t's generally about this time of the year—not so much because Christmas gifts have recently been opened and the gala festivities of New Year's Eve.and the festive hangovers are now just thumping memories, but simply because it's winter and the world, while cold, appears clean and whitewashed under a blanket of snow. It's usually then, a few months after we witnessed the demise of summer with the bright yellow, orange and red foliage that signified the death of yesterday and the birth of tomorrow. That's probably why, when the trees bloom in the spring, we think about life, and the future. In the dead of winter—when it's cold and lifeless—we think about past friendships and loved ones lost. And most of all, we think a lot about the fact that the America we now live in is vastly different from the one in which we were born, raised, and now live.

People go through something of a psychological metamorphosis at least twice a year—when the leaves on the trees wither and die of old age each fall, leaving the earth barren and as lifeless as those who count their years by decades. It's the elderly who most often watch life speed by as the blustery white burial shroud of snow covers the ground until spring. And then, like a new birth, flowers peek through the ground and blossom burst forth in a myriad of pastels, and green tree leaf buds spring back to life.

Many people—like my wife—used to enjoy that first major snow of the winter with the glee of a five year old waiting to flop down in the white stuff and make snow angels. Now that her health precludes making snow angels, she's content to enjoy the white stuff through the window. Since I'm the guy with the snow shovel and no snow blower, I'm not wild about snow.

While I might be revealing my age, as a young boy I actually did walk five miles or so to school each day—even in waist deep snow. In the upper peninsula of Michigan in my boyhood years, there was no such thing as a "snow day." Snow was just one of those facts of life. A snow day was simply a day when it snowed. In the America I remember as a youth, if you were a kid in school, you were expected to be there from the day after Labor Day until the end of the first week of June. Rural kids had the luxury of a school bus. But city slicker kids—even in small towns—walked, or their parents drove them. Mine didn't. My dad had an old 1920-era crank-start car, and I'd have rather walked ten miles to school than have any of my classmates see me in it.

My public school education took place largely during Solar Cycle 18 and the beginning of Solar Cycle 19—1944 to 1958. The world, just a few years before that, had just come out of what some described as a mini-minor ice age: short, mild summers and long subzero winters from Solar Cycle 9 [Dec. 1855] to the end of Solar Cycle 14 [Aug. 1917]. During that 62 year period, the sun generated negative sun spots and solar flares, from -654 in Cycle 9 (12.4 years) to -1,019 in Cycle 14 (11.5 years). Sun spots and solar flares are the primary heating mechanism of the sun in the inner planetary solar system—80° to 90° summers and mild winters. Oh, and by the way, you won't hear ecoalarmists like Al Gore, Jr. blame flatulent cows, sweaty fat people and coal-fired factories for the same global warming on Venus and Mars that we experience here on Earth. After all, since we don't regularly vacation on Mars and Venus, none of us pay a whole lot of attention to the average surface temperatures on Venus (460°) or on Mars (68°). But we should because the same global warming and cooling that affects us affects Mars and Venus. (The fact that we don't may be why simple-minded humans believe the global warming garbage spewed by carbon emissions profiteers like Al Gore who have become billionaires suckering the simple-minded since the Sun, and only the Sun, determines the temperature of the inner planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.)

As the coldest phase of Solar Cycle 17 hit North America, Ontario experienced its coldest day in recorded history on Dec. 29, 1933, -45°C. Other areas in western Canada hit sustained temperatures of -38.9°C. Then, three years into Cycle 17, sun spot and solar flare activity increased dramatically, averaging 112 bursts of some type per year throughout the balance of Cycle 17, bringing with it the deadliest heat wave in the history of the Northern Hemisphere two and a half years after the coldest day in the inhabited planet. The deadliest heat wave on record in the western hemisphere took place from July 5-17, 1936 from Ontario to Manitoba, Canada. Temperatures exceeded 44°C (111.2°F). The heat wave, which claimed 1,180 lives (mostly elderly and infant) was so intense that steel rail lines twisted, sidewalks buckled, fruit baked on the trees, and food crops like corn and wheat wilted in the fields. On July 5, 1937 the temperature in Yellowgrass, Saskatchewan hit 45°C (113°F). If doomsday prophet Al Gore, Jr. had been born in 1888 instead of 1948, Gore would have been clamoring for banning carbon dioxide when FDR campaigned for the White House in 1932 instead of 1992 when Gore became the Vice President and the nation's unofficial Climate Czar—with Carol Browner serving as the eckowacko pixie head of the EPA. Today Browner serves as Barack Obama's head of the Office of Climate Change Policy.

