BMW in Spartanburg

There are plenty of foreign manufacturers that assembly their vehicles in the United States such as Acura, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, and BMW in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  The United States is definitely not noted or known for its low labor costs but these mega-conglomerates recognize that labor costs are just one small component of a much greater whole in which the biggest factors in their opening of automobile plants in the USA approximately thirty years ago can be laid down to these three factors:

1.       Quid pro quo/free trade agreements

2.       For decades the USA was the largest auto market by sales volume in the world and now is second only to China

3.       Tax incentives

Vehicles are known as big ticket sale items in the world,  and with an average sale price of a new vehicle in the USA being just over $30,000 in 2012, the numbers involved in this industry are positively staggering.  Therefore, it is in the best interests of foreign manufacturers to come to a negotiated agreement with the government of the United States that allows these manufacturers to preclude tariff costs or to reduce them substantially based on certain contingencies being met, so that their vehicle prices are competitive with other manufacturers in the United States.  The United States is far too lucrative a market to pass up or to not take advantage of in all of its aspects, especially since the USA's transportation and ports are first rate, its labor force is available and scalable, its labor holidays are reasonable, its manufacturing capability is state-of-the-art, and further that the United States does not mandate using Union labor.

Additionally, the United States is somewhat unique in the world in that each of its fifty states competes against the others, in regards to incentives, tax rates, cost-of-living, and amenities.  In fact, it appears that States within this country will fall over themselves in providing special tax incentives and tax breaks in exchange for commitments in capital and labor investment.  Unfortunately, for most cities, the politicians that negotiate these deals on behalf of their citizens are not seasoned entrepreneurs with sophisticated business acumen but mere pretenders at the negotiation table.  This results in press releases that spin the job creation in one way, while saying little or nothing about the tax giveaways and other incentives that undercut the very deal that was made.

To make matters worse, too many city and State government lack transparency in their business deals in which the citizens have an absolute right to know.  Additionally, situations in which a certain manufacturer is provided special tax incentives and deals, means that the playing field for other businesses in the community is unlevel and consequently that their burden of taxation is unnecessarily higher.  The Nerve recently looked at BMW's $900 million expansion project in Spartanburg and through the Freedom of Information Act they were able to determine that: "...in a Dec. 2, 2011, application to the state for incentives, BMW said it had 3,822 permanent, full-time jobs in the entire state as of Jan. 1, 2011, – slightly more than half of the number that was cited in the press release."  In addition, "records … for BMW's latest expansion project show that the company will receive millions, and possibly tens of millions, in incentives over time."  Finally, "the incentives agreements for BMW’s latest expansion project allow job development credits if the average wage for the new employees is at least $15.12 per hour, which, based on a 40-hour work week, is slightly less than the 2011 per-capita income for the county."

Is BMW good for Spartanburg, or is it mainly good for BMW?  For fiscal year 2013, BMW's yearly revenue was just over $76 billion dollars, with a net income of over $5.3 billion dollars, whereas the city of Spartanburg just voted itself a yearly operating budget of $33.6 million dollars for fiscal year 2014.  I wonder just how badly outclassed Spartanburg was in its negotiations and their continued negotiations with BMW and how little it would take for those select few that represent Spartanburg in these talks to be compromised.  Further, because BMW sells high-end automobiles and SUVS, you would think that there would be plenty of middle management and upper management jobs within the corporation that would quite pay well.  No doubt, these jobs do exist; they just don't seem to exist at any meaningful level in Spartanburg.

USA Arms Sales

You can't have it both ways; that is to say, you are not going to make the world a safer place by manufacturing and selling military arms that have the absolute capability of wreaking havoc and destruction throughout the world, whether or not the buyers of these arms are your allies or not.  The more arms that are manufactured and sold, the more potential there is of destruction and harm. Additionally, there is also the reasonable fear that some of these weapons will ultimately fall into the hands of those that are not our allies, perhaps even avowed enemies of ours or 'allies' in name only.  Also, affiliations of countries and regimes will change based on political upheaval or political expediency but the weapons sold will remain in their possession. 

Those who profess the adage that there is peace in the strength of having a strong military, strong armed forces, state-of-the-art weapons and the like, are missing the point.  While military strength certainly has its place, so does moral suasion and moral courage.  The more weapons that are sold to foreign countries that you do not have control of, the more balls that you are juggling, and the more balls that you are juggling, the greater the chance of error.

The economics of arms sales are also a grand disservice to most of mankind.  While these sales are of great benefit to giant multi-national corporations such as Lockheed Martin. Boeing, and Raytheon, they aren't necessarily a real benefit to the recipient countries.  Countries such as Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco all rank within the top 15 countries in expenditures for imported arms, yet these countries are either relatively impoverished or have massive wealth inequalities within their borders.  The arms sales to these countries as a whole are not beneficial for the peoples that live there, because these expenditures don't provide food, shelter, or employment; these purchases instead are perhaps beneficial for those that are the privileged, the military, and the elite class. 

According to the NYtimes.com, the overseas weapons sales for the United States in 2011were over $66 billion, yet the world as a whole is no safer for these sales having been made.  To fight modern wars, you need modern weapons, such as helicopters, aircraft, missiles, tanks, radar, technology, knowhow, and the spare parts that go with them.  All of these things cost a lot of money and the price to keep pace with your neighbors is a continuous game of one-upmanship which never ceases.  For instance, sales that are made today do not appear to satiate a country's needs, instead they appear to place recipient countries on a never-ending binge cycle of additional sales which are bigger, better, and more advanced than the previous goods.

Saddam Hussein spent billions upon billions of dollars arming Iraq and strengthening its military forces but what did it ever accomplish?  Iraq attacked neighboring Iran in 1980 but this long and costly war ended in a stalemate in 1988.  Then Iraq attacked Kuwait, partly in order to cancel a $30 billion debt incurred during their Iranian war, but ultimately Iraq was subsequently defeated by allied forces in a matter of weeks.  Finally, in 2003, Iraq was attacked by mainly USA forces in which the total and unconditional defeat of Iraq and its military forces was accomplished in less than sixty days.  What then had Saddam Hussein received in benefit for those billions upon billions of dollars wasted on military expenditures?  Nothing, but death, destruction, and defeat.

Tipping

According to wisegeek.com the average American spends about $2,700 on eating out each year and although I don't have that number further broken down by restaurants in which a tip is expected as opposed to fast food restaurants in which a tip is uncommon, that dollar expenditure by Americans is in aggregate in the billions of dollars.   In North America, tipping at sit-down restaurants which offer table service is expected, and in fact, based on the salary of the wait staff that serve you in which the majority of these servers make less than minimum wage per state law, it is mandatory for these servers to receive good and consistent tips in order for them to make ends meet.  What is surprising about this whole thing is the tip that you provide to your server is neither something that you are legally compelled to do, nor is consistent from table-to-table nor person-to-person nor dining experience-to-dining experience.   You, the consumer, have absolute discretion, subject to social pressures, to tip the amount of money that suits you.

