At the Orphanage now.

At 19:23:

“Once we get this criminal JP Morgan out of the picture.”

“That, I think’s a lot of people’s hope” [she should stick to her day job rather than attempt to articulate or perhaps she should seek an education]

You’re not going to get JPM “out of the picture” – ever. Let’s go over it once more:

Wiki goes on about Helvetica:

Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.^[1] The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage.

No intrinsic meaning, no intrinsic form?   Meaningless?  Formless?  Soulless and therefore beloved of the public dictators of taste?  In fact, is Helvetica a symbol of The Great Nothingness we are moving towards, the mediocritized schlock blandness we take these days as style?

I tend to think of Helvetica as the Michael Buble of typography —you could play his music at a wedding, retirement or cocktail party and probably get away without raising an eyebrow. You could try to dance to his recycled Sinatra inspired ballads, but wouldn’t it be more fun to play some Nine Inch Nails and see what happens?

No intrinsic meaning in its form.  No style.  Concentric thinking.  Y-e-e-e-s-s-s.  From the vid:

We like restrictions, we can’t operate without restrictions.  We wanted to find more structure than design … if possible, we will use only one typeface and one size …  We don’t like humanistic typefaces … it must be more rational, otherwise we have too much expression.

We think that Helvetica contains, somehow, a design programme … it will lead you to a certain language … you will use it like that because the typeface wants it like that.

Ah yes.  We wish to be infantilized, we wish to be told, we wish to be comfortable in our smiley faced cocoon.

………..

* And lets not forget his good Welsh wife Mifamwy Cmfwyp.

Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society

and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina , KS – 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.

2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.

3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph

4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of ‘lie, ‘play,’ and ‘run.’

5. Define case; illustrate each case.

6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.

7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?

4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?

8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)

[Do we even know what this is??]

1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals

4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.’ (HUH?)

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two exceptions under each rule.

6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks

and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4. Describe the mountains of North America

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each..

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.

Gives the saying ‘he only had an 8th grade education’ a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?!

No wonder they dropped out after 8th grade. They already knew more than they needed to know!

No, I don’t have the answers! And I don’t think I

ever did!

From ja.bourque@comcast.net

#  Michelle Obama said in 2009 that she “wanted to rip Bill Clinton’s eyes out” to the New Yorker and the press ignored it.

#  Michelle Obama was also allegedly jealous of Oprah’s relationships with Barack. In fact, Michelle was so paranoid of all the women working near her husband that she reportedly asked her “inner circle” to keep an eye on any girl that Barack got “touchy” with.

#  “Oprah only wants to cash in, using the White House as a backdrop for her show to perk up her ratings,” Michelle was quoted as telling her staff. “Oprah, with her yo-yo dieting and huge girth, is a terrible role model. Kids will look at Oprah, who’s rich and famous and huge, and figure it’s OK to be fat.”

She may or may not have something there with that last one but the bitchiness is the common thread, is it not?

W-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l, what’s the issue?  Women are bitchy [and increasingly tarty and obese] and men are pigs [and increasingly surplus to requirements] – so what’s new under the sun?

The issue with lovely Michelle is not so much her uselessness in doing anything in her life other than marry Barry Soetoro, it’s not her utter gracelessness.

It’s her roots and proclivities.

Look at her relationship with Bill Ayres or at her college thesis, which Princeton hid, revealing her race-obsession:

After four years at one of America’s most esteemed academic institutions, Michelle recoiled at the thought of “further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”

And the Wright connection:

For Michelle, who had written that a racial “separationist” would have a better understanding of American blacks than “an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight,” Wright’s Trinity Church mission statement had to resonate.

In the oppression narrative, the murder of 3000 Americans on 9/11 isn’t terrorism but social justice. America, after all, had it coming. For Wright, it was “chickens coming home to roost.” Indeed, Wright sometimes prefers to call our country “the U.S. of KKK A” — a grotesque sentiment which, we shall see, is shared by others with whom the Obamas choose to associate themselves.

For their part, the Obamas couldn’t get enough of Wright. Barack and Michelle had him marry them. They chose him to baptize their children, who were routinely exposed to Wright’s race-baiting bombast.

And this is the non-transparent alleged Kenyan and his wife whom half of you over there want to make President of a disintegrating society for four more years.

Good luck, America, with role models like Michelle Soetoro.  She detests half of America and you can cut that any which way you like.  As a black, she detests white America.  As a woman, she detests men.  As a Marxist, she detests the nation built on free enterprise.

And yet white left-liberals will continue to support people such as Michelle Soetoro who detest them.  Go figure.

………..

By the way:

Losses at Oprah’s TV channel approach $330M
Oprah Won’t Publicly Support Obama in 2012 Election

Quick observation: doesn’t look too obese to me:

Near the top of the list of the Pirate Party’s demons is copyright protection, and rightly so. Copyright protection is an antiquated relic of the late Middle Ages that has no place in the digital era. It is debatable whether such government-granted monopolies were ever the best way to finance the production of creative and artistic work, but now that the internet will allow this material to be instantly transferred at zero cost anywhere in the world, copyrights are clearly a counter-productive restraint on technology.

The major difference is that the distortions from copyright protection are much larger. While tariffs on cars or clothes would rarely exceed 20-30 per cent, the additional cost imposed by copyright protection is the price of the product. Movies that would be free in a world without copyright protection can cost $20-$30. The same is true of video games, and the price of copyrighted software can run into the thousands of dollars.

Discuss.

In response to a question during J.P. Morgan’s April 13th quarterly earnings conference call, Mr. Dimon made his regrettable comment, “It’s a complete tempest in a teapot. Every bank has a major portfolio. In those portfolios you make investments that you think are wise, that offset your exposures.” And fully two weeks later he apparently still had not seen the detailed positions.

… or:

Mr. Dimon has been incredibly complacent, but he’s not the focus of this CBB.  It’s more important to contemplate that the entire world has been incredibly complacent – for years now.  I recall being bewildered when reading inside accounts of the months and weeks leading up to the collapse of LTCM back in 1998.  How could so many operating in the bowels of derivatives and speculative trading have been so oblivious to what was unfolding?

… or:

For years now, I’ve had a fascination with trying to better grasp how seemingly apparent crises invariably catch everyone unprepared.  True, a crisis wouldn’t really be much of a crisis if the marketplace was prepared for it.  But over the centuries there have been scores of major Bubbles and monetary fiascos.  And having read numerous detailed accounts of manias and Credit busts, on virtually every occasion I would find myself asking, “How could they not have seen it coming?”

There are those who do see them coming, so much so that they actually create them.  This post touches on it.  Some might say that that’s just good business, screwing everyone over and producing nations of Bob Cratchits.  No level playing field is good business?

In 1857:

Corsair, the Life of J.P. Morgan, tells us that the Panic of 1857 was caused by the collapse of the grain market and by the sudden collapse of Ohio Life and Trust, for a loss of five million dollars. With this collapse nine hundred other American companies failed. Significantly, one not only survived, but prospered from the crash.

… and:

In Corsair, we learn that the Bank of England lent George Peabody and Company five million pounds during the panic of 1857. Winkler, in Morgan the Magnificent, says that the Bank of England advanced Peabody one million pounds, an enormous sum at that time, and the equivalent of one hundred million dollars today, to save the firm. However, no other firm received such beneficence during this Panic.

Ron Chernow wrote that the Morgan munificence was reprised in the 1907 panic:

“In the following days, acting like a one-man Federal Reserve system, [J. Pierpont] Morgan decided which firms would fail and which survive. Through a non stop flurry of meetings, he organized rescues of banks and trust companies, averted a shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange, and engineered a financial bailout of New York City.”

Boom and bust are essentials for the Rothschilds/JPMs/hangers-onto make their dosh.  With no natural boom and bust cycles, they need to create them by influencing not only markets but political events or at the very least, profiting from them:

The 1837 panic:

Because of U.S. debt troubles, Peabody became persona non grata around London (after all, he had sold the Brits much of that debt). But that did not deter him. He bought the depreciated state bonds when they were trading for pennies on the dollar. When these bonds paid interest again, in the late 1840s, Peabody reaped a fortune.

Some will say: “There you go, Marx was right – capitalism in all its ignominy.”  What do they say about the corner shopkeeper who now can’t set up his corner shop because of bureaucratic greed?  Can they make any distinction between the two?

Some will say Peabody should not have profited.  I say there was nothing wrong with him reading and profiting on a changing market – that shows astuteness and often hard work.   Good luck to Capitalists at Work.  The issue, as you well know, is if your parent company created that market fluctuation and you had the readies to exploit it.

What is the saying again – don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence?  I’d submit that both are operating in the case of Jamie Dimon.

