Thursday 29 April 2010

Iceland volcano, EU "single sky" and NATO

Rationale revealed:
Siim Kallas confirmed that the EU would apply "maximum pressure" to force airlines to comply with European legislation and offer refunds to passengers, but said individual countries could provide aid to companies in the form of market-rate loans and guarantees.

He said the EU aimed to fast-track proposals by the end of the year for an integrated European airspace, with a "single sky" to replace the current system of each country monitoring its own airspace.

"The volcanic ash crisis that paralysed European air transport for nearly a week made it crystal clear that the single European sky is a critical missing link in Europe's infrastructure," Iata director general Giovanni Bisignani said this week.

Kallas said the EU was also aiming to introduce Europe-wide planning to provide other forms of transport should one mode become so stricken again.

The break also gave a chance for NATO to conduct large-scale air exercises over Western Europe.

"Invisible ash." Genius.

Update:
Britain's airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country.

Monday 26 April 2010

More on voluntary genocide

A follow-up on the vaccination issue, with Alex Jones talking to brain surgeon Dr Blaylock. I talked about this before, but it's such an enormous issue that it bears repeating.
They start off talking about the H1N1 thing, and how the medical literature never matched what the government was saying. The science was saying that the virus was difficult to transmit, was not that pathogenic and that not many deaths were expected. The news media however said they expected as many as 90,000 people to die. The death rate as it turned out was indeed very low. But what is clear is that the government knew this was all a lie. Hoever, they pushed the vaccines.
One result of the vaccines has been an increase in Guillain–Barré syndrome, an automimmune disorder. How many follow-ups have we seen in the media on this? Not many.
Blaylock received messages from over 200 women who had lost their babies, after taking the vaccine whilst pregnant. He also talks about the established fact that when the immunity of pregnant women is altered in mid-pregnancy, this increases the incidence of schizophrenia and autism in the baby tenfold. So we won't see the full impact of the vaccines for ten years or more.
Health agencies used to stress that prenant women should not risk things such as vaccines. But this time they were coming out and saying that pregnant women particularly need to take them! This, despite the known fact that they interfere with the placenta, and the oxygen supply to the baby.
Also, since they contain aluminium and mercury, they have a long-term effect on the brain and make people more susceptible to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It makes you hypersensitive to environmental toxins, which has been shown repeatedly in the lab.
The government is simply ignoring all this research, though it is not refuted, in fact it is generally accepted in the science literature. He mentions how the Czech president refused to take the vaccine, whereas his secretary of health did. Guess who got the flu?
Blaylock goes on to talk about vaccines in general. All vaccines are contaminated. They simply don't know how to get the contaminants out. Furthermore, all vaccines are made in China. Yup, those 1-child eugenicists, who once manufactured a contaminated cough syrup that killed more than 10,000 people worlwide. Who contaminated baby food. Furthermore, the vaccines are not examined once they've been manufactured.
There are documents which were declassified in the 1970s, outlining how 100 million Americans were given polio vaccines which contqained SV40, which gives you cancer and other horrible malignancies. In fact it is a vertically transmissable virus, meaning it can be passed down through the generations! Government scientists desperately tried to show that it was not a dangerous virus, but it was then absolutely proven that it was. Since then, they came up with a lame rigged epidemiological study, and left it at that.
Of course now, the older doctors are starting to see many types of cancer that used to be exceedingly rare - such as pancreatic cancer and lymphoma - which is now the number 1 malignancy among 30-year olds. Type 1 diabetes is also related to vaccines according to a recent study.
The Merck pharmaceutical company was annoyed that so many people turned down the vaccine, and have been lobbying heavily to make it mandatory. So watch out for that.
There have been a great number of books written about population cotrol, and foundations have been supplying billions of dollars for the issue. The literature often says things that survivors will benefit from this. Lots of people in powerful positions appear to believe this. It is probably the delusion that they will be in the group that gets spared. Rockefeller of course is well-known for being obsessed with eugenics - and he happens to own, directly or indirectly, tens of thousands of corporations, as well as being involved with foundations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg group and so on.
Blaylock also mentions how, with the passing of the Health Bill in the states, we are approaching an endgame of sorts. After the vaccines fiasco, the government wants to run the whole system! Terrifying, naturally, especially when you consider that physicians will be told everything they can and can't do. If they don't follow orders they will lose their license, or worse.
The elites, as we have seen before, are no longer hiding their agenda. They think they're close to winning.


Sunday 25 April 2010

Teacher destroys school

John Taylor Gatto is a remarkable man. Voted teacher of the year in New York, he stood up and gave one of the most incendiary speeches I have ever seen transcripted.

The following are exerpts from the text of a speech by him accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990 (emphases mine).

Although teachers do care and do work very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behaviour can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which only humanly successful people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework”.

“How will they learn to read?!” you say and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them — time they need to grow up — and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this because no reform that doesn’t attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.


  1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
  2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
  3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
  4. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
  5. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
  6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I’ve known in this respect — they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
  7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of school teachers who materialistically “grade” everything — and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
  8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

FAMILY is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. THE CURRICULUM OF FAMILY is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it.


Fairly brings tears to my eyes to hear such things. Bravo. Here's the great man elaborating further:

Saturday 24 April 2010

Faber fiction & the Goldman gang



Marc Faber seems to make a rather common mistake: that of making a distinction between the free market and government, without recognising that the "third way" is the way the world works now - that is to say, the merger of state and corporate powers, aka fascism.
He even says this:

I think Goldman Sachs is a very honest firm. They have a very strict compliance department compared to the others — they're like an angel. But they targeted Goldman as it stands as a symbol of Wall Street.
Maybe the intention is not to hurt Goldman Sachs, but just to gain popularity with the middle class and the lower class of America, so they will perceive Mr. Obama to have done something against the evil of Wall Street.



What. The. Fuck. Like an angel? I had to play that bit twice to see if any irony was being projected, but no.
Let's have a look at some key players here.

  • Henry Paulson - 74th United States Treasury Secretary. Previously served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs.
  • Lloyd Blankfein - current Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. After the nomination of Hank Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, Blankfein was announced as his replacement.
  • Greg Craig - former White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. He has represented Goldman Sachs.
  • Gary Gensler is the chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama. Spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, becoming the company’s co-head of finance.

The list goes on, but you get the picture. It's other banks too, they're all complicit, but calling Goldman Sachs an angel because it complies with regulations (???) is an enormous misunderstanding of the situation. The government is in bed with the bankers, and scared of the CIA-military complex, and acts accordingly. It's like a symbiotic organism of bully-boys, back-scratchers and back-slappers - an old boys club. Like Celente says, Harvard Princeton Yale, bullets, bombs, banks.

