ΩΩThe war in Afghanistan continues its downward spiral so of course, Petraeus thinks we are winning. A banking lady pets a kitty and then maliciously dumps it into a wheelie bin and then says, ‘What’s the big deal’ when caught. These things are connected just like all sorts of strange things are connected: humans are strange creatures. We have a strong self-destructive streak which can get totally out of hand.
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BBC News – Three Spaniards killed by Afghan police recruit
An Afghan police recruit has shot dead two Spanish police officers and their interpreter in north-western Afghanistan, officials say.
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The assailant opened fire during a training session in a “premeditated attack”, Spain’s interior minister….After the shooting, a crowd of angry locals were reported to be protesting outside a Spanish base.
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Hundreds of men hurled stones at the base in Qalay-i-Naw in Badghis province, while chanting religious slogans.
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Local officials said a large group of them tried to storm the base, and unconfirmed reports said part of the base had been set on fire.
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ΩΩThis story is typical for Afghanistan. That is, we have nearly zero control over the population there. The BBC story has a most interesting video: the streets are filled with men who are not all that angry, just determined. This is worse than angry. They show total contempt for not only the NATO invaders but also anyone who volunteers to work for the invaders (aka: Quislings). I detect no support for the NATO invaders at all.
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ΩΩTypically, the NATO base is surrounded by tall, tall walls. Machiavelli warned the ‘Prince’ about this in his famous book of advice for rulers: do not stick troops in hostile quarters where they are trapped by angry peasants in full revolt. You need some sort of base of support! This is a given in any invasion especially ones that are supposed to be bringing freedom and democracy.
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ΩΩThe history of invasions in support of democracy is a very bloody business that shows pretty clearly that military people are lousy at this work and the rulers of ‘democracies’ doing this odious activity are hypocrites or rather, are not really ‘democracies’ in the first place. The US struggles with this. We have elections but they tend to revolve around the most insane, bizarre issues such as this season’s lunacy which seems to be all about whether or not we should allow Muslims to buy property near the 9/11 horror site where we are building stuff on top of vaporized bodies.
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ΩΩThis silly argument scares me since it again, reveals some wide fissures in the US. I fret about real racism whereby the US support of Jewish apartheid Naziism is leading us towards generalized Naziism: Dog Days by Justin Raimondo — Antiwar.com
Speaking of the Israelis, their public image may have seen better days, what with the flotilla fiasco and the ongoing settlements issue, but among certain sectors of the far-right fringe in Europe they have found a whole lot of new friends. The fascist British National Party (BNP), founded by professional anti-Semites and neo-Nazi nutballs, is now officially “pro-Israel”: the British Nutzis admire the militant ethno-centrism of the Zionist militants now in power, and see Israel as a bulwark against the alleged threat of “Islamization.” The latest mobilization of haters calls itself the English Defense League (EDL): as in the case of the BNP, the EDL was founded by football hooligans and outright racists whose “sport” of “Paki-bashing” is now being pursued by broader sectors. The latest EDL innovation: carrying Israeli flags at demonstrations, alongside the Cross of St. George. The message is clear: their program for Muslims in Britain is the same as Israeli plans for Palestinians in the occupied territories – repression, culminating in expulsion.
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ΩΩInfluence and reception of Friedrich Nietzsche – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Nietzsche had a very formative influence on both the Zionists and the Nazis. The Übermenshen belief is key to both ideologies which nearly totally mirror each other perfectly. As with all identical belief systems, both hated each other with immense and hideous passion and sought to annihilate each other just as the Sunni and Shi’a or the Catholics and the Protestants or the Stalinists and the Troskyites hate each other. The list of near identical twin thinking systems hating each other to death is long, tediously long.
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ΩΩIt would be presumed that humans that think nearly the same are more likely to hate others who hold somewhat slightly different beliefs. I have seen this here whenever I don’t subscribe to this or that pet belief, a person who agrees with me on nearly everything else will use that one difference to turn against me with incredible hatred and fury. The web I weave here seeks to understand fundamental things and one of the many top things we must understand is how tiny differences are EXPLOITED by clever people to keep everyone at each other’s throats.
