Just a pernickety little point – how can the child be a son?  A son can only come to life through procreation, which requires a male and a female and that, by definition, confers a father and a mother on him, whatever subsequent misfortune might befall him.

Never mind – let’s move on.

Any studies on the matter?  Any connection with youth groups? Any historic linkage?  Here’s a forum about it. And the NCBI study.  The gay community hit back here.  Should there be no discussion whatever on the issue?  Is this lady misguided in saying that gayness is a social construct and those lobbying for it have a political agenda?  Was there anything to Dr. Judith Reisman‘s contentions in “Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences” ? She was president of the Institute for Media Education.

Is there anything at all to the claim that the editorial board of paedophile academic journal Paidika included prominent homosexual scholars such as San Francisco State University professor John DeCecco, who edited, according to WND, the “Journal of Homosexuality” and that the Journal of Homosexuality published, in 2002, a special double-issue entitled, “Male Intergenerational Intimacy,” containing “many” articles portraying sex between men and minor boys as loving relationships, in which one article said parents should look upon the paedophile who loves their “son”  “not as a rival or competitor, not as a theft of their property, but as a partner in the boy’s upbringing, someone to be welcomed into their home”?

Was that so or not?

In 1995, did the homosexual magazine “Guide” say, “We can be proud that the gay movement has been home to the few voices who have had the courage to say out loud that children are naturally sexual” and “deserve the right to sexual expression with whoever they choose. …” The article went on to say: “Instead of fearing being labeled pedophiles, we must proudly proclaim that sex is good, including children’s sexuality … we must do it for the children’s sake.”

Or is it a vicious lie that they included that?  Is it true what gays say that such people as these are entirely unrepresentative and no one in the gay community reads material like that?

Again, did Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT-UP, a homosexual activist group, write in his book, “Report from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist”: “In those instances where children do have sex with their homosexual elders, be they teachers or anyone else, I submit that often, very often, the child desires the activity, and perhaps even solicits it.”?

Was he or others of like opinion invited into schools to give talks on the topic or not?  Easily verified or not, one would have thought.

The problem we face, as a community, is that there is no neutral data.  On one side is the gay community, heavily backed by legislation regarding discrimination by the State and there’s a clear agenda which renders state agency stats next to worthless for the purpose of discussion.  Equally, there is an agenda  behind church groups who have been the main ones quoting extant studies and commissioning new ones.  Nor does the swamping of Google rankings by articles hotly asserting there is NO linkage cut much ice.  Nor can an article on a church website stating that there IS a clear linkage, that it has not been seriously disputed until the last couple of decades and that instances are occurring all the time which support the contention be taken at face value.

You see the issue of course.  Not many really care what gays get up to in private – it’s only when they come near children that people start to worry and the idea that two men could be given a child to live with staggers many born before 1970, particularly with the State being complicit in this act.

On the other hand, as many gays point out – 68% of paedophiles are ostensibly heterosexual so that’s the end of the argument.  Statisticians and the church point out, however, that if 6% of the community are gay and 32% of the offenses are committed by gays, then proportionally, on those figures, gays are 2.89 times more likely to offend than straights.  This is a long way from the 17 times quoted in some places.

If none of these things above are remotely true, then they are a vicious slur on the long-suffering gay community.

Ivan takes me to task for bashing Airbus over a long period of time and I plead guilty:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2089153/Now-cracks-wings-worlds-biggest-jets–Airbus-STILL-claims-theyre-safe-fly.html
http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-incidents/a380-cracks-check-fleets-now-say-engineers-20120106-1pnr6.html#ixzz1idwYKvd9
http://nourishingobscurity.com/2010/11/08/airbus-further-news/
http://nourishingobscurity.com/2010/05/13/airbus-down-yet-again/
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2006/11/fedex-cancels-airbus-orders-boeings.html
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2007/03/airbus-camel-designed-by-committee.html
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2008/10/crashes-and-marketing-of-faulty-parts.html
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2008/11/airbus-another-one-down.html
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2009/06/airbus-faulty-again-monotonous.html
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2009/06/airbus-a320-et-a330-serie-dincidents.html
http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2009/06/airbus-yet-another-down.html
http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/safety-warning-for-airbus-planes-20090924-g3nc.html

However, he challenges me to run this about Boeing:

Boeing’s flagship 787 Dreamliner is under inspection for possible repairs to the fuselage’s structure the company admitted this week.  Some of the structural stiffeners or shims were found not properly attached to the structure’s carbon fiber composite which could cause delamination or damage to that outer skin.  It’s an embarrassing setback for Boeing which launched the Dreamliner just months ago following a series of long delays.

I’d love to give dear Ivan back his own advice about all aircraft developing cracks over time but this might be a bit more serious:

With the current structural inspection, software glitches also cancelled two flights between Tokyo and Frankfurt of All Nippon Airway’s first long-haul flights in January.  ANA spokeswoman Jean Saito says the Tokyo-based airline canceled a Jan. 26 flight out of Frankfurt due to a malfunction of the flaps system and a Monday flight out of Tokyo because of an error in the software that monitors aircraft controls.

Then again – it might not.  Still, the title of this post is my feeling on the matter.

Barter does not work for two reasons. The first is that natural goods mature in due season. This means that for most of the year, the farmer has nothing to trade with the hunter save his promise to pay when the crop comes in. The second is that even simple production takes place in many steps and stages and over a period of time. Until the work is complete, there are no tradable goods, only a work-in-progress. This cannot be financed by barter, but only by a promise to pay when the work is completed and the product is sold.

And herein lies the real power of money: it coordinates the actions of millions of strangers. Our lives are critically dependent on the actions of others; thousands of people contribute daily to our well-being, and all but a tiny fraction of them are strangers to us. How shall we acknowledge our debt to them, and they to us, except by the medium of money? Money then, is not so much a medium of exchange as a record of the obligations we have to each other, a series of debits and credits.

Usury was the bane of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, but in the amnesties they recognized the communal nature of society; while maintaining a strict commercial order, they recognized that debts could not multiply without it being the end of all social order. Usury was also the great social evil of the Roman Empire, as more and more farms disappeared into the great Latifundia, the estates of the aristocrats who were able to seize the land of the citizens who were off fighting Rome’s extensive wars. Daniel Graber notes that the Roman solution was not to declare amnesties, but to throw money at the problem. The wealth of the provinces poured into Rome to create a vast welfare state that demoralized the people while leaving the power of the aristocrats intact.

It is worth noting that when the Bank of England was founded, in 1694, one quarter of its capital was in the form of tally sticks. But the bankers wished to monopolize the creation of money, and immediately set out on a long campaign to get the tally sticks outlawed. And they got their wish when the Liberal party came to power in 1832. One of their first acts was to fulfill the agenda of the Bank of England. All of the tally sticks were gathered together and burned in a stove in the House of Lords. However, the fire got out of hand and burned down the Houses of Parliament. When we view Turner’s magnificent paintings of this event, we should keep in mind what it was all about.

