Alan Caruba

Unfortunately, Alan passed away in June of 2015 and he will be sorely missed - With a career that began in the 1960s as a young journalist, Alan Caruba has been writing ever since to include several books and numerous magazine articles over the years.  In addition, he has been a reviewer and charter member of The National Book Critics Circle, with membership in the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Society of Professional Journalists.  He is best known and widely read these days for the commentaries he posts on his popular blog that cover a wide range of topics from politics to energy, environmentalism to education, and everything in between.  He is a graduate of the University of Miami (FL), served in the U.S. Army, and resides in New Jersey.  Caruba's blog, Warning Signs, has recently passed 2.3 million page views.  His monthly report on new books, Bookviews.com, is ideal for anyone who loves to read, reporting on many new fiction and non-fiction titles.   Information about his editorial and public relations services can be found on Caruba.com.  


Wednesday, 30 January 2013 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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I was fortunate to know both sets of grandparents, people who immigrated from Russia and Italy. It was not until they had passed on and I was older that I realized that they never spoke of their nations of origin. In the late 1800s they were nations that offered little opportunity and America was all about opportunity.

In the “Atlas of Human Migration” it says that “The message of this book is so important that it bears repeating here at the outset: migration is the history of the world. Humans are born migrants; human evolution is linked to the very act of moving from one habitat to another and then adapting to that new environment.” Migration scholars have called the last twenty years the “age of migration.”

“Some people—mainly the residents of the rich countries of the world—are allowed, even encouraged, to move. Others—the nationals of poor countries—are not. This exposes the stark social inequities that result from globalization and migration control policies.” The result for the United States and Europe has been the rise of “illegals”, people who find a way to access a better life in a better place. Some, however, have brought with them a variety of social problems. Some—Muslims—have demanded changes their adopted nation’s laws to accommodate the oppression they experienced in their home countries. Quotas worked in the past, but are rejected today.
 
Tuesday, 29 January 2013 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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Most Americans know the economy is in bad shape even if a majority voted to reelect the man most responsible for making a bad economy worse. And, no, it was not George W. Bush who is responsible for the 2008 financial crash. It was the government with its housing programs that encouraged giving mortgage loans to those who could not afford them and then bundling those “toxic assets”, and selling them to banks who then found themselves in trouble for investing in them.

Another partner in the nation’s financial woes has been the Federal Reserve, a banking cartel given the right to literally print money. The Fed recently released the fact that its holdings in U.S. government debt has increased by 257 percent since President Obama took office! Those holdings are at an all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000 at the close of business on Wednesday, January 23. The other major holder of our debt is China at $1,170,100,000.000.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to see how the policies of President Obama, whether a deliberate effort to ruin the economy or just the result a lack of understanding of how the U.S. economy works, has put the U.S. on the precipice of failure comparable to what is occurring in Europe. It is a global, as well as national problem as the central banks of the EU desperately transfer billions among themselves to stave off a catastrophe that will destroy the wealth of their citizens.
 
Monday, 28 January 2013 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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Rush Limbaugh has predicted the end of the National Football League and sees its demise drawing closer.

Is it really any surprise that Obama is leading the charge to make football “safe”, given that it is a sport where there is a lot of physical contact, often resulting in the occasional injury? Americans do not watch football to see players get injured. They watch because it is a version of war. It is fought in stadiums. The field of battle is well defined. And men outfitted like gladiators engaged in a modified version of combat.

The key word here is “men.” Nobody wants to watch two teams of women play football. Obama is a girly man. When you think of Reagan, he is astride a horse at his ranch. When you think of Obama, he is riding a bicycle.

The latest manifestation of an effort that pre-dates Obama, the “chickification” of America, is the decision by the Department of Defense to allow women to engage in battle alongside their male counterparts. There are few ideas more idiotic than this. Forget the usual arguments put forth about upper body strength and such, even the Israeli Defense Force, famous for including women in its ranks, uses them auxiliary functions in order to free up the men to do the actual fighting.

 
Thursday, 24 January 2013 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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If you passed through any school system since the 1960s, you are a lot dumber than you think you are. Those of us educated in the 1940s and 50s learned the fundamentals of literacy, history, civics, mathematics, and science in ways that no system relentlessly devoted to “self-esteem” ever could.

The takeover of the educational system, traditionally the responsibility of the states and individual communities, is part of the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter who reorganized the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, establishing a cabinet-level Education Department. He signed it into law on October 17, 1979 and it began operating on May 4, 1980.

The other factor was the rise of teacher’s union beginning in the 1960s. The unions feathered their nests, ensuring that costly retirement and healthcare benefits would burden state budgets until the present when a number of Republican governors in recent years began to reduce their power, based on spending millions to elect legislators friendly to their interests.
 
Wednesday, 23 January 2013 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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If anything good comes from the Newtown massacre, it will be a national discussion of the role of various psychological medications that have been foisted on a generation or two of young Americans in the nation’s schools. Particularly dangerous have been a group called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).

While the White House and other gun-banning groups grab the spotlight by putting the blame on guns, columnist Dr. Jerome R. Corsi recently reported that SSRIs have played a role in “some 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade…according to British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a founder of RxISK.org, an independent website for researching and reporting on prescription drugs."

A visit to one of Dr. Healey’s websites, ssristories.com, provides more than 4,800 news stories involving some level of violence in which antidepressants are mentioned. SSRIs include Prozac, Zoloff, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and Luvox. Others include Remeron, Anafranil, Effexor, Cymbalta, and Pristiq, as well as the dopamine reuptake inhibitor antidepressant Wellbutrin, marketed as Zyban. If you listen closely to television ads for medications to stop smoking and address other problems, you will hear warnings about the way they can cause serious mental disabilities.
 
Tuesday, 22 January 2013 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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It has taken four years of Obama’s first term, but Europe in particular and every other nation in general understands it is being told “You’re on your own.” The once great superpower that other nations looked to for defense and support is increasingly an island surrounded by two great oceans.

In a recent article in The Telegraph, a London newspaper, Janet Daley summed it up in the wake of the events in Algeria and Mali, two African nations under attack by al Qaeda. “The money which once went into missile silos in Europe—or troops patrolling the Afghan border, or defending existing regimes in countries under threat from jihadi militants—will be spent on Obamacare and the entitlements programs which are close to bankruptcy.”

Pointedly, Daley noted that “During the presidential election campaign, the mainstream media expressed almost no interest at all in the fact that an American ambassador had been killed at his post (for the first time since 1979) by a terrorist mob in Libya.”

By contrast, the Algerian government responded to the attack on a gas processing plant in Amenas with extreme force, killing most of the al Qaeda terrorists involved. In the process, most of the remaining hostages were killed by the jihadists, but kidnapping and ransoming hostages has been a lucrative industry for years now and goes back decades since the emergence of al Qaeda.
 

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