Monday, June 30, 2008

It was my pleasure, don't mention it

I'm currently in the process of dismantling my home, well its contents, piece by piece which means I'm not posting very much lately

Which I regret, as all sorts of interesting things are happening

Not least this breaking news from The Independent yesterday that...


"Spin doctor behind Davis's campaign promotes ID cards"; Spin doctor behind Davis's campaign promotes ID cards"




My regular reader and Lord Patel's more extensive subscribership might possibly notice one or two slight parallels with posts written by myself and Lord P. a fortnight ago

The Independent credits not one but two journalists with the scoop - one presumably to type the search strings into Google and the other to cut and paste the results into their employer's newspaper

It's worth comparing the last line in yesterday's Independent story...


"Yesterday, Mr Davis told The IoS: "Mr Bell is an old friend. He did initially help set up my website for the present campaign, for which payment will be made and declared in due course." Mr Bell did not respond."


with the Bell quote in the PR Week story which was published shortly after myself and Lord P's posts...


"The website will support Davis' by-election fight following his high-profile resignation from the Conservative Party front bench last week. F-H regional president Kevin Bell said the agency's digital team had been involved in website design, adding that he has known Davis for 20 years. Bell said he would not rule out providing further PR support should Davis need it."


So apparently, Davis is implying that his old friend Bell's involvement stopped at the initial web site registration and design stage, Mr Bell something different

and to the couple of people who suggested to me that any large PR agency is probably going to have a diverse range of clients with contradictory interests and therefore Davis employing F-H is no big deal - can I just remind them that Davis didn't pick F-H because it was a large successful agency. Davis selected it because of Bell.

This stinks to high heaven and, speaking personally, turned me off Davis' campaign as soon as I identified the connection

Still, looking on the bright side, David Icke might be standing against David Davis.

Now if only David Shayler could be persuaded to stand as well, people would have a REAL democratic choice of Messianic Davids to save them from the Shadowy Overlords


.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

The War on Children

One of the core beliefs shared by most of us conspiracy types is a firm conviction that the TERROR!! Threat is either a complete fabrication or, at the very least, hugely exaggerated. The objective of the people doing the exaggeration being to impose totalitarian control over the rest of us and make a few bob along the way

It’s been done countless times in the past and the only real difference today is the scale of what is being attempted

We Loons differ from more mainstream dissidents (sic.) in that we believe that this is being done deliberately and not merely an unfortunate and unplanned consequence of impersonal, stochastic forces


Believing what we do, we must also believe in the inevitable incremental expansion of what constitutes terrorism and who qualifies as being a potential terrorist.


So, no surprises for us paranoid mentalists then on reading bullshit like this being spouted by senior British policemen…


Blond, white schoolboy is al-Qa'eda extremist, say police


"...The white child we are working with has been downloading jihadist beheading videos ... He is not a Muslim. He is not driven by ideology - he is too young to spell the word. But he is being influenced and intoxicated by the imagery and appeal of jihadist ... violence."


“...We know that there is a latent sense of grievance in the minds of many young people which, in the right conditions, can lead to the desire for violent expression..."

“...The al-Qa’eda brand of violent extremism continues to spread like a virus infecting young minds...”


'Just Do it!!'
The Al Qaeda 'brand' - franchise applications from 12 year olds now accepted



If terrorism can be described as coercing civilian populations through the use of fear then the most successful practitioners of terrorism in this country; the people who are getting 24/7 airtime and who have been successful in bringing about a more repressive government, are most definitely not the ones with the beards


These guys are very shortly going to have find something else to hate us for


But I’m not saying anything new here –
something has just appeared on Alex Jones’ site on the subject of Aryan Terror Children and the even more credible Conspiraloon Alliance has also just published a post

No, I’m just looking for an excuse to paste a link to my favourite three minutes from Cabaret – it chilled me when I first saw it as a kid and it still gives me the willies today…


Now that's what I call Islamo-Fascism!!
- Al Qaeda-recruited Aryan mini-pops in action


whilst on the subject of Cabaret it’s an interesting exercise to ponder upon what are the modern day equivalents of the
1930s German cabarets which the Nazis closed down or censored shortly after they took power. I’m thinking of the Internet obviously and it’s a little scary to think just how effectively other channels of dissident expression have been locked down or could be locked down at the drop of a hat

-

edit:


and whilst on the general subject of kids, conspiracy theorists, possible psyops and non-Muslim Muslim dodginess, this peculiar story has a strange whiff about it and might be worth keeping an eye on...