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ΩΩFor example, we want to bring ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan but…here at home, ‘democracy’ means tearing at each other’s throats over sometimes microscopic differences of opinion or worries about really meaningless things like, ‘Should Muslims be allowed to open mosques where Christians and Jews get to do this?’ The Jews, of all people on earth, should be most anxious to say, ‘Absolutely!’ in this matter. If it is OK to prevent Muslims from opening mosques in perfectly legal places then it will become impossible for Jews to open synagogues or Christians of the wrong sects to open churches, etc. The fascist fervor that has gripped the Jewish Übermenschen mentality has leeched into everything here and is setting the stage for some ugly future messes.
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ΩΩBack in Afghanistan, the Jewish and right wing fascist Christian demands that the Constitution not protect Muslims is boomeranging in dangerous ways. The Taliban always said, NATO was all about Crusaders coming in to destroy their culture and beliefs. And I hate to say this, but this is a correct analysis. When the USSR came there and gave women civil rights, the US funded the Taliban and rejoiced when the liberal USSR troops that gave women civil rights were driven out! Now, we tell the Afghani men, we are there to give their women civil rights even if the men don’t want this to happen and then wonder why the men attack us?
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ΩΩAs for the mosque on Wall Street issue: I think we should never build anything on the 9/11 site except for one thing: a replica of the Skull and Bones crypt at Yale. Since ultimately, the people running this country were the ones who enabled this attack and the S & B president didn’t bother to protect us and the Pentagon sat on its ass during the entire morning, I think that this gaping hole should be represented by the real forces at work here. And put up a statue of Bin Laden laughing at us. A good reminder of who is smarter, dead or alive.
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Afghan Taliban Surprised to Hear Petraeus Claims of ‘Progress’ — News from Antiwar.com
Gen. Petraeus and Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave a series of interviews this weekend claiming that the war had turned the corner, and Vice President Joe Biden claimed that it had gone “as planned.”
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ΩΩThis man is insane. He should be hospitalized. Most of our mentally ill soldiers are suffering terribly, recently one shot his wife, children, baby and dogs before killing himself. He didn’t go after the people really responsible for his mental agony, of course. So Petraeus gets to roll onwards unruffled by any contact with any form of reality. If he were to watch the BBC news video, he should have a lightbulb light up in his dark brain and would suddenly say, ‘Oh! They HATE us! They want us gone! They will continue to hate us until we go! Why should more NATO and US soldiers die? Pointless!’
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ΩΩOf course, he is the fool who thinks Iraq is doing great, too. More explosions today in that tormented place and al Qaeda is rising from the ruins as the Shi’ite leaders who are very radical and most friendly with Iran’s leaders, gain more traction. Yes, it is going just dandy.
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ΩΩAmid flooding, CIA resumes Pakistan drone strikes – World news – South and Central Asia – Pakistan – msnbc.com: Petraeus couldn’t resist killing a bunch of women and children in Pakistan at the same time the country is drowning. Far from stopping the anti-American hate fest in Muslim countries, these predator drones are strewing dragon’s teeth. The more we use them, the more we are hated. Machiavelli made it very clear, if you spread hate, you go down in flames. You have to win hearts and minds in one way or another.
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ΩΩThe US did this after WWII by opening our borders to ‘free trade’ with former enemies and present allies which is why Germany and Japan took the lead in exports and grew rich while our own industries died off. Pakistan doesn’t have much to export to us, not even oil. Afghanistan sells us illegal drugs so they have a vested interest in keeping us there for financial reasons, that is, the opium warlords we funded and protected.
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ΩΩIran test-fires new surface-to-surface missile: minister: The Shi’ites in Iran have a pressing need to arm themselves since the Sunnis have fought them frequently and this will go on and on and on due to people who mirror each other hate each other. The Jews fear that these missiles will stop them from dominating all of the Muslims via using nuclear bomb threats. The US wants to arm the Saudi dictators who impose the most draconian restrictions on women’s rights that even exceed the ones imposed by the Taliban. The US is perfectly OK with Saudi repression of women. We buy their oil.
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ΩΩIf the US is all agog about women’s rights, we should be supporting China and asking China to please invade Saudi Arabia to save the women there or we could save them, ourselves. But of course, if a dictator pleases our plutocrats, they can have harems and force women to wear full veils in public and not allow them to drive cars and beat them to death if they have sex with other men.
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ΩΩLest we forget, the US was driven out of Somalia and the chaos there continues: 15 MPs Among 31 Killed in Somalia Hotel Attack. And right on our borders is this news: 72 dead bodies found on a ranch in Mexico – CNN.com. It seems NAFTA, like the Vietnam War or the Afghani War, spawned tremendous drug activity here at home. The drug wars over across the border are leeching onto this side of the border and will get worse and worse as time passes.
