Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Engine Of Nasty Surprises

It is one thing to be surprised because you neglected to follow the world events then got a dose of reality, and another to be surprised by something that turns out to be the opposite of what you were led to believe. The first is a bad surprise for which you may blame yourself, and the second can be so nasty you may not want to forgive those who misled you. Take for example the study conducted by the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, a study that was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Basically what the study says is that maternal mortality has substantially decreased in China, Egypt, Ecuador, and Bolivia but has increased in the United States, Canada and Denmark. The study also found that six countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and the Congo accounted for more than half of all maternal deaths in the world.

The authors of the study were so excited about the discovery that the senior author Christopher Murray, MD said: "These findings are very encouraging and quite surprising … There are still too many mothers dying worldwide, but … finding out why a country such as Egypt has had such enormous success in driving down the number of women dying from pregnancy-related causes could enable us to export that success to countries that have been lagging behind."

Before this discovery, people were surprised by another one made at the World Health Organization where they conducted a study on nutrition. They found that the inhabitants of two islands: American Samoa and Kiribati ranked first and second on the list of the people who ate the most food in the world, with 93.5% and 81.5% respectively being considered overweight or obese. The Americans, the Germans and the Egyptians were almost tied in third place with 66.7%, 66.5% and 66% respectively being considered overweight or obese. It was the discovery about Egypt that surprised most observers who could not explain it as they had fallen victims of a lie propagated by the engine of nasty surprises known as contemporary media.

To be given a picture of a world that is different from the truth is evidence of a more serious malaise plaguing America and some parts of the world today. Sooner or later the Americans will discover that there is more to the story because they neglected to learn about the developments that led them to being challenged economically by opponents they underestimated; and they will blame themselves for this shortcoming. But they will also discover to their bitter surprise that they had the key to altering the situation but were made to give it up by the people in the media they paid to tell them the truth but told them lies. And this will be the surprise that will embitter the average Americans so much, they will never want to forgive those who misled them.

At this time, the Americans are making two mistakes. The first is that they consider relative decline to be more benign than absolute decline. They cannot get their heads around the idea that when in a race what counts is not the absolute distance you or your challenger maintains with regard to the starting point but what your position is relative to that of your challenger. Thus, if America stagnates or advances slowly while Asia advances at a high speed, America declines. The second mistake is that they believe Asia’s advancements are all due to Asia’s efforts, giving little credence to the notion that they are misled by the Jewish organizations now running that notorious contemporary media which keeps on sucking the life out of America to spent it on nurturing their Zionist dreams.

What the Americans will discover when they begin to analyze what is happening to them is that their economic decline began in the year 1973 when, to retake the Sinai, Egypt launched the offensive it warned it will launch if Israel did not vacate the territory it invaded. Instead of stepping aside and letting things happen -- especially in view of the fact that the Egyptians said they had no intention of advancing into Israel proper -- the Americans participated in the Israeli war effort by re-supplying the Jewish state with weapons sent directly into the Sinai as the war raged, and by shooting at Egyptian targets to protect their supply lines. The response of the Arab nations, Egypt’s allies, was to deny the Americans the oil that fueled their war machine, now placed in the service of Israel, the self-declared enemy of all Arabs. This came to be known as the Arab oil embargo which, together with the subsequent rise in the price of oil broke the back of America’s industrial might and propelled Japan and the Asian nations into the lead as they were already producing the smaller and fuel efficient cars. Given the state of science and technology at the time, to have a healthy auto industry meant to have a healthy overall industrial economy, the reality that triggered America’s decline and Asia’s rise.

At the time, the Americans were buying the Israel-Jewish-Zionist argument that Israel and the Jews were so magnificent, it was a good thing to emasculate yourself to make them look potent. Thus, with one US congress after another acting like an assembly of low life weird idiots, the Americans emasculated themselves in an attempt to fool the world into believing that Israel and the Jews were magnificent things and that everybody should bow to them. The world did not respond to this call because it never responds to the call of traitors. What happened instead was that every congress after that believed in their own lies and they alone bowed to the Israeli-Jewish-Zionist demand by launching a never ending campaign to cut off slice after slice out of Uncle Sam’s testicles to please their master, the Jewish lobby.

Things have come full circle again and the Jewish lobby is now rerunning the old refrain but with a new ring to it. It is telling the new crop of American leaders that Israel and the Jews are so magnificent, America cannot do without them as to the development of its high-tech industries, the advancement of its financial industries, the organization of its governance set-up, the modernization of its military-industrial complex, the improvement of its agricultural and food processing industries and so on and so forth. In return, the lobbyists want America to continue to cut off slices of what is left of Uncle Sam’s testicles so as to endlessly promote the glory of Israel.

Take for example Tom Friedman’s article “Just Doing It” in the April 17, 2010 issue of the New York Times. He starts by reminding the readers of the old saying: As General Motors goes, so goes America -- and he goes on to say: “Thank goodness that is no longer true … my new motto is: As EndoStim goes, so goes America.” But what is this EndoStim? Well, let’s hear it from Friedman himself: “It’s a little start-up … company developing a … medical device. I have no idea if the product will succeed in the marketplace. EndoStim was inspired by Cuban and Indian immigrants to America. Its prototype is being manufactured in Uruguay, with the help of Israeli engineers.” And that’s the whole point of the article; to mention the help of Israeli engineers whether or not that help was substantial or was relevant at all.