Missing Mum in Muslim disguise

"CCTV footage of a missing mum and her five young children show her attempt to disguise her appearance in Muslim dress..."

"...The second show her walking through Kings Cross in London later the same day, at 6.20pm, wearing a white flowing robe and headscarf..."

"...It shows a high degree of planning and a great deal of effort to evade being identified, which further raises my concerns about her emotional well-being and the safety of her children..."

"...She is thought to have little or no money and no family connections in the London area. Officers believe she may be being sheltered by an organisation"


???

.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

It's the banker stupid #346

Here's a little something I just found whilst clearing through some old papers...




It's an unsolicited flier from the Halifax urging its customers to supersize their existing mortgages so that they can treat themselves to a well-deserved Caribbean wedding, a tasty Jag, or maybe even some chocolate




all very sensible and affordable behaviour as far as Britain's biggest home lender was concerned...



This disgraceful piece of marketing dates back to 2002. At the time I filed the leaflet away thinking that the Big Bust was just around the corner and that I would be dusting it off in a year or two's time for a bit of a chuckle

But those were very early days in my career as a budding Conspiranaut. Back then I actually thought that the banks, and the regulators, and the government weren't so wicked as to deliberately drive people into irredeemable poverty. I was actually naive enough to believe that common sense would prevail before the bubble reached the kind of size where the entire system was at risk

Silly me

.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Banks and business can legitimately protect their incomes. People cannot

There’s was a spot of light-relief on the economics side of things today with the news that…


The light-hearted relief comes not from the news that UK retail sales ‘soared’ last month but from the dissonant, deceitful way the news has been covered.

The BBC wins the prize


‘Food sales rose 3.3% as people bought salads and stocked up for barbecues’


So, it’s not the Evil Chinese or the Crafty Indians to blame for all that hyperinflation, it was the lettuce all along


Bastard


The implication is that ordinary people are stoking up price inflation by going out and buying more stuff


The possibility that they are buying the same amount or less stuff but are having to pay through the nose for it seems to have eluded the geniuses in the commentariat and over at the Bank of England

If the banks, as they are, create money like there’s no tomorrow, of the course the price of stuff goes up

I’ve no doubt that Zimbabwe has seen some record retail sales figures in recent years – though I doubt very much if many people there are buying plasma TVs and langoustines

-

There’s something very pernicious about the news media’s coverage of the price of stuff shooting up, interest rates and the language being used by the bankers and politicians describing what’s going to be done about it all

There’s a comment over at Lord Patel’s blog which sums things up pretty well...


‘Mervyn King has warned workers not to ask for pay rises which match inflation because that would trigger an inflationary spiral.

Of course, the other side of the spiral is not addressed. Prices have already risen far above inflation but this is not a problem for Mr King. After all, with the rising costs of production it is obvious that prices would rise to protect profits.

The spectre of inflation is only raised by the governor when people try and compensate for the situation they find themselves in because of higher prices. He also makes it clear that lower profits are not acceptable because he insists that prices and interest rates (over which he is supposed to exercise control) would "inevitably" rise.

Bottom line according to Mr King. Banks and business can legitimately protect their incomes. People cannot.’


And the problem for many ordinary people now is that not only are they facing steep rises in the costs of the essentials of life, the bankers are getting ready to shaft them twice over by pushing up the costs of servicing their debts as well


It’s hard enough facing what is happening if you are debt free but if you are unfortunate enough to have been suckered or forced into debt bondage, groups of unaccountable sociopaths sitting in boardrooms also get to play with your life like you are a puppet, or a serf

But remember, blame the letttuce

.

Slugs redux

A little follow up to my previous post about David Davis' freedom campaign being given support by a PR agency which thrives on the kind creeping authoritarianism which Davis apparently dislikes so much

A snippet from PR Week (dated 17th i.e. the day after my and Lord P's post on the subject)...

