The Times of India describes the increased levels of “eve-teasing” and groping in India since liberalization in the 1990s.

White women are more often targeted on the streets, as Hollywood culture ensures that they’re seen as more promiscuous and available. In addition, all white women are often  assumed to be “American” and therefore rich, complain some Latin women.

Finally, since white/fair skin is slavishly admired in Asia, white women are also objectified and targeted as symbols of status and economic class. Conversely, black men and women are denigrated.

Such colonial attitudes seem to be worse in north India.

In contrast to demeaning attitudes toward women in the the West, which seem to be most prevalent in areas dominated by urban cosmopolitan males (such as the financial industry) , the harassment of women in neo-liberal India seems to be more in the nature of street crime committed by  the semi-educated and the illiterate, under the influence of mass culture.

I noted this in a recent blog post arguing against the ban of the burqa and pointing out its use in protecting women from harassment on the street.

Among the educated and the professional classes in India, slavishness and obsequiousness toward the West and to whites is is a much more common social ill.

” Foreign women tourists in India often find themselves placed in uncomfortable cultural stereotypes and an increasing number of them have begun attributing this attitude to a colonial throwback.

A decade ago, women comprised only 25% of the total Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India every year. Presently, at 40%, women tourists are still a comparative minority despite the increase. According to a recurring Forbes survey on the world’s friendliest countries for expatriates and tourists, India ranked in one of the last slots for the second year in a row.

India’s not-so-friendly attitude towards tourists in general and female tourists in particular, varies in different regions. While the southern and western parts of the country rank favourably, north India is unanimously the most prejudiced culturally.

Theresa Price, a college student from Britain said, “Most people do tour North India because of the Taj Mahal, but it is steeped in cultural prejudices. The usual problems foreign women face like constant staring and eve-teasing is most rampant here.”

Amid this, the capital, which ranks second only to Mumbai in terms of popularity, emerges as a curious conglomerate. “Delhi is just like any other impressive modern metropolis on the face of it, but there coexists another reality as well. I find it very interesting that despite being such a representative city, a large section of people are still ignorant,” said Agata Ruiz from Argentina.

“White- skinned people are treated as being economically advanced and intrinsically powerful on account of their ‘fair skin’, despite which country they are from. This notion is usually shared by people of lower income groups. Taxi and auto drivers in Delhi just assumed I was American!” said Agata. She however agreed that this ingrained idealization of a stereotypical west is something she has seen in Argentina as well.

“Whenever I go out with my Canadian girlfriend, people think I am her ‘guide’. The shopkeepers at Chandni Chowk treated me like a middleman, as I stopped one from trying to unfairly fleece her, he cursed me for ruining the deal,” said Vikas Arora.

A lot of foreign tourists agreed that local north Indians tried too hard to please them, and this problem was compounded in the case of women. Sharell Cook, an Australian married to an Indian, living here for the last five years observes, “Indian men are more likely to want to try and please me. I find that in my daily dealings with Indian people, the men are likely to ‘adjust’ in my favour, whereas the women won’t. Indian women aren’t as influenced, impressed, or intimidated by me. They want to look after me and mother me.”

“Certain sections of Indian society still see their relationship with white-skinned people as that of master-servant. Putting them on a pedestal creates a distance, and this distance makes Indians feel resentful towards them. They conveniently stereotype us as being rich, powerful, wasteful, amoral and culturally degrading,” said Theresa.

In the same vein, women from the west are branded as morally loose and sexually promiscuous. This notion is at the root of the habitual eve-teasing that foreign women suffer. A lot of women complained about the touching and groping that happened in crowded public places over north India.

Recently, in the wake of rape cases, two(incidentally Asian) British politicians have observed that a section of Asian men think white girls are ‘easy’ and ‘fair game’ and this notion perpetrates the crime. The long list of crimes against foreign women and the flourishing foreign prostitution industry in India are also cases in point.

This implicit racism has another side to it. Dark-skinned people are deemed as undesirable and less economically advanced and civilised. “In North India, people are obsessed with fair skin. That is probably why African women do not face the same problems arising from sexual desirability that their white counterparts do,” said Theresa.

According to Indian Tourism statistics, a large number of Africans visit India every year, the highest number being Nigerians who come to Delhi on a medical visa for cheap medical treatment. “The sight of Africans on the metro is far from uncommon these days. I have heard commuters call them ‘habshi’ which is a derogatory colloquial word for a black person of African origin,” said Vikas.

Derina Kay, a research scholar form Namibia said, “In my experience of living in the capital, Indians have often behaved as if they were socially and economically superior to me. I remember a shopkeeper ignoring me and calling out to other white tourists in Dilli Haat. It was usually assumed I was less cultured and educated.”

She said, “I saw this in Ghana too. There, any non-black is immediately assumed to be a rich foreigner likely to spend more. This may be a developing world problem. But hopefully, over time, as the world becomes more globalised, these divisions will break.”

