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.

Civilization, n.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barbgate: How Western elites opened the gates and what to do about it

Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571, at which the Spanish, 

Venetian and Papal fleets, led by Don Juan of Austria defeated
the Turkish fleet, at Lepanto, near Navpaktos in the  Gulf of 
Corinth. Painting by Sebastian de Caster. Source.

The Slog, or evidence-based bollocks deconstruction (John Ward, Prop.), not only offers among the most entertainingly written political commentaries, but raises real questions never to be seen in the MSM. On occasion, it even attempts the subversive task of answering the questions it raises.

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.

Michael Rivero, Political Commentator, Explains the God Particle and the Epoxy Theory of the Creation

Atom smasher.

Yesterday, I wrote about Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physicist who believes his knowledge of physics and its applications enables him to predict the evolution of terrestrial civilization and its political transformation.

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.

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.

Source (which includes "A pictorial history of really expensive (and failed) attempts to connect with the gods!)

Flake, Fake, Fantasist or Shill? No. 43: Prof. Michio Kaku

Our glorious future, as a Type 1 civilization. (Image source)

Michio Kaku is the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York.

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...
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)

To quote just today's headlines.

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.

Type 1 Culture. (Image source)

Not only are we to have a Type 1 economy and a Type 1 language, "probably English," we are to have a Type 1 culture.

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.

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.

"The [Very Lethal] Values of a Liberal Society"

"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.
.

But the conclusive ethical case against the authors of "Why should the baby live?" is to be found in their names.

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.

The madness of genius: Glenn Gould

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Robert Fulford: Was Asperger' Syndrome the source of Gould's genius?

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. ...

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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:

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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 Iqbal

Updated 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.
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.”

Listen from approximately 8 minutes and 20 seconds in:

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

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

Our Friends and Enemies in the Middle East

Senior Hamas leader rebukes Syrian ally Assad, backs rebels
Al-Qaida urges Muslims to help Syrian rebels
Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood urge 'jihad' against Syrian regime
Syrian security forces destroy Wahabi terrorist gang

France’s secret war against the Syrian people
The ‘Friends of Syria’ is a contradiction in terms
Syria's "friends" prepare military assault

Clinton calls Russia and China 'despicable' for failing to condemn Syria
China calls US critique on Syria "super arrogant"
 SYRIA: US-NATO Behind the Killings of Civilians

WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE WEST SUPPORT US/NATO'S GLOBALIST ENTERPRISE?

By CanSpeccy

What is being fast created is a global empire ruled by the 146 corporate entities that control the bulk of international business activity. The people of the so-called Western democracies go along with this project largely because they imagine it to be a war of the West against the Rest.

This is a pathetic misconception.

The Western nations have already been subjugated. Hence, the fraudulent mainstream media that pumps controlled news and propaganda. Hence the ongoing genocidal program to destroy the nations of Europe as racial, cultural and religious communities. Hence, the progressive collapse in Western living standards. Hence, the reduction of the United States to a police state, where citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, where the president can order the assassination of anyone, including American citizens, where the government declares it vital to grope the genitals of every traveler.

How truly pathetic the people of the Western nations have become.

Libya was occupied and Gaddafi murdered, to Hillary Clinton's ecstatic delight, not because Gaddafi was "killing his own people," but because he put down a violent, US/Nato and Al Qaeda-backed rebellion, intended to restore Libya's resources to the control of the multi-nationals that already own the puppet regimes of Obama, Cameron, Harper, Sarkozy, et al.

The project was a success. Thirty thousand Chinese engineers and technicians were ousted from Libya, an American citizen installed as Libya's Prime Minister and the control of Libya's resources restored to the corporations that, through a network of elite groups meeting at Davos, or less publicly elsewhere, directs the crimes of US/Nato.

Grateful Arabs

ATTACKS ON BRITISH IN LIBYA; KILLINGS AND TORTURE EVERYWHERE

By Aangirfan

War graves in Libya

In Benghazi, in Libya, Commonwealth War Graves have been smashed up by the mad Islamists put into power by the USA and NATO.

Headstones commemorating British and Allied soldiers, killed during World War II, have been destroyed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106230/Insult-WWII-heroes-Graves-British-soldiers-smashed-desecrated-Libyan-Islamists-protest-U-S-soldiers-Koran-burning.html#ixzz1nNBepz3w ...

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THE RCAF: Al-QAEDA'S AIR FORCE

By Stephen Gowans

Canadian fighter pilots “flew 946 sorties and dropped almost 700 bombs” in last year’s NATO intervention in Libya. [1] But rather than enforcing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the Canadian pilots—and their counterparts from other NATO countries—took sides in the conflict, intervening directly on behalf of anti-Gaddafi rebels.