Here we may return to our original parable, the sad tale of how indissoluble obligations were turned into temporary debts; of how the ties that bind are easily dissolved by putting a number on them. We cannot help but be a society of strangers, yet underneath this, we cannot be a society at all unless we recognize our mutual obligations to one another. It is possible that our rude ancestors had it right all along: that obligations are more important than debts, and that amnesties are the key to economic and social order. Surely this question faces us now with a force that cannot be ignored.

This is offered with no commentary one way or the other.

However, to the issue:

[People such as her] are clearly less committed to environmentalism than their own careers — but also from what we know went on in the background. Here, for instance, is the halfwit eco-baroness, Bryony Worthington, revealing that the Climate Change Act 2008 was a rush job, designed to maximise Miliband’s profile.

As is clear, figures at the NGOs were happy to work with cynical, and self-serving politicians. And politicians, devoid of their own ideas, were happy to give NGOs influence in return for direction. ‘Showing leadership’ mattered more than considering the consequences of ill-conceived notions of leadership were.

Doubts from realists within government were brushed aside, or worse still, sneaked past with trickery. And a bill, dictating four decades of energy, industrial and economic policy was drafted in just 3 months, and after scant scrutiny by Parliament, became an act.

Isn’t that lovely – to know that that which is afflicting us, based on shoddy science and costing the taxpayer billions, including free rides for such as our Bryony “I’ve just been made a baroness in the Lords” Worthington, was all a piecemeal attempt to climb on the bandwagon and make many people a fortune, intended or otherwise, whilst putting millstones around our necks.

Baroness?  This used to be to recognize major contribution to the nation.  Our Bryony is just coming up to 40 now and is listed as a lifetime Labour peer, supposedly for performances such as in that clip. Lifetime? So when common sense returns and the Lords goes back to being what it should, people like Baroness Bryony can’t be unmade again.

Then we can look at the survey sent out to NOAA employees with the narrative already taken as read, even though there is no consensus whatever about climate change among scientists.  The annotated survey is at the end of the link.

Disgruntled?  Nous?

[H/T Chuckles]

This was the beginning of the end of my belief in The Guardian. Ever afterwards, I was wary of the innate bigotry of some of its journalists. Having already developed a healthy disbelief in Murdoch’s Times, I suppose one can trace the genealogy of my current opinions from this point. During the early 1970s, I grew up in all manner of ways.

In the soil of this poisonous harvest was the weed of Thatcherism able to thrive. Millions of people like me – holders of a candle for the unfortunate – got utterly fed up with Lambeth’s nuclear-free zones and fraternal greetings to Moscow, but no grit on winter’s icy roads. We all became pissed off with the liberal press inventing the fascist police State where there appeared to be only frightened coppers being brutalised by their experiences. Blokes like me – keen for female equality – found ourselves tired of apologising for having a dick.

There is a dimension of the Left-liberal mindset still stuck in that 1972 of my memory. Unfortunately, it has wrested back control of the Labour Party from the Mandelson-Blair drivel of 1997-2010. This – and the wandering cream wallpaper of LibDemism – has left constructive radicals like me with nowhere to go. Worse still, it provides no effective resistance to the amoral opportunism of Camerlot. But without this bitter learning experience, I wouldn’t have moved on to a fuller understanding of how things really need to change.

Sounds like he grew up in the same way I did but eventually found himself without a party, without representation and without a voice.  The galling part for those who care is that caring was hijacked long ago by the uncaring – the Moscow lovers, sleazebags like the Alinskys and Marcuses, by the Guardianisti, the feminazis and so on.

Some of us would like to care, would like to see the unfortunate supported and taken care of, we’re not cold, heartless bastards but we do see the other side of it too – the feckless, the lazy couch potatoes, the benefits scammers – and we’re always misrepresented but that’s by the by.

There’s an area of politics in the centre which no political group has truly captured yet – it contains the swinging voter, the malcontents, the thinkers-for-themselves, the caring who don’t wish to be railroaded down Guardianisti paths, it contains those who believe in industry, it’s against state theft of private assets someone’s spent a lifetime saving.

It has no voice except, to an extent, Ron Paul and UKIP but can differ radically from them on many issues.

It’s for the politically grown-up who think for themselves.  The softly spoken Sackers sees this as a reason why bloggers are giving up all over the place:

I think bloggers are giving up because in terms of response, half the time it’s as though the telephone line has been cut, and the rest of the time it’s 10% spam and 70% malevolent crapheads.

It’s for the politically grown-up who think for themselves.

Many bloggers/readers have been scathing about how Google seems to have lost the plot of late. I’ve read and heard what these bloggers/readers have been saying but haven’t had any personal issues since 2008 when a nutter decided to flag my Blogger site for inappropriate content and Blogger’s reaction was to shut it down immediately.

The logic therefore was that anyone could go to any site he didn’t like, flag it and Blogger would summarily shut it down, with some sort of investigation following some weeks later. This was precisely why I began the new site you’re now on – to stop this sort of insanity.

Now there’s another real doozy from Google.  Get this – they are disabling ad-sense at my new site because of a supposed offence at my old site.  The offence?  Inappropriate content for advertisers in that the youtube breaches some sort of sex/violence code.  Clearly youtube still see it as all right, plus it’s in Indonesian – are Google experts in the Indonesian language?  It was the American Google home which wrote to me.

You might like to put up with as much of the song as you can:

… and compare it to the offerings, say, on good sites such as this.  Offensive?  Gross sexual content?  Moi?

And the way they put it. This quoted post was “an example” of the type of offence I was committing. It wasn’t the offence, just an example of it.  If they want offensive, I can do far better than that, chums.

Some might say it was because of the inclusion of key words, e.g.

Then Inul swaggers on stage, packed in tight red jeans and a glittering crimson tank top. She turns her back to the audience. The guitars crunch, Inul’s hips swing low and hard.

There’s far raunchier stuff than that in my book, quite graphic in point of fact, in a serial way.  Let’s test it out here – titty, bum, erotic, sex, penis, vagina.  Let’s see what that drags down on me in the next day or two.

Curious why people are targetting my old site and leaving the new alone, despite Google’s obvious misdirection.  It’s the third incident now re the original site and in both previous cases, in 2011, concerning posts from 2007 and 2006, I complied.  Also, who’d be remotely interested?

Tell you one thing which has been happening though and I wonder if it has anything to do with it.  Some weeks back, I changed the theme/template at the old site, which had been a private template, with one of Google’s own, called Awesome.