Ten things that will transform the whole situation without requiring you to make up you mind on any of the binaries being thrown your way – Republican/Democrat, Left/Right, Romney/Obama, Gold/Paper, or anything else:

1. Withdraw your money from the big banks (multinational banks, especially those tied to the financial crisis).

This can’t be done suddenly. You’ll need a lot of research. And you may have to park your money in one of them for a while, until you’ve decided. So be it. But start doing it and don’t tell anyone when you’ve done it.

Invest it in real things, in businesses, in tangibles, collectibles, metals, land, and property, after careful research. Only you know what’s the right mix, but it should produce both safety and income for you.

Get out of debt either by paying it off, restructuring, or begging forgiveness.  Save money or borrow from friends or community banks or groups. Better yet, pay as you go.

2. Get the best encryption you can afford and use it for everything. It won’t always work. Your enemies will crack it; it will be buggy and slow. But live with it. Eventually, it will become second nature. The Internet is not a lovely playground. It’s teeming with all kinds of threats and dangers.  Even with encryption, try to limit posting on forums. Someone, somewhere is always targeting your computer.

3.  Stop watching all mainstream TV and cancel your print subscriptions. This will bankrupt the major media and their owners. If you can add to that all mainstream Hollywood movies, you are well on the way to warrior status. You will have foiled the main avenue by which intelligence prepares the public mind for its capers. Become a pop culture idiot. Brittany who?

4. Minimize shopping at major stores like Walmart. I know. It’s hard. But believe it or not, there are some better deals in smaller shops. Try them. Avoid rebates and programs that need your information. Or set up fake accounts, if you can. Try anonymous cards, nominee accounts and anything else to foil ID thieves and snoops.

Loose the consumer attitude. Make your own stuff, recycle, reuse, make do, buy second-hand, avoid the society of consumption addicts. Bargain for everything. Make companies earn your dollar.

Want to change corporations? Become their savviest, cheapest, most value-oriented  customer. They will respect you.  Heap contempt on people who do not live within their means. Take them under your wing and show them how. If they don’t listen, don’t pony up when they come back to you crawling. Give them a loan only if they renounce their evil ways. Even then, get your money back. Helping a friend and subsidizing his bad habits are two different things.  When people want to trample on something, give them a doormat and keep your boundaries.

5.  Disbelieve any major story in the media, reflexively. Practice saying, “It’s a psyop” to anything that comes up. You will be right about 85% of the time. And the remaining times you’re wrong, someone will be forced to actually dig to prove it. So much the better.

6. Refuse to endorse any personality cult whatsoever. Whether it’s for Obama or anyone else. Even politicians with “better” sounding credentials. The NWO wasn’t born yesterday. It’s had decades to decide which person to put into which slot at which time.

It has nothing to do with the individual merits of the person. The system is more powerful than any one person’s attempts to work within it. It will crush him, take your time and money, and destroy any real change.

Avoid people who promote personality cults. They are either fanatics who can make anything fit their ideology, genuinely naive, not the brightest bulbs, or shills.  That doesn’t make for long term happiness in their company.

Remember what Yeats said. The worst are full of a passionate intensity.

People who say “I don’t know” or ” I was wrong” or “I changed my mind” are greatly in short supply. Join their ranks.

Practice not having an opinion and just watching other people having them. Then shrug and tell yourself something like “It’s all part of the great web.”  Go for a walk.

7. Refuse to get involved in any cointelpro-type slandering of people. It’s perfectly correct to criticize and call out people, especially those proposing political programs or campaigning on them or harassing you.

But gross invective, malice out of nowhere, obvious mischaracterization of words/arguments,  accusations without evidence are all signs of an agenda.

Life is too short to figure out all the agendas out there.  Stay on top of the ones that hurt you personally, but stay clear of the rest.

Don’t make more enemies than you need to. They’ll add up on their own anyway, if you’re doing what you need to do and saying what you have to. So be it.

8. Develop religious faith or belief in the universe and its essential goodness. Don’t believe, however, in the essential goodness of men. Those are two different things, often confused.

Be prepared for the very worst from your fellow man, but expect nothing but support from the universe. In both, you will never be disappointed.

9.  Don’t be transparent. It’s giving ammunition to your enemies and material to IP thieves. Let them work for it.  Rehash old ideas, but keep your best ideas and thoughts to yourself. There is no law you have to share ideas with people who don’t credit you or share with you. Name and shame, if needed.

In fact, by defending yourself, you put others on guard that there are such things as rights. The internet is teeming with rights violators, who are never called out, because this is considered “free speech.”

It’s not.

It’s intellectual fraud and violence, which is the source of physical fraud and violence. The two go together like dosai and chutney.

Anyone arguing otherwise is simply wasting their time and yours. Avoid them.

10. Don’t reinvent the wheel. There’s no great complex idea needing to be discovered to change the world.

The prophets have already come and we killed every one of them.

We don’t need any more prophets. We need people working on at least one thing wrong about themselves.

No need to tell anyone what that is. Just work on it. And keep your mouth shut about it.

