Time.....

Long gone are the days when I could pick which Porsche I should drive that day...the red one or the white one...
or how much fun I could have with the horses.... at my own horse farm,
or take a walk along the ocean shore at Fort Lauderdale by the Sea and return to my own luxury suite by the ocean or the Oceanside pool. But times change...and yet if we refuse to learn from and understand yesterday it will be hard to anticipate what tomorrow will have in store.

Times change, the economy is down once again and we are looking at an extremely risky depression we somehow ended up in, without the necessary smarts or fortitude to work our way out of it. One can only hope that the new administration in Washington put things back on a positive path. Mr. Obama is on the right track but as he was saying the ship of state is large and turns slowly....too many immediate problems to face and deal with. But he is beginning to sound more positive.

Which reminds me as to how some events change the world....forever....
Way back when...somebody on a German submarine ( WW1) decided to torpedo a British Passenger ship...the Lusitania...Germany was at war with Britain and France and it was known that English ships were transporting weaponry from the USA. The passenger ship captains were told as well to ram the relatively small German U boats if they stumble upon them. It was generally assumed that unarmed passenger ships would not present a target to be attacked by the Germans. Bad mistake. Someone did sink the Lusitania with a torpedo to the bow..the ship went down with loss of life including many Americans who were on a cruise between the USA and the UK.








It is widely believed that this act dragged the USA ( by 1917) into the war, obviously on the side of France and Britain...and it is quite possible that President Woodrow Wilson, a fine and intelligent gentleman had little choice but to get involved.

Armistice, totally unfair and ridiculous treatment of Germany after 1918, installation of an allied created government ( Weimar Republic) made it possible for this idiot Hitler to eventually gain power...the rest is history. Total defeat of the Germans, rise of communism, iron curtain and attempts by the US to contain communism followed.
Today...the USA is involved in two wars...if one can call it war, with an unseen enemy with reasoning for their action difficult to sort out. And where do we go from here?

Brent Herbert:
As for ministers, you are preachers, and so I thought I would drop off a few sermon ideas. If you were preaching to some capitalist you might want to go with the ever useful all purpose sermon, 'repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Other good ideas for sermons would be that psalm, the one that reads, 'we dwell in a strong city, its walls are strong and tall. Open wide the gates and let a righteous people enter.' Or how about, 'My God trains me for battle. I leap over walls.' The possibilities are endless.

About this whole oil thing....and more

Labeviere paints a detailed panorama of the evolution of the special Saudi, US, Islamist movement relationship from the time when Roosevelt made his first deal with King Ibn Sa'ud in February 1945 on board the Quincy. The kingdom holds 26% of the world's proven oil reserves and agreed to provide the bulk of America's fuel needs at moderate prices for sixty years. The companies now are tenants and in the year 2005, the wells, installations and material will return to the monarch's possession. The premium paid to the king is 18 to 21 cents a gallon for each barrel of oil. In return the US agreed to unconditionally support the stability of the kingdom internally and externally. (A monarchy which beheads 200 people a year…) Not in the contract, but in return, the Saudi's have invested some $350 billion in the US and have developed an almost exclusive economic, commercial and financial partnership. Together they funded, trained, armed bin Laden, and helped to create the famed Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan through the Pakistan ISI, but they also met directly with bin Laden.

Like Christian and Catholic movements, the Islamist movement is complex and multi-layered with competing Sunni and Shiite backers. Saudi Arabia (Sunni) has done everything in its power to counter the Iranian Shiite influence that has grown since 1979. Each supports movements likely to help "the cause" and the winner will embody the political future of "true Islam." The oil monarchies give without counting and without requiring accounting, but Iran has confined itself to giving assistance to where it can influence some degree of control.
There is so much misinformation, screwball news, lies, fiction and made up stuff it is simply astounding.

A lot of it is without purpose or simply sensless propaganda. Take the recent uttering by this fellow McCain for instance(ex presidential Republican hopeful).
He stated about a week ago...somewhere, publicly, that the 9/11 hijackers came into the USA via Canada, therefor the Canadian borders must be beefed up as it were. Misinformed nonsense,it is clearly understood that the 9/11 criminals came to the USA directly and quite legally, visitors or immigrants, not sure...and that they took flying lessons in Florida. So much for war hero McCain and his screwball utterances. By the way this fellow was bombing innocent women, children and other folks in Hanoi,when his plane was shut down he was captured and lingered in prison as a POW for a few years. Does that make him a war hero? More like a push button killer with talent and skill to fly an airplane.

Occasionally I keep reading about President H.Truman who caused to have the atomic bombs produced.Not so.Roosevelt during his last term authorized the Manhattan project, the creation and testing of an atom bomb. He did not communicate much with Truman and when President Roosevelt died his V.P. Harry T.had no knowledge or understanding of these super bombs...but once he became president he quickly authorized their deployment over Japan,partly, probably to impress Joe Stalin but that's another story.

Without the Billions of American Dollars and munitions there would not have been a Soviet Union, Stalin " Man made of Steel"...managed to turn the tide on Hitler only with the support of the USA, the rest is history.
What followed was almost 50 years of cold war with the Soviets, Iron curtain and wars in Korea and Vietnam to contain Communism..

the year was *1*9*4*5*...

I remember clearly...as if it was just weeks ago...the situation I found myself in back in 1945...about this time of the year..mid or late April, in a tiny village in Franken..Germany.

( File picture not related to my story)..
We,mother and four small kids( 6-4-2 and 1 year old) were evacuated to this town called Zeubelried, near Oxenfurt and Frickenhausen because our hometown of Pirmasens( 50,000) was already 80% destroyed,bombed, army boots were produced there and the US army decided that boots are a critical war support product, I guess they were.

In any case...one day late April 45 my mother and a few other mothers of small children argued with a bunch of German soldiers and tried to persuade them to leave this little chicken town , but they, the somewhat ragged looking soldiers had other plans.

Apparently, the church roof was visible from a km away...about the only sign that there was a town. And so about 35 of the Wehrmacht decided to take a stand, remove ( destroy) the church so the rapidly advancing US Army would not see the town..I guess they wanted to defend the Vaterland no matter what the consequences.
They did...finally blow up the wonderful little church along with the schoolhouse next to it.
The U.S.Army did take the town and swiftly moved on to conquer the rest of what was left of the Reich.
About 34 corpses of the Wehrmacht were brought to town in a couple of oxen drawn wagons and so the war ended for me as a 7 year old, with the clear images of headless and bloodied bodies of the defenders, one got away ...,what a totally senseless undertaking.