"Fleishman-Hillard behind David Davis civil liberties campaign

David Davis has brought in Fleishman-Hillard to support the rollout of his controversial 'David Davis for Freedom' campaign, officially launching today. Fleishman-Hillard’s digital head Paul Borge registered the domain name for Davis’ campaign website, which went live this afternoon and includes web 2.0 applications like a Twitter feed and Facebook group.

The agency is known to have good connections within the Conservative party, although this new campaign will see Davis break away from traditional Tory policies. The website will support Davis' civil liberties drive following his high-profile resignation as MP for Haltemprice and Howden last week after the 42-day detention vote.

F-H chair Kevin Bell said the agency's digital team had been involved in website design, adding that he has known Davis for twenty years. He said he would not rule out further PR support down the line should Davis need it."


Now what does that make the retarded libertarian (sic.) fan boys who accused me of being '
a lying spastic cunt' and a 'boring cameron whore' when Blobfish floated my discovery in Guido Fawkes blog?


There's a simple reason why the fuckers who are changing our world for the worst have had the upper hand for so long...

They are smarter and, yes, sneakier than most of the cattle out there


Bred for taste - not for their problem solving abilities


And as I mentioned in a comment underneath my original post

"...imagine McDonalds is your biggest client and some one-man band outfit strolls into your office wanting to promote a campaign which conclusively proves that burgers give you cancer. What are you going to do?

Come to think of it, what's the one-man band outfit doing approaching you in the first place?"

.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Slugs



I’ve been chatting with a few folks over the last couple of days about David Davis’ announcement that he was going to resign as an MP and stand for re-election on a Civil Liberties/ Libertarian ticket

Based on the half-arsed way Davis went about things and the obvious confusion of the mainstream media and other politicians I was and, to an extent, still am open to the possibility that this was a genuinely spontaneous, genuinely principled act


Of course, even if it were a genuinely principled act, that wouldn’t stop Davis’ campaign acting like a magnet for the kind of spooks, shills, and useful idiots who have made opposition to the government’s creeping authoritarian agenda over the last eleven years the resounding success that it has been


As Lord Patel
mentioned the other day, it seems that David Shayler is the only spook, shill or useful idiot who hasn’t expressed support for Davis in recent days

There was a
particularly interesting article in the Guardian/ Observer on Sunday which included some names familiar to anyone who keeps an eye on the activities of the Editorial Intelligence/ New Commentariat/ Common Purpose crowd of interrelated PR invertebrates whose slimy trail can be seen all over the new media. For example...

‘Within hours of his (Davis’) resignation, senior Labour aides were suggesting the paper could mount a candidate against him; by Friday morning, ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie had offered to stand. MacKenzie has said the idea followed a party for Sun editor Rebekah Wade's 40th birthday, attended by Murdoch, on Thursday night. But Wade's inclusion on the guest list for a girlie sleepover hosted by Sarah Brown at Chequers this weekend has only fuelled speculation that Downing Street was closely involved in encouraging the Sun to join the fight.’

Sarah Brown is, of course, a mate of Julia Hobsbawn, the founder of Editorial Intelligence and creator of the term ‘New Commentariat’ and all the shilltastic bloggy goodness that goes with it

But just because the stench of new media manipulation and the clatter of professional self-publicists rattling into action started emanating from around Davis' campaign that itself didn’t suggest Davis himself was part of that side of things


-

but then a funny thing that happened to me today


Over on Guido Fawkes' blog this afternoon, Mr Fawkes announced that David Davis' campaign website would have the following url…

DAVIDDAVISFORFREEDOM.COM


Being a curious soul I did a swift ‘whois’ and came up with this name as the registrant's address


Paul Borge, 40 Long Acre, London, WC2E 9LG, UK

A bit of googling and I discovered that Mr Borge is a senior IT bod with a PR agency called
Fleishman-Hillard

More googling and I discovered that F-H UK is headed up by a guy called
Kevin Bell, a former Thatcher adviser, who's kind of big on pushing for ID cards and the lovely contract 'work' that would come with them

...which struck me as a strange choice of PR agency for someone launching a Libertarian campaign


Not sure, and I'm still not sure, if I had made an error or not I asked my friend The Blobfish to comment on Fawkes’ blog asking folk to confirm or refute this train of research

After a little while someone came back and said, no, the domain was actually registered to Davis and Blobfish was mistaken/ a liar/ a troll employed by David Cameron


I repeated the whois search for myself and also got Davis' name and address - though whois did mention that the entry was updated sometime today

A little more searching around and I found what appears to be a cache of an older entry for DAVIDDAVISFORFREEDOM.COM (it's here but presumably not for long) and there was Mr Borge’s name back again...