But who exactly were the rebels that NATO sided with?

Private remarks by Canadian military officers, reported by the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, suggest the rebels weren’t everyday people thirsting for democracy, as NATO officials and mainline media made them out to be.

Gaddafi had claimed that “the rebellion had been organized by” Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb “and his old enemies the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group), who had vowed to overthrow the colonel and return the country to traditional Muslim values, including Sharia law.” [2] But this was dismissed by the West as propaganda.

Still, a “Canadian intelligence report written in late 2009…described the anti-Gadhafi stronghold of eastern Libya” where the rebellion began, “as an ‘epicentre of Islamist extremism’ and said ‘extremist cells’ operated in the region.” [3]

And Canadian military intelligence noted “in 2004 (that) Libyan troops found a training camp in the country’s southern desert that had been used by an Algerian terrorist group that would later change its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM.” [4]

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who had “joined the U.S.-backed resistance to the Soviet (intervention in) Afghanistan, fighting alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaeda,” was emblematic of the militant Islamic character of the uprising.

“Mr. Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s and led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in fierce confrontations with Col. Gadhafi’s” government. The LIFG was aligned with al-Qaeda. [5]

Belhaj was “the rebellion’s most powerful military leader.” [6]

This should have aroused suspicions about the true nature of the uprising, but there was an earlier clue that the Benghazi revolt was inspired by something other than a thirst for democracy.

“On Feb. 15, 2011, citizens in Benghazi organized what they called a Day of Anger march. The demonstration soon turned into a full-scale battle with police.

“At first, security forces used tear gas and water cannons. But as several hundred protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked government buildings, the violence spiralled out of control. Demonstrators chanted, ‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.” [7]

Today, Libya is a warzone of competing militias. The Transitional National Council, anointed by the West as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, has no authority.

And now, one year after the uprising began, some NATO officials are admitting that NATO aligned itself with militant Islamic rebels to oust Gaddafi, who US officials had complained was engaging in “resource nationalism,” while oil companies denounced him for trying to “Libyanize” the economy. [8]

According to the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, some Canadian military officers in private refer “to the NATO jets bombing Gadhafi’s troops as ‘al-Qaeda’s air force’.” [9] ...

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EGYPT: A REAL REVOLUTION ON ITS WAY?

By Tony Cartalucci

In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, in what was hailed as the "Arab Spring." It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous." In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," it was stated (emphasis added):

"A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington."

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

"The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. "

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous organizations including NED, NDI, LaHood's IRI, and Freedom House and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. Preparations for the "Arab Spring" began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first "fist" was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

In 2008, Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM's various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO "Otpor" who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a "well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States." After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, a full year before the "Arab Spring," along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while waiting for ElBaradei's arrival at Cairo's airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his "National Front for Change" and began preparing for the coming "Arab Spring."

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm that the US government had trained armies of "activists" to return to their respective countries and enact political "change," when US State Department's Michael Posner stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect."

Video: The Revolution Business. The revolutions are fake, the people behind them illegitimate.

....

That ripple effect of course, was the "Arab Spring" and the subsequent destabilization, violence, and even US armed and backed warfare that followed. While nations like Libya and Tunisia are now run by a BP, Shell, and Total-funded Petroleum Institute chairman and a US NED-funded "activist" respectively, Egypt has managed to ward off and expose the US proxy of choice, Mohammed ElBaradei, who's own movement was forced to denounce him as a Western agent.

By striking at the meddling, seditious NGOs, Egypt seeks to undermine the source of destabilization, the conduit through which US money and support is funneled through to "activists," and expose the true foreign-funded nature of the political division that has gripped the nation for now over a year. ...

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WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE WEST SUPPORT US/NATO'S GLOBALIST ENTERPRISE?

By CanSpeccy

What is being fast created is a global empire ruled by the 146 corporate entities that control the bulk of international business activity. The people of the so-called democracies go along with this project largely because they imagine it to be a war of the West against the Rest.

This is a pathetic misconception.

The Western nations have already been subjugated. Hence, the fraudulent mainstream media that pump nothing but controlled news and propaganda. Hence the ongoing genocidal program to destroy the nations of Europe as racial, cultural and religious communities. Hence, the progressive collapse in Western living standards. Hence, the reduction of the United States to a police state, where citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, where the president can order the assassination of anyone, where the government declares it vital to feel the genitals of every traveler.

How truly pathetic the people of the Western nations have become.