As a student in the public school system in the America I remember, every student was expected to be able to read, write legibly, add and subtract and speak coherently—in English. Teachers were expected to earn their paychecks because even though teachers belonged to unions, tenure had to be earned—except in the large union States. Today's "educators" are too involved in political activism to waste their time actually teaching students the 3-R's: readin', 'ritin' and 'rithmatic. Today's classroom activists spend too much of their time and too many taxpayer dollars brainwashing our kids with the idea that homosexuality and lesbianism are not debauchery but are, instead, perfectly acceptable alternate lifestyle choices that don't clutter the world with more unwanted people. In addition, educators don't have time for the 3-Rs because they are too busy teaching our children the four "isms:" multiculturalism, interracialism, multilingualism and ethnic separatism in order to erase nationalism in favor of globalism. (The last two "isms" the utopians need to break down the borders and create a single nation in the western hemisphere that stretches from the arctic to the antarctic.)

In the America I remember, promoting homosexually as a viable lifestyle would never be tolerated. In most States those engaging in the practice would, at times, be charged with sodomy. The least that would happen is that any school teacher or school principal promoting homosexuality would, at least, be fired. The America I remember was a Christian nation, rooted in the Bible that fostered the Christian ideals practiced by God-fearing, patriotic people. Today's America has evicted God not only from its centers of learning, its public buildings and common areas, but it has finally reached the point where the social progressive politicians, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Bar Association and the Internal Revenue Service have succeeding in evicting, or threatening to evict, God from our churches by eliminating the tax exempt status of churches for politicking from the pulpit. (It's interesting that no leftwing churches ever lose their tax exempt status for advocating against conservative candidates and on behalf of social progressives.)

When the sun went down in the America I remember, it was safe for young women or teenage girls to walk down a street in most small medium-sized cities without running the risk of being raped. Or an elderly man or woman getting mugged by thugs simply because they lacked the physical strength to ward off an attacker. Even more, while dangerously addictive drugs like heroin and cocaine were readily available in almost every city in the world, drug use was pandemic only in the larger metro areas. Because drug dealers were easier to identify in small and medium sized communities, the majority of the American population had only a passing knowledge of street gangs like the Cripes and Bloods, the 38th Street Gang, MS-13, and the LA Hispanic Los Zetas or Lo Mara 18 in San Francisco, or a myriad of other lesser known gangs involved in the emerging drug culture.

In the America I remember there were no headlines in the evening newspapers or lead stories on the 7 p.m. news about drive-by shootings or kids been shot to death for their designer jackets or shoes. Human life in the America I remember was worth more than a pair of shoes or a jacket. Today it isn't. And, if you left the keys in your car in the driveway, it would still be there in the morning—as would any valuables left inside the vehicle. America used to be a safe place to live. That's not to suggest that crime didn't exist. Crime is as old as the world's first family. The first murder occurred in that family when Cain killed his brother Abel.

The America I remember in the 1940s and 1950s wasn't troubled with street gangs and drug wars. That arrived in the late 1950s and became pandemic the early 1970s—as the moral fiber of America began to deteriorate. Why? Because at the end of the first world war, the bluebloods of the dying Old World Order attempted to regain control over the nations of the world by joining forces with a consortium of wealthy industrialists, bankers and businessmen to form a political power-sharing entity that would be called the New World Order. It benefited the New World Order to completely destroy the nation-states by forcing every nation on Earth to submit to the political and economic authority of a global government. That was, after all, the reasons for both World War I and World War II.

America rejected global solidarity when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles in 1920 that would have shackled the United States to a global government in the Hague in Brussels. American fought a six year war against the mightiest army on Earth to gain its freedom in 1781, and it was not about to voluntarily surrender that blood-fought freedom to a consortium of international politicians, industrialists, transnational business hacks and international bankers. In 1991 President George HW Bush called that consortium "the New World Order." Where did he get the phrase? He borrowed it from Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor who coined the phrase a decade earlier.

A decade and a half before NAFTA was enacted as "law" in the United States (because there weren't enough votes to ratify it as a treaty—which means NAFTA cannot constitutionally exist as a "treaty"), social progressive Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor in 1977, observed that a "...global consciousness is, for the first time, beginning to manifest itself. We are witnessing the emergence of transnational elites...composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confirmed by national traditions...and their interests are more functional than national borders..."

