Achieving Growth In The Industrial Economies

What is clear about a modern industrial society is that it needs to maintain a minimum level of economic growth to keep the population satisfied. In the meantime, there are several ways to measure the growth of an economy because many of its aspects tend to correlate to one degree or another. However, the measure that counts the most is the indicator that correlates growth with the economy's ability to absorb the new entrants into the labor market. That is, when all is said and done, the level of employment is the indicator that best determines the state of satisfaction in a modern industrial society.

The question now is how to maintain the economy at a level of growth that equals the increase in the labor market or do better. To answer the question we first need to form a mental picture as to what an economy is and how it works. An economy exists first and foremost to produce the goods that fill the needs of society. And where goods are produced by industries such as farming, mining, manufacturing, construction, industrial transportation and utilities, a need is created to provide the kind of services that assist those industries and help them perform the best that they can.

In an industrial economy, a need is also created for another kind of service. It is that such economy forces onto society a hurried sort of lifestyle that requires services of convenience ranging from fast food to relaxation massages. It also causes the kind of stresses and diseases that require a variety of preventative and palliative medical services – psychological as well as physical. All of this makes the production and delivery of these services an inseparable part of the economy. In fact, in a modern industrial economy, the value of the services generally amounts to twice as much as all the goods produced. Thus, we begin to define an economy by the potential of its private sector to produce the goods and services demanded by the population.

And then there is the inevitable service known as government which has several levels – from the municipal to the federal – and whose duty is to administer the civic operations that range from the collection of garbage to defending the nation against potential enemies. Government also administers the redistribution of the wealth to ascertain that no citizen falls between the cracks of the safety net.

But this is not the picture that represents the whole economic equation because what is produced must go somewhere for the production to be maintained. For this reason, the complete definition of an economy takes into account society's ability to consume what it produces. What we have, therefore, is an equation that is made of two parts: there is the production side and there is the consumption side. We see from this that when the level of production in goods and services is high in a given economy, the level of consumption in this economy should also be high for the society to enjoy a standard of living that is commensurate with its potential.

Alas, things are not always this simple. They were simple enough for a short period of time at the start of the Industrial Revolution when the countries that experienced the Revolution relied on their own resources in raw material and in manpower to achieve growth. But things began to change when the industrial economies of the time saw the need to rely on the resources as well as the cheap labor of the societies that did not participate in the Revolution. The industrial nations took the actions that helped them develop their economies further, but these were actions that eventually came to be viewed as politically unacceptable and socially abhorrent.

In any case, this was the time that the economic equation was distorted. You had on one side of it a society that produced the least in terms of goods and services yet consumed the most. But for the economic equation to remain an equation, it must have two sides that equate. Because of this, you had on the other side of it a society that produced the most yet consumed the least. And what the latter produced which it did not consume went to the former whose members spent their time doing military service rather than produce the goods and services their society required. And this was the distorted symmetry that the world has called colonialism or slavery and deemed it unacceptable and abhorrent.

What happened after that was a reversal of sort. It is not that the economic equation was corrected; it is that we now have a sort of creeping colonialism in reverse that is upsetting the equation by doing the same as before but doing it in the opposite direction. What is happening, in fact, is that the advanced economies are made to pay for the habit of high consumption they never gave up, by trading their inheritance for the goods and services which are now produced in the emerging economies. While this is obviously not the kind of balance that will correct the economic equation, it is tolerated because no alternative has yet been formulated.

What all this means is that the current state of the world economies is so convoluted, it would be impossible to discuss with clarity how to achieve economic growth in a modern industrial society – be it a fully developed economy or one that is still developing. And so, to discuss the subject, we first imagine an industrial economy in isolation, one that relies solely on its own resources in raw material and in manpower.

This done, consider the following argument: Growth is achieved in an economy where you plow back into it a percentage of what you produce. For example, in an agrarian economy, you do not consume all the grain that you harvest in a given season; you save some of it and use that as seed to plant next season. The same idea applies in an industrial economy except that the operation is done not by setting aside grain or seed but by setting aside money that ordinary people save rather than use it to augment their consumption. The money thus saved is then borrowed by people who invest it and help grow the economy.

All factors being equal, the more that a society saves, the larger the growth that can be achieved. But when it comes to making a choice as to how the money should be apportioned between the various parties, we find that the parties are many, the factors they bring to the table are numerous, and the conditions under which an economy may find itself are varied. Thus, we realize that we face a daunting plethora of permutations from which to choose. So then, how do we sort things out? And how do we combine the factors that will lead to the correct choices? Well, the marketplace of a free economy has proved to be the best allocator of resources, and we should continue to let it make the difficult decisions.

But there is still the matter of having to decide what percentage of the nation's production known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) should be transferred as taxes from the private sector to the government. And when this is done, we must decide how much of that money should go toward the building and continued maintenance of the soft and hard infrastructures of the nation. Just as important, how much of the tax dollars should go toward the entitlements and the safety net that some people call redistribution of the wealth?

These questions are so important, we need to step back and focus on a narrow aspect of the economic engine. It is this: What helps make an economy hum is (first of all) the availability of capital – called money, and (second of all) how easily this money is circulated through the economy – a phenomenon called velocity of money. Thus, what matters is not who has the money at any given time but who will make it circulate at a higher velocity. That is, what matters is who will spend the money or invest it faster than someone else? On both these counts, the government will outdo everyone else which is why there should be no cause for alarm when the government raises the tax rate. It will circulate the money out of its treasury as fast as it takes it in.

