[fetish] when is it just a preference

Fetish, addiction, preference - are they a continuum from extreme down to mild? Must a fetish be purely sexual? Can one have a fetish for women in general - that is, the whole woman is the fetish ... or is that an addiction, a compulsion?

Can something banal and repeated by necessity be a fetish? For example you might really be crazy for curries because there's something you really like about rice. Who knows? Can it be a colour, e.g. red or maybe a black hijab?

Olga Kurylenko is into bondage:



Are fetishes always bad or can they be healthy? Can there be reverse fetishes, i.e. you take a strong dislike to certain things? As distinct from a phobia, it's more a distaste.

I was asked if I had a fetish for shoes. Don't think so. Hope not. I can't seriously think of anything I'm that addicted to - sailing, women, nature, conversation: they'd be the closest I'd come to having a fetish.

And you?

[floppy bowtie] the only way to dress

Don't make it too perfect, otherwise it might seem pre-tied

Shoes are most certainly the first thing to take care of but once you've got your leather soles on, it's time to take care of the tie.

During the 1980s, I was known for my bowties and particularly in Britain, these are de rigeur for the independent man with a sense of difference However, with the shifting of the colour in your outfit to your neck, some things have to be right:

1. the tie itself;

2. the shirt which now has no regular tie covering it;

3. your neck.

The greatest danger is that she'll want to upstage you and wear one too.

The tie should always be silk but you now come to a difficult choice - big ostentatious floppy or a neat little item like a pencil moustache. I generally opted for the ostentatious but that didn't have to mean gaudy or gauche. Your colour scheme is your own affair but I tended to go for the maroons and navies, with the grey of the suit somewhere in the scheme.

Warning - absolutely no pre-tied bowies with elastic. An afficianado will know instantly and your stocks will drop.

If you're the non-flamboyant type, you can still go for bowties in more muted colours and patterns, of course but the essential thing is to get into the bowie as soon as you can. You'll become braver as you go on and soon you'll wonder where the fear came from.

The beauty of the bowtie is that you can indicate character and mood. It can be tied disdainfully, perfunctorily or sloppily to project a more dissolute persona.

Here's how to tie it:

[macro-economic delusions] part four – recognizing the virus for what it is

Here is Part 3

[Well, isn't that interesting. Vox has also posted on Krugman, taking him apart.]

Paul Krugman, April 18, 2009: With 12 trillion dollars of household wealth destroyed, it's hard to imagine that this is going to be a consumer led recovery, given the levels of household debt and given the very low level of saving that people were undertaking before.

Krugman says that wealthy countries have historically been able to handle up to 100% debt to GDP or even more and not go to the wall. Countries maybe, in macro terms but not individuals, in micro terms.

Why weren't people saving up to the point where the crisis hit? Why were you personally spending rather than saving?

1. The explosion of credit and the nasty little algorithm which fooled people into thinking that they could have the lifestyle of the stars for a fraction of the cost on the never-never also fuelled prices, particularly cost of houses and cars against net income.

With all the jargon in the world to defend the opposite view, that is what happened. People spent and the spending was easy. There was never going to be a crisis because the government and its controllers, e.g. Gordo's Shadow Bankers, told us there wasn't, that all the lessons had been learned and the economists parroted this:

2. The very fact that prices skyrocketed when released from the nexus of living within one's actual household budget in terms of cash on call, a thing which charged ahead in the 60s but not accompanied by corresponding rises in income, salaries in other words, meant that the dollar or pound bought less. Solution? More credit debt to finance the debt. Michael Rowbottom is quoted by Ellen Brown: Web of Debt:

The gold standard precipitated the problem, but unbuckling the dollar from gold did not solve it. Rather, it caused worse financial ills. Expanding the money supply with increasing amounts of "easy" bank credit just put increasing amounts of money in the bankers' pockets, while consumers sank further into debt. The problem proved to be something more fundamental: it was in who extended the nation's credit. As long as the money supply was created as a debt owed back to private banks with interest, the nation's wealth would continue to be drained off into private vaults, leaving scarcity in its wake.

In other words, there was precious little left to save.

3. The eternal fear which tells us to get while the getting is good. Some bonuses come our way? Upgrade while we can, rather than save.

