Zbigniew Piekarski on A return to the Dark Ages
"We can say that they stand for terrorism and represent only a small part of the Arab population. A broad delegation, including 'moderates,' will display the Arab public's general resistance..."
- David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)
'One Palestine Complete,' p. 437.
All the important market indices are at, or near, crucially important levels and everyone is wondering when the markets will start to break down. I predict that it will happen sooner or later, and the longer it waits to happen, the worse the final destruction will be. The only thing keeping the world economy afloat right now is credit. Governments and people have to borrow in order to be able to continue buying things. The more they borrow, the more they owe. The longer it goes on, the more they'll have to cut back and the worse the result will be.
Laurence Kotlikoff, writing in the current issue of Fortune, explains that America's 'fiscal gap' has risen to $51 trillion, more than the value of all the private assets in the entire country; and the price of oil, upon which all economies depend, has reached record highs.
Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, points out that the track record of oil shocks affecting the U.S. economy is close to perfect. "In the case of the United States, for example," says Roach, "each of the five recessions since the early 1970s has been preceded by an oil shock."
If you want to make sense of the current 'geopolitical' situation, then use your most powerful sense - the visual. Locate a map of the Caspian Sea, where proven oil and natural gas reserves have been estimated as up to 3-4 percent of the world total. Start thinking in terms of oil and, more importantly, of the pipelines necessary to deliver that oil to the end users (http://caspiancenter.org/ may be of interest). Then locate a map of world religions and notice within whose territory the vast amount of oil resides.
To date, the USA and its allies have made only one recorded and publicized concession to the religion of Islam. On September 25, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush renamed 'Operation Infinite Justice' to 'Operation Enduring Freedom' before dropping 24,000 bombs (of which 13,000 were precision guided) on Afghanistan in order to restore the free flow of opium to the West, as the Taliban had almost eradicated it.
'Operation Infinite Justice' when literally translated into Arabic implied the justice of God, and would be understood by a Muslim as reflecting a religious judgment or fatwa issued by the U.S. President. But shucks, in that same week, Georgie Boy used the term 'crusade,' which for Muslims implies genocide as practiced by Roman Catholics in their First Crusade (1095-1099), when they rampaged through Jerusalem and slaughtered everyone in sight. Recent events in 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' have done very little to dispel this obviously erroneous conclusion. Only a superpower with benevolent aspirations can trample on your cultural values, destroy your places of worship, desecrate your holy sites and eliminate countless innocent civilians to 'force you to be free.'
The ultimate irony is that while Medieval Europe ran high on illiteracy, superstition, barbarism and filth, with the Catholic Church monopolizing education and repressing market forces by forbidding the lending of money and fueling anti-Semitism, the torch of learning was kept burning by the Arab world.
At that time, the Muslims, who the Spaniards called Moors, populated parts of Spain, and it was their civilization that enlightened Europe and brought it out of the Dark Ages to usher in the Renaissance. Education was universal in Moorish Spain, available to the most humble, while 99 percent of Christian Europe was illiterate. In the 10th and 11th centuries, public libraries did not exist in Christian Europe, while Moorish Spain had more than seventy, of which the one in Cordoba contained over 600,000 manuscripts. There were more than 17 great universities in Moorish Spain, while Christian Europe had only two of any value.
Several hundred years before there was a paved street in Paris or a street lamp in London, Cordoba was much like a modern metropolis. The streets were paved and there were sidewalks for pedestrians. At night, it was said that one could travel for 15 kilometers by the light of lamps along a continuous strip of buildings. The population of the city was over one million, with public baths and sewers. There were over 200,000 homes and 800 public schools.
During the end of the first millennium, Cordoba was the intellectual well from which European humanity came to drink. Students from France and England traveled there to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars, to learn philosophy, science and medicine.
While tolerance was unheard of in the rest of Europe, as the Church fostered discord and the persecution of 'non-believers,' in Moorish Spain "thousands of Jews and Christians lived in peace and harmony with their Muslim overlords" (James Burke, The Day The Universe Changed, 1985, p. 38). The society had a literary rather than religious base, and economically their prosperity was unparalleled for centuries.
Therefore, while the leaders of the led insist that the new European Constitution contains a reference to Europe's Christian Heritage, perhaps they ought to insert a few words thanking the Moors of Spain for liberating some common men from the twin tyrannies of ignorance and superstition. A direct inheritor of this knowledge was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who died condemned of heresy for challenging the Church's view that the Earth was the center of the Universe. On October 31, 1992, 350 years after Galileo's death, Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed but did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo - a typical bureaucratic ploy.
Over the last 1,000 years, Christianity in its various forms and guises has prospered, and its chief exponent, the USA, has unparalleled economic and military might. Yet foreigners own $8 trillion of U.S. financial assets, including 13 percent of all stocks and 24 percent of corporate bonds. The total debt burden of America is at least four times its GDP, and its ability to pay back what it borrowed is next to impossible. No Empire has faced such a predicament since the decline and fall of Rome, and after the fall of Rome, Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. Cycles repeat.
