FYI Note: Urban Dictionary: fubar
Military slang from WWII, fubar is an acronym
for "f - - ked up beyond all recognition". "the house was
completely fubar."
THE ISLAND OF FUBAR
Dr. Jack Wheeler
To The Point
Wednesday, 30 Oct 2013
Nauru. Welcome to the world's smallest country
- a tiny isolated rock in a remote part of the Pacific, right on the Equator,
8.1 square miles with 9,300 people living around its 10-mile circumference.
No one lives in the interior and we'll soon find out why. Of all 193 Member
States of the United Nations, Nauru is the smallest in population. Only
Monaco (less than 1 square mile on the French Riviera) is smaller in area.
I wanted to reach the three most unknown and
hidden nations in the South Pacific on this excursion. I found Tuvalu
entrancing, and Tarawa in Kiribati repelling - but now I have made it all the
way to the bottom of the Pacific's barrel.
I have been to almost all of those 193 UN
countries (189 in fact), and I can confirm that Nauru is more FUBAR than any
other. Actually, that's an understatement. You all know what the acronym
means, and Nauru takes it to a whole new dimension, a higher standard of
fubaredness than the rest of the world which is unlikely to be surpassed in
our lifetimes if ever.
Better get comfortable in your favorite chair
with at least three fingers of your favorite adult beverage at the ready to
get through this. You'll find it hard to believe but this is a true story.
Kafka himself couldn't have made it up, although he would have relished the
irony in how it applies to us. The photos are all mine.
Nauru is a coral outcrop built up over five
million years on top of an ancient volcano summit that eroded to sea level.
There's no lagoon, just the solitary island in the middle of a vast ocean.
For those five million years, countless nesting birds pooped on the coral
depositing millions of tons of guano. Polynesians showed up in their
outrigger canoes a couple of thousand years ago to eat the birds, fish,
gather coconuts, and make war between the dozen clans they divided the island
into.
The Germans claimed the place in the 1880s and
put an end to the inter-clan warfare. The Brits stole the island from the
Germans after World War I, and began a mining operation of the island's
interior containing one of the richest and highest-grade deposits of
phosphate in the world.
This came to a halt when the Japanese seized
the island during WWII, but resumed after the war. Nauru was now a UN Trust
Territory run jointly by the Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis - who were jointly
stupid enough to grant Nauru full sovereign independence in 1968.
When the Japanese surrendered the island at
the war's end, there were less than 800 Nauruans left alive. By 1968 there
were still less than 2,000 - while agricultural production in both Australia
and New Zealand had become dependent on Nauru's "superphosphate"
for the fertilizer making that production possible.
Yet this tiny number of Nauruans somehow
intimidated these huge countries into full sovereign ownership of the island
and all phosphate production. Mining the phosphate had been hard
labor-intensive work, chipping the solidified guano out of fossilized
limestone coral pinnacles. Yearly production in the 50s and 60s was in the
thousands of tons.
The new Nauru government wasted no time in
creating the government-owned Nauru Phosphate Company that went full-bore to
produce as much phosphate as possible by strip-mining. Soon, Nauru was
producing 1-2 million tons per year. During the 1970s and 1980s, Nauru was
making $100-$200 million a year in phosphate profits, giving Nauruans the
world's highest per capita GDP (over $50,000 per person per year, higher than
any other country on the planet).
For 30 years, from 1968 to 1998, Nauru
produced 43 million tons of phosphate at a cumulative profit of $1.8 billion.
Yes, billion - for a few thousand people. And they blew it all.
Everyone had a brand-new car. Nauruans'
favorite pastime was driving around the island - which takes about 20 minutes
- over and over like a lab mouse running on a circular treadmill, while
drinking Pale Blonde Aussie beer and throwing the empty cans out the window.
No one paid any taxes, everything was paid for
by the government as Nauru became a total welfare state. Nauruans changed
governments like musical chairs so that everyone was on the gravy train.
Nauruans became fully sedentary. Consuming
enormous quantities of beer and rice, Nauruans became and still are the most
obese people on earth - it is astounding how fat they are - and have the
world's highest rate of diabetes (e.g., 53% of Nauruan women over age 55 have
diabetes).
During Nauru's go-go days, the police chief
bought himself a $200,000 yellow Lamborghini. Off-loaded at the dock all
shiny spanking new, the chief was the proudest guy on the island - until he
tried to take it for a spin only to discover he was too fat to squeeze into
it.