The site had been relatively dormant for spam but suddenly now it was attracting 20 or 30 Anonymous would-be comments a day, increasing daily.  These were being anti-spammed by Google/Blogger itself – i.e. they were not appearing onsite but notifications were coming to my email thick and fast.

My mate couldn’t see what the spammers were getting out of it if they were never posted.  I thought it might have been something in the process of the anti-spamming which made it worthwhile for them – maybe it became a click for them.

Now I’m beginning to think that Google itself has been trawling, as they’ve said they have, but putting out Anonymous comments to test it out.  Hell, I don’t know.

What I don’t like is this “we’re punishing you summarily for an imagined offence”, they investigate and find me not-guilty but instead of an abject apology for maligning my blogs, they issue a “don’t do it again” and I’m on the record for a “prior offence”.  There’s a nannying, bullying, infantilizing element to this I don’t appreciate.

I’ve given Google the use of part of my sites for their advertising, which pays virtually zero.  I haven’t gone on the offensive about them since 2008 and comply as best I can.  I’ve been a good little Googlette.  And they give me this c*** in response?

My answer to Google is Arkell v Pressdram but naturally, it is a non-reply email – no redress.

Oh beat me, whip me, put your tongue there, sex, sex, sex

If anyone would know what his lot have planned, G. Soros would.  Gleefully, he laid it out some time back:

“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” Soros said.  As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil,” writes the Beasts’ John Arlidge. “Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America [Soros] predicts riots in the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties . The global economic system could even collapse altogether.”

I’m sure it could, George – at least your lot can give it a try – the Robert the Bruce principle.

In 1993, the Club published The First Global Revolution.^[5] According to this book, divided nations require common enemies to unite them, “either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.”^[6] Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, “new enemies must be identified.”^[6] “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”^[7]

… to immediately know what you’re dealing with.  Is there anyone left still not au fait with the antecedents of the EU’s early form?

Continues at Orphans.

With the UK cold snap just around the corner and the country about to be plunged into thick snowfalls, it’s wise to sort out your cleats.  Unnar Þórisson reports from Iceland on the efficacy of these items.  The Icelanders leave nothing to chance as she warns: “Ice is Slippery”:

The news stations have sent out cameramen seemingly with the express aim of watching the roads to see if someone slips so they can use the footage in their reports on the (apparently numerous) incidents across the country of people neglecting to bring their cleats and ending up with broken bones.

Sadly this is all too easy to believe; I myself have had to use ice cleats to walk 20 feet with a bag of trash so I wouldn’t break my neck. Chore day really shouldn’t be that hazardous in a first-world country.

First world country?  Let’s move on.  In that part of Russia where I was, no one used cleats and I wonder why.  In Iceland they seem ubiquitous.

For a start, the Russian city is much flatter than Reykjavik although there are some hilly parts and I recall trying to walk down some of the more notorious ones with a lady.  I had great clod-hopper boots with serrated rubber soles and she had my arm.  Then there is the ability of the Russian to simply stay upright on ice.  Kids would deliberately kick back the snow on paths to expose the ice to shoot across in their ordinary shoes, many kids used mini-skis strapped to their shoes and I learnt, the hard way, to adopt a semi-sliding motion when walking, knees bent, upper body almost upright, slightly forward – not unlike the cross-country skiers.

That does tend to keep you upright.

So, remembering Reykjavik and the steepness of some of those hills, it still doesn’t explain the need for cleats.  Unless you attribute a lot of it to PCism.  First world country-PCism.  Yes.  Russia second world-no PCism, finding their own way to stay up.

On top of that, there is this:

During a winter such as the one we’ve been having, where snow, rain and some very temporary increases in temperature have conspired to create vast fields of wet, slippery ice, it should come as no surprise that ice cleats are in high demand.

That’s probably it – Russia is more of a snow country, whereas Iceland is more of an ice country.

Rising wealth in Asia and fishing subsidies are among factors driving overexploitation of the world’s fish resources, while fish habitat is being destroyed by pollution and climate change, U.N. marine experts said Tuesday.

India’s caste system protected from the bottom up:

Only dalits, whose caste impels them to do this work, are willing to do it, something that both stigmatizes them and gives them a stranglehold on the market. And they have transformed this stranglehold into an ironclad cartel that closes the door on all alternatives for their customers.

On the Haditha killings:

It all starts with the US undermanning its armed forces and, in any event, sending too few troops to clear and hold or to stay living among the people to create security. This is the root and unpardonable error in the US conduct of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The educational blight:

Education professors drum into students that they should not “drill and kill” or be the “sage on the stage” but instead be the “guide on the side” who “facilitates student discovery.”  This kind of harebrained thinking, coupled with multicultural nonsense, explains today’s education.

On the Beeb:

How the Daily Mail stormed the US

And the rationalizations begin:

A spokeswoman for the US paper suggested the Mail won by including visitors to a sister site.

Meanwhile, good ole British knowhow:

Royal Mail’s Price Finder website hits glitch

Royal Mail’s web glitch persists

They were caught in the act of committing criminal damage and also assault, and they cost the force £100,000, but according to top brass these thugs met the highest standards of professional behaviour.

Dear American friends

Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, the trap you’re being drawn into?  What so proudly you hailed is about to be lost at the twilight’s last gleaming.

Surely with Mitt Romney being a slick machine politician, changing his mind on the run and fighting a dirty campaign in Florida, it’s clear to you that he’s unelectable.

Isn’t it?

OK, you might not like Paul’s policies, despite his being the only honest politician up there, you might find Gingrich unelectable but you’re really not going to vote for either the disgraced Obama or the empty Romney.

Are you?

Surely you want some decency and genuine concern for the constitution, rather than four more years of the same.  Surely you don’t want an even more corrupt Washington than what you already have.

Do you?

Please tell me you’ve got it all sussed and can see through all of them.  Tell me that because our welfare over here is, in large measure, determined by the prat fine gentleman you elect over there, that you won’t let anyone pull the wool over your eyes and vote for someone because of his “electability”? Tell me you’ll only vote for him because of his “integrity”.

Would you do that for the world please?

Yours truly
James

Knowledge spreads only through dissemination and so all you ladies and gentlemen are needed, not just to read what we say here but to write about issues at your own place, to get about and keep the blogosphere alive, to keep linking to one another, instead of going into our cocoons.

Issues such as payday loans need writing on.

Let’s make it clear straight away that it’s not only women. As one who was in debt some years ago and rapidly going further into the red, the effect on the spirit is bad in the extreme and that spills over into health and into all the nasty little habits we adopt to cope – like going further into debt and pretending we’re not.

Yet payday loan sharks appear to be particularly targetting the new woman in a job, realizing she can’t cope and the question is – why can’t she cope?

My answer is 1. aspirations, 2. actually/reality.

