Friday, September 29, 2006

A NEW WORLD ORDER, 2003

31 July 2003
A NEW WORLD ORDER
(To be continued)
Unless you received this in an e -mail from me, you are reading this writing in a web posting. Thank you for taking the time to look this over, and if you do happen to read it through, I will be pleased. You may even be surprised at what I have to say and I may just confirm your worst fears. Your being on the net and looking at this article already means that you are smart, that you are above average in income, and depending on your location you may even be a person of above average means.
But first! This document has no chapters, no break marks, it has no headings and discussion is desultory of necessity, subjects leading one into another into another and another. From economics to religion to politics into philosophy and sociology and even into the military. Rest assured I have more than a fair knowledge of these subjects thru education, assignments, jobs and life experiences. So what does that have to do with the end of the world? Please indulge me a while.
Around my house I joke around that if I were born three thousand years ago or so, they would have called me either a prophet or a heretic, either way I would have been killed. Here we are at the dawn of a new millennium; we are the greatest power on the face of this earth ever. We dare talk of liberating the nations, of bringing democracy and prosperity to the people of the world, we even talk of bringing the peace to the Middle East, the Muslims and the Jews sitting down together, ( remember the lion and the lamb).
I have never been known to keep my thoughts and ideas to myself. Having been on my own and having had to fend for myself since the age of about eleven, I have always been suspicious of the people in authority. And having lived among "foreigners" and "strangers”, I also learnt to speak my mind, without caring if I upset the proverbial apple cart.
In Saudi Arabia, I was beaten up, a few times, by the religious police, for my long hair and tight pants. And in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, I came eyeball to eyeball with a rifle, for hanging out with the wrong crowd, I was thirteen. My trouble started with analyzing the details of every situation came from the only thing I ever learned from my calculus classes, that adding even a single drop of water raises the level of the ocean, and that even if you take out the water a drop at a time over time even an ocean will be emptied.
And so it was, that in 1973, in an economics class at a place then called The University of Palm Beach, ( now Palm Beach School of Business???), that I declared in my Economics class, that having open and free trade with the third world countries, we will lower the standard of living for all the working people everywhere. My professor told me that I was a communist. Then in 1980, in the English literature class of Dr. Mabene, at The Troy State University I mentioned that having women in the work force reduces the wages for men, and reduces the wages in the society over all and actually increases poverty. I was lucky to have gotten out alive. (The class was over fifty percent females).
In 1989, at the height of the crack epidemic, in my class on Community Resources I stated that the Government cannot afford to stop the drugs, or our economy will collapse and the joblessness will sky rocket, my class mates gave me a standing ovation.
Take a look around you, I mean the world around you that we all live in. I here go out on the limb and make a prediction. In a matter of just two and one half years you will not recognize this place at all. No I am not a politician, and it really does not matter if the Democrats win the next election, here in the United States, or the Republicans, it will not change my estimation greatly, the time is up, two and one half years is all we have.
I assume that a few of my readers may not understand my hypothesis, some may disagree vehemently. And a few kind ones may think that I have lost my marbles, totally! Some may call me a racist, and some may just simply call me "Karl", like another one of my friends did. Personally I like the moniker “the Alarmist". And I do hope that you stay awake thru this reading.
Most of what I have here today is already general knowledge and available in books and newspapers. You may already know most of it. What I have done is to pickup the pieces and made a whole pictures, connected the dots. We live in a world that is inter-connected, and the events in anyone part of it have far reaching consequences. Also if we make a mistake in thinking that what does it matter to anyone else, we can do what we want, we may have unforeseen and unintended results for which we are ill prepared to deal with.
Item. The Government of the United States is broke, the people of the United States are broke too, but the individuals are oblivious to all what it means.
Item. All the governments of the world are broke. Every single one is running up a deficit beyond its real capability to pay it back.
Item. Peace in the Middle East is a pipe dream, it is impossible, with the current paradigm of the religions, gods and the prophets, of a hell and a heaven and salvation, the end of the world is still not inevitable. But in the hands of the zealots (idiots) it has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Item. Africa is dying; it is dying of ignorance, of the arrogance of its tin pan leaders, of starvation and of AIDS. It is dying of neglect and of greed the foreigners. It shall die. It is not salvageable.
The truth is, our planet is over extended, much as we want to sound benevolent, the earth is not capable of handling the population. With six billion plus people already here and the number keeps going up everyday the mother earth is tired, it is exhausted. We are over overtaxing the planet beyond its capacity in the natural resources. I would like to assume that we could feed everyone, clothe every child and educate and medicate each and every new arrival, but the truth remains that we cannot, we do not and we shall not.