Stick with the good old ideas.  The essence of the old ideas was –  don’t do to other people what you don’t want done to yourself.

That works out to – don’t lie and steal and murder and screw around.

Remember there really is a god and he’s (she’s) the final judge, not human beings.

Make your parents proud (at least, sort of).

And take a day off.

That’s about it.

Ali Hashem on the elite-controlled Al-Jazeera:

“In 1996 a new channel came to life. Qatar launched al-Jazeera and hired most of those who were dumped by BBC. This time they were assured that nothing would stop the new station, mainly because there were no limits, no red lines, and an unlimited budget. In the Arab countries, where people are used to listening on a daily basis to speeches by their leaders or members of ruling families, the new channel introduced counter-fire talk shows and documentaries from hotspots with an emphasis on controversial issues. For the first time, people saw opposition figures from around the Arab world saying in Arabic what they had only dared to say before on western channels in English or French.

Over the past 16 years al-Jazeera has emerged as the most credible news source in the region, though it was also joined by other channels such as al-Arabiya, Iran’s Alalam, the American al-Hurra, Russia’s RT and others.

The new Arab TV channels seemed to be flourishing and gaining credibility until the Arab spring came along and they began providing daily coverage of the revolutions. From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, people expected TV stations to embrace their dreams and defend their causes, but it seems that major networks decided to adopt some revolutions and dump others.

One example was the way they dealt with the uprising in Bahrain. It was clear that Gulf-financed stations were more interested in regional security than Bahrainis’ dreams of democracy and freedom and their revolt against tyranny.

Meanwhile, mainstream Arab channels gave the Syrian revolution a large portion of airtime, but things took a different path when they started interfering with the coverage. I was one of those who experienced it when al-Jazeera, the channel I used to work for, refused to air footage of gunmen fighting the Syrian regime on the borders between Lebanon and Syria. I saw tens of gunmen crossing the borders in May last year – clear evidence that the Syrian revolution was becoming militarised. This didn’t fit the required narrative of a clean and peaceful uprising, and so my seniors asked me to forget about gunmen.

It was clear to me, though, that these instructions were not coming from al-Jazeera itself: that the decision was a political one taken by people outside the TV centre – the same people who asked the channel to cover up the situation in Bahrain. I felt that my dream of working for a main news channel in the region was becoming a nightmare. The principles I had learned during 10 years of journalism were being disrespected by a government that – whatever the editorial guideines might say – believed it owned a bunch of journalists who should do whatever they were asked.

Today, Arab media is divided. Media outlets have become like parties; politics dominates the business and on both sides of the landscape and people can’t really depend on one channel to get their full news digest. It is as if the audience have to do journalists’ homework by cross-checking sources and watching two sides of a conflict to get one piece of news.

The problem isn’t who is telling lies and who is accurate. Media organisations are giving the part of the story that serves the agenda of their financier, so it’s clear that only part of the truth is exposed while the other part is buried. What is obvious is that the investment in credibility during the past two decades has been in vain. The elite are once again dealing with Arab news channels the way they used to do with Arab state media.

Once again, people have started relying more on western media to know what’s going on. That is reflected in the number of viewers the BBC Arabic TV channel gained during the past year – reportedly more than 10m while leading Arab channels have been losing viewers.

Governments who own media organisations in the Middle East, and impose their agendas, are pushing them towards journalistic suicide. They are taking the Arab media landscape back to the early 1990s rather than moving it forward.”

Email from Zahir Ebrahim, Islamabad, Pakistan*

*September 11, 2012*

Dear friends and well-wishers.

AsSalaam Alekum. Greetings from Pakistan. On this eleventh anniversary of 9/11, I find myself pensively brooding over my own journey in life since that dastardly day in infamy. With my children now grown up and pursuing their professional lives in the United States, I have moved to Pakistan to
once again re-attempt to re-start my life in Islamabad after a hiatus of more than three decades. My adult life mostly being spent in the Boston area studying engineering, and in Silicon Valley, California, building or contributing to America’s great military-industrial and academic complex as
an engineer, tax-payer, and finally as parent.

From that lofty perch of “Mr. Clean hands”, I imagine it is easy to opine the following commentary as an expat. returning home to pitiful surroundings, and for which one has contributed nothing towards its
amelioration. Permit me give it a try.