They're like an international gang of financial terrorists, as Max Keiser has often said. They hid billions of debt for Greece when they joined the EU, and you can bet the farm they are short Greek bonds right now, all the way, leveraged up to the hilt. They are going to make a lot of money when Greece defaults, like they did with Iceland. Actually, they will be doing Greece a favour, like Soros did when he knocked us out of the ERM. But when the debt is all re-financed, it will be the Greek people who suffer most in the short term, because that's essentially their money that Goldman Sachs just sucked out of the system. The fact that it's measured in euros is good for GS because it will keep its value - if it were drachmas, the currency would inflate and the play would be less lucrative, which is the only reason Britain is safe from this kind of predatory action, unlike the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain).

You hear the defence, often from people in the industry, that they're smart, they're good at their jobs, they work hard, they're a money making machine, that's what they do, and you must be jealous to attack them, or ignorant - implying that they're doing "God's work" to use Blankfein's phrase, some mysterious mission that we're not able to comprehend.
There's no mystery. These guys simply don't know how to make money. They're not entrepreneurs. They don't create wealth. What are investment banks? They're casinos that gamble. With other people's money. They certainly don't respect their clients, they don't genuinely go out looking for worthy ventures to invest in. They invent derivatives instead. They front-run, they short the things they're telling their clients to buy - all this is well-documented.
So no, they're not smart, they're autistic. They're not a money-making machine, they're a money-sucking parasite. They contribute nothing to society but bribes and corruption. They would not exist were it not for their buddies at the Fed and in government, and in their alliance with the military elements.

Indeed, bad as GS are, the major problem is central banks, particularly Fed policy, and indeed the existence of the Fed. Everything else, all the corruption, is just a symptom of that. You give a select few unelected people complete control of the money supply, and what do you expect? It will only all come to a head when everyone realises that dollars are just that - pieces of paper, backed by a government's promise which, as we all know equals... zero. It never ceases to amaze me just how long these fiat currencies have managed to last. I guess it's a mass hypnosis, a big waking dream, or nightmare, that we're all a part of and are on the verge of waking up from.

The trigger could be anything. Drop in the dollar. Chinese revaluation. Commercial property bubble burst. It doesn't matter - the system is so out of balance now, the pinprick to the bubble could come from anywhere, at any time. And the longer this eerie calm exists, the bigger will be the pop.

Friday 23 April 2010

Police state

Alex Jones is on a roll.

Thursday 22 April 2010

Recent headlines

Two equally remarkable observations regarding the subtleties of the environment and its myriad complexities:

Volcanic ash cloud: Global warming may trigger more volcanoes
Climate change could spark more ''hazardous'' geological events such as volcanoes, earthquakes and landslides, scientists have warned.

So far, so much hot ash. But how about this:

Women to blame for earthquakes, says Iran cleric
Women behaving promiscuously are causing the earth to shake, according to cleric, as Ahmadinejad predicts Tehran quake

Now that's a bit more plausible, albeit in a metaphorical kind of way.

Wednesday 21 April 2010

History repeats

Max Keiser predicts that the financial terrorists will go after Hollywood next.
I like what he says about Coca-Cola - let's boycott it, until its stock hits zero. There is no more potent a symbol of everything that is wrong with corporatism. The triumph of marketing, psychological manipulation and imperialist muscle over local markets and culture, common sense, and health.
Maybe a Facebook campaign is in the offing?
He also points out that that the French Revolution started just following an Icelandic volcano eruption which affected Europe.
Let's sacrifice some bankers to the gods of the volcano. Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, Jamie Diamond, Hank Paulson, Timmy Geithner, get in. Gordon Brown and Merv King, you too.

Tuesday 20 April 2010

Rich Dad

His books may not be Great American Novels, but his analysis here is spot-on and his recommendation to buy silver compelling. His face when asked if Obama is running the country like a Rich Dad is priceless:

Keep playing

Perhaps the single most damaging thing schools teach is that it's bad and wrong to fail.
But when we learn to walk, we fail over and over before we get it right.
Indeed, without failure we as humans simply cannot truly learn anything.
What we can do is parrot things back - in fact we can get 100% that way in school tests.
In life there's no such thing as 100%, there's only the hustle. If scared of failure, we become paralysed, unable to function with the creativity and originality which is our own peculiar character make up. We keep doing the same things, the safe things, over and over. We specialise. We practice routine. Our minds relax, our hearts stiffen. We practice frivolity without gaiety, and earnestness without seriousness. We forget how the game should be played.

There's no such thing as losing.

Kidz pt 2

Bob Black:
There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories [and schools] came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors; he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

They make us perpetual children

Grown men do not need leaders.
-Edward Abbey

Which explains why it is necessary for "them" to infantilise the general populace.

Universe from nothing

You cannot demand something like volume or time before it came into existence in the first place. Your question is like demanding a temperature below zero. It makes no sense.

Saturday 17 April 2010

Europe factors invisible volcano ash into everyday life

Realising they're getting away with it, the NWOists carry on taking the piss:


Now becomes this.


Questions?

Friday 16 April 2010

Invisible Empire, Invisible Boot

Something fishy about Iceland

Something doesn't feel right. The biggest halting of air flight in Europe since World War 2. Because of a volcano in Iceland? I haven't seen any ash, and I'm in London, so I'm also on the path to the rest of Europe - if there was ash going there it would be passing through here. Nothing - clear skies.
Besides, even if there were traces, surely pilots could avoid them by flying at different altitudes or going by different routes?
Let's take a closer look. Indeed, the ash has not arrived on UK shores yet. In fact, apparently the eruption started on March 20th, so pretty much a full month ago. The ash has been moving very slowly since:



And then we have this:



That's an image from the BBC website, which seems like a work of fiction. Now, it's pretty clear that the ash would not disrupt most flights, except those to Iceland itself. It may become an issue in a few weeks when it's path is revealed, but for now it's not. It's moving very slowly, and can be monitored and avoided.
Why do the New World Orderists want to shut down air travel? Perhaps just to convince themselves that they can. Prison planet, here we are.

Update: check this out:
In contrast to much of mainland Europe, Iceland's airspace remains open.
It's business as usual in terms of flights going in and out of Reykjavik, says the BBC's Ann Courtney from the Icelandic capital. Flights are departing for the US, Glasgow and Dublin. Some flights have been cancelled as a result of the airspace closures elsewhere in Europe though, she adds.
Read that again. Yes, it really is all a giant hoax.