In the early part of 1977, in a gasthouse in Erlangen Germany, a friend I would call "Red", an American GI, asked, hey, what do you think of the Americans, " in my estimation", I said, " the Americans are generally narrow minded and hard headed, they think they are always right and do not accept criticism lightly." "What the hell do you mean," said Sgt "Red", standing up over me, I looked up and said, "exactly". Luckily for me Red sat back down.
Right after 9-11, the US, at least the media went on a soul searching mission. "Why do they hate US"/us", the head lines would read. In the news papers, in the panel discussions on TV, every two bit talking head had an opinion. Everyone declared us the victims of the insane Muslim radicals who are jealous of our progress and material riches. And the rag heads were ready to take over the world and destroy the western civilization. We were the victims of our own progress and prosperity. It may be even true, but to a point only. But Mr. Bush declared a crusade (he then backed off of the title), first against the Taliban, then all the numerous other terrorists. Its pity, no on e was listening to Pat Buchanan.
In the animal kingdom, the population of a species never exceeds the available resources. If a given area becomes lacking in food or fresh water the species will stop reproducing at the normal rate and thin their own herd thru attrition or finally migration. The modern man is not as smart, actually we perform in way that is totally the opposite. For our own national or geographic reasons, we restrict migrations. The nations rich in resources often tend to keep away the have nots. Thus poorer nations, if for no other reason, become poorer thru unchecked reproduction.
As Americans, even when we see some of the pictures from the African lands, or Central America or South East Asia, for starving children, for the people dying of AIDS, of the hovels and shanty towns, it is really hard to imagine the TRUE conditions of these "lives". Let me explain.
Even as some of us have seen wars up-close, (I exclude the ones that suffer a direct loss for the 9-11), like those who were in combat in the world wars2, the Korean conflict, the Viet Nam war, and the two gulf wars, these wars had a remote feeling. It was not our towns, our villages, our cities, homes and our families destroyed by the war, and bombed and burnt to ashes. As a soldier, always ready and able to defend ourselves. Those children with burnt torsos and torn limbs were not our kids, not our babies. We never had to live under the occupation forces without rights or privacy, it was not our sisters mothers and daughters harassed and molested. And if you have never been there, any war, with our over whelming power and an assured victory, easily seems just, justifiable proper and easy.
Similarly, a vast majority of us do not understand the abject poverty and hunger and the misery that is the "life" for the billions on this planet. We are quick to blame the peoples of the different countries and cultures. We have never heard the cries of a hungry child, unable to sleep. Never touched the hand of a mother or a daughter, wasting, for no other reason but the cruelty of the man to his own kind. We cannot understand why a starving mass would mob a food aid convoy, instead of standing in a line and waiting their turn. As a matter of fact, some find a "perverse pleasure" in their "stupidity".
If we were to provide everything for everyone on the face of the earth, all the natural resources will be depleted very soon. And the planet will be left too polluted and depleted for it to sustain human life much longer. We must stop reproducing at the rate we are going. We must not only stop the growth in population we must immediately reduce our own numbers.
In the modern society, world wide, almost eighty percent of the population is useless and a net burden on the resources. These people are net consumers of natural wealth and do not contribute to the furtherance of human welfare and continuance of an intelligent species. The society and the governments must find ways to reduce and/ or eliminate these net spenders of our natural wealth. They only take up food and oxygen.
In any case the over all population of our planet is overwhelming our natural resources, from freshwater aquifers, to timber to fossil fuels and the fish of the oceans. I am sure that a number of individuals, organizations, think tanks and the governments are looking over these problems right now. They are designing solutions and strategies. But I am also sure that much more thought and consideration is being given to their own rights and benefits, and furtherance of the agenda of their own peoples, races and nations and their national goals and aspirations at the expense of the humanity and its future as a whole.
One of the greatest mysteries of today is the universal faith that the U.S. economy is too strong, it cannot falter. That our fiscal policies and our trade policies are there to help the lower classes and the poor not only here but also overseas. That free trade is always for the good of all people. Let me tell you a secret, Greenspan or no Greenspan, in the United States here today and world wide there is no MONEY, (at least in the hands of any government). What you have in your wallet, in the bank or in your retirement and social security accounts is "nothing", nada, it is all imaginary.
How are we to create wealth, and under what laws of economics do we keep creating riches "forever"? We used to say, in the nineties, that the old economics laws do not apply to this new economy. My friends laughed when at the start of the year 2000, I said we are going into a recession like none before, when I said that the markets are going to fall. Guess what?
For the past fifty years or so we have been hooked on to deficit spending, with a few exceptions. In 1980, Reagan ran on a platform of promise to balance the budget, only to get us into the largest deficits in the history, of mankind. Then Bush passed his tax cuts to give the economy a boost, when do we ever learn. Now here is the kicker, where as in the other countries, up until now at least, people have real savings; in the United States we are always spending our future income- borrowing. Borrowing to buy our homes, our cars, our education and our pizza and our jeans. A majority of our population is a paycheck away from bankruptcy.
