55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America This Holiday Season

For made-in-America read made-in-Canada/UK/Greece/Spain etc., depending on your place of residence

And remember that every cheap item from Asia, Africa or the Middle-East that you do not buy from WalMart or some other emporium for foreign  sweatshop products means more pressure on the governments of China, BanglaDesh, Indonesia, etc., etc., to rebalance their domestic economies and allow their own citizens to consume more of what they produce and thus achieve an immediate increase in standard of living.

By Michael, The Economic Collapse Blog, November 19, 2012: This is the time of the year when Americans run out to their favorite retail stores and fill up their shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic crap made by workers in foreign countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  By doing this, the American people are actively participating in the destruction of the U.S. economy.  You see, buying products that are made in America is not just a matter of national pride.  It is a matter of national survival.  If we do not support American workers, they are going to continue to see their jobs shipped out of the country.  If we do not support American businesses, they are going to continue to die off at a staggering rate.  Last year, the United States had a trade deficit with the rest of the world of 558 billion dollars.  More than half a trillion dollars that could have gone into the pockets of U.S. workers and U.S. businesses went overseas instead.  If that money had stayed in the country, taxes would have been paid on that mountain of cash and our local, state and federal government debt problems would not be as severe.  As a result of our massive trade imbalance, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth.  Both major political parties have sold us out on these issues, and we are getting poorer as a nation with each passing day.  We desperately need a resurgence of economic patriotism in the United States before it is too late.

Yes, I know that it is very tempting to buy foreign-made products.  After all, they are almost always cheaper.
But most people don't often think about why they are cheaper.

Unfortunately, in the name of "free trade" American workers have been merged into a global labor pool where they have to compete directly for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  This makes employing American workers a tremendous liability.
If a company hires you and pays you 10 to 15 dollars an hour with benefits, how is it going to compete with another company that pays workers a dollar an hour with no benefits on the other side of the planet?

Both major political parties are pushing this emerging "one world economic system", but it is absolutely killing American jobs.  We have already seen a mass exodus of jobs and businesses out of this country, and wages for the jobs that remain in the United States are being forced down because there are hordes of unemployed workers that are willing to take just about any decent job they can find.

It has become painfully obvious that our politicians are not going to do anything to help us on these issues, so what we need is a mass awakening among the American people.

We need to educate people that buying things that are made in America is good for the economy and that buying things that are made elsewhere is bad for the economy.

But for now, most Americans are clueless.  They will line up on Black Friday morning and trample one another in a desperate attempt to save a few bucks on cheap plastic devices that were made on the other side of the planet.

And they will pay for much of this "shopping" with credit cards.

Credit card debt is on the rise once again.  In fact, average credit card debt per borrower was 4.9 percent higher in the third quarter of 2012 than it was in the third quarter of 2011.  It looks like most of us didn't learn our lessons from the last financial crisis.

But not all Americans enjoy the shopping that is typically involved with this time of the year.  One recent survey found that approximately 45 percent of all Americans think that there is so much financial pressure associated with the holidays that they wouldn't mind skipping them completely.

That same poll found that approximately 41 percent of all Americans would only be able to survive for two weeks without a paycheck.  Many Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt, their incomes are not keeping up with rising prices, and they find themselves scratching and clawing just to make it from month to month.
Meanwhile, we continue to destroy our own jobs and businesses by spending our money on products that have been made outside the country.

The following are 55 reasons why you should buy products that are made in America this holiday season...
1. When you buy products that are made in America you support American workers.

2. When you buy products that are made in America you support companies that are doing business in America.

3. In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.

4. The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

5. Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion.  That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

6. In 2011, our trade deficit with China was 28 times larger than it was back in 1990 and more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985.

7. When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.

8. One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

9. Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.  That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers.  Federal, state and local taxes would also have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.

10. According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

11. The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

12. According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, the United States has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years.

13. During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day.

14. Overall, the United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

15. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

16. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

17. As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.

18. Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are "good jobs" at this point.

19. Right now, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.

20. The United States now has 10 percent fewer "middle class jobs" than it did just ten years ago.
21. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every $1 billion of goods that are imported from overseas.

22. As our economic infrastructure is gutted, formerly great manufacturing cities all over America are being transformed into festering hellholes.

23. Between 2001 and 2007, the value of products that Wal-Mart imported from China grew from $9 billion to $27 billion.

24. In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

25. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

26. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China’s high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports.

27. In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in "advanced technology products" of $16 billion with the rest of the world.  In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

28. The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

29. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

30. The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors.  This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.

31. According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

32. In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.
33. Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

34. Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe?  Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

35. In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.

36. In 2010, China produced 627 million metric tons of steel.  The United States only produced 80 million metric tons of steel.

37. In 2010, China produced 7.3 million metric tons of cotton.  The United States only produced 3.4 million metric tons of cotton.

38. Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

39. 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

40. Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

41. China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.  How stupid can we possibly be?

42. According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment.  According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, during 2010 the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.

43. All over the United States, road and bridge projects are being outsourced to Chinese firms.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent ABC News article....

In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.
In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.
These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.
"When we subsidize jobs in China, we're not creating any wealth in the United States," said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

44. The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.

45. The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

46. The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.
47. The Chinese economy is projected to be larger than the U.S. economy by 2016.

48. One economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

49. In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced "free trade" and the emerging one world economy like never before.  Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history....

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

50. If you gathered together all of the workers that are "officially" unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

51. China now holds approximately more than a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt.  If you were alive back when Jesus was born and you had spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent that much money by now.

52. Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama's highly touted "Jobs Council", has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States.

53. Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty.  Today, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.

54. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

55. If U.S. consumers do not start supporting U.S. workers and U.S. businesses, eventually we will all be so poor that very few of us will be able to afford to buy any gifts during the holiday season.

Fred on US Self-Assassination

If you're gonna have a blog, you ought to write something on it once in a while. But it's hard to do that when other people not only say what you'd have said if you'd thought of it, but do so with more pith and punch that you'd have mustered under even the greatest provocation.

Fred Reed is a case in point. He see the utter hopeless mental, financial and material deterioration of Western civilization as led by the United States, the country that was once seriously referred to as the the "Leader of the Free World," and spells out the criminal imbecility of the leadership so clearly that there seems little left to say. For example:

To me Mr. Romney’s candidacy signaled the Republicans’ admirable capacity to do the impossible: find an aspirant even more depressing than Obama. But they managed. It was a triumph of the human spirit. Never underestimate American ingenuity.

How was this result achieved? Mr. Romney asserted that Russia is America’s most perilous adversary, wanted to deal fiercely with China, asserted the nonexistence of Palestinians, pledged his undying troth to Israel (America presumably would be a second wife), wanted to attack Iran, and thinks we need to increase the military budget.

Oh god. Oh god.

Were the Chinese paying him off? If you want to bring the United States down, keep it spending. On anything. On everything. Does nobody understand this?

