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?

It's not a conspiracy

"I'm not inclined to believe in conspiracies. As anyone who's tried to get three friends to agree on a movie or a dinner knows, it's hard to get even such a small number of people on the same page on something as simple as that – much less hatching plans to take over the world."
Doug Casey

The 25 minutes or so spent interviewing John Perkins is probably the most eye-opening part of Zeitgeist: Addendum. Perkins denies the existence of a conspiracy, because he sees the US as a corporatocracy, in which there is no need for a plot, as politicians like Dick Cheney—who first was a self-professed "public servant" congressman, Secretary of Defense then served as the head of a construction company Halliburton before becoming Vice President—are alleged to be working under the same primary assumption as corporations: that maximization of profits is first priority, regardless of any social or environmental cost.

Yes - that's just it, and what so many miss who do see the wrongness going on. That's one of the things holding up public understanding of this mess: It's not a conspiracy, in the sense that its a deliberate machination of a small number of people, whether it's Jews, masons, the Bilderberg group, or whoever. It's simply the reverse of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" - an invisible fist, or boot, if you like. It's what happens when, instead of the free market or anarchy, you have government, or protection rackets, or myths, or obfuscation and widespread deceit. And these in turn come about when you disarm the mass of people. Turns out you can do it by deceit rather than violence - et voila! Snakes at the top, rather than great men and warriors.

How do we reverse the invisible boot? We re-arm, starting with information, health and strong networks. And the real biggie: courage. For standing aside and watching an evil go on, without intervening, is arguably a greater evil than that which is directly being acted out.

Al Qaeda, aka Toilet Bowl

Turns out that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan:

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US . . ." -- Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook

"Ana raicha Al Qaeda" is colloquial for "I'm going to the toilet". A very common and widespread use of the word "Al-Qaeda" in different Arab countries in the public language is for the toilet bowl.

Which is actually kind of funny.

The revolution is not being televised

It's worth watching Zeitgeist for a number of reasons. Whether you accept all of it or not, it will make you think. It's like the previously-touted Fall of the Republic, perhaps even better.
It's made up of 3 separate parts. Part 1 details the rise of religion, and is eye-opening. Part 2 is a kind of Loose Change thing, casting doubts on the official 9/11 story. But it's more convincing than Loose Change because it omits some of the more sloppy elements of said film, and doesn't bombard you with statements. Part 3 concerns the Fed.
When you take the 3 parts together, there is scope for tying them together in some way. For example, it could have explained how the elite evolved, as a kind of parasitic class that used superstition (at first), then religion, via all sorts of symbols, as a form of control.

Angus Laundrettes

It was on one of my regular strolls through the West End of London that I yet again considered the conundrum that is the Aberdeen & Angus Steak House chain. It's a series of restaurants taking up prime real estate that is yet so bad that Jay Rayner, the restaurant critic of The Observer, has described it as having “the mass appeal of herpes but none of the laughs”.
Indeed, it is almost laughably bad, even looking in from the outside. Tacky, red, and empty.
If this doesn't say money-laundering, I don't know what does. I mean, the biggest lies are always dangled right in front of people noses. Even the KFC at Leicester Square has closed down. Yet the ASHes remain.
Did a little research on this, but didn't find much, just this:

The man behind the 23-strong chain, one Ali Shah, failed to respond to interview requests (he is notoriously media shy). One restaurant expert argued that the chain survived by catering for undiscriminating tourists (which didn't explain the apparent paucity of customers), while another suggested that it was all down to a cheap long-term deal on the premises (for which he had no proof).

In 2003 it was then reported that they had gone into administration. But then:

A Google search subsequently revealed that not only was the Aberdeen and Angus Steak House back - with fresh online reviews from customers complaining about everything from the use of tinned mushrooms to waiters clearing tables before meals had finished - but had been so for five years!

