Thursday, August 31, 2006

Guaranteed America

Is the USA forever???

Did you ever consider when you were a youngster, for me, admittedly, we're talking a long, long time ago, that America would not go on forever? In all honesty, only recently have I even entertained the notion that America as we know (knew) it would not survive. The evidence of our demise as the "fifty, nifty United States" is piling up all around us.

Countries come and go all the time. Just look at a globe in made in the 1960's and note how many countries do not exist anymore a mere 40 years later. As a young man in the 80's you could not have convinced me that by 1992 the Soviet Union would not exist. Grab the 1960's globe again and look at Africa. Half the nations in the Congo region sport new names if not new borders. As well, the entire region we knew as being behind the Iron Curtain has been broken up into countless new nation states. Map making seems to be a good business to get into, no?

But what about America? Can it really happen here?

America has many enemies. The obvious ones like Islamic facists and France come to mind immediately. There are enemies within our borders even more potent than insane mullahs and envious frogs with an inferiority complex. The radical socialist left is the most dangerous enemy this nation has ever faced. Sure the radical leftist will counter claim that the unrestrained capitalist poses the greatest threat the world has ever seen. This is poppycock, of course, since market based systems are the natural state of things - evidenced by the lucrative black markets in those economically unfree states. The leftist is all about power and control and oddly enough will use the very capitalistic forces he derides as evil to further his desire to reign mighty over the ignorant masses.

Currently the number one enemy of the United States of America is George Soros. He has publically claimed that America is the source of all that is wrong in this world. He is hailed by the left as a great man of great causes. But Soros is a destroyer. His wealth and power came from destructive currency speculation and his philanthropic activity has been focused on entities that tear down the good with the bad.

In her scathing article called "George Soros, Postmodern Villain" Srdja Trifkovic cites a litany of Soros' causes...

he supports increased government spending and tax increases, drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders and immigration, immigrant entitlements, feminism, free abortion on demand, affirmative action, and "gay" rights. He opposes the death penalty in any circumstance... Soros remains primarily committed to destroying the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith...

The fact that Soros opposed the Soviet Union and the pre-Solidarity government in Poland doesn't a hero make. Remember, Soros is a destroyer and if one looks closely at what his foundations have done in former Soviet block nations as Srdja Trifkovic has -

Soros' main goal is clear and frankly stated: "to improve the quality of abortion services." Accordingly, his Public Health Program has supported the introduction of medical abortion in Albania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia and the introduction of manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) abortion in Macedonia, Moldova, and Russia... Why is Soros so interested in promoting more abortions in Eastern Europe? Overpopulation cannot be the reason: The region is experiencing a colossal demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortion cannot be the answer either: According to a recent U.N. report, five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000-the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Rumania, and Ukraine. Overall, the report said, abortion rates are "substantially higher in central and eastern Europe and the CIS countries than in western Europe and North America." The only logical answer is that Soros wants as few Russians and others born into this world as possible.

Soros has now set his sites on dominating American politics via the hostile take over of the Democratic Party. In a facinating interview FrontpageMagazine.com's Jamie Glasnov speaks with Richard Poe author of "The Shadow Party" about George Soros' grand designs...

POE: The Shadow Party derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money. By controlling the Democrat pursestrings, the Shadow Party can make or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund him... During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for Democrat candidates, prompting one of its operatives, MoveOn PAC director Eli Pariser, to declare, “Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it…”

Soros is the moving force behind MoveOn.org as well as countless amorphous liberal organizations. Oddly enough he can count on one Republican Senator to further his quest for total control of the Democratic Party - John McCain. It was the legislation known as McCain-Fiengold that empowered groups like MoveOn.org while destroying traditional funding mechanisms the DNC counted on...

POE: the McCain-Feingold Act was a Trojan Horse. It made the Shadow Party possible. Among other things, it forced the Democratic Party into a financial crisis, enabling Soros to swoop in and buy up the Party at a bargain-basement price... Democrats have traditionally relied on large, soft-money donations from unions, while Republicans relied more on small, “hard-money” donations from mom-and-pop donors. When McCain-Feingold outlawed soft-money donations to the parties, Republicans were not unduly hampered, but Democrats flew into a panic. They faced the real possibility of bankruptcy.... Enter George Soros. After forcing the Democrats into a fiscal crisis, he then offered to rescue them. He set up a network of non-profit, “issue-advocacy” groups – the Shadow Party.