Now I may be barking up the wrong tree here (I'm nursing a shocking cold), and I'm more than open to being put straight, but it does look like Davis’ campaign url was registered by an employee of a PR company, headed by someone who thinks ID cards are fucking ace, and subsequently re-registered to Davis’ name and address only today


Strange n’est ce pas?


That other great conservative libertarian maverick Ron Paul - urging concerned citizens to put all their eggs into one basket case


As someone said to me a few days ago, truly spontaneous expressions of mass dissent rarely start from the top down...


.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.

A little special something that caught my eye on ebay just now and the perfect Fathers Day gift...



Hmmm...


.

Friday, June 13, 2008

I want to have David Davis' babies - well, maybe not quite

David Davis feeling a littl' bit country


One of the key reasons why our current government has been able to get away with the shocking things that it has over the last eleven years has been the equally shocking lack of opposition to its behaviour

Traditional, nominally Left Wing, Labour Party fanboy activists have given the government a free ride on the basis that ‘it’s better than having the Tories in power’


And any voices of dissent given mainstream media access have been be carefully hand picked for their qualities of establishment-friendly ineffectiveness


The Labour government has NOT been better than having the Tories in power – we’ve seen more wars, more inequality, more corporate corruption, more authoritarianism than even Thatchler could have dreamed of getting away with. The only reason why people have taken so long noticing is that they’ve been bought off by unprecedented levels of debt. Debt that is now going to have be paid off in one way or another – which will lead to a lot of people finally realising that their lives have been sold off to the banking system in exchange for not very much at all


And as for the hand-picked shills who represent the voice of establishment-sanctioned dissent, I find it very difficult to put into words just how thoroughly depressed I was by the demonstration against the 42 Day Detention Bill organised by ‘Liberty’ in Parliament Square earlier this week

“The Lib Dem and Tory home affairs spokesmen, and the outspoken left-wing Labour MP, were outshone as James Bond actress Honor Blackman and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood came to Westminster. They were all there for a photoshoot, organised by the pressure group Liberty, to protest against government plans to extend pre-charge terror detentions to a maximum of 42 days.”



Fight Fascism!! Buy a T-Shirt!!
Kapow!! Take that Shadowy Overlords!!



The director of
Liberty is, of course, Shami Chakrabarti

Shami’s CV in a nutshell…

  • Worked as a Barrister for the Home Office 1996-2001
  • Leaves(?) Home Office and Joins Liberty 10th September 2001
  • Appointed director of Liberty September 2003

Shami is the first person to be called whenever someone is required to speak out against the latest legislative monstrosity and you can rest assured that she could organise photoshoots featuring scary undead celebrity crones for the next 5,000 years and not change a single fucking thing


In short, opposition to the creeping fascism we’ve experienced for the last eleven years has been carefully managed and all sewn up

And then David Davis pulled his little stunt yesterday



Davis may be an egotistical, self-serving, right wing moonbat but the mass confusion of the establishment press and other politicians caused by his resignation seems to be genuine


And after eleven years of ineffective opposition to creeping fascism I’m personally not fussy any more



This appears to be a genuinely off-script event and something which could, though the chances are admittedly tiny, upset the carefully managed false Left vs. Right dichotomy which is used to blind us all


There are some principles which should transcend people’s party political beliefs – it is wrong to kill, it is wrong to steal and it is also wrong to subjugate the many to suit the interests of the tiny few


This should be obvious enough stuff but a lot of people have been conned into overlooking basic moral principles through a media-led focus on irrelevancy and bullshit



Forget for a moment, whether Davis is being principled or not, and think for a moment what do his actions, and the reaction to his actions, say about what has passed for opposition to the onset of fascism over the last decade

The chances are that Davis’ Libertarian stunt is going to die on its arse in a very public and humiliating way – there are many powerful interests that will accept nothing less. But there’s a chance, just a tiny one, that Davis’ actions could have unexpected consequences which no end of Chakrabountybarti-
Liberty style bullshit could ever deliver.