Now, considering that the banks make money available for borrowing to those who do not need it because they are wealthy to begin with, and considering that the level of borrowing decides how much capital there is in the economy, we see that the wealthy determine the availability of money, which is half the formula that makes the economy grow. On the other hand, we know that the less wealthy members of society have “a higher propensity” to spend the money that comes to them – if and when it does – thus circulate it faster; and this is the other half of the formula that makes the economy grow. But we see a disconnect in that neither side gets the two halves of the formula. And so, this is the area where we look for a solution.

We ask: Why is it that the wealthy seem to go on strike some of the time, and sit on the money or invest it abroad rather than invest it locally? It used to be that the wealthy borrowed money to start new enterprises and hire people to make products and services that the local population was eager to buy. But things have changed in this era of globalization, an era in which the opportunities as to where the money can be invested are more numerous and more varied than ever before, and where the returns are potentially higher.

But the people who chase those opportunities locally and abroad are mostly financiers who push the papers and pull in the profits without running any of the operations themselves. They could also be corporate raiders, the kind that seek local enterprises going through a difficult moment. They buy these enterprises cheaply, borrow against them with the pretext of refurbishing them but then lay off the workers and prepare to liquidate the enterprise.

They sell the parts of the company to the highest bidders (usually foreigners who buy the production machines and the patents,) pocket the money and look for the next opportunity. To accomplish all this, they would have borrowed money that could have gone to medium and small enterprises, to the people who would have hired locally and made the products that fill the needs of the local population.

To reverse the situation and put an end to those destructive practices, legislation must be introduced that will force the banks to lend to the medium and small enterprises at a rate that is more attractive than what the financiers and the big businesses get. Prime rate must be offered to those who help grow the local economy while subprime rates will go to those who exploit the bad situations and make them worse so as to get rich in the process.

In some cases, the chance to borrow should be denied outright to the people who have had a track record of malpractice in the field. All the while, a good percentage, perhaps as much as 80 percent of the money lent to businesses, should be allocated to medium and small enterprises as a condition for the banks and the other financial institutions to borrow from the Central Bank.

When this is done and the economy runs at close to full employment, there will be more money coming to the treasury in the form of taxes, and there will be less demand on it for the purpose of serving the safety net. And no one will fuss about how much is collected in taxes or how the money is redistributed.

Until this happens, the government should be there to help those who need it so that the specter of what is unacceptable or abhorrent never again loom over society.

Justice By The Laws Of Rupert Murdoch

On the first day of December in the year 2012, the editors of the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece under the title: “The Palestinian Mirage” and the subtitle: “A futile U.N. gesture that violates the 1993 Oslo Accords.” It is a response to the resolution passed by the United Nations a few days earlier recognizing Palestine as a state.

As can be seen, the piece is about the law. It can also be seen that nearly 20 years have passed between the Oslo Accords and the move by the United Nations to correct the failure of a document whose reason for being was to dispense of the Palestinian issue in a few short years. Why then are the editors of the Journal dismayed at what the U.N. has done now? Did they want the Palestinian question to remain unresolved for ever?

In answering that question we get to understand why the Palestinian issue was not resolved long ago. In fact, a thorough probing of the subject shows that without U.N. intervention this time, the Palestinian question will never have been resolved because the Jewish Lobby and the Jewish propaganda machine that is headed by the Wall Street Journal have always wanted the matter to so remain.

To get our arms around the matter, we first need to understand how the rule of law took hold on Planet Earth.

When we think of the rule of law, we think of a system of justice that is administered by the courts. We think of judges, lawyers, members of parliaments, members of congress and what have you. Well, this is only the latest manifestation of the rule of law because it all started long before that. It started with the Big Bang when the laws of physics for our Universe were first spelled out by Nature itself, and what else may have been behind Nature.

The laws of physics ruled the Universe as they governed the behavior of inanimate matter for billions of years all alone. But then, the first organisms appeared on Planet Earth and perhaps somewhere else too in the vast Universe out there, and it all happened as a consequence of those laws of physics. And this is when a new set of laws to govern the behavior of organic matter arose, superimposing itself on the laws of physics without dethroning them.

As the early organisms started to evolve into more complex species about half a billion years ago, new layers of laws to govern the behavior of each new arrival were formulated. These layers superimposed themselves on top of the laws already in existence without dethroning any of them. After that came the higher species, and they began to formulate their own rules and laws to suit their individual needs. These were the protocols by which the interaction between individuals was regulated, and by which the social behavior of the collective was governed.

When it came to mankind, the highest of all the species, its governance required that an elaborate set of rules and commandments be formulated, and these took the form of a body of laws called the “law of man.” It took roots in the caves and the jungles as well as the mountains and the savannahs of our Planet where the early members of our species first lived. In time, the body of laws grew so complicated it required the installation of members of parliament and the like to legislate and codify them. This, in turn, required that lawyers and judges be trained to administer what had become an elaborate system of justice.

But for every case that goes to court to be adjudicated by a judge and a jury, millions of other cases are adjudicated every day by the litigants themselves or by a mediator who may be a friend, an acquaintance, a member of the family or a prominent figure in the community. And this is where we see that the law of man is predominantly made on the spot by individuals, and predominantly adjudicated by them outside of the system of justice. But where a resolution cannot be reached, people go to court and seek justice there.

What this means in practical terms is that we all participate in the making of the laws that suit us, and we help adjudicate the cases that come to our attention. We get involved in the affairs of other people when invited, and recommend that the issues be resolved in a way that will serve our interest now and in the future. We do so by setting the precedent that will form the example to be followed, and hope that the table will not someday be turned resulting in the irony of making the precedent work against us.

The same applies to nations on the international scene. This has been the norm since the time that the nations of the world gave themselves an international code of conduct (called International Law) by which to govern the interactions among its members thus insure that the rule of law will be there to resolve the issues that individual nations cannot resolve on a bilateral or multilateral basis. Institutions such as the UN, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court were created to perform that function.