- David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)
'One Palestine Complete,' p. 437.
All the important market indices are at, or near, crucially important levels and everyone is wondering when the markets will start to break down. I predict that it will happen sooner or later, and the longer it waits to happen, the worse the final destruction will be. The only thing keeping the world economy afloat right now is credit. Governments and people have to borrow in order to be able to continue buying things. The more they borrow, the more they owe. The longer it goes on, the more they'll have to cut back and the worse the result will be.
Laurence Kotlikoff, writing in the current issue of Fortune, explains that America's 'fiscal gap' has risen to $51 trillion, more than the value of all the private assets in the entire country; and the price of oil, upon which all economies depend, has reached record highs.
Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, points out that the track record of oil shocks affecting the U.S. economy is close to perfect. "In the case of the United States, for example," says Roach, "each of the five recessions since the early 1970s has been preceded by an oil shock."
If you want to make sense of the current 'geopolitical' situation, then use your most powerful sense - the visual. Locate a map of the Caspian Sea, where proven oil and natural gas reserves have been estimated as up to 3-4 percent of the world total. Start thinking in terms of oil and, more importantly, of the pipelines necessary to deliver that oil to the end users (http://caspiancenter.org/ may be of interest). Then locate a map of world religions and notice within whose territory the vast amount of oil resides.
To date, the USA and its allies have made only one recorded and publicized concession to the religion of Islam. On September 25, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush renamed 'Operation Infinite Justice' to 'Operation Enduring Freedom' before dropping 24,000 bombs (of which 13,000 were precision guided) on Afghanistan in order to restore the free flow of opium to the West, as the Taliban had almost eradicated it.
'Operation Infinite Justice' when literally translated into Arabic implied the justice of God, and would be understood by a Muslim as reflecting a religious judgment or fatwa issued by the U.S. President. But shucks, in that same week, Georgie Boy used the term 'crusade,' which for Muslims implies genocide as practiced by Roman Catholics in their First Crusade (1095-1099), when they rampaged through Jerusalem and slaughtered everyone in sight. Recent events in 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' have done very little to dispel this obviously erroneous conclusion. Only a superpower with benevolent aspirations can trample on your cultural values, destroy your places of worship, desecrate your holy sites and eliminate countless innocent civilians to 'force you to be free.'
The ultimate irony is that while Medieval Europe ran high on illiteracy, superstition, barbarism and filth, with the Catholic Church monopolizing education and repressing market forces by forbidding the lending of money and fueling anti-Semitism, the torch of learning was kept burning by the Arab world.
At that time, the Muslims, who the Spaniards called Moors, populated parts of Spain, and it was their civilization that enlightened Europe and brought it out of the Dark Ages to usher in the Renaissance. Education was universal in Moorish Spain, available to the most humble, while 99 percent of Christian Europe was illiterate. In the 10th and 11th centuries, public libraries did not exist in Christian Europe, while Moorish Spain had more than seventy, of which the one in Cordoba contained over 600,000 manuscripts. There were more than 17 great universities in Moorish Spain, while Christian Europe had only two of any value.
Several hundred years before there was a paved street in Paris or a street lamp in London, Cordoba was much like a modern metropolis. The streets were paved and there were sidewalks for pedestrians. At night, it was said that one could travel for 15 kilometers by the light of lamps along a continuous strip of buildings. The population of the city was over one million, with public baths and sewers. There were over 200,000 homes and 800 public schools.
During the end of the first millennium, Cordoba was the intellectual well from which European humanity came to drink. Students from France and England traveled there to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars, to learn philosophy, science and medicine.
While tolerance was unheard of in the rest of Europe, as the Church fostered discord and the persecution of 'non-believers,' in Moorish Spain "thousands of Jews and Christians lived in peace and harmony with their Muslim overlords" (James Burke, The Day The Universe Changed, 1985, p. 38). The society had a literary rather than religious base, and economically their prosperity was unparalleled for centuries.
Therefore, while the leaders of the led insist that the new European Constitution contains a reference to Europe's Christian Heritage, perhaps they ought to insert a few words thanking the Moors of Spain for liberating some common men from the twin tyrannies of ignorance and superstition. A direct inheritor of this knowledge was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who died condemned of heresy for challenging the Church's view that the Earth was the center of the Universe. On October 31, 1992, 350 years after Galileo's death, Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed but did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo - a typical bureaucratic ploy.
Over the last 1,000 years, Christianity in its various forms and guises has prospered, and its chief exponent, the USA, has unparalleled economic and military might. Yet foreigners own $8 trillion of U.S. financial assets, including 13 percent of all stocks and 24 percent of corporate bonds. The total debt burden of America is at least four times its GDP, and its ability to pay back what it borrowed is next to impossible. No Empire has faced such a predicament since the decline and fall of Rome, and after the fall of Rome, Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. Cycles repeat.
