The life of Jesus: Does it matter?

...there is not a single fact about Jesus of which we can be certain, other than that, if he actually existed, his name would not have been Jesus...
 

C'mon guys, you try it. (Image source)

The four gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul, which are the core texts of the Christian faith, tell the story of Jesus' life: his birth;  his intellectually precocious youth; his recognition by John the Baptist as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah; his 40-day fast during which he wrestled with the temptations of the Devil and determined the path he would follow; his recruitment of disciples; his journeys throughout Palestine; his teachings and miracles; his conflicts with the Jewish authorities; and finally, his arrest, conviction, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension to Heaven.

Yet there is not a single fact about Jesus of which we can be certain, other than that, if he actually existed, his name would not have been Jesus, since no such name was known to the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine of that day.

There is not a single reference to Jesus in the historical record. The day and month of his birth are unknown. The year of his birth is uncertain, the place of his birth, Bethlehem or Nazareth, is a matter of debate. And the circumstances of his birth and life as recorded in the gospels so closely reflect those of the Persian god, Mithra, and the founders of  other religious cults that the literal veracity of the gospel story seems impossible to accept.

If, then, the story about Jesus is largely if not entirely myth, what possible interest can it have for people of the present day? To many, the answer is "none." On that view, Jesus, if any real person existed who inspired the gospel stories, must have been a mere mortal, born not of a virgin, unable to raise the dead or turn water into wine, who died as any crucified man dies, and whose death was as final as will be yours or mine.

Lev Tolstoy by Ilya Repin (Image source)

That, precisely, was the view of Russia's literary giant, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Yet Tolstoy made Jesus the focus of his religious life. 

Why? 

Because the teachings of Jesus remain a fact undeniable on the basis of any historical evidence. The teachings of Jesus have a validity and significance totally independent of their authorship, and even of how they may have been edited or re-written. One can accept or reject them, but one cannot deny their reality or their force in the world. 

For that reason Tolstoy made his own translation of the gospels from the Greek bible. In it he combined the teachings from the four gospels in a single narrative, which omits reference to the supposedly miraculous nature of Jesus' birth, the miracles Jesus is supposed to have performed and the miracle of his resurrection.This work is available in English translation as The Gospels in Brief.

Tolstoy's rejection of the magic and mystery of Christianity naturally enough alienated him from the Orthodox Church, which excommunicated and anathematized him. His rejection of violence as a means to political ends alienated him also from the dictatorship of the Tsar, which though fearing to take action against Tolstoy himself, persecuted his followers. 

His ideas were equally repugnant to the Communists who claimed Tolstoy as a great patriotic artist while suppressing his religious and political beliefs and punishing those who attempted to put into practice his ethical principles. The Soviets shot more than 100 Tolstoyans, while consigning many more to slave labor camps and mental hospitals. 

An account of the evolution of Tolstoy's religious beliefs is provided in Rosamund Bartlett's fine biography: Tolstoy, a Russian Life.

Honorary President of the Italian Supreme Court to Cite Key US Administration Figures in 9/11 Criminal Case

By Ian Henshall

9/11 Doubts Seep into the Mainstream as Evidence Accumulates

The most significant expert may turn out to be Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the widely respected honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court and legendary mafia hunter who lost his brother in a revenge attack. 

Courtesy: liamscheff.com

 www.Salem-News.com, September 19, 2012: (LONDON) - As the annual 9/11 remembrance draws to a close, the world is as split as ever. Not only on whether the Afghan and Iraq invasions were justified, but between those who accept Washington's official 9/11 story and those who do not.

Under the mainstream media radar, the number of those who do not is steadily increasing, forming substantial majorities in places like Pakistan and Egypt and significant minorities even in NATO's heartland countries, France, the UK and the US itself. The issue is not whether, despite his denials, Osama Bin Laden might have wanted to organise the 9/11 attacks but whether Al Qaeda actually had the capability to infiltrate 19 terrorists into the US, including some very well known to the CIA, and the four highly skilled pilots necessary to pull off the spectacular coup. Up to then Al Qaeda's biggest success was setting off two truck bombs in East Africa. (1)

The stereotype promoted by the corporate media of a 9/11 sceptic, a badly educated redneck watching Fox News in a trailer park, could hardly be further from the truth. The website Patriot's Question 9/11 lists hundreds of University Professors, over a thousand architects and engineers and hundreds of aviation professionals who have spoken out against the official 9/11 story. (8)

The most significant expert may turn out to be Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the widely respected honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court and legendary mafia hunter who lost his brother in a revenge attack. Imposimato has written to the Journal of 9/11 Studies announcing his intention to bring a case before the International Criminal Court citing key figures in the US administration for involvement in the execution of the 9/11 attacks. (2)

Imposimato's take has received indirect support from people close to the heart of Washington's power elite. Richard Clarke, White House anti-terror czar at the time, has confirmed what researcher Kevin Fenton has established based on a meticulous examination of recently released official reports. Someone at the top of the CIA "made a decision" to stand down the FBI and the CIA, allowing the alleged hijackers a free run in the US when they would otherwise have been arrested and the plot foiled. (9)

Meanwhile the 9/11 truth movement continues with a drip, drip of new research. This year we have seen nothing on the scale of the revelations of iron spheres and uncombusted nanothermite in the dust at Ground Zero, strong indicators that the Twin Towers' spectacular collapses on live TV were caused by something a lot hotter than diesel fuel fires. But there are significant developments nonetheless.

