Britain's finance minister is due to present a budget. Much of the chatter this non-event evokes concerns the need for fiscal responsibility, curbing deficits, thinking even about paying down debt.
But this is twaddle.
Western economies are mired in debt because Keynesians avow the absurd belief that deficit spending during a depression, as now prevails throughout most of Europe, will restore full employment in open economies with a minimum wage of five, ten, or twenty times the basic wage paid throughout most of the third World.
This is fuddle duddle and bunkum, but it means that debt is not, according to the official line, the problem, it is the solution.
But the more Britain and other Western nations stimulate, the more cash will flow offshore for the purchase of very cheap foreign-made stuff, and the more the trade deficit will balloon. Unemployment will hardly be touched except through unsustainable expansion in the public sector and the retail distribution of mainly imported goods including the foreign made components that make up most of the added value of domestically built cars, computers and other high-tech products.
In fact, unless we are to assume that governments are run by dolts and morons (a possibility that cannot be entirely excluded), driving up the trade deficit must be the objective, as it is the inevitable result, of US and European policies of fiscal stimulus.
At some point, as trade deficits explode, the Renminbi:dollar peg will fail and the mighty dollar and the already sinking Euro will plunge in value relative to the currencies of Third World nations with trade surpluses. At that point, all the wonderfully cheap stuff and all the wonderfully cheap offshore services provided by four billion third-worlders employed, heretofor, at a small percentage of Western wages will suddenly become unaffordable expensive in the West.
The sooner this happens the better it will be for the tens of millions of unemployed Americans and Europeans. In the meantime, take a look at corporate profits: they're at all time highs, reflecting the low cost of offshore labor and the depression of wages in the West due to high unemployment and mass third-world immigration.
So, yes, the budget to be introduced by Britain's Chancellor, George Osborne, will fail totally to address the problem of budget and trade deficits, but a Chancellor's gotta appear to be doing something.
Meantime, folks should get used to the fact that to compete with the Third World, Third World wages are necessary and therefore inevitable.
And what that means is that if you're not one of the one percent, your standard of living will soon be a whole lot lower.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Ten Self-Evident Facts About Obama
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| Image source |
1. President Obama is a puppet who is owned by the parasitic financial community.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
2. President Obama is dedicated to the overthrow of America's constitutional republic.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
3. President Obama is a proponent of the fraudulent endless war on terror because he wants to use the global chaos to finalize the covert establishment of a global fascist government.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
4. President Obama is the new face of imperialism in Africa, and is militarizing the continent under the political cover of humanitarianism.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
5. President Obama is motivated to help Israel attack Iran and start World War III.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
6. President Obama is pursuing policies of de-industrialization and coercive population control against America, and other developed nations.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
7. President Obama is trying to disarm the American people with fear-mongering tactics, and using back-door tricks to get around public opinion and Congress.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
8. President Obama is destroying self-sufficient and independent communities inside the United States to prevent active economic and political resistance against the criminally hijacked federal government, multinational corporations, and Agenda 21.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
9. President Obama is impeding the economic recovery of the United States and advancing the financial oligarchy's criminal plan to bankrupt the country totally and set up a military dictatorship.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
10. President Obama is waging a total war against humanity for the benefit of his Satanic Globalist Overlords.
This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.
Madness was not the reason for Afghanistan massacre
Robert Fisk
The Independent, March 17, 2012: I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.
This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.
"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?
The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.
Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are." ...
Read more
The Independent, March 17, 2012: I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.
This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.
"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?
The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.
Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are." ...
Read more
Saturday, March 17, 2012
That explains it then. Obarmy and NutterYahoo are clinically insane
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| States of Madness: A good case can be made that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American President Barack Obama are clinically insane. |
It turns out that the propagandist behind the KONY 2012 campaign is a raving lunatic. But what about the propagandists behind the OSAMA 2001 campaign that brainwashed the planet into thinking that Osama Bin Laden did the 9/11 attacks? Aren't they also raving lunatics like Jason Russell of the KONY 2012 fraud?
Anyone who has seriously studied the psychopathy of the state terrorists and totalitarian propagandists who did the 9/11 attacks knows that they are total nutcases. They are capable of orchestrating mass murder on a large scale, all the while presenting a straight face to the public as if they're not completely insane war criminals.
In the immediate hours and days after the September 11 attacks, propagandist chiefs Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, all appeared on television to put out their twisted narrative that Islamic extremists were responsible for the tragedy, without providing any evidence for their assertions.
The videos that are linked above are of Wolfowitz on PBS, Netanyahu on NBC, and Barak on BBC. Every interview is worth watching. If you are interested in human psychology, history, cultural anthropology, sociology, and media studies, then you will find greater value in this archival footage.
Wolfowitz shared a brief glimpse into his totalitarian vision for America in his interview with PBS's Margaret Warner. He talked about fighting a "broad and sustained campaign," and said the American people were willing to suffer huge casualties because there was a "different mood" in the country after 9/11. Speaking on the attacks he said: "It's massive. And I think that focuses the mind. It makes you think in a different way. It makes you think anew." (5:26 - 5:33). This type of language is rooted not in objective observations of reality, but motivated by radical political beliefs about what kind of society America should be.
Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Netanyahu, Barak, and the other criminal 9/11 conspirators were all determined to transform American and Western public thinking after the 9/11 attacks in a radical and subversive way. And the Western media, which is dominated by state intelligence agencies, was fully on board with the secret totalitarian agenda to brainwash the global public and turn 9/11 into a global myth to awaken the god of war.
II. Ghosts of the CIA: The Mystifying Propaganda Power of Images of Osama Bin Laden And Joseph Kony
Ghosts of the CIA like Osama Bin Laden and Joseph Kony are used to scare Americans into supporting, and, in fact, demanding U.S. military action in resource-rich countries such as Afghanistan and Uganda.
CIA trained terrorists are compared with Adolf Hitler, but the propaganda falls apart because there is no sense of proportion and balance. Comparing Hitler with Kony and Bin Laden is like comparing the Sun of Evil in the 20th century with its distant shadows in the 21st century. Hitler was a Flood of Death during storm season, while Bin Laden was a light drizzle of blood on a sunny day. And he didn't even commit the crime. Shadow elements in the CIA and Mossad did.
Cartoon characters like Osama and Kony are easy to hate because the media and government say they are the bad guys, but there are bigger monsters to slay in this world. Most experts believe that Osama Bin Laden died shortly after the false flag September 11 attacks in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan due to a kidney disease, not on May 1st, 2011, in Pakistan.
News of Bin Laden's original death in late 2001/early 2002 was suppressed in the global media because it would've dampened public enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan and for the war on terror more generally.
III. It's A Mad, Mad World, Just Ask Obama
President Obama has politically exploited the lie that he killed Bin Laden at almost every political opportunity. On Wednesday, March 14, Steve Watson reported in an article called, "Obama Plays Bin Laden Card In Re-election Effort":
"The Obama 2012 campaign has launched it’s reelection campaign by drawing on the mythical version of events played out last year following the supposed assassination of Osama Bin Laden.Barack Obama is clearly a mad politician and a psychological basket case. But Obama is only the tip of the psycho iceberg. Top Western and Israeli political leaders are psychopathic. Harrison Koehli wrote about the personality traits of psychopaths in his article on March 17, 2010, called, "Ponerology 101: The Psychopath's Mask of Sanity," saying:
The campaign will release a 17 minute video later this week, narrated by hollywood actor Tom Hanks, as an opening salvo in the struggle to win a second term for the president."
"Until the publication of Hervey Cleckley's landmark book The Mask of Sanity in 1941 (along with its subsequent editions), there wasn't much agreement on what exactly psychopathy is. The term had come to describe individuals whose emotional life and social behavior were abnormal, but whose intellectual capacities were undisturbed. In contrast to psychotics whose grip on reality is clearly disturbed, as in paranoid schizophrenia, psychopaths are completely sane. They have a firm grip on reality, can carry on a conversation, and often appear more normal than normal. But at the same time, while talking to you about the weather or the economy, they may be deciding the best way to con you out of your life savings or perhaps get you to a secluded location where they can rape or murder you.It is not just lying politicians like Obama, Netanyahu, Clinton, Blair, and Bush who exhibit the traits of psychopathy. Most Goldman Sachs and Wall Street executives are probably psychopaths, too. And even top news executives and anchors at Fox News, CNN, and other state propaganda stations are probably suffering from some type of clinical brain damage. Does anyone think that 24/7 blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are sane? These people are totally nuts.
However, while psychopaths may be intellectually aware that their actions grossly violate the limits of normal human behavior, they lack the emotional engagement with others that normally acts as an inhibitor of anti-social acts, like calculated aggression, intentional intimidation, pathological lying and emotional manipulation. In the course of his (or her, as probably one in four psychopaths is female) development, the psychopath's inability to feel and thus identify with the emotions of others blocks the development of a "moral sense" that allows normal individuals to care for others and treat them like thinking and feeling beings. Psychopaths just don't care. To them people are things, objects. When they're no longer useful they can be discarded or destroyed without a second thought."
