Priests for export?

Indian seminarians around 400 of them, good prospects where some of then can be sent to America.

Click on colored link.

America as mission area.

A Catholic priest from Kentucky is sorting out emails to find out if there are priest outside America who wants to serve Kentucky.

Even priests can be exported? Or is America another mission area?

China, rising giant.

How China was able to hurdle its development problems. A short clip update.

Overseas parents, a generation affected.

There are millions of Filipinos who are abroad because the State has failed to generate employment. According to some economist, the failure of the State to industrialize, to harness their material forces towards machine based production of goods.

Due to this underdevelopment overseas worker becomes a function of that very underdevelopment.

Click on colored link for full article.

One for entertainment

Obama is carrying Hussein

Obama will try to win over Muslim to the side of American democracy.

A critical analysis on who are going to attend in this global conference.

Click on colored link to lead you to full article.

Labor in America

In the US it is the labor sector that bears the brunt of the economic crisis.

Click on the colored link.

Is China going to rescue America?

No, according to Thomas Friedman. But China is closely related to America consumers.

America has a solution according to Friedman.

Best of luck.

Click on the colored link above.

World most influential company.

World most influential company.

Just click on the colored link.

Christmas and the Jewish Chanukah

Chanukah & Christmas: When Hope Triumphs Over Cynical Realism
By Rabbi Michael Lerner

Christmas and Chanukah share a spiritual message: that it is possible to bring light and hope in a world of darkness, oppression and despair. But whereas Christmas focuses on the birth of a single individual whose life and mission was itself supposed to bring liberation, Chanukah is about a national liberation struggle involving an entire people who seek to remake the world through struggle with an oppressive political and social order: the Greek conquerors (who ruled Judea from the time of Alexander in 325 B.C.E.) and the Hellenistic culture that they sought to impose.

Though the holiday celebrated by lighting candles for 8 nights recalls the victory of the guerrilla struggle led by the Maccabees against the Syrian branch of the Greek empire, and the subsequent rededication (Chanukah in Hebrew) of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 B.C.E., there was a more difficult struggle which took place (and in some dimensions still rages) within the Jewish people between those who hoped for a triumph of a spiritual vision of the world embedded (as it turned out, quite imperfectly) in the Maccabees and a cynical realism that had become the common sense of the merchants and priests who dominated the more cosmopolitan arena of Jerusalem.

The cynical realists in Judea, among them many of the priests charged with preserving the Temple, argued that Greek power was overwhelming and that it made far greater sense to accommodate to it than to resist. The Greek globalizers promised advances in science and technology that could benefit international trade and enrich the local merchants who sided with them, even though the taxes that accompanied their rule impoverished the Jewish peasants who worked the land and eked out a subsistence living. Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theatre of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

To the Maccabees, the guerrilla band that they assembled to fight the Greek Empire and its Seleucid dynasty in Syria, and to many of the Jewish supporters of that struggle, the issue of Greek militarism, social injustice and oppression were far more salient than the accomplishments of Greek high culture. Whatever might be the value of Athenian democracy, the reality that it exported to the world through Alexander and his successors was oppressive and exploitative.


The "old-time religion" that the Maccabbees fought to preserve had revolutionary elements in it that went far beyond the Greeks in articulating a liberatory vision: not only in the somewhat abstract demand to "love your neighbor as yourself," "love the stranger," and pursue justice and peace, but also concretely in Torah prescriptions to abolish all debts every seven years, allow the land to lie fallow every seven years, refrain from all work and activities connected to control over the earth once a week on Sabbath, redistribute the land every fifty years (the Jubilee) back to its original equal distribution.

The identification with the oppressed, enshrined in Judaism in its insistence that Jews were derived from slaves who had been liberated, and in its focus on retelling the story of being oppressed that was central to the Torah, seemed atavistic and naïve to the more educated and enlightened Jewish urban dwellers, who pointed to the reactionary tribal elements of Torah and sided with the Greeks when they declared circumcision and study of Torah illegal and banned the observance of the Sabbath.

The miracle of Chanukah is that so many people were able to resist the overwhelming "reality" imposed by the imperialists and to stay loyal to a vision of a world based on generosity, love of stranger, and loyalty to an invisible God who promised that life could be based on justice and peace. It was these "little guys," the powerless, who sustained a vision of hope that inspired them to fight against overwhelming odds, against the power of technology and science organized in the service of domination, and despite the fact that they were dismissed as terrorists and fundamentalist crazies. When this kind of energy, what religious people call "the Spirit of God," becomes ingredient in the consciousness of ordinary people, miracles ensue.

It is this same radical hope, whether rooted in religion or secularist belief systems, that remains the foundation for all who continue to struggle for a world of peace and social justice at a time when the champions of war and injustice dominate the political and economic institutions of our own society, often with the assistance of their contemporary cheerleading religious leaders. It is that radical hope that is celebrated this Chanukah by those Jews who have not yet joined the contemporary Hellenists.

Radical hope is also the message of Christmas. Like Chanukah, it is rooted in the ancient tradition of a winter solstice celebration to affirm humanity's belief that the days, now grown shortest around December 23rd, will grow long again as the sun returns to heat the earth and nourish the plants. Just as Jews light holiday lights at this time of year, so Christians transform the dark into a holiday of lights, with beautiful Christmas trees adorned with candles or electric lights, and lights on the outside and inside of their homes.

Christianity took the hope of the ancients and transformed it into a hope for the transformation of a world of oppression. The birth of a newborn, always a signal of hope for the family in which it was born, was transformed into the birth of the messiah who would come to challenge existing systems of economic and political oppression, and bring a new era of peace on earth, social justice and love. Symbolizing that in the baby Jesus was a beautiful way to celebrate and reaffirm hope in the social darkness that has been imposed on the world by the Roman empire, and all its successors right up through the contemporary dominance of a globalized rule of corporate and media forces that have permeated every corner of the planet with their ethos of selfishness and materialism.

Seeing Jesus as the Son of God, and as an intrinsic part of God, was also a way of giving radical substance to the notion that every human being is created in the image of God. For God to come on earth, bring a holy message of love and salvation, and then to die at the hands of the imperialists and be resurrected to come back at some future date was and is a beautiful message of hope for a world not yet redeemed, and became an inspiration to hundreds of millions who saw in it the comforting message that the rule of the powerful was not the ultimate reality of existence. And yet, using the specificity of one human being and identifying him as God, a move made by St. Paul but not by Jesus himself, did not fit into the framework of Judaism, which could not accept Jesus as messiah either because of its view that the messiah would bring an end to wars and all forms of oppression, an end that had not yet taken place during or after Jesus' death.

Jews and Christians have much in common in celebrating at this time of year. We certainly want to use this holiday season to once again affirm our commitment to end the war in Iraq, to end global poverty and hunger by embracing the Network of Spiritual Progressives' version of the Global Marshall Plan, to reduce carbon emissions and population growth and to save the world from ecological destruction. We live in dark times--but these holidays help us reaffirm our hope for a fundamentally different reality that we can help bring about in the coming years. And that despite the fact that we must acknowledge that the Chanukah revolution led to the rule of the Jewish Hashmona-im whose rule devolved into tyranny and self-destructiveness, and that the beauty vision of early Christianity devolved into the tyranny and anti-Semitism of Constantinian forms of the merger of religion with state power.

