Some Comments from the Author of My Year in Oman about his Book

My Year in Oman: An American Experience in Arabia During the War On Terror

    The country is called the Sultanate of Oman because it is ruled by a singular figure in the form of a generous and caring despot named Sultan Qaboos bin Said who, though a small and thin man, carries the most weight in the Arabian world when it comes to enlightened counsel and settling the disagreements of other nations. My Year in Oman: An American Experience in Arabia is in fact the Sultan's story as much as my own, because without the work that he commissioned in modernizing his country on a Biblical scale, I wouldn't have been invited to teach at a university there and I would most likely have much less of a story to tell.

     My Year in Oman is about the mixing of cultures, something that has been done for thousands of years on this geographically strategic area of the world where India, Asia, the Persian Gulf and Africa are all relatively easily accessible by ship. My Year in Oman is, in a tongue-in-cheek way, a vehicle to highlight the author's stereotypically American manner of thinking.

     I first considered writing My Year in Oman, within the first few days I was in the country, based simply on the events that occur at the beginning of the book. I figured if that much had happened, there had to be much more coming that would be interesting and something people where I lived would never, ever experience, nor, most likely, even comprehend. I started My Year in Oman, the second year of my contract at the university where I was teaching. I was sure by then I had more than enough to write about. I will let the reader be the judge of that, although the size of the book is an indication there were at least a few events worth noting.

      More than anything else though, as I relate in my second book, Another Year in Oman, I knew that I was experiencing what I refer to ingeniously as the "Old Oman" with unpaved roads, small populations and enough infrastructure to keep the Omanis comfortable as long as they had more and more roads, buildings, houses, cars, electricity, water and money. 

     I wanted people to understand what the Omani culture was really like, but I also wanted people to see the places, to breathe the warm sea air and feel the sweat from the oppressive humid heat against the coolness of the open sea as I undertook solitary snorkeling trips into the Gulf. I wanted to share the Arabian desert at night, the dawn and the height of noon-day. I wanted people to experience my first mornings eating breakfast in a five-star hotel watching the dark blue waves hitting the brown sand beaches of the Gulf of Oman as the temperature intensive sun climbed into the sky. 

      However, more than the story itself, I hope the insights I am able to offer about Oman's history, and the stories of my interactions with the Omani's themselves will give the reader a more accurate understanding of the Arab Culture than they might learn anywhere else, or in such an entertaining way. I hope that with the understanding, we might someday be able to relate to each other in a more humane and civilized fashion.

Matthew D. Heines

Some Comments from the Author of Deceptions of the book Ages about his Book

Deceptions of the Ages: "Mormons" Freemasons and Extraterrestrials

by Matthew D. Heines

      Though some may claim it is, or is not, this book is not about religion, it is not about secret societies, deception or the massive amounts of human tragedy that have been heaped upon entire populations for the most nefarious of reasons. This book is a historical attempt to teach the reader about history while at the same time explaining how events, organizations, brotherhoods and cultures contributed to the modern world we see, or don’t see, in the present day.  The reader will soon discover that there is a lot of history that seems to be left out of the body of what we call history, as the reader comes to understand why that history was deemed as better left hidden in the darkness of Plato’s Cave.

     Ultimately, the reader may or may not come to understand that our world is a continuum of the same forces that always have been present and will always be present in some form or another. As we explore the modern world all the way down to the subatomic level, we will see how these same forces are necessary for the universe to even exist. It is my hope that the reader will take away from this book an overview of not only how we got to be where we are, but that the reader will have a better idea of exactly where we are and, where we appear to be going.

     It is my sincere hope that if enough people read this book and are able to see the world as it really is, then the decisions we make will hopefully be based upon an understanding of actual history, religion, science and human nature and not the illusions and delusions we see today. 

Matthew D. Heines

Hey Dude, Where's My Documentary Part 2. Elon Musk, Tesla and the Alternative Energy Revolution

     

      By the spring of the year 2013, it looked like a company called Tesla might just be able to buck the alternative energy trend. The company, named after the famous Serbian inventor who immigrated to the United States in the late 19^th century only to learn that big money fat cats like Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan were interested more in accumulating vast fortunes by sucking every dime and nickel they could get out the pockets of the consumer, than in creating Nikola Tesla's idea of free and available electrical energy for the people of the world. In no small sense of irony, a century later, it was this same kind of fat cat who had made his money from PayPal transactions that would use Nikola Tesla's name (although members of the 80's rock band might still deny this) to create a car or rather an electric vehicle that would no longer be the laughingstock of the auto world and of the auto purchasing consumer.