Scientist Kevin Ryan was fired from work some time ago after he went public saying his employer Underwriters Laboratories, the company which had certified the quality of the steel used in the World Trade Centre, was involved in creating fake computer simulations to help support the official story that the fires were sufficiently hot to cause the disastrous collapse of three skyscrapers. He has since been beavering away at various aspects of the 9/11 story.

This year Ryan has released an analysis of the changes that the 9/11 events have brought to the US building industry. If the official story is to be believed, 9/11 was an architectural and engineering disaster. Buildings expressly designed to withstand a high speed jet impact and subsequent fire failed spectacularly. This disaster should have led to an urgent and exhaustive inquiry with many action points for other buildings of the same construction. Instead, says Ryan, nothing like that happened.The US engineering community has acted as though it does not believe the official 9/11 story any more than the alleged conspiracy theorists in their trailer parks. (3)

Meanwhile the US Public Broadcasting System became the conduit for the latest film from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth: Explosive Evidence - The Experts Speak Out, with downloads nationally pushing Bill Clinton's Convention Speech into third place, an astonishing success for a topic the mainstream media as usual were entirely deaf to (4). The film has a section in which psychologists and counsellors explain why the media and sections of the public are so reluctant to doubt an official story that might, from another government, seem highly unlikely if not absurd. The reasons come down to trauma, belief in authority and a phenomenon psychologists call cognitive dissonance. For every trailer park dissident there are several other citizens with a very strong desire to believe in authority, especially after the terrifying circumstances and unprecedented media barrage of 9/11. Confronted with contradictory evidence some time later, such people suffer from painful cognitive dissonance and often resort to denial.

An example of cognitive dissonance occurred last week on CNN when Piers Morgan tried to dismiss Jesse Ventura, a maverick politician and broadcaster. Morgan clearly knew little about the issue and could only say the suggestion of an inside job was "preposterous". The studio audience applauded Ventura. (10)

Another 9/11 researcher who goes by the name of Shoestring has presented a very detailed analysis of the various emergency offices that failed on the morning of 9/11. Probably the most shocking was the FBI's emergency management office in Washington, designed to cope with up to five major emergencies at one time, which knew nothing more than the TV channels. In the light of so much other bizarre activity - at the CIA, on the building investigation, the failure of Washington's Andrews Airbase to scramble any of its fighters for nearly two hours - the official 9/11 story of coincidence, surprise and cock-up begins to look less likely than some of the alternatives. (5)

But surely the post 9/11 war against Al Qaeda has produced a network of detainees, led by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who have corroborated the official 9/11 story of a plot hatched in the caves of Afghanistan? Even the supine 911 Commission was disturbed by the CIA's refusal to allow them any contact with KSM or even his interrogators. As suspicions of systematic torture were confirmed in media leaks, the CIA illegally destroyed most of its own records, presumably to save its officers the worry of future prosecution. This ugly picture of detainees tortured into corroborating the official 9/11 story has been enhanced by another recent revelation from the Defence Department Inspector General: detainees were given truth drugs, or to put it in official language were drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information". (6)

Last year's bombshell from the White House anti-terror czar at the time has produced a sequel. Richard Clarke has focused on the role of the CIA saying the then boss George Tenet must have known about the shocking unexplained decision to block three FBI field offices from acting against several 9/11 hijackers. Most researchers agree that the CIA's dedicated Osama Bin Laden Unit, kept secret until some years after 9/11, is the best place to start asking questions. Up to now they have focused on Bush favorite and torture advocate Cofer Black who oversaw the unit before moving on to make money as a principal in Blackwater, the mercenary company in Iraq.

Recently another CIA official has come into the frame: Black's deputy in the CIA's counter terror center, Enrique “Ricky” Prado. A book based on sources in the Miami Vice Squad describes Prado's apparent double life as CIA official and a member of Florida's Cuban mafia. The story was ignored by much of the mainstream media but carried in detail in Wired magazine, the Daily Beast and the UK's Daily Mail, which operates under stringent libel laws. (7)

When will the truth be known? Many agree that the planet's intelligence services probably already know. Iran's President Ahmedinajad's UN General Assembly speech calling for a new investigation into 9/11 was greeted with predictable outrage and the corporate media applauded when the NATO countries angrily walked out. But most countries did not walk out and with global opinion ever more sceptical as time goes by, this could prove a bad omen for Washington.

(1) In the UK a poll by ICM taken last year showed only seven percent were fully confident they had been told the whole story of the attacks, while in France a large minority thought the US government was involved in the attacks. Middle East experts as diverse as Alan Hart and Mohamed Heykal have both said that any Al Qaeda plot would have immediately been known to the many intelligence services who had agents in the ramshackle setup.

(2) http://www.journalof911studies.com/

(3) http://digwithin.net/2012/09/07/are-tall-buildings-safer/. Note: the media have featured someone claiming to be from the original engineers team who has said that planners never imagined a plane crash into the WTC but this is contradicted by the written record and there is scant evidence that this individual was in the role he claims.

(4) digitaljournal.com/article/332051

(5) http://shoestring911.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/why-were-us-intelligence-facilities-in.html

(6) http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/u-s-drugged-detainees-to-obtain-false-confessions.html(7) http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/28/did-a-cia-agent-work-for-the-mob-excerpt-from-evan-wright-s-new-book.html(8) For an interesting review of some of the questions raised see

http://www.WantToKnow.info/9119-11_official_story_questions

(9)  Fenton's book is "Disconnecting the Dots", published by Trine Day

(10) http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2012/09/18/piers-intv-jesse-ventura-911.cnn

Until Blogger Restores Our Side-bar -- If Ever

Here are a couple of excellent links.

