Saturday, October 25, 2008

[thought for the day] saturday evening

Everyone knows that when [if] Obama [or McCain] gets hit , the Veep steps in. My question and thought for the day is - which Veep would you vote for?



...or:

[in sickness] and in leadership


How many world leaders and people who have had an influence on the thinking of their times and on history, have actually been too sick to impartially do their work, for example:

In 1973, George Pompidou, premier of France, attended the summit meeting of world leaders in Reykjavik, Iceland. Journalists noted he wore a scarf around his neck. But why a scarf in May?

It was revealed later as an attempt to hide a swelling of his neck. But he could not conceal the swelling of his cheeks and face. Pompidou's bloated cheeks were the result of cortisone injections. He was also suffering from anemia ...

Others:

Cheney [heart], Blair [heart], Colin Powell [cancer], Arafat, Sharon, Castro, Abe, McCain, Kim - these are the standard conditions. But what of Charles Darwin , Stonewall Jackson [both obsessive compulsive], Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan [both with dementia], FD Roosevelt [polio], Pope John Paul II, Adolph Hitler , Mao Tse Tung, George Wallace, Pierre Trudeau [all with Parkinsons], JFK [multitude of ailments], many leaders [Aspergers], Henry VIII [syphilis, gout], to name a few.

How many leaders have had their conditions suppressed?

Each condition affects the individual in its own way but reflecting on your own illnesses over time - would you say you were functioning at your best at these times? What if you were making critical decisions in your work at the same time? What if your position were such that your decisions affected millions [or even a few hundred]?

[the andromeda strain] recurrence of a new theme


I watched three and a half hours of the mini-series DVD The Andromeda Strain last night and apart from the action which I quite liked, despite the suspension of disbelief in certain places, the thing which has struck me about almost all modern films I've seen in the past month are the themes:

1. that only a kick-ass woman can win through these days and men are basically inadequate [admittedly, this particular series is not a bad case of that];

2. the boldness with which the military industrial complex's clandestine agenda is being used to fill out the baddies' characters, something which was not permissible in Hollywood some time back.

3. the black mood themes of modern films.

Do films pander to public tastes or do the tastes reflect the themes of modern films?

UPDATE: I've just finished the mini-series. This book/film/mini-series has provoked a mini-discussion which I thought I'd bring you. How does time travel work? I don't mean how does it work but how does it overcome logical problems?

Example - in the Terminator series, the machines send a machine back to terminate John Connor. He sends a machine back to terminate the machine, thereby setting off a different reality, a different path. Yet Skynet follows the original path. If someone else from the future sent someone back to create a third path, somehow we'd have a multitude of actual historical paths not gelling with each other.

What would that do to both history and perception?

[guy ritchie] might just go back and watch one of his films



So Guy Ritchie has finally told the truth and said she looked like a granny on stage. According to Madge herself:

Ritchie's comments made Madonna feel "worthless [check], unattractive [check], unfeminine [check], insecure [check] and isolated [wouldn't know about that - there are her Kabbalist mates, after all]", reported London's Daily Mail, which has been forensically dissecting the break-up since Madonna's publicist announced it last week.

But the fact is, Madonna does look like a granny on stage, albeit a 21st century, super-fit, androgynous, very driven kind of granny...

You might have got the idea this blog does not much like the misnamed Madonna and you'd be right.

I envisage an island where all the Hiltons, Spears, Jolies, Beckams, Madonnas et al, can be airlifted, to romp around together in their wild animal luxury and leave the rest of us alone.

[so predictable] world financial reform

Finance pow-wow:

Ending a summit in Beijing, they also urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to play a greater role in helping countries hit by the market turmoil.

And while we're there, we'll institute UN control of international relations, WTO control of trade and WHO control of global health. As Shakespeare once wrote: "feeding on that which doth preserve the ill".

They're nothing if not predictable, these people.

Friday, October 24, 2008

[seven deadly sins] how do you fare

Greed:Very Low
 
Gluttony:Low
 
Wrath:Very Low
 
Sloth:Low
 
Envy:Very Low
 
Lust:Low
 
Pride:Very Low
 


The Seven Deadly Sins Quiz on 4degreez.com

H/T Bag

[the real ubermouth] little known facts


The fearsome reputation of the Ubertunes-playing nemesis of naughty people belies her early start to life:

One day whilst walking the one mile to school after a rainy night, I noticed that there was an earthworm on the road. Worried that it might get run over, I bent to pick it up and safely put it on the grassy verge.

But then there was another. And another. There were f*cking millions of them all wriggling dangerously in the road!

I got to school somewhere around 11:00 only to have to explain why I was late.

Carrie had nothing on Uber in her teenage years:

The girls would all talk about their boyfriends who they hoped to marry ( at 15!) I had yet to be kissed properly.Not saying I was a prude BUT I closed my eyes when I showered so I didn't see nudity- MY OWN! Funny, how after 30 ,you revert back to that.

Later in life, after various vicissitudes, she found an idyll of solitude:

We have a 7 acre private wildlife sanctuary my mother created in one of the fields. She feeds all the animals and harbours them from the neighbouring KILLERS, who illegally hunt them if they stray onto their properties. We have everything from pheasants and deer to rabbits,badgers and foxes to name a few.

It's not all roses though, especially where culinary differences crop up:

Mum:"Would you like a banana?"

Me( not being a monkey and all) " No, thank you. I don't like bananas"

Mum: " Go on, have a banana"

ME: " Mum! I just told you,I HATE bananas."

Mum: "Really? I love bananas" ( her being a monkey and all).

We go through this ritual EVERY single time she eats a banana- which is ALL the time!

So now we're approaching Christmas but Uber has a warning for you, as a public service, to save you before you invite someone dangerous down your chimney:

[Santa] is overweight, clearly exploiting Mrs. Claus's domesticity. He is a slave driver of vertically challenged people (okay! Midgets!) who are hardly top runners in the employment stakes. He is constantly doing B and E's all over the world( but why is he not on any frigging naughty list?)

He keeps secret files on all of us. He is quite the dictator in his unilateral decisions pertaining to what list we are relegated to. He doesn't even answer his mail! How rude!

No wonder he wears RED!

Remember, Ubermouth is only dangerous around a nest of vipers - her cloak then turns bright vermillion, her nutter-hypocrite detecting antennae twirl round at amazing speed and it might not be a good idea to cross swords - Lilith has nothing on her.

With humans though, she's a true friend, warm and fuzzy with a voice of honey and a penchant for saving defenceless earthworms and other oppressed creatures.