     Enter Elon Musk, the self-styled rock star of the entrepreneurial world. Like Nikola Tesla, Musk immigrated to the U.S. to pursue a dream. Unlike Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk's entry into the United States was with a fortune of billions of dollars backing him up that assured the immediate respect and adoration of the business world and Wall Street's pay-for-praise pundits. Surprisingly, after a shaky start, the company seemed to be weathering the storm of criticism and naysayers who said that his company would suffer the same fate as those who had tried to fly in the face of the American auto  and oil companies in the past. With his billions to back him, it seemed that Elon Musk and his idea of a car company might be for real.

      By 2013, Tesla's stock price grew from $25 per-share at the end of 2012 and the beginning of the new year  to double and then triple. By the summer of 2013 Tesla stock had reach that magical pinnacle of $100 a share. Already, there were a number of investors who had made fortunes as they doubled and then tripled their money as Tesla stock began  to climb in an unparalleled bonanza hardly seen since the days of Apple and Microsoft. 

     But all was not as it seemed, as many of the so-called experts who published articles about stocks on the Internet began to compare Elon Musk to the emperor riding naked through town in his electric S carriage. Pundits at the Wall Street adjective mills like the Motley Fool and Zack's said that Tesla stock was way over sold and that the crash was coming any day. Obviously, nobody wanted to be left holding the bag at such an obvious replay of the First Solar alternative energy company fiasco of 2008.

     However, there were a few billion reasons that made Elon Musk different from so many others who tried in the past to fly in the face of the auto and oil corporations. Elon's company SpaceX, an ambitious "private" enterprise space exploration company has as a client, the United States government, which guarantees him billions as long as he can keep getting the government to renew his contract. With some of his billions placed in the re-election pockets of the Congressmen who make those decisions, why shouldn't he? Of course, PayPal was doing a booming business as the main commercial purchasing and selling platform for buyers and sellers operating in the global marketplace. Finally, his stake in Solar City, a residential solar cell installer that sells solar panels to homeowners in a scheme where the excess power generated is sold back to the power company and Solar City, not the homeowner who paid for the panels, keeps the profits. SpaceX, Paypal and finally, Solar City assured that regardless of what happened with his Electric Motor Company, Elon Musk's risks would be tempered and his financial success would continue unimpeded.

     Throughout the summer of 2013, Tesla stock made incredible gains followed by drops in the price that made some investors (like myself) quite nervous. The stock rose above $100 for the first time and continued to climb.  But there were bumps in the road. The bounce came when auto dealers began to approach their state legislatures and asked that Tesla not be allowed to sell cars in states such as South Carolina. The Tesla business model, based on the idea that cars would not be sold from lots but would be delivered in person to the owner, seemed to fly in the face of the automakers even more than manufacturing a car that ran on alternative energy and was not a complete joke to the American consumer. But somehow, Elon Musk seemed to weather that storm as his sleek cars continued to be sold and his lawyers used whatever means necessary to keep his cars for sale in states where they were challenged and the price of his stock somehow kept rising.
     There were other bumps, such as the reports of fires that started in the battery section and consumer complaints of the amount of time it took to recharge the batteries compared to a gasoline powered car. Consumers also complained about the battery life of the vehicle as well as the Tesla method of driving into a recharging station and completely changing out the heavy batteries for new ones. All of these seeming problems associated with the Tesla automobile did not seem to affect the sale of either the vehicle or the stock price and the price of Tesla stock continue to climb throughout the rest of the year 2013.

     And so, the Bonanza in at least one alternative energy stock seemed to be real and as solid as Microsoft or Apple. Suddenly, everybody who missed the Tesla electric boat looked for the next alternative energy stock that would go through the roof and make a new breed of alternative energy millionaires. Enter hydrogen fuel cells; the technology that had been sitting on the back burner for over a decade and finally seemed to be coming to life as investors, looking to cash in on the next alternative energy boom, began taking note.

Please tune in for next segment the hydrogen fuel cell stock scam of 2014.

For books by Matthew D. Heines please go to www.heinessight.com.

Hey Dude, Where's My Documentary? or What Happened to Pump and Dump, the Fuel Cell Documentary (Dude)?

In 2015, I began investigating hydrogen fuel cell companies for a documentary to educate the public about how an alternative energy source had been seemingly killed by Wall Street insider trading and Big Oil. I was most surprised at what little cooperation I received from any hydrogen fuel cell company. As I began to dig, I began to find out why. What I found out in my investigations will shock you. Here is part one of Hey Dude, Where's My Documentary? 