The startling development seems to have been covered by only two publications, one of which was The Estates Gazette, which explained in April 2003 that “a newly created private firm controlled by Noble Organisation, a Gateshead-based amusement arcade operator, had cherry-picked the most prominent Central London sites in the Aberdeen Steak House chain”.

Newly-created private firm? You don't say?

I hit the phones, although it quickly became evident that the Noble Organisation, a family firm best known for owning the Brighton Pier, would make Ali Shah seem as shy as Russell Brand. I rang one of the restaurants and was informed by an Eastern European voice that he was forbidden to give out the head office phone number. Another restaurant gave a contact number, but it was connected to a fax.

I left a message for David Biesterfield on his voicemail and he called back several hours later.

“Do you handle the Aberdeen and Angus Steak House?”

“Yes.”

“How's business?”

“We are upgrading and refurbishing the restaurants.”

“Great. I'm interested in writing about the brand for The Times. Could you give me an idea how it manages to survive, given the - erm - obvious challenges?"

“We're not ready to talk just yet about that particular business.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

So let me get this straight. No attempt at publicising or marketing, no explanation, the most extraordinary secrecy. Does it sound like a free market operation? Or corporatocracy? I'd like to think that it's "honest" money laundering, ie a genuinely private company avoiding the government's theft. But it's too big, too blatant, and has all the usual signs of corporatism.
Naturally there's a deafening silence from the media, and even the reporter above ends with a glib, lame "joke", intended to undermine everything she just said:

But it was when I put the phone down and once again began to wonder whether I should extend my research into paying the firm a visit as a diner that I had a revelation. The Aberdeen and Angus Steak House's longevity is surely due to the low-level but perpetual trade of journalists, all trying to work out how on earth it survives. Think about it. It's the only possible explanation.

Of course, if she had said it's a fraud, an accounting shell, and come up with evidence, she may have ultimately lost her job.

We have nothing to lose but our fun

Just read another interview with the incomparable Doug Casey, about "fun."
Now this is a matter which is perhaps closest to my heart, and I think really encapsulates everything else that is going on in the new world order of things.
Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, sex, drugs, rock n roll. Are there any more glorious six terms in the world? It's pretty much the antithesis of Celente's Harvard, Princeton, Yale, bullets, bombs, banks.
It is these things that make life worth living, along with food. And yet they are regulated, taxed, "educated" against, banned or otherwise pushed underground.
It's a big subject, and I admit it's making me angry just writing this. But I'd like to start with smoking.
Because I suspect that it is not bad for your health. And I know for sure that it should not be banned anywhere.

L: What would you say to people who don't want to breathe other people's smoke? Isn't it a violation of their rights when a smoker fills the air with fumes they don't want to breathe?

Doug: It might be, but it might not. It's a matter of property rights. If someone comes into your house and blows smoke in your face, that certainly is a violation of your rights. But if you're in a restaurant or airplane and the owners are okay with smoking, no one is violating your rights. You have the right to leave or fly another airline, but you don't have a right to impose your personal air quality standards on others, in their places. In these types of situations, it's not the smoke that's the problem, it's unclear property rights.

And I like what he says a bit before that:

It seems like all these chimpanzees get a new meme in their heads, and that becomes the new way it is. Fashion totally overrules principle.

So the smoking ban is a way of pushing bar and pub owners around, and generally undermining freedom, like They do, with a pseudo-scientific idea backing it up, that it's bad for you, and bad for those around you.

Ah yes, the science. Now, I'm reluctant to get into this, because even if they released mustard gas the government would have no business banning them. In fact, if they released mustard gas the government would be making a killing selling them to the CIA and the Taliban. They have no business banning anything.

But I'm becoming more and more aware of a gap in any persuasive evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, or any illness. Diet and food, yes. Smoking? Show me the evidence. Given that we spent 100,000 years in the palaeolithic era sucking up cooking fire fumes, and that the most successful of our ancestors did this most often, I have a hard time with a few lit sticks being a big deal.