It is most curious. Conservatives think that Reagan the Baffled won a great victory over the Soviet Onion by spending it into penury. Grrr. Woof. But in the great sweep of things, what he did was to increase military spending. The Russians didn’t matter: The Pentagon quickly found another financial pretext in Terrorism after the budgetary godsend in New York. Subsequent presidents continued the trend. From a Chinese point of view, it is wonderful. They build their economy while we assassinate ours. They don’t need a military. Ours is doing the job for them.

Read more. 

Or consider this:

We are doomed, saith the preacher, and should accommodate ourselves to it. In times of growing governmental power, protestation at some point becomes futile. Little is served by standing in front of a charging Mongol army and shouting, “No! You should reconsider! Perhaps some other course would be advisable. Let’s parley….”

Complaint is useless. It is too late. It booteth not. We are done. The Mongols ride. America comes apart at the seams. The country turns into something altogether new, new for America.

In high school, I read Shirer, first Berlin Diary and then The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I had little idea what I was reading. A naval base in rural Virginia is not a hotbed of historical understanding, or any understanding. I knew nothing of Weimar or the Spartacists or the Treaty of Versailles. Still, I dimly grasped that a theretofore civilized country with great rapidity turned into something horrible. It was not an evolutionary change, like the Industrial Revolution. Brahms to Goebbels in a decade.

Something alike happens in America, and one wonders—I wonder, anyway—how can this be? In little more than a decade, the Constitution has died, the economy welters in irreversible decline, we have perpetual war, all power lies in the hands of the executive, the police are supreme, and a surveillance beyond Orwell’s imaginings falls into place.

These observations are now commonplace. It is almost boring to read of them—yet they proceed apace. Where we go, we go fast. Already against the authorities there is no recourse. Should you talk back to the police, you will spend the night in jail.

I sometimes wonder whether there is not some malign force in play, some diabolical miasma with a sense of humor that, having brought the Soviet Union down, amuses itself by turning the United States into the same thing. Or maybe it is just that if any state that can become totalitarian, it will.

Read more

We are so doomed, even Fred has lost the will to resist.

But if you think Fred is a pessimist, take a look at this:

State-Controlled Fake Fascists Seek to Exploit "Tram Rant Lady," Emma West?

Croydon, 40% ethnic population, the night of the London riots.

Pretty certainly the British National Party and all the other Fascist anti-immigrant parties in Britain are infiltrated, and effectively controlled by, the British Security services, the better to make opposition to the genocide of the English appear indistinguishable from vile racism.

To this end, surely, is ex-BNP Richard Edmonds standing as the National Front candidate in the upcoming by-election in Croydon North, the home of "Tram Rant Lady" Emma West.

Emma West, as many will know, was jailed without trial for several days, and almost a year later still faces trial, for the crime of stating, while on a tram, that other passengers were "not English." This was certainly ill-mannered and possible an infringement of the political correctness laws which are based on a contempt for the old English saying: "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurt me," but it caused no riot and resulted in no real harm to anyone except Emma West.

As a result of the furor generated by the politically correct media, over 14 million people viewed the cell-phone video of Emma West's allegedly racist statement, many of them English residents of the working class districts now inundated by immigrants. Although a number of viewers threatened violence or murder against Emma West, a matter of no interest to the police authorities, many others and probably a vast if silent majority, sympathized with Emma West's complaint; namely, that the national policy of mass immigration imposed on the British by both Labor and Conservative governments since the time of Edward amounts to a policy of ethnic cleansing of the native people of Emma West's home town and many other large in dustrial towns and cities in both England and Wales.

The challenge for the liberal-left elite in Britain -- headed in the case of all three major parties by leaders with greater apparent loyalty to a mono-ethnic Israel (for example, and this and this) than to England -- is how to quell the murmur of dissent  that Emma West's remarks have evoked. What better idea, then, than to have the National Front kick up a ruckus during the Croyden by-election, taunting the ethnic vote, which at 40% will undoubtedly assure a New Labor another massive victory, thereby confirming the vileness of those who oppose the genocide of the English. In the process, Emma West will be thoroughly smeared by implication.

Free speech versus “hate speech”

JewAmongYou.blogspot.com: November 11, 2012: Thanks to Portland Realist for bringing my attention to an article in the Portland Tribune that masquerades as “news” when, in fact, it’s propaganda. When the corporate-controlled media accepts dogma as truth, it is bound to confuse the boundaries between “news” and “editorial.” At the very beginning of the article, accompanying a provocative photo, we read:

Defining hate speech may be more difficult than passing a law restricting it, yet most western democracies outside the U.S. have attempted to do both.

The unspoken, and underlying, assumption here is that there is a need to make a distinction between free speech and hate speech. In a bona fide news piece, the writer would present the case for making such a distinction (and for not making it), and then go about explaining how it might be done. But since no such argument is made (at least not at the beginning of the article), but rather it’s assumed, this falls into the realm of propaganda. In every country where hate speech laws are in effect, they are selectively enforced to the detriment of whites, males, Christians and heterosexuals. Rarely are they enforced against non-whites who speak hatefully against whites, or against Muslims who speak hatefully against Christians. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” It is evident that hate speech laws are merely tools of oppression to be used against select groups.
Korn treats us with yet more assumptions in the second paragraph of his article.

Blevins is TriMet’s director of marketing, the guy who deals with the ads. During the past two months, he has accepted – because TriMet attorneys said he had to – two controversial ads that Blevins recognizes aren’t hate speech but are moving in that direction.

One ad asked for public support for Israel and the defeat of jihad and “savages.” The other, which was pro-Palestinian, headlined “Palestinian Loss of Land.”

Why are they “moving in that direction” and who gets to determine when they cross the line into “hate speech”? It would appear that the first ad is objectionable because it attacks jihad and “savages”. If jihad is a call for war against infidels – and the Quran requires it – then wouldn’t the Quran be “hate speech”? How can objecting to a call for war be “hate speech”? Was it “hate speech” when people protested against the Vietnam war or the war on Iraq? Furthermore, is it not accurate to describe people who commit “honor killings” and acid attacks as “savages”? If the problem is the implication that all Muslims are savages, because they believe in jihad, then we should be asking ourselves honest questions about Islam and the definition of “savage.”
Here’s a proposal. Make it a requirement that anybody who wishes to reside in the U.S. must swear, and sign, that he disavows any sort of violent jihad. He would have to explicitly repudiate all passages, in the Quran and the Hadeeth, that call for war against infidels. If such a proposal were seriously suggested, there would be an outcry from the Muslim community. Of course, some would lie to gain residency, but it would keep some of the worst elements out.
I have more difficulty understanding why the pro-Palestinian ad is problematic. Had the ad decried the theft of land from native Americans, would it still be considered problematic? Apparently Korn (Jewish?) believes that a pro-Palestinian positions must be anti-Israel, and that anti-Israel = anti-Semitic.
Korn goes on…

In August, Ellis Bradley discovered that somebody overnight had spray-painted swastikas and racial slurs on his North Mississippi Avenue food cart and on the Sons of Haiti Masonic Lodge next door.