When he is firmly in control and the radicals regain political power he will begin to chip away at our constitution. Religious freedom and gun ownership will be the first to go.

POE: He appears to have a special animus against the Bill of Rights. Take freedom of worship, for instance. Soros seems to favor some sort of religious apartheid, with fundamentalist Christians banished to a socio-political Bantustan. For example, in a New Yorker interview of October 18, 2004, he said of President Bush, “The separation of church and state, the bedrock of our democracy, is clearly undermined by having a born-again President.” ...Then there’s the Second Amendment. Soros has provided massive funding to anti-gun groups and anti-gun litigators. The unprecedented assault on gun rights during the 1990s was largely bankrolled by Soros.

The scary part is the average American knows next to nothing about him and his phenomenal influence. This is my warning to those who think the two parties are the same. It makes one wonder about John McCain's allegiances since he has openly participated in several Soros backed events. Even Hillary Clinton has kept her public distance from Soros despite the fact they are kindred socialist spirits.

Mexifornia

Soros is only one front in the internal war against America. Another front is a well known hot potato: The Mexican invasion.

It is not entirely inconceivable that the southwestern states secede to Mexico one day (or create it's own sovereign nation). In his book "Mexifornia" Victor Davis Hanson infers that he does not think Mexicans are by and large bad for America but the circumstances of their arrival and experiences do not allow for them to become fully "American". Hanson is not without sympathy for the invading Mexicans whose own inept country can't provide for them. He advocates patrolling the border effectively and reducing illegal immigration, restricting immigration and stifling Mexican chauvinism in the U.S. We cannot allow current mushy policies to make the southwest look like an unreformed Mexico.

The current administration in Washington has willfully ignored (some say abetted) the problem until it showed up on the political radar last year. The President's relationship with Vincente Fox has raised more than a few eyebrows, particularly after Fox declared:

as cited by Patrick Buchanan
FOX: "Our long-range objective is to establish with the United States ... an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes as important as ... the freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and persons. The new framework we wish to construct is inspired in the example of the European Union."

Critical element of the Fox post-NAFTA agenda: absolute freedom of movement for persons between Mexico and the United States -- a merger of the nations. Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Debrez put it succinctly in April 2005. What Mexico is about is "complete integration" of the two nations.

We have only ourselves to blame for this mess. While we can't control Islamic Facists (or France, for that matter) we can and must defend our borders and demand that immigrants follow our laws.

The real question for America is: do we care enough for our remarkable country to save it. Has the media, academia, popular culture and Hollywood poisoned our collective psyche so completely that we are rotting from the inside out? The next question is: can the world afford another Europe? Because that's where we're headed.



CW

Friday, August 18, 2006

9/11 Conspiracy Theories Abound


They Started Before the Second Plane Plunged into the South Tower

I was in the car on my way to work when I heard the news of a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers and thought "How blind can the pilot be? Those towers are huge." I was just parking the car when the announcer said that a second plane had struck the south tower. I instantly recognized it was terrorists - I had no doubt.

By the time I reached my office on the 13th floor there were already groups gathered discussing the attack and its meaning. I joined the group just in time to hear someone say "I'll bet we'll find out it was the Republicans behind this so that they can make an excuse to drill in ANWR".

I point this out to illustrate the propensity for people to assign ulterior/nefarious motives to anything and everything when it comes to human interaction. Conspiracies are fun and cathartic. Nothing is what it seems makes for great fictional movie plots, and let's face it in so much of our modern life truth is stranger than fiction.

Concerning the 9/11 conspiracy the sheer magnitude of the "event" makes it ripe. We are still debating the murder of John F. Kennedy 42 years later for heaven's sake. In recent surveys it seems that 36% of the respondents said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

This does not surprise me one bit considering how the MSM and Chris Matthews continually infer that "Bush Lied and People Died" when it comes to the Iraq war.