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ΩΩI have been, since 1968, all for legalizing all drugs. If some fool wants to be an addict, let them. I even advocate giving them their favorite addictive junk for free. If they die due to this, it is their own choice if they are warned. People can be incredibly stupid. If they can’t tolerate regular reality, we shouldn’t force it on them if this means destroying our entire economic and political system in endless wars, murders, mayhem and crime. Generally speaking, if a druggie is happily tanked up, they don’t do much of anything. Our expensive prisons are filled to the gills with druggies who are denied their favorite solutions to life’s troubles so they are agitated and murderous.
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ΩΩThis will also destroy the business of all the drug warlords in Asia, Central America and all points of the planet. I fear that humans need some sort of balm to survive so why twist ourselves into knots over this? Hand out the drugs and have peace. Pass a joint.
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The loan was issued by a U.S. bank located in Baltimore (the “Lender”) and was guaranteed by Ex-Im Bank under Ex-Im Bank’s medium-term Master Guarantee Agreement with the Lender. Parra, Rodriguez and their co-conspirators gave the Lender false documents stating that U.S. goods had been purchased by, and shipped to, Rodriguez in Mexico. By providing the false documents to the Lender, the defendants defrauded both the Lender and Ex-Im Bank….Ex- Im Bank, an independent, self-sustaining federal-government agency, provides export financing that helps strengthen U.S. export competitiveness, and creates and maintains U.S. jobs. The Bank provides a variety of financing mechanisms, including export-credit guarantees and insurance to protect against nonpayment by foreign borrowers that purchase U.S. exports.
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ΩΩThe US imports far more from Mexico than it exports. The push for this leads to opportunities for crimes such as pretending to export to Mexico and then collecting on the insurance when the deals fail to show up. Great. Sounds like a good plan. And all our exports don’t matter if we have a flood of illegal imports from Mexico that are not taxed but cause lots of crime overhead costs!
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ΩΩThe US banks benefit from the drug trade! And so do Mexican banks. This flow of illicit money is great for everyone except the victims: druggies commit lots of crimes because illegal drugs are very, very expensive. Druggies steal from their own families, neighbors and businesses. A lot of our crimes are due to drug addicts needing to pay a high, high extra fee for their drugs due to legal restrictions which only make drug gangs richer.
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ΩΩInstead, our ‘Democratic Party’ government is all in a snit about Wikileaks. WikiLeaks says it will release CIA paper soon – CNN.com
Founder and editor of the website, Julian Assange, was arrested in absentia last week in Sweden on charges of rape. The warrant was revoked less than a day later by Chief Prosecutor Eva Finne.
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ΩΩThe Scientologists go a long, long way to find some dirt on someone and then spread it so they can destroy critics. The CIA does this, too. And so does the Pentagon. When an arms inspector said out loud that the Bush/Cheney talk about WMD in Iraq were fake, he was suddenly called up on charges of trying to have sex with a girl. Then, we invaded Iraq and murdered, raped and maimed thousands of Iraqi girls. And they enjoyed significant civil rights under Saddam which vanished when we invaded. A fact that US feminist propagandists who are fascist refuse to face.
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ΩΩI am glad Wikileaks is continuing onwards and hope it continues forever. Note, too, that Obama and his gang says nothing about any of this nor will he talk about the BBC video. Indeed, Obama seems to have opted out of being a President and is goofing off now. Why bother if Bibi Netanyahu runs America? And Bibi wants more wars with Muslims so this is what we are getting in spades.
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Now on to the news that is upsetting Brits:
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Woman dumped cat in bin as a ‘joke’ – Home News, UK – The Independent
A woman who enraged animal lovers across the world by dumping a cat in a wheelie bin said today she “thought it would be funny”.
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Mary Bale told The Sun that she binned the feline as “a joke”, adding: “It’s only a cat.”….Hundreds of people joined groups on the site, including one entitled “catch the evil b**** who put the cat in the bin”, and many have posted threatening messages about the woman depicted in the CCTV.
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ΩΩThis lady happens to also be a banker! HAHAHA. Torturing children and little friendly kitty cats is right up her dark alley! And like the Afghanis throwing rocks at the NATO compound, angry Brits will throw rocks at this rather heartless banking bitch. Maybe she could get a new career working in the Pentagon? Send her to Afghanistan to work on women’s rights!