While it is suggested that your tip range should be in the 15-20% vicinity, tips can widely range outside of these boundaries, depending upon the dining experience, your financial situation, your mathematical skills, and your personality.  I believe that the restaurant is doing you and their servers a favor when the bill is presented to you with suggested tip percentages of 15, 18, and 20 percent already calculated out, since there are such a significant amount of people that are either math deficit or excuse proficient when it comes to paying an appropriate tip.

Although tips have been a standard in America for a number of years, tipping and the compensation of servers in other countries does vary considerably from the American standard.  For instance, in Japan, there is no tipping permitted, and in many European countries tipping has been replaced in the most part by "service charges" in lieu of a tip, although a smallish tip of 5% or so is not considered out of the ordinary. 

But just because tipping in America is the norm, doesn’t mean that the model should be continued in its present form.  The main problem with the American model of tipping is the fact that the amount of money that a particular server will make is unnecessarily inconsistent based on the consumer having the power to withhold appropriate tips from servers as a form of punishment, ignorance, or cheapness.  A better model would be akin to the European model in which a restaurant will make it clear to its patrons that in lieu of tipping the wait staff, that a service charge of 18% has been added onto the check for all table service (but not take-out) and additionally that no tipping will be expected from sit-down diners.  This model is both simple and straightforward, additionally; it allows the restaurant to take better control of the distribution of the monies received from the service charge so as to fairly compensate cooks, busboys, hostesses, and other members of the restaurant, should management of said restaurant be so inclined.

The only real perceived negative of the service charge replacing the previous tipping policy is that some consumers might resent this new program, that is why it is important not to make this proposed change mandatory for all restaurants, instead make it a choice by the restaurant management itself and let the market sort it all out.  As for the wait staff, they too will have a choice, and I suspect most of them will prefer the new policy of a service charge, which appears both fairer and more consistent.

The Money Elite and their favoritism of socialism

The United States loves to spread the lie that the wealth of this country is honestly earned and evenly distributed subject to the laws of capitalism and individual human effort.   While there is little doubt that there are plenty of successful people within America that are indeed upstanding, hard-working, and play by the rules in both a legal and moral sense, there are also a select few that are able to bend the rules to their ego and to their desire.   In America, there most definitely are laws and rules that are setup to enhance the money elite and their power brokers and to serve their needs and their purposes.  In the USA, in virtually any business activity, the field is not level; it favors some and thereby opposes others.   

Quite frankly, the rich want to maintain or to increase both their money and their power, and those that have the political means to assist them in doing so will best maintain their own power and influence in providing these certain elite with that assistance, while those that can judge issues or issue rulings in the favor of these privileged elite will also benefit from their particular governance.  The wisest thing to remember is that the rich and powerful will never willingly give up any of the material advantages that they have and will do everything to protect and to foster their continual profit at the expense of others.  This is a zero sum society, in which there are winners and there are losers; winning gives you power, money, influence, and options; whereas losing at best builds character, and at worse destroys you and everything that you believe in.

The question then becomes why would the money elite favor their particular brand of socialism or socialism at all?  This is a very valid question which has some equally pertinent answers.  One does well to remember that the true money-elite are out-numbered by not just 99:1 but more like 999:1, or in all actuality, at an even higher ratio.  In order to maintain their existence, let alone their power, they must have control over the law, politics, media, and force.  Getting all of these things to work in the master's hands is not easily accomplished, unless you are able to offer to those that provide these things, lesser kingdoms that will satisfy them.  For the law, you offer honors and certain judicial power, for politicians you offer fiefdoms and lackeys to serve them; for the media you allow them to provide and profit enormously from mindless entertainment of any sort as long as they also provide the appropriate propaganda; for the military/police you offer battles, killing machines, and respect.  In all events, you make sure that these essential people are well taken care of and therefore have something of value worth protecting and fighting for.

Still that doesn't answer the question at hand in which the vast majority of Americans are neither the elite, nor the favored classes; it is for these people that socialism raises its ugly head.  In any country, there is a vast amount of people who are not interested in working, in applying themselves, or in educating themselves and are all too happy to be complacent and relatively passive if given food, shelter, and entertainment, in return in which their only duty is to acquiesce.  Because of the sheer numbers of these peoples it is desirable to disarm them, and for those that will not comply, to incarcerate them for having not done so.  For the people that make up the engine that makes America run, the workers, whether blue-collar or white-collar, that are diligent in applying themselves to their duties each and every workday, for these workers you most tax them, nickel and dime them, frighten them, indoctrinate them, promise them, and sell them the political illusion of choice, in which no matter which lever they press, the result is, in effect, the same.  Their purpose is to enrich the money-elite; in return they should be satisfied with their 'free' healthcare, 'free' schooling, 'free' military/police protection, and their 'free'dom. 

The money elite cannot afford a free-for-all, they, above all things need both law and order that supports them and their status.  This can best be done with a population which is distracted by wars, rumors of wars, secularism, or by entertainment that amuses them.   The money elite favors giving the mass of humanity just enough of the American dream to make them believe that the dream that they have amassed is the dream, whereas in actuality it is a sham.  The money elite cannot afford to be challenged and will not allow a challenge to their status and to their power, therefore the siren song of socialism is sung to the public to make them believe that there is only so much to go around, and it's fairer if we all share in it together, equally. 

The Dow Jones

The equity stock market has plenty of indexes that purport to represent the market, but the daddy of them all is the Dow Jones, named after Charles Dow and Edward Jones, who formed the nucleus of Dow Jones and Company, the future publishing company of the Wall Street Journal.  The Dow Jones Index was first published in the WSJ on May 26, 1896, and the average consisted of 12 stocks in which the simple addition of the closing price of the 12 stocks created the closing price of the Dow Jones.  By 1928, the Dow Jones consisted of 30 stocks and this remains true as of today, nearly 100 years later.  The oldest surviving member of the Dow Jones index is General Electric and the index itself makes few changes.  From the years 1999 to 2009, there were a total of eight additions and subtractions from the Dow Jones in which for most years there were no changes to the index at all.

The U.S. Stock market has approximately 5,000 stocks that trade on a given day, yet the Dow Jones represents just 30 stocks and it is considered by many to the be the "market" because these companies represent the "blue chips" of the U.S stock market.  Consequently, when most pundits report on the market on a given day, this reference is almost always referring to the Dow Jones and its 30 stocks.   Most of the names of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones are recognizable to most people, (e.g. Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Disney, and IBM) because these stocks are huge corporations with massive sales, global presence, and market capitalization.  The Dow Jones is often seen as a proxy for the economy as a whole and that is why so many people pay attention to how the market is doing on a given day.