But because the making of the law, and the adjudication of the cases depend on the truthful representation of the facts, some people make it their business to constantly hide the facts they can hide, distort those they cannot hide and fabricate new ones out of thin air and out of their fertile imagination. The people who are most active in this area are the Jewish lobby and the Jewish propaganda machine as can be detected in the piece written and published by the editors of the Wall Street Journal.

What comes out clearly from this piece is that the game the Jews play consists of doing the unthinkable while accusing their opponents of doing just that. In the case under discussion, having called the UN action a Mirage and a futile gesture, they simultaneously attack the Arabs for rejecting the 1947 UN resolution that partitioned Palestine. But this is not all because the game that these people play is even more complicated than that.

What they do in practical terms is grab what belongs to someone else then play the carrot and stick game with that someone. They did so when hordes of them fled the Europe of the Nazis and went to Palestine illegally where they unleashed a wave of terrorist attacks against the British troops that were stationed there and the Palestinian civilian population that lived there since the beginning of time. The Jews grabbed all the land they could grab, and waved a threatening stick to the effect that they may just grab some more if not blessed and loved for what they just did.

But they also waved a carrot to the effect that they would accept peace if the Palestinians relinquished title to what the Jews had already stolen. Now these questions to you, my friend: Would you have trusted a horde of armed barbarians that crashed through the gates of your city, robbed you of your possessions and committed atrocities along the lines of those committed by the Nazis in Europe? Would you have shaken hands with a hand that was still dripping with the blood of your loved ones murdered by these hands? You would be nuts if you accepted an offer like that.

But look how the Wall Street Journal describes those events: “The Jews accepted the [1947] Resolution … Had the Arab world voted for the plan, a Palestinian state would be as old as Israel today, and within larger borders than [what] the Palestinian President now claims for his new, national, 'state.'” And guess what, my dear reader; this is not all they say which describes how the Jews play the carrot and stick game.  What they do next is prepare to play another round of the same game. The way they do it this time is by enumerating the conditions they hope will lead the Palestinians to the carrot they dutifully place at the door of the trap which the Jews will be setting for the Palestinians.

For one thing, the editors of the Journal want Mr. Abbas “to acknowledge the Arab error in rejecting the creation of a Jewish homeland [in Palestine].” They also want him to stop talking about the “...injustices inflicted on the Palestinian people since … 1948.” The editors also want Mr. Abbas to stop accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” of being “an apartheid system of colonial occupation,” of symbolizing “the plague of racism,” all of which being so obvious to the rest of the world, even the editors admit that Mr. Abbas was given a standing ovation for telling the story of his people as he sees it; as he personally lived it.

But to think that a demand of this kind is coming from a publication whose pages are filled day after day with calls to the effect that everyone who has access to a megaphone should be out there insulting this Palestinian, damning that Arab, cursing those Muslims, “sending a signal” to that enemy or kicking the ass of that other one without showing a moment's respite – is to look directly into the face of dread itself. This horror, in fact, is so horrendous, it can only be Jewish. No one, but no one on this Planet but a Jew can acquire an attitude as disgusting as this and flaunt it. No wonder these people always end up as badly as they do.

As to the waving of the stick, the Journal begins by pretending to speak on behalf of the Israelis. Never mind that in reality, the Journal speaks only for Rupert Murdoch and for the Jewish lobby in America, both of whom stand at variance with the population of Israel and the ordinary Jews in America. But the Journal editors confer on the Israelis of their imagination the final say as to whether or not “a Palestinian state is ever to come into being.” This done, they warn of the following: “Those Israelis won't be reassured by the lopsided [UN] vote.”

Still, the Journal editors do not believe it is enough to wave the stick at Mr. Abbas alone, and so they decide to warn someone else while they are at it. This is how they do it: “Israelis will know that countries such as France … and Germany will not have their backs.” Watch out Europe, the editors of the Journal who happen to have a European edition to play with, have you in their cross-hairs as of this moment.

But if you really want to blow your mind, my friend, there is something that will do it for you in grand style. It is a peek at the mental retardation and the shameless gall which are simultaneously displayed by the Journal's editors. To this end, you may read the following two passages which come in back to back paragraphs. The first passage is this: “the General Assembly voted to violate the 1993 Oslo Accords, which are the legal basis for Mr. Abbas's Palestinian Authority and require negotiations with Israel to create a state.” The second passage is this: “It will be interesting to see if the Palestinians now use their new U.N. status to harass Israelis in venues such as the International Criminal Court.”

Even if you accept the implication that the Israelis have adhered to the Oslo Accords – which they never did – to say that the General Assembly violated them after nearly 20 years of negotiations that went nowhere is to say that a judge cannot alter the terms of an accord which proved to be worthless, or say that a legislator cannot amend a law which proved to be ineffective. This is never done, but what is even more significant in those passages is that they show the extent of the contempt that Jews have for the rule of law they pretend to be at the basis of their culture. To the astonishment of the world, they make that claim with a straight face then demand that they be recognized as being above their neighbors if not above everyone else in the world.

In fact, that contempt is so deep that the editors of the Journal are asking that the Palestinians be punished for wanting to adhere to the rule of law. Can you believe it? And look how hard they push forward their ideas. First, they hint at the stiff consequences that will result by telling of the interest they have in seeing how the Palestinians will use their new UN status. Then, they say this: “Somebody needs to send to Mr. Abbas the message that there's a price to be paid for flouting the agreements with Israel and ignoring the pleas of the Administration.” The editors did not have the courage to directly threaten the Palestinians should they take their case to the International Criminal Court; they only suggested that someone should threaten the Palestinians. This is so cowardly, it can only be Jewish inspired.