The Game's Afoot -- Still

Winter Patriot's 100 plus episode Sherlock Holmes And The Alderney Street Mystery, in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the murder of Garth Williams, the Welsh math wiz and cryptanalyst who became a victim of the British secret state appeared to have reached a brilliant conclusion. However, Sherlock, assisted by his more intelligent older brother has now resumed the chase in pursuit of criminals behind a much broader conspiracy involving both 9/11 and the death of National Football League star Pat Tilman who supposedly died as the result of "friendly fire" in Afghanistan.

Did you ever want to know about those subsidies for coal and oil while alternative energy was starved of funds? Well here's the scoop from the Climate Resistance blog. : It’s a F*ct – We’re F*cked

Pursuing Truth on the Kennedy Assassinations

By Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

LewRockwell.com, September 19. 2012: Everyone over the age of 60, and many over age 55 who were in grade school at the time, remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard what happened to President John F. Kennedy, on Friday, November 22, 1963 at 12:30 PM (CST). I was finishing lunch with other students in the dining room at Harvard Medical School’s Vanderbilt Hall lined with portraits of past professors when a student ran in and yelled, "President Kennedy has been shot."

I began studying and collecting books on the Kennedy assassination after reading Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, published in 1967. My interest in the subject is heightened by having personally known two physicians involved in President Kennedy’s care whose observations are pivotal to the case, Admiral George G. Burkley (1902-1991) and Dr. Malcolm Perry (1929-2009). Admiral Burkley was the President’s personal physician. He was the only physician who was with Kennedy in Dallas and also at the autopsy, done at a Navy hospital in Bethesda, MD. Dr. Perry performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy shortly before he died. He was the first physician to speak publicly about the President’s injuries in a televised news conference an hour after his death.

My family lived next to Dr. Burkley and his family on the grounds of the Newport Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island when I was a teenager, sharing a duplex that housed its Chief of Medicine, Dr. Burkley, and Chief of Surgery, my dad. His teenage son, George W., and I became friends. (We once sailed up Narragansett Bay in his Snipe sailboat and camped out on an uninhabited island. This adventure was cut short the next morning, however, when a Navy launch arrived to tow us back home, sent by our fathers after a hurricane warning was issued.)

Dr. Perry and I worked together at the University of Washington (UW). He moved to Seattle in 1974 with Dr. Tom Shires, Parkland Hospital’s Chief of Surgery, who came to Seattle to be Chairman of Surgery at the UW School of Medicine. Dr. Shires brought a group of surgeons from Parkland Hospital with him, which included Dr. Charles James (Jim) Carrico, who, as a surgical resident, was the first doctor in the emergency room to examine Kennedy after he was shot. Dr. Perry and Dr. Shires operated on Lee Harvey Oswald, but the bullet Jack Ruby shot into Oswald’s abdomen tore his aorta and vena cava and he bled to death on the operating table before they could save him. Dr. Perry was a vascular surgeon. We would perform surgery together on patients with a thoracoabdominal aneurysm. (I was the last UW faculty surgeon that Dr. Shires hired before he moved to Cornell in 1975. Drs. Perry and Carrico stayed, with Dr. Carrico becoming the UW’s Chair of Surgery in 1983, to 1990).

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren assured the American public and the world that there was no conspiracy. It said a lone assassin shot three bullets at the President from a window in the Texas School Book Depository, above and behind the Presidential limousine as it proceeded down Elm Street in Dealey Plaza. No one else planned or participated in the attack, not the Russians, Castro, anti-Castro Cubans, or organized crime – or any officials in the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex either, for that matter.

The Warren Commission concluded that one bullet hit Kennedy in the back, exited out through his neck, and went on to inflict all the injuries Governor Connally sustained sitting in a jump seat in front of the President. This bullet, as postulated in the Commission’s "single bullet theory," went through Connally’s chest, in-and-out of his wrist, and landed in his thigh. A second bullet missed the limousine, ricocheted off a curb and grazed a bystander. The third bullet the sniper shot hit the President in the head, killing him. The Commission concluded that the evidence compiled in its 888-page Report and 17,816 pages of Hearings and Exhibits (in 26 volumes) proves that a 24-year-old ex-Marine with Marxist sympathies, Lee Harvey Oswald, was the assassin. Likewise, the Commission found that nightclub owner Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.

At the first press conference after Kennedy died, a newsman asked Malcolm Perry, "Where was the entrance wound?" Dr. Perry informed the American public and the world that, "There was an entrance wound in the neck…It [the bullet] appeared to be coming at him…," which on repeated questioning he twice more affirmed and the world’s press duly reported. This did not sit well with the Warren Commission’s view of the matter. Testifying before the Commission several months later, however, Dr. Perry supported its contention that the bullet shot into Kennedy’s back had exited his neck, not entered it. Accepting the proposed one-bullet, two-victim hypothesis as true, Dr. Perry agreed that the bullet wound he observed in the neck "certainly would be consistent with an exit wound."

Fifteen years later Dr. Perry told me in a surgeon-to-surgeon private conversation that the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck was, without question, a wound of entrance, irrespective of what he had told the Warren Commission....

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See also:
Why Three Kennedys Were Assassinated: Lew Rockwell interview with Dr. Miller

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

Noam Chomsky "Debunks" 9/11 and JFK Murder After 7.00 minutes: (re: Kennedy assassination) "Who knows. Who cares. Plenty of people get killed all the time. What does it matter if one of them happened to be John F. Kennedy?) Yeah, right, Noam.