That is, if you miss a paycheck, your house of cards tumbles. Our politicians know this well, and they manage our house accordingly.saw the whole picture and just in time to save his butt became a born again Christian, thus becoming arrogant and suspicious of ones that are not like him. Our national security adviser is a specialist in the Soviet affairs, may be she would have made a good history professor, at a four year college.
We attacked Iraq on apparently fabricated evidence. Wither or not it was it was fabricated still remains to be seen. But I can tell you where our intelligence has already shown to be a total failure. No I am not talking about the intelligence community but the intelligence of our national security team, the state department and the defense departments. How could we imagine the Iraqis of any kind to be our freindlies, we may have forgotten but did they also forget (1) that the most of the Iraqis in those mass graves and the fallen of the Kurdish to the gas attacks were placed there because we asked for the Sheia and the Kurdish uprisings only to fail in helping them achieve their aims. (2) That most Iraqis , for the last 12 years suffered under the trade embargoes orchestrated and implemented by the United States, can you really believe they have forgotten the 12 years of misery, can you really believe that they trust us? Can they really be trusted? (3) No matter how long or how short our stay in Iraq; it will be pure chaos there the day we leave. We have created a new heaven for the al-Quieda types and now we sit there fertilizing it.
Our leaders, Christians, Muslims or Jews or other wise are all actually godless people who are more worried about accumulating wealth and destroying others in the process. No matter their professed ideology. Even the so called religious leaders’ corrupt souls believing that if there is a god they are the only ones that have a claim to him, exclusive of all others. That they are the only ones that know it all and the only ones that are righteous. This is the major fault of the monotheistic religions and their religious followers. They will kill each other and get to heaven.
If there were a god, of the kind they claim that there is, he is one hell of a conniving deceiving, vengeful, destructive god, actually if we look close, he is the devil. Where as the Muslims are justifying killing of the innocent, the Jews have their own version of the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza. what they are lacking in death chambers they make up for it with Apache gunship and bombing of the houses, forget the admonition of the bible that from now on fathers shall not pay for the sins of their sons, and the sons shall not be made to pay for the sins of their fathers. All sides actually being led by godless jackasses, thinking they are doing good. Honestly, if I were to blame the Muslims for carrying on with a religious war, then did we not start a religious war by creating the state of Israel itself? Our gods have failed us.
Is there a god? The question it self and the discussion thereof is a total waste of time for thinking minds. In the here and now, there are manifest many more immediate and oppressing problems. But in the affairs of the world today god itself is a major obstacle to a peaceful co-existence. Then there are these religious avenues of thought and the basis of many varied religious philosophies.
We must first admit that no matter how great a philosophy of a particular theological tradition, today we are basing future on traditions that are thousands of year of years old. These philosophies, traditions and theologies, though originating from probably some of the greatest minds ever, were actually only considering a world and a community that was much more primitive and smaller than the world as whole as we know today.
I do not wish to compare today, the great and contemporary philosophies, traditions and theologies (whatever you may call them), that is the Greek, the Chinese (Confucians), the Hindu and the Mid Eastern that is the Monotheistic orthodoxy (from which the Jewish, the Christian and the Islamic traditions originate). Somehow around five to seven thousand years ago the mankind had evolved enough to start contemplating god and the origin of the world/ universe. We must also revisit some of the basic tenants that have permeated some of these, both religious and the philosophical schools of thought.
!. That all men are created equal. As we must admit today that is on its face not a fact. Oh yes! At some level that everyone should have equal rights and equal protections under law, from tyranny, and a freedom of choice. But beyond that, not everyone is created equal, as to in intelligence, availability of resources and opportunity of self- improvement and advancement. Thus some sectors of the world population will always do better overall than the others, barring a catastrophic change in the equation.
2. And it follows also from 1. that we do not have a free will, we do not choose where we are born and in what society. You can not select your country of origin your parents and the religion or the race you are born in. It is all pre determined at your birth. And far as I know you did not do anything special to earn any of it one way or another. The ideas of religious indoctrination and having a free will are incongruous also. We are brain washed from our birth onwards in to believing whatever they want us to learn. A true exercise of the "god given" freewill will always result in a chaos. Religion teaches us only conformity.
3. (Will follow)
I am not a religious person; I do however read the bible as a story book, and to see what lessons we may glean from the history. The bible tells us a story of the Pharaohs; these kings assumed great powers and declared themselves as gods. The stories are similar to the stories of our own more modern history where Hitler or Stalin will have people murdered at will. Then the stories of Spain, Iraq, Argentina and Peru where people just disappeared. They were taken by the government, knowing that it was illegal under their own laws. The people were held prisoners without their being told why, their families had no way to found what happened or what the charges were. They were not allowed to have any legal defense or council. Today in the United States of America, and under John Ashcroft and a bunch of pansies in the congress of the United States, we have it all legalized, we have our own cases of “the disappeared".