The one flaw within the Dow Jones average is that the "Dow" weighs companies solely by their share price as opposed to weighing them by their market capitalization, therefore you get the strange phenomena in which Visa at a current stock price of $222.81 and with a market capitalization of $141.18 billion dollars has a substantially greater influence on the Dow as compared to Cisco which has a current stock price of $21.82 and a market capitalization somewhat comparable to Visa at $112.66 billion.  Consequently, Visa has a current weighing of 8.75% on the Dow, making it the #1 influence on the index whereas Cisco current weighing is a mere .86% or a ratio of just over 10:1, conversely on a market capitalization ratio that ratio would be just 1.25:1.  Additionally, Visa has the lowest yearly revenue by far of any component on the Dow, and its market capitalization is also in the bottom five, yet Visa has the biggest influence on the Dow.  Quite simply, because the Dow weighs companies by their share price, instead of market capitalization, or by some other fair metric, certain companies within the Dow will have an outsized influence on the Dow price and others will have significantly less influence.  As it stands today, creating your own Dow Jones index is as simple as purchasing the exact same amount of shares of each Dow component.

The Dow Jones could change its formula for creating the index and perhaps should change it.  For instance, by market capitalization, the two biggest stocks are Apple and Google in which neither are part of the index and neither has any hope of being part of the index because of their very high stock prices of $532.36 and $1218.26, respectively.  Google, itself, if it was part of the index as currently formulated would be well over 33% of the weighing of the Dow.  Therefore, in absence of either Apple or Google splitting their shares and assuming that their market capitalization remains at or near the top, the Dow Jones will change its formulation sometime within the next decade in order to maintain its relevance.

Taxpayer funded Stadiums

You can virtually always count on mega-rich owners of sports franchises using their power and influence to fleece taxpayers of their chosen city to subsidize and to build their sports stadiums.  The most egregious stadiums of public waste rest In the NFL for two primary reasons: the size and capacity of the stadium itself and the fact that the NFL can't guarantee more than ten home games a season (two: preseason, eight: regular season).  It doesn't take a genius to recognize that a state-of-the-art stadium that costs upwards of $650 million or more and is created primarily as a NFL stadium is a colossal waste of both money and space, yet 14 new NFL stadiums have been built since 2000.

Too often these stadiums are built without true taxpayer approval, the deep-pocketed owners instead preferring to do the runaround and deal directly with the city council or the mayor itself, as it is far easier to convince a handful of empowered people of the supposed benefits of a new stadium than to take the risk of putting the vote to the ballot.  The taxpayers will often be stuck with any or all of the following: a small increase in their sales tax rate, or hotel occupancy tax, or car rental tax, and an issuance of bonds to cover the expenditures needed to create the stadium and its inevitable cost overruns.

Of course, the proponents of the stadium building are always quick to point out the benefits of having such a modern and state-of-the-art facility.  It's great for the city image to have or continue to have this particular sports team, it will bring in spending dollars from surrounding communities, it will create jobs, and it will increase the value of the land surrounding the stadium.  Most of these statements are made up of whole cloth or close to it.  Instead, mayors, city council members, and other influential people within a city should be reminded that they have an absolute obligation to be good stewards of the public's money and not to build edifices around a wall of lies.  For instance, Los Angeles hasn't had a NFL team since 1995 and is the country's second largest media market.  Is LA any the worse for not having a team?

As bad as these matters are, what makes them worse is the shelf-life of stadiums continues to get shorter and shorter as time goes on.  In the NFL, in recent times, there have been five stadiums that were abandoned or demolished before they ever reached thirty years of occupancy.  Why is it that new stadiums have to be built as compared to a more sensible solution, such as the renovation of existing structures?  The oldest stadium in the NFL is Soldiers' Field in Chicago, which was built in 1924.  The only other stadium that has been in existence in the NFL for longer than 50 years is Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, all other stadiums in the NFL are no older than 38 years old, a mere blink of an eye in time, when historic stadiums such as the Roman Coliseum have been standing for over 1,900 years and was in use for approximately 400 years or possibly more.

Stadiums cost a lot of money and this money should ideally be spent by the owners or the sports franchise itself, and not be something that is tacked onto taxpayers and unjustifiably takes away from necessary and sensible infrastructure usages such as roads, plumbing, schools, public services, and the like.

Sin Taxes and Alcohol

I do support sin taxes for items such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, legalized marijuana, and would like to see sin taxes added onto porn (including all adult media and strip clubs).  But first, what is a sin tax?  A sin tax is a form of excise tax which is placed on certain specific commodities, such as tobacco, and not placed on other commodities such as milk. That is to say, it's a special tax placed onto special items in which these items are not mandatory to procure in the normal course of everyday affairs, that they are in fact, discretionary expenditures by the consumer and additionally are perceived by the general public as being something less than wholesome.  Further, an excise tax when applied to a specific product often has more than one excise tax component, that is to say, there will be the federal excise tax, the state excise tax, and in some instances a municipal excise tax applied to the particular product; not to mention the usual local and sales taxes applied.  Some people criticize sin taxes as being a form of regressive taxation, because it impacts poor people at a higher percentage of their income as opposed to rich people, but that is true of all taxation which is not progressive in nature.

Sin taxes, however, are not equally applied in fixed percentages to products, the specific excise tax rate varies from product to product and how it is applied.  A case in point is comparing the excise tax rate for both federal and state levels for tobacco and alcohol.  For instance, in April 1, 2009, the federal excise tax rate for cigarettes increased from .39 per pack to $1.0066 per pack, an increase of 158%, whereas in the last 55 years the federal excise tax on beer has been raised just once, in 1991, and consequently from 2009 to the present there has not been an increase in the federal excise tax rate for wine, beer, or spirits.

State excise tax rates vary from state-to-state, but taking recent history and only concentrating on four northeastern states that already had very high excise tax rates we can do a comparison of tobacco v. alcohol over the years 2008 through 2013.  Each of the states of Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, and New York increased their alcohol taxes during this period, but Maine which increased their wine and beer excise taxes by 116% got this tax increase reversed by referendum within the same year, so in actuality, their wine and beer excise taxes didn't increase.  The aggregate increase for these four states was 16.25% for the wine/beer/spirit categories.  Over the same period of time, their cigarette excise tax in aggregate increased 33.51% for these four states, but this increase is really even higher, if we were to include the NYC excise tax of $1.50/pack which I have left out of this calculation.

Looking at this somewhat small footprint of time and states, from a state excise tax level of tobacco v. alcohol, the tobacco increase over the years of 2008-2013 is more than 100% higher than the alcohol excise tax.  In regards to the federal excise tax of tobacco v. alcohol, the tobacco excise tax rate increased 158% while the alcohol excise tax rate increased 0% (it remained the same), and all forms of alcohol have remained the same since 1991.  While each state is entitled to raise or lower their excise tax rates per their discretion and/or voter and legislative approval, it is puzzling why tobacco has suffered such a huge increase in its federal excise tax rate in which in 1991 it was increased to .20/pack and now stands at $1.0066/pack or an increase of over 400%, whereas alcohol after seeing its federal excise tax increase in 1991, has not had it change since! 