There are reasons to not mush together these separate holidays. The tremendous pressure of the capitalist marketplace has been to take these holidays, eliminate their actual revolutionary messages, and instead turn them into a secular focus whose only command is "Be Happy and Buy." One might have imagined that the current economic meltdown would significantly modify these messages, but that has not yet happened in December, 2008. The huge pressure to be happy and the media's ability to portray others as beaming with joy makes a huge number of people despondent because they actually don't feel that kind of joy, and imagine that they are the only ones who don't, and hence feel terrible about themselves, something they seek to repair by buying, drugging or drinking themselves into happiness. And when that too doesn't work for very long, they become all the more unhappy with themselves or with others. The pressure to buy as a way of showing that you really care about others puts many people into the position of spending more than they have, putting themselves into further debt, and then feeling depressed about that. Still others have no way to buy "enough" on credit, and then their children, saturated by a media specially attuned to the best ways to market to toddlers and everyone older through their teen years, make their parents or others feel inadequate because they have not bought what the media portrays as the standard for what a "normal family" buys for the holidays. Jews, seeking to fit into American society, grabbed onto this path of the holidays "not really being religious but only a time to celebrate," and thus many embraced Christmas in the one way they could-buying presents for their non-Jewish friends and neighbors and celebrating Christmas as a "non-sectarian, American holiday." But this well-intentioned move to fit into American society only helped the capitalist secularists, and unintentionally further undermined the ability of Christians to hold on to the religious and spiritual intent of their holiday. This is why spiritual progressives of the Christian faith have urged Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives to NOT celebrate the holiday as one undifferentiated "holiday season" but to celebrate them as religious and spiritual holidays and to affirm the specific religious message of each one depending on which fits your particular faith.

Yet we also want to affirm the goodness in what secularists have tried to do with these holidays in removing them from their religious specificity. There has been far too much anger and killing in the name of religions in the history of humanity. We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives do not believe that most of that killing was actually motivated by religious differences so much as by power struggles that were given religious justifications and appearances. And we are all too well aware that in the 20th century over a 150 million people were slaughtered in the name of secular belief systems and secular powers (1st WW, 2nd WW, Korean War, Vietnam War, Stalinist gulag, Maoist gulag, colonial and anti-colonial wars, etc.), so we are not going to buy any notion that says that eliminating religion will increase world peace (though we wouldn't shed any tears if the fundamentalist and ultra-nationalist forms of religion disappeared into the dustbins of history). Many of those who have sought to secularize the holiday season do so from the fear that without that kind of secularization, it will be harder for people to express caring and mutual support if they have to do so through the frameworks of religions of which they are not apart. Certainly, when it comes to interfaith marriages and families, the need for this kind of smooth path to affirming both traditions is really much needed. And yet, as a Jew, I want to recognize the particular importance to Christians of having Christmas be about Christ, not about gifts and drinking and merry making but about the meaning of the Christ for Christian belief. In this respect, there is a fundamental asymmetry here. Christmas and Easter are the main Christian holidays, while Chanukah is only a minor holiday that has become major only because some (mostly assimilating) Jews in the West felt the need to provide their children with something that could compensate them for not having Christmas with its attractive glitz and lights and toys. But our major holidays are Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur and Passover (and of course, weekly Shabbat), and so when Chanukah gets secularized we don't lose as much as Christians do when Christmas is secularized.

As we enter this holiday season, let us stay conscious on all these levels, resist the allure and the seductive charm of the capitalist marketplace and its capacity to reduce all reality and all loving to the consumption of "things," and instead return to the deep spiritual messages of our own traditions, while lovingly supporting each other to stay true to our own deepest truths.

And as we affirm hope, so we must also remind ourselves to not allow our hopes for the Obama presidency to silence our prophetic critique of the powerful should it turn out that those hopes are not realized in the actual policies followed by Obama and his array of establishment-oriented politicians appointed to high offices in his Administration. We can at once celebrate the incredible advance of having white America vote into the presidency a Black man, and yet still insist that this new Administration embrace policies that favor peace and abandon the fantasy that security will come through domination or military victories, that economic and environmental well-being can be consistent with endless "growth" and expansion, or that the quality of human relationships can be improved while living in an economic system that values selfishness, materialism and "looking out for number one." So just as Christmas and Chanukah represent ideals that were quickly distorted by those who tried to make them consistent with the power-structures of a world based on inequality and domination, so too our contemporary victory of the Obama forces can be distorted. Our job is to stay true to the ideals and challenge the distortions, even while celebrating the moments of hope.

Chag urim sameyach-happy holiday of lights.
Chag Chanukah sameyach-happy Chanukah.
Merry Christmas.
Happy Kwanza.
Mubarack Eid.

Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun www.tikkun.org
Chair, (with Sister Joan Chittister and Princeton U. Professor Cornel West) The Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org

Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley and San Francisco

Bagosara and two others gets life sentence in Rwanda.

Bagosara of Rwanda gets life sentence.

Just click on the colored link.

No Better Idea by Antonio Abaya

No Better Idea

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on Dec. 17, 2008

For the Standard Today,

December 18 issue

This should be titled Anachronistic III as it is a sequel to the previous articles of the same title, and it seeks to answer the question of Can the Arroyo Government defeat the Communist insurgency by the year 2010, as it pompously claims it will.

My answer to that question is No.

The successful countries around us defeated their Communist insurgencies, in the 60s and 70s, by a combination of a) draconian measures that hounded their Communists without let-up, and b) a broad-based prosperity, brought about by correct economic strategies that made Communist ideology irrelevant and uninteresting to most of their people..

Such draconian measures, exemplified by the Internal Security Act (ISA) that the Malaysian and Singaporean governments inherited from the British colonial government aimed at destroying the above-ground front organizations of the Communist movement, even ahead of the armed guerillas.

In pursuit of that strategy, the ISA empowered the Malaysian and Singaporean governments to legally and constitutionally arrest and detain, indefinitely and without trial, anyone merely suspected of being a Communist or Communist sympathizer.

But that was in the 60s and 70s, at the height of the Cold War, when Communism was considered a global threat and the Soviet Union and Maoist China actually lived up to that reputation by sponsoring and arming "wars of national liberation" in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

At the same time that they marginalized their Communist malcontents with draconian measures, Malaysia and Singapore laid the groundwork for broad-based prosperity in the 70s and 80s by gearing their economies towards the export manufactured goods and by riding the tourism boom in the 90s. (The Philippines did neither one.)

So for the average Malaysian and Singaporean citizen, there was a trade-off. In exchange for diminished civil and political rights – much of which continue to the present – they enjoyed general prosperity that reached all levels of their multi-racial societies.

Such was not the case in the Philippines, where the authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos employed only half-baked measures against the local Communist movement and at the same time did very little to upgrade the Philippine economy from archaic import substitution to the more wealth-creating export of manufactured goods.

For example, at the same time that he allowed his military to assassinate selected Communist leaders, he also permitted the Communist-led labor unions of the KMU to organize openly and to stage strike after strike against our few export-oriented industries (e.g. garments factories) until their owners got fed up and moved their factories to other countries.

This would never have been allowed at all by the constitutional authoritarians of Malaysia and Singapore, much less by the military governments that ruled South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand in the 70s and 80s.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, Communism has faded as a global threat, having collapsed from the accumulated weight of its failures in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91 and the calibrated transformation of China (since 1979) and Vietnam (since 1986) into capitalist economies.

Any attempt now to revive the draconian anti-Communist measures that were standard in the region in the 60s, 70s and 80s would be universally condemned and would make the Philippines an international pariah. It would dry up the flow of foreign direct investments and official development aid for this country.

At the same time, having missed the exports bus in the 70s and 80s and the tourism bus in the 90s, the Philippines does not enjoy the broad-based prosperity that is self-evident in South Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and even in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Given this absence of broad-based prosperity and the now political incorrectness of draconian measures against the Communist movement, it is hard to envision how President Arroyo can live up to her promise of defeating the Communist insurgency by 2010.

A credible, visionary president, armed with a Better Idea, could conceivably overcome these handicaps and convince the remaining 5,000 Communist insurgents to abandon the armed struggle and return to the mainstream. It is safe to assume that most of them are no longer ideologically driven but are merely reacting to conditions of social injustice, poor governance and hopeless poverty.