Thursday 15 April 2010

The CIA is the world's dealer

More on the Afghan heroin thing:

There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan, where the first local drug lords on an international scale – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abu Rasul Sayyaf – were in fact launched internationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunction with the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While other local resistance forces were accorded second-class status, these two clients of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely because they lacked local support, pioneered the use of opium and heroin to build up their fighting power and financial resources. Both, moreover, became agents of salafist extremism, attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islam of Afghanistan. And ultimately both became sponsors of al Qaeda.

CIA involvement in the drug trade hardly began with its involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war. To a certain degree, the CIA’s responsibility for the present dominant role of Afghanistan in the global heroin traffic merely replicated what had happened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.
Thank God for those gracious folks at Langley. Doing their bit for geopolitical stability.

Scene from the Death Star

Or is it Pyongyang? Or Wolverhampton?

Wednesday 14 April 2010

A side effect is suicide

Always good to hear Gerald Celente in a healthy time slot. On the horizon: 2nd 9/11, Greatest Depression, 3rd World War. I'll put the kettle on.

Golden future

Cash is king, the king is dead?
Cash to be used in fewer than half transactions by 2015:
Cash will be used in fewer than half of all transactions by 2015, according to an official report which suggests plastic is rapidly overtaking notes and coins in consumers' pockets.
Given that cash these days isn't even cash, but a fiat currency, why not have it in digital form rather than coins and notes?
The danger of course here is the merging of a government database with your line of credit or access to your funds. Pretty soon the government will have complete control over every aspect of your life.
The only way out of this, of course, and really the one thing that will irreversibly destroy governments and elites worldwide, is a private cyber-currency, as outlined by Rees-Mogg and Davidson in The Sovereign Individual. It will almost certainly be backed by gold, and will be an encrypted script of some kind, representing deposits of gold in a storage facility somehwere.
Naturally, such an operation would need to be located outside the major nations which have shown themsleves to be totalitarian - the USA and Britain being the most obvious examples. The company would need to be located in some "offshore" nation and would need to be agile, re-locating elsewhere fast if necessary.
As to where the gold is stored, there is always going to be risk here. You would need to make sure the gold is deliverable - none of this "theoretical" exchangability for gold. So places like Geneva, South Africa may do to start. But you can never be completely assured theat the gold will not be confiscated by government. You would have to then spread the gold out amongst several jurisdictions, as diverse as possible to spread risk.
The private company would then charge maybe 0.001% per transaction, or some such. Compared to inflation rates of 10% or so, that's a different ball game. Plus, the currency itself never loses value, so does not skew incentives or create uncertainty.
Such an operation would require no controls, no disclosures required - it would be anonymous, transparent, completely open.
It would be an immensely dangerous operation. You would have to remain a mystery, because you would be a major target for bribery or assassination.
This is shown by the US government's ruthless crushing of eGold - read this, it's an eye-opener.
Jackson, 51, is the maverick founder of E-Gold, the first-of-its-kind digital currency that was once used by millions of people in more than a hundred countries. Today the currency is barely alive.
As Jackson envisioned it, E-Gold was a private, international currency that would circulate independent of government controls, and stand impervious to the market’s highs and lows. Brimming with evangelical enthusiasm, Jackson proclaimed it a cure for the modern monetary system’s ills and described it at one point as “an epochal change in human destiny” and “probably the greatest benefit to humanity that’s ever been thought of.”
Over the next few years, Jackson drained his retirement accounts, sold his medical practice and charged credit cards to raise more than $1 million to nurture the fledgling venture. Cynics might have considered him just another internet hustler looking to strike it rich, but those who knew him say he was a true believer. “He truly thinks that having a gold-backed currency is what’s needed in the world,” says James Clement, a libertarian attorney who met Jackson in 2003. “I don’t think anyone would have stuck with it … other than that he thinks it’s extremely important and somebody has to do this.”
Amen to that.
Eventually it went bad - the Feds got wind of the information he could offer them, and despite his full co-operation they eventually indicted him on money laundering charges.
“It never crossed my mind that anyone could seriously want people like us in prison,” he says. “But I guess my bigger fear was that we would go bankrupt, and there would be a train wreck of people that had trusted value to us who couldn’t get their money.”

Timberlake, the economics professor, is convinced that Jackson’s radical dream, his goal of upsetting the economic status quo and overturning the government’s monopoly on money, is what really got E-Gold targeted.

“No matter how innocent a person is you can always find a law that government agents can use to convict him of something,” Timberlake says, “And this is a perfect example of it. Any time anybody tries to produce money, the federal government is going to be on their tail.”

Every time I hear this story, I feel a little bit sick. Hatred for the state, central banks, politicians, and sorrow for this guy who had exactly the right idea, but the naivety to believe the government was there to support and protect him. I mean, the poor guy still believes it was him that did wrong:
Jackson, who always considered himself one of the good guys, acknowledges today that he might have done a better job of policing his system from the start. “In hindsight there’s any number of things that would have been a smarter or better way of approaching things,” he says.
He maintains that he would have done what authorities now want him to do, if they’d just worked with him to devise a plan, instead of treating him like a criminal.

Now, after all of E-Gold ups and down, Jackson hasn’t lost his optimism for the venture, or his knack for florid prose. As he wrote on his blog last year, he looks forward to transforming E-Gold from a marginal player to a respected institution — one, he says, that will serve to “advance the material welfare of mankind.”
I'm afraid not. Not any more.
So the question remains, when will the next eGold pop up, and will it survive?

Argie Bargie

Doug Casey's favourite place, Argentina, has reverted to their 2001 ways:
The Argentine state is taking control of the country’s privately-managed pension funds in a drastic move to raise cash.
Credit Default Swaps on Argentine bonds reached 2,900. Do we have a Latin Iceland on our hands, but with 100 times the population?
The Merval index of stocks in Buenos Aires is down 12.6pc as I write. Telecom Argentina took it badly (-25pc), so did Grupo Financiero Galicia (-13pc) and Banco Frances (-20pc).
I suppose Doug would say:
Sometimes people, who haven’t been there, look at me in a questioning way when I mention Argentina, because they’ve heard of the government. But it’s not evil, or dangerous, like many. It’s just corrupt, incompetent, and inefficient — which is actually much better than the alternatives, when we’re talking about governments.
I'm not sure, but I suspect that South America has held out against the rest off the global elitists for some time. I hope so, at least. I'd like to think that there's a corner of the world which offers safe haven. If so, then the fortunes of the Latins could be on the up, whilst the West slips into chaos and ruin.