[friday] today will be a superb day


"Conviviality, good cheer, chicken tikka sandwiches, cappuccino, muffins, fish'n chips, snug as a bug in a rug, good cheer, pint of ale, bracing cup of tea, sympathy and affection, uproarious laughter, closing a deal, bonuses, early end to the working day, exquisite paintings, fine opera or ballet in the evening, lots of blog commenters, stimulating discussion, feeling of security, intriguing novel"
These are just some of the cheerful words for this Friday. Yours is surely going to be a good and it will set you up for a relaxing weekend. Good luck, all readers.

[blogspot lame] posting only at fifty percent power

For non-blogspot blogs, you might not be aware that for some days, Blogger has been partially down.

The trouble is that one can only post from the edit html mode, which is fine by me as I do that anyway but it has also restricted resizing of images and viewing in compose mode. Blogger's strange configuration also denies justifying text, whilst allowing italics.

Thus you were hit in the moosh by that large Palin photo in the last post and the tools are not currently operational to resize her downwards.

The situation is still not dire enough to revert to the Wordpress Nourishing Obscurity but if anything happens to Blogspot Nourishing Obscurity, that's where this blog will have gone.

[vice presidents] always the millstones


Always have been, always will be [at least until the face of politics as we know it is reconfigured 2009-12].

Remember Spiro Agnew? Remember Dan "Potatoe" Quayle?

So what's new with Biden and Palin, heartbeats away from the presidency of the "free" world?


[free enterprise] and living within our means

This post is about human behaviour. Bearwatch opens with:

Karl Denninger explains why he believes we are now in dire crisis. If the insolvent continue to be bailed out with money that the government itself must borrow from elsewhere, the American government's own credit will be destroyed.

This article, about gold, states that there are zero one ounce gold bars in North America at wholesale [at this time] but that every Central Bank on the planet lists gold bullion on their balance sheet as an “official reserve asset”.

There is apparently trading in gold going on between big players at prices way over the odds and it is being held by CBs as a hedge but none is available to Jo Public. Worse are the lies created by people who should know better than to explain this away.

Alan Greenspan
said:

But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state).

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth [but gold] stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism towards the gold standard.

Stop and draw breath.

The government and the big finance have thrown paper money, whose only value is the government's word, into the economy at vastly greater book value than the solid assets in the country. In other words, the country is living almost entirely on credit.

Anyone knows that the way to act is to severely curtail such rash action and yet what are the people who have engineered this doing? They have their snouts in the trough, quangos being but one manifestation of it, completely at odds with how the rest of the society is suffering and what's more - not giving a damn.

The excesses are obscene.

This is the third great crime against humanity, along with making obscene profits from this collusion and corruption, the first crime being the knowledge that this was coming, the complicity, together with the feigned incompetence and the second crime - that these people, who should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, are in fact increasing their wealth and personal security as we read.

The fourth crime is the whole panoply of anti-people legislation which not only criminalizes the citizen but prevents him from trading his way out of trouble and leaves the whole family at severe personal risk of losing all it has built up over time.

The difference between this time round and 1929-1945 is that this time there is a collective consciousness, thank goodness, a slow dawning of understanding, of who is actually to blame.

I think it is a measure of how worried the criminals are that they are surrounding themselves with these defences so vehemently. This time round, the people know and that is a very frightening prospect.

Waiting to pounce on the new Weimar Republic are the state socialists who would use strongarm tactics and messianic solutions to what is actually very simple - cut a swathe through over-regulation to free up enterprise for the small businessman, let him trade his way out and allow prices to once again find a true market value.

That's the way out, not the artificial solution to the artificial crisis which will be propounded in 2009-11.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

[blogfocus thursday] seven classic lines


Liz Hinds: I don't think a new computer should have surrogate anythings. My tin-opener has also gone missing.

Morgan Hen
: Our heritage is more than just a couple of "celebrity " names such as Caerphili Castle, or even Cardiff.

Guthrum: Lets face it if you were not in this photo of neo-medievalists you are not going anywhere in the next ten years in terms of influence.

Calum Carr: For some reason, a few minutes ago, these lyrics popped into my head. A very rare occurrence this: swear words often float in but not lyrics.

Dave Cole
: To that end, I very much support the idea of introducing A Bill for the more effective prevention of unicorns.

Charon QC
: Don’t mess with a Rothschild….

Tiberius Gracchus
: Spurius Maelius had, according to Livy, attempted to use food as a weapon to bring down the Roman Republic.

[new venture] overcoming the negative climate


Despite the last two posts, I'd say it's necessary to keep a bright outlook however much it's stacked against us.

To this end, I've just explored, in a neighbouring town with the council officers, the idea of setting up a venture selling from a booth. The product is not a major consideration [to me although it was vital to him] as long as it's something people would walk across the carpark from the supermarket to avail themselves of.

An example might be a dry cleaning pick up point or power tool hire - let's leave the product for the moment and concentrate on the process. To do that it would cost £30 a day, each and every trading day and you'd nominate maybe four trading days in the week. Electricity usage is another cost before stock.

The plusses include that it does not involve huge overheads to set up, it can start gradually and new stock can be bought from takings and diversifying will also follow that. Advertising would be in the weekly local rag.

Hard work but it could be done if there was a positive climate.

There's not. For a start, the council has started charging for 8-6 carparking and this has apparently halved the shopper numbers. Now people are tearing in, getting everything from the supermarket [which has diversified its product range accordingly] and getting out before their 50p is up.

This has killed browsing in the shopping centre and while rentals go up, takings have gone down and businesses are going to the wall. The notion that the council relax its iron grip just a little does not seem to sway it one bit. It's of no consequence to them who goes to the wall or that half the stalls are empty.

It used to be impossible to get stall space apparently and the place was packed. Not now.

So, unless you have a product which would cause people to come to you and then pop over to the supermarket for the other things, it's not worth the effort. You'd need to be taking minimum £350 a week in sales to be able to expand even slightly.

This now brings us to the business climate at a recessionary time. At such a time, logic dictates that regulations are freed up, greed is reduced and small business is allowed to breathe. It's the only way to trade out of the recession. The most immediate people to do this are the councillors.

Will they do it?

The question of why not is tied up into what I believe [and others also] that there is a thrust to remove uninvested wealth from the individual [including the sole trader], in favour of larger corporations offering a diversified range of products, including what you were hoping to sell.

The only possible way to overcome this huge barrier, this climate inimicable to enterprise, seems to me to be to offer a product which has low unit cost, is wanted by the targeted shoppers, mainly pensioners and would sell in sufficient numbers. The old problem, isn't it?

Could this succeed?

[what to do] stay silent, do nothing

All right, I'm not going to wait till tomorrow morning. Let's do this now.

My angle on all of this [and please read it if you have just a few minutes] is very much where the chutzpah came from. I mean - from where did the people doing this get the idea that they were safe to do it?