In the early 1970s as the social progressives, led in the United States by globalist David Rockefeller, plotted the consolidation of the world into a Gondwanaland nation-state controlled by them, Brzezinski announced the birth of a New World Order to replace the Old World Order of Europe almost two decades before Bush-41 was credited as the creator of that cerebral catch-phrase.

In the America I remember, our enemies remained enemies even after the wars they fought ended. But the princes of industry and barons of business who are creating the world economy of tomorrow need the population of those enemy nations to be their customers as we get deeper into the 21st century because we aborted too many of America's future customers while they were still in their mothers' wombs. Our "former" enemies tried to kill us during those wars because thewy feared us—and they still do. They remain determined to achieve that objective providing they (or at least a majority of them) survive the nuclear winter triggered by the global nuclear destruction of the world. The trick for America's cold war enemies: the Soviet Union (posing as a single nation called Russia), China, North Korea, Vietnam, and the entire Muslim world except Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan (although all three of them, who rely heavily on the United States for arms, think America is the Great Satan.) That is the view of the entire Muslim world—including the three Islamic nations who pretend they are our friends.

Which is why China and the Soviets (my pet name for Russia only because the coup that drove Mikhail Gorbachev out of power was fake). The Soviets, who were bankrupted by Ronald Reagan, needed to change their gameplay to fool the Americans into believing the Soviets had capitulated, and the Cold War was over.

It wasn't, and although our adversaries, our government and the princes of industry and barons of banking and business pretend it is, it still isn't. The wealthy elite of the world, who have been quietly moving their assets out of the United States since Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law in 1994 are doing today what the European industrialists and bankers, who feared Adolph Hitler, did in 1934. Believing they could control Hitler, they financed him, and helped him overwhelm the Weimar Republic. When the bankers forced German President Paul von Hindenberg to name Hitler the Chancellor of Germany, Hitler had von Hindenberg poisoned and, 36 days later, the National Socialist Party suspended the Weimar Republic's written constitution, and the Third Reich was born.

Today, our non-Muslm enemies, posing as friends under the principles of mutually-assured destruction [MAD] wants the United States to be a pile of radioactive cinders for the next 100 years or so without the US retaliating against them as mushroom clouds destroy us. Unheard of in the America I remember as a boy, today some of our enemies—but not the Soviets—appear willing to provide the radical Muslim world with nuclear weapons to use on the United States not realizing that, ultimately, the radicals would use their nuclear gifts on their benefactors.

The only thing our enemies were sure of is that they were collectively afraid of the United States. In the America I remember, our allies in Europe were losing World War I in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany on April 6. Nineteen months after America entered the war, Germany surrendered on Nov. 11, 1918.

Why? Because Germany was overwhelmed by the most powerful economic and military power on Earth. America supplied the armies of all of our allies with weapons, ammunition and the machinations of war—and because the farmlands of Europe had been transformed into battlefields, America also fed the civilian population of Europe. America's friends marveled at what America had accomplished. America's enemies feared America even more.

That fear grew in World War II when captured Gestapo files revealed a phone call between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the night of Nov. 26, 1941 when Churchill warned FDR that the Japanese fleet was on its way to Hawaii. The Japanese, Churchill said, planned to attack the US Navy Base at Pearl Harbor on Monday, Dec. 8, 1941. Churchill bargained with Roosevelt to do nothing and let the Japanese bomb the Pacific fleet, giving FDR an excuse to enter the war. In the end, FDR agreed. On Friday, Nov. 28, without telling anyone in his administration that the Japanese fleet was on its way to Hawaii, FDR boarded his special train for a belated Thanksgiving at Warm Springs, Georgia.

Sadly for FDR and Churchill, Secretary of War Henry Simpson was warned by the Soviet ambassador on the 28th that the Japanese fleet was steaming to Pearl Harbor at that moment. Stimson frantically warned Secretary of State Cordell Hull who, of course, called Roosevelt. FDR was forced to return to Washington. The US Navy wanted to send the Pacific fleet back to sea, leaving one or two battleships at Pearl to defend the base in the event the rumors were true. One or two ships sunk by the Japanese would still merit a declaration of war. The Spanish-American war began over the sinking of the Maine and World War I was declared over the sinking of the Lusitania.