If Bradley’s food cart or the Masonic Temple had been in Canada, France, Germany or just about any other western democracy, the people who spray-painted their messages, if caught, might face punishments much harsher than they could get for mere vandalism.

Does Korn really think that the culprit, if caught, would not face charges of ethnic intimidation or worse? When a white person calls a black a nigger, he practically loses his rights in the eyes of the law. But, as mentioned, blacks can call whites “white boy”, “cracker” or “racist” with impunity.  Hate speech laws are ridiculously biased against whites in Canada, France and Germany. If Korn wants the U.S. to be like those countries, it must be because he shares their anti-white, anti-Christian, bias.
Not surprisingly, Bradly (who is black) favors the implementation of hate speech laws:

Bradley, a 41-year-old black man who grew up in Northeast Portland but lives in Vancouver, Wash., says he would favor a law against hate speech.

“I wish there was a law so when you do something like that, especially when I have my child with me, there would be some kind of sanction, someone I can call and say, ‘Hey, look, this is wrong.’ “

It’s obvious from the article that Korn also favors hate speech laws. I wonder if Korn and Bradley would support locking up rap artists for their hateful lyrics. Would they hold Islamic writings to the same standards as Christian preachers who condemn homosexuality from the pulpit? The Bible contains “hate speech” as well. Would Christianity and Judaism then be illegal? I don’t expect the average citizen, especially blacks ones, to comprehend the importance of freedom of speech. But a journalist, of all people, should know better.
The article is a fairly long one, and Korn makes it abundantly clear that hate speech laws are not intended to protect whites. He writes, for example:

Waldron would try to narrowly define hate speech in any legislation. Words that offend would not be enough, he says. They would have to attack fundamental dignity. And they couldn’t be simply hateful on a personal level, but would have to attack the dignity of an entire class of people such as blacks or gays.

“Such as” here clearly means “exclusive of whites or heterosexuals”. I would say “majority groups” – except that whites are a minority in many places, yet they are never given minority status. Neither Detroit nor South Africa recognizes whites as a protected minority. There are countless examples of anti-white speech, many of them from the pages of the Portland Tribune, that Korn could have cited. Yet he saw fit to ignore them completely and focus exclusively on white on non-white offenses.
To be sure, Korn does present the case against hate speech laws in his article – but only toward the end of the article, where most readers do not venture. As in the beginning of the article, the end also supports the enactment of hate speech laws:

Clackamas County attorney Ed Trompke, who is writing a book about the Oregon Constitution and characterizes himself as extremely liberal, says he’s coming around to the idea that maybe we should at attempt to address hate speech.

Trompke suggests legislation that would make public hate speech a low-level offense, like a traffic ticket. It could be a violation, Trompke says, not a criminal charge, but enough to let offenders know society doesn’t approve.

“There’s a very fine line between what is merely offensive and what is so offensive as to attack a person’s dignity as a human being,” Trompke says. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have to trust our judges to do the right thing. That’s what it comes down to.”…

The Portland Tribune is preparing the groundwork for the abolition of the First Amendment. It’s warming the public to the idea that hate speech legislation is a progressive idea whose time has come. Look for referenda in the near future to outlaw such speech. When they ultimately pass, bolstered by black, Hispanic and Asian voters, who will have the wherewithal to challenge them in court? Making them a “low-level offense” is a sneaky way to discourage people from challenging such laws in court. Stocking the courts with hyphenated Americans will assure that even if such cases make it to court, those laws will be found “constitutional.” At that point, the only means left to us to defend the First Amendment will be to exercise the Second Amendment.

Source

Exploding Carl Popper's Theory of Science in four minutes

Bishop Hill's blog presents the following talk by Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University, which briefly but effectively explodes Carl Popper's account of the scientific method, while neatly illustrating how science actually works.

"All great scientists ignore falsification...."



See also:
The Scientific Method: Karl Popper's "small bubble of hot air"
Floccinaucinihilipilification: Popperian poppycock as a theory of science

Indian Summer of the Neocons: The irresistible appeal of attacking Iran

By Colin Liddell,
 

Alternative Right, November 5, 2012: Sometimes empires just die, but often they have one last spurt before they go, and more often than not the spurt is all part of the dying. A good analogy is the Indian Summer, a period of unexpectedly warm weather that appears to turn the tide of approaching Winter. Less astute minds are sure to mistake this as proof of eternal summer and get frostbitten later. Those believing in the permanence of American hegemony are in for a similar nasty surprise, especially as in the coming years we are going to see the reassertion once again of American power.

This last hurrah won’t have the same post-9-11 naivety about turning everyone into "instant Americans" by giving them “democracy,” “freedom,” and cell phones over the craters of their bombed-out homes; even though that shrill note will probably continue to resonate through the propaganda. No, the new Neocons who will further this policy will be motivated much more by a cynical sense of realpolitik, realfinanz, and the increasingly jarring clatter of the gears of the machine that once smoothly ran the world.

It is not particularly important who wins the Presidential election today. Romney is a better fit with the dynamic of a late season assertion of American power; Obama a better fit with the economic decline powering it. Whoever is elected President, we will see a similar trajectory, whereby the hegemonic power of America will be asserted not as a burgeoning of true, broad-based power as it was in the post-WWII period, but instead as a flashy gesture disguising frailty and ultimate collapse.

Fall Guy

The crucible for this last act of overextended power will of course be Iran, the perfect fall guy because you just know they are not going to vary their route – their route being the one that leads towards a nuclear capability to balance that of Israel. Right on schedule, just when Uncle Sam wants to remind the world of what he looked like 50 years ago with his shirt off, the Iranians can be relied on to provide a convenient casus belli, especially if you have a few experts and a pet media to help refine the evidence and airbrush the fact that Israel and Pakistan have no business owning nukes either.

There is a tendency to view the coming war with Iran too narrowly. It is typically presented as an issue of security for Israel with a side order of protecting the free flow of Gulf oil and therefore that panacea of all dreams, the global economy. The security of the cute little tyrannies that dot the southern shore of the Gulf also gets the occasional mention. The real issue however is the maintenance of US power vis-à-vis its major global rivals set against a general background of its decline.

Riddled with flaws and weaknesses that are only getting worse, America is the yesterday man of tomorrow, but at least today the country still has some killer assets – and I don’t just mean its drones (either of the media or aeronautical variety).
The growth of America’s weaknesses means that its assets can no longer be kept on the shelf to exert their silent and secret power, but must now be vigorously milked for all they are worth. This is what will determine American foreign policy in the coming years, and impel it into inevitable war.