Look at the bailouts - they were quite secure that they could cry poor and be bailed out. How could they be sure that there would be no reaction beyond blog words in the U.S. and UK? Look at the way they put small business at risk and then held out their own lifebuoy.

I want to concentrate on people - you and me. The reason many won't accept what is happening is:

1. Any posts run here and on other blogs, daring to suggest some giant plan which is now coming to fruition have been labelled "conspiracy theory", one of the most moronic epithets I've ever seen. One only has to utter those two magic words and the person exposing the thing is immediately marginalized and a sort of false common sense takes its place - that could never be so, could it? Knowing nods all round.

2. No one wants to believe bad news, especially from less than respectable sources. Everyone wants their news to be "trustworthy", meaning from the MSM or talking heads on "reliable channels". It takes a hell of a lot of evidence to show the average punter that this reliance is so much bunkum.

When the silent majority do wake up, it's usually too late and even when they do wish to react, they cannot because:

1. There is no mechanism for reaction. Can you storm parliament [and let it be recorded that I am in no way advocating this]? Can you find Brown, Bush and cronies and physically remove them? You have no recourse, no mechanism. So you sit back helplessly and watch it all happen before your eyes, getting angrier and angrier and determined to "throw the bstds out" at the next election, little realizing that that makes not the slightest difference.

2. There is a defensive mechanism now kicking in, which is three pronged:

a. You're too weary and demoralized anyway through the vicissitudes of your current life to lift a finger, to pull the communication cord and anyway, with whom does the cord communicate?

b. You're too scared to do anything because of family, current job, benefits and so on - you have mouths to feed. Better to keep the head down, as was the case in Soviet Russia, say nothing and do nothing.

c. You're far too busy - working longer and longer for less and less in real terms [look at supermarket prices] or else you have been compromised by the offer of a secure job or monetary reward. You can't be blamed for that in one way - it's finely calculated.

I'm certain there will be an artificially induced recovery first to show people that the "doom and gloom" kooks were off the planet in their forecasts and for them to be forever marginalized for having ever dragged the economy down. There will be talk of "the only thing to fear is fear itself", that "happy days are here again" and that doomsayers are the real enemy of recovery. It will be turned back onto blogs such as this.

This is the major crisis facing the western world now - what the hell to do about the inevitable three card trick. Is there any solution then? Well, to trade our way out of trouble against the odds is a possibility but you can't even set up a company any more in order to do this. It's all tied up. There are other non-revolutionary solutions but that is in a post in the next few days.

In an effort to keep comments in one place, I'll not open them on this post but ask you to comment, if you would, on the previous one, which is part of the same topic.

[eu] more sleight of hand in basel and brussels

There comes a point where the non-economist bloggers and readers need to stop one moment and look at the fine print, hopefully set out in such a way as to retain our attention.

I found a number of articles which explained things clearly and this one underlines why the Basel II directive helped trigger the crisis. Basically, Basel II concerned the amount of capital reserves required by all banks across the EU, in order to officially trade:

In June 2004, the Basel committee agreed updated rules - Basel II. These had to be applied in the EU and in July 2004, the Commission set out proposals for a new Capital Requirements Directive (CRD) which would apply Basel II to all banks, CIs and investment firms in the EU.

The problem was, these new rules created a situation which was:

1. more risk sensitive;
2. costs to smaller banks and consequently to small-company growth, where the EU lags other regions, and;
3. moral hazard concerns in that risks are partly passed to insurers and banks, unlike insurers have potential last resort support from central banks.

To reiterate, should any sort of sharp downturn arise [remember this was promulgated in June 2004 and had to have been worked out long before then] then the banks [and ultimately major corporations] had CB fallback but everyone else, particularly small business, would go to the wall.

Now my question is whether this was sheer bad luck that 2008 saw precisely such a crisis or was something anticipated? Moving on, there is the question of the EU's own accounts which failed audit for the 14th year in a row.

This beggars belief. Open Europe says:

Speaking to MEPs, [Siim] Kallas, [the EU Commissioner for audit], admitted that there were “real and unquestioned” weaknesses in 17 areas including research policy, the European refugee fund, structural funds, external actions and rural development.

For the Common Agricultural Policy - which amounted to 12.4 bn euros in 2007 - the auditors found that rural development expenditure, was “particularly prone to errors” because of the complexity of rules for complying with the programme.

So, in the light of this, the EU blithely went out spending and to fund it, the UK partly pays by the weak pound against the Euro. What sort of things are they spending on?

* The European Parliament has stepped up efforts to legalise the use of the European flag and hymn as official Union symbols - something that was removed from the EU Constitution.

* European finance ministers backed plans to hike public lending to credit-starved small and mid-sized firms.

At the same time, the EU has stepped up the move towards greater "transparency and ethics", whilst at the same time, placed greater restrictions on lobbyists and anyone trying to find out what they've been up to. This is being handled by the same Siim Kallas.

On top of this, funds continue to be pumped in, on EU terms, into the UK regions, for example the West Midlands, through the Structural Funds, together with the Common Purpose management structure [more than enough articles on this on both this site and in the blogosphere].

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

[thought for the day] wednesday evening


Not a bad article on links here.

By this I mean incoming hyperlinks. Unfortunately, there are a number of truisms attached to links:

1. Everyone would like to have a perceived "higher" blogger link to him/her. Some of these "higher beings" will shove you in the sidebar and that's your lot, mate. You'd have to do something pretty spectacular or else have your writing take his fancy enough or rescue his daughter from a raging river or whatever, to score an occasional mention within a post.

On the other hand, he's more than happy for you to link to one of his posts. The more the merrier. The only benefit in visiting him, apart from the erudition you gain, is to leave a linked comment and make it fairly intelligent or witty. That will get you some attention from fellow commenters.

Generally speaking, he is not going to visit you, not because he is nasty or arrogant but because he has a full life of action and has just enough time to blog and visit a handful of the "in crowd".

2. You will be linked to by the growing circle of fellow bloggers of about your stature and this is like any community in that your contacts do increase all the while, the longer you go on and the more consistent you are. You're only as good as your content, your nature as a blogger and whether it coincides with what the visitor is interested in at the time.

3. Bloggers are interested in other people reading their posts. They're not as good at visiting others beyond a small circle of like-minded fellow bloggers and often plead that they have enough trouble just getting posts up without having to do the rounds. A member of a blog group of note once even wrote, on the forum, "If you think I'm going to sit at my computer visiting other people, well, I'm afraid I'm not going to ."

His notion was that he would run aggregators to himself and all traffic would be inwards. There are many tricks on the web to increase traffic and so he probably scores a good two to three times the stats I do but it's actually a very boring blog.