Nauru's circular road was littered with car
wrecks crashed by drunks. The politicians in charge of the Nauru Phosphate
Trust Fund squandered incredible fortunes on expensive real estate buys they
trashed like office buildings in Australia, or hotels on Waikiki in Hawaii
and the Grand Pacific in Suva, Fiji, then letting them go kaput. They spent
millions on a play, Leonardo (da Vinci) the Musical, panned by critics and
audiences as one of the worst in history of theatre, and to which the entire
cabinet and their families flew to London in their private jet for the
disastrous debut.
They insisted on having their own prestige
airline, Air Nauru, with five Boeing 737s and two 727s flying routes all over
the Pacific at 10-20% capacity. Often, the president or one of his cronies
would commandeer a plane ready to fly in order to take his family on a
shopping spree in Hong Kong or Tokyo, leaving all the passengers and their
luggage stranded on the tarmac. By 1990 Air Nauru was losing $100 million a
year. By 1996 it was down to a single 737.
As phosphate production began winding down in
the 90s, the politicians began borrowing against the trust fund to bankroll
their lifestyle and the Nauru welfare state. General Electric Capital
Division lent them $236 million. Phosphate production fell off a cliff in
1998 and was down to almost zero in 2006. GE foreclosed in 2004. Air Nauru
ceased operating in 2005 with its one plane seized by creditors.
The state was so bankrupt it couldn't pay its
satellite phone bills and lost contact with the world for several months.
Today, Nauru is kept on life support through
aid and handouts of various kinds from the governments of Australia, New
Zealand, and Taiwan. Nauruans think the world owes them a living. Very few
have any drive or incentive. The population has quintupled since independence
as Nauruan women have an average of 4 children - yet parents could care less
if their kids go to school. Truancy is rampant, with Aussie teachers here
telling me their students have almost no desire to learn anything.
People here are fatter than ever and dying
like flies from diabetes, smoking, heart disease and booze. Men die on
average at age 56, women a few years later. At least a quarter of Nauruan
children are stunted from malnutrition, eating sugar junk food and white
rice. Most Nauruans live in destitution. Most of the island looks like
Detroit in the Pacific Ocean.
There are no banks here or insurance
companies. There is no Nauru currency - the official currency is Australian
dollars. Every transaction is cash. Almost all real jobs are done by ex-pats,
mostly from Australia, or elsewhere in the Pacific like Tarawa or the
Marshall Islands. Almost all businesses and shops, mostly tiny tin shacks,
are run by Chinese. Defunct Air Nauru has been restarted with one 737 bought
as a gift from Taiwan. It operates as, I kid you not, Our Airline. That's the
actual name of Nauru's airline now.
As of 2013, according to the New Zealand
government, Nauru's public debt is around $869 million. After wasting or
stealing $1.8 billion, not one single Nauru politician has been prosecuted,
much less jailed. One reason is because of any 5 Nauruans, 2 are related.
They were all in the scam together.
Now let's take a look at the Island of Fubar.
Remember I asked you to note the vast gray patch of the island in the picture
above? 80% of the island has been rubble-ized by phosphate strip mining,
leaving countless stone coral pinnacles.
Nauruans call this area "Topside,"
and you have to see it to believe it. Pinnacles up to 20 feet high as far as
you can see. It's a mind-boggling ecological catastrophe. Topside - 80% of
Nauru - is utterly uninhabitable and always will be.
I'm quite sure by now that you see the irony
reeking in all of this, that it has dawned on you that Nauru is what Zero wants
to turn America into, that he wants to turn Americans into Nauruans. The
latest headlines proclaim it:
90,609,000: Americans Not In Labor Force
Climbs To Another Record.
U.S. Spent $3.7 Trillion On Welfare In Last 5
Years.
Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov't Benefit
Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers.
We were the richest people on earth and now
the most indebted, borrowing trillions to maintain our welfare addiction and
dependency. It is this addiction and dependency that got Zero elected and
reelected. What has destroyed Nauru is what is destroying America -
especially when we are governed by a president and a party determined to do
so, and have an opposition party too stupid and cowardly to prevent it.
There is no hope for the Nauruans, for they
have passed the point of recoverability, of no return. Their state must soon
cease to exist, with the island abandoned and its inhabitants scattered
elsewhere. (What is going on as an insane attempt to prevent this fate will
be discussed next week.)
Is there hope for us? Sure there is. Americans
are not Nauruans, no matter how much Zero attempts to "fundamentally
transform" them. Just look at the utter FUBAR of Obamacare, the lynchpin
of his presidency, for evidence.
photos and such, here:
http://www.tothepointnews.com/
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