Losing Our Turbulence

By John Derbyshire

Taki's Mag, September 13, 2012: The country of my birth no longer much resembles the country of my birth, mainly as a result of mass immigration. Britons were already grumbling about the influx of Third Worlders in my student days back in the mid-1960s.

Thanks to a nifty little app put online by the Office for National Statistics over there, I see that the grumblers of those days were straining at gnats. Until 1983 the net flow was actually outward, with more Brits emigrating than there were foreigners going in for settlement. The inflow wasn’t so Third-Worldy, either: In 1975, the first year for which we are given immigrants’ “countries of last residence,” the top three were Australia, the USA, and Iceland.

Then, after straining at gnats for a few years, the Brits began swallowing camels. The big inflows started after the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997. Numbers peaked at a stupendous 591,000 in 2010 (top countries of last residence: India, Pakistan, and Poland). Last year, we are told, they declined somewhat.

As two dissident parliamentarians have pointed out—and proved, with an extraordinarily successful online petition—the British public is fed up with immigration.

They were fed up in the 1960s, though, as Enoch Powell’s famous 1968 speech showed. Not only did their fed-upness achieve little; thirty years on, immigration was massively greater.

All this illustrates something I spend a lot of time pondering: the strange disconnect between what democratic populations want and what they get—or fail to get—from their politicians.

I read something that I thought might be relevant to the issue in Gordon Bowker’s recent biography of George Orwell. On page 183 we read of Orwell’s investigations among the Depression-stricken coal miners of 1930s northern England:

He remained at the tripe shop for almost two weeks, during which he attended large gatherings of “sheeplike” miners, concluding, “There is no turbulence left in England.”

If there actually was any turbulence left in England eighty years ago, there sure isn’t any today. (The Irish, bless them, are a different story.) A turbulent people would long since have dealt with the politicians who handed their country over to alien hordes by burning those politicians out of their houses, then stringing them up from lampposts.

You may say that the absence of turbulence is a good thing, that (A) turbulence is a characteristic of unhealthy, unstable polities; and that (B) it destroys property and injures—even kills—citizens.

(B) is indisputable. At my age and with my responsibilities, I’d rather turbulence not come roiling through my neighborhood.

(A) is more questionable. It may be that some turbulence now and then does no lasting harm to a nation. England was plenty turbulent from (at least) the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to the Reform Riots of 1831-2, a span of nearly half a millennium during which England never ceased to be England. The USA has seen turbulence aplenty: Authorities in New York City had just barely finished cleaning up from 1863’s Draft Riots when the Orange Riots of 1870-71 started up. Again, neither threatened the nation’s integrity.

Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights.

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The Ugly Interior of Jeremy Bentham's Head

Jeremy Bentham's head (Source) 

Yes, that's Jeremy Bentham's mummified head. In accordance with his will, his corpse was stuffed with hay and "put on public view for all to see" However, in time, his head got knocked off and was replaced with a wax replica. The original head (shown above) was locked in box and remains in the keeping of University College, London.

As you can see, by the end, Bentham's head was not in good shape. Unfortunately, what was inside Jeremy Bentham's head was even uglier than the exterior.

Bentham invented a new moral philosophy called utilitarianism. This is the basis of all liberal thought and can be summed up in the single rule:

It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

The consequences of this idea have been utterly toxic. My purpose here is to consider why. But first, what does it mean?

What is happiness? How do you measure it? Is it to be determined by the number of one's sexual partners, the amount of junk food one consumes, the length of one's life, one's freedom from work or responsibility?

Obviously, the idea is nuts. Happiness is not measurable, and what people think will bring the greatest happiness often brings only misery.

And how do you maximize happiness? Most people would say their happiness would be maximized if they were free to do exactly as they pleased. And allowing and even encouraging people to do exactly as they please is the basic liberal program: no-fault divorce, state-funded abortion, euthanization of tiresome elderly relatives, oral sex as part of the school curriculum, and no, oral sex is not talking a good line, as we of the older generation may have assumed. But as the poet T.S. Eliot remarked,

If you give people what they want, you begin by underestimating them and you end by corrupting them.

Exactly, which is what the liberal program has done.

And the project is idiotic because a state of persistent happiness is physiologically unattainable. We possess adaptive mechanisms that make suffering more endurable and pleasure cloy. We are made to strive, drawn by unsatisfied desire and propelled by the experience of discomfort and dissatisfaction.

The wise individual seeks not happiness but fulfillment: moral, physical and intellectual.

But there is another and truly evil implication of the Benthamite doctrine. If the happiness of the greatest number is the object of public policy and the measure of good and evil, then there is no absolute morality and the unhappiness of a few is a morally acceptable price to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Three thousand dead Americans on 9/11 provided the hoped for catalyzing event that kick started the NeoCon Project for the New American Century, aka the long war for American global empire. How easily such mass murder can be justified by the Benthamite calculus. Which means that if 19 incompetent Arabs with paper knives were insufficient to complete the task, why not help them out with a Norad stand-down? The subsequent death of a hundred thousand Iraqis is also easily justified in terms of the greater good.

Single-handedly, with one ridiculous and tawdry idea, Bentham provided the means for the destruction of Christendom, the greatest civilization the World has yet seen.