What is also very Jewish is to do it to yourself trying to have it both ways. Having made hay earlier in the article of the idea that the U.N. voted for a Palestinian state in 1947 but that the Palestinians rejected the plan, the editors of the Journal now say this: “in 1947 … the Jews of Palestine demonstrated that they were ready to create a functional state. [Now] the U.N. voted for a 'Palestine' that has become a byword for political dysfunction, ideological extremism...” Thus, the question that comes to mind: What happened in the 65 years between 1947 and 2012 that changed the situation so much?

Well, the question may or may not be relevant or even valid in the current context but what comes out clearly from the passage is that the Jews view themselves as superior. When they say so at a time that the world has sent them a message saying their mentality stinks, they oblige people to believe they are the opposite of superior which means they are inferior. But since they are made of the same genetic material as the rest of us, their inferiority must be caused by their culture. And the conclusion we draw is that the inferiority of the Jewish culture is what caused the troubles that have plagued these people since the beginning of time. If anything, the U.N. should do with Palestine and Israel what it did with mainland China and Taiwan.

What is also worth noting is that the world can sometimes be changed by a happenstance that seems innocent at the time it is observed, or a saying that sounds innocuous at the time it is uttered. For example, there is the story of a woman's face that launched a thousand war ships. There is also the saying that broke the back of superpower America. It went like this: “Zey know nossing about za damacracy of za Shamir.” And now, there is the saying that goes like this: “Zey know nossing about za chustice of za Murdoch und za Netanyahu.” It is the saying that may eventually break the bones of the superpower's remains. What a compounded tragedy!

And yet, this is how they end their editorial piece: “The tragedy of Thursday's vote is that it will only encourage Palestinians to remain in their make-believe world.” Here it is, my friend, not only do they pretend to speak for Israelis and for ordinary American Jews, they also want us to believe they know the Palestinian people so well, they can predict how the latter will react to the UN vote.

And of course, they expect us to believe that they, as editors of the Wall Street Journal, have their feet planted firmly on solid ground right here on this Planet of Man.

And I have a Brooklyn bridge to sell to you. Wanna buy?

Time For Rich Lowry To Do Something Else

Rich Lowry is working as editor of National Review, and the time has come for someone to tell him he has been an embarrassment to the profession of journalism. It is time for him to look for something else to do; for him to leave the profession he was never meant to be a part of, and go somewhere else.

His latest foray in a territory that is as alien to him as a planet that is yet to be discovered – comes in the form of an article he wrote under the title: “The Brotherhood Delusion” and the subtitle: “Morsi consolidates his dictatorship while the Obama administration tells itself bedtime stories.” It was published on November 30, 2012 in National Review Online.

Lowry starts the article by quoting a sentence that was authored by Ambrose Bierce, and he ends the article this way: “The first step is to … perhaps read more Ambrose Bierce.” In fact, it is the habit of this young man to drop the name of someone and recommend that people read him as if everything this person ever wrote was gospel truth. And if you follow the writings of Lowry himself, you realize that he does not relate to ideas because of what they mean or stand for; he relates to them according to the view he has of the author. The way this happens is that if he likes something uttered by someone, he gets to like him so much, he considers everything he wrote in the past and everything he writes now to be the ultimate in high level knowledge and great wisdom.

Rich Lowry reminds me of a number of students I had during the years that I taught in a vocational school where students were generally more difficult than those who went to a regular school. I first realized what the problem was that impeded the progress of these students when one of them asserted to me that he had all the books recommended for the course but then admitted to something that flabbergasted me. After a long discussion during which he tried to be evasive, he admitted that he did not yet open any of the books even though we were three months into the school year.

While Rich Lowry may not be as extreme as that, he displays a similar sort of tendency you see in young journalists these days. They treat the acquisition of knowledge and of skills the same way they treat a political ideology by sticking with what they like and by ignoring what they dislike. To this end, they draw up two columns, one of which would be headed by the title: “I like these” under which they list all the people they tolerate and would read. As to the other column, it would be headed by the title: “I hate these” under which they list all the people they do not tolerate, and would never read. They only read what they like, but do so without turning up a critical eye on them. And they do not bother checking if what they dislike contains something worth knowing or at least something they should not miss.

What this does is that it turns them into a generation where the best of them can only be considered half-baked intellectuals. The reason for this is made easy to understand when you look at the analogous sayings that exist in the other languages. For example, the southern Europeans use the locution “a little education” instead of the half-baked one. As to the Arabs, they prefer to use the “half-educated” locution. You sense from these examples that the foreigners see a correlation between the effort that people make to acquire knowledge, and the ability to process that knowledge creatively so as to make good use of it whether it is the kind of knowledge that suit their taste or it is the kind they find abhorring.

But how do people like Rich Lowry go on to draw up the list of authors they like, and the list of authors they dislike? They do it through a process that is very close to what happens to ducklings. When these birds hatch, they consider the first thing they see move to be their mother, and so they follow it till they die or it dies. In a similar way, the first set of ideas to which the would-be journalists are exposed when they reach the age of reason which is the age at which they begin to think independently – they stay with that set of ideas and follow it for ever or follow it till something drastic causes them to flip. They place the authors of these ideas in the “like” column, and place everyone else in the “dislike” column.

The net result is that many of those journalists grow up to be like Rich Lowry. Look what he does in his article. After quoting Ambrose Bierce, he says this about him: “He would understand events in Egypt very well.” How does Rich Lowry know that? you ask. And the answer is simple; it is that he claims he knows both Bierce and Egypt very well. Great God! I exclaim. I must brace myself for a magnificent lesson from this giant in the field of intellectual gravitas.

