[coffee] and the necessity to smell it now

You've all seen those films where the small anti-hero stumbles on something but when he tries to do something about it, he's faced by a wall of smug, at first tolerant disbelief. It's a pity that it's a Bruce Willis who gets the revelation in those films, an ordinary man who somehow turns into a die-hard hero because in the real world, it's more often than not a nobody, an amateur who gets it.

We know how, in those films, the wall of officialdom, like the cop big wig who threatens John McClane and tells him to get off the air or the police who jump James Bond at the airport after he's saved the plane from being exploded - how they always get it wrong, quite satisfied in their world view of what is going on. It's only a major event which shakes them out of their complacency and by then it's too late.

We can all feel the utter frustration of not being able to do anything - like Sarah Conner in Terminator 2 who knows what's going down but is then shut up in a loony bin while she sees a child on a swing being obliterated by the nuclear blast. And Sarah Conner is a woman on the edge, a strange, crazy, violent person who has got that way because no one will believe her.

We all believe we've got it right - within our sphere of accounting or finance or law or engineering or whatever, we have the world worked out and are the pub philosophers of the blogosphere. Much of what we've come to believe is right but there's always something to show that we are a bit off in some ways or haven't twigged certain other things.

For example, I was sure that the NAU was the big one and that's how my posts on it read. Now, as a result of info pumped in from outside [you'd understand that many people don't wish to commit themselves in the comments section of a blog], I can see that we've been led down a side path on this one.

OK, OK, hold up for one moment. You'd agree things are not too great out there just now, from the financial crisis through to our children on drugs and prostituted before fourteen, to the lack of respect, to the rise of the new hooligan and so on. We all have our own explanation and our own blog to push it.

This is the single biggest obstacle to any progress on this - we are self-satisfied and won't open ourselves to radically different ideas. It doesn't help when those that have stumbled upon something only have fragments of it and quite understand it ourselves. We're asked to lay down chapter and verse before you and we can't. Ipso facto, in your eyes, we're talking shite.

But we're not - we really did come across those things. Hallucination, explained by natural phenomena - all of this is thrown at us but we know what we saw and what we saw was wrong. That was the case of Obama lying [in yesterday's post]. I knew he lied because I looked at the fine print and at the same time, knew of the SPPNA meetings - I knew of this connect.

There are hundreds out there who know far more than me on this issue, some of them send me things. I check them out. They're actually right or have mysteriously disappeared off the web in the past few days. Obama used the words "dreamed up by the internet". You see what he's doing - inviting the audience, in a spirit of bonhomie, to mock along with him.

The bottom line? Internet = kook, David Icke, wild theorist. Classic propaganda move.

The point of all that

The BIS are effectively stating that nations' taxpayers should be responsible for all derivatives ever written prior to now. And also possibly ongoing. They are unique contracts, incapable of netting. The BIS is showing the net figures.

No exchange can possibly be created to insure this cr-p. Everything going over an exchange becomes ultimately the responsibility of the exchange, that's why counter parties are financially examined for qualification. Balancing is done nightly. Normal exchange accepted contracts are standardised, and are nettable and insurable.

This rubbish isn't. I'd like the financial boys and girls who read this blog in RSS to consider the following:

# Unless financial contracts have standards there is no way to clear them.

# Unless financial instruments have accurate means of daily valuation, there is no way to clear them.

# OTC derivatives outstanding from 1991 to 2008 have no standards.

# OTC derivatives outstanding from 1991 to 2008 have no sound means of true valuation in any time frame, certainly not from day to day.

It's why AIG went down, they had no assets behind the "insurance", derivatives, that they sold OTC. They were fools to get involved with GS, JPM, etc, these were the guys writing this rubbish, they knew they would fail, and given the repealed legislation, they, (GS, JPM, et al) knew the taxpayer, via treasury, would be on the hook!

Greenspan, CFRers et al campaigned for no oversight of these instruments. Meanwhile, the rest of the actual banking world, who understood the implications, were silent. The NAU is a side issue, a distraction. No one is shouting about this and that should tell the story in itself.

Why did gold jump last week? What's happening with gold?