Our shop on Saturday is fuelled by the women’s wear section, much of the High Street is and though there’s a certain level of Hyacinth Bucket to maintain, in most cases, it seems to me, there’s nothing snobbish – it’s just a taste for good things and to look good. There’s definitely a comfort zone below which British men and women refuse to fall, no matter what it takes but I’d suggest that when today’s reality finally gets through to the brain, men generally accept this more quickly.

For example, I have no fridge or TV and the electricity powers the combi, the laptop, the oven at mealtimes and one new-bulb on a timer which allows a certain amount of light in the evening and that’s it. I challenge any woman to come in and live this way, with no trappings whatever. Yet the flat is warm [I'm typing this in a t-shirt on our coldest day behind the triple-glazing] and the food on the kitchen bench [there's no dining table] is quality, for the sake of health and wellbeing. I’d rather a better cut of meat than a new ornament to impress the neighbours.

There’s the philosophical point that we shouldn’t have to live this way. No – the whole workplace scene is utterly knackered, weighed down by ridiculous statutes and PC adherence, greedy councils and HMRC does the rest. Blogs are forever going on about where the fake charity money goes and so on.

Let’s face it – many are not middle-class anymore. We are the new poor. We really should possess no credit card, no mortgage but why do we? Because our aspirations won’t let us live in a shed or under a tarpaulin and council by-laws won’t let us do anything but get a crippling loan for a vastly overpriced house – stratosphere stuff for anyone trying to get on the ladder. The moneys are not coming in in sufficient quantities and the card is the lifeline. This is sad. It’s impossible to maintain this forever.

In our shop or in ASDA or Tescos, everywhere you go, you see people paying by card, even for minor things. This is ridiculous and the rentals of houses and flats are near criminal, given the true state of our wealth, which is closing in on zero. It don’t work, matey.

And so to:

Bar manager Laurie Smith, 25, from Norfolk, knows all about the lure of the payday lenders, and how dangerous their apparently tempting offers can be. She took out a £300 loan with a rate of more than 2,000 per cent with Quickquid after falling short on her rent and being refused a bank overdraft in July last year.

The process was quick and frighteningly simple: she went to the Quickquid website, submitted her name, address and bank account details and minutes later the money appeared in her account.

And of course, the bottom line:

She intended to pay back the loan after her next pay cheque but found her debt had increased to £450. When she wasn’t able to pay back the £450 she claims the firm started to hound her, and even rang her employer. ‘I didn’t have a credit card or overdraft and family and friends couldn’t help me out financially,’ she says. ‘I kept telling the company they would definitely get their cash as soon as I was paid, but they still kept leaving me up to eight voicemails a day.

As one commenter wrote:

It’s time to use common sense and do it the way my parents did, if you can’t afford it then save up for it. This type of lending has been happening on doorsteps for hundreds of years; just because it is now on the high-street and glamoured up a bit doesn’t change the nature of a loan shark. If people didn’t borrow money from them they wouldn’t exist. Credit cards are the same.

There were three parts which struck me. 1. “Bar manager Laurie Smith, 25″ She is a bar manager and at 25? How? 2. As a manager, she arranges her finances using payday loans? [See other posts by me on parachutees and women managers]. 3. “She intended to pay back the loan after her next pay cheque” and “2000 percent”, taken together.

She is where I once was – letting 1. aspirations, 2. wanting to be someone people looked up to and 3. incompetence in financial management rule her life. I bet she talks the talk very slickly, I bet she comes over as quite rational and hard-headed but the bottom line is, once again – the numbers simply don’t add up and yet they have to. The owners of that bar need to do a radical reappraisal.

Then there is Macheath‘s point I simply must put in here [it was on the topic of young children being drugged by mothers]:

The increased focus on ‘early years’ education has seen vast numbers of children in structured daycare from as young as two – fuelled by policies designed to get mothers of young children into the workplace.

Toddlers are, by nature, boisterous and active; place them in an enclosed environment and group supervision and deprive them of individual attention and it’s hardly surprising that some demonstrate what could be described as ‘symptoms’.

We all need to do a radical reappraisal. We have to take an enormous blow to our pride and realize just where we are. As you’re reading this, you have an internet connection and therefore you’re not yet destitute but look at the signs, people – look at the signs. Time to cut the cloth according to our projected means in the next two financial years.

H/T Boing Boing

Clark was part of an offspring of the Weather Underground that they called the Republic of New Afrika, a non-existent utopia that Robbins writes “existed mainly in their fevered dreams.” She was part of those young people whom Peter Collier and David Horowitz termed the “destructive generation,” the movement of those who had turned against everything America had given them, and proceeded to ruin their lives trying to build a revolutionary movement that would bring the United States down as they rebuilt their native land along a Stalinist-Maoist model.

Just like Barry Soetoro, the current blighter of the USA and puppet extraordinaire of the global nastyists:

Clark had grown up in a Communist household. Her late father was Joe Clark, once the foreign editor of the Communist paper The Daily Worker.

But the left now try to distance themselves from the taint of the label “Communist” or “Marxist”. After the destructive ideologies are exploded, they all move on to some new epithet for basically the same idea and it will happen again when “Communitarianism” runs its course, after enslaving and destroying all around it.

A left-liberal friend of mine poured scorn on any talk of “like parent, like son”, as if parents have no influence, inspiring or reactive, on their offspring. It’s as if children exist in a vacuum, free of any passing-on of values . Of course, as you all well know, there is very much a passing on, parent to child and so it was with Janet Clark.

What is amazing about the profile of Clark is that unlike other leftist terrorists inexplicably freed by President Bill Clinton in the amnesty he granted to Silvia Baraldini in 1999 and to Susan Rosenberg in 2001 — one of the last acts carried out before he left office — Clark acknowledges thoroughly and honestly the depth of the crime she committed. Those Clinton pardoned, including the Puerto Rican terrorists who had tried to kill Harry S. Truman, have never said anything to indicate any regrets for their crimes.

The tragedy is perhaps one part what leftist ideology does to warp young minds and two parts the physical consequences when it is translated into action. Where Clark and Co wreaked their destruction and snuffing out of people’s lives in a small arena, Barry Soetoro has got to do his in the world arena and could quite possibly be doing it for four years more.

Clark was a model of a deluded young person consumed by ideology. Judy Clark believed for a time that she was “the keeper of the flame that flickered out in her parents’ lives” instead of realizing that perhaps her parents had something vital to teach her about disillusionment, and hence believed that “anything less than total commitment to the cause was betrayal.” What shattered the core of her belief system was her daughter, whose existence slowly led her to realize that she had to abandon her loyalties to become anything of a mother.

In my own deluded days of leftism, filled with zeal against those I’d been indoctrinated to believe were the enemy, without looking at my own colleagues in this light, we had a “Judith Clark” in our group and there is something about a leftist female radical which is highly dangerous – she gets a half-arsed version of a story, avidly reads up tomes supporting her oversimplifications and then goes out and demands heads on platters.