One can only conclude that the lobbyists for alcohol must be amongst the most effective lobbyists in all of America, because alcohol is certainly not a product that is without its demons and abuses.  It is high time that the federal government increased substantially its taxes on alcohol in which at best they have fallen asleep at the wheel, and at worse, have been compromised.

Gun Shows and Private Sales Loopholes

In most states and counties purchasing a gun in America through a licensed gun dealer is relatively easy but does involve a background check and filling out a form 4473 and there may also be a waiting period for the gun transaction to be completed and finalized.  For a semi-automatic firearm purchase you will need a certificate from a firearms safety training course and a more extensive background check in which there will be a mandatory waiting period depending upon the state or possibly the county that you are purchasing the semi-automatic firearm from.

While some states have enacted laws that preclude private gun transactions that don't also go through a licensed dealer in which the transaction is recorded, most states do not.  Consequently, people that are disqualified from owning a gun or that prefer to make their gun purchases anonymous can easily circumvent the law by purchasing their gun from either a Gun Show or through a private sale transaction and this is routinely done in America.

While there is a lot to be said that private transactions should be allowed without interference between individuals for most things, when it comes to firearm sales that are transacted between individuals it would be far wiser that these types of sales be monitored by and recorded by a licensed dealer within the state.  In particular, it is both dangerous and disturbing that individuals that are unable to pass background checks to purchase a firearm have an easy and an accessible way to purchase a gun in which there is no paper trail, no liability, and no recording of the activity that has been accomplished. 

Gun Shows should be re-constituted so that only licensed dealers may sell guns and that all buyers of said guns must pass the same background checks that they normally would have to pass in order to purchase a particular firearm.  That is to say, that all private sales should be prohibited as matter of course in Gun Show events, unless further transacted with an authorized and licensed dealer of firearms at the show.

To many people, however, there will be a hue and cry that we all have the right to bear arms and that anything that interferes in our ability to purchase said gun are as a matter of course a bastardization of our 2nd Amendment.   While I do have some sympathy to this viewpoint, the fact of the matter is that guns are lethal weapons and that it is not unreasonable to establish strict, fair, and exacting standards in regards to the purchase, distribution, and resale of firearms.

Many people do not want the government to know their business, to know what they do or don't have, because they may legitimately fear the government and its military/police powers turning upon them in times of intense crisis or chaos.  While this viewpoint has its place and its validity, we should be far more concerned about guns being in the hands of clear lunatics, unsavory characters, and violent criminals.  That is our clear and present danger.

The Great Pyramid

Mankind likes to believe that progress is linear, that is to say, that each generation improves upon the previous generation, even though there are plenty of times when barbarians, for instance, have conquered more civilized nations, such as when the Visigoths and Vandals, amongst others, took control of essential parts of the Roman Empire.  Progress is not always in a straight line, there are byways, detours, knowledge gained and knowledge loss or forgotten or forbidden, and those that believe that there is something new under the sun, apparently aren't familiar with or believe in Ecclesiastes 1:9: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."   

The great pyramid is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and it is the only one of these seven wonders that stands today.  The sands of time and the unfortunate vandalism by Muslims have changed the face and therefore the finished look of the great pyramid in which upon the completion of its construction it once was covered with huge blocks of finely-grained polished white limestone which reflected the sun's light. However, these stones were apparently loosened after a 14th century earthquake and over time were then removed.  The great pyramid is estimated to have over 2 million limestone blocks in its construction in which the weights of these range from two to up to fifty tons per block.  The height of the pyramid as originally created is estimated at 480 feet, and the estimated total weight of the great pyramid is a staggering total of nearly 6 million tons.  The great pyramid is also aligned at true north and it is located at the center of the land mass of earth.

Although most experts put the construction of the great pyramid at around 2560 BC, there are also estimates that date it thousands of years earlier.  The great pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for nearly four thousand years (depending upon the dating of the great pyramid)  until surpassed by the Lincoln Cathedral in England in 1311, and then by other cathedrals for a number of years, until these were all surpassed by our Washington Monument in 1884.  Yet, despite all of our advances in technology, knowledge, wisdom, engineering, and application since the construction of the great pyramid, we would be very hard-pressed to build the pyramid today with the same limestone blocks and construction materials that this pyramid was created with.

Mankind comes up with all sorts of theories of quarries, levers, pulleys, ropes, ramps, and thousands upon thousands of workers that put the great pyramid together through incredible manual labor in conjunction with absolute precision and perfection.  The theories that are put forth by most modern scientists for the creation of the great pyramid are utter bunk and laughable.  The great pyramid was the greatest of the pyramids built in Egypt, but there are estimated to have been built about 118 pyramids.  Additionally, this is not the only civilization to have built pyramids, as pyramids were built in China, Mexico, and Central America.  How did so many civilizations have this great talent that appears to have vanished completely from time?  The most sensible answer is that these civilizations were quite advanced and had the knowledge somehow to suspend gravity and thereby to levitate large objects.  Remember, for every action there is a reaction.  Gravity can be overcome and has been overcome, you can do it yourself, let drop from your hand a small metal object and gravity will take it to the floor, but produce from your pocket a magnet and this small metal object will defy gravity. As Sherlock Holmes says: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" 

Gift Card Reselling

In America, gift cards are the most popular gift for Christmas and other special events throughout the year, probably because of their ubiquity, their flexibility, their availability, their ease-of-use, their ease of delivery, and the fact that with the exception of the gift card store that has been selected, the recipient of said card can use it to pick out whatever merchandise that they desire.  In recent times, though, another choice has been presented to the recipient which is the ability to sell the gift card for cash.   With the amount of gift cards sold in the USA at over 100 billion dollars each year, this has created a marketplace of resellers in which http://www.giftcardgranny.com/ is the leading marketplace consolidator for people that either want to buy or sell their gift cards.  While you can also buy and sell gift cards through sites such as craigslist or eBay, your risk for doing so is increased considerably anytime you are dealing individual-to-individual as opposed to dealing with a company that makes it their business to buy and sell gift cards and has put into place conditions and protections for its consumers and sellers.

Buyers of gift cards will receive discounts that range from as small as 2% to upwards of 30% based on the popularity of a particular gift card.  For instance, a Wal-Mart gift card sells for a small discount, whereas Frederick's of Hollywood sells for a large discount.  The converse is true when it comes to selling a gift card, in which the seller of a Wal-Mart gift card may get about 93% of its value, whereas the seller of Frederick's of Hollywood would be fortunate to get 70% of the value of the card.  When you sell your gift card to a consolidator you will typically receive your payment through either PayPal, Amazon gift card, check, or direct deposit, with the receipt of that payment being accomplished shortly after verification of the balance of the gift card.  Buyers of gift cards typically will pay via credit card, debit card, or through PayPal and unless the card is an electronic card (i.e. non-physical), you will receive your bought gift card within a few days through the mail.