4. Some wiser heads than mine once told me not to worry about stats because firstly, most people read you on feeds anyway and that never registers. Secondly, the google searches will progressively make up a higher percentage of your stats as you go along [they're the bulk of mine] and as your topics of interest are more free-ranging.

Another wise head said that you can tell the blogger who is fixated by stats and it does affect the quality of the posts. The best bloggers are those who don't give a damn about it and say what they think, backing it up as they go. You have to know your stuff - no substitute for that. Well, there is one other way - to post nubile women all the time - that generates a certain type of traffic.

But does it get you linked to?

5. People will link to your post only if it is of interest and this is a hit and miss affair. The bloggers who maintain that they only post for themselves - I'm not totally sure how tongue in cheek they are about that. Of course we damn well want to be read and sometimes even commented on.

6. Sometimes we visit another blogger's site we admire and link and link and then he just ignores us and links to his same usual four or five. I'm guilty of this, most bloggers are. The only way round it is to run a policy of trying to spread your links, not artificially but if that blogger really does have something half decent to say. No blogger is perfect though and whilst the ignoring of a hopeful fellow blogger is hurtful, it is not deliberate.

7. One way round this is the blog roundup - I do an occasional Blogfocus and others host theirs too. Another way is to join a blog group but these are only as good as the people within them visiting one another and sometimes linking. This is a worry with our group just now and I know with some other groups as well.

Maybe the bloggers who do best are the ones who like other people and are interested in them.

In the end, it really does come down to a paraphrasing of the old maxim:

Link unto others as you would have them link to you.

[sexiest bike on earth] which would you choose



All right - there are two candidates above. Which would you add to the list?

[dearieme] and the quest for a decent sized font


Blogger Deogolwulf once wrote:

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense...

to which Dearieme asked:

European Hubcapital of Culture?...

Who on earth is this Dearieme? Once, at Freedom and Whisky, the ubiquitous one opined:

Without the Scottish seats for Labour, an English Tory government might just seize the chance to declare that Scotland is the successor nation and that England has thereby left the EU.

Who on earth is this Dearieme? At Stumbling and Mumbling, he maintained:

Equality of opportunity': why must the left always talk in extreme, often belligerent, terms? Why must we have equality, why must this be maximised, that eliminated and t'other never happen again? How about just trying to move in a desired direction, with this improved, that ameliorated and t'other reduced in frequency?

Recently, DM complained that my font size was too small to decipher and I notice he has just left this at Deogolwulf's:

The font size on your post below was easier on my eyes.

Deogolwulf addressed the mystery commenter thusly:

By the way, dearieme, when retirement hits you, do you think you would consider turning your hand to blogging -- or would you have better things to do?

Dearieme answered ...

I have retired. Mostly. As for blogging - I suspect that it's more fun and less work just to drop in on a few of the best blogs. (Though I am excluded from a few by their using painfully small fonts. Silly asses.)

He almost let the cat out of the bag here:

"It struck Tocqueville that the men who stormed the National Assembly in 1848 were like actors": exactly the same thing struck me about the evenements of 1968 - I was a student too at the time, and the inauthenticity was obvious ...

... and gave himself away completely on his blogger profile.

From all this, Sherlock Higham concludes that Dearieme is most probably a retired academic, much given to research and other jolly activities and possibly inhabiting the Cambridge region to boot. Of course I might be wrong and this BookCrossing seems to underline that:

G'day! I'm a vegetarian, scorpio, Buddhist, 40ish librarian. When I'm not reading (which is not a lot of the time) I watch the cricket on telly, go bushwalking, play on the computer, go to work, and write a word or two of my novel. Am planning the biggest adventure of my life (second only to emigrating to Australia by boat as a kid) - a trek in Nepal! Tres tres excitement!

Of course, this might just be the man's alta-ego but it does seem to be supported by the photo album. Is it the same man? One aside is that DM favours the use of the inverted commas, sometimes unclosed - a speciality of his. Some other Deariemeisms:

* Was feminism "The Revolt of the Misses"?

* "in the long run we are all dead": and in some cases, sooner.

* Don't use anti-climax in poetry" we were taught at school.

* "Liam Byrne": whose brilliant idea was it to have Britishness advocated by a bloke with an Irish name?

* “the likes of Oxford and Cambridge universities - world-leaders in scientific research for four centuries”: oh come off it. You can’t know much about their history if you think that.

*
Actually, I'll just give you my own view of why the NHS was adopted as the State Religion in Britain. Sheer fluke: the NHS was set up coincidentally with the first time in history when physicians could cure you of much - the age of the arrival of antibiotics. All other arguments are so much bumfluff - it was mere chance.

Finally, all appears to be revealed at Pootergeek's, where Dearieme even gets a little hot under the collar:

It’s the hopeless, defeatist “Don’t try because you might not succeed”, combined with the refusal to analyse and learn from any failure and instead just to blame it on “them”. It’s the life-denying, joy-hating, fearful, self-abasing, sodding negativity of it all: drives me up the wall. Tossers!

One thing is for certain - the storehouse of his mind must be indeed vast:

Do you know the story of the poor sod that penicillin was tried on? His condition improved enormously but they were running out of penicillin so they desperately recovered it from his urine and kept recycling it in dwindling amounts until eventually the bacteria won and he relapsed and died.

The measure of a blog, so it seems, is if Dearieme deigns to grace it with a comment and like F Scott Fitzgerald finding himself a duck out of water in his screenwriting and novelistic ventures, perhaps the honourable DM wisely restricts himself to commenting, at least in this current persona.


[Yes, I know I promised Neil Clark next but I couldn't be fagged doing it.]

[vaccines] how harmful are they


In researching "the new weapons for the 21st century, I began with depleted uranium weapons:

A flying rod of solid uranium 18-inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter," is what becomes of a DU tank round after it is fired. Because Uranium-238 is pyrophoric, meaning it burns on contact with air, DU rounds are burning as they fly.

When the DU penetrator hits an object it breaks up and causes secondary explosions. Some of the uranium vaporizes into extremely small particles, which are dispersed into the atmosphere where they remain until they fall to the ground with the rain.

As a gas, the chemically toxic and radioactive uranium can easily enter the body through the skin or the lungs and be carried around the world until it falls to earth with the rain.

... to chemical weapons:

Documents show British ministers knew in 1985 that [a] £14m plant, called Falluja 2, was likely to be used for mustard and nerve gas production. Ministers in the then Thatcher government ... gave financial backing to the British company involved, Uhde Ltd, through insurance guarantees.