Faber on gold

Marc Faber:
"My sense is that if gold went lower than US$1,050, the Chinese would come in and buy some. I think they're waiting for lower prices. We're just coming out of a seasonal period where gold is often weak, and heading into a period of seasonal strength, so it's possible gold may start outperforming here."

Tuesday 13 April 2010

Polish crash cont.

Well at least someone's come out with their suspicions. Not that the story in the Mail gives much of a coherent story. But there is this bit:
But he claims there were also serious language problems between the control tower at the military airport near Smolensk and the crew as the aircraft began its descent, and final approach, 'without our permission'.
So they're saying he went and landed "without permission"? Just because he was, you know, in a bit of a hurry?

Edit: Some thoughts from Webster Tarpley:

Not a new idea

Taken from Taubes:
Farinaceous and vegetable foods are fattening, and saccharine matters are especially so…. In sugar-growing countries the negroes and cattle employed on the plantations grow remarkably stout while the cane is being gathered and the sugar extracted. During this harvest the saccharine juices are freely consumed; but when the season is over, the superabundant adipose tissue is gradually lost.
THOMAS HAWKES TANNER, The Practice of Medicine, 1869
Starch, carbs and sugar make you fat. They're all the same thing, anyway. We've known this for a long time. Note there's no mention of dietary fat, or calories consumed and burned off.

Heroes & heroin

Classic. You actually have to laugh:
KABUL, Afghanistan — The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest.
I like the way they call it "opium", by the way, without once mentioning the more emotive word "heroin."
“Marja is a special case right now,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of the general’s Strategic Advisory Group, his top advisory body. “We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.”
Genius. Just like our own domestic growers of weed. Oh, hang on.
United Nations drug officials agree with the Americans, though they acknowledge the conundrum. Pictures of NATO and other allied soldiers “walking next to the opium fields won’t go well with domestic audiences, but the approach of postponing eradicating in this particular case is a sensible one,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who is in charge of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime here.
Yes I'm sure he is. In charge of getting the drugs and committing the crimes.
The argument may strike some as a jarring reversal; in the years right after the 2001 invasion, tensions rose as some Afghan officials vehemently resisted all-out American pressure to stop opium production.
Yes, but that was when America didn't have a claim on any of the poppies, silly.
Afghanistan now produces 90 percent of the world’s opium. And one way or another the opium trade supports an estimated 1.4 million households in the country, which has a population of 25 million to 30 million. It also provides enormous amounts of money to the Taliban, with a recent United Nations study estimating the insurgents had earned as much as $600 million in taxes from farmers and traffickers just from 2005 to 2008.
Well, 90 per cent is quite a lot. Must be pretty lucrative, really. For whoever's, you know, overseeing the racket.
The farmers themselves do not get rich on the harvest.
Not the farmers, then.

Monday 12 April 2010

Credit Anstalt over again

So, Trichet was right again, I see. He really is a treasure. Tighten your seatbealts, Europe:
[Mr Johnson] likens the crisis to Argentina's slide before default in 2001, a fiasco that led to calls for the abolition of the IMF itself. The Fund concluded in a post-mortem that it should never again throw good money after bad to prop up an unworkable structure with an overvalued exchange rate.
EU officials react with outrage to comparisons with Argentina, but as Mr Johnson says "Greece is far more indebted, is much less competitive in global markets, and needs a greater fiscal and wage adjustment".
Argentina's public debt was 62pc of GDP in 2001: Greece will top 120pc this year. Its budget deficit was 6.4pc: Greece's was 16pc last year on a cash basis. Its current account deficit was 1.7pc: Greece's was 11.2pc in 2009.
Actually, the comparison seems a little unfair on Argentina.
Greece is just "the tip of the iceberg", in the words of China's central bank. The design faults of EMU have left all Club Med trapped in debt deflation or perma-slump. Europe's banks are in turn stuck with fatal exposure. You cannot safely uncork Greece without risking a chain reaction.
This has echoes of Credit Anstalt, the Austrian bank that collapsed in June 1931, exposing the underlying rot of Europe's banks. It set off an earthquake across Germany and Central Europe. Contagion spread back into the Anglosphere, snuffing out the recovery of early 1931.
The global financial order came crashing down. The Great Depression began in earnest.
Oh. Dear.
Yet let us be honest. This is not a bail-out for Greece. It is a bail-out for European creditors that account for most of Greece's €391bn external debt (163pc of GDP). As such it is the first line of defence against greater sums at risk across Club Med. The EU rescue shifts the debacle onto taxpayers in order to prevent a systemic crisis, just like the bank bail-outs after the Lehman failure.
Absolutely - let's face it, a bailout always falls on the taxpayer. Why is that? Well, basically because the government doesn't earn anything. It takes, extorts, and taxes whilst creating nothing. In fact, they create less than nothing, a minus figure, because their business is war, ie destruction.

NB: the insufficient bail-out and subsequent rallying of Greek bonds will give the banking oligarchs another opportunity to go short from decent levels. They really do seem to be intent on creating a financial cataclysm of a kind never seen before.

Hot air breathing dragon

Prick:
Duncan Bannatyne has taken issue with Pakistan-born James Caan's non-domiciled resident tax status and it has now led the fiery Scot to issue an ultimatum to his fellow Dragons – he will not invest alongside any Dragon that does the show using offshore companies.
Trust the BBC to find the leftie entrepreneurs.
I wonder how he feels about the bailouts? You know, the biggest robberies in world history, by an order of magnitude? I have a feeling he might be OK with them.

No MOR

There is no tribe of normal:
People don't coalesce into active and committed tribes around the status quo.

The only vibrant tribes in our communities are the ones closer the edges, or those trying to make change. The center is large, but it's not connected.

If you're trying to build a tribe, a community or a movement, and you want it to be safe and beyond reproach at the same time, you will fail.

Heretical thoughts, delivered in a way that capture the attention of the minority--that's the path that works.

QOTDs

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
- William Faulkner

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
- Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

Sunday 11 April 2010

Polish crash

Is this suspicious or what?
Poland has declared a week of national mourning as the nation struggles to come to terms with the catastrophic plane crash that claimed the lives of the Polish president, his wife and dozens of the country's political and military elite.
The 60-year-old president had been travelling to Russia to take part in official commemorations to mark the 70th anniversary of a massacre of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union.
Along with the president, the crash claimed the lives of the head of the Polish armed forces, the head of the Polish national bank, the deputy foreign minister and a number of army's most senior commanders.
A final fuck you from the Russians?
Bear in mind the true odds of a plane crash. No doubt it can be calculated very accurately, but the figures I've seen range from 500,000 to 1, to 9 million to 1. Furthermore, 95% of crashes have survivors.
The odds are way against this being an accident. By the way this ought to be front page news everywhere. The downplaying of this story by most mainstream UK media outlets pretty much confirms foul play.