So then, what do you want to teach me about Egypt, ye Rich Lowry of the gravitas? And this is what he says he wants to teach me: “Unfortunately, the Brotherhood's credo is: '...Jihad is our way.'” What? What is that again? He says it is unfortunate that the Brotherhood's credo is that “jihad” is the way of the Brotherhood?

Hey, listen to me you pathetic little ignoramus. I have two brothers and two sisters, and all five of us grew up hearing our parents tell us incessantly: “Gahed alashan tengah.” You know what that means you little asshole? It means strive so that you may succeed. And do you know from where the word gahed is derived? It is the Egyptian pronunciation of the imperative that is derived from the noun guehad (or Jihad in classical Arabic).

Yes, you disgusting little cockroach calling yourself Rich Lowry, our parents were telling us we can succeed in school and in life only if we strove to learn hard and do our homework. And when the politicians in Egypt speak of jihad – whether they use the colloquial or the classical – they mean the striving to build the nation with hard work. If this is unfortunate to you who are from the gravitas of the sewer, maybe you're telling the world why it is that America is going down the sewer as well being populated by people like you.

Go find another profession and leave journalism to those who have the talent for it. You have embarrassed us enough already.

Is Moral Relativism A Problem Or A Cure?

Imagine being stuck in an elevator with a man who looks ordinary to you; maybe even gentle, well behaved, refined and classy. You talk to each other and before long, he starts to complain about someone he knows that is bugging him no end. He escalates the verbal attacks on the one he now calls his enemy, and paints a picture which says to you that the one out there is so evil, you conclude on your own, he should be labeled enemy number one of all mankind.

You make that suggestion to the man in the elevator, and lo and behold, he breaks down, drops to the floor and weeps uncontrollably like a crybaby. You console him and ask what is wrong. He says that the contrary has happened in that the evil man out there is loved by the whole world, and that he is the one who is hated by everyone.

What an unbelievable story, you say. No, it is not so unbelievable. If you want to read about it as written by the crybaby himself, go to the op-ed page of the November 29, 2012 issue of the Wall Street Journal. You will find there an article written by Ron Prosor who is the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He wrote the article under the title: “What Kind of Palestinian State?” and the subtitle: “The U.N. should consider whether the world needs another nation that imports weapons and exports extremism and terror.”

Having read the article, you now ask: How can something like this happen? You think about it and find an angle through which you manage to shed a little bit of light on the subject. The angle has to do with “moral relativism,” a concept that some people find difficult to understand even though it is a simple thing.

People find the concept difficult because when they hear about it, they think of something complicated. They look for a hidden meaning in every word that is uttered while paying little attention to what is actually being said. Here is the problem: The core idea being relativism, the concept is often discussed in conjunction with the principles of morality. And this combination of the two is what leads to the concept of “moral relativism,” the expression that ends up confusing people.

As to those who bring up the concept in the first place, they do not always clarify what they mean because it is as difficult for them to explain it as it is for the others to understand it. But in actual fact, there is a simple way to explain the expression; it consists of doing a thought experiment. To this end, imagine standing by a counter on top of which rest three washbowls. The one on the left is filled with water at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The one in the middle is filled with water at the room temperature of 70 degrees. The one on the right is filled with water at 90 degrees. You place your left hand in the left bowl, and place your right hand in the right bowl. You wait a few minutes then dip both hands in the middle bowl at the same moment. What will you sense?

You will sense confusion. The left hand will sense that the water in the middle bowl is warm. At the same time, the right hand will sense that the same water is cold. Why is that? Because when sensing is done by an organism, it is done in relative terms not in absolute terms. That is, one hand will sense that this water is warmer than the one from which it came. As to the other hand, it will sense that this same water is cooler than the one from which it came. Two signals, one being that the water is warm, and the other being that it is cold will go to the brain at the same moment and confuse it.

What this experiment says is that if we want to sense the state of something such as a body of water or anything else without using an instrument, we can do so only to compare the state of one body relative to the state of another body. That is, we can only determine if one body is warmer or cooler than another. What we cannot do with accuracy is determine the true or absolute value of either body. To do this, we need a thermometer that will measure the temperature as being 50 or 70 or 90 degrees, or what other value it may be.

The important idea to retain from this thought experiment is that where the hand comes from will make the difference as to what we sense. With this in mind, we should be able to see and accept that the same will apply in matters that deal with morality. It ought to be clear that in moral matters, the judgment that a person makes with regard to a happening will ultimately depend on where that person comes from.

For this reason, a current happening that is acceptable to one person may be objectionable to another because each will compare it to past happenings with which he or she is familiar – depending on where he or she came from. That is, each person will measure what they see now with the yardstick they came with, even if the yardsticks were constructed differently. And if the matter being measured or assessed concerns morality, which is almost always the case, then “moral relativism” will be seen as the concept that separates the position of one person from the position of another.

Whether or not we believe in the evolution of the species in the Darwinian sense, we all agree that being the organism that we are, we continually experience a sort of physical alteration because we see ourselves grow in size from a fertilized egg to a fetus, and from a newborn baby to an adult. We also see ourselves go through a series of moral alterations because we continually sense the need to learn new skills and adapt to a changing environment so as to stay alive.

And so, no matter what our position may be with regard to the evolution of the species, we all agree that a complex process of evolutionary changes affect us continually whether or not we provoke it. Those changes take the individual from a beginning that is no more than a sperm and an ovum to the end of one's natural life – which can be several decades away. And what this says ultimately is that everything which is natural about us is relative, and that nothing about it is absolute.