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ΩΩThe anger being splashed at her is a sign that there is underlying angst ready to burst out. That is, people will be a lot angrier next year in Britain as the reality of bankruptcy bites harder and harder. The US stock market just fell below the critical 10,000 level. Housing will continue to slump due to the high debt burden most people carry. We have many problems at home and there are several things the US and UK can do to fix the worst of them:
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- Stop all the wars including the war on drugs.
- Shut down the pirate islands and put them all under proper jurisdiction of the governments in London and DC.
- Tax the rich.
- Dump all bankers into wheelie bins for 15 hours (hahaha..)
- Use the money from taxing the international bankers to rebuild our industrial base.
- Put up serious tariffs and barriers to trade.
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ΩΩInstead, we see going into this election, more pledges to fix our trade via exporting more which is just plain insane. We see more demands for more militarism and even as more people demand an end to the war on drugs, we won’t see any changes there. The few miserable changes Obama pushed through don’t change one iota of what is wrong with things and won’t stop us from going bankrupt.
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ΩΩHe and the others all wanted to keep the status quo which is why he is, like Bush, doubling our debts, doubling Bush’s wars and doubling the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. All bad things that have bad side effects. We can’t wish our way out of this mess, we have to take active measures. And not be distracted by silly things although I admit, a banking lady petting a kitty and then trying to kill it is not a silly thing. It is sick. At least, my cats told me this after watching the video while sitting on my lap.
Culture of Life News 
Agree on all except only 15 hours for bankers? Nope, their bin has to be Houdini proof and they have to be dropped in the Marianas Trench!
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ELAINE: Only if they torture kittens. Torturing humans is OK…. 🙂
“This lady happens to also be a banker! HAHAHA. Torturing children and little friendly kitty cats is right up her dark alley! ”
Hmmm. I wonder if this story would have made your blog had she been, say, some Israeli family’s Palestinian houskeeper? Then, I expect, she’d have been reacting to decades of oppression.
I think many people are just evil shits. How they spend their working hours has little if anything to do with it.
Cruelty towards animals is the most important early sign of psychopathy.
1% of the population are psychopaths.
5-10% of CEO´s are psychopaths.
The world is run by psychopaths.
😉
“But they point out that the frenzied nature of modern business — the constant downsizing, the relentless merging and acquiring — provides a very fertile environment for havoc-wreaking psychopaths, who thrive on chaos and risk-taking. As Hare put it in one interview, ”If I couldn’t study psychopaths in prison, I would go down to the Stock Exchange.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12PSYCHO.html
Today I received a letter from the Quakers (Friends of Friends?) I think, and your list of what to do was not on their request for financial help.
They expertly pointed out that we spend close to 2 million a minute on the military and the wars in other countries, but instead of asking us to request an end to these wars and a dismantling or scaling down of the Pentagon, they wanted us to donate money to peaceful pursuits and to help get Obama to divert money from the military to projects that promote peace.
Yeah, that will really happen. My ex-wife was a Quaker before she bacame a Jew, and I could never understand what they believed in other than accumulating money and living in nice houses and stuff. The letter said that they were called to “speak truth to power” (whatever that means), but nowhere in the letter would they say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were fundamentally wrong and immoral. That is the truth, but they would not speak it.
They would not say it because they wanted my money and hoped not to offend me.
This is why I do not care much for Quakers. Their religion is so wishy-washy a duck could slide off it.
“The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, GLOBAL COOLING, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.”
http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/meeting_2010.html
This is bilderbergs own site.
Global cooling seems an interesting topic to me 😀 .
Glad you recalled the earlier sex sting against Scott R., it makes the charges against the Wikileaks founder fit a pattern.
Wow JT,
I thought the Bilderbergers wanted to be hidden from view. I did not know they had their own website. Was this something they recently did?
What a huge list of CEO’s! The rest are former CEO’s and soon-to-be CEO’s and of course “Friends of CEO’s”.
Looks like something straight out of Rollerball (the original film, not the remake). Creepy!
@devaul
Yes they just started a new website.
Lists are real they publish them every year.
Now they apparently publish the agenda too.
But conversations are not covered.
I liked the global cooling bit, could be a typo or maybe that´s the next big thing for 2011 😀 .