After 9/11, America and Western civilization took a nosedive into crazy land. Power possessed demons like Netanyahu, Barak, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Obama took over the planet. As Silver Surfer pointed out in this tweet, "this planet is a fucking #madHouse!!"
Crazy demons like Obama and Netanyahu who answer to their master the Great Satan desire war, chaos, and total destruction. They are agents of the power of Darkness and Hell.
American scholar and theologian Roland Mushat Frye wrote in his book, "God, Man, And Satan":
"So, on his journey towards the seduction of man, Satan courts Chaos, Milton's brilliant personification of anarchy and disorder, with the promise that he will "reduce" the created cosmos "to her original darkness and your sway" (II, 983-84). His power cannot enable him ever to destroy creation, but his perversions of it are precisely in the direction of atomism and anarchy, the reduction of harmony, the extension of discord and decay." ("God, Man, And Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Great Theologians." Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey. 1960. Pg.27-28).If the Great Satan has his way, Iran will be bombed back to the stone age. Both Obama and Netanyahu are preparing to woo their mind controlled flocks to accept an illegal war against Iran based on false pretenses. Philip Weiss wrote on March 15 that, "Israel will attack Iran– and Obama gave tacit approval."
The only counter-attack that global civil society has against a catastrophic world war is public education and massive de-brainwashing of America, Israel, and the West. The truth is a powerful force for good. And it is the most powerful force that we have in the global battle against endless war and totalitarianism.
During the middle of World War II, the White Rose group wrote six leaflets to wake up the people of Germany and inspire them to overthrow their totalitarian state. What they wrote applies to us today. In their first leaflet, they wrote:
"If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon. Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism."We must take these words to heart as America and the West descend further into madness and apocalyptic chaos. All it takes to expose and expel the demons of war out of America, Israel, and the West is excavating the truth and making their crimes against humanity public. They are only safe in the shadows.
The ludicrous notion that 20-year old soldiers from the bottom of western society can win hearts and minds of Afghan tribesmen
By Eric Margolis
March 17, 2012: News of the massacre by an American soldier of 16 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, made me reflect on the 14 wars and colonial conflicts I’ve covered. Horrible but not surprising.
It illustrates what I call the Iron Laws of Colonial Warfare:
Pick a good pretext to invade a country that you covet. France invaded Algeria in 1830 after its ruler supposedly flicked the French ambassador with a fly whisk. During the 19th century colonial era, Britain and France provoked incidents, then claimed their invasions were to bring the light of Christianity and western civilization to Africa and Asia. There was the notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident that sparked the Vietnam War. During the Bush era, spreading democracy was the claim.
Today’s pretext du jour is humanitarian rescue missions. Oil-rich Libya was a prime example. Britain, the US and France stirred up a revolt in Benghazi, then intervened militarily.
Divide et Imperia (divide and conquer) as the Romans said. Pick a disgruntled or rebellious minority, favor them against the majority, making them your allies in colonial rule. Good examples: Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan who first backed the Soviets, then Americans, against majority Pashtun. Tamils in Sri Lanka, favored by the British Empire; or Christian Ambonese in Indonesia used by the Dutch to enforce their brutal rule.
Build a native mercenary army. Imperial Britain used Gurkhas and sepoys in India; the French used Senagalese troops in North Africa; the US employed tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain’s Indian Raj was made possible by scores of cooperative princes. The Soviets ruled Eastern Europe through local communists and their security forces.
Denounce all those opposing foreign rule as: religious fanatics; terrorists; savages; bandits (favorite Soviet term). Western media dutifully denounced independence leaders as "mad mullahs;" "arch-terrorists;", "Hitler on the Nile (Nasser)" or today’s favorite, "Hitler in Tehran."
The longer your occupation army remains, the more it will first despise, then hate the local population, regarding them as savage and sub-humans.
Collective punishments of civilians by angry, frustrated, fearful foreign troops will become the norm. Atrocities will increase. Think of Vietnam’s Mai-Lai massacre, the infamous Amritsar massacre in India, India’s repression in rebellious Kashmir, Japan’s savagery in China, the US marines at Falluja, or Russians in Chechnya.
Colonial occupations increasingly rely on brutality and intimidation, then torture and secret executions. France’s Army was deeply corrupted by its crimes in Algeria and lost its honor. The United States is repeating this terrible precedent in Afghanistan. Italy used concentration camps and poison gas to subdue Libya in the 1930’s. The USSR killed 1.5 million Afghans. All colonial wars are dirty.
Colonial troops find themselves surrounded by a hostile civilian population, under attack from all sides, betrayed even by their nominal native allies. They become increasingly brutalized, vindictive and prone to drug use and rape. Surprise attacks, booby traps, mines and other explosive devices cause widespread fear and depression.
Russia now suffers a lethal heroin epidemic from its 10-year occupation of Afghanistan. The use of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan is spreading back to US law enforcement. Many former soldiers who served in these third world neo-colonial wars return home to join police forces and government agencies.
A sense of betrayal dominates. The Soviet’s supposed local Communist Afghan allies often kept secret links with the mujahidin resistance and warned them of impending Red Army operations. Today, many members of the US-installed Afghan government secretly cooperate with Taliban and its allies.
Foreign occupation and garrisons inevitably spread corruption, prostitution, junk culture, and venereal disease. The foreign troops increasingly keep to fortified bases, sallying out to take reprisals and show the flag. The notion that 20-year old soldiers from the bottom of western society can win hearts and minds of Afghan tribesmen is one of the most ludicrous myths of our times.
Occupying armies quickly transform themselves into colonial forces: lightly armed, mobile police units. When a real war comes, they are not ready to fight a modern opponent. In 1914, Britain’s imperial forces were slaughtered in the trenches of Flanders. The US has reconfigured its army for colonial warfare. But its next war may be with China or North Korea.
Source: EricMargolis.com
March 17, 2012: News of the massacre by an American soldier of 16 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, made me reflect on the 14 wars and colonial conflicts I’ve covered. Horrible but not surprising.
It illustrates what I call the Iron Laws of Colonial Warfare:
Pick a good pretext to invade a country that you covet. France invaded Algeria in 1830 after its ruler supposedly flicked the French ambassador with a fly whisk. During the 19th century colonial era, Britain and France provoked incidents, then claimed their invasions were to bring the light of Christianity and western civilization to Africa and Asia. There was the notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident that sparked the Vietnam War. During the Bush era, spreading democracy was the claim.
Today’s pretext du jour is humanitarian rescue missions. Oil-rich Libya was a prime example. Britain, the US and France stirred up a revolt in Benghazi, then intervened militarily.
Divide et Imperia (divide and conquer) as the Romans said. Pick a disgruntled or rebellious minority, favor them against the majority, making them your allies in colonial rule. Good examples: Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan who first backed the Soviets, then Americans, against majority Pashtun. Tamils in Sri Lanka, favored by the British Empire; or Christian Ambonese in Indonesia used by the Dutch to enforce their brutal rule.
Build a native mercenary army. Imperial Britain used Gurkhas and sepoys in India; the French used Senagalese troops in North Africa; the US employed tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain’s Indian Raj was made possible by scores of cooperative princes. The Soviets ruled Eastern Europe through local communists and their security forces.
Denounce all those opposing foreign rule as: religious fanatics; terrorists; savages; bandits (favorite Soviet term). Western media dutifully denounced independence leaders as "mad mullahs;" "arch-terrorists;", "Hitler on the Nile (Nasser)" or today’s favorite, "Hitler in Tehran."
The longer your occupation army remains, the more it will first despise, then hate the local population, regarding them as savage and sub-humans.
Collective punishments of civilians by angry, frustrated, fearful foreign troops will become the norm. Atrocities will increase. Think of Vietnam’s Mai-Lai massacre, the infamous Amritsar massacre in India, India’s repression in rebellious Kashmir, Japan’s savagery in China, the US marines at Falluja, or Russians in Chechnya.
Colonial occupations increasingly rely on brutality and intimidation, then torture and secret executions. France’s Army was deeply corrupted by its crimes in Algeria and lost its honor. The United States is repeating this terrible precedent in Afghanistan. Italy used concentration camps and poison gas to subdue Libya in the 1930’s. The USSR killed 1.5 million Afghans. All colonial wars are dirty.
Colonial troops find themselves surrounded by a hostile civilian population, under attack from all sides, betrayed even by their nominal native allies. They become increasingly brutalized, vindictive and prone to drug use and rape. Surprise attacks, booby traps, mines and other explosive devices cause widespread fear and depression.