There is, however, a fundamental flaw of this gift card exchange program and that is the seller "holds over" the buyer.  That is to say, the seller has all the information on the card in regards to the gift card number and the gift card pin, andcan "double-dip" by selling the card, and then after receiving their money, using the card themselves online.  Of course, this isn't legal, but it's done, and that is why the spread between the buy price and sell price is often around 8-10%, whereas if there wasn't any double-dealing going on, that spread would be considerably tighter.

Another question to ask is where do all these various gift cards come from?  The quick answer is that the cards come from consumers like me and you, that simply want to exchange a gift card that doesn't suit them for cash to pay bills or to buy something else that is more desirable, or even another gift card.  That's the short answer but I believe there is another answer.  Employee theft within retail stores is a serious problem and previously if an employee stole product from your store he would have to sell it at a significant discount on the street, or online, or at a swap meet, in which all of these things bring their own risk and also a delay in receiving monetary compensation.  Today's ability to buy and sell gift cards online has changed this dynamic considerably.  Now, an employee can steal from the company that employs him, typically then find someone else to exchange the merchandise for him at a different store or even the same store, and that person will receive store credit in return for that merchandise with no need of a receipt.  After receiving that store credit in the form of a gift card ormerchandise credit it can then be sold online for a very high value (e.g. 85-90%) as compared to its full worth and the criminal will receive cash for his troubles, all in a very short period of time and with no real questions asked.

Retailers aren't stupid and they probably are aware of this new phenomenon, in which they don't want to alienate their legitimate customer base but they do want to stop and/or better track shrinkage within their companies, but they will have to make some adjustments in order to do so, because the upside for employee thefts has never been better.

Birth Control and the Sexual Revolution

The Birth control pill was approved for contraceptive use in 1960.  However, the original intention for the pill given the mores of the day was for it to be prescribed for only married couples or for those couples that were engaged to become married and therefore not to be available for prescription for single college-age women nor for recreational sex.  But over time and through various court cases, the rights of women to control their own bodies superseded the original intent of the pill and consequently the pill availability became widespread.   This widespread availability of the pill was the significant reason for the sexual revolution in our country but with that came some unintended consequences.

For instance, as late as 1968 in America, according to johnstonsarchive.net there were less than two abortions per one thousand live births.  By 1971, as reported by Wikipedia.org, there were137 abortions per one thousand live births in America, with nearly 500,000 abortions in total.  The year 1984 was the peak of the abortion ratio at 364 abortions per one thousand live births, and the total abortions exceeded 1.3 million.  Since that time the trend and the ratio for abortions has been down but the ratio and the amount of abortions in America today are still at levels which simply didn't exist before the advent of the birth control pill and its universal availability to females.

Another consequence of birth control is that the playing of the "blame game" has changed.  Whereas, for instance in the 1950s and the 1960s, a woman who got pregnant and had the intention or little choice but of bringing her baby to term,  she would frequently be able to convince her partner, one way or another, to marry her in a "shotgun wedding" or similar.  Since the dual advent of birth control pills and abortion on demand, shotgun weddings have faded from sight.  The attitude of the man directly involved in a woman's pregnancy has changed from one of possibly "doing the right thing,", to an attitude that it was the woman's responsibility to assure that she wouldn't get pregnant because after all it's her body and she had all the necessary tools to take control of it!

That is why in an age when all sorts of birth control methods are readily available, such as condoms, pills, IUDs, patches, shots, sponges, and the morning-after-pill, abortions and the ratio of abortions to live births in America are still at an incredibly high and elevated numbers.  Additionally, whereas in 1968 approximately 6.2% of children lived in households with a never-married mother, today that percentage has climbed to 45.8%.  The mores and the traditions of the American nuclear family have changed over the past 40-odd years since the coming of age of the birth control pill and the sexual revolution, but not in the way that was intended nor expected.

The intent of the access to birth control pills was so that families could "plan" their pregnancies and to subsequently control the amount of children created in their household.  While that may be true somewhat, for the most part what has happened instead is a wide-open playing field in which anything goes with anyone at anytime in which no party takes full responsibility, but it is the female and her children that mainly suffers the consequences of these choices. 

The birth control pill in conjunction with legal abortion has empowered females to take control of their bodies, but unfortunately, it has also led to a massive increase in recreational sex and a wholesale decrease in our moral values, our family values, and our sensibilities.  The freedom to say yes is also the freedom to say no.

The Military in a Domestic Emergency Situation

Most of us go about our day blithely unaware that at any point, we as civilians, could be put under military control as given by the Code of Federal Regulations, Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) [ 32 CFR 185 ] Act which states in part:

"§185.3   Definitions.

Emergency Authority. A Federal military commander's authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances…"

The above essentially creates a military-police state within the United States, ostensibly for our benefit to "quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances", in which those "disturbances" could, in fact, be created by agents within or working with the military itself so that the military could declare essentially martial law within our country.  A law that once enacted may effectively end the reign of the United States as that "last best hope for mankind".

For those that think that the above scenario is somewhat far-fetched, recognize that in the following passage in regards to Policy, the use of Federal military forces is authorized when necessary to protect Federal property or functions, in which it's hard to find in America a major city block that doesn't contain some sort of "Federal property or functions."  The Code of Federal Regulations, Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) [ 32 CFR 185 ] Act further states in part:

"§185.4   Policy.

…(2) When duly constituted Federal, State, or local authorities are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for Federal property or Federal governmental functions. Federal action, including the use of Federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the Federal property or functions."

The United States has over two million military personnel that are well-trained, well-armed, with state-of-the-art communications and abilities that are well regarded as the most fearsome military force known in the history of mankind.  For those that believe that this military would never turn its guns on to its own civilian population, history is rife with example after example of armed forces that have done this exact same terrible thing and this continues until the present day.  Take for instance countries such as: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, Russia, and Turkey, in which each of these countries have deliberately committed genocide against certain segments of their population in recent times for various reasons.

Military personnel are trained to kill people by first dehumanizing them and designating them instead as "targets, sub-humans, animals, infidels" or assorted racist terms.  Military personnel are not trained to see their enemies as children of God or as equal to themselves.  When you intentionally and deliberately kill another human being with a bullet, a bomb, or a weapon of some sort, you have essentially crossed the Rubicon and deliberately killing your own country's civilians is a task relatively easily accomplished if guided and commanded to do so by your superior officers.  If you find this difficult to swallow, ask yourself this question,  when Christ was scourged, beaten, and crucified, how many Roman soldiers walked away or refused to participate?