FDR wanted to make sure the devastation at Pearl Harbor was severe enough to convince Congress to declare war not only on Japan, but Germany as well. 2,403 US military personnel were killed and 1,178 were wounded.Other than decimating Battleship Row, the Japanese damaged 3 cruisers (including the USS Helena), 3 destroyers (two of which were the USS Cassin and the USS Downes. Also damaged was an anti-aircraft training ship and one mine-layer, the USS Oglala which capsized when the Helena, a light cruiser in dry dock, was hit by an aerial torpedo). The worse damage occurred on Battleship Row. Only the USS Nevada, which managed to get underway and headed to open sea, was without damage. The USS Pennsylvania suffered slight damage from being strafed but joined the Nevada and lived to get revenge on the Japanese navy.

The worst disaster on Dec. 7 was the USS Arizona which sank with all hands. The Arizona has never been decommissioned and is now the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. The USS California was sunk that day, but salvaged and put back into service. Damaged were the USS Maryland, USS Tennessee, USS West Virginia and the USS Nevada. The Japanese also attacked the US Naval Air Station. Of the 408 fighter planes on the ground, 188 were destroyed and 159 were damaged. Only 55 fighters were capable of flying the following day. Two Army Air Corp pilots from Hickam Field, 2nd lieutenants George Welch and Kenneth Taylor were able to get their Curtis P-40s armed and in the air. Both became aces that day. Taylor was shot in the arm and leg. When they returned to the base for more ammunition and fuel, three other Army Air Corp pilots were already in the air. A squadron of Japanese planes, their bombs expended, began to strafe Hickam and Elva airfields and the naval air station on Ford Island. When the leader of the squadron saw the activity over Hickham Field, the Japanese disengaged and headed back to the Japanese carriers. The news footage and headlines enraged America so much that FDR got his way. On Dec. 8, 1941 Congress declared war not only on Japan but Germany as well.

When you visit the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, please remember the person memorialized there was personally responsible for the death and destruction that took place at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field on Dec.7, 1941, and quite possibly for hundreds of thousands of casualties in the Pacific Rim between Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 2, 1945. FDR had enough of a warning that the US Pacific Fleet had time to go out and meet the Japanese in mid-sea, long before Japanese fighter-bombers could reach Hawaii. Why is it that Americans honor politicians who should be impeached, removed from office, tried for treason, sedition or malfeasance, and imprisoned? Sadly, the America I remember from my youth, was already under the control of the princes of industry and the barons of banking and business. They had been since 1906.

No other nation in the world realized, until World War II, just how strong England's "former colonies" had become, nestled away as an island fortress at the crossroads of the world. How did America become so strong? You could say it was the frontier spirit of the American patriot. But, the truth is, it was because of the entrepreneurial spirit of America. In the American free enterprise system, unencumbered by government interference in the first half of the 20th century, free enterprise built the most powerful industrial complex the world had ever seen. It was this industrial ingenuity that allowed America to switch from peacetime to wartime manufacturing virtually overnight, and hold its enemies in the Pacific at bay with one hand while they built the war machine they needed to defeat them with the other. That was the America I remember.

Sadly, that can't happen today. Most of America's major factories are closed down and boarded up. The products which were made in those factories are now made (among other places) in factories in China, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the former Soviet Union. Do you see a problem here? Not only do we no longer possess the industrial wherewithal to convert peacetime manufacturing to wartime manufacturing, we surrendered our industrial might to our deadliest enemies—the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union and, worse yet, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia.

Tragically, the princes of industry surrendered more than America's manufacturing capabilities to our enemies. They also appear to have surrendered far too much of our technological know-how as well. If you recall, in February, 1996, GM-Hughes Electronics and Loral Space Communications contracted with the Chinese government to launch a Loral Communications satellite for Hughes. The US government initially discouraged American rocket firms from attempting to enter the commercial rocket field, correctly assuming that if they did, the possibility existed that vital rocket technology data might inadvertently be transferred from the military to the commercial arena and end up in the hands of current or future enemies who would then use that technology against us.

The only problem is, the rockets China used were as inferior as the dog food and baby formula the Chinese were selling to western consumers. On the morning of Feb. 15, 1996 when the Chinese 3B Long March rocket rose off the launch paid carrying a $200 million communications satellite into orbit, something happened. After rising a short distance from the launch pad, the 3B Long March seemed suspended in midair for a millisecond that seemed like an eternity until, like a felled giant redwood tree, the rocket dropped and crashed into a nearby village. In less time that it takes to roast a marshmallow on a stick over the embers of a campfire, the 3B rocket exploded into a fireball that consumed the entire village. Thousands of charred corpses lay where, only moments before, they walked, talked and breathed.