Paul Channon, then trade minister, concealed the existence of the chlorine plant contract from the US administration, which was pressing for controls on such exports. He also instructed the export credit guarantee department (ECGD) to keep details of the deal secret from the public.

... and from there to vaccines. The problem with this area is that we're back to the old denial from the conglomerates and allegations from the left scenario which makes it well night impossible to get at the truth. The CDC argues for increased stockpiles of smallpox vaccine:

The U.S. stockpile of smallpox vaccine is maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These decades-old doses may be inadequate to meet the vaccination needs projected after a bioweapon incident. The number of doses needed in various scenarios has recently been discussed. In 1972, for example, a single case of smallpox in Yugoslavia required 18 million doses of vaccine to stop the spread of disease.

Yet other sources are saying something quite different:

According to the CDC, nearly half a million Americans simply "drop dead" each year from what it calls "sudden cardiac death". Americans are subjected to some 95 antigens (and their companion toxins) by the time they are five. Many experience adverse reactions that range from minor irritation, to permanent brain damage and death.

Many American children are developing chronic mental problems for which they are prescribed mood-altering drugs such as Ritalin. Many also develop chronic health problems such as asthma and cancer.

This seems to be supported in this news item:

Drug giant Eli Lilly and Company makes thimerosal. It's the mercury in the preservative that many parents say causes autism in thousands of children – like Mary Kate Kilpatrick. Asked if she thinks her daughter is a victim of thimerosal, Mary Kate's mother, Kathy Kilpatrick, says, "I think autism is mercury poisoning."

Whether or not that is so, a congressman with ties to the White House, which in turn has ties to Eli Lilly, put in a legislative provision banning possible court action against Eli Lilly. Hmmmm. This company is also tied in with the psychological mind control issue, being mentioned in various sources in researching MK Ultra and others.

If you research further, you can get into the vaccines administered in Africa:

The use of OPV was discontinued in the west because all cases of polio since the late 1960s were attributed to the vaccine. Rather than destroy remaining stocks of OPV, WHO began giving it to Africans. Curiously, the package insert for OPV cautions against giving the vaccine to people with AIDS-but, Greater Africa radio founder Kihura Nkuba observed, Africans were not screened for AIDS before being vaccinated with OPV.

The symptoms of polio are identical to chemical poisoning. No cases of polio were reported in Africa until people became exposed to chemicals (and vaccines). Polio and West Nile virus Researcher Jim West has conducted compelling historical research on this subject.

WHO recently announced a new outbreak of polio in West Africa and Central Africa. The humanitarian organization plan[ned] to vaccinate 74 million Africans by November, 2004.

Then you can get into the vaccines that are developed against bioweapons:

Ricin, which is extracted from castor beans, has a highly lethal toxicity in small doses, causing fever, nausea abdominal pain or lung damage, followed by death within a few days of exposure.

Because castor beans are readily available, ricin is easily manufactured and it is also easily aerosolised - making it all the more dangerous - however currently there is no prevention or cure for the deadly substance. "The successful development of an effective vaccine against ricin toxin may actually reduce the threat of its use as a bioterror weapon," said Robert Brey, chief scientific officer of Dor.

So where did the idea come from in the first place to extract Ricin? One name which pops up from time to time is Len Horowitz and I confess I didn't know of him so the only thing to do was google "Len Horowitz debunked" but that didn't get too many debunkings. It's a worry though that Nation of Islam supports his findings.

So the debate appears to be at a standstill - the conglomerates have smeared and the allegers have alleged.

The only anecdotal evidence I can present is that in the 80s and 90s, I was getting flu shots with the rest of the population and going down for two week bouts of influenza, one which almost finished me. At the same time, the media were constantly writing of "new resistant strains" and so on.

At some point I decided to take the risk of the flu and didn't have innoculations ever again. Since that time, I've not been laid low for any length of time due to flu or any other disease.

This has hardly been research and others have documented the issue in detail. In my first attempt at tackling this one, I'm wondering where the truth lies.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

[thought for the day] tuesday evening

Expect nothing - live frugally on surprise.

Alice Walker - 1973


[desirable jobs] five possibilities

Which of these would you rate as a desirable job?

1. Mattress tester;

2. Condom tester;

3. Playing a corpse in a movie;

4. Parks and gardens horticultural officer;

5. Personal fitness trainer.

Or would you prefer to be a member of a SWAT team or the SO19?

[trafalgar] lest we forget nelly and red ken


Today we remember the Battle of Trafalgar.

The Quiet Man has posted his tribute and now here is mine about the proposal to slaughter the innocents. Red Ken's peristerophobia knew no bounds, as he first tried two Harris Hawks to kill off the pigeons and then brought in the heavy artillery:

London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has pledged to provide an army of robot fighters to help combat the over population problems caused by pigeons in Trafalgar Square - one of London's top tourist attractions. The robot army, due to go into production in early 2007, is the latest development of Livingstone's ongoing vendetta with his avian nemesis.

The Telegraph ran this piece at the time:

Already, the numbers of poorly "sky-rats" admitted to Pigeon Recovery, the Sutton pigeon hospital, have soared. "He has not done his research," says Guy Merchant of the Pigeon Control Advisory Service. "He actually hired a couple of heavies to forcibly remove the seller. Thousands of pigeons are dying as we speak and that is a fact.

The battle ended on January 9th, 2003 and Red Ken was effectively defeated by fifty years of tradition and the wishes of the people, to later meet his Waterloo in Boris. As with that other great Battle of Trafalgar, the signal was given:

His Lordship came to me on the pigeon poop, and after ordering certain signals to be made, about a quarter to noon, he said, "I wish to say to the fleet, England confides that every man will do his duty. Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter."

After the battle was done and the poop had been scooped, the pigeons got back to what they do best. It's not every great battle which is remembered in two entirely separate theatres of war.



[anatole kaletsky] readers slowly waking up to him

This is the first in nourishing obscurity's new series of Punditwatch.


Delighted with Private Eye's lambasting of Anatole Kaletsky whom some have been unkind enough to describe as a charlatan. This has been an ongoing thing for some of us but at the time, people saw the Kaletsky bashing as the rantings of a few malcontents.

Now the Eye has taken him to task over his economic forecasting [Hackwatch, Issue 1220, p5, followed up on p4 of Issue 1221]:

No need to worry, he assured his readers. "This crisis will probably turn out to be another storm in a teacup."

The thing is, Mr. Kaletsky must mislead as part of his brief for his backers and so we get:

Mr Kaletsky's other arguments – which, to his credit, are more focused on the first quarter alone – are, at best, misleading. He suggests, for example, that the UK's problems effectively lie within the measurement of export and import volumes, pointing out that domestic demand rose 0.9 per cent in the first quarter relative to the final quarter of last year. Yet this is a highly selective use of data.