Be very afraid, it is coming.

Pedophile's Delight

When I write of "pedophile's delight" I am not referring to the act itself, which is disgraceful, abusive, harmful, and wrong on every level, nor am I referring to the severity of the punishment for those convicted sex offenders, instead what I am referring to is that in today's society with its ubiquitous online social media it is truly a time in which the fox is guarding the henhouse.  Consumer Reports stated on 5/10/2011 that: "of the 20 million minors who actively used Facebook in the past year, 7.5 million of them were younger than 13, according to projections from Consumer Reports’ latest State of the Net survey.  Facebook’s terms of service require users to be at least 13 years old. Also among this group of minors using Facebook, more than 5 million were 10 and under." The WSJ followed this up with their 2011 survey of 1,007 parents in which 19% of children age 10 had a Facebook account, 32% at age 11, 55% at age 12, 69% at age 13, and 78% at age 14. 

Pedophiles' already have access to children through all of the usual methods, what has changed during the Facebook era of the last decade is their ability to exploit children and teenagers using that same social media.  As easy as it is for a child to pretend to be an age that they are not, it is just as easy for a predator to do the exact same thing in reverse.  Just as a child can post age information and data that are inaccurate, so can a pedophile do the same thing with pictures stolen or taken from other accounts or other media and create a fake profile that allows them to represent themselves as nearly the same age as their intended victim.  Because the adult has the intelligence, the deviousness, the physical strength, and the experience, it is hardly a fair contest for that same adult to successfully assault and/or exploit the child.  Social media sites such as Facebook create both the roadway and the necessary pathway for pedophiles to successfully ply their trade.

Through it all, the parents of the child are oblivious that their child is even in danger of molestation and exploitation for an adult's deviant pleasure through sites such as Facebook.  Instead we have the illusion of safety that Facebook sells to its users, when in fact, you can make a very strong argument that Facebook has an absolute duty to restrict, protect, and to assist their underage users in knowing the dangers that social media can present.  As a parent you warn your child not to talk to strangers outside of your presence, to never get into a car with a stranger, that there is strength in numbers and therefore not to walk alone, and that when in doubt to not take a chance but to return to your safe zones.  The online pedophile can take advantage of these defense mechanisms, because he knows your name, where you live, where you go to school at, what your habits and likes are, and he can pretend to be something that he is not such as a security officer, or teacher, or anything that makes him look respectable and upstanding to you.

Pedophiles have never had it any better, they can search for their potential victims, systematically, diligently and at any hour (for instance, does it make sense for a "thirteen year old" to be online at 3 AM on a school day and shouldn't this be red- flagged).  Pedophiles can afford to look and look again since the cost of their attempts merely comes down to the value of their own time and they won't stop until they find their victim.  It is for them, the best of times.

Being Nickel and Dimed

Being nickel and dimed refers mainly to being squeezed out of extra money through unnecessary costs or hidden fees or deceptive charges by companies.  It is akin to squeezing out just a little extra money from you, with the expectation that you'll just accept it as the cost of doing business.  There are plenty of examples of being nickel and dimed which I will elaborate on.

T-Mobile prepaid advertise their prepaid plans as monthly such as their unlimited phone, text, and data plan for as low as $50/month but that price isn't accurate, nor is it completely true.  You could make a strong argument that it's false advertising, since the program itself is not based on a true monthly fee but on a thirty-day preplan fee, so that given that there are 365.25 days in a year but only 360 days (12 x 30) for 30-day periods, you as a consumer will end up paying for an extra month, around 70 months into your prepaid plan when your yearly shortfall of 5.25 days will equal another payment of $50.  Consequently, whereas the plan states it's $50/monthly if you were to actually convert the 30-day plan into a monthly plan it would be about $.714 more per month; so their monthly plan is really not $50 but is $50.714 on a monthly basis which is an increase of 1.43% which is pretty much pure profit to their bottom line, unless consumers as a whole were to take offense by it, and switch to another carrier.

Credit card companies have all sorts of charges that they can nickel and dime you with, and these charges can quite easily get beyond the mere nickel and dimes.  If you are even one-day late they can hit you with a $35 late fee or possibly more, a variable interest switchover in which instead of paying a fixed interest rate because on your late payment you will thereby pay a variable "penalty" rate as much as 29.99% or possibly more.  All of this for being one-day late in which your balance may be trivial, your past payment history may be excellent, and there may be legitimate extenuating circumstances or possibly a mistake on the credit card issuers side.  However, in fairness to the credit card companies, they are often willing to work with you on these penalties if you contact them, but if you do not, you will default to these penalties.    In addition, the one truly unnecessary nickel and dime charge by credit card companies is the "minimum" credit card interest fee, as for some reason some credit card companies claim or have no desire to charge you the correct interest on low balances but instead round you up to their minimum interest charge of $1.50, or possibly more.  There isn't a single valid reason for this to be done, except to nickel and dime you.

Utility companies have late fees, service restoration fees, deposit requirements, and processing fees, and if you somehow fall behind or fail to make timely payments, they are in principle really piling on the misery for a consumer that clearly is having trouble making just the normal payment.  Since most utility companies are publicly monitored, it is both unnecessary and mean-spirited to charge any additional fees which are above and beyond the real cost of doing business in order to spite and needlessly penalize the consumer.  Water, electricity, and gas are absolutely vital for modern-day consumers to make their home, habitable; therefore the termination of these vital functions should not be done lightly or without due consideration.

There are plenty of nickel and dime fees that consumers deal with on a daily or monthly basis.  These fees can often be overcome by asserting your consumer rights but that takes diligence, effort, and savvy on your part.  Not everyone has those same capabilities or knowledge, and is these people that suffer most from being nickel and dimed.

The "New" Bread and Circuses

There are a lot of ways to keep your population and especially your large underclass under control and relatively docile.  Some of these methods are quite effective and some are not.  When the Government bares its teeth and uses force to keep its population down, this is usually the sign of overall weakness in the Government's effort to placate the population and an additional sign that the whole edifice may soon come tumbling down.  Far better it is to sell the illusion that all is well, and to follow that illusion up with the items that mean most to the people which are food and entertainment, also known as "bread and circuses".

The United States has a massive welfare class in which according to townhall.com, "a new report from the Census Bureau showed a total of 108,592,000 people were on some sort of means-tested government benefits program in the fourth quarter of 2011, yet only 101,716,000 people were employed full-time for the entire year."  It is fortunate that the United States is known as the breadbasket of the world so that food here is not only just plentiful, it's relatively cheap, widely available and competently distributed, and access to this cheap food is readily given to all Americans as almost a given right.  Fortunately too, America is known as the preeminent entertainment center of the world, in which its products are easily available, at a price-point that is either quite affordable or basically free, and that these diversions can also be up-scaled for consumers with a little bit of extra cash on them.