An Israeli engineer who worked on the project and witnessed the disaster, later reported that COSTIND brought in trucks, loaded the charred bodies into them and carted them off to be buried in a mass grave. There was no formal inquiry into the incident because, as far as the Chinese people were concerned, neither the incident nor the town that was destroyed ever existed.

But, it existed for Loral and it existed for Hughes. Thinking of their bottom line and not the national security of the United States, they opted to help the Chinese solve the problem of their defective rockets. Bernie Schwartz, the CEO of Loral applied for a satellite export license, but was denied by Secretary of State Warren Christopher. As a $2.2 million "friend of Bill," Schwartz called Bill Clinton and got his waiver. Clinton then removed export waiver authority from the State Department and returned it to the Commerce Department where it had resided until Clinton's Chinagate scandal became public.

Has former President Dwight D. Eisenhower's minute-before-midnight warnings about the industrial-military complex come home to roost? Are the industrialist stargazers who created the Star Wars technology that gave the United States its edge over the world now selling their visionary technology to the highest bidder on the mistaken belief that mankind has evolved beyond war? If that's the case, they need only look past the saber-rattling at the very serious buildup of nuclear weapons delivery systems by our "former" enemies to realize they still are our enemies who, today, are sucking the economic life out of the America I remember to finance their 21st century weapons and delivery systems which they insist, with a straight face, are defensive rather than offensive weapons systems. Add to that the exodus of America's Fortune 500 companies and you can see the dilemma which awaits us when ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood achieves their objective of taking over the entire Muslim world. At that point, they will launch a global war, striking every Gentile nation on Earth simultaneously. America will discover, too late, that her capacity to convert from a peacetime world to a world at war no longer exists. The American factories that armed our friends and allies, and our farms in the America I remember which fed that world, will no longer be available to us since they are now in the lands of our enemies who pose as our friends and trading partners.

Phil Condit, the head of Boeing, told an interviewer in 1997 that he would be delighted if, in 20 years "...no one thought of Boeing as an American company. My goal," he said, "is to rid [Boeing] of its image as an American company."

When I first penned those words in the book, "Prince Albert: Prophet of Utopia" in 2000, I noted that "...in less than two decades, Boeing and Lockheed will both likely be viewed as Chinese companies by the American people." Today, Boeing Stealth technology appears to have been used to build China's new J-20 Stealth jet fighter, giving China a technological edge over the United States. Boeing got it's wish. Boeing is now headquartered in China, and China now owns a fairly substantial block of Boeing stock. The question is, how privy is China to Boeing industrial secrets? Particularly those tied to stealth technology? How much Boeing technology know-all went to China's Chengdu J-20 Stealth fighter? Can we now assume Boeing is no longer as American as apple pie?

Today Condit's believes that America's blue chip transnational corporate giants are no longer answerable to the unelected fourth branch of government in Washington, DC. Between 1990 and 2003 foreign direct investment in the blue chip corporations from the developed nations increased fivefold with the value of their assets coming almost exclusively from the increased worth of their foreign affiliates.

That's why when you check the stock market, it appears we are enjoying a robust economy when, in fact, unemployment in the industrialized nations is still skyrocketing, tax receipts in the coffers of the world's wealthiest nations are drying up, and governments are now forced to make hard choice cuts that are impacting those who actually believe they are entitled to entitlements. (It should be noted that the 5% increase in our economy in the third quarter of 2014 came from entrepreneurs drilling for shale oil and natural gas—something that Barack Obama tried to stop, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could not get his bill through the GOP-controlled House. (So, don't give the Obama Administration any credit for the boost in the economy. Thank the Republicans in the House who blocked Reid's attempt to ban fracking.)

The America I remember is being systematically raped and pillaged by the princes of industry and the barons of banking and business who now own the politicians we elect. Sadly, the voters continue to vote for them because the mainstream media gurus keep telling us that the yardstick by which electibility is measured is the campaign war chest the candidate has amassed. In reality, the larger the war chest the more indebted the candidate is to the princes of industry and the barons of banking and business.

This is precisely why the leftwing media hawks base electable viability on the candidate's indebtedness to the money barons. And why, once you elect them, the voice of the people is muffled, and the voice of money determines the politicians' legislative agenda. More times than not, the legislation your Congressman and Senators vote for was actually written by the lobbyists of the campaign donors to benefit their corporate clients, and not the legislators' constituents. Which, of course, is why most legislators never read the bills they vote for. The politicians who sold their souls to the money barons really don't want to know what's in the bills—which is why someone like then Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi could stand up with a straight face and tell members of Congress "...we need to hurry up and pass this bill so we can see what's in it."