Why did China say it was OK for Chinese Coys to default on certain derivatives, raised by certain western banks? Why has a trade dispute suddenly blown up between China and US? The short position to cap gold, right now, is unbelievable. Those who hold it are the bullion banks, in thrall to the central banks.

We are in very, very strange times right now, where very weird things, which defy explanation, are going down. They attempted to make Iran the target of a new war and Iran, the nutters, willingly obliged with their provocation. Why? Why did the U.S. shift its position on this in the sense of not going at it as gung ho as before?

The Chinese obviously woke up to this, to what was really behind the U.S. moves at key strategic points in the world and they had their own agenda, which this threatened to derail. Hence their moves in the last decade. I'm sorry to go back to Wilson's dictum again but if it's true, it keeps coming back.

There is clear international financial collusion going on and the question is where the source of it is. Wilson could only see as far as the U.S. itself when he said "Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

It's been said by many others, even by those involved in it. It's there to read and people don't read. It is sheer lunacy to ignore what people on the inside say, when they give out warnings. Eisenhower was a brave man, hence his position in WW2. He gave the same warning , only disguised and muted, when he realized what was going on.

Do you think the things going on in America are normal, usual? Do you think the state control of our rubbish bins and over education in our country here, to the dissolution of England as an entity, is normal and usual?

There are things clearly going down, aren't there?

We know some of the centres of it but even they, the CBs, are just the visible front which can take the flak. You can see the arrogant way in which banks are getting bailed out and top execs, in the past few days, have been revealed to have given themselves huge bonuses. The world is descending into mania, it seems.

No - we are not mad. Not us. The madness is at the top, in Them, the disconnect with normality and morality and it's a very sane mania, predicated on money. Always it comes back to money and who controls the credit.

That's what's going down.

Look a your own situation. Do you have a mortgage? Why? Why isn't the house price within a range which you could pay off in five years? The answer is that the prices have, over the past decades, slipped out of your grasp. Why do mothers work? Two reasons - feminism/suffragettism and economic necessity. Nothing wrong with it but why is it necessary? Why are things so grim, so difficult?

Because they've been made so. Because this is all about control of the population. You call it Statism if you like, you call it the socialist move to break down the free enterprise system. I call it Them. Same thing, different name.

2010/11 is when the major moves come up. Which year did this blog rabbit on about, in its early days? 2012, wasn't it? Why? Because I stumbled upon something - I read some FOMC reports word for word and what was couched in there was jaw-dropping.

It was written on this blog that we'd come out of this recession for some time too before the real crash came, the crash engineered years ago by the simple expedient of sitting back and allowing some things to come to pass, knowing the game well enough to know that they would, must, come to pass. Greenspan is one of the men who did that. There were others. Blind Freddy knew that sub-prime lending must implode and that hedge-funds were fraught with issues.

They knew people would run to metals and voila - gold has shot up. Does anyone seriously say that gold and silver are not controlled?

You, the people, have no mechanisms to hit back, even if you understand it. You are effectively disempowered. There is no democracy, for the simple reason that you cannot effect change. The running of your family and you is in the hands of the government, itself riddled with and in thrall to Them. The departments of state and semi-governmental bodies are riddled with Pod people, all administering the party line.

Only major action would change this but all social upheavals have been anticipated anyway and the funded leaders end up in control again. The Who - meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

We run around blindly in our impotence and frustration but there is someone we can hit immediately and it at least dents the push. That is the combination of Central Banks who are far, far more than financial institutions. All the command and control resides in there. They're powerful but anything human can go down, never forget. Hitler did, Stalin didn't but he died anyway.

Hit the humans behind the CBs, feeling safe behind their firewalls and we have part of the victory back. Then starts the long haul.

So ... who'll bell the cat? We're waiting for a hero to do something about it.

[crb checks] skip this post - it offends

Take your pick of the blogs running the story of the CRB checks gone mad. Here's the Norfolk Blogger:

The latest initiative by the government to ensure that everyone who has anything to do with children, including those parents who give lifts to and from clubs is an astonishing amount of overkill and symbolic of this government's willingness to ignore common sense at all costs.

