is able to sustain itself and provide us with a style of life we deem necessary for our continued survival and development as a species. But we have been in similar situations before as the predicament we now face seems to be our perennial preoccupation.

Still, I consider myself lucky to have been born when I was because, as a war baby, I was slightly older than the baby boomers I grew up with. It meant that when they were at a stage in their lives where they developed at their fastest rate, I had the luxury of being detached from their activities and their debates when it was necessary for me to be, and the option to immerse myself in them when I felt it was time for me to do so. Thus, I was an elder observer when I needed to see what was done from a distance, or a close participant when the situation required that I add my two cents worth to what was said and take the criticism for it.

These were the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies when a new theory was being debated left and right but never formulated to the satisfaction of anyone. The political Left was saying that small criminals who engage in reprehensible activities such as rob a bank or mug an old lady do so because they are pushed by the desperate situations in which they find themselves. But as certain as a classical physicist can be about Newton’s laws of motion and energy, mainly the one which says that for every action there is a reaction equal in force and opposite in direction, the ideas of the Left caused the political Right to respond as mechanically as you can imagine and speak of individual responsibility.

The Left went on to explain that because the desperate situations were encouraged by the apathy of a neglectful society, the responsibility for the crimes fell on the shoulders of society and not those of the individuals who committed the crimes. But the Right which stood at the opposite side of the political divide went on to assert that the crimes must be shouldered by no one but the culprits themselves and them alone. And so the political divide became a cultural one as well, and a fault line was dug up between the two sides along which stood the protagonists from where they darted their hardest lectures at each other.

The political Left proposed that to remedy the situation more rehabilitation centers be built so as to take in the desperate individuals who are the real victims of the difficult situations. And the movement went on to demand that those who stray from the norm and engage in antisocial activities be given more education and better psychiatric care to boost their self-esteem and make them behave like good citizens again. Thus, together with the Leftist diagnosis came a possible remedy, something that made the population at large understand the theory better and sympathize with it to some degree. But let it be said that the public gave the theory no more weight or importance than that.

Contrasting the stand of the Left was the theory proposed by the Right which argued that more cops should be fielded on the streets of the nation to catch and to deter the culprits who, once they are caught, must be thrown in jail where they will be made to serve more time than the Leftist judges have cared to throw at them so far. In addition to that, as indeed it was legislated much later on, the criminals were treated with the notion of a "three strikes and you’re out" possibility to make them understand that society is putting a price not only on the severity of the crimes they commit but the frequency with which they may commit them even if the crimes are of minimum severity and little damage to society.

Those debates ended in a draw as no side was able to throw their darts hard enough at the other to knock them off their debating pedestals, and the social arguments did very little to determine the outcome of any election. Instead, the nation as a whole oscillated between electing more candidates of the Left or more of the Right depending on the direction from which the economic wind was blowing at the time of every election. And this reality highlighted the neutrality of the population with regard to social issues, a fact that was obvious to everyone at the outset given that the accompanying arguments were treated with no more seriousness than a curious look and a disinterested shrug.

No more seriousness, that is until now, as the political issues of the day and the social ones began to converge and to become one and the same cause. And the new situation has paved the way for those who champion the interests of Main Street to find themselves in the same camp as those who champion the interests of Wall Street. It is as if you were asked to imagine the head of the UAW and that of GM sitting not at apposite sides of a table bickering about a new labor agreement but on the same side of the table facing a hostile foe that takes a sadistic delight at interrogating them from the opposite side of a congressional chamber of torture.

And in fact, this is what happened as the old antagonists sat shoulder to shoulder and sang in unison from the same book of hymns to fight the battle they together unleashed against a looming economic crisis which promised to disintegrate the republic of the free and the rest of the developed world alongside those whom they believe are yet to be free and be fully developed.

More astonishingly than this is the fact that what is happening now is not only that the political winds have shifted in direction but that the views of the Left and those of the Right have reversed themselves and the protagonists have swapped their traditional positions. The Left is now asking for more regulations and more inspectors to police the one and only street that is known as Wall Street, a move that parallels the increased number of cops that the Right used to call for in order to police all the streets of the nation.

On the other hand, the Right is now asking for less interference on Wall Street by any authority whatsoever because, as it says, it still believes in the power of the invisible hand that Adam Smith wrote about to come to the rescue and correct the situation. The hand will do the work in its own subtle ways and will do it when the time is right, says the political subgroup of the Rightist movement, even though the economic subgroup of the same movement is beginning to question its old assumptions.

Of course, you can tell that a publication such as the Wall Street Journal was on the side that lectured on individual responsibility and more cops on the streets of the nation. And so here is the funny part that is not funny anymore as the Journal has tried to pick up the pieces following the implosion of the Ponzi scheme of the century; that scheme which was revealed in the wake of the near collapse of the planet’s economy. And bear in mind that these were a scheme and a collapse that were not the work of the antisocial elements of society but the work of the socialites who mingle with each other and mingle with no one else whether you see them partying in upscale Manhattan or you catch them socializing in similar places everywhere else on the planet.

And so it was with their usual flair for showing authority over the subject they are discussing that the editors of the Wall Street Journal declared the following: "The real lesson here is about men, not markets. Human nature doesn't change, and crooks will always be with us … As Shakespeare understood, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." That’s ourselves in the plural which here means all of society. You see my friend, these editors are now saying that the responsibility for the crimes committed on Wall Street must fall on the shoulders of society and not the shoulders of the individuals who commit them. And they no longer insist that the crimes be shouldered by the culprits themselves and them alone. This is what is called doing a 180.

The Journal published this declaration on December 15, 2008 in an editorial titled: "Madoff and Markets" and a subtitle that went this way: "Shakespeare is a better investor than the SEC". But go over the entire editorial, my friend, and you will see that not a single word was said about going after those crooks to jail them or even revoke their right to trade again.

In consequence of all this, it is not too difficult to conclude that in the understanding of the Wall Street Journal, the stars that were exonerated by Shakespeare are nothing more than the invisible hand of Adam Smith. And who would understand what Shakespeare understood more than the Journal for, when they speak of the playwright, you can take what they say to the bank or better still, take it to Bernard Madoff who will invest it for you with the same flair and authority that the Wall Street Journal is showing on matters relating to Shakespeare.

You may do that if you want or you may give the situation a more critical look and conclude that the Wall Street Journal advocates a theory that was not alluded to by William Shakespeare but one that was attributed to another famous Englishman, one named Charles Darwin. But let me hastily add that Darwin is innocent of the many interpretations that were attributed to him or to his theories, let alone the new twists that the Journal seems to inject into the debate. And these are twists that boil down to this: The world will be better off without regulations to restrict the mighty crooks, and will be better off without cops to go after them when they commit the kind of crimes that only they are capable of committing.

Darwin never said that survival to the fittest is a condition that can be emulated or that must be nurtured, yet this is what the Journal is advocating when it calls for less regulation on Wall Street or no regulation at all. And given that the most fundamental belief of the Conservative movement is to the effect that government exists to protect the people from each other, the journal has made a mockery of Conservatism by violating this belief. And the journal commits such violation every time it advocates that the predators on Wall Street be given free range to feed on those who cannot protect themselves from a savage capitalism that is more savage than it is capitalism.

Which leaves us with one puzzle to solve: To which philosophy does the Wall Street Journal adhere anyway? In other words, do these people know what the heck it is that they believe in? Do they believe in anything at all?