[H/T Chuckles]

This came by email:

A young man hired by a supermarket reported for his first day of work. The manager greeted him with a warm handshake and a smile, gave him a broom and said, “Your first job will be to sweep out the store.”

“But I’m a college graduate!!” the young man replied indignantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding,” said the manager. “Here, give me the broom – I’ll show you how.”

It’s common for the old to serve it up to the young and has been for eons – read a book like Decline and Fall and it’s in there. Selective memories which make things seem rosier and a tendency to lump all youngsters in one basket, whilst the young who see anyone fifteen or twenty years older than them as being on the decline are par for the course.

Nowhere was this more obvious to me than in the comments of girls in my lessons in Russia who were bemoaning what “the young” were doing in the mid-2000s. This was 20 year olds referring to 15 year olds – kid sisters etc.

Was there any truth in it? Yes. I’m not saying “thin” is the be-all and end-all but no girl with any self-respect would have left the house pre-2000 with hair messy and carrying weight. It was rare to see any sort of paunchy roundness – it was seen as “I don’t care” – and as for obesity, there just wasn’t for those 20 year olds.

Not so the 15 year olds. One summer’s day at Ikea, which was part of a new shopping complex, we went for something to eat and there were two girls at the counter with bare bellies hanging over waistbands of short shorts and the thighs were flabby. My mate was shocked and appalled but I said: “Par for the course in the west.”  What had really shocked him was that these girls did not care.

The girls in my groups were savage about the new phenomenon. “They see it as a badge of distinction,” was the general tenor of the comments. “To be fat is to have money and to have money is everything.” That was a candid assessment of Russian society.

If there was ever a society which didn’t need, which wouldn’t be able to cope with, which was ill-suited to western imperialist pig-dog “depravity” and “slackness”, it was Russia and I can’t help thinking that there was intention here. Western mega-companies were everywhere with enormous clout to influence things. That gave me my livelihood, true but at the same time, it was seducing the Russians with things they didn’t need, like credit.

And part of it was the repulsion felt by my girls about the “new generation” of tarts, for that was the other thing they told me about the young. Never mind that there were a considerable number of those in the “house of girls” where I taught, at all levels but there wasn’t the blanket tartdom which was coming up. In fact, that very word uttered by a 20 year old showed there were still vestiges of the old society remaining.

And I tell you, if it was a choice between the company of a 20 year old who looked after herself, attended to her studies and had a serious boyfriend and the new pseudo-western phenomenon – foulmouthed, drugged out of their skulls, clubbing many times a week [who let them in the clubs?], no prizes for which one I’d rather be with. For a start the former at least brushed their hair.

So, Mike Stock, of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, has come out, has he, and bemoaned the use of sluttiness to sell things to the young:

The 60-year-old launched a scathing attack on acts who use risqué performances and sexually-charged pop videos – in contrast to the stars he helped launch in the 80s, such as Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan.

More than one commenter mentioned hypocrisy but hey, let that one pass and look at what some editor or whatever of some magazine called Q wrote that anyone criticizing the new porn are just “outdated”.  This is the mantra that’s always been used by those pushing things onto others, especially things which are obnoxious.

Someone rightly pointed out that Madonna was just as bad [and got worse as time went on] and that Adele, far from being a role model was foul-mouthed and tasteless.  Someone [not sure if male or female] wrote:

Wise words. If only people would heed them. But the agenda in Britain to sexualise young girls is phenomenal and it is the people who want that who seem to have control. And noone stands up for the young girls who will be the victims of this approach.

The other word is kosh’mar [stress the kosh, more like 'lush'] – which means ‘nightmare’. It does pretty well the same job and I’d submit both are the words of choice in this case below, via Chuckles, via WM Briggs:

In Sweden, “it is now considered a distinct discrimination if one is addressed as a man or woman.” So reports Kopp Online.

Sweden is angling to de-genderify their pronouns so that use of he or she is officially discouraged, to be replaced by something resembling it (hen).

Not only does this move strip useful information from its language, the Swedes have made an important step in subtracting from a person’s humanity, since to be called an “it” is to be equated to a chair or a bug.

Now that, dear reader, is true equality. And it is under the banner of Equality that these changes are being made.

Koshmar!  Uzhas!

Cut immediately to Uncle Badger who commented at OoL on Barry’s Kenyan birth [or not]:

What I find so deeply sinister is the completeness with which the Left has managed to shut-down any discussion – to the extent that even some who are usually lampooned as swivel-eyed Rich-wing loons slam the door once the issue of Obama’s origin is raised. They are too scared even to discuss it.

It is the Left’s power to control the debate, via the media but also in real life, that is troubling.

Because, let’s face it – we are powerless to stop this madness going on.  I lump JD’s art comment below, the Barry Soetoro birth, this Swedish insanity and so on under the same heading and that heading is less than complimentary.

De-genderify their pronouns!!!Uzhas! Koshmar!  You thought that was bad – try this – Briggs continues:

There is in Sweden a kindergarten with the telling name of Egalia where “gender-free” children are taught the joys of homosexuality and to play house, imagining, for instance, that there are “two or three mothers.” In a separate article, the wardens of this institution justify their experimentation by claiming that “gender” is not something which you are born with, but is something which can be “changed at any time.” This being so, the little tots should learn early how to do this morphing.

I want to weep.  People, what has happened to us?  What has gone wrong and who are these people who would perpetrate such outrages on toddlers?  What sort of parents have that progeny?  What substances are they on?  Can they be reasoned with?

… the mind boggles … the solution to the UK economic crisis, and the way to end the persistent nuisance of the climate inconsiderately changing all the time, is to add a million “secure, flexible, permanent” union workers building wind farms to the UK government’s permanent welfare rolls.These folks would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.

Comments on the post:

Greg Cavanagh says:

One million more government employees within a 12 month period. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s truly sad that supposedly intelligent people couldn’t figure out that government employees take their wages from the general public. And the worst aspect of it is, surely he would have talked with other people about his idea before going to print, yet nobody else saw the flaw in his plan either.

There is a madness gripping the world.

Bob says:

I don’t know. I’ve been doing environmental management full time and part time in private industry for 30 years. If it weren’t for the government, I’d have had to find honest work.

1 million permanent government workers building high cost windmills and other high cost green delights. Absolutely wonderful. Why not 2 million? We’d stop the climate from changing twice as fast.

[H/T Chuckles]

Constitution Club;

Not a minute too soon, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is creating “environmental justice” units that will be empowered to oversee regulations in conjunction with local governments throughout the country. The framework for the Environmental Justice Working Group includes eleven federal government agencies, including the TSA, the Secret Service and FEMA. Go big or go home, right?

VISION STATEMENT

“Environmental justice” describes the commitment of the Federal Government, through its policies, programs, and activities, to avoid placing disproportionately high and adverse effects on the human health and environment of minority or low-income populations. As described in the 2010 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR), our Nation’s vision of homeland security is a homeland safe and secure, resilient against terrorism and other hazards, and where American interests and aspirations and the American way of life can thrive. In seeking to fulfill this vision, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aspires to avoid burdening minority and low-income populations with a disproportionate share of any adverse human health or environmental risks associated with our efforts to secure the Nation. DHS joins with other departments and agencies to appropriately include environmental justice practices in our larger mission efforts involving federal law enforcement and emergency response activities.

[H/T Chuckles]

‘The danger is in looking at only, say, 80% of the story, when the last 20% alters the picture significantly.’

So let’s look at the only part of the story most people are likely to look at:

“The international community is guilty of sins of omission,” Mr Annan said. The [Rwandan] genocide – in which some 800,000 people died – occurred when Mr Annan was head of UN peacekeeping forces. The UN Security Council failed to reinforce the small UN peacekeeping force in the country. “The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret,” Mr Annan said.

He also said that he believed at that time that he was doing his best. Someone ordered those Belgian troops removed and unprotected, those people were then slaughtered. Someone in the UN forces ordered that. Annan was head of the UN and had ultimate control of those troops, in terms of what the UN policy was regarding peacekeeping – the protocols, in other words.

Immediately, Chuckles, who sent me the Beeb link, opined that it was to do with Oil for Food and he’s probably right:

In an extraordinary intervention, Kofi Annan attacked the conclusions contained in the Iraq Survey Group Report (the Duelfer Report)[2] regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program. Annan firmly rejected accusations in the report that Saddam attempted to bribe members of the U.N. Security Council through the Oil-for-Food program:

I don’t think the Russian or the French or the Chinese government would allow itself to be bought because some of his companies are getting relative contracts of the Iraqi authorities. I don’t believe that at all. I think it’s inconceivable, these are very serious and important governments. You are not dealing with banana republics.[3]

These remarks on the Duelfer Report are breathtaking in their arrogance and are a blatant demonstration of the Secretary General’s bias in favor of those nations that had opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

Annan’s comments are all the more remarkable for the fact that they were made against the backdrop of the biggest scandal in U.N. history, the ill-fated Oil-for-Food program, now the subject of at least four congressional investigations, three U.S. federal investigations, as well as a U.N.-appointed commission of inquiry, the Volcker Commission.[4]

Chuckles is therefore way ahead of the average John out there with a tele who watches the X Factor or Sky News or the Beeb.  In fact, he’d probably not have even looked at this, John Citizen, as it’s the World News: Africa page and who’s interested in Africa in the west?  And ask John citizen to explain Oil for Food.