Life here in Islamabad is very humorous, to say the least. For, a sense of humor is surely what it takes to survive its daily travails: the daily 6 to 8 hours of load-shedding of electricity during the hot summer which has only now abated somewhat; no water in the taps unless one is willing to pay
1500 rupees (about US $15) for a private water tanker service which appears to be financially benefitting the same governmental agency staff responsible for officially supplying tap water and for which they also bill you quarterly whether or not any water trickles out of the faucet (the scam
in fact appears to me to be a thinly veiled way to privatize all water supply by way of extortion and other pretexts of inefficiency, while drinking water has already been effectively privatized, my monthly bill being an additional 2000 rupees on the average, paid to Nestle); frequent armed police check-points on city streets as if Pakistan has moved to Palestine; long lines of taxis and small cars in front of gas stations which form every Wednesday evening because CNG (Compressed Natural Gas
which is now priced almost at parity with petrol) is not available Thursday through Saturday; continuous demoralizing news and commentary floods the 500 news channels which make the plebeian want to long for the *Messiah *and the *Mehdi;* just to mention a few items off the top of my head which must induce a great deal of humor in daily existence in order to bear it. That humor naturally leads one to seeking refuge in religion, and consequently what passes as spiritualism, meaning, a resignation to fate while *waiting for Allah*, is rapidly rising to its zenith here. The mosques are full, and there are several belonging to different sects, in almost every street. In my street alone, I have counted four, and another two or three in the next street over. I don’t need an alarm clock here because I get five wake-up calls a day in quadraphonic surround sound.

And Yet, there are also petrol-guzzling Mercedes and BMWs roaming the streets of Islamabad without a care; fancy car dealerships, shops, boutiques, and restaurants which would make the upscale hangout of *Santana Row* in San Jose California in need of a face-lift; and the elite are
living as if they have a special tunnel that daily takes them straight from their posh homes in the outskirts into *Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard,*by-passing all the misery behind the
*Iron Wall* and totally oblivious of it.

Most of my long-time friends are drawing handsome compensation packages as vaunted academics, or corporate widgets and CEOs selling cell-phones to *field niggers* or providing software services to *the white man*, or as poster-child of various governmental bodies suitably anointed with lofty
titles. Higher education being the sassiest gravy-train in the civilian sector as it evidently requires the least amount of talent and scruples to really make a killing under the strong leadership of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission. I had previously written about it in the scandalous *Plagiarism
Case*I
had accidentally uncovered. It was evidently as dead on arrival at the *supreme court of
Pakistan*as it was among the distinguished academics of Pakistan. Diploma
mills abound in this country as if trying to compete with America’s two thousand colleges and universities in sheer numbers – numbers evidently being the hallmark of both learnedness as well as piety here.

Sheer numbers, whether it be the number of servants employed in a house (often exceeding the number of family occupants in the elite homes of Islamabad by a factor of two or three), or the number of papers published (often exceeding the highest acclaimed Nobel laureate’s in the respective
field by a factor of at least ten), or the numbers of *hajj* performed (don’t even ask), or the number of gun-totting security guards manning the front gate – all count for status here. Unfortunately, I too have one thin scare-crow sitting at my gate – but one is not a number that matters in the
race to nowhere here. Some with their dual citizenship, and the *white man’s * Passport of any color, and others eagerly trying to acquire theirs, a comfortable life-style is the carefree lot of a handful who seem to own most everything here. I am not even speaking of *Military Inc.*, who evidently own most of the wealth and real-estate of Pakistan. I am only speaking of civvies I know of.

I seem to have sadly escaped all the lofty charactership which the Pakistani society evidently cultivates among the genius of our peoples, having contributed directly into the *white man’s* military-industrial complex for the highest level of corruption which begets all others – intellectual corruption. Instead of working for the benefit of my own peoples in a labor of love as only a handful of my friends have endeavored, I have helped – like the millions of other Silicon Valley engineers –
buildup the *white man’s ability to destroy* us. So I can hardly throw stones at others
who are merely trying to do well for themselves – with the only means they know how.

The *house niggers* over here however, are a different species altogether. They are sadly funny in way. They have taken over Pakistan across the full spectrum of social intercourse – from the military to the economy to the media to the elected to the bureaucrat to the mullah to the judge to the
professor to the so called NGOs largely populated with ex-military and secular humanists with foreign degrees – in all their Hegelian Dialectic variations. I dare to think that the sex prostitutes working the streets and nearly ubiquitous, are probably the most honest and hardworking of all professionals here. I don’t know any yet, but I suspect I may rather prefer their company.

The amount of bullshit which passes for great wisdom and profound knowledge over here is simply astounding. Everyone is a saint and a scholar. “Experts” abound. I am frequently informed how honest they each are, *“not a haram morsel has been fed to my children”* is the common refrain as the
pious bow in prayer five times daily in their million dollar homes.

The trend of self-deception arguably tops the United States. The bullshit there at least stands on the giant foundations of a super-power who needs a compliant public. Here we don’t even need foundations to build tall totem poles to get a compliant public. Hey, we are ahead of the US in something!”

Aangirfan,  a very informative blog, argues that Al Jazeera is under Western intelligence control:

A. Remember that lots of Moslems work for the CIA and its friends. (Foreign Arabs clamor to join Mossad, IDF)

“Thousands of foreign Arabs have sent requests to Israeli government agencies … offering to serve … Mossad.

“Israel’s Foreign Ministry told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper that it is receiving requests even from ‘members of Arab parliaments, members of political movements and other important political figures.'”

B. Tiny Qatar played a very big part in toppling Gaddafi in Libya (Wired.com)

C. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera was set up by two French-Israelis, David and Jean Frydman.