.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Somebody must be doing something right redux



Anyone who has bumped into this blog more than a couple of times will have noticed that I have doubts about the Official Narrative of the July 7th bombings and the wider War on Terror


And whenever the subject of July 7th comes up I endorse the efforts of the July 7th Truth Campaign - a group of people who try very hard to research the Official Narrative of 7/7 in as objective and sensitive a way as they can

Naturally enough, there are other 7/7 sceptics out there who are little less objective and a little less sensitive about how they go about things

Some of those other 7/7 sceptics also have some pretty peculiar beliefs and opinions on other subjects

but, in the same way that I don't accuse all Labour Party supporters of being mass murdering genocidal twunts simply because they support a political party which has given safe haven and a platform to mass murdering genocidal twunts, that doesn't mean I or other 7/7 sceptics agree with or approve of some of the nonsense other self-professed 7/7 'conspiracy theorists' come out with

This should be an obvious enough point but, sadly, it appears to be too intellectually demanding for certain bloggers and other members of the 'commentariat' to grasp

A few months ago I mentioned that the BBC was putting together a documentary (sic.) about 7/7 Conspiracy Theories. I also mentioned that everyone I personally rate in the field of sceptical 7/7 research had told the BBC to go fuck itself. I speculated at the time that, cheated of its prey, the BBC would probably whisk up a few genuine nutters and/or provocateurs, pretend that they were the real™ and representative voice of 7/7 scepticism and do a number on them

A few months after my post a guy called Nick Kollerstrom hove into view - billed by 7/7 conspiracy theory debunkers as a 'leading' 7/7 conspiracy theorist and exposed (sic.) as a revisionist Holocaust Denier at more or less the same time

I love coincidences


Well, the completely unplanned, unmanaged, cross-media marketing campaign that is Operation BBC Conspiracy Files now appears to be entering its next phase

A spot of manufactured outrage in the
Evening Standard...

'BBC buys holocaust denier sandwich shock horror!!'


and the Daily Telegraph...


and The Sun...


and, of course, Melanie Phillips is in on the act too...

Melanie Phillips

"And now some further evidence of the BBC’s famed commitment to its public service principles of fairness, balance and objectivity for which British taxpayers stump up the licence fee. The London Evening Standard reports that the BBC paid expenses to Nicholas Kollerstrom for contributing to Conspiracy Files, a documentary about theories surrounding the 7/7 London tube and bus bombings. Kollerstrom, a Holocaust denier, has pestered families bereaved by the 7/7 bombs, claiming the attacks were an intelligence agency plot."

"The BBC treats conspiracy crackpots like this as legitimate sources of information because it produces programmes which, merely by investigating them, give credence to crackpot conspiracy theories involving Americans, Israel and the Jews. And that is because it leads the field in Britain’s current abandonment of reason and embrace of irrationality and prejudice towards America, Israel and the Jews."

Mel may be a frothy-mouthed shill but she's not a stupid frothy-mouthed shill. She must know full well that the only reason the BBC gives hand-picked people like Dr Nick occasional airtime is to smear anyone with legitimate doubts about official fairy tales by associating them with moonbats like Dr Nick.

By slagging off the Beeb for doing the interests she cheerleads for a favour, Melanie is trying have her cake and eat it. Only her mouth is probably so full of bile she probably couldn't get it down anyway


and, as with the police and politicians doing the terrorists' work for them by bigging up their capabilities at every opportunity, even if I didn't have doubts about the Official July 7th Narrative in the first place, the fact that the BBC needs to resort to such slimy tricks would just scream out to me that something about the War of Terror fable is terribly amiss

-

and, on the subject, of smearing by association there's a flier doing the rounds which gives the impression that some folk from J7T are appearing at a meeting with Muslim academic Nafeez Ahmed in London later this month


only they're not - I've just checked. And there's a very a good chance that the 'J7 researchers' billed in the flier are none other than every 7/7 sceptic's favourite holocaust denier Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom.

which, whether he realises it or not, probably means that Nafeez is a closet Islamorevisionst (the next exciting development in sticking the word 'Islamo' in front of something unpleasant - Islamofundamentalist, Islamofascist, Islamorevisionist, Islamokiddiefiddler, Islamotrafficwarden, etc etc)


and remember boys and girls, if you doubt what your government and newspapers are telling you you're probably a Nazi, or mad, or, more than likely, both

.