However, if he did happen to read it, Mr. Citizen would conclude that “they’re all corrupt and Kofi Annan is covering his butt”.  Not untrue but that gets us 80% of the way.  In my case, I recall two things – that Kofi Annan was good friends with Maurice Strong who’s good friends with Gore and the world government movement, that the UN was set up for the express purpose of regulating the world [read control] and many understand that.  Hence the World Core Curriculum with its theosophist basis [see Mueller], food, water and so on.

But all this is still vague, general.  Accuse Kofi Annan of actually enabling the genocide, not just of “being unaware” and he’d claim he has a case in saying he couldn’t control events actually occurring on the ground  – that’s what his commanders were for.  And initially, it looks as if he’s right. Take fifty-five-year-old Romeo Dallaire, then a major general in the Canadian army who at the time of the genocide was the commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda:

In 1993 Tanzania brokered peace talks, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords. Under its terms the Rwandan government agreed to share power with Hutu opposition parties and the Tutsi minority. UN peacekeepers would be deployed to patrol a cease-fire and assist in demilitarization and demobilization as well as to help provide a secure environment, so that exiled Tutsi could return.

In 1993 several thousand Rwandans were killed, and some 9,000 were detained. Guns, grenades, and machetes began arriving by the planeload. A pair of international commissions-one sent by the United Nations, the other by an independent collection of human-rights organizations-warned explicitly of a possible genocide.

But Dallaire knew nothing of the precariousness of the Arusha Accords. When he made a preliminary reconnaissance trip to Rwanda, in August of 1993, he was told that the country was committed to peace and that a UN presence was essential. He was never briefed about the Accords, nor about the massive planeloads of arms coming in.

Once he was actually posted to Rwanda, in October of 1993, Dallaire lacked not merely intelligence data and manpower but also institutional support.  The small Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, run by the Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan, now [it's a 1994 article] the UN secretary general, was overwhelmed.

Every aspect of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda was run on a shoestring. UNAMIR (the acronym by which it was known) was equipped with hand-me-down vehicles from the UN’s Cambodia mission, and only eighty of the 300 that turned up were usable. When the medical supplies ran out, in March of 1994, New York said there was no cash for resupply.

Very little could be procured locally, given that Rwanda was one of Africa’s poorest nations. Replacement spare parts, batteries, and even ammunition could rarely be found. Dallaire spent some 70 percent of his time battling UN logistics.

Dallaire had major problems with his personnel, as well. He commanded troops, military observers, and civilian personnel from twenty-six countries. Though multinationality is meant to be a virtue of UN missions, the diversity yielded grave discrepancies in resources.

Whereas Belgian troops turned up well armed and ready to perform the tasks assigned to them, the poorer contingents showed up “bare-assed,” in Dallaire’s words, and demanded that the United Nations suit them up. “Since nobody else was offering to send troops, we had to take what we could get,” he says.

That looks, on the surface, to be the usual fiasco at governmental level but it takes a nastier turn as you read on:

The signs of militarization in Rwanda were so widespread that even without much of an intelligence-gathering capacity, Dallaire was able to learn of the extremists’ sinister intentions.

In January of 1994 an anonymous Hutu informant, said to be high up in the inner circles of the Rwandan government, had come forward to describe the rapid arming and training of local militias. In what is now referred to as the “Dallaire fax,” Dallaire relayed to New York the informant’s claim that Hutu extremists “had been ordered to register all the Tutsi in Kigali.”

“He suspects it is for their extermination,” Dallaire wrote. “Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis.” “Jean-Pierre,” as the informant became known, had said that the militia planned first to provoke and murder a number of Belgian peacekeepers, to “thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.”

When Dallaire notified Kofi Annan’s office that UNAMIR was poised to raid Hutu arms caches, Annan’s deputy forbade him to do so. Instead Dallaire was instructed to notify the Rwandan President, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Western ambassadors of the informant’s claims.

Now, what we have here is Annan’s office telling Dallaire to shop his informant to the very people about to carry out the massacre.

On April 11, 1994, more evidence of outside knowledge of the massacres became apparent.

This memorandum from the Undersecretary of Defense for Middle East Africa to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, also warns of the inevitable disaster. It was used as a briefer before a dinner between the Frank Wisner, the Under Secretary and third highest ranked official in the Pentagon, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the document, Pentagon specialists warn that it was “highly likely that inter-tribal killings will spread” and “massive (hundreds of thousands of deaths) will ensue” (Deputy). There are also predictions that the United Nations “will likely withdraw all UN forces” and that the United States will not get involved “until peace is restored” [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Africa. “Talking Points on Rwanda/Burundi.” Memo to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. 11 Apr. 1994.]

And a question we might have missed – planeloads of weapons were pouring in – from where?   From whom?  An attempt to answer this was an article in Sky News on Kissinger and Rwanda. As you can see if you click it, it’s been removed.

Every single issue of this nature has followed a pattern.  Known hostilities stay under wraps for years, e.g. between women and men.  Hardliners start stirring trouble.  In goes a Kissinger or similar to test the waters.  There’s a short space of time.  Then weapons pour in from nowhere, for no money [?] and the parties start killing one another.  Governments then issue statements condemning the violence and plans are put into practice to withdraw “peacekeepers”.

It’s all too easy for Kofi Annan to say “dear me, we should have done more”.  He was very much in a position to and in fact made active moves to prevent the genocide from being halted, as in that memo.  Back to the 2004 article:

As the U.N. faces its greatest ever crisis, with its reputation firmly on the line, it is in the interests of the world body that Kofi Annan stand down while investigations into the U.N.’s management of the Oil-for-Food program proceed. The allegations against the U.N. are of such a serious nature that it is inappropriate for the organization’s CEO to remain in place when his own credibility is in question.

Question – what is the purpose of the UN?  What is its mindset?  On Kissinger, concerning a different matter:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger tells Nixon, tapping the table for emphasis. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. It may be a humanitarian concern –”

“Well, we can’t blow up the world because of it,” Nixon responds.

If the Monroe Doctrine still applied and the U.S. had nothing to do with any foreign matter, that might make sense, cold-blooded as it is. Yet the U.S. is not observing the Monroe Doctrine in the least.

Now, how to get the last 20% to John Citizen who already has 50% to 80% of it – erroneously?

The hearing was told she shouted at pupils in an aggressive manner, mocked a child whose father died in a car accident and targeted special needs children – allegedly telling one child with a speech impediment to ‘talk properly’.

Must be slipping.  Again, look at that body and that hair.  Compare to these, all parachutees of the worst kind:

It’s uncanny, is it not?  Coarse, blunt, full of their positions, throwing around all the weight they can muster, incompetent, totally unsuited to any role of responsibility, utterly cowlike and unfeminine but absolutely au fait with their entitlements and victimhood.  Met one a few days ago.

Euthanasia would be the kindest way.

From Iceland.  And here it is explained:

Mjög sérstætt skýjafar sást víða af Reykjanesi um ellefu leytið í gærkvöldi, þegar skýjaslæða á annars heiðum himni tók á sig hinar ýmsu kynjamyndir.  Um tíma var eins og risavaxinn fugl væri að hefja sig til flugs og náðust margar góðar myndir af fyrirbærinu.

Couldn’t agree more.

GDP takes all forms of economic activity and treats them as equal. It holds that the same value accrues to creating a new home with new windows as accrues to replacing broken windows. This is often talked about as the Broken Window Fallacy in economics.

It is well recognized that replacing broken windows does not create an increase in wealth. Yet GDP makes no distinction between a window manufactured to be placed in a new home, vs one placed in an old building due to destruction. This leads to all sorts of broken behaviour, especially by our Political Class, who seem incapable of remembering the difference.

They can spend $Billions (oh, sorry, now we’re spending $Trillions…) on schemes that do “economic stimulus” and “job creation” that really amount to breaking windows and replacing them.