Perhaps the Independent is biased against the man. The message boards have this:

It's not just the useful idiot Kaletsky who is pushing the reckless option of government backed mortgages. It seems that lunatic prime minister Brown wants them too ...

... and blogger Alice Cook says:

If Anatole thinks that there can be a debt financed pick up in economic growth, then he hasn't learnt anything in the last 18 months.

... to which readers commented thusly:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Kaletsky is a fool.

20 October 2008 16:43

Anonymous dearieme said...

I think you'll find that he hasn't learnt anything in the last 18 years.


I'd take Dearieme to task on this. It's not that Anatole hasn't learnt but as stated above and in the link at the top, he must take this line - it's his raison d'etre at the Times. Plus a few more things, for example:

In January this year, for example, he called the credit crisis "almost over". As stock markets tumbled in July he concluded another piece suggesting problems were overblown by declaring that "market prices are sometimes plain wrong".

What Kaletsky failed to mention in these and all his other weekly columns, as well as in several appearances as an economics pundit on TV programmes including the BBC's Newsnight, is that since 1999 he has been chief economist of a financial services company called GaveKal.

The firm, whose name is an amalgam of Kaletsky's and French co-founder Charles Gave's names, was initially set up as a pure research operation but in 2006 moved into fund management.


Gavekal is known for its misplaced bullishness but to find criticism from within the industry itself, it's by definition going to be indirect:

We've heard iTulip described as GaveKal's evil twin brother. Both firms strive to be rigorous and consistent, but where GaveKal surveys the financial markets scene and sees a glass half full, iTulip sees a glass of Kool-Aid.

Their theories do not find great acceptance in the economist community, which is a far cry from describing them as actively evil and yet the readership of the Times and others should be, at the very least, circumspect about Mr Kaletsky and pals.


Next up - Neil Clark, the "top UK blogger", according to Neil Clark.

[my father] a most significant birthday

Beckfoot bridge, where my father would toss pebbles


My father’s birthday has just passed. I didn’t want to write anything during it but shall put down a few words now.

If ever there was a complicated relationship, this was it and it reminds me of Springsteen’s Independence Day but without the rancour. Looking back now, I see that his distance from us was partly his war experiences catching him up, partly his age and partly his being transplanted into the new world downunder so long ago.

He never lost his Yorkshire accent [he was a West Riding man] and neither did the sizeable shipload of pilgrims from the Bradford area who eventually settled in Geelong, fifty miles south west of Melbourne shortly before the war, clearly escaping the Great Depression or at least hoping to, the other half of the family electing to remain in England.

He was still youngish when he travelled to join the army upon declaration of war, serving in the Middle-East and Palestine with some distinction – his medals bars went right across his chest – but he was of the kind who never recounted war experiences and so there are only the three small, leather bound albums of box brownie type snaps to go by.

In a rare moment of togetherness, he once told me, “Look at that photo, James. The Germans were two mile up the road there.” It was the El Alamein Road, for want of a better description of the dirt track and a sign had been stuck in the roadside sand, proclaiming, “Advance at your own peril; Jerry’s awaiting you.”

My memories are from decades later, as a nipper down at the beach in summer in a 12 by 18 tent with a 24 by 24 canopy stretched taut above it, all the other campers stretched up and down the foreshore and not a care in that sun-drenched world. He hardly ever went for walks, electing instead to sit on the camp stool and gaze out over the sea, whilst I was out skiffle-boarding or sailing on a surfboard with a raised beach towel or whatever.

The rain would pour down quite often and he’d be out there, with my help, digging trenches around the tent, water running off down the slope and he’d tell me not to touch the calico tent walls, as the rain would come in at that point. All food was in the icebox and we had a porta-gas stove and lamp.

His skills were as a painter for what is now Telecom and he’d been a carpenter before that, having built our house and just about everything in it, as well as other people’s edifices. Despite my humble origins, I had a public school education, which both my parents scrimped and saved for and so I write now in this most unhumble manner and can do nothing about that. I remember my roots though.

There were various stays back in England - my aunty had a lovely house near Ilkley Moor and that was my centre of operations until I made my own way in life – followed by stays back in Australia. Eventually I came back here for good but that is another story.

Another memory I have is of him sitting in the large brown chair, which nobody else sat in, drumming his fingers on the armrests and drinking tea. This had to be a rare moment, as he was always in the garage or shed building something or other and his tools were in immaculate condition, each in its place on the garage lattice wall and jars of nails, screws, bolts and so on along the bench.

I remember his metal comb for his full head of hair he kept till the end, which is more than I can say for myself and I should have been more vigilant after he died as my mother was one of the “clearers out” of the world and practically all memorabilia was thrown out at the time.

He was a dour man and my mother's vivacity was a nice counterpoint to that. About the only joke he ever told was that old chestnut about the garage doors needing painting badly but he certainly appreciated comedy programmes like Alf Garnett, On the Buses, Fawlty, Yes Minister and so on. I got the impression he didn’t like Australians, as most Brits don’t and yet he chose to spend his remaining days there. He’d cheer for the English cricket team but then would support the Aussies in rugby.

I’ve obviously inherited this and more and in the world cup a few years back, watching it at a Russian gym, one of the Russkies asked me whom I was supporting. I can remember being in a real quandary over that one and decided to just enjoy the match, which was a rip-snorter as you’d recall, with Johnno putting on the final points.

Not to put too fine a point on it – my father was a very sick man, physically. Emphysema, hepatititis and a number of other complications eventually brought him down and when he did succumb, it turned out he’d been suffering for the past three decades, in great pain, it seemed.

My mother was nearly a decade younger than my father and both had had me very late in life – I don’t know what they’d been doing during all those years after the war. Many people would be surprised that this particular birthday was or would have been his centenary.

G-d rest his soul.

[poll closed] most remembered people in the world

In a staggeringly popular poll, [6 votes after seven days], the results were:

Jesus 4;
Mohammed and Hitler tied on 3;
Confucius, Tutenkhamen, Stalin, Paul Gascoine and Rolf Harris tied on 2.

Tied on one vote each were Shakespeare, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Rameses, Osama Bin Laden, Nelson Mandela, Ubermouth, Hilton, Gandhi, Napoleon, Harry Hill, Lionel Blair, Madonna, PJ Proby, John Lennon, Chairman Mao, Jimmy Shand and Gordon Brown.

On absolutely no votes at all, not a sausage, were the Beckams, Wayne Rooney, Princess Di, George W Bush or Babe Ruth.

Where in the world?

Where in the world?






Clue: Sicko

Answer: Here.

Interesting video especially from 3min 30secs in.