Yet, we can say with certainty that everyone of us sees one or more things as being so inviolable, we consider them to be absolute and not subject to alteration. Why is that? To answer the question, we need to look closely at who we are not only as an individual or a species but as a live organism. We must also accept the argument advanced by the narrative of Darwinian evolution which is that a species will not remain in existence for long if the individuals of whom it is made ignore a prime directive telling them to behave in ways that protect their own survival and that of the species. The reason here being that if the directive is violated, the species will ultimately perish, as many have throughout the ages, leaving behind only their fossilized remains.

Thus, it is the prime directive concerning survival which ultimately determines what we consider to be an absolute taboo that cannot be violated. And what this does to organisms – especially those of the higher species including humans – is that it motivates them to cobble up a “culture” based on rules that serve to maintain their survival and defend it when necessity. This happens when we have an encounter with the unknown, at which time the different experiences of the various individuals and cultures make up the different yardsticks by which assessments are made as to whether a situation is hot or cold; whether it is acceptable or objectionable.

So then, where do Israel and the “Jewish people” stand in the face of all this? Well, what we have here is the sad story of a crybaby in the elevator making matters worse for him and for all of humanity the more that he tries to put down the Palestinians he robbed, beat up, stole their possessions then asked the world to love him because he was chosen by God to rule over humanity.

When this is the kind of culture you are fed with your mother's milk, you grow up to be as sick as the Israeli ambassador. And there is nothing that will cure you; not even the concept of moral relativism.

You are doomed unless you change for good; change once and for all.

Playing The Religious Card Like A Jew

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on November 24, 2012 under the title: “Egypt's Islamist Coup” and never mind what the rest of the article says. The very idea that these people worry about Islam asserting itself in its region at a time when their Judaism and the Christianity of America they dragged along with them are asserting themselves worldwide, says that they fear being defeated at the game they have unleashed on a world they tried to control by playing the religious card. In short, they played with fire and now worry about it spreading.

It is said that danger looms when children play with fire. It can also be said that calamity looms when fanatics – be they young or old – play with the fires of religion. And the way to play this game is to play the religious card which is something that is done as a matter of course almost exclusively in the so-called democracies – be they real democracies or sham democracies as most of them are.

While people of every religion have played this card at one time or another, the Jewish leaders played it all the time. More than that, they played it not only with their own religion; they played it with other people's religion as promiscuously as they played with other people's money. They even played the religious card inside governing systems where religion was frowned upon or banned altogether, being considered opium used by men of the cloth to pacify the masses and render them docile.

I am neither a trained historian nor an expert on religion. What follows is a collection of impressions and observations I retain about an environment in which my early education was done almost exclusively in Catholic schools. But I also lived in the Muslim country of Egypt for a few years during which time I spent one year in the public school system. I received no religious education there but did enough reading on the history of Islam on my own to have learned something about it. I then came to Canada some half a century ago where I gradually began to question the utility of religion in our daily lives.

It was not the saying that religion was the opium of the masses that made me question the role of religion in the daily lives of people; it was the way that I saw how religion was used to motivate people. Like children, grownups of all ages were moved in directions that had political ends or worse. To give an example, one of the most important events in my life as I was growing up being Christmas, it pained me to see the subtle yet vicious ways by which the Jews were attacking the birth of Jesus, an event they said was the cause of their troubles for two thousand years. And I still cannot shake the memory of a saying uttered by a Jewish woman on television during the week of Christmas some decades ago. While pretending to speak on economic matters, she found a way to go on a tangent and curse “the woman on her way to Bethlehem with evil lurking in her belly.”

As I detected this sort of behavior in the mid Nineteen Sixties and beyond, I also noticed that they engaged in a three-pronged offensive in the religious field. First, they wanted to interface with the other religions by creating interfaith groups they planned to bring under their control. Second, they wanted to blend Christmas, Hanuka and the Festival of Light into one celebration that would be controlled by them. Third, they wanted to lead a fight that would lump together the right to wear the Jewish skull cap or the Sikh turban in places where both were forbidden. They must have been aiming to achieve a grand plan of some sort, but one that was never completed having been preempted in the late Nineteen Nineties by a turn of the events they could not have foreseen.

What happened was that Karl Rove appeared on the scene. He was managing the campaign of then candidate George W. Bush when he had the idea of capitalizing on the inroads that the Jewish rabbis were carving inside the Christian groups using the principle of “interface with interfaith.” By then, the rabbis had completed the snarling of pastors who had a skeleton or two in their closets, and had gotten these televised men of the cloth to proclaim to their flocks of human sheep that God was not in heaven but was right here on earth. He was not the Jesus who was born on Christmas day, they told the young and the old of America; he was the Jew who could be a neighbor of theirs or someone they worked or stood with shoulder to shoulder day in and day out.

And so Karl Rove promised to the Jewish honchos (their rabbis and their political leaders) that if they succeed in getting the Christian sheep to vote for the W, they will be rewarded not only with the moon which, after all, is conveniently promised to everyone else, but also the Jerusalem in the sky they alone fantasize about, and the Jerusalem in Palestine which belongs to the Palestinian people. Help the “W” win the election, said Karl Rove to the Jewish honchos, and you will be given everything you wish to own no matter whose thing it is today.

As it turned out, I was not the only one seeing the religious developments in the North America of the mid Nineteen Sixties and beyond; the whole world was watching and seeing the same thing. Among the people watching most anxiously were those in the Middle East who had a stake in the matter and would be most affected by the end result.

These people were seeing acts of political and religious machinations unfold like a horror movie and they wondered what was happening to the America that used to symbolize freedom but whose children are now told they will succeed in life not by learning to read, write or do arithmetic but by unearthing a Jew they can befriend. This done, they will worship him or her and serve them as slavishly as the American legislators serve their Jewish masters, something they do as faithfully as the devout of any religion worship their God.