There is a caveat to this. I suspect that because of the intervention of government with their regulations and so on into the tobacco industry, it has created large conglomerates (discussed here) and perverse incentives which have decreased the quality of the cigarettes. They add ammonia and god knows what else, in order to get tobacco into the blood stream quicker, and make them burn faster. This is why I smoke roll-ups.

Anyway, there's a great online book by Lauren Colby which is worth a read, and contains a few gems:

There is an Internet News Group devoted to smoking (alt.smokers). Recently, a participant called the Office of Smoking or Health, in an effort to find out how the government arrives at its estimate of 450,000 annual smoking related deaths. After repeated calls to different individuals within the government, it turned out that nobody really knew how the figures are compiled.

Quite frankly, I do not know whether there is a risk to smoking, or not. I do know that "risk" is not the same as causation. Philosophers, from Plato to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, have been fascinated with the word "cause", and have written many learned treatises on the subject. My great grandfather was working on a bridge construction site in 1927, when a careless driver jostled him. My great-grandfather became startled, lost his balance, and fell through a hole in the bridge. Not being able to swim, he drowned in the river below. Was the cause of death (a) drowning; or (b) the actions of the careless driver; or (c) the loss of balance; or (d) the existence of the hole in the bridge flooring; or (e) not being able to swim?

In this book, I have shown that the case for a smoking/lung cancer connection is by no means proven. Certainly, there is no case whatever for a connection between ETS (second hand smoke) and any disease, nor is there are any case for a connection between cigar and pipe smoking and lung cancer. The case for a connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer rests on the slim reed of a science called epidemiology. But all epidemiological studies, predicated as they are on statistics, are subject to so many co-factors and confounding factors as to be subject to innumerable different interpretations.

You may want to refer to this page also, which refers to sources that indicate smoking may alleviate or help prevent Parkinson's, TB, skin cancer, breast cancers, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and others. I'm not saying these claims are "right" either, just that they are hypotheses just as valid as "smoking is bad for you."

A word on that last hypothesis. As Karl Popper has said, a good hypothesis is one that can be falsified. The above hypothesis has been falsified. Take a look at the list of the ten longest-lived people ever, in the world. The top two smoked for most of their lives. And if more information was available (I don't have time to research them all) you would probably find that 5 or 6 of the others also did.

So this falsifies the theory that smoking is bad for you. Well, some may say that they would have lived longer than that if they had not smoked. But that doesn't really wash, does it? We've had billions of attempts at creating long-lived people, and these are the best we've come up with. End of story.

I wouldn't mind if it were just commonly wrongly assumed that cigarettes were bad for you - because they would then have more of an edgy, sexy image, and that would benefit me. But it's that Big Government thing again, sucking all reason to live from our bones. And, scarily, it's happening all over the world.

A nation of racist dwarves

From Christopher Hitchens at Slate:

The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

Yes - you could also say it's fascism taken to its most extreme, and you may say most successful. After all, it's been extant for a long time now.

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Pretty much what I alluded to here. But he's right - it's not socialism, and perhaps never was. It's what we have, and the yanks have - the merger of corporate and political powers, fascism. We can all go this way, in fact the whole world is headed this way. Alarm bells are ringing.

Ivestartedsoillfinish

While I'm on the subject, it's pretty clear what the new verld order would be like. It's Nazism writ large, it's fascism. It's the UN blown up to unmanageable proportions. And to the extent it is like the UN, it's what the UN have been up to in macro form:

• sex-slave trade in Bosnia
• refugee extortion racket in Kenya
• cover-up of sex-for-food scandal in West Africa
• complicity in massacres
• oil-for-food

Then there's what they haven't been up to, which is conferring "legitimacy" on anything. Or saving lives. Or, you know, helping. At all.
They're unelected, "connected", they're the "elites", which in a fascistic system means the mediocre, the venal, the unbearable do-gooders, the pompous, the humourless, the automatons, the ahuman, the grey, the anti-life, the cowardly.