Libya was occupied and Gaddafi murdered, to Hillary Clinton's ecstatic delight, not because Gaddafi was "killing his own people," but because he put down a violent, US/Nato and Al Qaeda-backed rebellion, intended to restore Libya's resources to the control of the multi-nationals that already own the puppet regimes of Obama, Cameron, Harper, Sarkozy, et al.

The project was a success. Thirty thousand Chinese engineers and technicians were ousted from Libya, an American citizen installed as Libya's Prime Minister and the control of Libya's resources restored to the corporations that, through a network of elite groups meeting at Davos, or less publicly elsewhere, directs the crimes of US/Nato.

Sixteen trillion here, fifteen trillion there, soon you're talking real money

Google for "sixteen trillion" and you come up with some scary stuff:

Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion (Ahead of the Heard);
US$ 16000000000000.00 (sixteen trillion) bailout (Pravda Forum);
Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion Dollars (News Goldseek.com);
FED doles out sixteen trillion in bailouts that banks don't have to repay (trulia.com);
The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake (cup.columbia.edu);

and many, many similar stories, although none, it seems, from the mainstream media.

Then comes this speech in the British upper house by Lord James Blackheath, a man of supposedly wide experience of banking and finance, in which the speaker claims to possess documents indicating that the US Fed was a participant in a fraud involving the transfer of $15 trillion dollars from an Indonesian potentate to the Royal Bank of Scotland.



Wow. Beeeeezaaaaaaarrrrre.

However, on the Blackheath claim, at least, we can probably set our minds at rest, for according to Andy McSmith at the Independent the noble lord himself appears to have been taken in by a Nigerian-letter-type scam.

David James was a City businessman commissioned by the Tories, in opposition, to report on ways of eliminating government waste. Last week, the 74-year-old peer was exercised about a story he has picked up that $15trn – that is $15,000,000,000,000 – belonging to "the richest man in the world", Yohannes Riyadi, was deposited in 2009 in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Lord James said he remains baffled after a two-year pursuit of the story, but has all the information on a memory stick, which he is offering to hand over to the Government.

His documents include a letter from the Bank of Indonesia telling him the whole story is a "complete fabrication". He took his concerns to the Treasury minister, Lord Sassoon, who said: "This is rubbish. It is far too much money. It'd stick out like a sore thumb and you can't see it in the RBS accounts."

And an alert Financial Times blogger said that had Lord James googled "Yohannes Riyadi", the first item to come up would be a warning from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that the name is part of an internet scam designed to get money from the gullible. Two agents are trying to trace who is behind it. Perhaps Lord James should offer his memory stick.

But what of Bernanke's "secret," "not-to-be-repayed" "give away" to those undeserving banksters?

Thanks to an amendment by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Wall Street reform law passed in July 2010 directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct "the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve."

"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

But what we also know from Page 137 of the Government Accountability Office report is that by last summer, every cent of the $16 trillion had been repaid. 

So perhaps what is most puzzling about the $sixteen trillion is that the US Fed does not do more to publicize the success of an operation that seems to have cost the US taxpayer nothing, while possibly saving the World from a total banking system collapse.

George de Mohrenschildt, George H.W. Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

George de Mohrenschildt, a millionaire petroleum geologist and acquaintance of George H. W. Bush, befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in the period immediately prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

De Mohrenschildt supposedly committed suicide by blowing his brains out with a 20 gauge shot gun the day, in 1977, he was to be interviewed by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In this video clip, Bill O'Reilly explains the relationship between de Mohrenschildt and the CIA, and the curious circumstances of de Mohrenschildt's death.



In this article, Russ Baker explains why Bill O'Reilly's forthcoming book on the Kennedy assassination is unlikely to tell all.

When Science and Politics Mix

Politics has to do with appearances without regard for reality. Science has to do with reality without regard for appearances. When science and politics mix the results can be remarkable. Politicians prove to be ignoramuses, scientists prove to be liars. Climate science provides a wonderful example. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, intent on making science serve political ends, proves himself to be an ass and the Nobel Peace Prize a joke. Dr. Peter Gleick, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, McArthur Foundation Genius Award winner, intent on shaping public opinion proves himself a thief and liar, and those who backed him, gullible dupes.

Those who care about the perversion of science and wish to avoid being themselves duped by scientists behaving as politicians or politicians falsely claiming scientific expertise should apply to every argument about science the following questions.

Does the argument rest upon observational data?

Are the data disputed by those with expertise to make a plausible judgement?

Do those who advance the argument deal honestly with those who question the data or the logic of the analysis?

On that basis, Al Gore's claim that past increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were associated with increases in global temperature is based on observable facts, and the data are not, as far as I am aware, disputed by qualified experts. However, what the experts do assert is that Gore has the timing wrong, and that the rise in temperature always came before, not after, the rise in carbon dioxide concentration.