And so, the people of the world, especially those in the Middle East said to themselves better hang on tightly to their religion – be it Coptic, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Atheist – before these characters come over here and proselytize a brand of religious syphilism in their quest to enslave the human race and bring it under Jewish control the way they did America.

And Egypt said “Yes” to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Wall Street Journal is whining like only an Australian Jew can whine.

Seeing Past The Fog Of Moral Syphilis

If the editors of the Wall Street Journal could only see past the fog of moral syphilis which they help generate in partnership with the rest of the Jewish propaganda machine, they would be transformed into a force for good instead of being the force for evil which they are now. This thought comes to you clearly when you read their editorial piece: “Hamas's Gaza Victory” which also has the subtitle: “The cease-fire leaves the terror group intact and politically stronger.” It was published on November 23, 2012.

After overcoming your amazement at a title through which they admit that Hamas scored a victory in its latest encounter with the Israeli military, you feel let down by a subtitle in which they continue to call Hamas “a terror group.” You then read the first paragraph of the piece in which they quote Henry Kissinger who once discussed America's war in Vietnam from the angle of a guerrilla group that takes on a regular army. And when the editors of the Journal follow that quote by opining: “Regarding Israel's latest war against Hamas … the same considerations apply,” you get the feeling they might be up to something that will redeem them after all.

Believing that the editors of the Journal are setting up to draw a parallel between the North Vietnamese whose land was not occupied by America yet fought to liberate South Vietnam that was, you expect to see them opine at long last that Hamas in Gaza that won the election in all of Palestine had the right to fight for the liberation of the West Bank which is still occupied by Israel. But the editors disappoint you because it is not what they do. Instead, they lament that when a Gaza TV station called the latest encounter a victory for the resistance, it was not making an idle boast.

They go on to list the accomplishments of Hamas among which are the following: “Gazans [are] relieved ... the leaders of Hamas emerged politically intact and strategically stronger … suffered no military defeat … dared Netanyahu to invade [which he did not] … Israel has agreed to launch no ground attack or target killings … Hamas not responsible to enforce the cease-fire on other organizations.” Thus, instead of going back to calling the Palestinians the freedom fighters they used to be called, the editors of the Journal continue to call them terrorists having degraded the designation from freedom fighter to commando to guerrilla to terrorist.

And this is what tells you these people are still plagued by the fog of moral syphilis they help generate in partnership with the Jewish propaganda machine. Having looked at the parallel between the Vietnamese war on the American occupier, and the Palestinian war on the Jewish occupier, they deny to themselves what they see with their own eyes thus fall victims of the fog they generate to blind themselves and their readers from seeing the truth that the rest of the word sees so very clearly. And this is why they cannot understand someone saying that the terrorist is not the Palestinian who fights for his freedom but the Jew who kills the freedom fighter for refusing to submit to his whims.

Having blinded themselves from seeing past the fog of their own moral syphilis, they now spin the rest of the narrative in a way that is so contradictory, it rises to the level of a paradox. Thus, to explain Netanyahu's motives, they say this: “Mr. Netahyahu avoids a costly ground invasion shortly before a January election.” And you ask yourself, why then did he start the bombing campaign, sent 15,000 troops to the border with Gaza and mobilized another 70,000 reservists? They don't answer this question but mention the public protest in Southern Israel as well as the one texted by an Israel soldier, both of which “may spread in Israel as the election nears,” they opine.

What's it all about, anyway? you finally ask. And the answer is that Netanyahu is an out of control terrorist who cannot put a lid on his violent impulses, or that he and his team have underestimated the force underlying the cause of the Palestinian people regardless as to who is leading them at any moment in time. And the truth may prove to be that both hypotheses are correct. It may prove that Israel is a terrorist state – as pointed out by many people around the world over the decades – and that its leaders keep underrating the right of the Palestinian people, something they do by habit and do it at their peril.

Failing to face this reality and to embrace it, the editors of the Journal plunge head on into the cesspool of moral syphilis which compels them to rattle off the worn out observation that “Israel lives in a bad neighborhood” without admitting that where the Jews have gone throughout history, they turned the neighborhood into such a bad place, the toxicity of the culture they carried with them compelled the people of every race and every creed to disinfect the place after them with gas and with fire.

Then comes the ending of the Wall Street Journal which contains the obligatory lie that confirms what you have been looking at was Jewish inspired through and through. The following is how the editors have formulated the ending this time: “Iran … noticed that the Jewish state had an opportunity to strike a decisive military blow but declined to do so under world pressure.” No, you say to yourself, Israel did not decline under world pressure, it did this time what it has always done, which is to bluff.

Israel bluffed but the Palestinians called the bluff and the “Jewish state” proved to be the eunuch that only strikes those who cannot defend themselves when they are not watching or when they are unprepared.

When on the contrary, people are alert and the Jew bluffs, the people call the bluff at which time the Jew chickens out like a Netanyahu.

That's what happened this time and the world salutes the people of Palestine for their admirable tenacity.

They Pay Israel To Murder Palestinians

It is often said that when viewed in hindsight, the unfolding of a historical event appears to have been a logical occurrence, and there is a great deal of truth in that. The fact is that while most people believe that life imitates art – which is true in some cases – it is also true that art imitates life, and this is true in almost every case. It is true even when the art is done by beginners who start the practice by imitating the masters before branching out on their own and doing original works.

The fact is that the stories we write in the form of a novel, a film script or a stage play could not have been written in a vacuum. They exist because they are an imitation of life. And like the plot of a storyline in which we do not see what the author has in mind till we reach the end, we often fail to see the logic behind the unfolding of a historical event till it has taken its course and has reached a resolution. It is only then that we look back at what happened and realize it was all logical and that it could not have happened any differently.