D. The current ruler of Qatar was reportedly put into power with the help of the CIA and MI6.

E. Qatar has a giant air base used by the USA.
According to a former US intelligence contractor: the main source of support for the Libyan rebels came from Q-SOC, the Qatari special forces.

Q-SOC trained the rebels.

The Qataris were the first foreign military on the ground providing military training.

Qatar provided air support.

The Qatari military are trained by British and French forces.

Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV played its part in helping the CIA and its friends topple the regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt.

Now Al-Jazeera is helping the CIA and its friends against Syria.

Let’s look at some history:

Al-Jazeera has recruited a number of former BBC journalists; BBC journalists are believed to have connections to MI6 and its friends.

Al-Jazeera also has links to the CIA’s Voice of America. (televised.)

And, Al-Jazeera has links to the Muslim Brotherhood which has long worked for MI6 and the CIA.

Thierry Meyssan, at Voltaire Network, on 26 September 2011, tells us more about Qatar’s Al-Jazeera.

(http://www.voltairenet.org/Wadah-Khanfar-Al-Jazeera-and-the)

According to Meyssan:

1. Al-Jazeera was conceived by two French-Israeli personalities, the David and Jean Frydman brothers.

2. BBC journalists were recruited to launch Al-Jazeera.

3. The new emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, had toppled his father with the help of London and Washington.

4. Sheikh Hamad authorized the Israeli Ministry of Commerce to open an office in Doha.

Mahmoud Jibril, the new boss of Libya. He is also the boss of Jtrack. And allegedly he is a CIA asset.

5. Sheikh Hamad brought in a firm called JTrack to help al-Jazeera.

“From Morocco to Singapore, JTrack has trained most of the political leaders backed by the United States and Israel, often mere heredity puppets…”

6. Al-Jazeera played its part in the Arab Spring.

“In Egypt the uprising was harnessed in the interest of a single element of the opposition: the Muslim Brotherhood…”

7. The boss of JTrack is Mahmoud Jibril.

As the the number two man in the Libyan government, Jibril organised the deregulation of Libya’s socialist economy and the privatization of its public enterprises.

8. Jibril has personal relationships with almost all the Arab and Southeast Asian leaders.

Jibril has created trading companies, including one dealing with Malaysian and Australian timber in partnership with his French friend, Bernard-Henri Levy.

9. Jibril has studied in the USA and he is a member of the the Muslim Brotherhood.

10. With Jibril as prime minister of the rebel government of Libya, “the height of duplicity was reached when a replica of the Green Square and Bab-el-Azizia was built in the studios of Al-Jazeera in Doha, where footage of false images was shot portraying pro-US ‘insurgents’ entering Tripoli.”

Al-Jazeera and Sky News broadcasted these fake images.

Lew Rockwell interviews Jesse Trentadue about the apparent murder of his brother Kenneth Trentadue over the Oklahoma City bombing and the secret infiltration of patriot groups by the sinister PATCON:

“But then, in the course of my war with the FBI, I stumbled across reference in one of the documents they produced to an operation called PATCON, P-A-T-C-O-N. I found out that PATCON was an acronym for Patriot Conspiracy. And the FBI immediately began to back-peddle away from PATCON when I pressed them about what is PATCON. They came back and said, well, it was a small operation in Alabama designed to catch some folks who had stolen night-vision goggles from the military and were selling them. But it looked bigger than that. It looked much bigger than that. When I looked at the documents, I could see there were references to PATCON Group 1, PATCON Group 2, and a whole bunch of PATCON operations all over the United States. And I, over the years, kept pushing and pushing on PATCON, and more and more information started to come out.

But where the PATCON story really took off was last summer. I received a call from a man who told me, he said, I’ve been reading the information on the Internet about PATCON. He said, you have all the pieces, you just haven’t put them together. And I said, what do you mean. He said, you don’t see the big picture, and I’ll come up and – I’ll come out and see you and tell you about it, so he came to see me. He had been one of the major undercover operatives for the FBI in PATCON for about 10 years. PATCON ran throughout the ’90s.

His health was bad. He said that he wanted to, I guess, set the record straight about what had happened. He had joined the FBI in filtrating about 23 groups. And he said his objective was, he felt that these groups were dangerous and a threat to the country. But looking back on it, he now sees that the real objective of the FBI was to infiltrate and then fight these groups so they could be crushed. And he said they targeted the right wing, the military movement, evangelical Christian right, and others who were out of favor perhaps with the government or were critical of the government. He said that Ruby Ridge was a PATCON operation, Waco was a PATCON operation. He told me that he believed Oklahoma City was a PATCON operation but he couldn’t say for sure because he wasn’t involved in that operation. But he thought it was a PATCON operation because the others who had worked with him on PATCON were there.