Python parodied the type with – guess what – yep, a Judith, in Life of Brian. There was also Patty Hearst as a role model and Hanoi Jane – total horses’ backsides who were happy to betray all that was giving them the chance to do that in the first place. Hanoi Jane in particular enjoys the good life America provides, whilst badmouthing America in the meantime.

And naturally, they don’t see this at all.

The tragedy of Judith Clark, as distinct from all the deluded lefties still wreaking their havoc via the ballot box, was in her very waking up, as I woke up, as many fellow bloggers woke up, as this hardwired, seasoned leftist friend of mine has not yet woken up but one can always hope. In Clark’s case:

No longer using her radicalism to “avoid confronting her own doubts” and walling herself off in “the safety of doctrine,” she acknowledged that what she believed was crazy. As Clark told Robbins: “I’ve experienced so much loss, and created so much loss, for the sake of an illusion.”

That is fantastic that she could confront what she’d been doing and had seen where it was going. That really is the beginning of genuine enlightenment, with a small “e”:

I was responsible for that. There was the human toll. It was a terrible truth, but it was my truth.

Leftists are used by the machine which feeds on their vague compassion and feelgood mindset that wishes to solve all the world’s problems and see a land of happiness and everyone getting along with everyone but the tragedy of the leftist is that she [or he] does not see that the vehicle she [or he] chooses to achieve those aims is an ultimately destructive one.

The Alinskies, Adornos, Learies, Marcuses, Huxleys, Ayreses and so many others are actually destructive people – goaded into this by sampled bites of ideology which ignore the non-sustainability of their draconian solutions. The rhetoric of the left entraps people within its own groupthink.

They speak of tolerance but the policies are intolerant. They speak of “positive discrimination” without the slightest hint of irony, without seeing how this dispossesses others in the community. And so on. They are so hardwired into it because they fully believe that they are the good people, the only ones fighting for humanity whilst all the time, their ideas are abetting the enslavement and destruction of humankind in the regions they are never allowed to see, nor are they interested.

All attempts to show them their folly is met with “Republican/Tory propaganda” and anyway, who wants to be shown folly when what they’re doing is the real deal in their eyes? It’s people like Radosh and even me who are the deluded in their eyes, even though we were the ones who’d been there and had now had our eyes opened.  We are now, in their eyes, traitors to “the cause”, “sellers-out”.

Clark, to put it starkly, is the opposite of those like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who to this day revel in their revolutionary ideology, and have never seen fit to apologize for anything they and their movement wrought. Clark’s sentence stemmed most not from her crime — since she herself did not kill anyone — but from her arrogant pantomime of a revolutionary that she played in court.

I’m not sure if she truly repented or didn’t but I bet bells went off and red flags are raised in readers’ minds at mention of the word “repentance”.  Is this to become a Christian exercise in apologetics?

No, it’s to acknowledge that progress, the way forward, depends on acknowledging the mistakes of the past, along with the vindications, to own that you might not have been always right, intellectual that you were, with the very truth at your fingertips, as you thought.

Just as with an alcoholic who finally owns his situation, in all its grim reality, so the do-gooding left-liberals need to confront what they are actually doing, just as I had to all those years ago and to see that we were being used, a bitter pill for any to swallow.

Whether Clark has or hasn’t done so, the truth is that if she has – then that is her final tragedy for the rest of her living days.

That one side acted as they did and will still claim it was all open and above board is interesting.  Obviously it would not convince the public, were they to know of it and just what the government is trying to prove is puzzling.  I think they’re conceding that anyone who was privy to these proceedings will damn the govt but as long as they can come back months later and point to the official record, then whatever is in that official record is “the truth”.

What a shoddy way of operating.

That’s very like NIST who were caught out in specific lies on WTC7 yet set their trolls on those who called them out, inventing the term “truther” and that was the end of any effective discussion.  Anyway, to the story, via Rowan H [many of you already know of this and might even have blogged on it]:

We’ve been hearing more and more stories about the government being extra secretive in so many things, avoiding scrutiny at every turn, and here’s yet another example. You may have heard that, last month, the Boston police, along with a Massachusetts ADA, sent a vague and broad subpoena to Twitter, demanding “all available subscriber info… including address logs for account creations,” for any activity between December 8th and December 13th, 2011 for the following list:

• Guido Fawkes
• @p0isAn0N
• @OccupyBoston
• #BostonPD
• #d0xcak3

This is kind of a weird list. While the second and third items on the list are usernames, the rest are not, so it’s not entirely clear what Twitter would need to send in response to those requests. #BostonPD, in particular, is a bit weird, since it’s just a tag. It seems like the police are fishing for any info on anyone who used that hashtag over a five day period.

Either way, the subpoena asks Twitter to keep the subpoena itself secret:

In order to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the ongoing criminal investigation, this office asks that you not disclose the existence of this request to the subscriber as disclosure could impede the ongoing criminal investigation.

However, it appears that Twitter did, in fact, forward the subpoena on to the user @p0isAn0N, who posted it publicly. That resulted in the ACLU jumping on board to represent the anonymous user of that account and to protect the subpoena… leading to a bizarre and Kafkaesque hearing in which the case itself was never even named and the government representatives conferred privately (without the other side’s lawyers) for an extended period of time, and then everything was put under a gag order for the parties who did hear what was going on. I’ll let Kade Crockford from the ACLU explain the situation. He had gone to the court to hear what happened and basically heard a lot of nothing:

We entered the courtroom. I sat in the front row, behind the bar. Presiding Judge Carol Ball called our cooperating attorney Peter Krupp’s name, and the Assistant District Attorney’s name. She did not call out the name of the case to begin the proceedings, as is custom.

The ADA approached the sidebar, the area adjacent to the judge’s perch, far enough away from us, the general public, that we couldn’t hear the content of the hushed conversation spoken there. Krupp objected immediately, before even approaching the bench; he wanted the case heard in open court. (The judge had already sealed the proceedings the day before, pending a hearing this morning.) Krupp’s objection was not granted. Our legal team therefore approached the sidebar, joining the judge and the prosecution.

Then we among the general public, including journalists from all the major media outfits in Boston, listened and heard nothing, as the prosecutors, our lawyers and the judge conversed secretly, in plain sight. I have no idea what they said. I still don’t know, because my colleagues, lawyers at the ACLU of Massachusetts, are prohibited by court order from telling me.

So all I know is what I saw. As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. After the proceedings this morning, I’m left with little of the former, and a whole lot of the latter two.