But President Arroyo is neither a visionary nor is she credible. Her concept of a Better Idea is limited to looking for creative ways to remain in power beyond 2010. Unless she steps down or is removed by force, there is no future for this country. *****

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in www.tapatt.org and in acabaya.blogspot.com.

Black Hole, short film

FaceBook now used for sending legal papers

FaceBook is now used for sending legal papers by Australian lawyer.

Portugal's tradition

One for tradition, Portugal's Christmas fish.


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/16/europe/16cod.php

When mud burries your village.

Just click on link below:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/asia/mud.php

Parents fined in Korea

In Korea parents can be liable for the crime of their son.

Copy paste link below to your browser.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7782245.stm

In China it will be electric cars.

China is fast producing their electric hybrid cars. What will they come up next? And what would happen to American car manufacturing?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7779261.stm

What is happening to America?

(Forwarded to Tapatt by Krip Yuson)

The Coming American Revolution?

I was shocked that Fox would air such a segment.

They mentioned that before 2012:

1. America will be the first undeveloped country
2. Revolution, food shortages, riots, marches
3. Food instead of gifts for Christmas

Seriously, I was shocked. The segment lasted for more than 6 minutes. He said things like parents shouldn't send their kids to get business degrees or psychology degrees and send them to community colleges to learn a real skill. He kept implying that food will become the most important thing for us. He said the retail industry will die off completely but local markets will thrive.

The host even introduced him as a guy who's "predictions always come true".

Gerald Celente's website: http://www.trendsresearch...

Here's a well written prediction from Celente: http://www.earthfiles.com...

After Wall Street Bailout, 
Is Main Street Headed for Depression?

© 2008 by Linda Moulton Howe


"This Wall Street bailout is really taxation without representation." 
- Gerald Celente, Editor and Publisher, The Trends Journal

October 17, 2008 Rhinebeck, New York - The American government bought $250 billion in ownership of United States banks this week of October 13th. The week before, it authorized nearly a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street that included even saving the world's largest insurance company, A. I. G.

But what about all the struggling Americans on Main Street who are watching their 401(K) savings and their pensions shrink as the Dow moves up and down 700 points a day? What about the estimated million Americans who have lost their homes to foreclosures in the sub-prime mortgage mess? Who is bailing out the Main Street taxpayers who are being used by the United States government to bail out Wall Street? And what happens to shopping malls and other retailers as the government reported this week that retail sales are down 1.2% in September 2008 - and are expected to keep falling?

Virginia Cervasio, Exec. Dir., of the Lee County Suicide Resource Center in Florida told Associated Press this week: "A lot of people are telling us they are losing everything. They're losing their homes; they're going into foreclosure; they've lost their jobs."

On October 13, 2008, Associated Press reported: "As Economy Sinks, Officials Fear Violent Solutions"

- An out-of-work money manager in California loses a fortune and wipes out his family in a murder-suicide.

- A 90-year-old Ohio widow shoots herself in the chest as authorities arrive to evict her from the modest house she called home for 38 years.

- In Massachusetts, a housewife who had hidden her family's mounting financial crisis from her husband sends a note to the mortgage company warning: 'By the time you foreclose on my house, I'll be dead.' Then Carlene Balderrama shot herself to death, leaving an insurance policy and a suicide note on a table.

- In Ocala, Florida, Roland Gore shot his wife and dog in March 2008 and then set fire to the couple's home, which had been in foreclosure, before killing himself. His case was one of several in which people have killed spouses or pets, destroyed property or attacked police before taking their own lives.


On October 9, 2008, Gerald Celente, publisher and editor of the highly respected Trends Journal issued a Trend Alert headlined: "Washington Bailout A Bust. Depression to Follow." This week I asked him why a Trend Alert about an economic depression when the American government seems to be doing everything it can to hold off financial collapse?

Gerald Celente, Editor and Publisher, The Trends Journal, Rhinebeck, New York:"All they are doing is throwing good money after bad. This is unprecedented. This isn't the United States of America. It's now the United Soviet States of America. They are buying banks, brokerages, insurance companies. We (U. S. government) now own the world's largest insurance company! And mortgage companies. And they are doing it all with taxpayer money. So, anyone with a little common sense, Linda, could figure it out.

If the boys on Wall Street botched a deal before, what makes anyone think that the inept people in Washington are going to pull it off any better? They are not. What they (government bureaucrats) have better than the scammers on Wall Street is that they (government) has unlimited funds from the U. S. Treasury by taxing the people and taking all the money they want to do their deals. So, nothing good is going to come out of this. All they are doing is bailing out the preferred shareholders, the foreign banks that have loaned the money – all on the backs of the American people. This is a 'Foetus Tax' in the sense that generations are going to have to pay for this. This will do nothing, nothing! to stop the economic depression that is coming. All it will do is bailout the 'too big to fail' companies.

WHY DID THE DOLLAR GO UP DURING THE CHAOS?

Gold went down, the dollar went up. The markets are so highly manipulated. There are reports coming out of banks shorting gold positions by the hundreds of thousands trying to keep gold prices down. There are reports of people lining up in Europe and other countries to buy gold and cashing out.

Because when people realize that their paper is not worth the paper it's printed on and people start going into gold, the whole system could collapse immediately. So, they are doing everything they can to prop the dollar up and to push gold prices down. They are propping the dollar up also, so that the people that are in dollars that want to get out have an opportunity, such as the Chinese and all the other foreign banks that are holding so much of the dollar debt.

WHO HAS THE ABILITY TO PROP UP THE U. S. DOLLAR?

The central banks because remember they are in control of the printing press. So you have coordination between the world central banks and the Federal Reserve and they are trading heavily into the markets to keep it going.

SO, THE CENTRAL BANKS MIGHT HAVE MORE EFFECT ON WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH THE DOW NOW THAN JUST NORMAL STOCK INVESTORS?

Absolutely! The game is rigged. It's being rigged in broad daylight and we see it right in front of us.

Goldman Sachs has now taken over the White House with Henry Paulson in Treasury. When they had the A. I. G. bailout, the biggest financial insurance company in the world. They just got $85 billion and just asked for another $40 billion and we taxpayers just paid for a half million dollars worth of perks for their A.I.G. Commissars to go to the resorts like they used to do in the Soviet Union.

Do you know who the only person sitting in on that meeting was outside of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve? It was Blankfein from Goldman Sachs! It's criminal activity from top to bottom.

WHAT DOES THAT LEAVE THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WITH IN TERMS OF ANY KIND OF POWER TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM?

It leaves them with anger and when they are broke and desperate, that's when denial no longer rules. Denial, by the way, is still pretty prevalent among a lot of people. But when the reality hits and they see how bad things are, you're going to start to see tax revolts. It's going to start taking place at the local level. People can't afford these school taxes. They can't afford the property taxes. I mean it's a joke! Property taxes keep going up and they keep re-evaluating. But when the value goes down, the bureaucrats don't lower the taxes. What is going on here? People are not going to be able to afford it and that's when the tax revolt happens and that's what we are going to see.

What Could 2009 America Look Like?

YOU HAVE BEEN SO ACCURATE SINCE 2007 IN CALLING EXACTLY WHAT HAS UNFOLDED IN 2008. COULD YOU HELP THE GENERAL NORTH AMERICAN AUDIENCE UNDERSTAND WHAT THE TRENDS JOURNAL AND INSTITUTE WOULD SEE IN DETAIL AS WE GO FORWARD NOW FROM OCTOBER 2008 TO OCTOBER 2009?

First, we have to remember there are many wild cards that are thrown on the deck that nobody can ever anticipate and that's why nobody can really predict the future. You can see the face of it, but you really never know what's going to happen (in detail).