Russia now suffers a lethal heroin epidemic from its 10-year occupation of Afghanistan. The use of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan is spreading back to US law enforcement. Many former soldiers who served in these third world neo-colonial wars return home to join police forces and government agencies.
A sense of betrayal dominates. The Soviet’s supposed local Communist Afghan allies often kept secret links with the mujahidin resistance and warned them of impending Red Army operations. Today, many members of the US-installed Afghan government secretly cooperate with Taliban and its allies.
Foreign occupation and garrisons inevitably spread corruption, prostitution, junk culture, and venereal disease. The foreign troops increasingly keep to fortified bases, sallying out to take reprisals and show the flag. The notion that 20-year old soldiers from the bottom of western society can win hearts and minds of Afghan tribesmen is one of the most ludicrous myths of our times.
Occupying armies quickly transform themselves into colonial forces: lightly armed, mobile police units. When a real war comes, they are not ready to fight a modern opponent. In 1914, Britain’s imperial forces were slaughtered in the trenches of Flanders. The US has reconfigured its army for colonial warfare. But its next war may be with China or North Korea.
Source: EricMargolis.com
Friday, March 16, 2012
UK Gov. Takes Firm Stand Against Display of Christian Faith at Work
Telegraph, March 12, 2012: In a highly significant move, ministers will fight a case at the European Court of Human Rights in which two British women will seek to establish their right to display the cross.
It is the first time that the Government has been forced to state whether it backs the right of Christians to wear the symbol at work.
A document seen by The Sunday Telegraph discloses that ministers will argue that because it is not a “requirement” of the Christian faith, employers can ban the wearing of the cross and sack workers who insist on doing so.
The Government’s position received an angry response last night from prominent figures including Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Read more
Sort of makes you inclined to believe all those wacky conspiracy theories about the World being run by Satanists and extra-terrestrial lizards. Come to think of it, Cameroon does look a bit weird.
It is the first time that the Government has been forced to state whether it backs the right of Christians to wear the symbol at work.
A document seen by The Sunday Telegraph discloses that ministers will argue that because it is not a “requirement” of the Christian faith, employers can ban the wearing of the cross and sack workers who insist on doing so.
The Government’s position received an angry response last night from prominent figures including Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Read more
Sort of makes you inclined to believe all those wacky conspiracy theories about the World being run by Satanists and extra-terrestrial lizards. Come to think of it, Cameroon does look a bit weird.
Yes, he's a reptile, alright. But, no, that's David Cameron's boss.
Coventry blues: A trip to the multicultural Midlands
Theodore Dalrymple
The Spectator, 3 March 2012: He who would see England’s future should be separated for a while from the better parts of London and sent (literally, not metaphorically) to Coventry. There, amid the hideous and dilapidating buildings of a failed modernism, he will see precincts with half the shops boarded up, where youths in hoodies skateboard all day along the walkways, the prematurely aged, fat and crippled unemployed occupy themselves in the search for cheap imported junk in such shops as remain open, and the lurkers, muggers and dealers wait for nightfall.
I stayed four nights in Coventry, in a hotel whose nearest architectural equivalent was the hotel in which I had once stayed in Makhachkala, in ex-Soviet Dagestan. At reception, there were three notices:
SAFE KEYS ARE NOT HELD ON THE PREMISES OVERNIGHT
IMPORTANT NOTICE: NO CASH IS KEPT ON THESE PREMISES OVERNIGHT
THE HOTEL DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY ITEMS LEFT IN THE HOTEL
Thus encouraged, and in need of a drink, I went to the bar called Rogues. At the entrance was another notice: no hoodies or tracksuits. no shorts or baseball caps.
Someone had applied the theories of Lombroso to modes of dress, no doubt correctly.
In the bar, a large screen relayed football and loudspeakers pop music. This meant that anyone who wanted to make himself heard — and there were plenty who did — had to shout. There is nothing quite like shouting to reveal the banality of what is being said.
Read more
The Spectator, 3 March 2012: He who would see England’s future should be separated for a while from the better parts of London and sent (literally, not metaphorically) to Coventry. There, amid the hideous and dilapidating buildings of a failed modernism, he will see precincts with half the shops boarded up, where youths in hoodies skateboard all day along the walkways, the prematurely aged, fat and crippled unemployed occupy themselves in the search for cheap imported junk in such shops as remain open, and the lurkers, muggers and dealers wait for nightfall.
I stayed four nights in Coventry, in a hotel whose nearest architectural equivalent was the hotel in which I had once stayed in Makhachkala, in ex-Soviet Dagestan. At reception, there were three notices:
SAFE KEYS ARE NOT HELD ON THE PREMISES OVERNIGHT
IMPORTANT NOTICE: NO CASH IS KEPT ON THESE PREMISES OVERNIGHT
THE HOTEL DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY ITEMS LEFT IN THE HOTEL
Thus encouraged, and in need of a drink, I went to the bar called Rogues. At the entrance was another notice: no hoodies or tracksuits. no shorts or baseball caps.
Someone had applied the theories of Lombroso to modes of dress, no doubt correctly.
In the bar, a large screen relayed football and loudspeakers pop music. This meant that anyone who wanted to make himself heard — and there were plenty who did — had to shout. There is nothing quite like shouting to reveal the banality of what is being said.
Read more
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
By GREG SMITH
New York Times, March 14, 2012: TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. ...
Read more
Mish: Wall Street Pimps and Whores Story Extends Far Beyond Goldman Sachs
Forbes: Greg Smith isn't a whistleblower
ZeroHedge: Goldman Sachs reassure themselves
ZeroHedge: Goldman Sachs reassures their clients
To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. ...
Read more
Mish: Wall Street Pimps and Whores Story Extends Far Beyond Goldman Sachs
Forbes: Greg Smith isn't a whistleblower
ZeroHedge: Goldman Sachs reassure themselves
ZeroHedge: Goldman Sachs reassures their clients
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Civilizational Collapse: The West Versus the Hypercapitalist Entity
The other day, I wrote of "the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse."
Afterwards, I began to wonder what exactly "civilizational collapse" is, and whether that really is what is happening to the West?
Here I attempt to answer those questions.
But first, what is a civilization?
Many definitions have been offered, but none seems to have been generally accepted.
Yet no one doubts that the term "civilization" as applied to the way of life of a community has meaning. Here, then, I offer the following definition, which corresponds closely with the ideas of the American Historian, Carroll Quigley, author of The Evolution of Civilizations.
If that is civilization, what is "civilizational collapse?"
The dynamics of civilizational transformation follow one of two courses: evolutionary or revolutionary.
Evolutionary change results most often from the emergence of new institutions serving new functions or performing old functions in different ways, or through the corruption of institutions, which then cease to perform their intended purpose well or at all.
Revolutionary transformation usually follows a period of decline due to the failure or corruption of one or more of the institutions comprising the social infrastructure. The immiseration and impoverishment that such decline brings about may result in a violent transformation of the institutions of government, which, in turn, may lead to wholesale reconstruction of other social institutions.
Because the decline or corruption of institutions tends to weaken the war-making power of the state, civilizational decline leads to the eventual subjugation of the state by another, and the wholesale transformation of its institutions under the direction of the conqueror.
This was is how the British and other European empires transformed much of the world, how the United States transformed the civilization of Japan after World War II and how the United States, today, is attempting to transform Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries.
What we see, then, is that Western civilization, which is to say the civilization originating in Europe as a successor to the civilizations of Rome and ancient Greece, which in 1914 extended its influence over most of the globe, is after the catastrophe of the World Wars, once again asserting its influence globally.
Why then talk of civilizational collapse just as Western civilization again aspires to universal domination?
As the Western states seek to project increasing power throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, their own institutions have been infiltrated, and taken captive, by an alien power that I will call the "hypercapitalist entity."
This power, comprising an informal confederation of several hundred business corporations, now owns the governments, the media, and directly or indirectly many other social institutions throughout the West.
It is this entity, the money power, that has transformed the West from a collection of proud, dynamic and competitive nations that regarded individual liberty, democracy and the rule of law as among its highest attainments, into propagandized, humiliated and intimidated units of an increasingly tyrannical globalist empire.
The drive for global empire in the service of the money power has corrupted virtually all the institutions of Western civilization. Governments are democratic only in name; the rule of law gives way to a regime of universal surveillance, detention without charge or trial and assassination by remote control; Christianity, which provided the moral underpinnings of Western government and law, is publicly reviled and officially trivialized; education has become a channel for the indoctrination of a once free people; medicine is complicit in the mass slaughter of healthy children in utero and the institutionalization of euthanasia; the outsourcing of services and the off-shoring of production has robbed tens of millions in the West of their livlihood; the entertainment industry makes fiction into history; the news media make heroes and role models of corporate psychopaths, war criminals and porn stars, while promoting racial, cultural and national self-denigration, and stuffing our immortal souls with gossip, envy and greed; and the state, through taxation and legislation, systematically undermines the family, the essential institution for the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, and ethics.