The known knowns: the scrum of lawyers, defense and prosecution, addressed the judge. I saw the judge speak to the lawyers. Then I saw our attorneys return to their bench, closer to where I was sitting, out of earshot of the sidebar. But the ADA stayed with the judge. He spoke to her, with his back to the courtroom, for about ten minutes. Our attorneys didn’t get to hear what he said to her, didn’t have a chance to respond to whatever the government was saying about our client, about the case. It was frankly shocking.

After those ten minutes of secret government-judge conversation, our attorneys were invited back to the sidebar, whereupon the scrum of lawyers spoke with the judge for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they dispersed. The judge uttered not one word to the open court. And that was it.

These proceedings sucked big time, to employ the vernacular.   Just what we can do about what everyone knows was such open flouting of procedure is jawdroppingly worrying. The government are basically gangsters and people are the victims.

But we knew that.

She stunned viewers and fans alike when she called the professional skier a ‘big woman’ live on TV. But today, Dancing On Ice judge Katarina Witt apologised to Chemmy Alcott and said she meant her comment to be complimentary.

Look, if the woman is big, then she’s big.  If she’s fat, that’s another matter.  In the words of Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel: “She weighed 203 but that was OK by me – it was lots of action.”  Witt said she herself was big, so let’s check that:

Actually, it was just an excuse to run pics of Katarina Witt.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/18/heart_of_england_trust_to_digitise_millions_of_patient_records/

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/01/18/uk_government_launches_hydrogen_motoring_task_force/

The Bruges Group has ranked Members of Parliament according to their voting in the House of Commons since the 2010 General Election You can check how they voted on the key EU related issues that came before them and see who are the genuine Eurosceptics and who are Europhile.

I’ve listed all MPs who scored 50% plus, in percentage order but for the full list, click on the link above.   Therefore, in the light of many campaigns currently underway, including our Say No to the Big 3, perhaps we could be a little circumspect and exclude some of those below from our wrathful box filling at the next elections:

100% Conservative  - Peter Bone, Wellingborough

96% Conservative – Mark Reckless, Rochester and Strood

88% Conservative  - Richard Shepherd, Aldridge-Brownhills
88% Conservative  - Douglas Carswell, Clacton
88% Conservative  - Philip Davies, Shipley

84% Labour  - Dennis Skinner, Bolsover
84% Conservative  - David Nuttall, Bury North
84% Conservative  - Andrew Turner, Isle of Wight
84% Conservative  - William Cash, Stone

80% Conservative  - Philip Hollobone, Kettering
80% Conservative  - Christopher Chope, Christchurch
80% Conservative  - Julian Lewis, New Forest East
80% DU. -  Jim Shannon, Strangford
80% Conservative  - Steve Baker, Wycombe

76% DU.  - Sammy Wilson, East Antrim

72% Labour  - Graham Stringer, Blackley and Broughton
72% DU.  - Gregory Campbell, East Londonderry
72% DU. -  Ian Paisley, North Antrim
72% Conservative  - Zac Goldsmith, Richmond Park
72% DU.  - William McCrea, South Antrim
72% Conservative  - Anne Main, St Albans
72% DU.  - Nigel Dodds, Belfast North
72% Labour  - Kate Hoey, Vauxhall

68% Conservative  - James Clappison, Hertsmere
68% Labour  - Jeremy Corbyn, Islington North

64% Labour  - Mike Wood, Batley and Spen
64% Labour  - Jon Cruddas, Dagenham and Rainham
64% DU.  - Jeffrey M. Donaldson, Lagan Valley
64% Conservative – John Redwood, Wokingham

60% Labour  - Roger Godsiff, Birmingham, Hall Green
60% DU.  - David Simpson, Upper Bann

56% Conservative -  Chris Kelly, Dudley South
56% Labour  - John Cryer, Leyton and Wanstead
56% Conservative  - Peter Tapsell, Louth and Horncastle
56% Conservative  - John Whittingdale, Maldon
56% Independent  - Sylvia Hermon, North Down

50% Labour  - Ronnie Campbell, Blyth Valley
50% Labour  - Lindsay Hoyle, Chorley
50% Labour/Co-op -  Alan Keen, Feltham and Heston
50% Labour/Co-op - Ian Davidson, Glasgow South West
50% Labour  - Frank Dobson, Holborn and St Pancras
50% Labour  - Natascha Engel, North East Derbyshire
50% Conservative  - Nigel Evans, Ribble Valley

There may have been errors in transferring from the Bruges’ Group list. These will be corrected as they come to light. It’s fairly obvious from this that the Lib-Dems should be eliminated from the political arena at the next elections.

Well done, Bruges Group, for that mammoth task.

This sort of thing has been blogged on before.  What we have is an activist who talks of his PhDs at the beginning and is given to “absolutely”s and predictions of the direst consequences, a gilding-the-lily style of journalism I can’t abide … and then there is the issue itself.

The bottom line is that with the Codex Alimentarius, we have an attempt to regulate something where there is no desirable reason to regulate.  At its most benign, it’s an attempt to corner the market in food – at its worst it is indeed an attempt to command and control.  The wording is both meticulous, comprehensive and at the same time vague – i.e. it allows for interpretations by ministers of state.

The formula never seems to change.  Create some minor or artificial crisis or if necessary, an outrage, bring in draconian legislation, leave it on the statute books until people have long forgotten it, quietly implement provisions you really wanted, using these statutes for your justification, notwithstanding your disdain for legitimacy anyway.  You’re obsessed by legality but not legitimacy.

So while this emotional, almost hysterical reaction by the pundit ascribes all manner of horrors as a result of the legislation, thereby turning off a large proportion of the populace before he begins, it’s probably going to be this legislation plus all subsequent amendments which are really going to hit home long after it’s too late to change them.

Therefore, the time to change it is, as the author quite rightly says, now, whilst still in the implementation stage.

The greatest obstacle for the ordinary citizen is the tone and level of scholasticism of the pundit and the difficulty of the document itself:

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/0160/latest/whole.html?search=ts_bill_food+bill_resel&p=1#dlm3435700

How to stop the bastards?  We just can’t and as Rossa says, it will tried out in this backwater first and if successful, will be rolled out in more mainstream nations – the globalists will be observing carefully and as dispassionately as a Dr. Mengele.  One commenter wrote:

The key thing is seeds, as we’ve said many times. The bill bans the sharing of seeds as it stands, and Kate Wilkinson confirmed this (amazingly), she promised to amend it, but she has not it and will not. Why?

Yes, why do seeds need to be regulated?  for whom?  In practical terms, how can people formally protest and go through the process of hearings and court judgments to get it reversed?  Then they bring in another raft and it starts all over again.  There was success against the NAFTA and SPPNA but they’re now going the backdoor route, via the states.  They never give up if temporarily stymied.  Look at the regional assembly legislation in the UK.

There is only one answer and that’s to remove these people.  Yet they’re legion, are they not and it runs right down into society and various people’s misguided ideas that it’s for the common good.