Having said that, there might be wars. Geopolitical tensions are always coming to light just as happened this past summer with Georgia invading South Ossettia and the belligerency shown by the United States on behalf of Georgia in support of their invasion. So that was the beginning of a new Cold War. How is that going to play out? We're not sure. But here's what we know, for example, about that. We know when that happened, the Russian stock market collapsed and it has not recovered since. So, the Russians are very angry at America for having instigated that war, as the Russians believe. So, we don't know all the geopolitical tensions.

If things remain constant on the economic and political fronts, what we're going to see in the beginning of the New Year 2009 is a very cold winter. February and March 2009 are going to be very, very bleak. We're going to see the depression really start to set in.

WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF A DEPRESSION?

We don't go by unemployment numbers. They reached almost 25% in the last Depression of 1929. Now, there will be masses of working poor doing two to three jobs just to make ends meet, plus you're going to have a lot of people unemployed as well – probably in the 15% level at least. Again, the numbers are cooked all the time because what happens is that once a person is no longer looking for work and their unemployment benefits have run out, the government no longer counts them as unemployed!

Again, the United Soviet States of America! Just as the bureaucrats don't include energy and food into the core inflation numbers.

Mall and Retail Store Collapses

This whole notion that we need a Wall Street is a fallacy because Wall Street killed Main Street by giving all the real estate developers money and special tax breaks and grants given by the cities and states to build all these huge malls and outlets that have sapped the vitality out of Main Street. That vitality is going to be re-invigorated and it's going to start now in the New Year 2009. You're going to see more vitality spring up in the dead areas because we're only talking now in the media about the financial collapses. Let's start talking about the retail collapses that are going to follow soon. You're going to see big name retailers buckle under and go under. You're going to see malls become ghost malls.

Desperate People, Tent Cities, Rise in Crime

It's going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we're going to see many more.

We did a piece about self-storage units really taking on the true meaning of their name. People are going to start living in these things and it's going to be better than living in a tent out in the street or risking your life in a homeless shelter.

We're going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It's going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It's going to come as a shock and with it, there's going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people's minds weren't wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody's comprehension.

Tax Revolts

WILL THIS COUNTRY EVER CHANGE BACK TO WHAT IT WAS BEFORE THIS CORRUPT COLLAPSE?

There will be a revolution in this country. It's not going to come yet, but it's going to come down the line and we're going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.

We're very confident of that because as we look through history – tracking trends is a way of understanding where we are, how we got here and where we're going. Throughout the entire 19th Century, and even into the early 20th Century, the major issue was the central banks taking over the country. That's why you had people like Andrew Jackson. It's been a major issue since our founding fathers and will continue to be. This is only a temporary take over.

BUT HOW DO THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE NON-WALL STREET PEOPLE GET ENOUGH LEVERAGE TO HAVE A REVOLUTION AGAINST A CORRUPT WALL STREET AND GOVERNMENT IN TERMS OF THEIR PRIORITIES?

The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That's going to be the big one because people can't afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You're going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.

From that taxation issue because that's what's going on right now – this Wall Street bailout is really taxation without representation. It worked before; it will work again. That's what we see as being the glue that brings this third party movement together because now it's not a question of becoming involved because it's a political or ideological belief. It's in your pocketbook. It's staring you in the face. People cannot make ends meet. What are they doing? They're going around begging to bailout disenfranchised Wall Street executives?!?

No, you're going to start seeing the revolution and it's going to take the form of tax revolts.

Main Street Renaissance?

You're going to see a lot of changes that are going to make it better for the average person. The system right now is built on too-big-to-fails. There's not enough money in the world to save them. So, we're going to see a Renaissance as well. Something old is dying and something new is being born.

DO YOU MEAN THAT THERE COULD BE SOME SORT OF REJUVENATION BECAUSE PRICES WILL BE FORCED DOWN TO SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE CAN HANDLE?

The prices will be forced down, but we're going to go through a period of hyper-inflation the likes of which we have never seen before. The government is just printing money on a daily basis. They are just manufacturing it out of thin air! So, we're going to see hyper-inflation, the kind you used to see in Argentina and Brazil when they went through currency crises. The prices are going to go lower, but in real dollar terms, it's still going to cost a lot.

Where the change is going to come about is that people are going to start re-thinking about what consumerism is about. That's the real dynamic change. You can't buy what you can't afford and don't need. That's going to be a wake up call. You don't borrow to build. You only build with profits.

So, as that happens, we're going to see more community spirit. The small towns that made this country great in the first place are going to re-emerge. With that, family, friends, relatives – a whole different structure starts taking place rather than doing it all on your own, you don't need anybody, you can make it to the top mentality. So again, something old is dying and something new is being born. *****

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in acabaya.blogspot.com.

Want to earn at You Tube?

Copy paste link to you browser if you want earn at You Tube.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/business/11youtube.php

Celebrating 60th anniversary of Human Rights

The author is an Egyptian Muslim.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/10/opinion/edeltahawy.php

How to fire 50,000

From the Forbes magazine.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/09/fire-layoff-jobless-lead-careers-employment08-cx_tw_1209layoffs.html?feed=rss_popstories

Prostitution also feels the economic crisis.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/europe/sex.php

You have junks?

The article is about the junk accumulating in the US.

Insights on how we produce wastes.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08recycle.php

No jobs, No health care.

It says it all.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/america/07uninsured.php

Its all about happiness.

If you are not in any network at the moment please enroll yourself because networking seems to be the place to be happy.

Read CNN's article.

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http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/05/happiness.social.network/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Biography, military-industrial complex and role of interests.

This is how biography, history, business interest, role of media meets at a particular crossroads where decisions are being made. When such decisions will be examined in the lens of history. Who will benefit from such decisions?

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/30/america/30general.php?page=1

Living together at Tatarstan

Republic of Tatarstan chose to live harmoniously with Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim. Is that possible? Read.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/europe/kazan.php

Shopping behavior

Wal-Mart worker dies after shoppers knock him down

NEW YORK – A Wal-Mart worker was killed Friday when "out-of-control" shoppers desperate for bargains broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.

At least four other people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were taken to hospitals for observation or minor injuries, and the store in Valley Stream on Long Island closed for several hours before reopening.

Shoppers stepped over the man on the ground and streamed into the store. When told to leave, they complained that they had been in line since Thursday morning.

Nassau police said about 2,000 people were gathered outside the store doors at the mall about 20 miles east of Manhattan. The impatient crowd knocked the man, identified by police as Jdimytai Damour of Queens, to the ground as he opened the doors, leaving a metal portion of the frame crumpled like an accordion.

"This crowd was out of control," said Nassau police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming. He described the scene as "utter chaos."

Dozens of store employees trying to fight their way out to help Damour were also getting trampled by the crowd, Fleming said.

Items on sale at the store included a Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV for $798, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28, a Samsung 10.2 megapixel digital camera for $69 and DVDs such as "The Incredible Hulk" for $9.

Damour, 34, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 6 a.m., police said. The exact cause of death has not been determined.

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was taken to a hospital, where she and the baby were reported to be OK, said police Sgt. Anthony Repalone.

Police said criminal charges were possible in the case, but Fleming said it would be difficult to identify individual shoppers. Authorities were reviewing surveillance video.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., based in Bentonville, Ark., called the incident a "tragic situation" and said the employee came from a temporary agency and was doing maintenance work at the store.

"The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority," said Dan Fogleman, a company spokesman. "At this point, facts are still being assembled and we are working closely with the Nassau County Police as they investigate what occurred."

Kimberly Cribbs, who witnessed the stampede, said shoppers were acting like "savages."

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling 'I've been on line since yesterday morning,'" she said. "They kept shopping."

Shoppers around the country line up early outside stores on the day after Thanksgiving in the annual bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday. It got that name because it has historically been the day when stores broke into profitability for the full year.