See Also:

Britain's Peeping State: Bureaucrats At the Washroom Keyhole

Britain's Peeping State: Bureaucrats At the Washroom Keyhole

 More than 200 schools across Britain are using CCTV cameras in pupils' toilets or changing rooms, according to figures obtained by anti-surveillance campaigners, who warned that the research raised serious questions about the privacy of schoolchildren.

A total of 825 cameras were located in the toilets or changing rooms of 207 schools across England, Scotland and Wales, according to data provided by more than 2,000 schools. The Guardian

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. (Image source)

This is what it has come to: public servants watching school girls taking a pee, blue-gloved airport goons viewing passengers naked. This is the end result of the project to dismantle religion and abandon the notion of personal moral responsibility. As people lose the ability to control themselves, everyone has to be spied on at every instant by a bunch of perverts on the public payroll.

Jeremy Bentham, who invented the Panopticon, a structure allowing prisoners to be under observation 24/7, would have been delighted, as must be his totalitarian followers, people like Fidel Castro of Cuba who built this huge Panopticon complex:

The Presidio Modelo Prison, Cuba. (Image source)

Bentham also proposed that Panopticons could be used as "houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, lazarettos, manufactories, hospitals, mad-houses, and schools."

So yes, the Brits have finally got around to it. Adapting the Panopticon to schools.

Naturally the architecture of the modern Panopticon is not as Bentham envisaged it. There's no need to arrange people in a circle all in view of the centrally place observation post. All that's needed to convert any building to a Panopticon is some wires or wireless links and a bunch of CCTV cameras. Then the bureaucratic state has, in Bentham's words, "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

But they promote buggery and oral sex in British schools, so what can the pervs in the control room be watching for? Is it some dopey white kid calling an immigrant kid a Paki or a nig-nog? Nah, probably it's the heteros -- making sure they put on a condom.The prime object of "obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example" is, after all, the genocide of the English without the use of bullets or gas chambers.

So, well done David Camoron, the latest in a long line of liberal British Prime Ministers, working to reduce the English to abject slavery  and eventual extinction.

The New World Order: What Is It? Who Wants It?

The New World Order is not an international organization, treaty or political movement. It is not even a conspiracy. It is simply an idea.

With the advent, in the 19th Century, of the steamship, the telegraph, and the Gatling gun, the possibility of global empire became evident to all and has been pursued by many under various names including the British Empire, World Communist Revolution, Pax Americana, the United Nations, the Empire of Unlimited Voluntary Assimilation -- aka the European Union -- Islam, the Banking Cartel, Wall Street and the City of London.

All of these projects are or were manifestations of the struggle for what some have called a New World Order, which is nothing but a sanitized term for global empire.

With the victory over the French in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo, Britain became the World's first super power. The first nation to industrialize, Britain reaped the largest profits from the industrial revolution, then earned interest on the profits by financing industrialization throughout the Empire, and in America, Russia, Argentina and much of the rest of the World. Ruling a quarter of the World's population, with naval forces greater than those of the next two largest national naval forces combined, Britain in the year 1900 was the indispensable nation, able to project power from China to Peru and all places between.

Canada's Humiliating Foreign Policy

By Eric Walberg

EricWalberg.com, September 10, 2012: On 7 September, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced that Canada is suspending all diplomatic relations with Iran, expelling all Iranian diplomats, closing its embassy in Tehran, and authorizing Turkey to act on Canada's behalf for consular services there. Baird cited Iran’s enmity with Israel, its support of Syria and terrorism. "Canada views the government of Iran as the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today," Baird said at the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in Vladivostok, Russia.

Canada has not had a full ambassador in Iran since 2007. Relations between the two countries cooled after Iranian-Canadian free-lance photographer Zahra Kazemi died in Iran in 2003 under disputed circumstances, and went from bad to worse under the Conservative government in power in Ottawa since then.

While indeed Iran has been the nation most outspokenly critic of Israel, and is actively working to thwart the Western-backed insurgency in Syria, there is no evidence of its support for "terrorism". It is in fact the victim of terrorism on the part of Israel and the US, which boast about assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and destroying Iranian computers with viruses made-to-order, among other officially-sponsored acts of subversion.

Forget Iran, it’s Israel’s Nuclear Gun Pointed at Obama’s Head: The Myth of the US-Israel Special Bond

By Jonathan Cook

Global Research, September 10, 2012: It is possibly the greatest of American political myths, repeated ad nauseam by presidential candidates in their election campaigns. President Barack Obama has claimed that the United States enjoys a special bond with Israel unlike its relations with any other country. He has called the friendship “unshakeable”, “enduring” and “unique”, “anchored by our common interests and deeply held values”.

His Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has gone further, arguing that there is not “an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally Israel”. A recent Romney election ad, highlighting his summer visit to Israel, extolled the “deep and cherished relationship”.

But, while such pronouncements form the basis of an apparent Washington consensus, the reality is that the cherished friendship is no more than a fairy tale. It has been propagated by politicians to mask the suspicion — and plentiful examples of duplicity and betrayal — that have marked the relationship since Israel’s founding.

Politicians may prefer to express undying love for Israel, and hand over billions of dollars annually in aid, but the US security establishment has — at least, in private — always regarded Israel as an unfaithful partner.

Obarmy Is a Tyrant But Romney Could Be Worse

By Paul Craig Roberts

Institute for Political Economy September 7, 2012: If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one.
How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad?

The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines. For nearly four years Republican operatives have flooded the Internet with portraits of Obama as a non-US citizen, as a Muslim (even while Obama was murdering Muslims in seven countries), and as a Marxist (put in power by the Israel Lobby, Wall Street, and the military/security complex).