Depressing.

Cobbling together some comments from the Telegraph article on the GOP on the other side of the pond:

#  Obama is used to being treated kindly while his minions engage in gutter tactics on his behalf to destroy his opponents.  If Romney is the candidate, that pattern will continue.  If Gingrich is the candidate, Obama will find himself on the receiving end and the teleprompter president will go scurrying off in tears to hide.

#  On the basis that the USA is usually better governened when the guy in charge knows how the levers of power work, I think I would go for Newt. After all he is the man who, as Leader of the Senate (is that the right title?), tried to get the slime-ball Clinton impeached for engaging in oral sex acts with a girl on work-experience.

Mind you, she wasn’t exactly unwilling or 12 years old.

#  The Tea Party have been busy bees, working from the ground up on such tasks as capturing local elected civic committees, local political precincts and such. Power begins at the ground and works upward and the Tea Party has been doing precisely this.

Those who have been breathing unguarded  sighs of relief will soon have their breaths taken away. 2010 was a bad event for Progressives. 2012 is about ready to become a whole lot worse.

Sounds to me like the solution is to mirror our own Say No to the Big Three.  Just reduce it three to two.

Here we go again. Someone puts up an idea, supports it with photos, auto-sceptics come in and ‘debunk’ him, anyone even discussing him is lumped in as being in support and mud sticks. Standard pattern.

Question, if he’s a fraud, what’s his motivation?

1. Nutter;
2. Disinformation to discredit;
3. He’s a fraud but the material is not, at least in part;
4. The real story is much bigger but more grubby than the stated story.

First stop for me is always the sceptic press and here’s one such site. There’s a question by one sceptic and a response by another:

Q:  As you can see he clearly  gets upset and gets emotional about the whole thing ,even if he does go on the crazy side by claiming that the drone founded in Iran was given to them by aliens.  But what I’m saying, is that for the first time, has a conspiracy theorist managed to uncover a great secret that could change modern society?

A:  Nope.

The answer-giver is a complete richard, a non-comp.  He doesn’t feel his own position requires any backing up, he doesn’t apply the test of scientific stringency to himself, he just goes with the umbrella protection of being a ‘rationalist’, such as these self-proclaimed hardheads think they are.

Now I’m not saying that I buy the story myself, which we’re coming to by degrees but I prefer the sceptic who asked the question – at least he’s agnostic on the matter.

On the one hand, we have photos of U.S. government bonds and bond boxes [see top and bottom photos].  The boxes seem real enough.  This is accompanied by a story about a Dragon society and the main thrust is that for a thousand years or more, the gold of the world was progressively hoarded in China.  Somehow, the Kuomintang shifted it to Taipei and the Japs wanted to get their hands on it.  The U.S. were then complicit in getting their hands on it by issuing bonds which were then never honoured.

The last bit does sound like something the PTB would do and mention of Bretton Woods does raise all sorts of spectres of collusion – that’s a separate topic.  Given the real motivation for Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, along with all the other anomalies at this time with the crims above, it’s not hard to run with this idea.

The issue is that David Wilcock does not have a good name.  In the Icke mould in many people’s eyes, he’s so easily vilified, rightly or wrongly – google him with the word fraud tacked on and you’ll see what I mean.  Did he really say he was some historical character reincarnated?  That won’t go down well.  I’m not saying anything about reincarnation or Planet Nibiru or lizards because if you’re going to speak of the latter, there’re still the bible’s Nephilim to explain away.

My position is that I don’t know and can’t know.  Full stop.  Period.  I’ll extract from the post and comments that which seems hard evidence:

#  Adam Smith and what he really said:

http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/adam-smith/Wealth-Nations.pdf

# The Italian fake bonds:

# The trillion dollar lawsuit – note the defendants [pdf]

#  The Fed and the government:

#  Thanks to heroic efforts of Congressman Ron Paul, former Congressman Alan Grayson and Congressman Bernie Sanders to audit the Federal Reserve, we now know that the Federal Reserve secretly lent out 26 trillion dollars’ worth of American money from 2007 to 2010 — much of it to foreign banks.

#  The bottom line here is the bailing out of foreign banks:

http://www.unelected.org/audit-of-the-federal-reserve-reveals-16-trillion-in-secret-bailouts

The results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100-year history were posted on Senator Sanders’ webpage earlier this morning:  http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3

# The GDP of the United States is … $14.12 trillion.

#  In early November:

Congressman Bernie Sanders revealed that in addition to handing out 16 trillion dollars, (not counting the ten trillion in “currency swaps” Congressman Grayson pointed out), the Federal Reserve also owns the financial agencies they are supposed to be regulating:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/the-veil-of-secrecy-at-th_b_1072099.html

The GAO [audit] also revealed that many of the people who serve as directors of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks come from the exact same financial institutions that the Fed is in charge of regulating.

Further, the GAO found that at least 18 current and former Fed board members were affiliated with banks and companies that received emergency loans from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.

# Bloomberg claimed:

At their peak, these seven programs represented $1.2 trillion in loans to banks and financial institutions — the high-water mark of a massive, systemic bailout whose details the country’s central banking authority has not always seemed eager to divulge….

# This much is corroborated:

http://moneymorning.com/2011/10/12/derivatives-the-600-trillion-time-bomb-thats-set-to-explode/

In 2009, five banks held 80% of derivatives in America. Now, just four banks hold a staggering 95.9% of U.S. derivatives, according to a recent report from the Office of the Currency Comptroller.

The four banks in question: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS).

Derivatives played a crucial role in bringing down the global economy [in 2008], so you would think that the world’s top policymakers would have reined these things in by now — but they haven’t.

#   With 114,825,428 households in the US:

It would only take one payment of 275 billion, 581 million dollars to guarantee the savings of all American citizens. The Fed’s secret bailout of 26 trillion dollars was nearly 100 times greater than that.

#   The United States Department of Defense handed out 721.3 billion dollars in Fiscal Year 2011 alone.

This does not include 20.9 billion for Atomic Energy Defense activities, nor 124.5 billion in veterans’ benefits, nor 10.1 billion in foreign military aid, nor 44.1 billion in foreign economic aid, nor 7.5 billion in defense-related activities.

CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches.

He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York.

Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.

Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]

The assertion is that there was much in gold bonds in the Philippines and that some sort of double-cross was/is going on where the U.S. is not coughing up the gold now that the bonds are to be redeemed.  The U.S. said the bonds were faked and let’s accept that at face value for now.   So who faked them?  Go back to Glenn Beck’s guest.  It also assumes that the U.S. is in a position to officially pay back bond holders.

Can’t make a lot of this one:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16392922

Twenty ‘gold’ bars found in a case on a train near Paris last week have been found to be fake.  A suspect package on board a RER train at Massy-Palaiseau station was examined by the bomb squad and found to contain what seemed to be 20kg (44 lb) of gold.