Feminism and Islam

The article talks about the struggle of female Muslim in Uzbekistan. She liked secularism but found again her Koran after two decades.

The article shows how interpretation of religious texts are highly conditioned by the power of men in a 7th century Arabic world.

Copy paste link on your browser and understand a struggling woman trying to come to terms with her religion.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/28/opinion/edartyk.php?page=1

An eye for an eye

This is a story on a blind woman who was thrown acid by his husband. She asked the Shariah court that blinding should be done also to her husband. The court agreed in Iran.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7754756.stm

Is there hope in the Philippines?

Is there hope in the Philippines? If there is where does it lie?

The article written by Antonio C. Abaya is very timely for we as Filipinos should think critically on this island nation's direction.

Read along.

Anachronistic

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on Nov. 24, 2008

For the Standard Today,

November 25 issue

The topic assigned to me was "Defeating the Communist insurgency."

But I told my audience last Friday, Nov. 21, that talking about "defeating the Communist insurgency" was anachronistic because Communism itself has become anachronistic.

My audience was composed of military officers, local government officials, and representatives of various government agencies, taking a five-day seminar on national security at Camp Aguinaldo under the direction of the National Defense College of the Philippines.

Our neighbors in East and Southeast Asia had defeated their Communist insurgencies decades ago, by taking draconian measures against their insurgents: Malaysia and Singapore, by using their Internal Security Act (ISA), inherited from the British colonial government, which gave both governments the right to throw in jail, indefinitely and without trial, anyone suspected of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer; South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand – confrontational states vis-à-vis North Korea and Maoist China - by crushing the Communist movements in their territories during their periods of military rule in the 70s and 80s; Indonesia by a bloodbath against the Parti Komunis Indonesia which had tried to grab power by machine-gunning to death almost the entire military high command in Halim Air Base outside Jakarta in September 1965. Estimates vary from 300,000 to two million on the number of suspected Communists and Communist sympathizers summarily executed by the military in their counter-coup.

But to use such draconian measures now against our Communist insurgents would no longer be fashionable and would just make this country an international pariah, and would dry up investments and official development aid..

Even before the first decade of the 21^st century, Communism has faded as a global threat, having imploded from the accumulated weight of its own failures.

In 1989, millions of East Europeans – Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, etc – literally walked out on their Communist regimes in a spontaneous, leaderless and largely bloodless (except in Romania) civil revolt, People Power in its purest form, that forced their Communist governments to resign.

In 1991, a similar civil revolt broke out in Moscow, primed by the glasnost and perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and inspired by the defiance of the Eastern Europeans. The 15-state Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was even outlawed, ironically in the very country where the first Communist revolution had triumphed, only to be restored months later.

Since 1979, Maoism as the definitive national ideology was slowly and systematically dismantled in China by the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, who restored capitalism and the profit motive, a counter-revolutionary transformation which propelled China to the status of an economic super-power in less than 30 years.

Communism is dead. The only Communists left in Europe are two Filipinos: Jose Ma. Sison and Luis Jalandoni. And even Joma has admitted that the victory of Communism, once considered by its gibbering true believers as inevitable and imminent, would now take "hundreds of years." (See my article 'Hundreds of Years' of Nov. 14, 2006, archived in www.tapatt.org.)

But why is there still a Communist insurgency in the Philippines?

Largely because of the failure of successive Philippine presidents, from Marcos to Arroyo, to build an export-oriented economy. And also due to the failure of these same presidents to conceptualize and articulate a Better Idea. Communism is an Idea. To defeat it, one must have a Better Idea.

In my article Why Are We Poor? of Dec. 14, 2004 and subsequent articles, all archived in www.tapatt.org, I listed down the economic missteps that successive Philippine governments committed in the past fifty years.

One. The passage of the Minimum Wage Law in the late 1950s, which discouraged American companies from locating their factories in the Philippines. They located them instead in Taiwan and Hong Kong because wages there were lower (believe it or not) than here and there was no statutory minimum wage.

Two. In the 1970s, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (then a British colony) geared their economies towards the export of manufactured goods. The Philippines did not, content as we were with import substitution.

Three. In the 1980s, Malaysia, Thailand and Suharto's Indonesia followed the original Four Asian Tigers above in gearing their economies towards the export of manufactured goods. The Philippines did not. What few export industries Marcos managed to set up were deliberately wrecked by the Communist KMU unions which staged strike after strike against them, until their owners got fed up and moved their factories to other countries.

When I started writing a column in 1987, I kept on hammering on the theme of export—oriented industries, but President Aquino and her group of allegedly 50 advisers ignored my counsel. It was President Ramos in 1992 onwards who seriously went into export industries., but by then it was too late: China was emerging as the dominant producer and exporter of manufactured goods. (FVR himself told me that he kept a file of my articles, which was confirmed by an American academic who was researching on the Philippine military.)

Four. President Ramos worked at cross purposes with his own export initiative by accepting the advice of Opus Dei economists Jess Estanislao and Bernie Villegas, who pushed for an accelerated embrace of free trade and globalization, even ahead of fully developed South Korea and Taiwan. The resultant flood of imports drowned local producers, causing them to stop or reduce operations, forcing millions of Filipino workers to look for work overseas.

Five. In the 1990s, the Philippines failed to ride the tourism boom, just as we had failed to ride the export boom earlier. In 1991, Indonesia and the Philippines had exactly the same number of tourist arrivals :one million. In 2007, Indonesia had six million; we managed only three million. (Malaysia had 16 million, Thailand 13 million).

Six. The Philippines failed to manage its population growth. In the 1970s, Thailand and the Philippines had the same population size, 45 million. Because it had an active and successful population management program, Thailand's population grew to only 65 million in 2007, while the Philippines', which did not have one, grew to 89 million.

By any yardstick, it is easier to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide jobs for 65 million people than for 89 million.

Prosperity is about jobs. Let us not even talk about South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore because they are so far ahead of us, having embarked on the export of manufactured goods as far back as the 1970s. In 2006, South Korea's exports totaled $326 billion, Taiwan's $216 billion, Singapore's $283.7 billion.

Let's talk of Malaysia, whose exports in 2006 totaled $158.7 billion, compared to the Philippines' $47.2 billion, or a difference of $111.5 billion. If we follow the rule of thumb that one billion dollars worth of exports create 100,000 manufacturing jobs, we can conclude that our failure in exports cost us about 11 million foregone jobs.

And consider also that in 2007, Malaysia attracted 16 million tourists, compared to our three million, or a difference of 13 million. If we follow the rule of thumb that one million tourists create 100,000 tourism-related jobs, we can conclude that our failure in tourism cost us another 1.3 million foregone jobs.

So our combined failures in exports and tourism cost us 12.3 million foregone jobs, one and a half times the number of Filipinos forced to work overseas because they could not find jobs here. It is the difference between prosperity and poverty and explains why a Communist insurgency continues to fester here, long after Communism became anachronistic. (To be concluded) *****

Conclusion:

In the first part of this essay, I had written that the ultimate reason why a Communist insurgency still lingers in the Philippines, decades after our neighbors had solved their Communist insurgencies, is the failure of one Philippine president after another, from Ferdinand Marcos to Gloria Arroyo, to create broad-based prosperity.

In the East and Southeast Asian context, this failure was caused by wrong choices in economic strategies and policies, most especially in exports and in tourism. Two other East and Southeast Asian countries share our failure: North Korea and Myanmar, both of which have followed autarkic economic policies – meaning they were not interested in importing or exporting anything. Both countries have also deliberately shunned the presence of foreigners, tourists and otherwise, out of a deep-seated xenophobia.

But in the case of the Philippines, our failures in exports and tourism were not the result of deliberate autarkic and xenophobic policies, but rather the result of poor, mediocre, myopic, unimaginative, even stupid, leadership at the very top, from Marcos to Arroyo.