@JT
Could be a typo, or could be referring to the various crackpot geo-engineering schemes to slow the warming, that some of those crazy people favour.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11076786
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/10/greenland-ice-sheet-tipping-point
re. B. burgers:
search who is type functions. . the B.
burger. ORG was once a 1 person
comment ON the B. burgers. . . not an
official site.
. . . Washington Post. n.paper c 15 yrs ago
mentioned B. burgers meetings oft in
EU in June. . .
. . . re: contra band: see nar. –
co politics. groups oft in S. Amer raise funds
thru the only export they can export to N/
West. . . h’erbs. Calif decied on legalizing N
‘ ten. Like alchohol, cigs, even legal
pills are linked to problems, but crime en-
forcement waste$ will drop will legal pills.
@wb
Yes. That´s propably it.
“The first approach involves limiting incoming solar radiation through the injection of SO2 (sulphur dioxide) aerosols into the stratosphere.”
Chemtrailing?
Hold on to your tin foil hats. 😀
People will go nuts.
You´re propably right.
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ELAINE: By far and away, volcanoes produce the most global cooling stuff injected into the stratosphere. I am assuming they are discussing dropping virgins into volcanoes or maybe, to irritate Vulcan, they will drop Palin into a volcano in order to get it to erupt. 🙂
@JT
“Hold on to your tin foil hats. :-)”
I’m not so foolish as to take mine off, JT, it’s got a comfy chin strap and a propellor on the top to deflect the incoming rays when I’m asleep…
“People will go nuts.”
Already happened in the USA, too late now.
🙂
@JT, “1% of the population are psychopaths. 5-10% of CEO´s are psychopaths. The world is run by psychopaths.”
Yep, gotta kill your way to power these days.
sorry ,way OT, but UFO’s for real this time?
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/tribnation/2010/08/behind-covering-the-chicagoohare-ufo.html
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ELAINE: Nope.
@JT
Chemtrails are for real … been going on for years.
The real reason for chemtrails these days is
to counter hydrofluoric acid depleting the Stratospheric ozone shield.
The Elite Petites are in a panic over HF.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/21/21832/0066
cats are cool dude
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http://www.cahrecords.com
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go cats!
TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults
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news for adults lol what is that???
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so like i REALLY wanted to post a VDO just to see if it works… my bad
@elaine
“Vulcan, they will drop Palin into a volcano in order to get it to erupt. :)”
Old Belsebup would love to hae her as his bride.
Would not work.
A pure young virgin might do the trick though (that excludes the whole Palin family).
😀
Revirginization surgery is a common medical procedure.
“For example, we want to bring ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan but…”
That wasn’t the original mission. The original mission was to root out al-Qaeda from the bases they had there. That was badly bungled, but they did have to cut and run for a while.
Then you got the chorus of “what happens when we leave?!” and suddenly Afghan Democracy was a front-burner item. TIME did a cover story on “what happens when we leave” in July; I got the full force of that one while I was in my dentist’s waiting room (at 8:15AM last Friday – thanks, Doc. That one made my entire fuckin’ day.)
Well… here’s what happens when we leave: the place sinks back into the morass where we found it. Which, in the scheme of things, doesn’t matter a whole lot. Them People have been carving up their women for far longer than we’ve been interested in the place. And we can keep the terroristic elements under some sort of control with surveillance and air strikes.
DeVaul: “My ex-wife was a Quaker before she became a Jew…”
I have to say, that one stopped me. I had to think about that for a minute before I could read on. All I can say is, “Wow.”
@ck
😀 that is a premium plan.
And lets reunite R. Emmanuel with his foreskin and throw him in as a gentile bonus offering.
@Finland, “Finnish doctors knew about neurological damage of Pandemrix swine flu jab for months but kept silent to further career, alleges Expressen”
Finland has known for months that the swine flu shot was poisonous, but only stopped their mandatory swine flu shot last week.
Fucking idiots.
http://birdflu666.wordpress.com/
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ELAINE: my entire family has gotten flu shots for years and years with no ill effects. You are hysterical about this. I wonder if you would enjoy living in a germ dominated world where many people drop dead all the time.
Yes, JSmith, it is true.
Her whole family presented themselves to me as Quakers. Her parents had a huge Quaker marriage certificate framed on their wall and lacquered to preserve it. Lisa and I also had one made, but with Celtic knotwork and calligraphy worked into it. Lisa assured me that they were not Jewish and that their religious beliefs would not conflict with mine. I am not stupid. I would never marry a Jew because of their attitude towards non-Jews.