Just Ask the Question

THE BBC AND JIMMY SAVILE: COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN? 

Yes – Because it’s Happening Now. 

By Ex-Senator Stuart Syvret

stuartsyvret.blogspot.co.uk/, October 14, 2012:  

“Everybody would say, ‘what evidence have you got?’ I would say, ‘well I don’t have enough evidence to ever prove to anyone that he’s guilty…I just feel that I have huge responsibility, a huge need, to go and ask a lot of questions’.”

David Walsh, the journalist who, in 1999, first questioned Lance Armstrong’s remarkable performance in the Tour de France.

At a moment when the BBC is being forced to confront the toxicity of its intrinsically compromised “networked” and “club-like” nature – in which uncomfortable facts can be hidden in plain sight if that’s what suits a number of people – I was most interested to read a parallel story; one which has echoes of the BBC’s omerta.
On the 11^th October, the Press Gazette carried an interview with sports journalist David Walsh, who was the first person to publicly question the plausibility of the startling performance of cyclist Lance Armstrong. What struck me most about Walsh’s story was not so much that he was a person who walked a lonely and demanding path, against the groupthink of the day (there are always a few) but, rather, his grounds for doing so.

He wasn’t leaked dynamite information – he didn’t obtain access to secret medical reports – he had no “deep-throat” source back then, in 1999. Instead, he coolly observed what he was witnessing – and asked himself the plain and obvious question: “is this plausible?”

He didn’t think so. Following Armstrong’s victory in the 1999 Tour, Walsh wrote “This afternoon I will be keeping my arms by my side because I’m not sure this is something we should be applauding.” His only ground for writing that provocative opinion in the Sunday Times, was his intuition for the plausible.

Walsh incurred widespread damnation for his comments. But as he said in the Press Gazette article, “Everybody would say, ‘what evidence have you got?’ I would say, ‘well I don’t have enough evidence to ever prove to anyone that he’s guilty…I just feel that I have huge responsibility, a huge need, to go and ask a lot of questions’.”

And David Walsh carried on doing that thing which is actually surprisingly rare amongst the journalistic profession – he went to his subject – and simply asked the obvious questions.

Lance Armstrong invited Walsh to interview him in 2001; “He rang me because he knew I was asking a lot of questions and he thought that if I come along, and he’s really nice to me, and he gives me a one-on-one interview, I’ll be as happy as every other journalist and I’ll become his friend,” Walsh says.

“I didn’t feel any desire to be his friend because I had a sense of what he was like, and I felt there were lots of questions that needed answering.”

Walsh’s first words to Armstrong when he arrived at the hotel were: “I don’t believe you’re clean, but this is why I’m here, because I have questions. But the only questions I want to ask you are about doping. I won’t be asking you one question about cycling outside of the context of doping.”

David Walsh had those suspicions – and he simply went, and bluntly asked the obvious questions. And carried on asking them. And he was right.

Now that so many people in the BBC are mumbling about how the conduct of Jimmy Savile was so widely suspected – and that there were so many rumours – and, indeed, actual victims to be spoken with, as we now know – why did no BBC journalists go and ask – and persist in asking – the plain and obvious questions of Jimmy Savile – and ask the same obvious questions of those who had employed Savile, and those who persisted in enabling him to be around children?

What is it – about that simple foundation-stone of journalism – just asking the damn question – that is so difficult for 99% of today’s journalists?

Well, as an example of the modern phenomena that so increasingly threatens the entire relevancy of traditional hacks – a citizen’s media journalist – I am going to ask some damn questions.

Some obvious questions – arising out of things that sit in plain sight, yet which go unremarked, uninterrogated.

For example – why are BBC journalists still – this very day – silently permitting the scandalous and corrupt concealment of decades of child-abuse to go unquestioned?

What are their motivations – their reasons – for doing that?

Could it be - like the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Lance Armstrong – the most plain and obvious explanation?

That corruption is widespread amongst BBC staffers?

Indeed – I’m asking - I’m pointing at the elephant in the room – and asking the question: “is, in fact, corruption endemic in British journalism?”

That is my gut-instinct – just as Walsh had his about Armstrong.

Gaby Hinsliff, former Political Editor of the Observer, wrote in a tweet at 1.37 on Friday 12^th October, “Whatever failings of BBC management, BBC journalists are doing an exemplary, unflinching job of reporting Savile case.”

Really?

Well – now that it is safe and undemanding to do so – maybe a number of BBC hacks are reporting the sordid details of Savile’s conduct. But are they asking THE important – the plain and obvious questions, a la David Walsh?

Are they questioning the very “culture” of the BBC as a traditional institution – and all the baggage that brings?

Are they asking – “is corruption and concealment a common currency in the BBC?”

Or – “why has the BBC played the role it has, in so strongly assisting the Jersey establishment to cover-up child abuse – including abuse by Savile?”

Well, let’s hope one or two them might be planning to do that, though I haven’t yet seen any sign of it. And to help any budding David Walshes in the BBC – I’m going to assist, by laying out some of the stark and extraordinary matters that require – that demand - questions.

And the failure of the BBC to deal competently or honestly with current child-abuse scandals in Jersey is one of those matters that demands interrogation. Consider yourself to be a serious and ethical BBC journalist? Then come to Jersey – and ask the damn questions of the BBC management and staff here.

The plain and obvious questions.

In the previous posting – I wrote of the “currency of concealment” in respect of child-abuse.

But the currency of concealment applies to most walks of life – most situations. Let’s face it – knowing stuff – embarrassing stuff – or problematic stuff – about people – having done them favours, or they having done you favours, by keeping schtum about certain matters – and helping each other up the career ladder, is how influence is peddled in Britain; it is how the nation “networks” – and, frankly, it has been for hundreds of years. Corruption, and the concealment of corruption, is endemic in the UK.

And in so many ways – the way the traditional media has worked, is simply a giant, technicolor, unsubtle cartoon version of that workaday custom – that way of “doing business”.

Don’t take my word for it. The journalist who broke the phone-hacking scandal, Nick Davies, said at the Leveson inquiry, “journalism doesn't begin with checking facts, it's about selective decisions on what to cover”.

That’s as good a one-sentence description of how journalism works as you will ever find.

Here’s something I noticed, when my career was in politics; journalists look down on politicians with contempt. And, in most cases, you couldn’t blame them. But lacking in the perspective of those journalists, is the realisation that they too float down the same gutter, perhaps clinging to a fractionally more elevated turd. And maybe not even that.

The blunt truth is that most journalists are lazy, uncourageous and useless. 95% of them are unspeakably crap – yet without even in mitigation, the self-acceptance that you might find amongst most politicians. The smug self-regard of broadcast journalists in particular is a revolting wonder to behold when you have the misfortune of attempting to work closely with them. 