And PATCON is an ugly, ugly story. According to this man, that PATCON was running guns and ammunition, automatic weapons out of the same gun store in Arizona that’s now the subject of the Fast and Furious scandal, and doing it in the ’90s. So when Attorney General Holder says the government new nothing about PATCON – about Fast and Furious, that this a rogue operation run by a local ATF agent in Arizona, that’s not true. The equivalent of PATCON, the prototype of PATCON was being run by the FBI and the ATF in the mid 1990s. Only there, they were funneling weapons and ammunition to the militia movement and the right, the extreme right of this country. And that’s the real story. And if folks would get beyond Fast and Furious and look where the real story is, it will be PATCON.

I’d like to talk a little bit more about Elohim City. It’s a fascinating place because of the people who were there. McVeigh was there. The Midwest Bank Robbers were there. Guthrie was there. Strassmeir was there. And as I started to probe the FBI for information related to Elohim City, I found out the ATF had informants there. The Secret Service was involved. And recently, I discovered that the CIA was involved. Now you have to ask yourself, what in the hell is the CIA doing involved with a right wing, evangelical Christian group in eastern Oklahoma. And when I pressed the CIA for documents and records linking Strassmeir, CIA, and Elohim City to the bombing, I received a denial from the CIA. And the reason they gave for not releasing anything to me was, and I quote, “Unauthorized release of this information could cause grave damage to our national security,” unquote. For the first time in all these years I’ve been fighting the government for information under the Freedom of Information Act that is the only time that national security has ever been used as a reason not to turn over documents. And it is a bullet-proof exemption. All they have to do is say “national security,” you can’t look beyond that statement. But I think it’s telling that they raised and played that national security card when I asked for information linking Strassmeir, the CIA, Elohim City, and the bombing. Immediately, they’re back with that national security claim.”

[h/t Becky Akers, at LRC for the lead]

As soon as I read this quote in a story about Aussie mining magnate and multi-billionaire, Gina Rinehart, I knew something more was going on than a debate over the nastiness of a rich woman mouthing off in the press.

Here’s the quote from “The Iron Lady,” Sidney Morning Herald, January 12, 2012:

“Prince Philip had just met Gina Rinehart, ranked by US business media company Forbes as the 19th most powerful woman in the world – 30 places ahead of Queen Elizabeth II. Rinehart is the richest Australian in history (and far richer than the Queen), with a net worth of about $10 billion. At least, that is one recent estimate.”

Oh? Someone wants to let you know that there are much richer people than the Queen? Could that be because the Queen (the Crown) is entwined with the Rothschilds and the City of London?

That might explain the extremely negative slant of the major media toward Ms. Rinehart’s no doubt thoughtless, heartless, and superficial remarks (like that doesn’t apply to the content of most newspapers).

Articles peppered with demeaning personal references pop up.

In the piece I just mentioned, I found  this:

“He said he wanted to remember her as the ‘neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady’ she had been rather than ‘the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become’. “

Not too often anyone refers to the richest woman in the world in those terms.

So what’s really going on?

Some conspiratorial folks seem to have got the real story:

The Rothschild related climate-controllers (backed by the CIA/Rockefeller funding) are attacking rich magnates opposed to the climate-scam tax.

See, “Palmer says green groups funded by CIA .”

And here’s more at Barnaby is Right :

“Apparently the Canberra media gallery and the social mediasphere are all abuzz over comments by anti-CO2-derivatives-scam activist, self-made billionaire and recently honoured National Living Treasure, Clive Palmer….. here is a news article from the Brisbane Times this afternoon that does at least include a number of complete quotes from Mr Palmer’s press conference.

Since you will only see/hear selectively edited sound bites on the TV and radio news this evening – because after all, it is vital to smear the character of anyone threatening a legal challenge to the bankers’ CO2 derivatives scam – I’ll reproduce the Brisbane Times’ piece in full.

I assume that readers of this blog are significantly less predisposed to hasty judgements and attacking the messenger rather than dispassionately assessing the message, than the average egotistical narcissist twit on Twitter … and in the Canberra press gallery:

Mining magnate Clive Palmer has accused the Australian Greens and Queensland environmental campaigners of “treason” in conspiring with US powers to destroy the nation’s coal industry.

Mr Palmer was expected to give his response to the passing of the Gillard government’s mining tax at a media conference called this afternoon, but the multi-billionaire was concerned only with perceived collusion between the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the environmental lobby.

Mr Palmer turned his attention to a report by Greenpeace and other anti-coal groups, titled Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom, which outlined an environmental campaign designed to disrupt and delay the expansion of the industry.

While brandishing a copy of the report this afternoon, Mr Palmer said it was the result of a CIA conspiracy involving the US-based Rockefeller Foundation.

“This is funded by the CIA,” he said.

“You only have to go back and read … the reports to the US Congress that sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding.

“You only have to look at the secret budget which was passed by Congress last year – bigger than our whole national economy – with the CIA to ensure that.

“You only have to read the reports to US Congress where the CIA reported to the president that their role was to ensure the US competitive advantage – that’s how you know it’s funded by the CIA.”