During our divorce, her whole family converted en masse to “Christians” so that all of the religious holidays would be given to them even though they had never celebrated them. We always had Christmas at my mother’s house. Same with Easter.
After they moved, again en masse, to Ohio, they then converted to Jews (orthodox, I guess) and declared my sons to be “Jewish”.
I could never live with myself if I had engaged in such massive lying, not to mention insulting various gods by using them as props to get whatever you want at that particular moment, then ditching them as soon as conveniently possible.
I am still in a state of shock. I really don’t understand how whole families can engage in coordinated (not very well, I admit) lying not just to a judge and others, but also to children just so they can say “we won! we destroyed that deaf cripple! we showed him! he’s nothing!”. That was their attitude. They felt no shame whatsoever.
Today, I read that Tiger Woods’ ex-wife will allow him to help raise their children in spite of all the crap she suffered. He is lucky he married a decent woman. She could run off to Sweden with all her money and never let him see his children again, but she is not a complete psychopath. She’s probably not Jewish, either.
@DeVaul, “They felt no shame whatsoever.”
“By way of deception thou shalt do war.”
That motto describes the modus vivendi of an entire race. It is necessary to understand that fact before one can hope to understand fully the role of the Jews in national and world affairs.
@ Elaine
Re ….For example, we want to bring ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan but…here at home, ‘democracy’ means tearing at each other’s throats over sometimes microscopic differences of opinion or worries about really meaningless things….
….This man is insane. He should be hospitalized…..
…….Instead, we see going into this election, more pledges to fix our trade via exporting more which is just plain insane…..
Thank you for another insightful and sad article.
Your theme of US insanity and disarray has become more apparent to others:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/296444
Opinion: USA a failed state? It may be closer than you think
…The rule the Romans could have taught the US is simple: “Don’t go broke.”…
…The Chinese could have taught the US another basic lesson: “Insularity destroys countries.”…
…It was the story of China up to 1911.
…The Russians can provide a lesson that “A monomaniacal approach to spending is fatal.”…
…The British Empire has another lesson: “However big you are, ignorance and hidebound policies will wipe you out.”…
…The US, through a truly insane, self-inflicted mix of these factors, has managed to achieve a condition which would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
…The social results are well known. Crime, media pandering to privileged nutcases and politics are now the only real growth industries. The basics of Middle America have been falling to pieces. Home ownership, health, education, welfare, you name it. The state economies are deficit-riddled disaster areas. The Midwest has been gutted. Michigan was in deep recession long before the crash. Jobs which generate domestic capital were long ago exterminated by outsourcing. California has been battling its budget for decades. The South is a “job free zone”, made worse by the recession. The West? What West? There’s a West?…
…What’s most fascinating about this train wreck is the aura of respectability so many people who’ve contributed to it seem to think they have….
Former FBI Agent Breaks His Silence On JFK
The fact that US Authorities and institutions are broadly distrusted is another symptom of cognitive disarray and insanity worldwide.
Click to access 20090627_TODASPOSummit_Korowicz_Complexitysupplychainscollapse.pdf
Things fall apart: Some thoughts on complexity, supply chains, infrastructure & collapse dynamics
Another search for why the US and the West is imploding into disarray and collective insanity?
You are so right that the Administration wants to prop up the status quo, even though this means perpetuating systemic malinvestment, leaving zombie banks untouched and toxic assets on the books, and refusing to acknowledge that most of today’s debt overhang will never be repaid — and it must be written down! Ditto for the trade situation … we can’t be a one-way “consumer economy” with most of our GDP is built on speculative finance and real estate. What is there to trade? Our main exports are decent jobs and essential industries … and now carry trade debt denominated in fantasy currency. Suicide! We will not begin to pull out of this depression until we acknowledge these facts and address the insanity underlying the status quo.
Instead, I hear endless media and political chatter about the need to “lend to small businesses” and to “give small business a tax break.” As a small business owner I can attest that neither taking on more debt nor accepting a tax cut will cause my firm to ramp up and become a roaring “jobs engine.” Borrowing only makes sense when one can count on having the revenues to pay it back and leave a profit besides. In an economy where most of the small businesses I know are at a standstill (and fighting to stay there) taking on debt is suicidal. Likewise, a tax break for hiring warm bodies is worth something only when there’s income we can count on. What good is a tax break when we’re using loss carry-forwards? Why risk the expense of hiring someone today for a tax break next April when all of our big corporate clients are hemming and hawing about committing to next month’s proposals?