It was late 2013 November to be exact my wife and I had just returned from a contract teaching in Saudi Arabia for the American company of Raytheon and its subsidiary company called SALTS. We had returned to the United States full of many things. We had hope for the future. We were also full of relief at being able to return to the United States and leave the Arab world behind after many years of teaching and finally a fairly sized chunk of money. We would finally be able to settle down and live the American dream.

There were many reasons for our hope and optimism. The first being that we had been watching a technology that seemed to be on the verge of a major breakout. That technology was called hydrogen fuel cell technology. But before we go into too many specifics, let's begin with a little bit of background and history of what hydrogen fuel cells are and what they have been in the past.

In 1999 while reading Scientific American, I had seen an article about a new technology called hydrogen fuel cells. The article stated along with an explanation of how hydrogen fuel cells work (that I will not go into at this point) as well as how hydrogen fuel cells will ultimately replace batteries, internal combustion engines and just about every other energy source. According the article, we had with a cheap clean technology whose only byproduct was water. I mean water. How much cleaner can you get?

But I was not the only one riding the hydrogen fuel cell title wave of optimism in 1999. On the stock market the stock prices for companies like Ballard Power Systems of Canada, Plug Power Systems of New York and Fuel Cell Energy of Connecticut also saw their stock prices go everywhere from over one hundred dollars for Ballard Power down to between $75 and $80 for the other mentioned companies. But alas, the tech bubble burst in 1999 and took with it price of fuel cell stocks and the optimism. It also took millions if not billions of dollars in investor money and placed in the hands of those who had the “vision” to get out early.

I myself have never seen a lot of activity in the stock market simply because of the fact that I have never had that much money to invest. But, with the salaries I was making in the Middle East as a teacher of English in universities and on military contracts, along with the sales of my first two books, I finally had a little bit of extra money. So, I thought I would begin to invest. I, being an idealist through and through, limited myself to investments in green energy starting in the year 2008.

Although it may seem to be digressing a little bit, I feel it is important for the reader to understand that the idea here is to not only understand what has happened to fuel cell technology, but also what is happened to alternative energy stocks period. So, we must start in 2008.

In 2007-2008, the stock price of a company called First Solar began a meteoric rise. This rise was based on the fact that First Solar’s solar panels incorporated a new cheaper metal (cadmium telluride if anyone cares) which allowed them to be produced and sold at a much lower cost. At the time of the news and the expansion of First Solar from the United States into Germany and Europe, the stock price soared from around $45 and ultimately hit $280 before it, in the vernacular of the market "tanked." For the first time ever, I chose to invest some money and I actually made a little bit on the transaction.  I had enogh sense to get out of the stock before it ultimately plummeted.

Full of enthusiasm for the stock market and the "American Way" I began looking around for more green technology to invest in. Enter a company called BioSolar.

When I first saw BioSolar, my attention was peaked because, like First Solar, they claimed to have a revolutionary new solar panel or what they called a back sheet which was made from naturally occurring materials such as linseed oil and cotton. Not being a petroleum product made it both environmentally friendlier and much cheaper to produce.

I watched as the stock went from mere pennies to over a dollar. I saw that it was time to get in as I calculated my profits from investing a few thousand dollars at a little over a dollar a share in a stock that could reach the same levels as First Solar had just a few months before.

Like all other unwary uneducated and most likely foolish investors, I saw the pie-in-the-sky and I wanted as big of a slice for myself as I could possibly afford. It was at the time that the market had just crashed and I had made some money investing in things like Ford at $4 and General Electric at $8. At that time, GM was a dollar a share, but a taxpayer bailed out company to me did not seem like the kind of investment with the return that Biosolar, a small company out of Salinas California was sure to produce. And so it seemed, it was just a matter of time before my ship was going to come in. It also seemed foolish at the time not to have as much money as I could possibly scrape together to invest in this company.

There were warning signs, however. In an article posted on the Internet shortly after I began to make my investments, I noticed an article written by somebody who had nothing good to say about Biosolar. The article stated that the reason its stock price has soared to over a dollar was the result of something called a “Pump and Dump.” In the article the author pointed out that a Bloomberg "journalist" had been paid an undisclosed amount of shares by Biosolar management in return for a favorable treatment of Biosolar in an article. I remembered that article was what had influenced me to even consider the penny stock company was that it had been mentioned in Bloomberg, a reputable publication. So how could anything go wrong?

Immediately after the article was published, the price of the shares stopped rising. In fact, they seemed to be dropping somewhat. Being a new investor, I was not familiar with the term the author criticizing the company and the writer's publication used, or "pump and dump.” It seemed a rather self-explanatory phrase but I was not overly concerned. After all, I hadn’t lost any money trading, yet.