Is it just mindlessness or is it something else as well? A bit of both really. Nich makes the point:

The other aspect is the fact that CRB checks are a very good income stream for the government. My old school had to get me CRB checked when I qualified as a teacher. I then got CRB checked again 3 years later when I became a councillor. There was then a change in the status of my school and all staff (including me) had to have further CRB checks. Then I changed school, and my old CRB check (only one year old) was deemed invalid so I was checked again ...

... and it didn't stop there. So that's a prime motivation. There is still that mindlessness aspect though and the appalling mindset of the modern civil servant - compliant, fearful for the job, wishing to score brownie points and so, so complacent in their conviction that they're on the right path.

Is it the ideologue or the 2IC, the middle to upper level numpty who sees the "need to protect the kiddies" and to hell with blighting anyone's life because it's such a good cause and we have to turn Britain/America/Canada into a nanny state a.s.a.p.?

Look at the pics of these people in this post and they are the ones I mean - do-gooding, intolerant in their PC way, riding roughshod over all who dare question the sanity of what they're doing, with a "suspect everyone, just to be sure" mindset and so, so sweetly reaching for the big stick to beat you down with, refusing to debate the issue publicly and so on.

Ezra Levant is writing on a similar mentality over in Canada, with this piece on [Such and Such a Numpty] is Delusional. Fill in your choice of name - the plot's the same.

These are the people who honestly believe they are doing good. Hell, even satanists think they're on the right track. The people in those photos, each and every one, wish to bring in more and more legislation, just to tie up the loose ends but their minds cannot encompass or else they simply don't care what they do to substantial portions of the population when they get one of their brainwaves.

Changing topic - angels and demons

There's another phenomenon I'd like to look at today - the murderer.

Lower right is a murderer. Doesn't look like one - looks like an angel but she took part in a murder in Italy.

Why? What would motivate her to do so? It's a long story.

For a start, the pic immediately below shows one reason:



This is the culture which youth has no choice but to be immersed in , from cradle to club, the values being completely twisted. In lieu of any sort of moral absolutes, instead there's booze and bodies, with the consequent deterioration of intellect and any sort of caring values plus sheer ignorance of any externals. Youth never cared much anyway for charity at home, except in a jargonistic way for birds with broken wings, little kittens and the starving poor in Africa, live aid concerts and so on.

So already, Amanda Knox was part of all that but exacerbating it was the new lack of control - the ASBO syndrome, the "Wotchoo lookin at, eh?" mindlessness. Some other girl steps on Amanda's territory - rape the bitch. In a culture with no decency but values conferred by gaming, clubbing and with parental input long since rejected and absent, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

The minds of these people have to be observed to be believed and it's not a new phenomenon. Twenty years ago I was briefly living in a city, in a house where two of this type were also living. I've never seen such gross self-centredness, where each wanted the other to wait on her hand and foot.

These are not pleasant people, except maybe 40% of the time, when they are absolute angels. We're talking, of course, of teenagers who don't grow up but instead of being Peter Pans and Wendys, they're Chucky and that girl from The Ring, only in a supposedly grown up form.

It's no accident how they got this way - the education system, the bilge on the net, the way music and games have turned dark and nasty - all of it sucks big kids in.

Little kids still cling to mum and dad.

The Annakin Skywalker syndrome

I would posit that the vast majority of personal crime, even in crimes of passion, is perpetrated by people who've already been softened up by perverse circumstances and in Knox's case, by a diet of perverse culture. You think your own son or daughter, free of any moral constraint, would be incapable of such acts?

It all comes down to your own moral fibre in the end and how far your parents and teachers imparted it to you. Someone once said of Guinevere, "How can you expect her to resist Lancelot and stay true to Arthur when she was kept shut away and ignorant?"

Parents turn around today and say, "Well what can we do? He doesn't listen to a word I say."

Why not?

Because the perverse culture has got him/her, a culture which should have been shut down the moment it reared its head decades ago. The Spock method of bringing up children. And in the schools, a different type of teacher was now in place who jollied it along in an Edmund Burkean [good men do nothing] sort of way.