Monday, October 20, 2008

[airports] you thought heathrow was dangerous


Try Juancho E. Yrausquin [above] ... or Princess Juliana International, St Martin Island [below]:



Check some of the others here. Just trying to keep up to speed on these, you know.

[rough justice] they don't muck around downunder

Students went on the rampage in the city so:

An exclusive Melbourne boys school has suspended its entire year 12 group after end-of-year high jinx resulted in one student being taken to hospital and complaints of drunken, disruptive behaviour by neighbours.

This is in the period coming up to exams and at Year 12 level, that's not so good. There'll be a lot of bleeding-heartedness over this but the swot-vac is almost upon schools now anyway so it is not as dire as it seems. However, I'm a bit concerned about the drunken, disruptive behaviour by the neighbours reported here. Surely they need to set an example to the young tykes.

[the non-quiz] true or false

Which of these two stories is true and which false?

1. Copies of LittleBigPlanet are being recalled from shops worldwide after it emerged that a background music track contained two phrases from St. Matthew's gospel about loving thy neighbour. Sony issued an apology for any offence that its use of the backing track might have caused.

2. Copies of LittleBigPlanet are being recalled from shops worldwide after it emerged that a background music track contained two phrases from the Koran. Sony issued an apology for any offence that its use of the backing track might have caused.

Answer

Duh.

[jobsworths] no time to help, no time to think


I was at the Post Office and saw something which really stopped me in my tracks. There was an old lady, I don't know, maybe seventy and she was trying to either pay something in or get some payment back.

For a start, she couldn't cope with the fast moving line which then fanned out to the "Cashier-N3-please-sing-song window". Once there, it was all brisk.

"Yes luv?" demanded the fortyish woman behind glass and the slow speaking old lady tried to explain but of course they'd changed the procedure, hadn't they?

"Here, luv, just fill these out," and she was given four forms to complete and sign. She might have had Parkinsons, she might have just been jittery but she tried to go through them and completely failed. Perhaps the eyesight was not so good.

Now she was just blocking the way for all the foot-tapping, bustling, young middle-agers waiting in the line and there was total indifference to her plight. At that same moment, I was called to one of the windows for my posting. The stamp was slapped down, I paid and the woman behind glass then walked off. She came back in three minutes and I was still there - her annoyance was showing.

In my sweetest voice, I asked her the question I'd been waiting to ask before she'd walked off and she shot back the reply but it was to the wrong question, so I had to ask again. By the time I got away, the old lady had gone - she'd clearly either given up or had been told to go home and complete them there.

This whole thing stank and it seems it's not an isolated phenomenon. Here's another:

A Job Centre in Bolton demanded that "friendly" be removed from a job ad on the basis that it discriminates against the unfriendly - "enthusiastic" and "motivated" have also been victims of similar bans.

Those women behind glass probably felt they were being eminently reasonable , in a jobsworth way but they simply weren't being reasonable. That old lady should have been sent an officer from behind the counter to help her fill in the forms - it would have taken maybe three minutes to do and the Post Office would have had one satisfied and very grateful customer.

It really affected me, that incident and made me think of some concierge service for the elderly or incapacitated. I don't know how to do it, as I'd hate to take money from pensioners and yet I'd like to get something going for just such situations. Need to think on't.

[disturbing images] bolting the stable door ...

Lebanese kids stressed out by wall to wall inhumanity - kids in the west have so far escaped this but are immersed in a different form of wall to wall inhumanity.


The trouble with this post is that it runs contrary to the majority view, particularly that of many under 40s.

The NSPCC has run a poll of children which I find, quite frankly, bizarre. For a start the children had to be on the net to respond, they had to know to go to the site and then they were asked for degrees of how far they had been disturbed by images:

Some 377 of 497 votes cast claimed to have been disturbed by internet images. One child posted a comment on a There4me message board saying: "I've seen violent images I didn't search for. I was freaked out."

Don't get me wrong - this is a disturbing issue but it needs far more than a flawed poll which plays into the hands of the "porn and violence never disturbed me" school of justification. If a supporter of protecting children can pick holes in this poll, how much more are the opponents of it going to take it apart?

The essence is that, in a society where almost the whole of the new generation has been denied access to the traditional social contract and values, where the proliferation of porn and violence on the web cannot be checked or filtered to any discernible degree, children in a web based lifestyle, even within the school walls, are going to be drawn both by the accessibility and by the peer group mores, sliding younger and younger into this stuff.

This is not just naked female bodies here but the dislocation of any form of affection at these sites. The gaming sphere is about destruction and defence, the relations with women are shallow. It is skewing the human persona and suppressing or not mentioning one side of it, the good side, whilst playing up the other elements, e.g. revenge, these days with fiendish embellishments. And yes, I have seen them.

This is what kids are accessing and you'd have to be pretty naive to think otherwise. How on earth could you say that, with kids accessing quite sick stuff [and do you think they would settle for the tamer stuff], that they are not being affected in terms of long term jaundicing of their outlook on life?

You can quote any number of studies - in this field they are, by definition, flawed becasue this is an unquantifiable thing - but it is is sheer common sense that kids brought up in a vacuum with only these values as their late night companions, with added piquancy as parents try to bolt the stable door, are going to be affected by that. They are kids after all, for goodness sake, with underdeveloped emotional and mental equipment.

You only have to look at the streets and the schools, to compare that to three decades ago, to see that the thing has slid downhill. Without any means of reference to that earlier time, except for revisionist and selective histories, how can Generation Y and Z determine whether things have gone downhill or not?

How to educate a whole generation swamped by an industry dedicated to purveying this material and these values? One can only hope that, with maturity, the kids, after growing up, will have a Who experience, as in "905" from Who are You [1978]:

In suspended animation
My childhood passed me by
If I speak without emotion
Then you know the reason why

Knowledge of the universe
Was fed into my mind
As my adolescent body
Left its puberty behind

And everything I know is what I need to know
And everything I do's been done before
Every sentence in my head
Someone else has said
At each end of my life is an open door

I have a feeling deep inside
That somethin' is missing
It's a feeling in my soul
And I can't help wishing

That one day I'll discover
That we're living a lie
And I'll tell the whole world
The reason why

Sunday, October 19, 2008

[political comedy] the only way out perhaps

One of the key elements missing from political debate today is surely humour. If we can't stop this government by argument or by lawsuit, perhaps we can try ridicule. Let's bring back Spitting Image.



Incidentally, can you imagine a show like that in Italy with Silver Silvio the target? Would Gordo allow it today? At least this one is still going:


[the candle of freedom] stil flickering ... about to be doused

Andrew Allison has run two posts in recent days which, IMHO, are very important "line in the sand" pieces. One was on capitalism as a concept and the other on imperial measurements.