Friday 9 April 2010

IMF: Inflation Maximising Fund

Pretty much spot-on.
The joint rescue between the IMF and the EU would turn the Bundesbank into a "money-printing machine" for the purchase of Greek bonds, according to Rundschau. This would breach the EU's 'no-bail clause'.
And I don't blame the Greeks for taking advantage of the system. They invented anarchy too, after all.

Thursday 8 April 2010

Greece invented chaos

Black Friday for Greece tomorrow?

The markets turned against Greece again on Thursday, driving up its borrowing costs to record levels on doubts that the EU will provide a credible rescue.

As usual Trichet's being a cunt:

The yield on the Greek 10-year bonds eased slightly to 7.35pc after Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, said he did not expect Greece to default on its loans and that he is confident the country will solve its own budget problems

Erm, or they're guaranteed to default, JC. You wouldn't be helping anyone to accumulate a short position in euros and euro bonds would you? For example, oh I don't know... Goldman Sachs?

Obama orders murder in public

It was inevitable:
The Obama Administration has taken the unprecedented step of authorising the killing of a US citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, linked to the plot to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day.
The decision is extraordinary not only because Mr al-Awlaki is believed to be the first American whose killing has been approved by a US President, but also because the Obama Administration chose to make the move public.
So they're now confident enough to kill their own people publicly, openly, without trial. The first of many.

Wednesday 7 April 2010

The world turned upside down

Fuck me. The USA financed Hitler. The industrial military complex funded both sides of the war. I'm just going to have to completely re-educate myself, aren't I?
Glad those 15 years of schooling weren't a waste, then.

Shooting yourself with bullets is good for you, too

This is a permit to run a nail salon...

Civil disobedience from Christopher Walken:

“Well, it’s their fault for bringing kids to a battle”

Anger, anyone? I wonder how long Youtube will allow this one to stay up...
Killing children and the press. It's what they do:

Tuesday 6 April 2010

How stimulating

Maybe I've been watching too much Alan Watt lately, but did anyone else notice they're advertising the new Xbox on TV as "The Stimulus Package"?
Pre-conditioning, anyone? Are we about to have another big "stimulus" (robbery)?

Buying food is throwing your money away

According to the Telegraph, UK house prices face a prolonged bear market.
Bear market? See, that's the whole problem. Houses aren't financial instruments. They're not even assets, for Christ's sake - they're places to live. What was ever wrong with renting, anyway?
I still hear the argument that renting is "throwing your money away." Who made this one up, and what were they on? I guess buying food is throwing your money away, too, right? You could have bought some tech stocks instead and got rich!
People say that mortgage payments are the same as rent, so you might as well be buying more and more of it each month, instead of none. Incorrect, for four reasons.
Firstly, mortgage payments are almost always higher than rent payments.
Secondly, as an owner you have to pay: property taxes, maintenance (repairs, utilities replacement, etc), permits, council tax, stamp duty, licences, etc.
Thirdly, you are paying interest on the mortgage to the lender.
Fourth, what if the house stops gaining value on the market? What if it falls, and you end up owing more than the house is worth, with interest rates at sky-high levels? You are screwed, and you will lose the house, and be worse off than if you had been renting all along.

It's pretty clear that real estate is due a fall of around 90% at some point. It's proven remarkably difficult to forecast the timing of the adjustments. In 2003 the Economist magazine was already calling the housing bubble the largest of all time. And then prices continued rising, doubling or even tripling for another five years.
Then they started to pop, and stimulus money arrested it.
But not for long, this time, I think. When the dam bursts, there will be a dollar crisis, followed by inflation, sky-rocketing interest rates, a flood of foreclosures, ghost towns, and nobody will be able to sell their houses anymore. It will be accompanied by the popping of the commercial real estate bubble, of course, which has also started to become apparent, as I've shown in earlier posts.
Naturally mortgage lenders will implode in the hundreds, there will be more cries for bailouts, but the government has no more money.
Then they'll take us to war. There will be riots, and the police and military will be called out to deal with those involved. Lots of deaths.
What can we do? Buy gold. Have an escape route in mind. Spread information any way you can. Get in shape.

Get barred

Modern drunkard:
There are generally two types of drunkards in the world: Those that get 86’d a lot and those who never do. If you’re the latter, you’re missing out on a very special feeling. A man with any character at all must have enemies and places he is not welcome—in the end we are not only defined by our friends, but also those aligned against us. So choose the type of bar you loathe. Get remorselessly smashed on tequila. Let your lizard brain do your talking. Splash the kerosene, drop the match and watch the bridge burn. Few sentences in the English language bespeak a mysterious dark side than: “I’m not allowed in there. And, quite frankly, I don’t blame them.”

Police taser a ten year old

Wow. And just listen to them talk about it, too. A 94-pound kid vs two burly cops. The lawyer guy saying that there's precedent, as if that makes it OK.



As Alan Watt says, what is a taser? It's a cattle prod with wires. They're now using it on you. What does that make you?