Most Republican voters will vote against Obama based on these charges despite the curious fact that no committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a hearing to determine if Obama is a citizen. If Obama were not a citizen, why would the very aggressive House Republicans not capitalize on it. It would be easy for a Congressional committee to determine if Obama were a citizen. Despite the propaganda, the Republicans in office have shown no interest in the propaganda charges spread by Republican operatives over the Internet.

Either Republicans have no confidence in the charges and do not want to end up proving with Congressional hearings that Obama is a citizen, or the Republicans, having destroyed every other aspect of the US Constitution, reducing it to “a scrap of paper,” feel that making an issue of the last remaining Constitutional provision other than the Second Amendment would be the height of hypocrisy and don’t want to risk opening the constitutional issues that Republicans have run roughshod over.
If the Republicans can destroy habeas corpus, due process, violate both US statutory and international law, ignore the separation of powers, and create a Caesar, why can’t the Democrats run a non-citizen?

Why didn’t the Republican convention raise the issue about the Obama regime’s claim that the executive branch has the power to assassinate US citizens without due process of law? No such power exists in the US Constitution or in US statutory law. This gestapo police state claim exists only as an assertion. Republicans ignored this most important of all issues, because they support it.
Why didn’t the Democrat convention raise the issue that the Republicans took us to wars based on 9/11 assertions without ever conducting an investigation of 9/11? No qualified high-rise architect, structural engineer, physicist, chemist, or national security expert believes a word of the US government’s 9/11 story. Neither do the first responders who were on the scene and witnessed and experienced the event.

The Liberal View

Cartoon by Baloo

White people are pussies

By John Derbyshire

Taki's Magazine, September 6, 2012: On a call-in radio program recently, we had been airing my infamous assertion in a Taki’s Magazine column back in April that white people should avoid large concentrations of blacks as likely to be dangerous.

A caller asked me why I would not be similarly fearful of a large concentration of whites. I made the obvious reply—that the element of racial animus, of black hatred of whites, would be missing. Then I added, off the cuff: “Anyway, why would anyone be scared of a crowd of whites? Whites aren’t going to do anything to you. Let’s face it, white people are pussies.”

The remark passed without comment, but I regretted it nonetheless. It was, after all, an expression of ethnomasochism—of contempt for one’s own people. Having railed against ethnomasochism considerably the past few years, I really should be more careful what I say about my own ethny.

It’s a thought that keeps coming up, though. It came up yesterday when I was reading this story about France’s ban on Muslim women wearing the burqa (full-body with face veil) and niqab (shoulder-length face veil). “Of civilized peoples in general, I think it’s only whites that are pussies, and perhaps only white Gentiles.”

Following the trashing of that Gypsy camp by French police the other day, I’d been nursing hopes that at least the French were holding out against the tide of pussification. Alas, no—not in the matter of burqas and niqabs, anyway:

Since the law went into effect, 425 women wearing full-face veils have been fined up to 150 euros ($188) each and 66 others have received warnings, said Pierre-Henry Brandet, spokesman for the Interior Ministry. But even the police concede that they rarely enforce it, having no desire to further increase tensions.

Heaven forbid law-enforcement officers should “increase tensions” by enforcing the law! And so the Muslims are free to continue insulting French culture and sapping away at French nationhood.

In Britain things are worse, as one of the Muslims in the Times story, a Monsieur M’hammed [sic] Henniche, tells us with satisfaction:

But when he visits London, Mr. Henniche said, the first thing he notices is the number of women wearing the niqab walking freely on the streets. “I think, ‘Whoa, it’s an open country, English people are open,’” he said. “Such tolerance is a good thing.”

Well, it sure is a good thing if you’re an African or West Asian Muslim keen to escape the poverty, ignorance, intolerance, corruption, and backwardness that your ethny—assisted by your religion—has created in the land of your origin. It’s hard to see that it’s been a good thing for the native British, who would much prefer to have been left alone in their warm-ale-swilling, rhubarb-chomping, dentally challenged, eccentrically plumbed, and uniquely foggy culture.

But whose fault is it that London and Liverpool’s streets are now blighted with what expats living in Saudi Arabia refer to as “BMOs”—black moving objects?

Why, it’s the fault of the British themselves for letting it happen. You get what you vote for. No native Briton should ever have cast a vote for any party whose platform did not include a clear ban on mass Third World immigration. Why did the British yield on this? Because they’re pussies.

The Liberal Way to Run the World: “Improve” or We’ll Kill You

By John Pilger

Global Research, September 05, 2012: What is the world’s most powerful and violent “ism”? The question will summon the usual demons, such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged,” because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.

In his 1859 essay, On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mills described the power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided the end be their  improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as “a triumph of Christianity and civilization” that was “clearly pre-ordained in the sight of Providence.”

“It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature — its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] self-righteous fanaticism.” He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around us” according to his “moral values.” At least a million dead later – in Iraq alone – this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13 million.

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Tram Rant Lady a Problem for Britain's Globalist Elite Intent on Genocide of the English Working Class

Emma West (Source: This is Croydon)

Emma West was due to face Croydon Crown Court on Wednesday, 5 September, charged with two racially aggravated public order offenses after a video was posted last year on YouTube in which she complained out loud that everyone on the tram in which she was traveling was "not English." However the case has been adjourned yet again following a request by the Crown Prosecution Service for further reports to be compiled. A new date for the trial has still to be set.

The case was previously adjourned in June and in July, in both cases the reason given being the need, by prosecutors, for further psychiatric reports.