4. The lack of understanding, even of Krugman and certainly all the otehr economists and financial advisers - and they STILL don't understand it - that the market doesn't run itself. It's controlled. Krugman partly understood it:


Bernanke admitted it:


Here's Karl Denninger with some interesting stats:

Banks make $38 billion a year from overdraft fees. Now let's look at the internals on that statistic:

3/4 of all accounts have not had an overdraft in the last 12 months. This means that one quarter of all accounts are responsible for basically all of this.

Of the remaining quarter, half of those account for nearly all (90th percentile plus) of the overdrafts. This means that roughly 12.5% of consumers are bearing the entire brunt of these fees.

70% of the overdrafts happen at a POS terminal or ATM, not by writing a check.

The last statistic is the clear one: There is no reason whatsoever for anyone to take such a hit. The bank knows before they approve the transaction that the money isn't there in the account.

This is not the same thing as a check, which the bank has no way to warn you about before you write it, as there is no "connection" between your checkbook and their computer.

IF we had honest regulators it would be strictly unlawful for a bank to intentionally approve a debit transaction which it knew you did not have the funds to settle unless you had an established overdraft line of credit (at a reasonable APR.)

I'd wager that almost any economist who has bothered to read this post so far would still not accept that the crises have been induced and for all the wrong reasons.

It's as though they know nothing about the hand in glove politics of the finance [here too] or the way this has always been the case. e.g.the Panic of 1857, 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, in response to which the BofE lent Peabody $1m [an enormous sum for those days] but declined to support other firms.

Or the 1907 panic, when JP Morgan rescued banks and trust companies, averted a shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange, and engineered a financial bailout of New York City. Same players, same result - deeper capture of the financial infrastructure, completed in 1913 with the privately owned Fed.

This isn't good economics - it's monopoly of a malevolent type which not only doesn't give a toss whether the free enterprise system survives or not but which can realize profits under any system people are currently under the yolk of. These are the men and women who need to be taken from their secluded redoubts and incarcerated on Elba, with no food, with an international flotilla of warships surrounding them and observers noting how they survive their final ordeal.

These people need to be dug out, not in fantasy, as in Quantum of Solace, but for real, to once and for all get this yolk from around our necks. The evidence is there and until this is recognized by pundits, as a very beginning, then no amount of discussion of land value tax or cbi or whatever is going to produce one iota of lasting difference. The virus will simply go benign for a time and then strike again.

So when the depression grips, don't go for the muslims or just for Gordo, Obama and chums - go direct to the Real Enemy and do as Andrew Jackson urged - root them out. They were the ones who started it.

Here is Part 5

[camera obscura] that's all

[channelling] what does hillary know of that

The Enemy occasionally slips up. Ostensibly letting her jealousy get the better of her:

They may be hailed as ‘Team Clinton’ for their international humanitarian efforts, but there was no mistaking who is the official top diplomat in the Clinton household when Hillary reacted angrily to a question about her husband Bill yesterday.

Less than a week after the former US President stole his wife’s thunder by securing the release of two American journalists detained in North Korea, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, snapped when asked about her husband’s opinion by a university student during her seven-nation African tour.

... Hillary let something slip which few if any, IMHO, would have picked up on:

“You ask my opinion I will tell you my opinion, I’m not going to be channelling my husband,” she said.

Oh wow - that sticks out a mile. This, at the end of the link here, was most certainly the spirit in which she was using the term "channelling" - nothing whatever to do with digging ditches or running aqueducts under the State Department.

May I quote just a little of it?

Mediumship is also part of the belief system of some New Age groups. In this context, and under the name channelling, it refers to a medium who claims to receive messages from a "teaching-spirit".

Teaching spirit. Hmmmmm. Teaching spirit coming into Hillary's and Obama's and Gore's and who knows who else's heads.

Right. Good.

Which teaching spirit? One which says, "Let's go into Iraq and Afghanistan perhaps"? You might like to look at this post again and its connection with the movers and shakers in Washington. Let me quote a little of it:

The Shamballa force is in reality Life itself; and Life is a loving synthesis in action. We also used the Six Laws and Principles of the New Age to lead us towards creating a vision of how these principles might create patterns for the New Civilization humanity will be constructing over the next 2500 years.