Western civilization has been largely destroyed from within. Should the West triumph in the domination of the World, it will be a hollow victory, for the people will have been subjugated by a tiny, hidden and criminal elite, who regard humanity, themselves apart, as animals to be bred, culled, and ruthlessly managed as any other domestic creature.
The triumph of the West will mean the death of humanity as we know it.
Afterwards, I began to wonder what exactly "civilizational collapse" is, and whether that really is what is happening to the West?
Here I attempt to answer those questions.
But first, what is a civilization?
Many definitions have been offered, but none seems to have been generally accepted.
Yet no one doubts that the term "civilization" as applied to the way of life of a community has meaning. Here, then, I offer the following definition, which corresponds closely with the ideas of the American Historian, Carroll Quigley, author of The Evolution of Civilizations.
Civilization, n.The central role of institutions in shaping and perpetuating the ways of life that constitute a civilization means that civilizations are coincident with political jurisdictions or states, although many states may share the same basic civilization.
A multiplicity of ways of life constrained and perpetuated by institutions of government, law, religion, education, war, medicine, production and entertainment, by conditions of climate and geography, and by inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, ethics, superstition and prejudice.
If that is civilization, what is "civilizational collapse?"
The dynamics of civilizational transformation follow one of two courses: evolutionary or revolutionary.
Evolutionary change results most often from the emergence of new institutions serving new functions or performing old functions in different ways, or through the corruption of institutions, which then cease to perform their intended purpose well or at all.
Revolutionary transformation usually follows a period of decline due to the failure or corruption of one or more of the institutions comprising the social infrastructure. The immiseration and impoverishment that such decline brings about may result in a violent transformation of the institutions of government, which, in turn, may lead to wholesale reconstruction of other social institutions.
Because the decline or corruption of institutions tends to weaken the war-making power of the state, civilizational decline leads to the eventual subjugation of the state by another, and the wholesale transformation of its institutions under the direction of the conqueror.
This was is how the British and other European empires transformed much of the world, how the United States transformed the civilization of Japan after World War II and how the United States, today, is attempting to transform Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries.
What we see, then, is that Western civilization, which is to say the civilization originating in Europe as a successor to the civilizations of Rome and ancient Greece, which in 1914 extended its influence over most of the globe, is after the catastrophe of the World Wars, once again asserting its influence globally.
Why then talk of civilizational collapse just as Western civilization again aspires to universal domination?
As the Western states seek to project increasing power throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, their own institutions have been infiltrated, and taken captive, by an alien power that I will call the "hypercapitalist entity."
This power, comprising an informal confederation of several hundred business corporations, now owns the governments, the media, and directly or indirectly many other social institutions throughout the West.
It is this entity, the money power, that has transformed the West from a collection of proud, dynamic and competitive nations that regarded individual liberty, democracy and the rule of law as among its highest attainments, into propagandized, humiliated and intimidated units of an increasingly tyrannical globalist empire.
The drive for global empire in the service of the money power has corrupted virtually all the institutions of Western civilization. Governments are democratic only in name; the rule of law gives way to a regime of universal surveillance, detention without charge or trial and assassination by remote control; Christianity, which provided the moral underpinnings of Western government and law, is publicly reviled and officially trivialized; education has become a channel for the indoctrination of a once free people; medicine is complicit in the mass slaughter of healthy children in utero and the institutionalization of euthanasia; the outsourcing of services and the off-shoring of production has robbed tens of millions in the West of their livlihood; the entertainment industry makes fiction into history; the news media make heroes and role models of corporate psychopaths, war criminals and porn stars, while promoting racial, cultural and national self-denigration, and stuffing our immortal souls with gossip, envy and greed; and the state, through taxation and legislation, systematically undermines the family, the essential institution for the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, and ethics.
Western civilization has been largely destroyed from within. Should the West triumph in the domination of the World, it will be a hollow victory, for the people will have been subjugated by a tiny, hidden and criminal elite, who regard humanity, themselves apart, as animals to be bred, culled, and ruthlessly managed as any other domestic creature.
The triumph of the West will mean the death of humanity as we know it.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Life in America on Two Dollars a Day. Or Why American Poverty Will Soon Match That of the Third World
A catchier title might have been Life on Two Dollars a Day: The Third Worldization of America. But one must try always to be accurate, and the Third World was defined by Mao Tse Tung by distinction from the first two worlds: America and its tributaries, the so-called Free World (a term now hardly ever used -- I wonder why), and the Soviet Empire. So although America may come to look like the Third World, it will never be part of the Third World -- at least, not until another country becomes Number 1.
However, that the U.S. is beginning to look like the Third World is confirmed by the latest poverty statistics that show the number of American families with an income of less than two dollars per person per day more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. Note, those are households, not people, and the number of children, alone, who were in extremely poor households rose from 1.4 million to 2.8 million between 1996 and 2011.
These income figures exclude benefits in kind such as food stamps and charitable assistance. Still, a cash income of barely sixty dollars a month plus food and a few hand-me-down garments donated via a community church is hardly enough to enjoy the American way of life, as that term has come to be understood.
How is it that a country with a per capita GDP of $48,100 has a such a large and growing number of extremely poor citizens?
The answer may be complex, but a critical factor is globalization, a momentous transformation of the World's economy set in motion by the 1994 GATT agreement, which opened the West to competition with the teaming masses of Asia where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.
The result, a tsunami of cheap stuff from the Rest to the West: from shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax to cabbages and kings (bronze sculptures, thereof), which wiped out a million Western manufacturing companies and tens of millions of Western manufacturing jobs.
As we've spelled out elsewhere, the unemployment problem will be solved, if not sooner in the way we propose, then later through natural processes of impoverishment and falling expectations.
What this means is that income differentials in the West between the 1 percent and the 99 will be about what we see today in Calcutta or Shanghai, not the relatively egalitarian distribution that all of us who grew up in the West during the early post war period took to be a natural, necessary and permanent economic arrangement.
However, that the U.S. is beginning to look like the Third World is confirmed by the latest poverty statistics that show the number of American families with an income of less than two dollars per person per day more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. Note, those are households, not people, and the number of children, alone, who were in extremely poor households rose from 1.4 million to 2.8 million between 1996 and 2011.
These income figures exclude benefits in kind such as food stamps and charitable assistance. Still, a cash income of barely sixty dollars a month plus food and a few hand-me-down garments donated via a community church is hardly enough to enjoy the American way of life, as that term has come to be understood.
How is it that a country with a per capita GDP of $48,100 has a such a large and growing number of extremely poor citizens?
The answer may be complex, but a critical factor is globalization, a momentous transformation of the World's economy set in motion by the 1994 GATT agreement, which opened the West to competition with the teaming masses of Asia where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.
The result, a tsunami of cheap stuff from the Rest to the West: from shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax to cabbages and kings (bronze sculptures, thereof), which wiped out a million Western manufacturing companies and tens of millions of Western manufacturing jobs.
As we've spelled out elsewhere, the unemployment problem will be solved, if not sooner in the way we propose, then later through natural processes of impoverishment and falling expectations.
What this means is that income differentials in the West between the 1 percent and the 99 will be about what we see today in Calcutta or Shanghai, not the relatively egalitarian distribution that all of us who grew up in the West during the early post war period took to be a natural, necessary and permanent economic arrangement.
Barbgate: How Western elites opened the gates and what to do about it
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Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571, at which the Spanish,
the Turkish fleet, at Lepanto, near Navpaktos in the Gulf of Corinth. Painting by Sebastian de Caster. Source. |
Today, the SLOG poses a question about the ongoing, and ever accelerating decline of the West with such clarity that I have been able to answer it, not only with authority, but with finality and extreme simplicity.
The question, in brief, and stripped of all puns, riddles and scintillating allusions is this:
Europeans, having borrowed their brains out in a many-nation property boom, are now experiencing horrendous debt deflation and mass unemployment.
So, asks the Slog: WTF do we do now? (I paraphrase.)
To which I responded:
You pose the right question, the necessary prerequisite to the right answer, which I am happy to provide.
The reason for mass unemployment in the west is in plain sight. It is the 1994 GATT agreement that opened the Western nations to unrestricted free trade with the rest of the World, which is to say with the teeming masses of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.
The reason for the 1994 GATT round is obvious. "Wages plus profits, together, are always the same," as David Ricardo tirelessly repeated. In other words, cheap Asian labor = max western-owned multinational corporate profits.
In the short term, the resultant mass unemployment can be avoided through mass indulgence in debt, to fuel property booms, retail mall construction and the consumption of wonderfully cheap Chinese stuff. But at the point now reached, the cost of debt service approaches total income and the bubbles burst.