Currently there is a 9/11 Conspiracy DVD going around that we are encouraged to copy and distribute quickly before the Patriot Act has the Feds knocking down our doors. The DVD is fairly well made with nice footage, some CGI graphics and compelling theories and dangling questions. The only part of the DVD that was concerning to me was the attack on the Pentagon. There were some things that didn't seem to add up. The rest of it was basically wild speculation and first person interviews that were obviously chosen to bolster the conspiracy angle.

Let me say that I think America was caught with our pants down on 9/11. There were warnings and of course there was Richard Clark and his self inflating ego ringing pre-9/11 bells. The fact that FEMA and other government agencies used the image of the WTC towers in the cross-hairs on there terrorist preparation documents didn't strike me as odd since the WTC was the target of a terrorist attack 8 years before Bush became president. Also, the fact that there were training exercises that supposedly took American fighter jets further away from New York and Washington DC does not strike me as conspiratorial - it was the first full week after Labor Day and many, many things start up in earnest after the official end of summer.

The financial angle touched on in the video seemed a stretch too. The owner of the WTC complex after plunking down millions sought to take out an insurance policy against terrorism on building that had been struck by terrorists less than a decade earlier. The "cut" trading done in UA and Boeing stock in the days and weeks leading up to the attacks was odd but it wasn't indicated who did it - why it could have been al Qaeda itself!

The overwhelming majority of the DVD focused on the collapse of the Twin Towers and the physics of jet fuel and implosion. This was the least convincing aspect to me. Having seen Discovery channel and other MSM specials on this topic I think it was fairly well proven that the unique design of the WTC towers and the sheer kinetic energy of jet liners (with full fuel tanks) crashing into building at such speeds COULD and DID bring the buildings down. Focusing on the temperature at which structural steel melts and the temperature that jet fuel burns while ingnoring the fact that steel does not have to "melt" to be structurally compromised is a fools game. Comparing the collapse of the Twin Towers to controlled implosions of vastly smaller structures was unconvincing to me. Trying to convice us that puffs of smoke or debris falling from a building that was just struck by an airliner were actually controlled explosions of a planned implosion did not seem compelling. As the floors pancake on each other during the collapse there is going to be windows blown out on the lower floors and dust and debris will spew out.

The DVD producers also chronicled example after example of other highrise buildings that burned but did not collapse as proof that the WTC towers were deliberately imploded. There was one mitigating circumstance ignored by the producers of the DVD - namely, none of those buildings had been struck by a speeding jet liner.

Aspects of the Pentagon attack, as I mentioned earlier, did have some very unnerving facts and speculations that did not sit well with me. Most of it is addressed to my satifaction in the Popular Mechanics study called Debunking The 9/11 Myths of March 2005. If you ever see this DVD I urge you to have a copy of this article handy. However the topic of the jet engines from Flight 77 is not addressed in the article. According to the DVD there was simply no evidence of the engines at the crash site. Engines of this size and made of titanium should have survived somewhat intact. The only identifiable piece was a turbo fan that experts claim could not have come from a 757??? Yet there were many eyewitnesses who say a plane hit the Pentagon there was the famous wife of a Bush administration official who never stepped off flight 77 that day. Barbara Olson a Fox News TV commentator was the wife of Ted Olson who was President Bushs' Solicitor General. She has never been heard from since her fateful cell phone call to her husband on Sept. 11 2001.

The Popular Mechanics piece is extensively credited on the last page with dozens of qualified experts in various fields. The DVD cites a few "so-called" experts and interviews the late Hunter S Thompson, a famous rabble rouser and LSD head. I'll let you decide which is the more credible.

The bottom line for me is that I find it impossible to believe that a conspiracy of this magnitude could be perpetrated. It would take hundreds if not thousands to be involved to cover something like this up. Since we can't even keep CIA operatives (this is an orginization that relies on lies and conspiracies to do its job) from leaking national security secrets to the press - how is the "secret government" going to keep hundreds of people from dozens of agencies and organizations quiet? It is more likely that a small group of men with no love for this country using the financial backing of state and non-state players (who also have no love for this country) to pull something like this off. It would far easier to pull this attack off than it would be to cover it up. The truth is easier than a lie!


CW

Two Eagles

Sometimes painting a picture can be an inspiration and sometimes an obbsession... Sometimes it can be both.