Did Al Gore openly acknowledge this criticism and revise his argument accordingly? Apparently not, and it is this failure that confirms that Gore does not seek to reveal the reality of climate change, but to manipulate public perception of climate change for political reasons.

In addition, it is essential to determine whether the data presented in support of an argument are comprehensive or cherry picked.

In his Forbes blog, the above-mentioned Peter Gleick assails those who claim that global temperature is not rising in a piece entitled "Global Warming Has Stopped"? How to Fool People Using "Cherry-Picked" Climate Data.

The current favorite argument of those who argue that climate changes isn’t happening, or a problem, or worth dealing with, is that global warming has stopped. Therefore (they conclude) scientists must be wrong when they say that climate change is caused by humans, worsening, and ultimately a serious environmental problem that must be addressed by policy makers.

The problem with this argument is that it is false: global warming has not stopped and those who repeat this claim over and over are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth.

These liars, ignoramuses and blatant disregarders of the truth Dr. Gleick fails to mention by name, but he aims to refute them with a series of graphs showing in every case, so he claims, a rising trend in global temperature.

In fact, for the past decade, there seems no discernible trend, but Gleick assures the reader that:

The linear trend (the blue line) over the past decade is relatively flat, but in fact it still exhibited a warming trend, despite the temporary cooling forces that are masking the overall warming

which seems something of a contradiction in terms. If the line is flat it is flat. To talk about a warming trend masked by "temporary cooling forces" appears to be sheer sophistry.

And note that the issue of the past decade is central to Gleick's case, for he has set out to refute those who say that despite the current rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, global temperature is not rising.

But if Gleick's argument about the last decade is dodgy, what about the rest of his evidence?

Four other graphs all show a rise in global temperature or global heat over varying time scales going back to 1880.

So do those graphs clinch his argument? Hardly.

As can be seen in the adjacent image, over the last 130 years, global temperature has been quite variable, falling between 1880 and 1910, then rising more or less continuously until 1945, after which it fell slightly before flattening out for 30 years, then rising until around 2000, since when it has been flat.

Does this reflect a close correlation with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration? No.

Does it show, as Gleick asserts, that those who claim global warming has stopped "are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth"? No.

What it does show is that global temperature varies, sometimes rising sometimes falling, and that while the overall trend since 1880 is upward, the trend since 2000, when atmospheric carbon dioxide was rising quite rapidly,  has been flat.

Does this prove that human activity has no effect on climate? Absolutely not. It merely shows that global temperature fluctuates for reasons we do not fully understand.

But if global temperature has, for now, stopped rising, despite the continued and increasing human-caused rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, does that prove that human activity cannot harm the planet? Far from it.

Neither the climate "warmists" nor the warming "skeptics" know enough about the vagaries of the Earth's climate to make any definite statement. All that one can reasonably say is that changing the chemical composition and spectral properties of the atmosphere in an uncontrolled way, as we have been doing with increasing effect, does not seem like a very good idea, and could eventually have clearly apparent and seriously harmful environmental consequences. On the other hand, we cannot simply shut down the fossil-fueled economy overnight, without wiping out most of humanity.

What then to do? The answer is simple, though not easily accepted. Leave climate science to the scientists, and be very skeptical of everything the politicians, including those in white coats, have to tell you about the environmental, social and economic implications of the science.

But we have to act, many will assert. That is true, but we have to act in a state of uncertainty. There are risks whatever course is taken. We must hope for intelligent political decisions base on first-rate, unbiased science, not panic-driven actions serving ulterior political motives.

For now, neither the physical evidence nor the theoretical considerations suggest imminent danger. Viewed in the long-term, we are currently in a pleasantly warm and perhaps all too brief interglacial and seem in greatest danger not of harmful warming but of catastrophic cooling.

Greening the Sahara

Tensegrity sphere

Are you anxious to feed the hungry, combat the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and see the desert bloom? If so, this piece, Greening the Sahara, outlining a scheme to do just that by irrigating the ten million square kilometers of the Sahara desert using solar power as the sole driving energy source may be of interest.

The scheme involves the use of geodesic spheres as gigantic, lighter-than-air cloud-containment structures that carry water-saturated air from the coast inland on the sea breeze, deposit the water over the desert during the cool nighttime and return to the coast either on the predawn land breeze or perhaps drawn by camels.

I had intended to add a cost analysis of the scheme but it is some months since I worked on the idea and the details about cost now escape me. As I recall, however, the thing was not altogether unfeasible. In fact, with some ingenuity in the construction of the hot air dirigibles, it seemed to me that the idea could payoff quite well.