Thoughtful post as usual, great links from Aussie, especially on supply chain and infrastructure collapse. We’re witnessing it all around us.
@ Elaine
Re Afghan Riots And Kittens Tortured By Bank Lady
…..We have a strong self-destructive streak which can get totally out of hand….
….This man is insane. He should be hospitalized…..
…….Instead, we see going into this election, more pledges to fix our trade via exporting more which is just plain insane…..
Unfortunately, our hominid ancestors killed off our smarter Boskop hominid cousins some 10,000 BC ago.
We now have evolved a complex and technology intensive civilization but continue to solve our problems the old fashion way….because our brain and apeshit instincts keep getting the way?
Maybe disarray and insanity is our fate?
Maybe the Boskop hominids below would have done a better job for the planet – see below.
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us
What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us?
…..The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors…..
….Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149.
This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history…..
….Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors, but could be leaders of society if they were among us today……
A photographic tally of what America is really leaving behind in Iraq.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/US-iraq-withdrawal-left-behind
This is interesting. Seems that it’s becoming possible to export another lot of jobs to cheap labour countries, the jobs supervising the robots in factories.
“Transmitting a real-time visual image overseas, where a low paid worker can then manipulate the machinery, is certainly already feasible. Remote controlled robots are currently used in military and police applications that would be dangerous for humans. We very likely will see such robots in factories and workplaces in the near future.”
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/
Which took me to a review of the free pdf. book mentioned, which offers another interesting idea…
“Consumer demand for goods will plummet as unemployment rises. Defaults on mortgages and consumer debt will reach unprecedented levels, and plunging values for housing and other assets will result in cascading financial crises. College enrollment will fall as potential students shy away from “knowledge worker” jobs that are susceptible to automation and off-shoring. Young people will instead compete for trade jobs in the occupations that can’t be automated. (Hypothetical examples here might include nursing or even specific types of high-tech machine repair.) Governments will face rising pressure to restrict technological progress. Organized labor may realize a last-ditch resurgence. High unemployment in developed countries will dramatically reduce demand for foreign-manufactured goods. The result may be social unrest and political instability in places like China as export trade crumbles. The U.S. government’s already dire projections for pensions and government entitlements will become even more dismal as wide unemployment among young people decimates payroll tax revenues. Sovereign debt crises—of the type playing out in Greece at the time of this writing — will spread as demand for government services outstrips revenue. Political battles will become even more heated, partisan, and irrational.
Ford’s solution to this calamity is at once obvious and politically unspeakable: Governments must devise a system to pay their unemployed populations to consume. Only in this way can the demand for goods stay bouyant and depression be avoided. Human labor may be largely superfluous in the automated economy of the twenty-first century, but broad-based consumption will remain essential.
The idea of consumption without labor is truly radical. In the developed world — and in the United States especially — work is tied directly to our individual sense of self worth and identity. Almost half of the unemployed people in the United States suffer from depression or anxiety; unemployed Americans are four times more likely than those with jobs to report symptoms of major depression, according to the American Psychological Association. Absent career ambition, how will capable, intelligent people discover and create meaning in their lives?
The answer, says Ford, is to distribute income on the basis of performance. Civic involvement, educational, research, or humanitarian accomplishments should be better compensated than indolence, allowing for competition. Effort and intelligence, well intended and skillfully applied, would still meet with reward. But the actions of these workers would not “necessarily result in ‘work’ in the traditional sense.”
http://beta.wfs.org/content/postemployment-economy
Pay unemployed populations to consume ?
What does that mean ? I can do nothing and get given free money so long as I’ll buy lots of crap i don’t need ?
I suppose an alternative might be to give us free money so we can play ?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play
@wb
I think this has been proposed here in Finland already by the Green Party.
Here it is called “citizen´s salary”.
Advantages:
a less bureaucracy (everyone gets paid; progressive taxes eat it away from the rich)
(we have a huge bureaucracy around unemployment, training, paying out benefits etc)
b easier to accept short term or temp jobs (you never loose your citizens salary)
disadvantages:
a the young will move to Thailand and live on just citizen´s salary
b people will stop looking for jobs
I think this solution means we give up.
(well we have given up. There is no other solution to the jobs problem except unwinding globalisation and multinationals will never let that happen)