On my vacation I was fortunate enough to have a friends who lent me the use of their lake home in beautiful northern Wisconsin. On a whim I packed my acrylic paints and three of my favorite paint brushes. We were crusing along Hwy 77 and happened upon a bald eagle doing the dignified thing bald eagles do - eating road kill. Despite the buzzard-like behavior it was an awesome spectacle. Inspiration struck!

Obbsession soon took over. Sitting in the natural light of a Wisconsin summer on the shores of Lower Kimball Lake I spent the next three days painting this:


Two Eagles

(acrylic 16X20)

( unfortunately some of the fine detail is lost in the rendering of images, but you get the idea! )

The painting was left as a gift for my wonderful hosts. Enjoy!

CW

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Moon Beach: Wish You Were Here

Here now my latest painting. It was inspired by a magazine ad I saw years ago. They were probably selling cigarettes (or booze). I did a painting like this 20 years ago and when I looked at it recently I said I can do better than that...


Moon Beach
(acrylic 16X20)

One little hint I learned while painting this - if you are intending to do a silhouette it's best not to have a black background. Enjoy.



CW

Thursday, August 03, 2006

On Vacation

I am off to Denver for a short business trip and then I will be on vacation until Aug 20th.

Stop back by the end of the month and I will have something on the recent spate of articles that have been published about all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Hint: it was Mel Gibson, yeah, that's the ticket... Mel ...is... a... muslim, yeah that's it, he's Osama bin Laden's cousin, yeah that's what he is. His real name is Mel bin Gibson!

Its the Global Economy, Stupid

What with prices at the pump exceeding $3 a gallon this week in Minnesota it is hard to be entirely positive about the state of economic affairs in this world. In fact if there is one thing that threatens to derail the excellent global economic news it is the effect of the global Islamic terror campaign. So far the terrorists have not been so successful in disrupting in a major way the oil from the Middle East and the Gulf region from getting to the market. Not to say they haven't tried. The Saudi's have thwarted more than one attack on their major facilities. In Iraq it seems nearly a weekly occurance that their pipe lines are bombed. The oil market is tight and the market is jittery. It is speculation and high demand that is driving barrel prices beyond reality. All the more reason the Western world needs to replace oil as the fuel to power our daily transportation needs - but again reality creeps in - the technology and infrastructure to accomplish that could be years if not decades away.

Despite the oil market dysfunction the global economy is booming. I read with great interest this piece on TCSdaily.com "Don't Look Now, But the World Economy Is Booming". Nathan Smith points to the world's developing countries as evidence that things are actually looking up outside the core nations that anchor the global economy.

...check out the back page of The Economist. There is a column showing the GDP growth rates of 27 developing countries. In a typical copy from the late 1990s as many as one-third to one-half of these could have minus signs in front of them.

Today, every single one of these developing countries' growth rates is positive. Substantially positive. The slowest growth rate, in Brazil, is still a respectable 3.4 percent.

The old saw "A rising tide lifts all boats" absolutely applies to economic systems in a market based paradigm. Is there any doubt now that centrally controlled communist economic systems are a complete disaster? Smith declares the winner...

...Never in history has the market-capitalist system been so widespread. A golden age of capitalism started in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell, India hit a financial crisis and embarked on market reforms, Deng urged the Chinese to "plunge into the sea" of market competition, and Latin American countries beat inflation and tried out the Washington Consensus. Market capitalism was the only game in town...

Sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Empire and a decade or more since China and then India began to reform their economic models away from communism and socialism we see that capitalism in one form or another is working its magic like any other "natural" system. Only governments, including America's can convolute the free flow of goods and services with bad legislatiton. Governments, foreign and domestic sad to say do a good job at bad legislation.

There is pain associated with all this good news and it will be felt mostly by North America and Western Europe. Demographics do not favor large stable economies. We have an aging population for one and secondly a ever more under-educated youth. The costs associated with these facts coupled with an aging infrastructure that is no longer world class spell hardships for many people who do not position themselves for personal success. Basically, for all intents and purposes high paying low-skill jobs are going away and there's nothing to be done about that.

Unfortunately our public school systems are not preparing the next generation to meet the challenge of reality, but rather teaching them to be sub par and above all to feel good about that. This is what I fear most. We should not fear the success of other nations in the free market because their good economies will lift ours if we are smart and prepared. Are we?



CW