Although, as the Digital Journal states "her views were not expressed in the most ladylike manner," 94% of the UK population agree with her, saying that Britain is "full up" and mass immigration should end now.

See Also:
Emma West, an Angry Woman With Much to be Angry About
My Britain is fuck all now
And What Is Racist About Objecting to the Genocide of Your Own People?
How the West destroys its own
Political Correctness as a Weapon of Class War
The Facist New World Order
Double Standards Under British Law
How Britain's Liberal-Left Are Destroying Britain's National Identity

18 Indications That Europe Is An Economic Black Hole That Will Suck The Life Out Of The Global Economy

By Michael Snyder

Activist Post, September 4, 2012: Summer vacation is over and things are about to get very interesting in Europe. Most Americans don't realize this, but much of Europe shuts down for the entire month of August. I wish we had something similar in the United States. But now millions of Europeans are returning from their extended family vacations and the fun is about to begin.

During August, economic conditions continued to degenerate in Europe, but I figured that it wouldn't be until after August that the European debt crisis would take center stage once again. And as I wrote about last week, if there is going to be a financial panic, it typically happens in the fall.

The stock market has seen quite a nice rally over the summer, and many investors are nervous that we could see a significant "correction" very soon. The month of September has been the absolute worst month for stock performance over the past 50 years, and it has also been the absolute worst month for stock performance over the past 100 years as well. Of course that does not guarantee that anything is going to happen this year. But things in Europe continue to get worse. Unemployment rates are spiking, manufacturing activity is slowing down, housing prices are crashing and major financial institutions are failing. What is happening in Europe right now appears to be an even worse version of what happened to the United States back in 2008.

But most Americans aren't too concerned about what is happening in Europe. In fact, most Americans don't believe that a European financial collapse would be much of a problem for us.

Well, just remember what happened back in 2008. When the U.S. financial system started coming apart at the seams it sparked a devastating worldwide recession which was felt in every corner of the globe.

If the European financial system implodes, the consequences could be even worse. Why?

Europe has a larger population than the United States does.

Europe has a larger economy than the United States does.

Europe has a much, much larger banking system than the United States does.

If Europe experiences a financial collapse, the entire globe will feel the pain.

And considering how weak the U.S. economy already is, it would not take much to push us over the edge.

What is going on in Europe right now is a very, very big deal and people need to pay attention.

The following are 18 indications that Europe has become an economic black hole which is going to suck the life out of the global economy....

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Israel Demands Unconditional American Subservience

By Philip Giraldi

American Conservative, September 3, 2012: Israel’s attempt to steer American foreign policy has been nowhere more evident than in the sustained campaign to move the United States in the direction of war with Iran, a war that serves no American interest unless one believes that Tehran is willing to spend billions of dollars to develop a nuclear weapon only to hand off the result to a terrorist group.

The most recent overtures by the Israeli government have pushed the United States to make a declaration that negotiations with Iran have failed and will not be continued. For Israel, this is a necessary first step towards an American military intervention, as failed negotiations mean there is no way out of the impasse but by war, if the Iranians do not unilaterally concede on every disputed point.

Two recent op-eds have elaborated the argument, promoting the necessity of convincing the Israelis that the United States is absolutely serious about using military force against Iran if the Iranians seek to retain any capacity to enrich uranium. One might note in passing that this new red line, sometimes also called the abstract “capability” to create a nuclear weapon, has been achieved by moving the goal posts back considerably. At one time Iran was threatened with a military response if it actually acquired a nuclear weapon (which is still the official position of the Obama administration), but earlier benchmarks within that policy saying that enrichment should not exceed 20 percent or that the enrichment should not take place on Iranian soil have been abandoned in favor of what now amounts to zero tolerance. Those who note that Iran, which is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is under IAEA inspection, has a clear legal right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes have been ignored in favor of those who believe that Iran is somehow a special case.

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Why I Spurned Tony Blair: If Leaders May Lie, Who Then Should Tell the Truth

By Desmond Tutu

The Guardian, September 2, 2012: The immorality of the United States and Great Britain's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.

Instead of recognising that the world we lived in, with increasingly sophisticated communications, transportations and weapons systems necessitated sophisticated leadership that would bring the global family together, the then-leaders of the US and UK fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.

If leaders may lie, then who should tell the truth? Days before George W Bush and Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, I called the White House and spoke to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, to urge that United Nations weapons inspectors be given more time to confirm or deny the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Should they be able to confirm finding such weapons, I argued, dismantling the threat would have the support of virtually the entire world. Ms Rice demurred, saying there was too much risk and the president would not postpone any longer.

On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers' circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr Bush's chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.

But even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world.

Has the potential for terrorist attacks decreased? To what extent have we succeeded in bringing the so-called Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds closer together, in sowing the seeds of understanding and hope?

Leadership and morality are indivisible. Good leaders are the custodians of morality. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.

If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children?

My appeal to Mr Blair is not to talk about leadership, but to demonstrate it. You are a member of our family, God's family. You are made for goodness, for honesty, for morality, for love; so are our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in the US, in Syria, in Israel and Iran.

I did not deem it appropriate to have this discussion at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg last week. As the date drew nearer, I felt an increasingly profound sense of discomfort about attending a summit on "leadership" with Mr Blair. I extend my humblest and sincerest apologies to Discovery, the summit organisers, the speakers and delegates for the lateness of my decision not to attend.