The formula for America works so well that even when there are protests against the Wall Street and the money-elite such as "Occupy Wall Street", the protestors are only able to gain traction for a very short period of time, despite the fact that this country is clearly divided between an absolute money-elite, a middle-class that is being squeezed and marginalized, and an underclass that is big and growing.  The reason that the poor and underprivileged are still satisfied within America is because they are very well fed, so well in fact that obesity is nearly an epidemic in America, and they too have ready access to all sorts of entertainment and games through their TVs, their cell-phones, and other electronic items that connect to the internet.

Countries like Egypt and Greece get it so wrong, because when you don't properly feed your population or keep the price of food within reason you will get unease, grumbling, and riots.  Additionally, when you create a welfare state but over-promise your population and under-achieve with them, such as in Greece, you will get blowback of the highest order in return.  Whether the United States will disintegrate into these types of conditions remains to be seen, but should it come to that it will get very, very ugly.

Rome, once the greatest empire ever known, eventually succumbed to its enemies because its' love of bread and circuses, sapped the virtue and desire of its citizens to apply themselves, and instead replaced this with indolence, hoarding, corruption, and trade deficits.  Our future is both uncertain and hardly secure, for when those that have their hands out are greater in number than those that through their efforts and diligence are able to create the handouts, you have a problem of increasing significance, and our edifice of bread and circuses will begin to crack, crumble, and eventually to fall.

Government spying

There has never been an easier or more efficient or more effective time to spy on your own citizens as there is today.  Whereas, in previous years you might need to have someone on the inside of an organization in order to infiltrate it and neutralize it, that isn't even often a step that need be taken.  Listening devices are sophisticated, reliable, portable, cost-efficient, and effective, and while there may be laws that are suppose to protect you from indiscriminate eavesdropping by the government, the fact of the matter is, there are so many additional laws that supersede these "protections" that the government need not worry about them.  Additionally, you don't need the manpower to track vehicles and where they go, where they stop at and where they visit at, the cars own GPS is vulnerable to hacking and if not hacked, the information is stored by the GPS provider and can be accessed.

The main problem that the Government has at this point in monitoring you is not the lack of information, but the overwhelming amount of information that has to be processed, correlated, and analyzed.  Any thought that you can hide from the government, be anonymous to the government, can only occur if you are living a life that has no involvement with modern technology whatsoever, and people like that are virtually never a threat to the government.

There isn't anyone watching the watchers, while there may be oversight committees they are toothless and without effectiveness.  In any event, even if these oversight organizations were to discover something untoward, they are so far behind the eight ball, that any hope of them being able to stop or prevent government spy agencies from doing what they desire to do is misguided and hopeless.  Our present spy system is like a runaway train that cannot be stopped, cannot be diverted, and cannot be slowed down.

We are at the mercy of anonymous government spying agencies that will stop at nothing to obtain all the actionable information that they can obtain from its citizens and visitors within the United States.  We would be wise to remember this prescient quote from C.S. Lewis: "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

These are dangerous times.  These are times in which the common man has no defense for spying agencies that have an ax to grind against them for legitimate or illegitimate reasons.  Also, when government spy agencies have all the pertinent information that they can obtain from you, it is then easy for them to manipulate that data, to change and distort some facts, in order to best make a case against you because in theory their data is inviolable, whereas in actuality it isn't. 

Also, ask yourself this question, what does an individual with immense spying power and the authority to use it, do in a situation in which he says to himself, "I don't like my neighbor and I wish to destroy him."  He probably annihilates him, completely, irrevocably, and without mercy.  Far from serving us, the people, government spying agencies serve only themselves in which their purpose it clear: We are all their slaves, their servants, and their subjects, and if we get out-of-line they will eviscerate us. 

In short, God-like powers in the hands of fallen human beings is a formula for absolute tyranny and oppression. You have been warned.

First, Do No Harm

The Hippocratic Oath contains the words "… and never do harm to anyone," and further "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion."   Virtually all American medical doctors swear an oath or oaths before receiving their medical license to practice and although these oaths vary from school-to-school, they are similar in concept and have as their foundation the code that a medical doctor has an obligation to perform their duties to the benefit of their patients, and to their health and to their life, further that they will perform no actions that will bring shame or discredit to the profession, nor will they cause deliberate harm nor provide lethal drugs to their patients.

It is important that medical doctors take this oath, because as a patient, there is an implicit trust between you and your doctor that any prescriptions and any procedures that you engage in are to your benefit and not deliberately to your harm.  Additionally, we need only to look back at history to see that doctors under the aegis of the State, are not hesitant to perform all sorts of dubious medical procedures such as mandated sterilization, serological experiments, pharmaceutical testing on certain human subjects, infanticide, and euthanasia.  That these procedures are conducted upon human beings at all is abhorrent, that these procedures are conducted by medical doctors is unprincipled.

Medical doctors should be held to a higher standard than other human beings since they have the necessary knowledge that can help or harm our natural life.  In regards to euthanasia, clearly this is an action that no well-meaning doctor can possibly conceive as being within the confines of a good and moral action.  A physician that believes that he has the right or the obligation to terminate the life of a patient has willingly taken a step too far and has consequently disavowed his Oath to his chosen profession. 

In regards to abortion, you have an area of medical practice that has significant moral challenges that are not easily answered.  Because of Roe v. Wade, abortion is legal in all 50 states of the Union; however, the law within those states in regards to how abortion is treated does vary from state-to-state.  The legality of abortion, nonetheless, does not by definition, mean that this is a medical procedure that conforms or adheres to the Oath that medical doctors attest to.   In fact, according to Dr. Rachel Phelps ”… only 2% of obstetricians perform over 50% of all abortions."  The dilemma in regards to abortion is between the woman's right to choose (her body, her choice) and her unborn child's right to life.  America has decided to restrict abortions based on the length of pregnancy in most states, which places abortion in both a legal and moral gray area, in which the answer appears to be that abortions are okay within a certain prescribed amount of weeks, but typically not okay outside of that timeline, with timelines ranging from when the first fetal heartbeat can be detected, to when a fetus can first feel pain, to when a fetus is considered to be viable outside the womb, to no restrictions at all.

The medical profession and its position towards abortion is a great and terrible moral quandary.  This is a tragedy played out on a daily basis, time and time again, leaving a trail of tears.

Defending Your Country

There are about 190 countries in the world and although there are plenty of people who don't believe in the adage "my country, right or wrong", most people do believe in defending themselves especially from foreigners or outsiders that would attack them, their institutions, their beliefs, their land and to also to protect themselves from those who would take aggressive actions against them, whether foreign or domestic.  Not all of us are born into wonderful countries that are known for freedom, liberty, and the American way; in fact, most people are born into countries that are in various degrees of misery, poverty, and oppression.  Even worse within that country, your education may be limited, your economic choices may be anemic,  and your freedom of both thought and movement may be severely constrained, yet, within that all, this is virtually all that you really know.   