There are thus, now, only two ways mass unemployment in the West can be eliminated. One is by a return to protectionism, which is out of the question, given that we are ruled by corporate-owned governments, e.g., the Golden Sacks, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, wholly-owned-subsidiary, Barak O'Bomber. The other is through wage convergence between the West and the Rest. That's what governments are working on now.
The Germans are doing rather well in this environment (a) by making Germany Europe's center for snapping together components made by cheap labor elsewhere, and (b) by disciplining the workforce, for example, by requiring the unemployed to take -- what do they call them -- mini-jobs, which provide a few hours of work a week for a few tax-free Euros, which provides some on the job work experience and lowers the unemployment rate.
The rest of Europe wants to adjust the easy way, by debasement of the currency. The Brits are going at it full bore, with six hundred billion newly minted and freshly printed quid in the pipeline fueling the mother-of-all government deficits.
The terminally discredited MerKozy want the ECB to follow the same route. Unfortunately, this would contravene the German constitution. Still, what's a constitution, in the post-
George-Wunfinger-Bush era? Only a goddam piece of paper.
But government "stimulus" spending is a bad idea.
Government spending generates wasteful boondoggles such as windmills that pay the British Prime Minister's father-in-law a thousand quid a day, while generating energy at ten times the cost of that from gas turbines, with little or no net saving in carbon emissions.
What's needed is a full employment policy implemented by means of a job subsidy program.
How does that work?
Easily: the Government auctions job subsidies equal to the full minimum wage. There could be an E-Bay style online auction. Employers bid competitively for the subsidies (for new hires). So if the minimum wage is five Euros, or whatever, an hour, the work year is 2000 hours, and on average subsidies sell for half the minimum wage, each subsidy will cost the Gov. five K a year.
Which means a million jobs will cost five billion. So to create, the approximately six million jobs, full- or part-time, that are required in the UK, the program would cost a total of under thirty billion a year, which is practically less than peanuts, for a government that has 120 billion to spend on land-owning friends and relatives -- I mean windmills.
Postscript:
There is a comment at the Slog, providing a mass of facts and figures confirming my claim that German prosperity depends in large part on snapping together components made with cheap labor elsewhere.
What these data show is that Germany prospers by adding value, through design, assembly, packaging and marketing, to goods made in cheap labor areas, which are exported to high-wage markets. In some cases, German companies "export" directly from abroad, "the made in Germany" label being strictly a book-keeping attribute.
The success of Germany's export model depends on international domination in a zero sum game. By definition, this means that Germany's success cannot be emulated by Germany's trade partners.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Michael Rivero, Political Commentator, Explains the God Particle and the Epoxy Theory of the Creation
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| Atom smasher. |
Today, I draw attention to Michael Rivero, a political commentator who believes his knowledge of the uses and abuses of power enables him to interpret the latest findings from the world of experimental physics.
The following quote suggests to me that Rivero's claim is the more credible.
The Big bang is not science. It is religion disguised as science.Source (which includes "A pictorial history of really expensive (and failed) attempts to connect with the gods!)
The claimed Big Bang is inconsistent with Einstein's theory of General Relativity. But the religiously deranged segment of society are unwilling to accept that those child molesters in the funny-looking robes might just be fibbing about a life in Heaven after a lifetime of slavery here on Earth. So there is a great desire to find a magical way around the paradox between Einstein and the theory of a Supreme Moment of Creation (without actually using the "G" word) and that desire now focuses on the Higgs Boson, a mythical construct that allows the universe to be created without any mass at all, thereby evading the unpleasant problems of gravity wells and escape velocities exceeding that of light itself.
It's a lot like epoxy cement. God creates two tubes (one of which contains the Higgs Boson) and tosses them into the universe where the tubes mix to make normal matter with mass and gravity, but not until everything is safely spread out so that the gravity produced by the epoxy, I mean the normal matter, doesn't suck it all back into a black hole.
There have been several claims of having found the Higgs, all of which proved premature, and scientists are always claiming to be on the verge of finding it, their excitement not unlike small children ready to open their Christmas gifts.
But here is the problem. With their latest machines and the energies they are running at, should something pop out that looks like a Higgs Boson (hard to detect because it must be massless to escape the singularity of the proposed Big Bang) there is no proof that it existed before that moment.
Particle Physicists like to joke that studying matter with accelerators is like smashing two mechanical watches together and then figuring out what the watch looked like as the gears fly out. But if you smash those watches together hard enough, individual teeth may fly off the gears and be mistaken for new pieces of the watch even though they never existed as a separate components prior to that collision.
So there is a real risk that physicists may look at a broken tooth from a gear and see a Higgs Boson, because that is what they so dearly want to see, and as Climategate proved, scientists are as biased by their desires as anyone else.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Flake, Fake, Fantasist or Shill? No. 43: Prof. Michio Kaku
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| Our glorious future, as a Type 1 civilization. (Image source) |
He is also an advocate of globalism, which he says, will transform Earth's mishmash of lowly competing civilizations, which he terms collectively a Type Zero civilization, to a Type 1 civilization.
This transition, he tells us, will be a splendid thing, which makes him feel privileged to be alive as it occurs.
But what is this Type 1 civilization to which Kaku looks forward with such delight?
Here's his explanation:
A Type 1 civilization has harnessed its planetary power. They control earthquakes, the weather, volcanoes, they have cities on the ocean. Anything planetary, they control.
A Type 2 civilization is stellar. They've exhausted the power of the planet, and they get their energy directly from their mother star. ... They use the power of the sun to energize their huge machines. Eventually, they exhaust the power of a star, and they go galactic. They harness the power of billions of stars within a galaxy.
Now for example Buck Rogers would correspond to a Type 1 civilization, a planetary civilization. Star Trek and the Federation of Planets that colonize a few star systems, would correspond to a Type 2 [civilization]. And the Empire, of Star Wars, would correspond to a Type 3 civilization.
Now what are we, on this scale? We are Type Zero. We don't rate on this scale. ... But we can calculate when we will attain Type 1 status. In about a hundred years.
So let's get this straight.
Kaku's telling us we're about to mutate from a rubbish world of competing petty and worthless civilizations to the glory of a Type 1 civilization as defined by a classification of civilizations of which there is not a single known example in the entire universe, our own paltry effort here on Earth being off the bottom of the scale.
Ah, but his classificatory scheme is admirably illustrated by examples drawn from the sci-fi fantasy movies. Who will not be satisfied with that?
What's more, Kaku tells us we can calculate almost exactly when we will take the first step up the ladder of heretofore non-existent civilizations.
But can we? Um, well apparently not, for what Kaku offers in verification of his prediction is not calculation but that trusty source of knowledge, the MSM:
Every time I read the newspaper, I see evidence of this historic transition from Type Zero to Type 1.O.K., so we just need to take a daily newspaper and we'll be clued in on the most important event in the history of mankind. Like:
PROTEST FEAR: G-8 MOVED OUT OF CHICAGOLAND...To quote just today's headlines.
GODFATHER 'SURPRISED'...
Netanyahu: Israel 'reserves right' to strike Iran...
REPORT: Israel has already made decision...
HERE WE GO AGAIN: Obama moves to aid Syrian 'rebels'...
Secret Meth Lab Sparked Fatal Fire at Ohio Nursing Home... (Headlines source)
But, wait, we're reading the wrong headlines, Kaku tells us:
I read the newspaper and I see evidence of this everywhere. What is the European Union? The European Union has been formed to oppose Nafta, that is the United States, Canada and Mexico. But why? Because we're seeing the beginnings of a Type 1 economy. Huge planetary trading blocks are the beginnings of a Type 1 economy.Oh, yeah?
Well, O.K., no.
The EU arose out of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, a litle bit ahead of the 1994 Nafta agreement in opposition to which Kaku claims the EU was formed.
And the term "planetary trade block" is self-contradictory. A planetary economy requires global free trade. Trade blocks, are what prevent trade being free and global.
But let's not quibble.
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| Type 1 Culture. (Image source) |
This Type 1 culture will be characterized, so he says, by the universal recognition of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Madonna (Madonna? or Madonna's crotch, which is surely better known than her face).
Then he says:
Some people don't want it. They fear this transition, because this transition is to a planetary civilization tolerant of many cultures. These are the terrorists.Wait a minute, didn't he just talk about integration, and the creation of a global culture? So where's the tolerance for many cultures? Those who seek to preserve their national identity, their race, their culture and their religion under the onslaught of globalization are the folk's Kaku calls terrorists.
Murderous intolerance, it seems, the accepted standard of totalitarian empires, is to be the new tolerance. Although some correctly call it genocide
Kaku offers no reason to suppose that global governance will promote the technological advancement of human civilization. History suggests that it was competition among the nation states, first in Western Europe, then globally, that drove the recent acceleration in technological innovation, not imperialism.