The Bee Gees do 9/11 Troof

This could be the video that changes the world...




NB Youtube has banned this video - see it here
.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Post Turtles

This comment over at Guido Fawkes' blog just tickled me...


"While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 90-year-old man, the doctor asked his patient how he thought Gordon Brown was doing as Prime Minister.

The old man said, "You know, Brown is a post turtle." Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a "post turtle" was.

He said, "Did you ever drive down a country road and come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top? You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he can't get anything done while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor thing down. That's a post turtle."



.

Funny F*ckers

Seen in Stockwell Underground Station today...




The station is festooned with the things - including one placed tastefully on the platform directly opposite where JCdM was executed


edit: coincidentally, my North of England correspondent sent me this picture taken in Rochdale station today whilst I was typing this post up...


hmmm, mucho synchronisticomente


and remember, it's only subliminal if you're deaf, dumb and f**king blind


.

Friday, June 06, 2008

The Conspiraloon™ Alliance's Newest Member


"While the growth of consumption is lower than that of production and the market is full of oil, prices continue to rise and this situation is completely manipulated...


...hidden and unhidden hands are at work to control the prices mendaciously to pursue their political and economic aims."



Take a bow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!!


Darth Ahmadvaderjad and Hugo Chavez demonstrating the key differences between hidden and unhidden hands



.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Maybe not all but quite a few roads lead to Goldmans - redux

Cheers to anon who left a comment underneath my previous post on futures pricing shenanigans, including a link to this article on the Global Research site...




"As detailed in an earlier article, a conservative calculation is that at least 60% of today’s $128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract. At today's price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme “leverage” of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population."



The earlier article referred to above can be found here...




There are, of course, many different paths to something which approximates to the Truth, so I take some elements of these articles with a large pinch of salt. I would personally never describe 'Peak Oil' as an outright fraud for example. However, the material on the insanity of today's futures markets strikes me as being essentially along the right lines


And, of course, it comes as no surprise to see Goldman fucking Sachs named as one of the key Bubble Blowers. After all the good things they did with the subprime market it's reassuring to know that their hands are over oil pricing - in the same way that Californians must have slept easy in their unlit bedrooms knowing that Enron was looking after their electricity supplies


(NB Thanks to the power of margined leverage, six million dollar men are now trading at about 150 million dollars)


I don't know what's worse - having to consume a daily diet of the mainstream press, and even our own prime minister, completely blanking out the role of speculation in the rising costs of energy and food; pissing around promoting measures that won't improve the situation one little bit, or the risk, however slight, that some psychopath somewhere might pull a stunt to lock those inflated speculative prices in place


The problem with bubbles is that, sooner or later, they burst

Unless, some totally-random-coincidental-event occurs which genuinely makes the commodity you've been speculating in as scarce as you've been pretending it to be

It's not so easy to shore up a collapsing property market by making a few hundred thousand houses disappear overnight without killing potential buyers/ borrowers in the process

The supply of oil, or food, is a lot easier to fuck around with, particularly if you've got some friends in high places - about 35,000ft high




Goldmans seem pretty confident that oil's going to hit $200 - and they have proven to be very good at, um, guessing stuff

.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Mainstream Conspiraloons: #136 George Soros, #137 Germany

Typical commodity trader in action - less of an amoral financial psychopath, more of a latter day Messiah figure sent to save us from the evils of 'cheap' food and oil which are Proven to be very bad for both us and our planet


Peak Oil…


Hmmm

One of those subjects which has the potential to divide Conspiraloons straight down the middle

There are many loons out there who believe that much of the apparently fascistic, aggressive behaviour of Western governments, especially the US and the UK, is driven by the impending shortfall in global energy supply and the need to find excuses to occupy other countries and to make preparation to clamp down on dissent at home when the lights start going out

I’m not one of them

I’m one of those loons who believes that, yes, finite energy resources are an issue but, no, that's not the reason why the price of oil, and food, have been going through the roof recently

I once worked for a company which traded, amongst other things, cocoa. The firm was a real cocoa trader; buying cocoa from real suppliers, transporting it in real ships and selling it on to real customers. And every now and again, I and half a dozen other people who made a living counting stuff would fly around the globe to take stock of our company’s prodigious physical holdings of the yummy brown stuff. Our firm held onto a ridiculous amount of cocoa – much more than it needed to meet its immediate or even medium term requirements. Some of the stocks were literally years old.