Marcos is pilloried for having been corrupt and authoritarian. But all the other leaders in East and Southeast Asia in the 1970s were corrupt and authoritarian, with the possible exception of Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew, who was also authoritarian but was apparently incorruptible.

The greatest sin of Marcos, I told my audience at Camp Aguinaldo, was his failure to build an export-oriented economy for the Philippines, as the other Asian leaders had succeeded for their countries at that time.

The Communists and nationalists blame our poverty on the Americans, the Japanese, the IMF and the World Bank. But neither the Americans nor the Japanese, nor the IMF nor the World Bank exerted any pressure on us NOT to develop export industries or tourism. These were the sovereign choices of our leaders, and they have been proven spectacularly wrong.

I wrote in the first part of this essay that our failure in exports and tourism, compared to Malaysia's success, cost us 12.3 million foregone jobs, one and a half times the number of Filipinos forced to work abroad because they could not find gainful employment in the Philippines, jobs that our domestic economy failed to create because of wrong and poor choices in economic policies and strategies.

The export of manufactured goods was the basis for the industrialization of our neighbors which enabled tens of millions of their citizens to rise from poverty to middle-class status. Broad-based prosperity, generated by exports of manufactured goods, dulled any interest in and appetite for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolution.

Aided in no small measure by successful efforts to slow down population growth. As I wrote in comparing Thailand and the Philippines, it is far easier to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide jobs for (Thailand's) 65 million people than for (our) 89 million.

The growth of enterprises in their export-oriented economies mopped up their pools of unemployed and underemployed, thus raising wages and salaries without the crutch of a minimum wage law, as entrepreneurs bid higher and higher for the workers and employees that they needed

In the light of the current economic crisis ravaging the entire world, there is an upside to our failures. As millions of people in the developed and developing countries lose their jobs and/or reduce their family expenses, markets for everything – including foreign tourism and imported manufactures – will shrink in the next two to four years.

As the East and Southeast Asian country with the least developed export and tourism sectors, the Philippines will suffer the least from the global meltdown, not because of any astute defensive measures taken by our stupid leaders, but because we just happen to have accumulated the least crockery that can be broken as the financial tsunami sweeps through our neighborhood.. This is our consuelo de bobo.

The tsunami also means that, for the time being, exports and tourism will not generate the GDP needed to raise tens of millions of Filipinos from poverty to middle-class status, as they did in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in other Asian countries. It is the enduring tragedy of us Filipinos that, having missed the exports and tourism buses in the past, because of the myopia and stupidity of our leaders, we now see that there is no bus going anywhere anytime soon.

While the tsunami is raging worldwide, GDP has to generated largely in the domestic economy. This means domestic producers have to be encouraged to start and expand their enterprises, with the domestic market, by necessity, their target market. This also means that global trade has to be conducted on a fair or managed trade basis, not on a free trade basis, despite the hue and clamor against protectionism in the recently concluded APEC Summit in Lima, Peru..

Under free trade – embraced foolishly by Gloria Arroyo, even while she was still a senator – rich and developed economies will always have advantages over poor and developing ones. Rich and developed countries have the capital, the technology, the marketing connections to overwhelm poor and underdeveloped ones with their products.

Poor and developing countries will never manage to develop their economies – and generate the jobs they need to survive - if they are overwhelmed right from the start by the superior products of rich and developed ones.

Under fair and managed trade, poor countries should have the option of choosing which products they can import and from which countries, so as to protect their producers and their workers from being overwhelmed by floods of imports, under the rubric of reciprocity. Nations will have to come to mutual agreements that "we will buy your products a, b and c, but only if you will buy our products x, y and z, in more or less equal measures."

This may be the direction that President-elect Obama is heading, after he promised the American electorate that he would create "five million jobs that cannot be outsourced." My sense is that American producers and American jobs will be protected under an Obama administration, and rightly so. Copycat Filipinos should do no less.

President Arroyo is correct in proposing a P100 billion package to stimulate the Philippine economy through a crash public works program. The US has set aside a similar bailout package now totaling $1.5 trillion, China more than $530 billion, parts of both of which will go into public works spending.

This would be similar to the New Deal emergency employment program launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s to pull the US economy out of Depression. Which, for the information of McCain-Palin supporters who labeled Obama a "socialist", was socialistic and against the tenets of laissez faire capitalism.

In the Philippine context, however, caveats have to be raised: how much of those P100 billion will really go into building infrastructure and generating jobs, how much will get attached to the sticky fingers of President Arroyo's relatives and favored bureaucrats, and how much will go into bribing congressmen and women into passing ChaCha that will allow her to stay in power beyond 2010 as prime minister? *****

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Weapons of Mass Destruction - Update

Thomas Friedman, an American writer and critic, says that the Weapons of Mass Destruction has been found and it is in the mortgage subprime and stock derivatives, at its own backyard.

What are you going to do in this global economic crunch?

Individually you can do a lot, by turning off your lights when not needed.

Copy paste link below to your browser.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/23/opinion/edfriedman.php

No navel beauty

A controversial 24-year old beauty model believed to have no navel.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7738144.stm

Defend yourself!

How to defend yourself from verbal assault.

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http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/11/18/o.handle.verbal.ambushes/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Islamic and British law in Britain

Article outlines how Islamic law runs with British law in the UK. British law tells it is supreme and should not run contrary.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/19/europe/19shariah.php

Doctors in America

It seems fewer doctors will be produced in the US. Primary health care dcotors wants to get out of the practice.

Copy paste link from CNN to your browser.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/11/17/primary.care.doctors.study/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Magical Boy Samson shows us magic

Vendettta not sparing male children

This is a story of old feuds resurfacing in Albania. Young children are kept in their homes for fear that their male children will be killed. The dangerous code is called "Kanun".

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7727658.stm

Brettonwood and its legacy

This article outlines Brettonwoods influence on the present economic system that needs a badly needed repair. Should it be junked?

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7725157.stm

What is private and public? Google

The case of Google on showing maps around is being curtailed on privacy laws in Europe.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/16/technology/google17.php

When world leaders meet.

When world leaders meet, what do you think is the menu? That may be irrelevant or very relevant but the President of Brazil said that the US dragged the third world country to this turmoil. He said that as his seatmate is President Bush. US is short of cash while on the side of other side of Bush, China's Hu Jintao has a fat checkbook in his pocket. What is in the mind of Hu Jintao when he is aware China has $3.3 trillion?

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/16/america/16leaders.php?page=2

Chinese factories, closing, unrest

Article below shows Chinese factories are closing down due to the worldwide economic slowdown.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/14/asia/14china.php

Fighting Cancer

Lance Armstrong talks about fighting cancer and is directed to Barack Obama.

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http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/09/armstrong.cancer/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Fighting Cancer

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/09/armstrong.cancer/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Iceland melts

Now I know where Iceland is. I didn't know what to say.

This article from the International Herald Tribune tells the story of the great economic crash of Iceland.

It is a country of three hundred twenty thousand people, say we combine seven cities in Metro Manila. Ninety three percent are Icelander.

It is a country where people are getting unemployed by the minute due to their economic collapse.


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/08/europe/09iceland.php?page=2

Different culture, Taiwan suicides

In Taiwan when parents are desperate about their financial situation, some parent choose suicide as a way out. But when they commit suicide they include their children.

Read the article below. Copy-paste the link to your browser.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7714169.stm

Function of the US Senate

Taking a perspective on the US Senate. This is a must reading for those who want to be informed intelligently.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/news/09powert.php

Jews and Muslim, A critical analysis

Why are Jews so powerful…and Muslims so powerless

By: Dr Farrukh Saleem
The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance columnist

Why are Jews so powerful?