On the first, Rob, of The Broadsheet Rag, draws attention to Brown's dumbness with this quote:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said the current global financial crisis has “laid bare the weaknesses of unbridled free markets”.

... coupled with:

The ethic of fairness means we reward hard work, thrift, enterprise, effort and responsible risk taking, but refuse to condone or reward irresponsible or excessive risk taking ...

I suggested to Andrew that "private [or free] enterprise" sounds better than "capitalism" and to Rob, that it was not so much dumb as the next stage in the ongoing agenda. These people stick to neo-Hegelianism like limpets, don't they? Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Or in political terms:

1. Create a crisis or let one be created by inaction and deliberate ineptitude;

2. Reap the worldwind of people's approbation, shrug the shoulders and suggest that under your current powers, you can do very little;

3. Step in with a "solution', a giving to the people of what they are crying out for, along with all the elements of what you originally wanted to achieve.

Are there still people out there who seriously believe there is no agenda? No matter, the next year should address this.

Calling a spade a spade, we are headed for a new era where the covert structure now being laid in place becomes increasingly transparent, in line with the level of personal security these bstds feel and it is state socialism on the menu, with capitalistic running mates, just as the NEP men of the 20s operated.

It is not just governments who are inimical to free enterprise - it is the monopolies too. Brown's "unbridled free markets" is not in the least directed at the oligopoly. It is aimed squarely at the small investor, the small businessman. The person trying to make a living by his own risk taking and hard work.

The notion of Brown suddenly coming out with a solution which will "save the world", given his persona, is so Yes Minister, especially the point where Hacker becomes PM. A "success" is engineered for him and the new-Churchill rides a temporary wave of applause.

It all makes me sick because it was predicted long ago. Here is Svali, in the year 2000:

There will be continued conflict in the Middle East, with a severe threat of nuclear war being the culmination of these hostilities. An economic collapse that will devastate the economy of the US and Europe, much like the great depression. One reason that our economy continues limping along is the artificial support that the Federal Reserve had given it, manipulating interest rates, etc.

But one day, this won't work (or this leverage will be withdrawn on purpose) and the next great depression will hit. The government will call in its bonds and loans, and credit card debts will be called in. There will be massive bankruptcies nationwide. Europe will stabilize first and then Germany, France and England will have the strongest economies, and will institute, through the UN, an international currency. Japan will also pull out, although their economy will be weakened.


Peacekeeping forces will be sent out by the UN and local bases to prevent riots. The leaders will reveal themselves, and people will be asked to make a pledge of loyalty during a time of chaos and financial devastation.

Since 2001, I've watched world events unfold, occasionally dropping back into this quote above to check progress. What about this one?

1933 - "The Shape of Things to Come" by H. G. Wells is published. Wells predicts a second world war around 1940, originating from a German-Polish dispute.

After 1945 there would be an increasing lack of public safety in "criminally infected" areas.
The plan for the "Modern World State" would succeed on its third attempt, and come out of something that occurred in Basra, Iraq.

The book also states: "Although world government had been plainly coming for some years, although it had been endlessly feared and murmured against, it found no opposition anywhere."

... or this one:

Feb. 9, 1950 - The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee introduces Senate Concurrent Resolution #66 which begins: "Whereas, in order to achieve universal peace and justice, the present Charter of the United Nations should be changed to provide a true world government constitution."

The resolution is introduced by Senator Glen Taylor (D-Idaho), who later states: "We would have to sacrifice considerable sovereignty to the world organization to enable them to levy taxes in their own right to support themselves."

... or this one:

April 12, 1952 - CFR member John Foster Dulles [who later became Secretary of State], in speaking before the American Bar Association in Louisville, Kentucky, says: "Treaty law can override the Constitution. Treaties can take powers away from Congress and give them to the President.

They can take powers from the States and give them to the Federal Government or to some international body, and they can cut across the rights given to the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights."

Lisbon Treaty? Treaty of Rome? How about this one?

Feb. 23, 1954 - Senator William Jenner of Indiana says before the U.S. Senate: "Today the path to total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people.

We have a well-organized political action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state. It has a foothold within our Government, and its own propaganda apparatus. One may call this group by many names. Some people call it socialism, some collectivism. I prefer to call it 'democratic centralism.'


The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization. It is a dynamic, aggressive, elite corps, forcing its way through every opening, to make a breach for a collectivist one-party state. It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government without our suspecting the change is underway.


This secret revolutionary corps understands well the power to influence the people by an elegant form of brainwashing. We see this, for example, in the innocent use of words like 'democracy' in place of 'representative government.' "

... or this one:

October 24, 1975 - In Congress, 32 Senators and 92 Representatives sign "A Declaration of Interdependence," which states that "we must join with others to bring forth a new world order ... Narrow notions of national sovereignty must not be permitted to curtail that obligation."

Congresswoman Marjorie Holt refuses to sign the Declaration saying:
"It calls for the surrender of our national sovereignty to international organizations. It declares that our economy should be regulated by international authorities. It proposes that we enter a 'new world order' that would redistribute the wealth created by the American people."

You might to look at the state of global economics, as of 1994. And finally - look at the current march of Obama towards the Presidency.

The quislings are everywhere, fundamental changes to society are now being spoken of openly and mentioned in the blogosphere to an extent unknown before 2008 and a rattled populace are open to Messianic ideas of a material nature. Those ideas will be the redistribution of wealth, such as it is into the hands of the non-enterprising fat cats and a meted out handout to the rest of the nanny state.

There is a stage in the socialistic movement which could be termed "the compassionate society", suggesting that to believe in hanging onto what you've worked to achieve is somehow wrong and that, out of a "spirit of love ", it should be redistributed to those with no intention of working for what they have. Correctly interpreted, it could be called The Politics of Envy.

There is just as much "compassion" in giving people opportunities, removing barriers to ideas and so on than in enforced "compassion". it is more sustainable. It says, "I'll give you the chance to get back on your feet and you can choose to either take that chance during your window of opportunity, not take it or else fail to take it." During this time, the onus is on the individual to climb out of the mire.

To me, that is practical love, practical compassion. Why do the politically correct assume that the go-getter can't feel pity or is indifferent to suffering? It's not so. Yet there has to be the possibility to do that. There has to be a free enterprise mentality to the country which supports initiative taking and offers incentives to do this.

That's why people committed to freedom of association, worship, speech, private enterprise and private property need to dig in now, to silently and not so silently resist the dead hand with every fibre of their being. We have our differences, often personal but these are as nothing compared to resisting the inexorable tide of state socialism now sweeping over the stone walls and threatening to swamp the land beyond and all who reside in it.