Yet, for this alone, Tom Friedman says good riddance to General Motors and hello to a company whose product he admits he has no idea if it will or will not succeed in the marketplace. But it’s okay for America to go the way of this company (no matter what that way will turn out to be) because Israeli engineers are involved with it. Indeed, the worst that can happen is that America will go down a Jewish toilet which, come to think of it, is not an unusual place for America to be in given that it lives as it does with a Congress that stinks so horribly already. But seriously, why is the Jewish lobby doing this to America?

We search for the answer to that question in Friedman’s article and find that he says this: “Where innovation is sparked and capital is raised still matter.” And he quotes someone named Hogg who explains it this way: “In the aftermath of the banking crisis, access to public markets is off-limits to start-ups … [which now must be] much leaner, much more capital-efficient, much smarter in accessing worldwide talent and quicker to market in order to do more with less.” So then, how does it all come together for Israel? This is how it happened on this occasion, says Friedman: “Two Israelis … joined a Seattle-based engineering team led by an Australian … A company in Uruguay … is building the prototype … This kind of very lean start-up where the principals … access the best expertise and low-cost, high-quality manufacturing anywhere, is the latest in venture investing.”

Hidden in this scenario is a lesson to make future adventures work even better for Israel. But first, the Jewish organizations had to change one perception; they had to fuse the image of Israel with that of America so as to confuse the two in the eyes of the world. This way, the Israelis who take part in such ventures will not only help move things along but will get to own them as well on account on them being thought of as Americans. This done, what is left to do is to work on changing another perception. The Jewish organizations will have to give Africa and the Middle East a bad image in the eyes of the Americans by painting those regions as backward and hopeless places where no American should go alone without an Israeli taking them there by the hand. This way, the Middle East and Africa, which are the nearest places to Israel where low-cost and high-quality manufacturing already exist, will come under exclusive Israeli control and not under American control or even a shared one.

But how do you pull a trick like this in practice? To explain, I must recount an incident that came to my attention only lately. An Indian company called Jaipan decided to enter into a joint venture with an Egyptian company to manufacture a few items in Egypt for distribution in all of Africa. One of those items happened to be the pressure cooker. The local newspapers and the audio-visual media reported the news like ordinary civilized human beings report the news everywhere in the world everyday. But things fell into the proverbial Jewish toilet when it came to an interview conducted by CNBC-TV18. The Channel interviewed a big shot from Jaipan whose first words out of the mouth were to the effect that Egypt was a poor country. And because he refrained from throwing any more insults at Egypt during the rest of the interview, he was pressed to clarify a few things at the end of it to be reminded of his obligation. So he blurted out that they still do not have pressure cookers in Egypt.

This was not the first time I was informed that people in Asia, especially India, were told before being interviewed by the English media not to say something good about the Arabs, especially Egypt if they want to continue to appear on this network. I wrote about this bizarre manifestation previously in conjunction with America’s PBS network where denigrating the Arabs was and still is the obligatory thing to do. Some English reporters and producers across the globe even go as far as to urge the interviewees to say something bitingly denigrating, which seems to have been the case with the Jaipan spokesman talking to CNBC-TV18.

Now, having lived in sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteen forties and early fifties, the pressure cooker played a role in the daily life of our family. We cooked either with coal or kerosene which were slow and inefficient methods. To cook faster while making better use of the available energy, we used the pressure cooker. When the family decided to go back to Egypt, we pondered if we should take the pressure cooker with us. Lucky for my parents who wanted to take only what was necessary but were unsure about the pressure cooker, we met someone who had just come from Egypt. He told my parents that in Egypt most people were using electric or butane stoves having done away with the pressure cooker years earlier.

Given that the planet is now running out of energy, I gather from the Jaipan interview that the pressure cooker, which is already in Asia, is slated to make a comeback in the Middle East and Africa if not Europe and the Americas too. Thus, the correct thing for that man to have said was not that they still do not have pressure cookers in Egypt but that they had them, they did away with them decades ago and they are about to have them again. As for Egypt being poor, that man better hurry up and help raise the standard of living in India before someone notices that India is still so much poorer than Egypt, the maternal mortality rate and the state of nutrition in the two countries stand at the extremes of the totem pole with Egypt being near the top and India near the bottom.

But how does that situation affect America? Well, the reason why there are business channels such as CNBC is to give potential investors an accurate picture of what is going on in a specific region of the globe which is what many people in the English speaking world rely on for first impression. By contrast, the Asians and a few others in the fast developing countries send teams of specialists and of professionals in the relevant fields to scout those places where they get an accurate picture of the situation on the ground. When they see the right opportunity, they make the deal on the spot and start the work. This puts the Americans at a disadvantage and when, on top of this, you have the Jewish organizations distort reality in the eyes of potential partners by infesting and manipulating such networks as PBS and CNBC from the inside, America forfeits the race to others and languishes far behind. But do not be sad because it is all done for the glory of Israel, says the contemporary media.

And there is here an irony so poignant, it blows your mind. It is that CNBC is owned by GE which is in the business of making power generation equipment. All the while, the Middle East and Africa have embarked on the construction of power generation projects worth a trillion dollars over the next ten or fifteen years. Yet, all what America's CNBC can do is send to the region a young cheerleader who gets excited about car races, horse races and camel races. She reports on these events and on women in veil, on petty corruption, on insignificant acts of piracy and the like. But not a word is said about the stunning growth in all sorts of industries, especially power generation, that these places are experiencing.

You then discover that the whole asinine package was put together, organized and produced by the hate-the-Arab division of the World Jewish Congress in collaboration with Israel's office of cheap propaganda. And you wonder: How much more of Uncle Sam's testicles are they going to slice off? And you want to scream: They gotta be kiddin' at CNBC!