So, if you tear down a hospital and put up another, you are not creating but replacing.  If you build a new hospital, you are creating – that’s how I understand it.  Speaking of private firms:

If they do not create more wealth than they consume, they go out of business and cease that consumption. Government does not. It simply raises tax levels and continues to consume in the name of higher GDP. This taxation, though, takes resources from the hands of net wealth creators and puts it into the hands of net wealth consumers. The “end game” is a bankrupt country and economic collapse. (Currently in the middle stages in Greece and Spain).

The infrastructure falls into disuse:

The transition from ‘net gain’ to ‘net loss’ may not be noticed at first, as most economies grow in the 1% to 3% range. But once the decay sets in, the rate of shrinking can be 10% to 20% a year. (Even faster during wars. Germany essentially went to zero in about 4 years of W.W.II). Even a couple of percent increase in consumption or maintenance can turn an economy from growing to shrinking.

And of course, the effect on jobs is considerable.

What puzzles me at the moment is why the seemingly selective admissions of incompetence, almost the show of incompetence, e.g. Dimon’s admission.  In January, the main banks defaulted by normal measures from the past but the regulators said: “No they didn’t,” and by their new definition … they didn’t.  Just why Dimon’s lot didn’t do the same this time round seems to have more to it than just taking a loss.

The only thing I can think of that trumps continued rapacity for Them would be preparing for the new financial paradigm but for that, there needs to be a collapse and what better collapse to get it rolling than that of a behemoth like JPM? Whatever you think of Max Keiser, he probably has this one nailed:

Jamie Dimon is a threat to the Fed and global banking system. Coming losses to be reported are 18 (not 2) billion. It’s clear now that JPM’s stock will go the way of Enron and Lehman as we predicted more than a year ago.

Still, as long as the young have a certain amount of gravitas, perception and responsibility about them on the road, then we’re all reasonably safe.

[H/T Chuckles]

One is a Wisconsin experiment into bird flu:

The scientists wondered if one reason that H5N1 does a lousy job of spreading in humans is that it struggles to invade human cells. So they introduced mutations into the gene for haemagglutinin, producing a vast collection of mutant H5N1. They then offered the viruses a chance to infect some cells.

The other is a Dutch experiment:

Based on presentations he’s given and on news articles, it seems that the Dutch scientists introduced mutations into H5N1 bird flu and then carried out an evolutionary experiment. They injected the viruses into ferrets, let them replicate, and then drew out newly replicated viruses to administer to another ferret. The viruses mutated inside the ferrets. Some of the mutations sped up their replication, and those mutant viruses came to dominate the population.

There are two ethical issues:

1. Should either or both of those experiments have been conducted?
2.  Should the results [especially if successful], be published?

On the latter:

David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist who serves on the NSABB … explained to me that he had voted in favor of publishing the Wisconsin paper and against the Dutch paper. For him, it was a matter of whether the risks incurred by making the research public were just too high.

The Wisconsin paper came close to the line but didn’t cross it, because the virus contained only one H5N1 protein. If people want to do some evil with the information in the paper, they’ll have to engineer an H5N1 virus with the four-mutation haemagglutinin. And they’d have no guarantee that it would cause a human pandemic.

Relman felt that the Dutch experiment, on the other hand, crossed the line. The Dutch scientists used bird flu from start to finish, and so the final genome they ended up with may be an attractive starting point for malefactors. The fact that the Dutch flu turns out not to be deadly to ferrets doesn’t make Relman any less worried. What matters is that it is bird flu that can now move on its own between mammals. If the Dutch virus were to start infecting humans, it could spread quickly. Along the way, it might be able to evolve into a deadlier form.

On the former:

Richard Roberts, the chief scientific officer of New England Labs and the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery that genes are sometimes split into separate segments of DNA … went after both of the scientists with an understated fury. He asked how it could be that scientists could tamper with the flu this way, when they could be doing unquestionably valuable research such as developing a universal flu vaccine.

Throughout the whole issue and through the whole Discovery article, there was a distinct mindset of playing G-d.   A classical liberal believes that one should be free to act, unless there is a distinct possibility [not speculative or fanciful] that harm could be unleashed.

Both of those experiments had degrees of probable harm, the Dutch experiment far more so.  By the very nature of the danger in mutating bird flu, this was posing a risk to humankind and I trust no one is going to be naive enough to say that such a virus is going to be “closely guarded” from baddies getting to it?

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Roberts puts the question – why create something which is highly dangerous, of epidemic proportions when the opposite might be created – something to prevent such a flu getting to humankind?

There are many other questions too.  Just who was paying those scientists to come up with that and what are their connections, who gave those scientists the right to tamper with my health, what possible cast-iron guarantees could they give that such a thing would not get out of hand and just how ethically grounded are those men?

Against that is the criticism that if we were to prevent or ban anything for its potential harm, then we’re getting into a PC dystopia of Elfansafetee proportions.  I’d contend that there is a world of difference between a known global epidemic, cutting out the avian middleman … and a removing a child’s climbing frame because he/she might one day fall off it.

Are there any ethics in science whatever or is it complete open slather?

[H/T Chuckles]

Frankly, this has been a rotten two days and all manner of things have gone awry.

For a start, Saturday is the graveyard day for this blog – it starts going down on Friday afternoon, is always at its worst on Saturday and starts coming up again on Monday – consistently and uncannily so, in terms of numbers of readers.  So anything written here now will be seen by very few.

This is a bitsy post because there are so many awful little things to report on, none of which justify a post in themselves.

1.  Cranmer – Boiling Frog reports:

In an almost rational-defying move by the Advertising Standards Authority it is investigating Cranmer for carrying an ad on his blog on behalf of the Coalition for Marriage, which I reproduce above. Apparently complaints have been made that it is ‘offensive and homophobic’.

That’s not only sickening, it’s gut-wrenching.  In response, I’m going to devise a pro-marriage banner and put it up in the sidebar.  I can’t even begin to blog on how despicable this so-called ASA is, how illegitimate in terms of the common law of the land and if I don’t get off this topic now I’ll lose my rag completely.

2.  When football is more than football:

In 2007, my team downunder came up and won their first flag in 40 odd years but not only that, they started a dynasty.  Out of about 120 starts, they won about 105 of them – don’t know the exact stats.  They were close to invincible.  They had a rotten 2010 and at the end, it was clear they were too old, too slow, over the hill and the era was over.  Their manager and top player left for pastures new.

The assistant-manager who’d been there for 17 years and was acknowledged by all to have been a major factor in their success, knowing the players through-and-through, their strengths, weaknesses etc., felt he should have got the top job but he was passed over for a former head-kicker from another former top club.

The assistant stayed on for 2011.

As it turned out, the old-timers were blended with some youth and the combination stunned everyone by winning the flag last year and not by any fluke – they steamrolled the opposition.  The assistant though was offered the top job at another club, Adelaide and he spent the summer getting them ready.

Meanwhile, four of our players retired, including two the club could barely do without but these things happen.  In the past few weeks, other champions have fallen away to niggling injuries, loss of form etc.  Just as you’d expect.  This morning, from 4.15 a.m. to 6.50 a.m., UK time, our club played Adelaide and were taken apart, utterly dismantled, not only by the former assistant, now manager of Adelaide but with one of our club champions having also defected over there.

The result was that those two knew every single weakness of our players and instructed their players accordingly.  It was an utter snow-job, the worst loss for years and years, which was really nice to read as I got ready to go to work.  Not only that but one of the new young [injured] stars has for weeks refused to sign a new contract with us but insists it’s not because he wants to go home to Adelaide, where he comes from.

However, as it now appears the dynasty really is over, many such players may well be having second thoughts about sticking round with a declining club.  the fact that with this new blood remaining loyal, the club could rise again may or may not be a factor in them not leaving … or leaving.

So that’s awful from where I stand as that was one of the few good things going in my life in recent years.

The thing which stuck in my mind though was the manager’s reply to the question of whether all the good players being out had hurt the team.  “Oh not really,” he replied, “we value our system over our personnel.”

WTF??!!  He doesn’t value his players and wonders why they’re underperforming?  He calls their flare on the field “cavalier”?  He wants them playing as automatons?  The reason he got the result he did last year was because he let them play their natural way.  Now he wants to change it, to justify his salary.

Looks bad from where I’m sitting.

3. Nurse Ratched and her henchwomen:

I was inducted onto a training course at the end of last week and whether it was deliberate or intentional, there was the most appalling image – wish I’d had a camera.  I thought it was to be a one-on-one interview, as it had been stated it would be.  Instead, hordes of us were herded into a large room, like cattle and were lounging around on plastic chairs, legs outstretched and with defiant eyes.

WTF, I thought?  I thought this was meant to be a training course for a new career.  Some woman came in and started telling us all how many opportunities there were in the UK today and how good things were, then she wanted to introduce two other people to us, who’d help us set up businesses or whatever.  The two who came in had HR written all over them – they were butch, gruff, arrogant and were answering questions bluntly.