Rome sank into decadence and stagnation, as did the Turkish Empire, the Soviet Union and all the other empires that ever were. Only the American empire remains, and that sinking, punch-drunk, into a financial swamp, ever more at risk of a peasant revolt.
So why will a global empire not stagnate too, the people distracted with bread and circuses or food stamps and TV, while the culture degrades to a cult of foot binding, calligraphy and the study of ancient literature, or if America is the inspiration, Madonna's crotch, breast enhancement and Christmas cleansed of the baby Jeusus and beginning in June.
Kaku, who, by implication, labels me a terrorist and thus, presumably, a legitimate target for assassination by drone or other means, talks, so it seems to me, like a mouthpiece for a fascist global empire, a charlatan spouting pseudoscience in the service of totalitarianism: an example of the total corruption of science by politics as occurs under all totalitarianisms.
But how do you rate him: flake, fake, fantasist, charlatan or shill? Comments welcome.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Why we don't need to slaughter infants
That the World is "overpopulated" is almost universally believed by the inhabitants of the West.
That this is believed at a time when prosperity has never before been so widely enjoyed and when the technology for the production, processing, storage and transportation of food has never been more advanced seems surprising.
True, the rate of human population growth has been rapid over the last several generations and may, therefore, be closer to the upper limit than before. But the limit is not fixed but is constantly advanced as a consequence of developments on a vast technological frontier.
Thus, whether we have already passed the carrying capacity of the planet or have yet to reach even the 5 or 10% mark would seem a question entirely beyond the capacity of the average person to judge.
One must conclude, therefore, that anxiety about population is attributable to anti-growth propaganda featuring more or less bogus claims about "peak oil" and global warming, the deification of the Environment, and as I have suggested elsewhere, the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse, due to a failure, not of the means of physical support, but of will.
But even if it were possible to show, which it is not, that the world is in some sense "overpopulated," there seems no reason for panic.
If the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet, nature will take care of a reduction. No need for a tyrannical elite to dictate who can reproduce and who must die, or to turn morality on its head and announce that killing babies is "permissible".
Overpopulation is part of the normal process of evolution. All animal species at some times exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat. Then the population crashes and the cycle repeats.
One evolutionary biologist, Prof Wynne Edwards, at Aberdeen University, had the idea that animals regulate their numbers to prevent overpopulation, but this proved, by empirical research, to be a fallacy.
The reason that no mechanism preventing overpopulation has evolved is that it is beneficial neither to the individual nor the group and thus provides no basis for natural selection.
The strategy all organisms follow is to multiply to the max which insures that when the population crash comes, those with the most progeny have the best chance of being represented in succeeding generations.
In the past, among humans, the wealthy had the best chance of raising a large family. Because wealth was roughly correlated with desirable physical traits and high mental capacity, the reproductive success of the wealthy was good for the species.
In a competitive world, not all the offspring of the wealthy were able to maintain the wealth and status as their parents. This meant that members of the upper classes were constantly being pushed down into the lower strata of society, which ensured that desirable physical, mental and cultural traits were propagated throughout the population.
Now, under the welfare state, the system has gone into reverse. The most educated women have the fewest children and posterity is disproportionately derived from the lowest social classes. This will have catastrophic consequences for Western society.
That this is believed at a time when prosperity has never before been so widely enjoyed and when the technology for the production, processing, storage and transportation of food has never been more advanced seems surprising.
True, the rate of human population growth has been rapid over the last several generations and may, therefore, be closer to the upper limit than before. But the limit is not fixed but is constantly advanced as a consequence of developments on a vast technological frontier.
Thus, whether we have already passed the carrying capacity of the planet or have yet to reach even the 5 or 10% mark would seem a question entirely beyond the capacity of the average person to judge.
One must conclude, therefore, that anxiety about population is attributable to anti-growth propaganda featuring more or less bogus claims about "peak oil" and global warming, the deification of the Environment, and as I have suggested elsewhere, the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse, due to a failure, not of the means of physical support, but of will.
But even if it were possible to show, which it is not, that the world is in some sense "overpopulated," there seems no reason for panic.
If the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet, nature will take care of a reduction. No need for a tyrannical elite to dictate who can reproduce and who must die, or to turn morality on its head and announce that killing babies is "permissible".
Overpopulation is part of the normal process of evolution. All animal species at some times exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat. Then the population crashes and the cycle repeats.
One evolutionary biologist, Prof Wynne Edwards, at Aberdeen University, had the idea that animals regulate their numbers to prevent overpopulation, but this proved, by empirical research, to be a fallacy.
The reason that no mechanism preventing overpopulation has evolved is that it is beneficial neither to the individual nor the group and thus provides no basis for natural selection.
The strategy all organisms follow is to multiply to the max which insures that when the population crash comes, those with the most progeny have the best chance of being represented in succeeding generations.
In the past, among humans, the wealthy had the best chance of raising a large family. Because wealth was roughly correlated with desirable physical traits and high mental capacity, the reproductive success of the wealthy was good for the species.
In a competitive world, not all the offspring of the wealthy were able to maintain the wealth and status as their parents. This meant that members of the upper classes were constantly being pushed down into the lower strata of society, which ensured that desirable physical, mental and cultural traits were propagated throughout the population.
Now, under the welfare state, the system has gone into reverse. The most educated women have the fewest children and posterity is disproportionately derived from the lowest social classes. This will have catastrophic consequences for Western society.
Friday, March 2, 2012
"The [Very Lethal] Values of a Liberal Society"
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| "Ethicists" declare the killing of this child "permissible," its potential "morally irrelevant." |
After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? is the title of an article in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics by Alberto Giubilini, of the Universities of Milan and Melbourne, and Francesca Minerva, of the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford.
The paper is summarized thus:
By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.The feeble-mindedness and moral nullity of this argument is established by the use of the term "after-birth abortion," a contradiction in terms introduced to establish the moral equivalence of abortion, which is now legal throughout the "liberal" Western world, and infanticide, which is still deemed to be murder.
But this crass effort to manipulate opinion by the misuse of words is totally unnecessary. Self-evidently, it makes no significant moral difference whether a human being is killed immediately before, or immediately after, birth.
But by resorting at the outset of their argument to philosophical fraud, the authors accomplish something that they should, given their beliefs, have avoided at all costs, which is to draw attention to the moral equivalence between the killing of a perfectly healthy infant and the practice of abortion.
As it is, they have succeeded in creating a surge of opposition to the extraordinary evil of murdering, yearly, literally millions of perfectly healthy human beings, with the sole justification that their human potential is of "no moral relevance" -- a morally depraved nonsense that reveals the banality of the evil espoused by the liberal-left that dominates the thought of the Western establishment.
The argument is framed in a vacuum.
No consideration is given to religious scruples, for in the "liberal" West, religion is dead and all but the unenlightened are atheists like the evolutionary biologist and Oxford University professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, for whom Christianity is a contemptible delusion.
No consideration is given to the propagation of the race, for in the "liberal" West, there is no such thing as race, the difference between a Chinese and a Zulu being a purely social construct, notwithstanding the liberal's professed delight in human diversity.
No consideration is given to the broader implications of declaring the murder of a newborn child "permissible." Yet if a newborn child lacks "morally relevant" potential, how many of us can truly claim to be different?
But though the case for child murder is made in isolation, one should be under no illusion about what is to follow. As the corpses of little children pile up, the lack of a "morally relevant" potential will be advanced to justify slaughtering the occupants of every mental hospital and every geriatric ward. This has long been the goal of the Fabian left: to exterminate the halt, the sick, the maimed, and every other kind of "useless" eater.
What passes for "liberalism" provides justification for all the horrors of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. As they plan for the installation of diminutive gas chambers in every maternity ward, the medical "ethicists" are surely already working to justify the profitable recycling of tissues and organs of those of no "morally relevant" potential.
What distinguishes the vileness of this Western liberalism from the vileness of Nazism is that its racism is the the self-hating racism of a dying civilization rather than the predatory racism of an empire. The West has been turned upon itself for the greater enrichment of a plutocratic and globalist elite.
That the liberal-left program for the the annihilation of Western civilization and its people is based on no ethical system whatever, is evident from the way in which its proponents respond to their critics. Thus, according to the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Prof Julian Savulescu, referring to death threats received by the authors of "Why should the baby live?"
... those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society."Bravo. An exemplary refutation of every argument: find a few nutters threatening violence, preferably skinheads with "fuck off" or "Heil Hitler" tattooed on their foreheads, and use them as a pretext for smearing all opponents as far-right-wing extremist Nazi, fascist, racists.
Which explains why the liberal-left cannot do without the fringe right-wingers, such as Britain's BNP, EDL, British Freedom Party, and the dimwitted knuckle-dragging oafs that these parties attract.