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Taking the American Police State to the Next Level

Q&A with Salman Khan

An amateur teacher who rocketed to fame on the Internet tells us how he’ll take his free video tutorials to the next level

By Antonio Regalado

Technology Review, November 7, 2012: What kind of crazy teacher would put high-school math on a site known for cat videos?

In his new book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, Salman Khan recalls how, eight years ago, he uploaded his first mathematics tutorial to YouTube. “I had no preconceived notions about how people learned; I was constrained by no orthodoxy regarding the ‘right’ way to do things,” he writes.

Today, Khan’s throw-out-the-rules message has turned him into a pedagogical star. CNN and Charlie Rose have called him to explain where education is headed, and his nonprofit Khan Academy, in Mountain View, California, is rapidly branching out from videos into educational software.

Khan’s book retells details now familiar to anyone who has followed his sudden rise. Beginning when he wanted to help his 12-year-old cousin Nadia pass a math test, Khan ended up recording more than 3,000 videos explaining long division, plate tectonics, and much more (they’ve been viewed 204 million times). He was soon discovered by wealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates, who’ve showered the Khan Academy with $16.5 million in gifts.

One World School House is a partly a hymnal for future donors, in which Khan gamely plugs a riches-to-rags storyline. A Louisiana native, he was president of his MIT class, earned an MBA at Harvard, and later made a tidy sum working at a hedge fund. But he gave up all that when he discovered his true calling as an online teacher. (His first big contributor, the wife of powerful venture capitalist John Doerr, was moved to write him a $100,000 check when she discovered he was living “off of savings.”)

The rest of the book is an erudite and accessible call to reorganize education. In much of the developed world, Khan writes, schools use a top-down teaching model first developed in Prussia, a Germanic kingdom known for “stiff whiskers, stiff hats, and stiff way of marching in lockstep.” Students must march ahead even if they haven’t understood what came before. Eventually, some stumble and tune out.

Khan’s big idea is that using online technology for lessons, quizzes, and constant assessment will create an affordable way to implement a different teaching ideal known as “mastery learning.” Everyone advances at his or her own pace. Don’t try algebra until you know your arithmetic. Spend less time in lectures and more in hands-on problem solving.

MIT Technology Review spoke with Khan by telephone.

Read the interview.

Why Romney Deserved to Lose

The other day I went to all the trouble of explaining why 'Barmy wouldn't be re-elected because he didn't deserve to be, and then the blighter comes right back and wins.

But Obama owes his victory chiefly to his opponent's complete contempt for the wishes of ordinary people. Romney proved even more Zionist, imperialist, militarist and globalist than Obama, while promising nothing to restore the Constitution, and far too little to restore to the mass of people hope for their economic future.

Next time the Republicans might consider seeking the support of the American people instead of the money power. But that would defeat their whole purpose.

See also Mark Levin:

We conservatives do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We're not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We're not good losers, you better believe we're sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we're called 'purists.' Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We're purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

And Mish:

Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh Are the Past

Romney is the past. So is Rush Limbaugh, so are all the extremists and so are all of the warmongers hell-bent on starting WWIII or a war with Iran.

Why Obama [Should have] lost: Because 50 million jobs haven't come back (and never will)

It is an abiding mystery why the US, after leading the west to the greatest strategic victory in the history of the nation state in the cold war and the triumph of democracy in most of the world, has been for about 15 years, in public policy terms, an almost unrelievedly stupid country. America’s enemies could scarcely have devised a more suicidal programme than the one that was followed: outsourcing nearly 50m jobs while admitting 20m unskilled aliens ...
Conrad Black, The Financial Times, August 29, 2012.

Chinese sweatshop: Where the jobs went. Source

Whether the US has really outsourced as many as 50 million jobs, I cannot confirm. But certainly the West as a whole must have lost at least that many jobs to outsourcing and offshoring since the 1994 Gatt agreement that opened the West to competition from four billion of the Rest willing to work for pennies an hour. In Spain and Greece officially recognized unemployment exceeds 25%, youth unemployment is over 50%, while in the US, black youth unemployment exceeds 90%. Overall, US unemployment, according to the old U6 measure is still well into double digits and the number of those in the US and Europe who have dropped out of the workforce because of the futility of continuing the search for work runs into the many tens of millions.

US U6 Unemployment: 14.6%, October 2012. Source

The idea that just a bit of Keynsian deficit spending is all that's needed to bring the jobs home again is fantastic nonsense that could only be entertained by a Nobel-Prize-winning tenured economics professor with a guaranteed income for life. The only way that money printing and deficit spending could return jobs from the Rest to the West is if it were to drive the US$ and the Euro down against the Renmimbi and the Rupee by 90 %, while wages remained constant and the cost of living soared.

But even that would not solve the problem of mass Western unemployment. Faced by rising wages at its Chinese slave plantations Foxconn, the manufacturer of the iPhone and many other hot electronic items, proposes to replace workers by the million with robots. What we will have then is a world in which most labor is not worth its hire. Even a starvation wage will be too much.

This was foreseen many decades ago by the geniuses who brought about the cyber revolution. Thus, in 1960, Norbert Wiener, a child prodigy from Columbia, Missouri, and the inventor of cybernetics wrote:

Robotics and the paradox of slavery
A slave is expected to have two qualities: intelligence, and subservience. These two qualities are by no means perfectly compatible. The more intelligent the slave is, the more he will insist on his own way of doing things in opposition to the way of doing things imposed on him by his owner. To this extent he will cease to be a slave. Similarly the machine with a higher-order programming will do things that we many not have foreseen in detail. The result is that in the employment of such a machine we are bound to find sooner or later that the purpose of the machine does not conform to the detailed mode of action which we have chosen for it. ...

Assembly line workers. Source

With a machine of this sort ... where we do not fully understand we shall be under pressure to confirm and to a certain extent the machine rather than ourselves will be the lord of such performance. This imposes upon us new obligations and new responsibilities. The machine will still be literal-minded on the highest level, and will do what we have told it to do rather than what we want it do and what we imagine we have told it to do. Here we dig into the moral problems which earlier generations have faced on the level of magic. WW. Jacob's story The Monkey's Paw, Goethe's poem The Magician's Apprentice, and the Arabian Nights legend of the fisherman and the genie call this matter to our attention. The Monkey's Paw gets its owner a small fortune at the cost of the mangling of his son in the machinery of the factory in which he works. The Magician's Apprentice has learned the words by which the broomstick was made to fetch water but has not yet learned the words to stop it. The genie in the bottle, once it has been released by the fisherman, has a will of its own which is bent on his destruction. These tales of imagination cease to be tales of imagination once we have actually made working agencies which go beyond the complete comprehension of those who have constructed them. There is nothing which will automatically make the automatic factory work for human good, unless we have determined this human good in advance and have so constructed the factory as to contribute to it. If our sole orders to the factory are for an increase in production, without regard to the possible aspects of this new and vast productivity and without regard to the problems of unemployment and the redistribution of human labor, there is no self-working principle of laissez-faire which will make those orders redound to our benefit and even prevent them from contributing to our own destruction. The responsibilities of automation are new, profound and difficult

But the capitalists, the Jobs's, the Gates's the Goldman Sachs's and all the other people who fund US Presidential elections and profit from globalization and the robotic revolution have no concern for those mangled in the machinery. If there is no self-working machinery of laissez-faire that insures that maximization of profits for the owners of capital redounds to the benefit of the people as a whole, who among the owners of capital cares? The attitude is clear: if labor is needed, outsource to the Third World or bring to the West workers from the Third World who are young, fertile, ambitious, energetic, and ready if necessary to work in the underground economy at less than minimum wage.