French police have now established that the bars are made of a base metal – with a thin coating of gold.  The ingots would have been worth around 800,000 euros ($1m; £670,000) if they had been genuine.  Police in Palaiseau, south-west of Paris, told Reuters news agency that they were not ruling out the possibility that the fake bars were part of a scam – in light of the worldwide demand for gold.

There have been tales of fake gold bars for some time.  Here’s a more detailed one about the U.S. allegedly scamming the Chinese [or was it the other way around?]  I’ve read one financial blog pundit say, “Rubbish, it would never happen,” and the obvious rejoinder is – where’s the evidence that they haven’t?  Not saying they haven’t but I need more than just assertion.

At a minimum, there’s a lot of buying and selling, using gold as collateral or payment.  Someone’s tried to scam someone else along the way.  $134 billion?  At a maximum, there’s a mass withdrawal of gold, money, food/water and other commodities going on, along with mass scamming, e,g, OTC derivatives.  The regulators are receiving largesse as members of the organizations they’re regulating.

By any normal standards, there is mass criminality going on up top, even by their own skewed regulations and they obviously feel it can be done with impunity.  Where does that leave us, with the middle-class fast disintegrating and joining the poor?

Effed over.

[H/T Rossa]

The history of the EU is the battle ground of two rival, mutually exclusive views on Europe: the Classic Liberal, rooted in individualism is about economic freedom in a voluntary, economic confederation of nation states. The socialist vision is the opposite, and will eventually lead to full integration and central governance from Brussels. That view is laid out in the usual statist-collectivist shibboleths as ‘solidarity’ and ‘social-economic policy’. It pushes for a political union which will inexorably lead to an end of the nation state, without as much as one European citizen ever having cast a vote for it.

The Dutch perspective.  She writes of the covert statist agenda.  Meanwhile, Luikkerland writes on the mass immigration scandal:

Just as in the USA with rampant immigration from Mexico, it is the design of the elite to economically and politically destroy Britain by importing huge numbers who have no loyalty to the host country, do not understand about labour rights or any customs of the host country, have no experience of a middle class and the expectations born of it, who will help cause national disintegration through ghettoisation, and will keep wages low for so as to create a situation that is most conducive for corporate profit making and control. The idea that British are lazy is a deliberate lie that is used to justify the mass influx of immigrants; if some Britons have become dependent on welfare it is because the British government has deliberately created that situation.

Toyota Australia announces the loss of 350 jobs at its Altona assembly line. [Australia]

FSA Pressures NY Banks To Release Customer Funds [U.S.]

JP Morgan At the Center of the MF Global Failure [U.S.]

United Welfare States of America: In 2011 Nearly Half The Population Received Some Form Of Government Benefit [U.S.]

U.S. economy may never fully recover: Carney [Canada] 

We’re living on borrowed money and borrowed time [Canada]

Thousands Turn to Charities in Iceland in December [Iceland]

NZ houses rated ‘highly unaffordable’ [New Zealand]

State’s retirement reforms ‘need to be sustainable’ [South Africa]

Civil servants press on with strike [South Africa]

I’m a 35 year old woman looking to meet men between the ages of 36 and 46.

Find out more about me… [South Africa]

US overcomes the crisis as UK sinks into the swamp

So we’re all meant to lapse into despondency.

Rule N1 – never believe what they’re trying to put over you – this is psychological warfare and the first step in combatting that is to identify the enemy, his agenda and his weapons. For a start, it’s BS that America has overcome its crisis. A visit to Jesse, Karl or Zero Hedge are sufficient to put that back in its box. In fact, they’re heading for the big one over there.

Secondly, it is true that on the whole, the U.S. … this continues at OoL … [comments off at this end].

[H/T Chuckles]

Smith saw economics as a branch of moral philosophy, and he saw capitalism as an ethical project whose success required political commitment to justice and freedom, not merely an understanding of economic logistics.

The notion of classical liberalism certainly embraces economic freedom but it also embraces that pesky bit “unless/until it is to the detriment of others”.  Cue the moral dimension.

A great deal of contemporary (neo-classical) economics can be understood in terms of translating Smith’s Invisible Hand metaphor into a systematic theoretical form, with a particular emphasis on the economic efficiency of perfectly competitive markets.

However the popular view of Smith that has resulted from this emphasis is twice distorted.

Firstly, it is based on the narrow foundations of a few select quotations from The Wealth of Nations (WN) that are taken in isolation as summing up his work (Smith only mentions the ‘all important’ Invisible Hand once), and secondly these quotations have been analyzed in a particularly narrow way.

Both selection and interpretation have been driven by contemporary economists’ interest in justifying orthodox economic methodology and their peculiar (Mandevillian) assumption of the selfish utility maximising homo economicus.

And that’s the nub of the matter.

But anyone who cares to read Smith’s Wealth of Nations for themselves will find an economics discussed and justified in explicitly moral terms, in which markets, and the division of labour they allow, are shown to both depend upon and produce not only prosperity but also justice and freedom, particularly for the poor.

This is more than just a philosophical nicety and sets it at odds with the Randian dystopic view of freedom, the free market’s motivation and the cold indifference of the amoral “business is business”.  This extremist position is a central plank in the platform of the crony capitalists and justifies all the corruption and I’m all right, jack of the Dimons et al.

It has zero to do with classical liberalism, it is maniacally driven and all consuming, monopolistic and anti-market in the end, in the sense that it wishes to eliminate the free market altogether.  That’s why the global capitalists can be called the global socialists – with a state full of serfs run by the economic oligarchs above, for their pleasure and enrichment.

While Rousseau sought a perfect and absolute solution to the problem through his famous social contract, Smith argued that under conditions of freedom and justice, society could endogenously produce a decent social order for co-ordinating moral and economic conduct without centralised direction or coercive moral policing by religious or secular authorities.

In the light of yesterday’s post and using the analogy of the Lord of the Rings, while it is good not to be under the thumb of the diktats of religious or secular authorities, it is an impossible dream if you think it can be achieved by setting up model communities with man providing for man.  Hobbiton only survived in the first place because of the rangers such as Strider who patrolled the region and kept the nasties at bay.

I put to you that the analogy holds true in terms of Adam Smith’s vision and in terms of the possibility of the free market.  Using a further analogy – that of our armed forces – it is only with such as these defending us, well-funded, well-equipped, well-trained, honoured and respected, that the nation is safe enough to indulge in its Smithian ideals.  As a parent with a child beginning to run, the watcher, the guardian, is a necessary precondition of whatever we wish to achieve, otherwise it’s not going to last all that long.

There is an enemy out there and also within.  The trick is that the watchers need to have the altruism of a Strider, rather than that of a Barosso.

[H/T Chuckles]