There seem to be two different governments in this country, on that are open and visible to the people, and another that makes the real policy and sets the direction of this country. It matters not who is sitting in the White House, and for what he was elected by the people. President Clinton followed 12 years of the Republican administration. No one in these Untied States seems to remember, and I have never seen it explained by the press
That the cuts in the defense department budgets, the force restructuring, the base closings. The NAFTA and the GATT were all the initiatives started by the Reagan administration. The problems with the defense were blamed on Clinton. And Clinton also fought for, and signed up on the most anti American worker and anti labor treaties of NAFTA and GATT.
We really do not have a problem with the immigration, no matter how you slice it. Here is the real deal. As people find cheaper goods on the store shelves, and they turn to these goods, the people here start to loose jobs. As people loose jobs the wage pressures are lessened. People looking for work settle for lower wages. As people settle for lower wages they look for cheaper prices, and so on, you see the pattern. Any wonder that the Wal-Mart no longer has banners proclaiming how many jobs it has created in America? Wal-Mart is the enemy; Wal- Mart controls what you make. (I have only used the name Wal-Mart for it is the biggest and most common, it could be any multi-national company. These companies and their ilk of the mega corporations with mega stores have crushed the back bone of our economy, the individual entrepreneur.)
How is it that the government and the private analyst with their so called real time data failed to see the market crash, failed to see the 2000 recession, failed to predict the unemployment levels in the dot com industry. In 1999 the department of labor projected a need for 225000 year need for the computer engineers and a starting salary of near 70000. Today we are all told to train for the health care professions. Does anyone know with the lay offs nation wide in the major corporations, with people loosing the health benefits and retirement how much growth is possible in the health care.
From the hills of the Himalayas to the flat lands of African sub-Saharan, and from the Philippines to Pakistan and Philadelphia, poverty and ill education, or illiteracy extol a heavy price on human lives. A heavy cost of stupidity. In other places it may not be as simple, it is to the favor of the haves to keep the have nots poor and ill educated. They are thus easier to control. Virtual slaves, only now that they are so called "free", we don't have the responsibility to be taking care of them. These poor worthless souls are ignorant of their own misery. And as they wallow in the refuse of life clueless, the life passes these by. They are thus no threat to the ruling class. And as if there were ever a chance of a revolt, the media, by default or design fill the air with sexual images and messages, ever presenting a younger and younger role model of sexual awareness to where the people have become as if cats and dogs, only bred to procreate and bring forth another generation of the slaves. From "Fox’s married with children to Disney’s promotion of Leanne Rymes crooning of love making, the suggestive dialogue, the revealing attire and what with the moves, it is a wonder anyone in the junior high is even opening the books.
These poor and helpless make for the prime cannon fodder for those who wish to promote slavery in the guise of religion, revolution or even revelry. Where as in Iran and in Saudi Arabia the poor and the ill - educated are used by the governments to secure there bases. In the United States and the other free countries these people are kept in control in their sub-human condition with a promise of so called personal freedom ( you can screw anyone you like, or get your six pack and forget it), watching Leeza and Jerry and Maury, we are not so bad after all.
Technology has failed us too. Technology alone cannot save us, it is killing us. As we sing the praises of the medical advances that have cut down the rate of childhood deaths, we end up with more and more mouths to feed. Children, who would have died off childhood diseases just sixty or seventy years ago, are today the child soldiers and gang members being taught to kill each other. And they are the child prostitutes today in the streets of Hong Kong, Mexico City, Manila and LA. They are the "discarded" children of the streets of the Rio, Karachi and Nashville.
We use lasers to guide our bombs, radios to bring murder and mayhem to our cities. We use cameras and microphones to steal privacy. Our technology joins us not in peace and prosperity for all, but in SARS AIDS and the West Nile virus.
Yes we could feed the whole world today, we have the technology. But to feed everyone and more, we will have to use more of the modern methods, i.e. use more fertilizers, more insecticides and use more of the farm machinery, not to mention the genetic engineering. Just to discuss the fertilizers, we use more oil base products, a majority of the chemicals either washes off in the rivers and streams. And the rest seeps into the ground, thus polluting our underground reservoirs and the aquifers. These chemicals destroy the aquatic life, over a period of time the water table is ruined, the rivers and the streams become so salinated that they cannot support aquatic life. And what about over time period of a hindered years, a couple of hindered years? Will our oceans will become finally to over salted to support life. It is not a stretch, we already have areas near the river deltas that are dying and some are choked with oxygen sucking algae. This is what the future holds. We have a choice, fewer people today or no one living tomorrow.
All this and it is only a part of the world that we are living in, there is much more
(M.N.R.)*