And so it was with the latest murderous activities committed by Israel in the Middle East. Looking back at the way the events have unfolded, we realize that the elements in the plot line motivating them were many. As in a classical drama, you have characters whose background prepares them, even compels them to behave in a way that would be unthinkable to someone else. We usually call such characters Shakespearean because the English dramatist William Shakespeare was the one to stand out more than anyone else when it came to showing how captive people are of their character; something he excelled at doing in play after play.

This is the case with the cast of characters in charge of Israel today and those who cheer them in far away places like New York and the District of Columbia. The latter are also the ones who work behind the scenes to gather support for them. As to the immediate factors that have motivated the recent activities, they start with the failure of Israel to convince America to attack Iran. And there was the reelection of the American President Barack Obama, an event that did not sit well with those who financed the campaign of his rival for the specific purpose of motivating America to attack Iran and to get involved in a never ending war against the Arabs of every religion, and the Muslims of every race.

And while these were the immediate factors motivating the Israelis, there were then and there are now simmering factors ready to boil over and set off the pressure cooker. These are economic factors pertaining to Palestine, to Israel and to the comparison between the two. In fact, it has been the view of many – including ardent Jews – that the Jewish culture does not equip its people to have a normal country of their own because they can only lead a parasitic life, and do so at the expense of someone else. And you cannot have a bunch of parasites in one place living off each other for very long.

However, having been kicked out of every place where they attempted to lead that kind of life, the Jewish leaders plotted to have a country of their own and have it remain viable at the expense of someone else. They were able to pull off such a feat because they had the Europeans from whom they siphoned reparation payments by moaning, crying and bellyaching. They also had the American taxpayers from whom they sponged billions of dollars by cultivating the brain dead, potted plants of the Congress and by conditioning them to rubber stamp each demand they make, then go beyond it to show how dogged they are to be Israel's best friend.

By way of comparison, the Palestinians have proven in more ways than one they have one of the most productive cultures in the world. In fact, being barred by the Jewish occupation of their land to develop their own businesses, some of these people – in need to feed their family – accepted the alternative which was to work for a Jewish business. Once there, they demonstrated how good they are, and there has been various testimonies to this effect by the Jewish owners.

Other Palestinians looked for opportunities in the neighboring Arab countries and beyond where they excelled in everything they did. Thus, they proved here as well how conducive to high productivity their culture is. And when the Israelis were forced by world pressure to ease the restrictions on the inhabitants of the West Bank, the Palestinians demonstrated how well and how quickly they can build the country they are forbidden from having by force of arms.

Enter at each side of the stage two events that finally caused the pressure cooker to explode. The first event was that the sources in Europe and in America which kept the Israeli economy afloat were drying up. The second event was that the Arab leaders of the oil rich nations who were staying clear of Palestinian affairs lest they pour money where it would be stolen by the Jewish occupation, changed their mind. They began to look to Gaza as a place where they could put their money and have it work exclusively for the Palestinian people while waiting for the liberation of the West Bank.

This conjured up the image of a Dubai-like Palestinian state rising on the Mediterranean Sea at the very moment that Israel was proven incapable of heading off a looming famine. At last, the true nature of a productive Palestinian culture was going to stand side by side against the true nature of a parasitic Jewish culture now starving without a host on which to feed. And the world will see why the Jewish leaders of America paid Mitt Romney a million dollars to help them mask the truth by insulting the Palestinians and praising the Jews.

And now that the truth was about to be demonstrated in concrete terms, panic set in throughout the corridors of power in Israel, New York and the District of Columbia where the alarm bells went off and the decision was made to destroy Gaza before the Palestinians can start building on what is already there in terms of roads, bridges, buildings and the power grid.

Those in charge of this sickest of the sick cultures decided it was time to do what the Old Testament instructs them to do. It is to exercise their religious duty by killing and destroying, and thus earn the right to eat. Having American jets, bombs, tanks, armors and frigates, they will use them to show the world what it means not to have daylight between them and America. It means that America is partnering with a people mandated by religion to be bloodthirsty or starve to death. America was asked to be an accomplice in the ongoing Jewish crime against humanity, and America said yes. Not only that, but America will now be compelled to run around the world and defend Israel's murderous campaign by calling it self defense.

But first, the Israelis needed to get America to guarantee the four billion dollars tranche of the debt that was coming due. Yes, this is only a small part of the massive quarter of a trillion dollars that Israel owes in large part to American and German banks but it was coming due, and without America's guarantee, Israel would not have been able to roll it, and would have defaulted. The result would have been the instantaneous collapse of the economy and the triggering of the dreaded famine. Worse in the eyes of Netanyahu was the prospect of Ahmadinejad laughing his head off at being vindicated.

They got the guarantee that avoided the collapse but this, in itself, will not be enough to keep the economy afloat. They will have to restore the stream of revenue without which there could never have been an Israel. To this end, they will go back and siphon off more taxpayer money for the non-existent thing they call Iron Dome. In preparation for doing this, they put out a video they say shows that the system has worked when in fact it shows nothing of the sort. And there were journalists on the scene who saw that nothing has worked. Instead, these people were told that what they saw was the intent of the system which determined that the incoming rockets were not going to cause any damage, and so it fired and deliberately missed. Oh yeah! Oh sure!

Nobody was fooled but everybody expects that the Jewish parasite has once again found a way to suck the blood of the already exhausted American taxpayers. A payment made for killing Palestinians; how will they ever justify this to posterity?

I shall soon have my second cataract operation, and may have to take a short vacation. I'll see you here again as soon as I can.