Monday 5 April 2010

I'll move straight on to the intravenous injection of mercury, please

Vaccination is slow torture and genocide. In every form. A vaccine has never been proven to have any effect on preventing the spread of disease. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence implicating them in causing degenerative diseases en masse, including autism, cancer, Altzheimers and so on.
In the interview below, Dr Russell Blaylock is a neurosurgeon saying that the whole basis of vaccination is unphysiological, and that this is well-documented in scientific literature. For a start, they cause aluminium accumulation in the body and brain, and can contain a level of mercury thousands of times higher than is considered "safe" (note: real safety is zero, there's no reason for the stuff to be there!). It's difficult to move this stuff once it's there, and they can convert into more toxic forms once inside the body.
Alex Jones mentions that when you question a doctor you will mostly be met by a look as if to say, "well you're not a doctor, you wouldn't understand". There's a doctor goes to my local pub who said as much about some of his patients - "they don't know what the fuck they're talking about." This is the worst form of "expertism", which is something that all fascistic regimes recognise - credentialism, the idea you need a uniform or a document or paper to prove yourself, to prove your value and worth. We all have reason and experience, and we can all use it.
Health in fascistic societies such as ours is actually not about health, it's about disease. You'll notice that doctors and Big Pharma are not interested in making people healthy. They're interested in getting people on treatments, and preventative measures. There's way more money in a recurring treatment than a one-off cure.
One comical fact to come from this interview is that physicians are not actually taught about vaccines at med school - they just get a leaflet like the rest of us. And then most don't bother looking into it themselves.
There has been an explosion in the last 30-40 years of every kind of autoimmune disease. A number of explanations have been made. I'll explain another time how diet is a major factor, including high-fructose corn syrup and low-fat diets. But really perhaps the simplest, most elegant and obvious explanation is vaccination.
Vaccines have been shown to attack cartilage, the brain and lungs. The problem is, the money from Big Pharma means that evidence can't get out. There is circumstantial evidence linking to diabetes and asthma, as well as cancer and neurological disease. In fact, according to Blaylock (and he's not alone), virtually every vaccine is contaminated. He was writing about this ten years ago but more and more people are coming around to it.
They also mention fluoride in the water, which of course does not reduce cavities at all, and is in fact a powerful accumulative poison, which combines with aluminium in body to form a new compound and increases the spread of the flu virus in the body. It produces apathy, and affects the ability to think clearly. It affects fertility, and the use is correlated with the opening up of hundreds of fertility clinics.
They also mention that MSG affects formation of brain, accelerates degenerative diseases & behavioural disorders among children. There is a connection also to suicide and depression.
Blaylock then talks about the Obamacare bill, saying he's read it and notices that they will be grading doctors on how well they do their paperwork, rather than on their results. Sound familiar? Plus they allude to taking control of medical education as well.
Then there's the vaccines given to pregnant women, which are virtually guaranteed to cause damage to the babies, like autism.
They inevitably move onto nutrition by the end, which is as it should be - and I mean real nutrition, not the bullshit peddled by the media (and this relates to my previous post on HIV).He talks about vitamin D3 and its uses for autoimmune problems.
It is a long interview, so if you can only watch part of it, go for parts 2-4 at least.

This is one of those topics where people love to come out the woodwork and denounce anti-vaccinators as being unscientific. Wrong. Vaccines are anti-scientific, and anti-life:



Another little gem:



In 1955, Bertrand Russell, who is from an aristocratic English family with ties to high level British intelligence and the shadow governors (banksters), wrote in his book The Impact of Science on Society:
"I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. There are three ways of securing a society whose population is stable: birth control, infanticide or really destructive wars which creates general misery except for the powerful minority. These considerations prove that a scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government with a monopoly of armed force."
And it gets better:
“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.”

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.”

“Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.”
- Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953, pg 49-50

Still think vaccines are OK?

Democracy is slavery

Aaron Russo. Interesting guy? Understatement. Definitely worth watching all the way through. He's been down the rabbit hole, and now he's here to tell us what's going on. It makes you realise that the world we live in is not what we thought - fact is stranger than fiction, every time.

Dangerous grannies

File under: Couldn't make it up:
A great-grandmother has been ordered to wear an electronic tag for breaching new animal welfare laws by selling a goldfish to a 14 year-old boy.
Joan Higgins, a pet shop owner, was caught selling the fish to the teenager in a 'sting' operation by council officials. She was then prosecuted in an eight month court process estimated to have cost the taxpayer more than £20,000.

Under new animal welfare laws, passed in 2006, it is it illegal to sell goldfish to under 16s. Offenders can be punished with up to 12 months in prison.

Mrs Higgins, 66, who thought the boy was much older than 14, escaped jail but was instead ordered to wear an electronic tag and given a night time curfew. She was also fined £1,000 by Trafford Magistrates Court.

Her son Mark Higgins, who was also proscecuted in connection with the case, described the treatment of his mother as a "farce" and "legal lunacy". He said the punishment she had received would prevent her from attending her weekly bingo sessions as well [as] babysitting her one month-old great grandchild.

Heretic

QOTD

Godin:
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.

More on adolescence

Robert Lindner:
the abandonment of that solitude which was at once the trademark of adolescence and the source of its deepest despairs as of its dubious ecstasies. And frequently this solitude was creative. From it some times came the dreams, the hopes and the soaring aims that charged life henceforward with meaning and contributed to giving us our poets, artists, scientists . . . But youth today has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality. Into these mindless associations the young flock like cattle. The fee they pay for initiation is abandonment of self and immersion in the herd . . . This innovation can yield no social gain. For it is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived. In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass mind that operates—a mind without subtlety, without compassion, uncivilized.
Groupthink, herd instinct, sheeple... The goal of fascism has always been to turn the Many into the Mob.

One from the archives

Financial terrorism by the Anglo-American banking cartel is in full swing these days. The PIIGS are next, Greece first. Remember Iceland? Hannan, back in 2008:
Gordon Brown claims that the expropriation was necessary because Iceland planned to default on British Icesave accounts. How he got this impression is a mystery. Iceland's finance minister made clear in meetings with the British authorities that depositors would be paid. The Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, said in public: “We will immediately review the matter together to find a mutually satisfactory solution. We are determined to make sure that the current financial crisis does not overshadow the important and longstanding friendship that we have with the UK.”
Brown's response? To seize the UK assets, not of the bank that ran Icesave, but of a wholly unrelated bank, Kaupthing, thereby collapsing it(emphasis mine).
And as Obo shows, Ian Parker-Joseph runs with this:
Follow the money my mind keeps telling me, follow the money. Where does government money flow. It flows not only to Local Authorities, but to NGO's, to Quangos, and to the thousands of shady 'Charities' and 'Registered Companies' that NuLab have pumped taxpayers funds into.

And why has Brown gone for Nationalisation of Banks rather than just pumping in liquidity as the experts have advised?

Then on Wednesday of last week a single act added luminescence to that dust ball. The use of Terror legislation to seize the assets of foreign banks.

The questions have been asked, why? The press has been speculative, the government dismissive, the opposition parties silent.

It was that single event that triggered a thought, that misuse of terror legislation that made me ask why? When terror legislation is used, the government can claim that it was invoked in the national interest, it can suggest that for 'security' reasons, we must never know the real truth.

What was the urgency within the Cabinet Office and the Treasury that an 8 man delegation needed to visit Iceland to put the strong arm on the Icelandic government.

What is the truth here? Well we dont know, but we will ask the question:

Is it possible that government or corrupt officials have been running for the past 10 years a massive money laundering scam with taxpayers funds through NGO's, Quango's, Local Authorities, Charities and 'Registered Companies', a scam so big that the financial crisis was going to scupper and expose it, that the beneficiaries were going to lose the money or even worse get found out, or was it that receivers and auditors would be able to unravel it, and that only Nationalisation and the use of terror legislation could keep it under wraps?