There are only 14 million Jews in the world; seven million in the Americas, five million in Asia, two million in Europe and 100,000 in Africa. For every single Jew in the world there are 100 Muslims. Yet, Jews are more than a hundred times more powerful than all the Muslims put together. Ever wondered why?

Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish. Albert Einstein, the most influential scientist of all time and TIME magazine's 'Person of the Century', was a Jew. Sigmund Freud -- id, ego, and superego -- the father of psychoanalysis was a Jew. So were Karl Marx, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.

Here are a few other Jews whose intellectual output has enriched the whole humanity: Benjamin Rubin gave humanity the vaccinating needle. Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine. Alert Sabin developed the improved live polio vaccine. Gertrude Elion gave us a leukaemia fighting drug. Baruch Blumberg developed the vaccination for Hepatitis B. Paul Ehrlich discovered a treatment for syphilis (a sexually transmitted disease). Elie Metchnikoff won a Nobel Prize in infectious diseases.

Bernard Katz won a Nobel Prize in neuromuscular transmission. Andrew Schally won a Nobel in endocrinology (disorders of the endocrine system; diabetes, hyperthyroidism) ... Aaron Beck founded Cognitive Therapy (psychotherapy to treat mental disorders, depression and phobias). Gregory Pincus developed the first oral contraceptive pill. George Wald won a Nobel for furthering our understanding of the human eye. Stanley
Cohen won a Nobel in embryology (study of embryos and their development) . Willem Kolff came up with the kidney dialysis machine.

Over the past 105 years, 14 million Jews have won 15-dozen Nobel Prizes while only three Nobel Prizes have been won by 1.4 billion Muslims (other than Peace Prizes).

Why are Jews so powerful? Stanley Mezor invented the first micro-processing chip. Leo Szilard developed the first nuclear chain reactor. Peter Schultz, optical fibre cable; Charles Adler, traffic lights; Benno Strauss, Stainless steel; Isador Kisee, sound movies; Emile Berliner, telephone microphone and Charles Ginsburg, videotape recorder.

Famous financiers in the business world who belong to Jewish faith include Ralph Lauren (Polo), Levis Strauss (Levi's Jeans), Howard Schultz (Starbuck's) , Sergey Brin (Google), Michael Dell (Dell Computers), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Donna Karan (DKNY), Irv Robbins (Baskin & Robbins) and Bill Rosenberg (Dunkin Donuts).

Richard Levin, President of Yale University, is a Jew. So are Henry Kissinger (American secretary of state), Alan Greenspan (fed chairman under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush), Joseph Lieberman, Madeleine Albright (American secretary of state), Maxim Litvinov (USSR foreign Minister), David Marshal (Singapore's first chief minister), Isaac Isaacs (governor-general of Australia), Benjamin Disraeli (British statesman and author), Yevgeny Primakov (Russian PM), Jorge Sampaio (president of Portugal), Herb Gray (Canadian deputy PM), Pierre Mendes France (French PM), Michael Howard (British home secretary), Bruno Kreisky (chancellor of Austria) and Robert Rubin (former American secretary of treasury).

In the media, famous Jews include Wolf Blitzer (CNN), Barbara Walters (ABC News), Eugene Meyer (Washington Post), Henry Grunwald (editor-in-chief Time), Katherine Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), Joseph Lelyyeld (Executive editor, The New York Times), and Max Frankel (New York Times).

Can you name the most beneficent philanthropist in the history of the world? The name is George Soros, a Jew, who has so far donated a colossal $4 billion most of which has gone as aid to scientists and universities around the world. Second to George Soros is Walter Annenberg, another Jew, who has built a hundred libraries by donating an estimated $2 billion.

At the Olympics, Mark Spitz set a record of sorts by winning seven gold medals. Lenny Krayzelburg is a three- time Olympic gold medallist. Spitz, Krayzelburg and Boris Becker are all Jewish.

Did you know that Harrison Ford, George Burns, Tony Curtis, Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Paul Newman, Peter Sellers, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Ben Kingsley, Kirk Douglas, William Shatner, Jerry Lewis and Peter Falk are all Jewish?

As a matter of fact, Hollywood itself was founded by a Jew. Among directors and producers, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Oliver Stone, Aaron Spelling (Beverly Hills 90210), Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Andrew Vaina (Rambo 1/2/3), Michael Man (Starsky and Hutch), Milos Forman (One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), Douglas Fairbanks (The thief of Baghdad) and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) are all Jewish.

To be certain, Washington is the capital that matters and in Washington the lobby that matters is The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Washington knows that if PM Ehud Olmert were to discover that the earth is flat, AIPAC will make the 109th Congress pass a resolution congratulating Olmert on his discovery.

William James Sidis, with an IQ of 250-300, is the brightest human who ever existed. Guess what faith did he belong to?

So, why are Jews so powerful?
Answer: Education.

Why are Muslims so powerless?

There are an estimated 1,476,233,470 Muslims on the face of the planet: one billion in Asia, 400 million in Africa, 44 million in Europe and six million in the Americas. Every fifth human being is a Muslim; for every single Hindu there are two Muslims, for every Buddhist there are two Muslims and for every Jew there are one hundred Muslims.
Ever wondered why Muslims are so powerless?

Here is why: There are 57 member-countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around 500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims. The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an 'Academic Ranking of World
Universities' , and intriguingly, not one university from Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.

As per data collected by the UNDP, literacy in the Christian world stands at nearly 90 per cent and 15 Christian- majority states have a literacy rate of 100 per cent. A Muslim-majority state, as a sharp contrast, has an average literacy rate of around 40 per cent and there is no Muslim-majority state with a literacy rate of 100 per cent. Some 98 per cent of the 'literates' in the Christian world had completed primary school, while less than 50 per cent of the 'literates' in the Muslim world did the same. Around 40 per cent of the 'literates' in the Christian world attended university while no more than two per cent of the 'literate s' in the Muslim world did the same.

Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The US has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million. In the entire Arab world, the total number of full-time researchers is 35,000 and there are only 50 technicians per one million Arabs (in the Christian world there are up to 1,000 technicians per one million).
Furthermore, the Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Christian world spends around five per cent of its GDP.

Conclusion: The Muslim world lacks the capacity to produce knowledge.

Daily newspapers per 1,000 people and number of book titles per million are two indicators of whether knowledge is being diffused in a society. In Pakistan, there are 23 daily newspapers per 1,000 Pakistanis while the same ratio in Singapore is 360. In the UK, the number of book titles per million stands at 2,000 while the same in Egypt is 20.

Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to diffuse knowledge.

Exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports are an important indicator of knowledge application. Pakistan's exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports stands at one per cent. The same for Saudi Arabia is 0.3 per cent; Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria are all at 0.3 per cent while Singapore is at 58 per cent.

Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to apply knowledge.

Why are Muslims powerless?
Because we aren't producing knowledge.

Why are Muslims powerless?
Because we aren't diffusing knowledge.

Why are Muslims powerless?
Because we aren't applying knowledge.

And, the future belongs to knowledge-based societies.

Interestingly, the combined annual GDP of 57 OIC-countries is under $2 trillion.
America, just by herself, produces goods and services worth $12 trillion;
China $8 trillion, Japan $3.8 trillion and Germany $2.4 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).

Oil rich Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods
and services (mostly oil) worth $500 billion;
Spain alone produces goods and services worth over $1 trillion,
Catholic Poland $489 billion and Buddhist Thailand $545 billion.
(Muslim GDP as a percentage of world GDP is fast declining).

So, why are Muslims so powerless?
Answer: Lack of education!
All we do is shout to Allah whole day and blame everyone else for our multiple failures..!.

Books digitally available

The future of book reading is now digital. The future has arrived and you can read it in electronic format. Jeff Bezzos of Amazon calls it Kindle. Its Europeana in Europe. What are the consequences of reading books in digital format?