Politically correct Britain. Source

The Western nations are headed for unavoidable extinction. Betrayed by an elite without a sense of national belonging or loyalty, the fertility of the nations of Western Europe and their New World offshoots has collapsed. Oh, sure, the Western nations will continue in name. But they will be populated by a different people, the indigenous inhabitants of Western Europe and the European population of the Americas are declining and increasing despised remnants, betrayed by leaders increasingly alienated from, and contemptuous of, their native population.

Today's leadership consists in the promotion of a  perversion of liberalism, together with criminalization of the expression of traditional morality, loyalty, responsibility and religious belief. Trouble from the plebs? Just give 'em more rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, the right not to work and other rights they want just as long as they remain distracted and continue the process of self destruction. As Konrad Lorenz remarked:

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Or as the T.S. Eliot put it:

If you give people what they want, you begin by underestimating them and end by corrupting them.

Britain's migrant baby boom Source

And a system of universal corruption is not a civilization but the end of civilization, and when a civilization ends, the people go with it. The US birthrate is well below the replacement rate— -- even lower than during the Great Depression. In Texas, white births in the minority. Meantime, in England Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Nigerian mothers are doing well, each producing twice as many children as native British women.Over 25% of British births are now to foreign born mothers, and many more to foreign born fathers and the sons and daughters of foreign-born parents. Within a generation, the British will be a rapidly shrinking minority in their own homeland.

Britain must atone for its sins in Palestine

By Nabeel Shaath

The Telegraph, October 31, 2012: Over the past few weeks, British diplomats have stated that they are doing all they can to discourage Palestine’s bid for “observer state” status in the UN General Assembly. If this is an official British position, then it is reprehensible, yet not all that surprising.

Ninety-five years ago tomorrow, on November 2, 1917, British imperialism in Palestine began when Lord Balfour, the then British foreign secretary and former prime minister, sent a letter to Baron Rothschild, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement. This letter became known as the “Balfour Declaration”.

In that letter, Balfour promised British support for the Zionist programme of establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This pledge of support was made without consulting the indigenous Christian and Muslim inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinian people. And it was made before British troops had even conquered the land.

Balfour, on behalf of Britain, promised Palestine – over which Britain had no legal right – to a people who did not even live there (of the very small community of Palestinian Jews in Palestine in 1917, very few were Zionists). And he did so with the worst of intentions: to discourage Jewish immigration to Britain. No wonder Lord Montagu, the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, opposed the declaration.

And yet, just two years earlier, Britain had committed herself to assisting the Arab nations in achieving their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Arab fighters all over the region, including thousands of Palestinians, fought for their freedom, allowing Britain to establish her mandate in Palestine.

From that moment, Palestine became the victim of colonial conspiracies. The Balfour Declaration helped to encourage Zionist immigration into Palestine and away from America and Western Europe. Concomitantly, Britain repressed Palestinian nationalism, which was exemplified by its crushing of the Arab revolt of 1936-1939 and the denial of the right of the Palestinian people to express their will through their own representation. In fact, Britain suppressed Palestinian political representation through a policy of systematic denial of Palestinian political rights.

The dying days of Britain’s rule in Palestine were marked by destruction, blood, and the start of the Palestinian exile, meaning the expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people against the backdrop of Zionist terrorism. It was not the Palestinians who blew up the King David Hotel, who blew up the British Embassy in Rome, who tried to assassinate Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary, and who succeeded in assassinating Lord Moyne, British minister of state in the Middle East. That was the Irgun, an ideological Right-wing group – and the predecessor to Israel’s ruling Likud Party.

The British mandate was supposed to deliver independence to Palestine through the establishment of representative institutions. It was never meant permanently to thwart Palestinian national aspirations. Nor was it ever envisaged that the British mandate would end with a catastrophe in the form of the expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

When Britain decided to relinquish Palestine to the UN in 1947, she was well aware that the Zionist movement was well established and equipped, while Palestinians were still healing from the effects of British colonialism during the years of the revolt.

Since the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, during which approximately two thirds of the Palestinian people, Christians and Muslims, were expelled to become refugees, Britain has not done anything substantially to repair the suffering it has caused to the Palestinians. Britain has not met its historic responsibility. Successive British administrations have avoided repairing this injustice by making statements of goodwill instead of taking actions to end the Israeli occupation and support the Palestinian right to self-determination.

It is unacceptable that today, 65 years after the partition of Palestine, the UK has recognised the state of Israel but not the state of Palestine. It is unacceptable that, having invested large human and economic resources in the development of Palestinian institutions, the UK has not taken the necessary political and diplomatic steps to realise the establishment of a free and independent state of Palestine. Rather than continuing down this path, the UK, more than any other state, should stand behind the Palestinian endeavour towards the fulfilment of their national rights and aspirations, through supporting its application for enhancement of status at the UN.

Some argue that Palestine’s recognition and enhanced status will not immediately end the occupation. None the less, it is a step in the right direction towards a peaceful solution, and it sends a strong message to Israel that the world will no longer tolerate its illegal and oppressive policies. For a country with the historic responsibility that the UK carries towards Palestine, a victim of British colonialism, this should be the least we can expect in order to repair decades of occupation and exile.

Dr Nabeel Shaath is a member of the PLO Political Committee and Fatah Central Committee, and is a former Palestinian foreign minister

Palestine in 1896:

The Holy Inquisition: A Defender of Civilization

By Ioannis Auxentiou 

Alternative Right: There is, probably, no other institution in the medieval world that has been slandered as much, as the Holy Inquisition. Enlighteners, Protestants, and Jews managed for a long time to tarnish this very important institution in every possible way. Even in our own day, Hollywood continues to produce movies that reinforce this view.

But, as the saying goes, “lies have small feet.” Modern historical research has proved that a lot of the so-called “truths” that were widely believed about the actions of this institution were just myths created by modernity.

Important in this act of historical revision were the works of historians: Henry A. Kamen, a member of the Royal Historical Society, Edward Peters, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Bartolomé Bennassar, professor at the University of Toulouse, and many more.

In the short article that follows, the reader will have the chance to understand the causes behind the slanders against the Holy Inquisition, but also to learn about some parts of its activity that are unknown to a wider audience.