So, here's our young person, with little self-control and along comes the Emperor Palpatine, feeding, Iago-like [to mix screenplays], on the natural jealousy, envy and sudden hatred of the one who's been on your mind. You fly into a blind range, you suddenly snap, you do the deed and then the tap is turned off and you can observe your handiwork.

You'll either feel remorse, as Ivan the Terrible did, going to the chapel and praying for forgiveness or else you'll harden your heart, refuse to accept responsibility and there's a sociopath and psychopath in the making. How many late teenage to early thirties psychos infest the bars and clubs around this country each evening? Or else they stay in their room, locked into the net.

You do it long enough and you have gone over to the dark side.

How can you pull back, how can you pull out of it? There's no chance while there is no moral basis underpinning the society, no moral code which is generally accepted. When that is thrown out, as it has been, only dark, empty values can take their place. Where is the messiah who appears, the embodiment of integrity and security, like the ship's officer at the end of Lord of the Flies?

Where is he? There are only false messiahs like Obama. It was even predicted so.

Therefore, the Amanda Knox/Annakin Skywalker phenomenon is only going to increase, not decrease, pollies will have expenses scandals, church leaders will be rapists, those we look up to will turn out to be hollow shells, white-anted from within, until people reattach themselves to sanity, to rationality, to the classic liberal mentality and some sort of decency and integrity can return in our dealings with one another.

And look at this! The lies which are told. It's not down to that at all.

[thought for the day] monday evening

Xlbrl presents Toqueville:

The more a cause seems to be abandoned, the more passionately I become attached to it.

[figaro it out] practical outfits

Seeing double

How much would you pay me to wear this in Leicester Square?

[late evening listening] the big o and the boss

My goodness - look who's the Big O's fellow vocalist and guitarist and look at those back up vocal girls - now that's respect!





.. and one from Bruce himself:



"At night on them banks Id lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take
Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it dont come true
Or is it something worse that sends me
Down to the river though I know the river is dry?

[meetings] love them or loathe them, you can't like them

Is this typical or is this typical?

With respect to Douglas Adams' Marvin.

At one staff meeting, soon into my headmastership, I stopped and said, "You know, I really hate sitting around at lunchtime, going on and on about things like this, when what I really want is my break.

The thing is, when we do have a meeting, we don't want it to drag on and we don't want to have to come back the next day and the next. Nor do we want it to go on into the night.

If we run these meetings before school, we get insufficient concentration, it pressurizes you because you like to do your preparation then and I'd like you always to be there when the parents and kids come in. We'd not resolve anything and have to continue later.

Alternatively, we could run them in our break times, such as lunchtime and we all know how we feel about that. Again, we'd have to come back the next day most like.

Or we can run them after school, in your time and mine, have fewer meetings, when sufficient business comes up to need one. In the meantime, we can deal with most issues by a sort of bulletin board with tick boxes where you can anonymously tick which option you like or suggest your own.

If there are things we really need to decide together, getting ideas, brainstorming and so on, then we'll hold a meeting, with one week's notice. However, we'd expect people to be at it, to contribute and most of all, we want a result on each question - at least an interim working plan, so that we don't have to come back next day and do it all over again.

I envisage you'd need to give up to an hour and a quarter, I'd micro-manage it so that we'd keep moving along and not overly dwell on one point but at the same time, get as many points in as possible, then it would cut off at the hour and a quarter, no matter what. Plus I don't want to have it here but over the road at the Fox and Hounds - there's a side room, as you know.

Your say."

The mothers didn't like the after-school bit but the reduction in the number was attractive. Some wanted it only in school hours but in an independent school where staff were expected to give time outside the regulation hours anyway, that wasn't taken too seriously.

One didn't like the pub idea but the rest did. No one wanted before school. Some wanted the "least worst option" of lunchtime but when it was apparent that it would need to be two lunchtimes, balked at that.

We voted and tried the pub option occasionally after school - in practice it became every two and a half weeks or thereabouts.

Question - if you were heading up a team or group, how would you arrange meetings? How do you arrange them?