Consequently, when your country is under attack, in the normal course of events, your native sympathies will be to protect the little that is yours.  It is not your fault that you have been born in a particular country, that is just your lot in life, whether for good or for bad, and in all likelihood you will do the best that you can do given your circumstances.  However, when put into the position in which your life, your livelihood, your home, and your family, are in imminent danger you will almost without hesitation do whatever is necessary to protect your turf, whether compelled to do so by your country's law or military or not. 

Therefore in the scheme of things, you are not concerned, in fact it's not even really a thought, whether your country is in the right or the wrong.  What you are concerned about is somehow your country is under attack and this fight is a fight for survival, nothing more, and nothing less.   In most cases, you know the basic law within your country, it may not be ideal, it may not be desired, but it is the conditions that you have accommodated yourself to.  In all probability, especially with propaganda that demonizes those that attack your country, you will be cognizant of the fact that if your country is defeated that things will get worse, perhaps much worse, because after all there will be a new master to answer to and he does not know you, nor will he care to respect you.

It is not wrong to defend your country.  During our civil war, there were two sides to this conflict, in which for the most part, the country was divided into a clear sectional conflict.  Those that were from the southern States that seceded opposed the rest of the nation that remained as a modified United States of America.   Whether your physical presence was in the North or in the seceded Southern states, it was that physical location itself that determined in most instances the side that you fought on.  You may not have had a strong feeling about the war one way or another, but by golly, when a man in a different color uniform is trying to kill you, to take and destroy your property, your family, and your land, you will defend yourself or perish. 

Those that defend their country are only doing the natural thing in the given circumstances, they aren't traitors, not even in our civil war in which the South was vanquished but allowed to come back into the Union upon a loyalty oath and ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution forbidding slavery.  You will defend yourself, you will defend your country, and you will do this because the unknown and the uncertain are far scarier than the known and the certain.  Few people welcome their conquerors, and fewer still are satisfied with them, it is the exception to the rule when conditions improve upon conquest

Christ as the Second Moses

The Torah is the first five books of the Bible which are: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  These books are known as the Five Books of Moses in which the great Hebrew prophet, Moses wrote down the dictated and revealed words of God during his forty days and forty nights at Mount Sinai and then passed this knowledge onto his Hebrew people.  From this point on, the children of Israel were indeed a divine people with a specific chosen destiny.

In Exodus 3:2, in regards to Moses and Mount Sinai we read: "And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed." In Matthew 17: 1-3 in regards to Christ andthe mountaintop we read: "And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.  And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him."  Although we are prone to look upon the physical form of mankind and believe that that is all there is, in reality, as beings made in God's image, we are beings of Light, encased in a physical body, but that body is nothing more than our outer garment.  The image of God as a burning bush that is not consumed and speaks law unto Moses, and the transfiguration of Christ in the presence of Moses indicates a brotherhood of he who was the bearer of Light for the Jews, and for he who was born of the tribe of Judah, who would ultimately be the bearer of Light for the Gentiles.

There are many parallels between Moses and Christ, such as: Pharaoh commanded that all male new-born babies were to be killed in Moses' time, whereas King Herod ordered all male new-borne babies to be killed in Christ's time.  Each fasted forty days and forty nights on a mountain, each performed miracles, Moses blessed each tribe of Israel, Christ blessed his twelve disciples, and each fed their brethren supernaturally.  Moses spoke of a prophet to come in Deuteronomy 18:18: "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him."  Christ fulfilled this prophecy in Matthew 26:56:”But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled…"

Moses was the supreme lawgiver, Exodus 31:18 reads: "And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God."  Because these words of God were inscribed on tablets of stone they were given special significance and created the Decalogue or Ten Commandments that we are so familiar with today.  Later in Christ's time, the Pharisees who were meticulous in their obedience to God's law, asked Christ in Matthew 22: 36-40: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."  Does this then mean that Christ' teachings superseded Mosaic Law?  Christ made it clear in Matthew 5:17 that he came not to destroy the law of the Prophets but to fulfill it.  This paradox then can best be answered by understanding that Christ wished to impart to us the knowledge that our sole purpose in life is to find our way back to God and in so doing one will see that God is in each and every human being.

Black Abortion Genocide

One way to control your population mix and your population growth is to reduce your procreation rate for all peoples or just for certain peoples.  This can be done through a myriad of ways such as: birth control, abortion, propaganda, and government mandates (e.g. one child per family).  In America, if you are of legal age to bear children, you may have as many children as you desire, subject to your ability to have adequate housing and the necessary creature comforts that maintain and sustain life.  A person's desire to have and bear children is based on numerous factors such as: fertility, education, background, religion, and age.   There is, however, no biological reason that I am aware of, that the race that you are identified with would be the controlling factor as to your fecundity.

Initially then, one would premise that the abortion rates for all races within America should be approximately the same, even taking into account the differences and disparities between  races, in regards to income, family background, religion, and education.  However, this clearly is not the case, in which according to abort73.com, in America for every 1,000 births for white women there are 138 abortions, and for every 1,000 births for black women there are 501 abortions.  The ratio between 501/138 is a staggering 363% higher abortion rate for black woman as compared to white.  That type of abortion discrepancy cannot easily be explained by any mitigating or series of mitigating circumstances and on the surface appears both suspect and disturbing.

Since mankind is finite, that is to say, he is born and he must inevitably die, one way to control your population mix is to control the life and death of your citizens; but that type of government coercion brings an innumerable amount of problems.  Far better, perhaps prescient, is to somehow convince certain population segments to voluntarily abort their own offspring, thereby reducing the population of a particular demographic to suit those that support a specific goal.  Since abortion is legal for all races, it could be questioned that there isn't such a policy goal in mind, but the facts of the abortion rate for blacks disproves this point, in addition according to prospect.org, an astounding "42 percent of women having abortions live under the poverty line", whereas only 15 percent of Americans as a whole live under the poverty line, so clearly abortion unfairly targets both the impoverished and blacks.

The government, its' lackey press and media, protest again and again that of course there isn't any hidden agenda for killing black unborn babies, that Margaret Sanger who was chairman of the Birth Control Council of America, which later changed its name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was a strong advocate for eugenics (improve population by controlled breeding), but of course, that was before we all knew better.  Seems to me as Queen Gertrude said in Hamlet:  "the lady doth protest too much methinks".  Clearly, if you want to keep a segment of the population under your control, you do not allow them to procreate themselves at a normal rate.  Instead, you convince them, that their pregnancy is an inconvenience, a burden, an undesirability, and with a smile on your face and smooth words from your mouth, you persuade them that killing their unborn child is the right thing to do. 

It isn't.