Cult ethic

Arbeit macht frei:
We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult.

This relates to my previous post about the ancient intertwining of the parasites: religion and politics. Without these, civilisation as we know it would never have come about. Were they inevitable? Unlikely - it seems they were more like a disease that spread from the Middle East.
Peter Drucker, who loves Calvinism and "management" - admitted that it was not certain that management was a good thing, or productive, or whatever. Well it isn't - the best "management" like "best government" is hands off. Which begs the question - why is it there at all? Because of organised violence, that's why. Giant protection rackets, all over the globe, born of politics and religion. The Invisible Boot.
There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.

Adolescence is a man made problem

Peter Drucker:
PT: All right. I believe you. You'd put off graduate school?

Drucker: I'd put off elementary school if I had my way. I am not a great believer in school. School is primarily an institution for the perpetuation of adolescence.

PT: If you don't believe in school, how would you educate?

Drucker: That is an entirely different question. The thought that school educates is not one I have accepted yet. No, I am not joking.

PT: I know you are not joking.

Drucker: No, I would be much happier if kids at age 17 were young adults among adults. Those who wanted to go back to school could come back later. They would be better students and much happier people. But I don't control the universe. In the university we expect everybody to sit on his butt through the full natural life-span of man-which is about 25. All I can say is, Thank God I am not young. I could not survive this horror. The only thing my secondary school faculty and I were in total agreement on was that I sat too long and did not belong in school. In this we were in total agreement. Otherwise, we had few points of contact. Adolescence is a man made problem. It is not a stage of nature.

Sunday 4 April 2010

"It's important to show that Alan Greenspan is full of it..."

Peter Schiff has been around for a while, but this is the angriest I think I've seen him. And rightly so. Greenspan is an obvious crook, who was bizarrely hailed as some sort of oracle during his tenure. And he won't 'fess up, even now.
If Schiff were to debate Alan Greenspan live on TV, I have little doubt he would tear him to pieces. Let's hope he gets his spot on ABC. You can help - just go to abc.com, at the bottom of the page click "contact us", where you can fill out a form and request they show Peter. Takes 30 seconds max.

Saturday 3 April 2010

9/11

Here's the guy who finally convinced me that 9/11 was indeed an inside job. Webster Tarpley, you the man.

Politics is the second oldest profession

Celente on form, as always.

Friday 2 April 2010

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear

A quick word about the meme that you hear more and more of these days as justification for tearing down freedom:
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from these security measures.
It's a ubiquitous, insidious idea, and has been used to defend everything that's flushing the Western world down the toilet. My local publican said it when policemen came on a random patrol into his pub on a Friday and scared away half his punters. It's what they say about ID cards. It's what they said about airport scanners.
Here's the thing.
It's a false dichotomy. Hide/fear, or Nothing to hide/nothing to fear, is not exhaustive. It takes as a given that intrusion is logically inevitable. It's not, hence it makes the logical fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. That is, there are other scenarios out there. Some of my favourites: innocent until proven guilty, privacy rights, mutual respect, you're our servants not our masters, and leave us alone you fucking cunts.

Liberty vs Safety

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Ben Franklin
This has been quoted in a number of ways. I prefer a variant that goes something like:
If you exchange freedom for security you will lose both.
This cannot be said too many times in this current climate.

Keep failing

Too true:

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called 'neither'. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you'll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that's easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you're after.

And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

Thursday 1 April 2010

Gods before grains

Only just found this, but it's massive. Evidence that religion predates agriculture - a new archaeological find, apparently an 11,500 year-old temple structure:
Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
All that followed. You mean, the bad stuff anyway.
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.
Absolutely. This is huge! Agriculture marks the shift away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, that is to say - freedom. If you grow crops and only crops, you can be extorted. It's the beginning of protection rackets (governments). And it's also, of course, the beginning of the decline in human health and vitality. Bear with me here.
Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.
Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshippers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."
Doesn't that give you hope? Not that I can wait 1000 years personally, nor would I want new gods. Why have any at all?
Now, of course religion came before agriculture. It had to. Why else do it?
By the way, I am more of an anarchist than a libertarian, mainly because I give no credence to the non-aggression principle. Why start with a principle that's going to be violated immediately in practice? Wishful thinking is not a sound base for a philosophy.
Now, religion would have come before agriculture because they would have now have a reason to pray to the gods - for a good crop. Because - and here's the thing -they will have been convinced by the unscrupulous ur-politicians that they ought to.
So religion is to blame. But what came before? Paganism. A more benign form of religion, that religion got all its symbolism from.
So are symbols, including speech, to blame for it all? Not speech, because it's cultural. and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes do it. But how about written words? The ability to think was then equated with fire. And the sun, which is fire, associated with life. Fire of course is crucial, because it enabled us to evolve at all, because we could then eat meat.
It would make sense then that the earliest politicians were those that sought the human race to devolve, by going back to eating vegetation. Just like today. Because God, or Gaia, demands it. I bet it turns out that the Turkish temple dates from a feminised era, ie no logic, only superstition. No strong men or warriors - only sophistry.
A time or place becomes feminised when there is a relative paucity of women, as observed by Roissy in a recent post. This means they become worth more, and can throw their weight around more. Men put them on pedestals, and become weaker. That is, there is a disarming of men, in reproductive terms.
All the ills of the world happen when people come together. When there is centralisation. When they "get on" (ie bitch behind backs) instead of sparring, playing or fighting. When they compromise. When they stay in one place and ossify, instead of moving around - and moving sloooowly, not dashing around like an idiot. When women are treated as more than trophies. When the outside is considered more important than the inside. When the collective good goes above the individual. When words mean more than actions.
Now the obvious retort to all this is - are you kidding? You think we should revert to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and be like all those half-naked people we see in Africa on the TV? What about all the progress we've made since then? Civilisation. The industrial revolution. Health care, consumer goods, education, the finer things in life, the abundant food, culture, music, cars, transport. Science, the amazing discoveries we've made. We've been to the moon, and the bottom of the ocean. We split the atom. Do you think we could have done all this without agriculture?
My answer: yes, and at least 1000 years earlier, and better.
Everything that has come from religion has slowed us down. You think the Church helped in all of this? The Romans? Governments? Even the industrial revolution - do people really believe that those slave factories were necessary? Those furnaces, resembling Dante's inferno? The mines, those hellish pits cratered in humanity?
We would have figured out the use of oil without priests and governments. It is absurd to think otherwise. But instead we have huge oil cartels propping up societies that would be better off dead, for all the joy and vigour they bring to the world. It's true that there's too many people on this planet, but that's because of agriculture, industrialisation and fascism. The thing about agriculture, of course, is that it allowed for an explosion in the quantity of people, at the expense of quality of people. I've met perfectly "normal" people these days who are all for compulsory sterilisation, and I guess that means we're getting close to another holocaust of some kind.
So yeah, let's kill a few million here, a few million there... A bit of sterilisation, bit of NHS style genocide, gas chambers, nuclear bomb here, machete gang there...
Except that the problem wouldn't go away, would it? And besides, it's you next. Does nobody fucking understand that?
So what is it that makes us susceptible to being tyrannised, and can we overcome it? And make no mistake about it - we need to overcome it. Life is not zero-sum. When a trade is made, both people benefit. That's true holistic activity - it's more than the sum of it's parts. That's how we grow - though self-interest, free trade and self-strengthening measures.
So where does the invisible boot originate? From a general disarming by deception.
Is it not inevitable that governments would arise? Rees-Mogg and Davidson
talk about the megapolitics of war, which is to say, nation states had to arise because industry gave way to economies of scale in warfare. To put it another way, it made sense now for countries to fight each other, because we now had planes, and machine guns, and bombs.
But, as I will discuss sometime, economies of scale (and monopolies) only ever arise because of government. And anyway - how about guerilla warfare? America hasn't won a single war since WW2. Unless you count Grenada, which you shouldn't. And then look closer - didn't the USA pretty much fund both sides of both World Wars? Didn't the UK also, for that matter? Aren't they doing the same thing now around the globe? Isn't something funny going on here?
There's no such thing as a nation state - they're for the little people. There's only been a snake-like global elite profiting from war for hundreds of years, without having to get their own hands dirty. Nothing is as it seems, we've all been enormously, hugely misled as to the nature of things. Our understanding of history is warped beyond any semblance of reality.
So we come back to deception. So perhaps its the difference between belief and non-belief. If you believe anything, you can be controlled. If you believe nothing, you can do anything.
From Might is Right:
Belief  is  a  flunkey,  a  feminine — Doubt  is  a creator,  a  master.  He  who  denies fundamentals  is  in  triple  armor  clad.  Indeed  he  is invulnerable. Strong men are not deterred from pursuing their aim by anything. They go straight to the goal, and  that goal  is Beauty, Wealth, and Material Power.
Can we learn not to believe? Or will we continue on the historically extraordinary path of being ruled by the weak and venal?