At one point, there was this image of two of the three [these HRs] standing up the front near the whiteboard, arms folded, staring down their noses at the punters and every one of those punters was male and in his 50s – every single one.  Not only that but these were guys had clearly been something special in their former careers, line managers most like – erudite, quick, not given to verbosity [unlike me] and I was wondering just how they saw this divide – all of them corralled together in this room and these three Nurse Ratcheds with zero life or corporate experience peering down at all them, thinking: “What losers”.

And believe me, these two HRs were the very worst you can imagine HRs to be – ignorant, talentless, by the book, having graduated from HR college or wherever they came from.  I was mightily unimpressed and my cooperation level is going to depend next week, as I discovered the main one is the one assigned to me.  It’s going to be all I can do to bite the lip and not say something to her but this is soul-sapping stuff.

What these idiot women don’t understand is that these men are only going to accept this female attempt at oppression for a short time longer.  For example, I asked Ratched why we couldn’t use USB sticks when all modern firms allow them?  She said they had allowed them but someone put one in last year and crashed the system.  There were smiles all around.

Time is running out for these Ratcheds and I, for one, am not the type to put up with this crap.  I’ll see what she has to say for herself next week.

4.  The parachutee departs:

At work today, I found out that the area manager had resigned and so I’m delighted to be able to bring you a tale of parachutees for once not involving a woman.  I’m glad I can do this to show you, for once and for all, it’s not anti-women but anti-parachutees.  The heroes in this tale are the women.

The idot had been appointed because a bunch of women at head office felt they needed a man to get them in line – they were forever at each others’ throats, they’d squabble over this and that, they needed some discipline and men are good at that.

Often.

Not this time.

What they’d hired, unfortunately, was a “my way or the highway” type who’d brook no opposition but whose expertise in the field simply did not match his disciplinarian approach.

The worst thing he did seems petty and minor but it actually cascading into many other failures.  There had been three sizes of bags for bagging up people’s purchases – small, medium for most clothing and large for coats etc.  Good system, names on the snazzy bags, all was well.

He was looking to cost-cut and decided to cut out the medium sized bags.  Now the large bags were like body bags and the small ones would just about fit a paperback.  So, needs must and staff were bringing in packets from all over – Primark, M&S, whatever but the bottom line was 1. all these packets were used and crumpled and 2. they weren’t ours – they didn’t have our name.  People were going out of our shop with crumpled up packets.

Then he decided to spend the savings on brand new, super-slick packets which cost customers a pretty penny.  No one wanted them.  They were a white elephant.  Not only that but he started bringing in rules for money floats which left almost no money in the till.  His answer to the outcry was that staff could jolly well wait until customers bought something and then there’d be change.

WTF?

There was apparently a store managers’ meeting, they all brought up the same issues, he virtually asked them to shut up and sit down as he didn’t want to hear any more.

As my assistant boss said today, “James, there are certain ways never to speak to women.”  Not mentioning my own little to-do last week over my apparent brusqueness, I just nodded in agreement with her.  Seriously though, the guy just had to have been an idiot.

Feeling he didn’t have the support of all the women managers, he stormed out and wasn’t seen again.  Apparently he found a job elsewhere.  He was quoted as saying he hadn’t realized management at our place was so “hands-on”.

WTF?  Management is not hands-on?  What is it then – come out of management school and take over some company without any knowledge of the ropes?

Good riddance.

By the way, I asked my assistant-lady-boss who bought me some Belgian chockies to welcome me back after my illness – she sees me as one of her proteges and who am I to complain – I asked her: “Well, do we eventually get our packets then?”

“Ah,” she replied, “he [the area manager] committed us to so many schemes, there’s no money left to get the new packets.”

Brilliant – he’s gone, his schemes live on in obligations and the central issue – providing packets customers like – cannot be because of the ongoing wastage.

Seriously, people – is that insanity or is that insanity?

Hmmmmm.

He eventually realized something that seems obvious to any nonacademic, that poor countries are saddled with laws and, crucially, customs that prevent new ideas from taking shape. He concluded that if they want to be rich, poor countries need to somehow undo their invidious systems (corruption, oppression of minorities, bureaucracy) and create an environment more conducive to business.

As the UK has done, for example?

Or they could just start from scratch.

Ah but they can’t.  The point consistently missed is that there is a Them who are actively maintaining themselves in power and the poor in a state where they can’t challenge that. And even revolutions are orchestrated.

Plus there’s an agenda.  I continually quote Wolfie but here it is again:

It looks to me like the grand plan is going just perfectly. As globalisation increases the western client state, the socialist imperium will simply expand until it runs out of wealthy and middle-class to feed on. Then we will have true equality in our poverty.

So, any nation’s people are not only up against the sheer weight of the daunting reconstruction task but also both the currently active and the intergenerationally institutionalized measures to maintain power, let alone the global agenda with its nasty provisions, e.g. depopulation.

There’s no starting from scratch until these actively hostile “people” are eliminated, otherwise, like a persistent cough which fades away, only to come back later, so it will be with these excrescences.  The only thing to do with a boil is to lance it.  It has to be root and branch stuff, not some cosmetic treatment.

[H/T Chuckles]

Question

Here’s a curious fact about the French economy: The country has 2.4 times as many companies with 49 employees as with 50. What difference does one employee make?

Answer

Plenty, according to the French labor code. Once a company has at least 50 employees inside France, management must create three worker councils, introduce profit sharing, and submit restructuring plans to the councils if the company decides to fire workers for economic reasons.

And a little something extra, at no extra cost:

There are now 2.9 million people out of work in France, almost 10 percent of the workforce and the most in 12 years. “For the 100 employees we have in France, we have 10 employee representatives, for whom we have to organize weekly meetings even when there is nothing to discuss,” Haan says. “Every time a social security contribution changes, which is frequently, we have to update software and send our HR people for training. We can’t fire anyone without exorbitant costs.”

Aren’t you glad you’re in the UK, where work practices and the employment rate are just so exemplary?

And just how do you propose to nail me?   I’ve got Rupy and iDave right up behind me.

Beeb:

Mrs Brooks resigned last year after the phone-hacking scandal led to the closure of the News of the World. [She] was arrested on 17 July 2011 over phone-hacking and corruption allegations.

She was released on bail and re-arrested on 13 March 2012 on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. She was bailed again to appear at a London police station in May 2012.

Inquiry lawyers will not be allowed to ask Mrs Brooks any questions that could prejudice the police investigation into phone hacking or any future trials.

It’s all right, Bekah – I’ll send you a Crimbo prezzie to your cellblock on the day.  Never you mind.

It’s not that I have anything personal against Brooks in RL or even that she did the phonetapping [she claims she didn't know but if she didn't - why not and what does that say about her parachuted-in competence in the role?] … but it’s the smug smile.  Having sacked the entire staff, Rupi sends in Bekah to take the heat and she lies through her teeth to them [allegedly].

Then she goes out and is caught on camera hiding behind Rupi and grinning.  At that point, I decided to do all I could, in my own humble little way, to see her behind bars if I could.  Heaven knows I’m not a vindictive man, as Enry Iggins might say but that smile …

Dot dot dot.

Another with the grin is our Jamie:

Yes, Jamie, it’s a huge joke what you’ve [allegedly] done to the economy and for world stability.  Thank you so much.  One day, maybe there’ll be a little present for you too.

At the same time, Chuckles has been thinking along these lines and his contribution is oceanographer Sylvia Alice Earle:

Now here’s a lesser-known figure and his response to the continued lack of genuine birth certificate:

You m***erf****ers ain’t ever gonna know.

Now, I can’t remember – what word was it came before “dwarf”?

Well, I think Gordo took care of you:

Any biscuits with your tea, Caroline?  May we smoke outside your window?

Well at least it’s better than the voice:

Have you listened to her speak?  And Australians elected her?  That’s Australians for you.

Now, about that return to Westminster …

A candidate in the municipal elections for the town of Paternò in Catania Province has promised, in his manifesto, to improve the city’s finances by creating a port there – the only problem being that Paternò is inland, lying 43 kilometres from the Port of Catania and 142 km from that of Messina.

It turns out that the unfortunate candidate copied the election manifesto of a candidate from Genova and the  “port” promise was left in by mistake.

Naturally, he’s been mercilessly ribbed, “port” associations set up etc.

Ah, plagiarism – where would we be without you?

“Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton write in the National Journal that seven in 10 Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track; eight in 10 are dissatisfied with the way the nation is being governed, only 23 percent have confidence in banks, and just 19 percent have confidence in big business. Less than half the population expresses “a great deal” of confidence in the public-school system or organized religion. ‘We have lost our gods,’ says Laura Hansen. ‘We’ve lost it—that basic sense of trust and confidence—in everything.’