The Seal of the Spanish Holy Inquisition

To defend and justify the Holy Inquisition is the exact opposite of Political Correctness. But as I have nothing to do with PC, I am happy to present the real history of this medieval institution.

Even the biggest critic of the Holy Inquisition, the American Quaker historian Henry C. Lea (1825 – 1909), was forced to admit that “The aim of the Holy Inquisition was the same as the aim of Civilization.” Indeed, even the most fanatical anti-Catholics, agree that the Holy Inquisition effectively countered:

• the suicidal beliefs of the Cathars, who were against childbirth
• the vandalism of the Anabaptists, who believed in destroying all art works
• the murderous tendencies of Fra Dolcino, who wished to kill every sinner
• the “Brothers of the Free Spirit,” who wished to remove from public office everyone who was not “enlightened”

All these victories for sanity were due to the Holy Inquisition. Today, no-one would be crazy enough to believe that God created some just to damn them for eternity. But, that was for centuries, the protestant dogma, and the cause of terrible wars that bled Europe. It is due to the Holy Inquisition, that Spain wasn’t touched by such have religious wars.

We should also remember that the famed University of Salamanca (one of the best and oldest in Europe), was created by an Inquisitor, and that the conversation about the rights of American Indians took place under the aegis of the Spanish Holy Inquisition. In this, we could even say that the Holy Inquisition was one of sources of modern day international human rights.

To understand how the Spanish Inquisition developed we have to understand Spanish history. In 1492 that country had just completed its national Reconquista, after eight centuries of occupation of a large part of its territory by the Moors. It thus had two really powerful national minorities in it: one of the biggest Jewish communities in the world as well as the Muslims. The first group had managed to concentrate a major part of the financial power in its hands, while the second, did not hide its dreams of vengeance.

The “Marranos” and the “Moriscos” were two in-between categories, made up of pseudo-Christians, meaning Jews and Muslims, who had – only in name – been converted to Christianity. Many of these had managed to occupy high offices in the Spanish hierarchy, both secular and ecclesiastic. This situation was full of danger, threatening the submission of the country to those hostile minorities, as well as causing intense friction and clashes with the real Christians, who saw that those pseudo-Christians were not only using their networks to control positions and offices, but were also taking economic advantage of them. Because of this, the country was in danger of civil war.

So the leadership of Spain thought it essential to intervene so that ne cives ad arma veniant (the citizens would not take arms). It therefore instituted the Holy Inquisition, and, in order for it to be impartial, the first High Inquisitor was Tomás de Torquemada, a man from a “converso” background (genuine converts to Christianity). In the case of Torquemada’s family, the conversion had been from Judaism. The main aim of the Holy Inquisition was to clarify things, making Jews declare that they are Jews and Muslims to declare that they are Muslims. In other words, no one bothered with the Jews that remained Jewish and the same went for Muslims.

Much has been written, said, and implied about the torture methods of the Holy Inquisition. There is no historian, worthy of that title, who does not recognize the fact that the Holy Inquisition was a rather mild and fair court, that it respected the procedures and was honestly interested in the salvation of the guilty.

As far as tortures go, they were rarely used, and were accompanied by medical controls, and only for the purpose of proving guilt. In any case, they were not overly harsh by the standards of the day. The accused was lifted high off the ground with ropes and left to fall down – three times maximum. If he could withstand the pain, the procedure stopped there. When the police arrest a criminal today, it is not unusual for the apprehended individual to be beaten and restrained.

Let us consider the prisons of the Holy Inquisition in Rome. The Italian historian Luigi Firpo mentions that there were a change of sheets twice per week, beer for those who could not drink wine, leave for the prisoners to see their parents, for work, and for medical care. The sentence of “continuous imprisonment,” in the language of the inquisitors, actually meant only three years in prison.

As far as France is concerned, it is known why the Holy Inquisition was established in that country. This was due to the heresy of the Cathars, which had managed to gain control of whole provinces, and had even princes convert to it. In short, the real reason for the existence of the Holy Inquisition in Europe was the to counter that era’s version of “Trotskyists,” meaning Gnostic movements and crypto-Jews, that were applying, then as now, their favorite technique of Entryism.

Before we finish, a small mention of the Galileo Galilei case. The Catholic Church supported the Aristotelian - Ptolemaic earth-centered theory for the movement of the celestial bodies, while Gallilei believed in the Copernican heliocentric theory. The Holy Inquisition, did not call Gallilei to condemn him, but asked him to prove his theory, and if he did the church would accept it. What happened, and was kept in silence for many years, was that Gallilei could not give irresistible scientific proof. Today every scientist knows that. This is not the right place to present the whole case. It is enough to read what Arthur Koestler, a Jew himself and thus no fan of the Catholic Church, writes about Gallilei:

“There is no doubt that the theory of tides by Gallilei was based on an unconscious fraud. But there is no doubt that the theory of tides, by Gallilei was a deliberate effort to confuse and deceive... As we have seen, academics are always prone to manias and obsessions and tend to falsify details. But fraudsters like Gallilei are rare in the chronicles of science...”

(Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, New York, 1959).

Would you like to know the penalty that the court of the Holy Inquisition forced on Gallilei? Five months of detainment in the tower of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco Niccolini and the recitation of some religious psalms. Finally there was a “deal” and the psalms were recited by his daughter Maria Celeste. A bit later, after Gallilei disobeyed the orders to not spread his unproven theories, they were forced to isolate him in his villa, (known as “The Jewel”) in which he lived with every comfort.

Another big lie is the famous phrase that Gallilei supposedly used after his conviction: “Yet, it moves”. This phrase was not used by Gallilei, but was invented by the author Giussepe Baretti, who invented the incident for the purposes of anti-Catholic propaganda for the British public in an anthology published in London in 1757.

The End of the Cathars

But somebody is sure to ask: Did the Holy Inquisition go to no extremes? Did it not abuse its power at all? Of course it did, as is the case in any human activity, whether religious, political or military. The death penalties that the Holy Inquisition declared (in reality the Holy Inquisition decided if someone was guilty or not, the death penalty was an issue of the state and not of the Church) were limited to serious offences and anyway were quite less than the number of death penalties that the civic courts declared in that time.

History should be judged on the same basis as pharmaceuticals. A medicine is evaluated by comparing its healing abilities against its negative side effects. If we judge the Holy Inquisition by the same rule, then we will have to admit that if its spirit had been kept throughout Europe steadily and for a longer time, then maybe today we might not be living in our present age of darkness. In other words we would be free of Puritanism and thus Capitalism, and from WASPs like G.W. Bush, freemasonry, as well as every leftist ideology.

This article was originally published in Greek on the Theodotus blog. It was translated into English by Dimitrios Papageorgiou for Alternative Right.