But the vast majority of ordinary people who have never acted in an abusive or threatening manner are in total opposition to the legalization of infanticide and the destruction of their own race and nation by a liberal elite that sanctions the slaughter of millions of healthy humans in utero while condemning as racists those who oppose the replacement of their own people and the destruction of their culture through a combination of state promoted abortion, psychological manipulation under the guise of K to middle-age education and mass immigration of people differing from the indigenous population in race, culture and creed.
 |
| Italian Fertility Rate (Replacement rate = 2.1) The recent rise in the Italian fertility rate reflects the fertility of the philoprogenitive immigrants from North Africa and else- where who are replacing the indigenous Italian population. Image source. . |
Their names are Italian and Italy, with a birth rate barely half the replacement rate, leads the World in the globalist-driven program of national self-destruction.
Italy, will endure, and it will be occupied by people calling themselves Italians. But these will be "new Italians," not the descendants of the now dying generation. They will be the descendants of people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, a mongrelized population whose "morally relevant" potential will be defined not by a religion or a culture, but according to the needs of a globalist elite.
This is a point one might have expected the public intellectual (or at least the publicly funded intellectual), Richard Dawkins, to have considered and discussed. But apparently, it is a point too abstruse for Oxford's present-day successors to such moral and intellectual heavyweights as Bishop Robert Grosseteste and C.S. Lewis.
But things may yet go astray. The Muslims who seek to settle and occupy the West could yet come out on top. On top, that is, of the plutocrats now seeking to remodel the World in their own interest. In which case, we can look forward to a future when the Atheist dons of Oxford are replaced by God-fearing mullahs who understand that their powers and privileges depend on caring for, not destroying, the people.
But by then, rather sadly, the European peoples will have been submerged and largely displaced by others.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Four views on democracy
Andrew P. Napolitano: What If Democracy Is Bunk?
What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn't make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way? What if "one person, one vote" is just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy is dangerous to personal freedom? What if democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the foundations of government, and instead turns elections into beauty contests?
What if democracy allows the government to do anything it wants ...
Read more
Peter Hitchens: If not Putin, Who?
I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War.
In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.
He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.
Read more
Winston Churchill: Speaking on the Parliament Bill, the House of Commons November 11, 1947
... No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power. No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise. The whole history of this country shows a British instinct—and, I think I may say, a genius—for the division of power. The American Constitution, with its checks and counterchecks, combined with its frequent appeals to the people, embodied much of the ancient wisdom of this island. Of course, there must be proper executive power to any Government, but our British, our English idea, in a special sense, has always been a system of balanced rights and divided authority, with many other persons and organised bodies having to be considered besides the Government of the day and the officials they employ. This essential British wisdom is expressed in many foreign Constitutions which followed our Parliamentary system, outside the totalitarian zone, but never was it so necessary as in a country which has no written Constitution.
The right hon. Gentleman spoke about Parliament, about the rights of Parliament, which I shall certainly not fail to defend. But it is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament. That is the mistake he made, an important omission. All this was comprehended by those who shaped the Parliament Act and the settlement which developed upon that Act, so that it was never mentioned again for 36 years until now. That is what the Government are seeking to mutilate, if not to destroy. The object of the Parliament Act, and the spirit of that Act, were to give effect, not to spasmodic emotions of the electorate, but to the settled, persistent will of the people. What they wanted to do they could do, and what they did not want to do they could stop. All this idea of a handful of men getting hold of the State machine, having the right to make the people do what suits their party and personal interests or doctrines, is completely contrary to every conception of surviving Western democracy. "Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made," "Some patient force to change them when we will." We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
I remember, many years ago, the late John Morley talking to me about a Greek word, born in the classical cradle of democracy, meaning the wish, the will, and the determination, with special reference to the gods, or to destiny, or, as it was adapted, to the desire of the mass, the inward desire of the mass of the people. This implied, that there should be frequent recurrence, direct or indirect, to the popular will, and that the wish—the —should prevail. That is what the party opposite is afraid of, and that is what this Act is devised to prevent. ...
... all these constitutions have the same object in view, namely, that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group or sect or faction assuming dictatorial power. Single-Chamber Government, as I have said, is especially dangerous in a country which has no written Constitution and where Parliaments are elected for as long as five years. When there is an ancient community built up across the generations, "Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent"," it is not right that all should be liable to be swept away by the desperate measures of a small set of discredited men. "A thousand years scarce serve to form a State." "An hour may lay it in dust." This is the argument against Second-Chamber Government, which is evidently so espoused on that side of the House. In this field the outlook of His Majesty's Ministers is marked by the same meanness of thought and spirit which characterise so much of their action and which destroys their power to help or unite and save our suffering country. They wish to keep the present Second Chamber on the hereditary basis so that they can abuse it, insult it and attack it and yet to cripple its powers, although those powers stand on 36 years of modern Parliamentary title so that, in effect, it is both vulnerable and powerless. That is their tactical method. By this artful, and insincere scheme they hope to substitute for the will of the people the decisions of the Government. This sinister intrigue will be exposed by us, without fear, to the electorate resting upon a universal suffrage. ...
Look around at what is happening every day. The idea of a mandate is only a convention. A band of men who have got hold of the machine and have a Parliamentary majority undoubtedly have the power to propose anything they choose without the slightest regard to whether the people like it or not, or the slightest reference to whether or not it was included in their election literature. I will not expatiate upon the kind of laws they could pass if all is to be settled by a party majority in the House of Commons, under the discipline of the Whips and the caucus. But anyone can see for himself, and it is now frankly admitted on the opposite side of the House, that what is aimed at now is single-Chamber Government at the dictation of Ministers, without regard to the wishes of the people and without giving them any chance to express their opinion. There is, in fact, only one thing that they cannot do under the Parliament Act, 1911, and that is to prolong the life of Parliament beyond the five years' span to which we reduced it in those old days. I must say I am very glad we thought of it.
As a free-born Englishman, what I hate is the sense of being at anybody's mercy or in anybody's power, be he Hitler or Attlee. We are approaching very near to dictatorship in this country, dictatorship that is to say—I will be quite candid with the House—without either its criminality or its efficiency. But let the party opposite not imagine they will rule our famous land and lead our group of Commonwealths and our Empire—or what is left of it—by party dodges and Cabinet intrigues. Lots of people have tried to break the British nation and make it do things it did not want to do. Some were British and some were foreign. They all came a cropper. Do not imagine, I say to right hon. Gentlemen opposite, that you have got this country in pawn. The British are a proud people and, more than any other country in Europe, they have known how to control their rulers. You are our rulers now and we are going to show you that there are limits to your control. ...
Read more
CanSpeccy: The Only Real Breach of the British Constitution
The only real breach of the British Constitution, Lord Salisbury believed, occurs if the government does something of which the great majority of the population strongly disapproves.
For decades, successive British governments have been doing something of which the great majority of the British population strongly disapproves:
Read more
What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn't make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way? What if "one person, one vote" is just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy is dangerous to personal freedom? What if democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the foundations of government, and instead turns elections into beauty contests?
What if democracy allows the government to do anything it wants ...
Read more
Peter Hitchens: If not Putin, Who?
I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War.
In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.
He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.
Read more
Winston Churchill: Speaking on the Parliament Bill, the House of Commons November 11, 1947
... No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power. No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise. The whole history of this country shows a British instinct—and, I think I may say, a genius—for the division of power. The American Constitution, with its checks and counterchecks, combined with its frequent appeals to the people, embodied much of the ancient wisdom of this island. Of course, there must be proper executive power to any Government, but our British, our English idea, in a special sense, has always been a system of balanced rights and divided authority, with many other persons and organised bodies having to be considered besides the Government of the day and the officials they employ. This essential British wisdom is expressed in many foreign Constitutions which followed our Parliamentary system, outside the totalitarian zone, but never was it so necessary as in a country which has no written Constitution.
The right hon. Gentleman spoke about Parliament, about the rights of Parliament, which I shall certainly not fail to defend. But it is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament. That is the mistake he made, an important omission. All this was comprehended by those who shaped the Parliament Act and the settlement which developed upon that Act, so that it was never mentioned again for 36 years until now. That is what the Government are seeking to mutilate, if not to destroy. The object of the Parliament Act, and the spirit of that Act, were to give effect, not to spasmodic emotions of the electorate, but to the settled, persistent will of the people. What they wanted to do they could do, and what they did not want to do they could stop. All this idea of a handful of men getting hold of the State machine, having the right to make the people do what suits their party and personal interests or doctrines, is completely contrary to every conception of surviving Western democracy. "Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made," "Some patient force to change them when we will." We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
I remember, many years ago, the late John Morley talking to me about a Greek word, born in the classical cradle of democracy, meaning the wish, the will, and the determination, with special reference to the gods, or to destiny, or, as it was adapted, to the desire of the mass, the inward desire of the mass of the people. This implied, that there should be frequent recurrence, direct or indirect, to the popular will, and that the wish—the —should prevail. That is what the party opposite is afraid of, and that is what this Act is devised to prevent. ...