But the fact was, the Bloomberg author had pumped the BioSolar stock using his publication’s reputation for integrity and then had dumped the stock. Most likely he dumped it immediately after he was given the shares and that massive dump, along with the panic caused by the article subsequently published cause the shares to drop. First, they went into the $.80 a share range and ultimately ended up around $.10 a share.

But for me, the uninitiated unwary investor, I could see nothing but light and hope at the end of the tunnel as the lower stock price would allow me to accumulate hundreds of thousands of shares while I waited for my ship to come in.

While I was waiting and daily watching the stock’s activity, a year went by and then two years went by. Then in 2010, the company called BioSolar announced what I had never heard of before. It was called a reverse share stock split. For the uninitiated like myself at the time, what that meant ultimately, was that my hundreds of thousands of shares had suddenly become a few thousand shares. I didn't think it was even possible that a company could do that, but I found out it was all perfectly legal. So, I had been burned on alternative energy stock for the first time.

I swore then that I would never, ever invest in any kind of solar energy stock again. In fact, in the back of my mind I thought that the shares would ultimately turn around and like the Phoenix of mythology, rise from the dimes and reach that mythical $280 mark. That, and not wanting to lose my money, compelled me to sit on thousands of shares of basically worthless stock for years.

So, to review what we've learned so far in 1999, there were high hopes for an alternative energy technology called hydrogen fuel-cell technology. The pumpers on Wall Street had managed to get its share price in the case of the bigger companies to over $100 share. In the crash of 1999, the bubble that burst took with it the high stock shares of the hydrogen fuel cell companies along with many Internet companies and billions of dollars from the American economy, leaving that money in the hands of those at the Federal Reserve and those with connections to the Federal Reserve that knew that the bubble was about to burst.

We have also learned that there have been a number of other alternative energy companies that over the last decade and a half have burned millions of investors and left millions if not billions of dollars in the hands of insider traders on Wall Street.

So, thus ends the first part of the Hey Dude Where’s my Documentary blog series.

In the next segment, we will discuss the rise of a green energy company called Tesla that seemed somehow to reverse the trend and looked as if it was paving the way for green energy to make a comeback in 2012-13. Please stay tuned.

For more Deceptions, read Deceptions of the Ages by Matthew D. Heines

Diane Donovan Book Review Deceptions of the Ages: "Mormons" Freemasons and Extraterrestrials

Deceptions of the Ages  
"Mormons" Freemasons and Extraterrestrials
Matthew D. Heines

Print ISBN 9780990879329     
Print Edition $18.99
 516 pages
  Deceptions of the Ages: "Mormons" Freemasons and Extraterrestrials doesn't continue Matthew Heines' previous travelogue/teaching books covering intercultural relationships and discoveries: instead, it analyzes a different kind of relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aliens, and Freemasons.

If this approach seems a 'stretch', for some readers - it will be. Deceptions comes from a teacher who takes five thousand years of history and brings a variety of disparate forces together, using a blend of historical texts, philosophical reflections, holy writings, and more to provide factual historical insights into traditional conflicts between science and religion - and he does so with an added measure of humor to make his approach more palpable.

From the incongruities of a secret society that claims the ambiguous situation of not being a 'secret society' so much as a 'society with secrets' to the great dig under the Temple of Solomon, why it happened, and the contrast of various theories about what they found (or didn't find), Heines takes a step-by-step approach in examining various facets of history and its deceptions.

And perhaps that's the most intriguing approach of all: not just the evidence of deceptions and how they evolved over the eons, but why they happened and how their stories were perpetuated and changed over time.

Few new age or historical discussions take the form of closely analyzing the gaps between science, history and religion. Too few pinpoint exactly where and how these gaps occurred, why they widened, and the various controversies that sprung from them, creating in and of themselves new perspectives and even religions and belief systems.

And few such considerations skirt the line between history, new age analysis, and philosophy, incorporating elements of all in a compendium that is, ultimately, greater than any of its individual parts.

Despite Heines' attempts to inject humor and readability into the text, this is by no means a light read. Typical new age readers (the book's most likely audience) will find it dense, packed with historical, philosophical and spiritual references, and filled with evidence that points to the obvious fact that "we are not alone".

An index to its many references and approaches would have made Deceptions of the Ages even more useful for readers who want to cross-reference strings of thought and different historical figures - but would have been a weighty undertaking in a discussion of this magnitude.

Suffice it to say that Deceptions of the Ages offers much food for thought, will find its most enthusiastic readership among new age circles who appreciate wide-ranging discussions pulling together facts from a range of disciplines, making for a powerful, thought-provoking read.