Iran vs the Empire: Fighting dollarization

By Eric Walberg

The West's attempts to destroy the Iranian economy through heightened sanctions—including most imports, oil exports and use of banks for trade operations—is having its affect. According to Johns Hopkins University Professor Steve Hanke, Iran is facing hyperinflation, with a monthly inflation rate of nearly 70% per month and its national currency, the rial, plummeting in value against western currencies. Iran is the latest casualty to be placed on his Hanke-Krus Hyperinflation Index, which includes France (1795), Germany (1922), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1986), Argentina (1990), Russia (1992), Ecuador (1999) and Zimbabwe (2007), countries which experienced price-level increases of at least 50% per month.

Hanke, relishing his role as the world’s expert on this nightmarish phenomenon, has "played a significant role in stopping more hyperinflations than any living economist, including 10 of the 57 episodes" on his Index. He writes that Iran has three options: spontaneous dollarization (people unloading rials on the blackmarket for dollars, as happened in Zimbabwe), official dollarization (the government withdrawing the currency in favor of dollars, as in Ecuador), or a currency board issuing a new domestic currency backed 100% by—you guessed it—dollars. Hanke insists that the foreign currency doesn't have to be US dollars. Pitcairn Island, for instance, uses New Zealand dollars.

The inflation doctor admits vaguely that there are "foreign factors", without a hint of criticism of not only the sanctions, but the active subversion of Iran through everything from support of Iranian terrorists, assassinations of leading scientists, right up to war (the US encouraged Iraq to invade Iran in 1980). He emphasizes "Iran's complex system of subsidies, capital controls, and multiple exchange rates", but most of all "massive overprinting of money", though he complains that "the Central Bank of The Islamic Republic of Iran has not reported any such statistics for some time". As if a country living through a state of emergency is likely to divulge such sensitive information.

He coolly dismisses consumers' expectations influencing prices, since "fear surrounding military tensions is nothing new for Iranians". Indeed, the US has been targeting Iran for destruction ever since it threw off its colonial chains in 1979—a dangerous example for other, especially Muslim countries. It is miraculous that Iran has done so well economically since the revolution, given the unremitting victimization it has experienced. One can only marvel at the stubborn courage it has shown to build an Islamic society in the teeth of opposition by the world empire and even by other Muslim nations allied to the empire.

We indeed may ask why Iran's inflation rate has jumped so dramatically precisely in recent times. Of course, it is because of the sanctions. And why the sanctions? Is it really fears that Iran will develop a nuclear bomb, despite professions to the contrary and membership in the IAEA? No. Besides Iran’s role in inspiring the current 'Islamic Reawakening' in the Middle East, there is another very important reason, one which flies in the face of Hanke's 'three options' for Iran.

Those ‘options’ all amount to one: accept US-dollar dictatorship. Iran has been trying to trade oil in non-US dollar currencies since 2008, when it opened its Oil Bourse. Iraq did this in 2000, and the US reaction was invasion—dollarization at gunpoint. The point of the sanctions today is a last-ditch attempt by the US to force Iran to comply with the US world order, as epitomized by continued acceptance of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Hanke insists it is not necessary for Iran to use US dollars as its substitute currency, which in any case would be ridiculous under the circumstances. However, the alternative of using, say, New Zealand dollars finesses the reality that all currencies are tied to the US dollar, as the de facto international reserve currency. This has been the case in reality since the 1930s, when the world abandoned the gold standard. Acknolwedging this fact, over 20 countries call their legal tender 'dollars'.

Whether the government moves quickly to raise the white flag, as in Ecuador, or belatedly, as in Zimbabwe, or insists on printing pretty new paper scrip tied 100% to the US dollar through an exchange board, as did Argentina, merely confirms the obvious. In past cases, such as Chile, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe, the message was: your socialist policies are unacceptable. In Iran's case, the message is: take dollars for your oil.

Hanke's monetarist credo—printing money causes inflation—ignores the underlying causes of inflation. As he admits, Iranians have faced war fears for over three decades. The exchange controls and subsidies, "government monopolies, price controls, and Soviet-style economic planning", which Hanke calls "wrong-headed", are not the cause of inflation, but a way for the government to keep it under control. However, at a certain point, the "foreign factors" become so egregious that even such measures fail. That is what has happened now, as sanctions have created extreme pain for the average Iranian. Bare shelves and panic in the face of invasion threats means that the currency will devalue, however many rials the government prints.

This is what happened in Germany in 1922, when it was forced to export everything to buy the gold to pay the extortionate reparations. It ended by resorting to Hanke’s currency board and marks issued against gold, but the underlying cause—the extortion practiced by Britain and France—only ended when Hitler took power and canceled the reparations. The devastation cause by "foreign factors" led in that instance to the rise of fascism.

University of Missouri Professor Michael Hudson maintains that “every hyperinflation in history stems from the foreign exchange markets. It stems from governments trying to throw enough of their currency on the market to pay their foreign debts.” Canadian commentator Stephen Gowans calls it “warfare by other means”. Devaluing the enemy’s currency was used as a war tactic by Napoleon against the Russians and by the British against the American colonists.

A consideration of all the countries on Hanke's Hyperinflation Index can trace similar real causes and real ways to end the underlying problem that led to hyperinflation in each case. Ecuador finally took control of its economy and reduced its foreign debt in defiance of the IMF under President Rafael Correa, and is today the most popular political leader in all of the Americas. That is what created political stability and ended the ever-present threat of inflation there. The same goes for Argentina under President Nestor Kirschner and Russia under President Vladimir Putin.

Hanke is like the doctor telling the patient who was shot that he must have his leg amputated immediately. He refuses to condemn the sanctions as a violation of human rights, targeting the Iranian people without cause. He wants to cut off the patient's leg to save him, which he can do in a matter of hours. The Iranian government is trying to remove the bullet and use a strict regime of rehabilitation, something that requires patience and grit. There is no magic cure to solve inflation under these circumstances.

The possibility looms that the US will undertake yet another criminal invasion of a Muslim country, recapitulating its war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The real analogy for Iran is wartime. During war, all countries ration scarce goods, and people unite and accept sacrifice in the face of the enemy. This is the only solution for Iran today unless it agrees to join the US-dollar denominated empire as a junior member. Hanke's patient could well die under the 'anesthesia' of US-Israeli bombs, but the Iranian people are proud and will fight for their dignity till their dying breath. The worries about hyperinflation will then pale in comparison to the real "foreign factors", and the US will face the revenge of history for its criminal actions.

Most countries are too afraid of the US wolf to stand up to it. There are exceptions. China, Russia, India and South Korea have not abandoned 'the patient'. Egypt is establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Iran in defiance of the US. Hopefully other 'Arab Spring' countries will join Iran in pursuing a policy of justice for the Middle East, working together to undo the horrendous legacy of US imperialism in the region. Someday, ‘dollarization’ will be a shibboleth, consigned to the ‘ash heap of history’.