In my early naive days, I believed that things just went along, that there were no coincidences and that most people were basically benign because that’s how I personally found them.  The notion that there might actually be people out there so crazed that they would combine in order to feather their nests, to protect themselves and to institute, globally, policies of enslavement, malnutrition and generally anti-human things was so far outside the conceptual limits of my brain that I’d laugh at them.

I voted Labour and thought we should all just be good to each other.

Those were also my military days and I wonder now that I could have been so compliant – in other words, I trusted the game plan and can’t recall ever questioning a superior officer’s competence.  The very idea of even having a “superior” officer seemed the natural order of things.

Unfortunately, I began to read more heavily and more widely, as part of entering academia and didn’t stop at the approved reading lists, the result being that it gave me an entirely different perspective to earlier.

A couple of years back, a fellow academic said that he’d neither heard nor read any of the supposed “sources” I was quoting and by that, he meant they held no water.   They couldn’t have been authoritative because he hadn’t come across them at university.  He fancies himself as a historian.

And therein lie our basic divisions – not just with him but with so many that haven’t read the sorts of things those issuing warnings today have read.  It’s not superior thinking power, it’s not greater ability to sense truth, it’s not any of that – it simply comes down to the reading of little known history or variations on the accepted history.

Let’s take two bloggers – one at OoL and one called Ana the Imp.  The one at OoL does not believe in history, doesn’t believe that history can teach us all that much or prepare us for what we see repeated.  The latter believes passionately in history and sees many patterns recurring today which uncannily occurred through the past.

For example, when I was exploring MK Ultra, certain names kept coming up – Gottlieb, Ewen Cameron and so on.  The names would pop up in a Colin Ross lecture or in an article in the Melbourne Age where Selwyn Leeks was prosecuted and Cameron was mentioned and so the stock of substantiated knowledge built up, to the extent that I probably couldn’t lay my hands on most of those files these days – there are just too many of them.  Most of that knowledge just lies dormant, as there’s nothing else to compare it to or apply it to.

But then everything from Ely Lilly to Walter Reed, to Omaha airforce base started coming up again and they were nasty connections.   A lecture on the psychiatric old boy network named many of these same names, then I read about how Franklin was all a giant hysterical overreaction but two things seemed wrong there.

One was that I’d read the actual testimony of 80 children, all saying roughly the same thing but in different stories and the second – many of the people pushing False Memory Syndrome were dubious in their own right, were interconnected and were the same names which had already come up many times before.  FMS said the children had all been brainwashed by the therapists into saying the same thing but the testimony was far from the same in detail.  And if it had been the same, then there had to have been, in one therapist’s words, “some vast conspiracy of toddlers” or else the testimony was independent.

FMS then said it was parents brainwashing the kids and that there was a vast conspiracy of therapists.  So they were arguing exactly the same thing as colin Ross with his old boy psychiatric network.  I mean, they can’t have it both ways – either there are conspiracies … or there are not.

FMS responded that what they were saying showed no conspiracy but what the anti-FMS were saying was conspiracy.  How can you deal with people who argue like that?

So great anomalies continued to exist until it all just went away.

Then along came Belgium and the parallels with Franklin were uncanny, from the tales of the children to the way they were publicly accused, on national media, of being delusional.  That was only one small eye-opener.  Into this had come Svali, in a 2000 Canadian radio interview and though she was on about different things, many of them were close to the ones I already knew about, things I’d never have known had I not spent so much time reading them.

The way she described what was done to people was exactly as described by GH Estabrooks and I’ve a copy of his report to the forerunner of the CIA on hypnotism, drugs and shock therapy.  Precisely what Selwyn Leeks was convicted of 70 years later and Ewen Cameron was accused of half a century later.

So, what was happening here was that, far from the thing dying away from lack of corroboration, it was being added to piece by piece and the usual suspects kept coming up.  So, when someone writes that he supposes I believe in the Franklin coverup and I ask yes, why not, in the light of what I know of it, this person hoots with laughter and speaks of tinfoil hats, as if he himself has studied all the available literature.

And I look at him doing this and wonder why he’s being that unprofessional in his approach to fact and fiction.

So then we get onto 911 and in amongst all the information and disinformation was something that couldn’t be passed over -  NIST did lie on WTC7.  People come in and say: “I suppose you also believe that …”

No I don’t.   don’t bring other issues into it.  I’m simply saying NIST lied because I saw a question put to their spokesman and he told a porky in reply, just as Blair did when questioned on whether he’d attended a Bilderberg Conference.

You’re a human being, I am too and one thing we know is when someone’s lying to us – you’d be the first to accept that and I’m saying it was so with NIST.   Many others said that too but they’re not listened to because they’ve been swiftly labelled and mocked.

Why?

Why this fanatical defence of government on that point, WTC7, when these same people will concede Obama is also involved in lies and coverups, e.g. here.  It truly puzzles me, this inconsistency.

OK, I went to a meeting during the lead up to the last general election and the fellow, a former councillor, spoke of exactly how he’d been shut out of meetings, not informed, kept off the podium and I looked at him and he wasn’t the whiny type.  He was just quietly angry.

At about that time, Graham Roberts was sending me documents from Julia Middleton in which the spider’s web of Common Purpose was there for all to see, literally in black and white.  This wasn’t blind assertion – it was documents and these are online at my blog.

Then I look around at some of the very people who’ve been trying to defend the government now talking about the climate scam.  Hold on – do you believe there are scams after all, collusion, agendas?  Or do you not?

Oh, I see – one is fashionable and all the literature is out there on blogs because people want to know about it but on the other issues, you’d have to actually do some rummaging about, some nifty googling and some reading.

Therefore it doesn’t exist.

Yet, despite this auto-denial and selectivity in which scams to believe in, some things are nevertheless forcing their way into public consciousness.  When some of us started blogging about Common Purpose, I can quote you the mocking responses from three years ago and name those readers.

Now it’s almost mainstream in the sphere.  It really puzzles me – so many will distrust the government on David Kelly but not on 7/7, despite Cressida Dick.  Do you know which organization Cressida Dick graduated from?

And the net effect is that people are losing trust in their institutions.  EU Referendum pointed out that around 10-12%, I think, voted for Boris/Ken, which made a hell of a lot who didn’t.  So this is a shift in the political atmosphere over the past few years, even though the sheep did wildly run in the red direction for safety last week.

And there’s a point of view that it is all factored in.  There is a point of view that the process is self-defeating.  Investment banker Wolfie writes:

It looks to me like the grand plan is going just perfectly. As globalisation increases the western client state, the socialist imperium will simply expand until it runs out of wealthy and middle-class to feed on. Then we will have true equality in our poverty.

Moving on, we now have this ludicrous thing from Hollande about taxing the City.  Doesn’t he know he can never tax the City?   I’d like to ask him – just who does he think is sovereign in the City?  Bet he doesn’t know.  It’s the Crown.  And who is the Crown?  Why is there a Temple?  From where does the name derive?  When Philippe of France did the dirty on Jacques de Molay and chums and the narrative says that the Templar money just suddenly disappeared – oh yeah and where did it just suddenly disappear to?

You mean it was never factored in that such a contingency might arise through greedy potentates?

I mean, we’re talking gold and hard collateral here, not paper.  It doesn’t just go up in smoke.  It’s not difficult – truly it’s not.  What financial giants arose after that time and where?  Name the financial centres of the world today – why are they where they are?  Who bankrolled them at the beginning?  Where is the old money right now?

It only takes a rudimentary knowledge of history and half a brain and you don’t even have to imagine anything because these questions just now provide you with their own answers.  It simply needs to be thought through.

Why would the Tavistock Institute have come into being?  For what actual purpose?  Have you read up on the principals of that organization?  Which body is the heir to Tavistock in London today?  What are their house rules?  Why do they have those strange rules?  Which training programme are they connected with, with the motto: “Leading beyond Authority?”

Who set up its forerunner – Demos?  What are Marxists doing mixed in with supposed City conservatives?

So Hollande hasn’t a hope in hell, nor does the EU, in getting their greedy mitts on the wealth stashed away in the City.  And if the EU does take over and we have another Philippe of France situation where City or Scottish bigwigs are burnt at the stake for debauchery, where would the City wealth disappear to?  Scotland?  Or New York?  Zurich?  Or Tibet?

Your humble correspondent was not always like this.  He just read and crossreferenced, that was all.  You could too if you had a mind to do it.

Which is the more likely scenario – that people will begin trusting again or that they’ll become even less trustful?  And into that scene, is more data likely to surface or less?  Will we go EUSSR or has the internet actually done for Them?

Many think we’re in a battle royal right now.  Some of us think we’re in the Grand Battle of the Ages.  Time will tell.