Ministry of Health

Welcome to our world, USA:
Of 4,670 haemophiliacs, over 2,000 had died as a direct result of being given infected imported blood in what Lord Winston described as the ‘greatest tragedy in the history of the NHS’. Those who are calling for a public inquiry into Staffordshire might care to reflect on the ineffectual outcome of the inquiry which did result from that tragedy.
Friday 5th February, arch Twit of the Government Whips Office, Kerry McCarthy was sent toddling down to the chamber to lodge a formal objection to the Bill being passed without debate.
[The Government] said ‘No’ to an official Government Inquiry, ‘No’ to giving oral evidence to the Archer Inquiry, ‘No’ to implementing the Archer Report in full, ‘No’ to a Commons debate on the Archer Report, ‘No’ to supporting the Contaminated Blood Bill and now it is saying ‘No’ to giving MPs time to even debate the Bill!

Game, set, and match to the Government. 25 years of campaigning hit a brick wall.
There's a response in the comments that could hardly be bettered:
Dear Ms Raccoon,

Thank you for your enquiry.

You appear to be under some misapprehensions about the purpose of the NHS. You believe that it’s supposed to cure people, or something. Things have moved on since that philosophy was in operation, many decades ago. No, these days, the new thinking is that the real purpose of the NHS is to kill people, in as large as numbers as possible.

Let me explain. In the past, people were understood to have become ill as a result of bacterial or viral infection, largely through no fault of their own. But now we know that most disease is caused by ‘lifestyle’ factors. Smoking cigarettes, for example, causes all forms of lung disease, every kind of cancer (and not just lung cancer), all variants of heart disease, and more or less every other disease as well. And if cigarettes don’t cause these diseases, then drinking alcohol does so instead. Or eating meat. Or not getting enough exercise. And these lifestyles are what people have freely chosen to adopt. And so, it’s their own fault if they contract these diseases. And given there’s next to nothing that the NHS can do to cure them, the only option is to assist them to a premature death, which is where they were all heading anyway.

In modern NHS hospitals, doctors all know that anyone who has been wheeled through the front door is someone who has been trying to kill themselves all their lives with smoking, drinking, overeating, sex, lack of exercise, and so on. We simply try our best to help them on their way to the early grave they quite obviously seek.

I agree we’re not very efficient about it. MRSA is a nasty way to die. We’re hoping that new legislation on assisted suicide will allow us to open some assisted suicide facilities in our hospitals. Some people call them ‘gas chambers’, but these have some unfortunate resonances, and so we’re looking for another name for them. But, once the new facilities come online, we’re hoping to boost the NHS deathrate from its current figure of about 70,000 a year to something more like 1,000,000 a year. Patients with ‘lifestyle’ diseases will be able to look forward to rapid and immediate treatment in these new facilities, with waiting times of only minutes or hours.

We will, of course, retain the treatment centres for the old-style bacterial and virally-transmitted diseases. So if you get malaria, we’ll still prescribe drugs for its treatment. However, there is a strong argument that even malaria is a ‘lifestyle’ disease. You get it by going to West Africa. And anyone who gets malaria has only themselves to blame, and must have had a death wish of some sort, which we at the NHS will be more than happy to fulfil.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the new model NHS will be far more efficient than the old one. Hospitals will be much smaller. Wards will be small and very private. Patients will be treated immediately. Much of the old bureaucracy will vanish. Furthermore, the health of the remaining population of Britain will be greatly improved as unhealthy people are removed, and the population of Britain will fall towards sustainable levels. We’re hoping to bring the population down to 5 million or so by the end of the century.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me again if you have any further questions.

Yours faithfully,

Josef Mengele, M.D.

Light beer from a town in Austria...

...aka Fucking Hell:

The EU's trademarks authority has permitted a German firm to brew beer and produce clothing under the name "Fucking Hell". It may be an expletive in English, but in German it could refer to a light ale -- Hell -- from the Austrian town of Fucking. Whether it will be brewed there is another question.

h/t obo