... all these constitutions have the same object in view, namely, that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group or sect or faction assuming dictatorial power. Single-Chamber Government, as I have said, is especially dangerous in a country which has no written Constitution and where Parliaments are elected for as long as five years. When there is an ancient community built up across the generations, "Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent"," it is not right that all should be liable to be swept away by the desperate measures of a small set of discredited men. "A thousand years scarce serve to form a State." "An hour may lay it in dust." This is the argument against Second-Chamber Government, which is evidently so espoused on that side of the House. In this field the outlook of His Majesty's Ministers is marked by the same meanness of thought and spirit which characterise so much of their action and which destroys their power to help or unite and save our suffering country. They wish to keep the present Second Chamber on the hereditary basis so that they can abuse it, insult it and attack it and yet to cripple its powers, although those powers stand on 36 years of modern Parliamentary title so that, in effect, it is both vulnerable and powerless. That is their tactical method. By this artful, and insincere scheme they hope to substitute for the will of the people the decisions of the Government. This sinister intrigue will be exposed by us, without fear, to the electorate resting upon a universal suffrage. ...
Look around at what is happening every day. The idea of a mandate is only a convention. A band of men who have got hold of the machine and have a Parliamentary majority undoubtedly have the power to propose anything they choose without the slightest regard to whether the people like it or not, or the slightest reference to whether or not it was included in their election literature. I will not expatiate upon the kind of laws they could pass if all is to be settled by a party majority in the House of Commons, under the discipline of the Whips and the caucus. But anyone can see for himself, and it is now frankly admitted on the opposite side of the House, that what is aimed at now is single-Chamber Government at the dictation of Ministers, without regard to the wishes of the people and without giving them any chance to express their opinion. There is, in fact, only one thing that they cannot do under the Parliament Act, 1911, and that is to prolong the life of Parliament beyond the five years' span to which we reduced it in those old days. I must say I am very glad we thought of it.
As a free-born Englishman, what I hate is the sense of being at anybody's mercy or in anybody's power, be he Hitler or Attlee. We are approaching very near to dictatorship in this country, dictatorship that is to say—I will be quite candid with the House—without either its criminality or its efficiency. But let the party opposite not imagine they will rule our famous land and lead our group of Commonwealths and our Empire—or what is left of it—by party dodges and Cabinet intrigues. Lots of people have tried to break the British nation and make it do things it did not want to do. Some were British and some were foreign. They all came a cropper. Do not imagine, I say to right hon. Gentlemen opposite, that you have got this country in pawn. The British are a proud people and, more than any other country in Europe, they have known how to control their rulers. You are our rulers now and we are going to show you that there are limits to your control. ...
Read more
CanSpeccy: The Only Real Breach of the British Constitution
The only real breach of the British Constitution, Lord Salisbury believed, occurs if the government does something of which the great majority of the population strongly disapproves.
For decades, successive British governments have been doing something of which the great majority of the British population strongly disapproves:
Read more
superstar Angelina ‘Humanitarian’ Jolie is now baying for Syrian blood
Angelina Jolie of the Council on Foreign Relations Conscripted To Sell Genocidal ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ War Doctrine
24 February 2012 14,485 views 45 Comments
by Martin IqbalUpdated Sunday 26 February, 2012. Click here to go to the update.
Angelina Jolie, Goodwill Ambassador to the UN and member of CFR, is now using her profile to promote NATO’s genocidal ‘humanitarian intervention’ war doctrine. In an interview with the Balkans branch of Al Jazeera (NATO’s ‘Ministry of Truth’), Jolie (whose father has been a staunch defender of George W. Bush and who also visited Israel to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba) promotes her new film ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’, a pro-war propaganda set-piece centred around the ‘humanitarian intervention’.
Set in Sarajevo, Jolie’s directorial debut aims to justify NATO’s brutal butchery in Bosnia during the 1990s, and Jolie even specifically refers to Syria in her Al Jazeera interview. She puts forth a string of utterly hollow gripes about the inactivity of the ‘international community’ as civilians suffer and die. Jolie’s selective morality means she doesn’t once mention Libya – a nation now butchered, fractured, and transformed into a torture state by NATO’s genocidal ‘humanitarian intervention’; an estimated 100,000 innocent people slaughtered by the very same ‘international community’.
Most likely reading from her pre-defined talking points, Jolie even calls out Russia and China for using their veto powers against the ever benevolent ‘international community’ vis-à-vis Syria.
“I think Syria has gotten to a point, sadly, where some form of, certainly, where some sort of intervention is absolutely necessary.Listen from approximately 8 minutes and 20 seconds in:
It’s so disheartening, it’s so sad, it’s so upsetting, it’s so horrible, what’s happening…at this time we just must stop the civilians being slaughtered…when you see that sort of mass violence and murder on the streets we must do something. And I know that the countries in the region are pushing as well, so I feel that this is a good global effort, but then there are these countries that are choosing not to intervene and I don’t feel, I feel very strongly that the use of a veto when you have financial interests in a country should be questioned, and the use of a veto against a humanitarian intervention should be questioned.”
Hollywood superstar Angelina ‘Humanitarian’ Jolie is now baying for Syrian blood. The worst part is, due to our pitiful culture of celebrity worship and braindead media consumption, this episode may do great damage to the months of hard work that truth-seekers have done to expose this genocidal doctrine of war.
Update: 26 February, 2012
Yet another celebrity has been conscripted to sell the war on Syria. This time it’s UK singer Joss Stone telling the BBC that “these stories have to be told” otherwise the “massacres will just get worse”.
Via PoorRichard's Blog
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Amazing Ancient Culture of Syria: World's Oldest Known Melody, ca.1400 BC
By Michael Levy
This unique video, features my arrangement for solo lyre, of the 3400 year old "Hurrian Hymn no.6", which was discovered in Ugarit in Syria in the early 1950s, and was preserved for 3400 years on a clay tablet, written in the Cuniform text of the ancient Hurrian language - it is THE oldest written song yet known! Respect, to the amazing ancient culture of Syria...السلام عليكم
Although about 29 musical texts were discovered at Ugarit, only this text, (text H6), was in a sufficient state of preservation to allow for modern academic musical reconstruction.
In short, the Cuneiform text clearly indicated specific names for lyre strings, and their respective musical intervals -- a sort of "Guitar tablature", for lyre!
Although discovered in modern day Syria, the Hurrians were not Syrian -- they came from modern day Anatolia. The Hurrian Hymn actually dates to the very end of the Hurrian civilisation (c.1400BCE) . The Hurrian civilization dates back to at least 3000 BCE. It is an incredible thought, that just maybe, the musical texts found at Ugarit, preserved precious sacred Hurrian music which may have already been thousands of years old, prior to their inscription for posterity, on the clay tablets found at Ugarit!
My arrangement here, is based on the that the original transcription of the melody, as interpreted by Prof. Richard Dumbrill. Here is a link to his book, "The Archeomusicology of the Near East": http://bit.ly/d3aovp
It is played here, on a replica of the ancient Kinnor Lyre from neighbouring Israel; an instrument almost tonally identical to the wooden asymmetric-shaped lyres played throughout the Middle East at this amazingly distant time...when the Pharaoh's still ruled ancient Egypt.
A photograph of the actual clay tablet on which the Hurrian Hymn was inscribed, can be seen here:
http://www.phoenicia.org/music.html
The melody is one of several academic interpretations, derived from the ambiguous Cuneiform text of the Hurrian language in which it was written. Although many of the meanings of the Hurrian language are now lost in the mists of time, it can be established that the fragmentary Hurrian Hymn which has been found on these precious clay tablets are dedicated to Nikkal; the wife of the moon goddess.
There are several such interpretations of this melody, but to me, the fabulous interpretation just somehow sounds the most "authentic". Below is a link to the sheet music, as arranged by Clint Goss:
http://www.flutekey.com/pdf/HurrianTabLtd.pdf
In my arrangement of the Hurrian Hymn, I have attempted to illustrate an interesting diversity of ancient lyre playing techniques, ranging from the use of "block and strum" improvisation at the end, glissando's, trills & tremolos, and alternating between harp-like tones in the left hand produced by finger-plucked strings, and guitar-like tones in the right hand, produced by use of the plectrum.
I have arranged the melody in the style of a "Theme and Variations" - I first quote the unadorned melody in the first section, followed by the different lyre techniques described above in the repeat, & also featuring improvisatory passages at the end of the performance. My arrangement of the melody is much slower than this actual specific academic interpretation of the melody- I wanted the improvisations in the variations on the theme to stand out, and to better illustrate the use of lyre techniques by a more rubato approach to the melody.
All of my 9 albums of mystical, ancient lyre music are now available from iTunes. For full details please visit: http://www.ancientlyre.com
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