Mr Palmer argued descendants of US oil magnate John Rockefeller had bankrolled the report, in a bid to disrupt and damage the Australian coal industry.

He went on to say that the document confirmed local environmental campaigners, including Lock the Gate Alliance president Drew Hutton and Greens leader Bob Brown, were improperly collaborating with foreign multinationals.

“The Greens have not been providing you with the full information about where their money comes from or what it’s about,” he said.

“I think the Greens [candidates] in this upcoming state election … should resign if they’re being funded by an offshore political power.

“It’s paramount [sic] to treason and something needs to be done about it.”

Mr Palmer made little mention of mining tax legislation, passed last night in the Senate, saying he had no concern with it.

“I don’t care about any tax. It won’t affect my life one way or the other,” he said.

Mr Palmer said the controversial tax, which aims to distribute the spoils of Australia’s mining boom, would have no affect on his businesses.

“It probably won’t cost me anything, because I’m not mining anything that comes under the classification of it. So, you know, it’s not something that’s worried me,” he said.

Mr Palmer said he would not join Australia’s third largest iron ore miner, Fortescue Metals, owned by Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, in mounting a legal challenge.

“Certainly Andrew Forrest has indicated he’ll do that – he has major concerns with it, because it affects him, affects his business and affects the ability of his workers,” Mr Palmer said.

UPDATE:

Andrew Bolt at least shows some restraint in joining the mockers, but does make one worthy observation (emphasis added) –

The Opposition will be thinking, oh, damn.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a straw from which this grass castle was built. From the CIA’s website, this book review:

She also does a fine job in recounting the intriguing story of how the CIA worked with existing institutions, such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and established numerous “bogus” foundations to “hide” its funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its other covert activities. Everything came a cropper in 1967, however, as a result of press articles, especially revelations in the long-gone Ramparts magazine.

An interesting post from  FauxCapitalist on the “mainstreaming” of alternative activists. You can also call this commodification of dissent or dissent-porn:

“For someone who is, by his own words, allegedly one of the biggest threats to the New World Order, Alex Jones certainly has some high-powered connections into mainstream media, as mostly vividly demonstrated by his February 28, 2011 appearance on The View.

His June 8, 2012 Infowars.com article, Alternative Media Becoming Mainstream, may have been a sign of things to come, given this celebrity lineup in the two months since, as shown on his prisonplanet.tv show archives:

Richard Belzer – August 16
“Alex is also joined by actor, stand-up comedian and author Richard Belzer. Mr. Belzer has an expansive career as an actor and has appeared in NBC police dramas such as Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

John Rocker – August 15
“On the Wednesday, August 15 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex talks with John Rocker, the retired American Major League Baseball relief pitcher who played for the Atlanta Braves and other teams.”

Dave Mustaine – July 26
“On the Thursday July 25th edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex airs an interview he recorded this past weekend with American virtuoso guitarist and legendary lead vocalist for the almost three-decade strong, highly influential thrash-metal band Megadeth, Dave Mustaine.”

Charlie Daniels – July 20
“Alex also welcomes back to the show to country and southern rock music legend Charlie Daniels.”

I dug up this piece on “good debt” and its problems from the Baltimore Chronicle (2006). It’s my second “Penny Whys” column. There were only two, because I got busy with writing “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets” after that.

As you can see, I was sounding off against college education a long time back.

And folks who know me know that the sounding off goes back to childhood. Getting me to even stick with high school was a protracted battle.

I wanted out at around 11 or 12. I day-dreamed  of working my way around the world.

If I couldn’t be a sailor (like Conrad), I could at least do something practical.

I would have liked to work for National Geographic. For which education wasn’t necessary, I thought. I could write. Why wouldn’t they hire me? Well, apparently, they wouldn’t.

I’m sure they don’t open letters from thirteen year olds in India.  I wrote to Boris Spassky around the same time,  asking about his latest strategy against Fischer. He didn’t reply either.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t a good student. I was.  But I learned much better on my own, had interests that didn’t match my subjects, and hated all the extra things that went with school.

As some kind of bitter karma, I ended up getting a Master’s in India (the minimum needed to get a job above starvation wages) and then had to redo my education in the US, which tends not to accept degrees from other countries. Out the door went all the books I had pent up inside. Between working several badly paid jobs, household duties, a small business, and night-school, there was less and less time for writing.

I wanted to go to a Catholic school and study theology and music theory. But I didn’t drive in those days, and I couldn’t make the classes on the bus. So I ended up in political science at Hopkins, which was the only place that offered classes that fit.

Course by course, working my way through at the rate of a couple a semester, I Iearned the Byzantine treacheries of the academic world, its ghettos, mafias, and Tammany Halls.

I don’t regret going through it, any more than soldiers regret going to war or mothers regret having children. It’s not possible to regret something that takes up half your life. You can only live with it as well as possible.

[The first column was “A Twelve Step Program for Debtaholics.”]