………..

[H/T haiku]

True, it’s probably just as bad with any member of the PTB,  the landed and titled in Europe, Belgium and other stories are pretty putrid and anyway, France is not exactly noted for its puritanism.

However, there’s something really that extra bit off about the French left, such a view crystallizing after reading Lucy Wadham’s book The Secret Life of France.  As someone who married a Frenchman and had a family over twenty years ago in France, she’s in a position to speak.  As for her, she was a British punk, loose around the edges but more immoral than amoral and she goes into that.

She was a natural target for a Frenchman of the privileged left, the champagne set but almost immediately she was shocked by what she found in French social life or more specifically French left high social life.  The first thing she learnt was that even married to the guy and having his child, he had no concept whatever of fidelity.

The existence of that social set was shallow, contrived and postulating, a sort of perma-adolescence.

We know about Frenchmen keeping mistresses and it’s all supposed to be part of life’s rich pageant over there but that’s not universal amongst the bourgeoisie and rural class – it’s part of certain demographics, one of which she found herself in in Paris.  This was not just mistresses or less than careful dalliances – this was the full thing, for example, at dinner parties where they’d all be into it in some room off to the side after the coffee and she hated it.  She remonstrated and was seen as quite strange – the English girl with complexes.  Never seen as a wife and mother.

Then we had that Tristane Banon rape thing with DSK and to look at her, she came over as innocent and vulnerable but going into the story, she was into sleeping with anyone at a party, letting herself be groped and DSK obviously knew of this when he saw fit to do as he did.  What hope did she have – a broken family, a mum who slept with anyone, including DSK and boasting about it and seemingly no moral compass whatever.

Then there was DSK himself, who comes over to us as a beast but actually, he’s just a more ostentatious version of what that set is all about.  People marvel at how his wife puts up with it.  She puts up with it because it’s the norm.  I would ask if such people are fit to run a country and yet there is one now in power, courtesy of the French people.

Then we get to Segolene Royal.  Why wouldn’t she marry?  Why wouldn’t she bring her children up as a normal family?  Why would she not wish to?  And Hollande himself – what game does he think he’s playing?  On the night he was elected, I wondered if Segolene would suddenly rediscover her feeling for him and voila, today:

New President-elect to make ex-wife and mother of his four children country’s most powerful woman – while refusing to wed his ‘First Partner’

This is not just hedonism run riot – it’s a deepseated fear of being caught in a position of having to take responsibility or where pleasure could be curtailed.  It tries to make a cultural norm of irresponsible behaviour and what hope for children of families does that provide?  Lucy Wadham herself seems unaware of the effect on her children and yet she keeps mentioning one dysfunctional aspect of her children after another as the book goes on, blaming it on external circumstances.

I’ve had a family connection in France and yes, things were more laid back and looser than over here but they certainly weren’t anything like the life described by Wadham, DSK’s colleagues and Banon’s mother.  Not even Brooks and the NotW scandal go down this path.  Natasha Giggs did but she was a one-off and even her nooky lacked the overt bestiality and refinements of the champagne set of Paris.

And are they happy?  Wadham describes two women who confess they aren’t but as they confide, what can they do?

She makes an interesting observation about Englishwomen:

In time, I learnt that the extraordinary female friendships in Britain, absent in France, were part of a wider social landscape, itself not so pretty  – a landscape ravaged by a low-level, and persistent war between the sexes.

That is so over here and I’m wondering which is worse – the lack of mutual sympathy and understanding over here, the living of parallel lives of men and women … or sex as the only criterion of relations worth anything over there.  In Russia, there was always some form of flirtation going on the whole time.  Here, there is just deadness.

Which is straying from the point and that is to ask how such people as Hollande, Royal and DSK could possibly be any sort of role models for anyone in that country.  I’d be interested in surveys of what the French consider a good leader because these people come across as people without spines, whose integrity would not inspire confidence and yet who are full of the rhetoric of love, fairness and tolerance.

Out of Currency.

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/223899-senators-look-to-strike-the-word-lunatic-from-federal-law?

“Outlasted its currency in the psychiatric profession” they said. I bet the codification of federal law probably predates the so-called “psychiatric profession”.

Really? well I guess only the emergency services still believe some people tend to get wacky around the full moon, but that’s because they have to deal with them.

Senator Conrad said that “the continued use of this pejorative term has no place in the US Code,” “‘Lunatic’ is an unnecessary term.

The word basically means crazy person these days and we all understand that from Australia to Canada and Hong Kong to Britain. It does not mean we all absolutely think every crazy person is influenced by the moon.

Maybe they should outlaw “inspired” or “bad humoured” while they are at it?

I am wondering if it was anywhere near the full moon when these two senators came up with this idea? It’s not as if they aren’t being paid to do important stuff like balance the budget or something.

I figure it is much more to do with political correctness and newspeak. I don’t think “lunatic” is any more or less pejorative than say psychiatric, but don’t they realise that whatever they replace “pejorative” words with quickly gets to be pejorative in turn. I mean have they heard the way Schitzo is used sometimes? Challenged also. Once upon a time “retarded” was “PC”.

All they are doing is creating more unkind words.

Professor Horowitz at Rutgers University a sociology professor who studies mental illness agrees (and that is nice, but I already had it figured thanks). He says, “I would be confident that 100 years from now, the terms that we now see as enlightened will be seen in the same way that we consider these old-fashioned terms”.

Actually, it had everything to do with freedom because it was about the proliferation of “World” colleges in every nation, teaching a uniform social policy education. Very much a producer of “the new child” for “world leaders”.  Just as the pervasive and corrosive influence of the Frankfurt School was shown to have produced a great deal of the trouble about today.

Now here’s one about blacks, not a topic I blog on all that much because it’s boring. Maggie’s Farm points to PJ Media Roger’s Rules, which has an item about the Naomi Riley affair.

Firstly, it’s nice how Maggie’s says:

The Naomi Riley affair is just one more example of enforced groupthink in academia. After all, everybody knows that any academic department called “Studies” is non-serious, and exists solely as a sop to some interest group.

And when you think of it, there are so many examples which make it so.  You can be guaranteed it will be staffed and peopled by left-leaning tree-hugger types.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with loving and being connected with nature – hell, I love thunderstorms and driving snow – but when that translates into social policy, colour me out.

Sooner or later it gets down to grievance and self-entitlement and that’s more boring than anything.

Now, the lady they’re calling racist and who’s just been drummed out of academia is actually married to a black man so surely that colours the way her opinions should be analysed on this particular topic?

Riley’s brief column only highlights what we all know to be true about the pseudo-discipline of Black Studies. And what was the upshot of her foray into the forbidden territory of truth about this embarrassing subject? A cataract of outrage from readers of the Chronicle’s blog — almost all of whom are academics.

And a legitimate question arises about which opinions are or are not allowed, especially if they’re substantiated:

Why is it that more and more editors these days seem to respond to any controversial piece — controversial in challenging the reigning political pieties, that is — by public rituals of ostracism? Their first response to speech they or some of their readers don’t like is to rusticate the offender while loudly assuring the public of their own spotless virtue.

Pardon me but academia was always supposed to be the free flow of ideas and their examination and discussion.  This wasn’t discussion – this was the gag.  And of course, the real reason – disagreement with the orthodoxy – was dishonestly explained away thus:

“We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.”

The day OoL admins act like that is the day OoL should fold.  That’s one blog where you can put whatever ideas you like on the vague theme of freedom, provided you substantiate them.  Of course you can put them unsubstantiated too but in comments, you’d very quickly be asked to substantiate them.

So, what was the storm over?  It was: “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.”

“‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth,” by Ruth Hayes. “It began,” Riley writes,  “because she ‘noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.’ How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in ‘natural birth literature,’ whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.”

This is the height, the cutting edge of American academia?  As Rodge puts it:

Everyone knows, though few have the temerity to say, that “Black Studies” is an awful confidence game: an exercise in racial grievance mongering utterly without scholarly merit. In this, I hasten to add, it resembles many other pseudo-disciplines invented since the late 1960s to provide a home for intellectually challenged but politically fermenting denizens of our universities: Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Transgender Studies, etc. etc. Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with twentieth century academia could be summed up in the word “workshop.” “Studies” is the new “workshop.”

Yep and this time, the craven academics do not have it all their own way:

See Riley’s splendid op-ed in the WSJ today: “The Academic Mob Rules.”

See also Ron Radosh: How the Academic Establishment has Silenced a Major Critic of the Field of “Black Studies”

What is most grievous about that utter bollox in those dissertations is the flagrant breaking of long-established academic standards on structure and presentation and any academic from the 60s at the latest knows how stringent those standards once were. You didn’t get published unless you met those, e.g. on plagiarism, e.g. on circumlocution – there are so many points on which one had to be disciplined.