Barky and Mitt: Two faces of one power cult

By Christopher Manion

LewRockwell.com, September 3, 2012: Gary North’s insightful piece last week invites serious reflection. He refers briefly to Barack Obama’s twenty year discipleship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose theological roots lie in the shallows of the faux religion called "Liberation Theology." That term signifies the variant of Marxism that presents Jesus not as Savior, but as a materialist warlord and political liberator. In other words, Liberation Theology hides Marx’s impersonal and inexorable process of the Class Struggle behind a Christian, human face to make it more palatable to the masses and more intimidating to its clueless opponents – all without changing its methods or its goals.

This is what ideology is all about – the deceptive assertion of falsehood as the ground of truth and reality. It represents a perversion of metaphysics and philosophical anthropology – that is, it denies what’s true about reality and about us. But the Devil knows Latin, as the saying goes, and the ideologues feel free to pick and choose from among treasured, traditional language and symbols that once meant something real, but have long been emptied of their content and stuffed with tyrannical hemlock. Thus "patriotism" now means love of government. "Freedom" means bombing ornery foreigners into submission. And the "Two-Party System" means the one-power charade. And "Change" means the same old same-old.

Consider the neocons. We’ve long known that they are the proud intellectual disciples of Trotsky. Well, they dread pitchforks as well as pickaxes. They rise and fall on the dialectic -- they never "lie," you see it’s just that the "correlation of forces" keeps on shifting. For a neocon, there’s nothing that’s true for long except the timeless fact that they’re always superior (after all, Marx called the party "The Vanguard of the Proletariat"), that they are always right (especially when they’re wrong), and that we must all love Big Brother.

But here is the theoretical breakthrough: as Dr. North suggests, a glance at Obama’s own campaign reveals that he too is relying on the dialectic, and in a most original and innovative way:
Obama is still running against George W. Bush, as we knew he would. But Obama is also running as George Bush.

"The Obama Administration is the operational successor of the Bush Administration. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, [and] on Wall Street," North writes. All this, and so much more. But should we be surprised? Consider: long ago the neocon altar boy at the pagan power-shrine welcomed Obama into the ranks of the Inner Party as a "born-again neocon."

We might not ever find Obama’s birth certificate, but here’s Bill Kristol issuing his baptismal certificate.
"But Obama is such a liar," we are plaintively told. True enough. Now, please examine George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign promises. Were any of them true? Smaller government? A humble foreign policy? Less federal spending? Blah Blah blah? Which is to say: Of course Obama lies. Was Bush any different?

The elephant in the room has morphed into a donkey. No one will acknowledge it, although everybody sees it. That, too, is a required ingredient of the dialectic.

Admittedly, the GOP has an internal dialectic of its own. It claims it wants to win, yet it has repeatedly acted as though it is possessed by a death wish. Just last week several of my neighbors here in the Shenandoah Valley witnessed firsthand the slow-motion suicide of the GOP when they were held in involuntary servitude in Tampa. Victims of an endearing prank engineered by the party Hot-Tubbers, they were trapped for hours aboard a "lost" bus supposedly sent to bring them to the convention hall. This cute little ploy occasioned their convenient absence from the convention floor, allowing the party elites to vote holy war on the grass roots, whom they nonetheless expect to vote for them by the millions in November because of course everybody knows that "Obama must be defeated."

In ancient Rome, near today’s Forum of Nerva, there stood the Temple of Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, of war and peace, and (perhaps a stretch) of outright duplicity. Our own imperial age should trot out this good fellow, who symbolizes so much of the spirit of our own time. The two parties are actually two faces of one power-cult. Our politicians are not actually lying, they are only ignoring Confucius ("restore the proper meaning of words"), preferring instead the scornful reprise of Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

We live in an age of DoubleThink – where "minds [are] trained to hold contradictory positions simultaneously and unquestioningly." On examination, the campaign promises of both parties thrill to the dialectic: Freedom is Slavery. War Is Peace. And, especially in even-numbered years, Ignorance is Strength. We’ve heard before of politicians who say that "I was for it before I was against it." Now Obama has magically raised the dialectic to a new high (Hegel called it die Aufhebung): he is governing as George Bush while he is running against George Bush. It is indeed a stunning specter to behold.

Nicolas Sarkozy, NWO Agent for the Destruction of the European Peoples, Joins Tony Blair in Receipt of JP Morgan payoff

Since the emergence of Western democracy it has been the standard practice for hidden powers to pay politicians for services rendered only after the political agent has left office, thereby eliminating any risk to either party of being charged with bribery.

The recipient, while in office, can be confident of  receiving a payoff because the future credibility of those making the payment depends on their living up to past obligations. No promises need be made, no agreements must be entered into. For those who sell their soul to the Devil and betray their country in the interests of the money power, compensation is automatic.

This form of bribery was noted byThomas Macaulay in his History of England Since the Accession of James II (1849), and also by the American historian, Carroll Quigley in his great work Tragedy and Hope (1966). 

It is appropriate that the payoff to both Sarkozy and Blair for their genocidal work (and here, and here) on behalf of the New World Order is made by JP Morgan, since as Carroll Quigley recorded, JP Morgan played a central role in the formation of the Council on Foreign Relations, the public face of the New World Order.

For Tony, the pay off has been a handsome $2,000,000 plus per year for, well, bugger all one would think based on his banking qualifications. And for Sark it'll be $200,000 per hour, which seems a bit rich for a dinky shyster born of immigrant parents and first known to the world by the name of Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sárközy de Nagy-Bocsa. Two hundred thousand hours of penal servitude for zero remuneration would have seemed more appropriate.