“In our last little chat, I talked about the addiction that drives consumers to spend in America, an addiction driven by a desperate loss of control over their financial future. No longer is a house, an education, or good health care a genteel burden your average upstanding citizen can shoulder on his own. Instead, it has become debt bondage….life-long servitude. And the enslaved ones yank at their chains in the only way they know—by recklessly throwing away money on consumer goods they hope will compensate them for their slavery. They buy to fill the queasy emptiness unsettling the pit of their stomachs.

But salvation by stuff is not in any gospel that Penny ever read. King Solomon—he of the supernumerary wives—had plenty of stuff too. But didn´t he sigh wearily that it was all vanity? Or was that the preacher in Ecclesiastes? Twenty years out of school, these things can get foggy.

The point is, the urge to look outside yourself for solutions to problems that stem within yourself is the source of addictive behavior. And buying stuff you don´t need is the definition of looking outside your self for solutions.

But Penny realizes that not all stuff is stuff you don´t need. In fact, the largest part of the modern consumer´s debt in the United States and the source of her perpetual anxiety is necessary debt, “good debt.” The kind that she feels proud to own up to, the kind that she staggers under for the natural term of her adult life with the game smile of a Christian being escorted into the catacombs. All for a good cause, it says, before it sets into rigor mortis.

Now, anyone who has picked up a newspaper or even switched on his TV has surely absorbed every nuance of the first of the “good debt” traps lying in wait for the unwary—the great housing hustle of the early twenty-first century. Actually, in America today it would be hard to find even a borderline member of the human species who had not slapped up hard against the phenomenon of home-as-honey-pot. And we also haven’t lacked for warnings about the advanced state of deterioration of another “good debt” trap—our health care system—since überwench Hillary decided to play Nurse Ratched with it in the boisterous days of William Jefferson’s regnum.

But the third “good debt” trap—the gargantuan price tag of education, lower, higher, and all sizes in between—seems to have slipped through our fiscal early-warning system, no doubt because a mega-tsunami of debt suddenly becomes manageable, worthy, and indeed downright righteous when it’s driven not just by vulgar splurging on run-of-the-mill consumer junk but by the sweat-and-blood payments of the solid citizenry on something so rarefied (and thus obviously much too elevated for us plebes to debate) as education.

Well—time to debate.

First, college costs rise faster than inflation and have done so for the last ten years. According to the report, “Trends in College Pricing 2005,” of the College Board, a non-profit association of 4,500 schools, colleges and universities, tuition costs at four-year private colleges grew at about the same rate as in 2004—5.9 percent—to $21,235.

The rate fell at four-year public universities to 7.1 percent (from 10.5), but the actual costs still increased by $5,491.

Second, Kal Chaney, author of Paying for College Without Going Broke, forecasts that “For the foreseeable future, college cost increases are going to exceed inflation…”

Add room and board to tuition, and the cost of a private college averages out to $29,026 per year, and at a four-year public college to $12,127. Over four years, that works out to the price of a modest bungalow and condominium. At least in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

But of course, it’s completely worth delivering this samurai chop to the family piggy bank because when Junior grows up to be a hair-transplant surgeon, bankruptcy lawyer, used car salesman, or—better yet—beltway lobbyist, it pays off big time. That’s the theory, anyway. But what the theory overlooks is that counting on a professional in the family means doubling the bill to fit in professional school fees. Three years of education at one of the nation’s tonier law schools, for instance, and you rack up at least a hundred twenty grand on the ..er..bar tab. So now we’re looking at something over two hundred grand for the whole business.

But so what? Aren’t we all worth it? Don’t we all deserve the very best? Don’t we love us enough to do this for us?

Apparently, vast numbers of college-intoxicated adults think so. But Penny—who has eyeballed more ivy halls than she cares to admit to—is here to tell you otherwise. No. Don´t do it. Think again. Need to get a job? There are much quicker ways. Need to make more money? Take that college fund and buy an education franchise…or a gas station. Need to get an education? Just remember it was Mark Twain who said he never let his schooling get in the way of his education. And he wasn´t kidding. Twain, Jack London, Benjamin Franklin, George Gershwin, Galileo…just a few of the geniuses who never finished college…and never needed to.

There is no longer any need to accept debt—even respectable debt—as a badge of honor of your socio-economic aspirations. From now on, the highest mark for smarts will go to those who avoid any kind of debt.

And even if you insist on going, there is no reason whatsoever for contracting a terminal case of insolvency.. Penny knows several ways you can get yourself a college degree for substantially less than the going rate, and do it with a lot less effort.

The point is there is no longer any need to accept debt—even respectable debt—as a badge of honor of your socio-economic aspirations. From now on, the highest mark for smarts will go to those who avoid any kind of debt.

Next time: How to get an education without getting into debt….or even into your car.

Until then,
Penny, giving you the whys of thrift, not just the hows.

Penny Whys is a column of personal finance written by Lila Rajiva, a political journalist and writer for the Daily Reckoning, a libertarian financial magazine headquartered in Baltimore.