By grievous, I mean saddening and sickening, plus fearful of the political takeover, not especially on the climate of opinion – leftists have run the show since the turn of the 20th century – but on the standard of the “works”. When a bunch of academics can view those dissertations and actually be satisfied to the point that they call for action on any academic who calls them out – then that is when academia has reached utter direness.

………..

[H/T Chuckles for the Maggie's piece]

For example, the sail with the two long yards:

… one of the most efficient going, with an index way above the norm, is useless in a cruising capacity because you have to be able to reef the sails in a blow [strong winds] and do it quickly.  The red rig above can be dropped quickly but that’s it – all or none.

So rigs have tended to be gaff or gunter:

… easily dropped and you’ll notice all those little cords across the sail – the reefing points.  You simply must have them.  You’ll also notice the inverse “Y” shaped line from the mast across the sail – the lazy jacks – you can’t be without those either.

So there’s almost a compulsion to conform, not imposed by fashion or by any person or committee but by simple design considerations.  There’s no real escape.  Jibs, for example – the small sail at the front  – brilliant on the wind but a pain downwind – there are ways around that, by using a lugsail up front instead:

… but not as efficient as a jib, on the wind.  Ditto with hull shape – you see the blue hull here.  You can design all manner of hull shapes but when it comes down to sheer efficiency, beauty and the mathematics of the thing, you’re always forced back to something like this blue hull.

You’ll notice it’s made of overlapping planks – here’s another:

… and you might say hey, that’s old-fashioned.  Yes it is but it has distinct advantages.  That less than aquadynamic efficiency in straightline speed is made up for in the anti-roll motion and the steady tracking of the boat through the water – something a cruising sailor learns to appreciate over a long journey.  Plus clinker is strong and light – both design considerations in boats.

So, it’s very hard to deviate from the tried and tested, over a range of conditions and applications and one is always drawn back to something others have designed before him.  Perhaps the best thing is to just accept this and design within known parameters.

Sigh.

Have a look at this bow shape:

In that Cornish fishing lugger, you’ll see the bow is high and there’s much “freeboard” or distance above the water.  This is because the likely seas are high or heaped up and the boat needs to ride over them.  The upside is relative dryness for the crew and accommodation below but the downside is the up-and-down motion, the way the bow can act as a giant scoop if the sea does get over it, plus the weight up front which makes for more pitching up and down.

Have a look at this one:

Though pictured on a river, it’s designed for open ocean with big swells, not necessarily heaped up seas.  So the scooped, light ends are good for driving through short seas, rather than over them, causing the boat to sail flatter, which is nicer for the crew.  The downside is the lessening of accommodation and a tendency for the bow and stern to drive under, rather than be supported.

So, expected conditions are very much a consideration and you need to design for where the boat will be.

In Russia, there is a well-known expression trotted out after every new disaster, as all the locals gather in a meeting – kto vinovat i kto delat’.  It means who’s guilty and what to do [now]?

Failure analysis often descends, over there, over here,  to “point the finger” at the person we can most afford to have the finger pointed at, the one in no position to hit back and so we get into human nature, which is self-protective and in fact, always reverts to base instincts unless there is an ethical code in place everyone buys into.

There’s a word in Russian for the person one blames – strelechnik or the signalman [on the railway].  In other words, in our terms, the scapegoat.  Politically, this is false flagging, as you know.  Chuckles sent an interesting one from America:

Discover was the shuttle return to flight vehicle after Columbia was lost; two and half years were spent from February 1, 2003 until Discovery flew in July 2005.  Many improvements were made but safety was not assured.

It was not until Discovery again flew in July of 2006 before she flew safely.  That counts as the third “return to flight” mission for Discovery.  You see, we dodged a bullet in 2005.  One we should have seen coming but didn’t.

After the loss of Columbia, it became very clear that the loss of insulating foam off of the external tank caused damage to the heat shield which led to the loss of the good ship and crew.  It was a devastating time.  Tens of thousands of experiments, tests, and analyses were performed to discover why foam was lost from the external tank and how to prevent it.

All the tests and analyses lead to the conclusion that defects in the application of the foam insulation could cause foam debris to be generated during the early supersonic phase of shuttle flight.  We informed the foam technicians at our plant in Michoud Louisiana that they were the cause of the loss of Columbia and then worked them overtime in training with new and exhaustive techniques on how to apply foam with no defects.

Many other safety measures were incorporated during those two and a half years [as well].  What you probably don’t know is that a side note in a final briefing before Discovery’s flight pointed out that the large chunk of foam that brought down Columbia could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect.  Hmm.  After 26 months of work, nobody knew how to address that little statement.  Of course we had fixed everything.  What else could there be?  What else could we do?  We were exhausted with study, test, redesign.

We decided to fly.

You’ll probably want to read the whole article as the guy was involved in Discovery:

John Muratore, my good friend, fellow flight director, and then the head of the shuttle program Systems Engineering and Integration office informed me in very flat terms that he was in the JSC video lab with head photo interpreter Cindy Evans who had uncovered evidence of a large foam liberation during the critical mach number regime which appeared to have impacted the left wing of Discovery.  Just like Columbia.

I was numb.

Chuckles comments, as you’ve probably already been thinking:

There wasn’t a ‘training course’ available for this was there?

This sentence is a wonderful window into all that is wrong with the modern world. The blame obsession among others.

‘We informed the foam technicians at our plant in Michoud Louisiana that they were the cause of the loss of Columbia and then worked them overtime in training with new and exhaustive techniques on how to apply foam with no defects.’

The approach focuses all attention on finding someone or something to ‘blame’, instead of ensuring that the focus is on actually identifying and fixing the problem.

The obvious question is how to eliminate or divert/control this natural inclination to blame anyone but self.  Not only that but when you yourself are not going to be blamed, to look at 80% of the data and having found a solution, ignore the significant last 20% or perhaps become less careful.  As I’ve quoted myself many times from my book:

‘The danger is in looking at only, say, 80% of the story, when the last 20% alters the picture significantly.’

The context in the book was a disaster which had occurred in which an enemy were able to infiltrate and kill a key operative.

‘Firstly, they were designed to get past your guard. Secondly, your own antennae weren’t picking up clear signals due to your own troubles and that was factored in – to make you less effective. Thirdly, those girls were only bit players, on the peripherique. And there is a fourth point.’

‘Go on.’

‘Sometimes we’re blinded by close association with people. On the grounds that we’ve been working with them for a long time and that they appear to be our kind of people, we make the logical jump that they are, therefore, good people. We don’t really know that – we don’t know who has what hold over them. Are they more likely to betray that or to conceal it?’

This can come down to trust.  You’ve trusted this friend for donkeys’ years, he’s never made an error before of this kind but equally, you haven’t had this situation before.  You don’t know how competent he is or what else is going on in his life/head.

This is often used as an argument for automating processes and one example was the air disaster at Tenerife in 1977.  For those not familiar with the story, the pilot was one of the main trainers at HQ who was “shaking the cobwebs out”, having not flown for some time, except on simulators in the training room. Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten was a company star, the golden boy, a celebrity who’d even graced the pages of the company in-flight magazine.

The First Officer was experienced but not in the same league, celebrity-wise, as the Captain. It was the Captain’s impatience to be off home [to keep him within the flight time window for pilots] which tipped him over the safety edge and the First Officer did not object.  He knew but did not object.

Here was the error:

17 :06 :32 (KLM first officer) – Is hij er niet af dan? {Is he not clear then?}

17 :06 :34 (KLM captain) – Wat zeg je? {What do you say?}

17 :06 :35 (KLM first officer) – EstIs hij er niet af, die Pan American? {Is he not clear that Pan American?}

17 :06 :36 (Angry KLM captain) – Jawel. {Oh yes. – emphatic}

It must be tough for an underling to call a celebrity on a clear error which could make it all go pear shaped. I wonder if we’d have the guts to do it?  This has strayed a little from “the blame game” and that came later, after the disaster.  Those in the cockpit were dead and couldn’t blame anyone.

So is automation the solution?  I was on a flight from London to Melbourne and on one leg, I can’t recall how, I was allowed to the cockpit, where the flight engineer spoke to me [can't imagine that happening these days].  He explained, in answer to my question about whether this was the same plane and same flight which had dropped 15 000 feet some weeks earlier, about sine waves, about this and that and the bottom line was that the automatic system had been fooled by the extraordinary condition of the stream at that time.

The situation was rectified by manual override.  There are proposals to save money by implementing driverless trains in Britain within a few years.  Would you go on one?  One other thing – but the post would become too long – was the way ideology makes people take certain decisions not based on reality and of course, disaster follows down the track – sometimes intended.

What’s the solution?