But I think the printed book as what Guttenberg has seen will still be around for the next one hundred years. When the digital books are enmasse, the printed book will shoot up its price because it will be a rare commodity.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/07/technology/book.php

Anti-ageing drugs

Srt1720 is being tested to be the new drug that can lengthen life from 10-15 years. It is being tested on mice. Sirtris is making the experiments.

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http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/next-generation.html

Sex and the brain

A research by Dr. Anita Chandra links that teenage girl who watch TV with high sexual content are twice to get pregnant.

This is the effect of media to human consciousness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7707664.stm

Brain and Magic - Watch

When saving money is a paradox

Paul Krugman talks on the need for a policy response on the recession that is happening in the US. Saving can be a pull-down on the economy. Rebates may not work. Federal spending can be a door. Read the article.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/31/opinion/edkrugman.php

Mathematics and Fractals

Seeing mathematics in a beautiful angle and the use of fractals.

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http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/a-beautiful-math/?em

Collectors with mission.

Collectors of debt are like soldiers. They have a mission to accomplish. Around the US due to the large credit problems of American consumers, claims come in that collectors are threatening them with deportation (as to migrants) and a sheriff knocking on their doors.

What is your experience of Filipino collectors? Or credit card sellers?

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/10/30/debt.collectors.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Decision making, Fannie Mae, Risk we take

A discussion by David Brooks on this timely subject.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/28/opinion/edbrooks.php

Gold as seen by Dr. Mahathir Mohammad

There are far too many comments and questions in my blog that I simply cannot respond to all. But I will try.

Pegging

The Bretton Woods System did not fail because the United States ran out of gold. It failed because Britain decided to devalue the pound. President Richard Nixon decided to go off the gold standard much later.

After that it was a free for all as currency traders fiddled with valueless paper money.

If we have a trading currency, it should be controlled by an international body unbeholden to the US or anyone else. Poor countries must be adequately represented.

Like all systems we need to study the pros and cons before we approve.

If during all these years we could use the US Dollar as a kind of standard, I don't see why we cannot use gold. Gold prices do fluctuate but the range is far less than with paper currency. Besides there will always be a demand for gold so that you will not lose too much if gold depreciates.

Ref: www.chedet.com

Former PM uses blog to needle government

Former Prime Minister Mohammed Mahathir of Malaysia is using his blog to criticize a leader he once support.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/26/asia/blogger.php

What about blood?

The wonders of blood. Can human live without it?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/science/21angi.html?em

Loukili is renting a place in Paris

A story of Loukili and immigrant from Morocco. It is that difficult to look for a place in Paris.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/25/business/mparis.php

Improving a blogspot or adding gadgets

Josephs tomb, pilgrimage and conflict

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/24/africa/24tomb.php?page=2

Who produced the first oxygen?

Scientist from Perth Australia are investigating the first ocurence of oxygen on earth. As to the answer to the question well nobody knows. They have a name for it, cyanobacteria.

Copy paste the link below and read the article.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/10/23/photosynthesis-rock-02.html

Where the hell is Matt?

Media's role in US presidential election

Below is a link on how mass media has been covering the US presidential election.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/24/america/24webseelye.php

A Prayer

This is a forwarded message. It seems it came from the USA.

This pastor has guts
It seems prayer still upsets some people. Please read.....



When Minister Joseph Wright ( NOT obama's pastor!!!) was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate,
everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is
what they heard;

'Heavenly Father,

We come before you today

To ask your forgiveness and

To seek your direction and guidance.

We know Your Word says,

'Woe to those who call evil good'

But that is exactly what we have done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium

And reversed our values.


We have exploited the poor and

Called it the lottery.


We have rewarded laziness

And called it welfare.


We have killed our unborn

and called it choice.


We have shot abortionists

And called it justifiable.


We have neglected to discipline

Our children and called it

Building self esteem.


We have abused power

And called it politics.


We have coveted our neighbor's

Possessions and called it ambition.


We have polluted the air

With profanity and

Pornography and called it

Freedom of speech and _expression.


We have ridiculed the time

Honored values of our

Forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us, Oh, God,

And know our hearts today;

Cleanse us from every sin

And set us free. Amen!'

Spain, once our mother

Spain is now experiencing an economic downtrend and there seem to be no end in sight. Two hundred years ago, it was considered our mother.

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http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2008/gb20081016_531383.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Debt Trap

A series of visual and article in understanding the debt we are into.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/20/business/20debt-trap.html?ref=multimedia

Debt, new strain of virus

Jerez was in deep debt but the credit card company still wants to issue her a double platinum credit card. How's that? In America and the Philippines, it is happening.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/22/business/22target.php

Border talk.

Mexico and American border, a place where you can talk about friendship. A place where love is stronger than border walls or constructed separations.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/22/america/22border.php

Monastery open to public?

Perhaps if you are looking for a place in Baguio, Bukidnon, Davao, Tagaytay, you can look up on the religious congregation's website. You might hit it good.



http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/21/travel/19journeys.php

Sovereign wealth funds

Sovereign wealth fund is a new word in my vocabulary. Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France taught what it is and its reason for having one.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/21/business/funds.php

Botnets are coming!

Botnets are considered to be a digital internet scourge. It enters computers and snoop on anything particularly something that has to do with money. It can be used by the dark forces that will undermine the internet regime.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/21/technology/21botnet.php

Buckypaper

Is your newspaper made of "buckypaper"? Will books be printed on "buckypaper"? Or will "buckypaper" be the next generation of stealth planes, outer space probes?

Read article below.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/17/buckypaper.invention.ap/index.html

On buses and God

The British Humanist Association is putting up slogans in buses that will read, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7681914.stm

America needs $2 billion daily to run government

Joseph Impoco tells us that America is not saving while the Japanese does. America needs loans to run its government which is in the figure of $700 billion a year (we only have 365 days a year). America is in deep credit card debt.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/19/business/19impoco.php?page=2

View on economic meltdown

Tyler Cohen traces what could have went wrong.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/19/business/19view.php

Iceland meltdown

This article essays on how the world economy is tightly interconnected and it could tells us it has both a boom side and just like a balloon it can burst.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/19/opinion/edfriedman.php

Islam meets China rules

Below is an article on how Chinese authorities are dealing with Muslim in Xinjiang autonomous region.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/18/asia/19xinjiang.php

Melamine Tsunami and Chinese courts

The article essays on the Chinese response to the problem of tainted milk. Well, somewhere in a limbo.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/17/asia/17milk.php?page=2

What volcanos do.

Are you in a credit crunch?

Solutions from CNN article.

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http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/08/pf/personal_credit_crisis/index.htm?iref=werecommend

Office of tomorrow

A glimpse of what could be the office of tomorrow.

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http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/16/future.office/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Child mortality, global view.

Link below are country indicators on the prevalence of child malnutrition and child mortality.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7670229.stm

Who is Richard Fuld?

The story of Lehman's collapse.

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http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/the-last-days-of-lehman-brothers/?excamp=GGDBlehmanbros&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=DB-S-E-GG-NA-CT-lehman_bros

Cost of Food?

In this days of hardship, how much is the cost of food around the world?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7671124.stm

Why China is important in global politics?

With trillions of dollars in their foreign reserve, who can ignore China?

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7671482.stm

How the bailout will cost?

Is anybody in this room know how much space will it take to have a $2.25 trillion in one hundred bills?

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/15/business/15bailout.php

Special Court for drug dependents

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/15/america/15drugs.php

Wash your hands

Washing hands with soap will help a lot.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7670855.stm

Yilmas, a woman examining modernization

In Turkey the government is run by a secular doctrine. It's founder Ataturk push Turkey towards the democracy of the west and cut its ties to the Ottoman East.

Yilmas is an activist who is advocating the wearing of headdress or veils for women.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/14/europe/turkey.php