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me.

William Kern said...

This is William Kern, Mohammed.

I just have one note I'd like to add. In the 1790s there was a man that said the same thing about global resources and the world population. His name was Malthus.

He asserted that population tends to grow at a faster rate than the food supply. He said that human beings, in the absence of checks on population, will tend to increase their numbers geometrically, but that the food supply can only increase arithmetically.

But it turned out he was wrong, because of the very technologies you suggest will fail to solve the problem this time.

I agree with you that the human species is likely in for a major die-off. But it isn't because we can't feed everyone. It's because we can't seem to stop killing one another and living in a state of suspicion, greed and fear.

I hope we can avoid the worst. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I suggest that we do our best to lessen these evils that you so eloquently point out.

-- William Kern

Anonymous said...

This is William Kern, Mohammed.

I just have one note I'd like to add. In the 1790s there was a man that said the same thing about global resources and the world population. His name was Malthus.

He asserted that population tends to grow at a faster rate than the food supply. He said that human beings, in the absence of checks on population, will tend to increase their numbers geometrically, but that the food supply can only increase arithmetically.

But it turned out he was wrong, because of the very technologies you suggest will fail to solve the problem this time.

I agree with you that the human species is likely in for a major die-off. But it isn't because we can't feed everyone. It's because we can't seem to stop killing one another and living in a state of suspicion, greed and fear.

I hope we can avoid the worst. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I suggest that we do our best to lessen these evils that you so eloquently point out.

-- William Kern

Anonymous said...

Hello Consent to all of you!