... or:

'What if a small group of these world leaders were to form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse? It's February. They're all at Davos. These aren't terrorists. They're world leaders.' 'They have positioned themselves in the world's commodity and stock markets. They've engineered a panic, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can't close. The rich countries -'

That last was not a New Age tree-hugger or a David Icke. It was Maurice Strong, cohort of the world leadership. Speaking of Maurice Strong:

"This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. "If he is whispering in Kofi Annan's ear this is no good at all."

... with good reason:

During his college years at Brown University, Magaziner was one of the two architects of the "New Curriculum," a liberal academic approach which includes no core requirements aside from the concentration the student pursues.

These New Agers are serious kooks. The Left likes to speak of right-wing nuts, crazy people who believe in a free enterprise system and the rule of the family and of law. Truly kooky stuff. By comparison, the sane and noble Clinton speaks of channelling:

In 1875, Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society. Madame Blavatsky claims that Tibetan holy men in the Himalayas, whom she refers to as the Masters of Wisdom, communicated with her in London by telepathy. She insists that the Christians have it all backwards - that Satan is good and God is evil. She writes: "The Christians and scientists must be made to respect their Indian betters. The Wisdom of India, her philosophy and achievement, must be made known in Europe and America."

Speech at Bohemian Grove. Notice the presidents.

Or we can look at the sanity of Bohemian Grove:

Few journalists have gotten into the Grove and been allowed to tell the tale (one exception is Philip Weiss, whose November 1989 Spy piece provides the most detailed inside account), and members maintain that the goings-on there are not newsworthy events, merely private fun. In fact, official business is conducted there: Policy speeches are regularly made by members and guests, and the club privately boasts that the Manhattan Project was conceived on its grounds.

San Francisco bureau chief for People magazine, Dirk Mathison, got in to the compound in 1991 and witnessed some interesting things:

He witnessed a speech -- "Smart Weapons" -- by former Navy Secretary John Lehman, who stated that the Pentagon estimates that 200,000 Iraqis were killed by the U.S. and its allies during the Gulf War. Other featured speakers included Defense Secretary Richard Cheney on "Major Defense Problems of the 21st Century", former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano on "America's Health Revolution -- Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays", and former Attorney General Elliott Richardson on "Defining the New World Order".

Now, most people know about Alex Jones getting in there too and reporting burning crosses along the walkway at the ceremony of Cremation of Dull Care in front of a 40 foot stone statue of an owl, with priests in robes and a fire onto which a body [claimed by Bohemian Grove to be just an effigy wrapped in a sack] was rowed across a stream and laid, with the world's grey-haired movers and shakers in the congregation, including presidents, prime ministers and European royalty chanting along. Charles has been there.

Many dismiss Jones as a sensationalist, opportunistic loony but much of the detail he reported is confirmed by other sources, especially that of the Grove itself, who explain it away.

Either way - Grove? In New Age Paganism, that is a significant term.

What we have then, if hard-pressed by the New Age Left as to what we do actually have, is at least a nodding acquaintance with and a willingness to go along with the ceremonies of distinctly un-Christian practices by the major figures in the world economy, at the same time that they pay lip service to being Christian, to appease the Christian Right, itself distinctly un-Christian.

In a world view where almost anyone on the atheistic Left would strongly assert Rationality and the Age of Man and Science, this would have to be very unnerving because these are very much the trappings of religion - a savage, sacrificial religion too, dedicated to the other half of the Christian dichotomy. It seems the rationalist hoi-polloi might have expunged Christianity from the national consciousness and substituted hedonism and the rule of credit blowout but in fact, the leaders are following paganism and the nameless one.

Interesting, huh?

Look, let's call a spade a bloody shovel. These people are walking about groves and temples in their spare moments in cassocks and hoods, chanting mumbo jumbo. They are seriously insane in the sense that they give all the appearance of being quite sane, yet their policies are insane.

And they are in charge of us. They appointed themselves. We're in good hands, huh?

The sodomite boys club in action

[isolation] these pleasures a wayward distraction