The reason why the firm held onto so much was because, thanks to the involvement of hedge funds and other speculators, the cocoa futures market had become an absolute fucking joke. It was simply cheaper and less risky to sit on tens of thousands of tons of physical stock rather than expose the company to a market being mugged by characters who were using the futures exchanges as a (rigged) casino


The futures pricing of cocoa had become, just like the price of oil or wheat today, no more a product of genuine supply/ demand issues than the price of Dutch tulips 400 years ago or Florida real estate every thirty years or so

The role played by speculators spending money they've borrowed cheaply to buy and drive up the price of stuff they don't personally need is key and always played down by the owned press - as is the role played by the people who make that money available in the first place

and it comes as no surprise that very few people given a mainstream voice are connecting the very close timing of the collapse in property speculation, central banks printing shed loads of lovely inflationary money and the sharp rise in commodities prices


It shouldn’t be rocket science but the obvious conclusions seem to be beyond the grasp of people who make a living pretending to tell the rest of us what’s going on


(courtesy of The Daily Mash)


Honourable exceptions include…

"What is particularly worrying about this speculative boom is that a number of the big Wall Street banks are up to their oxters in it. Goldman Sachs, for example, which recently forecast that oil would reach $200 a barrel, is heavily involved in the oil futures market. It stands to make a lot of money if its forecast comes true. So do other investment banks. These institutions control billions of dollars of oil contracts, and it takes only a few of the big banks to move in a given direction for the entire market to shift. The extraordinary financial power of the banks is one disturbing aspect of globalisation"


Madder than a sack of ferrets

A veritable hornets' nest of mainstream conspiralunacy


And whilst I do understand why some fellow loons are concerned about future shortages of oil and food I do suggest that they keep their minds open to the possibility that real structural issues are being manipulated and used as Trojan horses to facilitate some serious financial rape and pillage


A couple of other recent examples come to mind…

  • The kinds of companies and technologies which produce the unnatural abomination of deliberately infertile seeds being promoted as a solution to impending global famine (with little or no coverage being given to the role of predatory commodity speculation in advancing that impending famine)
.

Brrrrrr, the irony


This story has probably already been circulated a thousand and one times but I've been away for a few days so thanks to LWTC247 for pointing me towards it...



Of course, there's the distinct possibility that a deranged Man Made Global Warming Sceptic-Conspiraloon has completely misrepresented the misfortunes of the good ship Kapitan Khlebnikov and its cargo of well-heeled ecowarriors but it's funny and I don't care

Sauce for the goose...

.

A secure home for your money with Laurel and Hardy



I've just returned from a few days away from t'Internet, television and the like and have started to catch up on the last few days' of news...

including the totally unexpected (sic.) sell off of bank shares earlier this week - especially holdings in the exceptionally fragrant Bradford and Bingley

Not that the fact that B&B is a fucked up PoS run by crooks came as any surprise to me

Last September an elderly relative I care for very much mentioned to me that she had her entire life savings deposited with B&B and asked me if she should have any reasonable cause for concern.

My response was that she had reasonable cause to shit herself and I moved her loot into a couple of building societies that same day


The writing has been on the wall for anyone with the sense to totally disregard the mainstream media's coverage of the 'credit crunch' for months

The fact that the B&B board, the mainstream media and other banks are pretending that the news that B&B is effectively dead came as a surprise is, in itself, not a surprise

These people are professional thieves and liars and have been busy bullshitting the general public to buy time whilst they move their own holdings away from fucked up banks and related holdings and into commodities

What does surprise me is how so few people have made the obvious connection/ reference between B&B's famous bowler hat focused logos and publicity material and these guys...


And whilst on the subject of B&B and sage advice from the mainstream media this snippet from the Telegraph's Q&A on the B&B farrago made me laugh, and not in a good way...

Is this another Northern Rock?

No. Northern Rock ran out of cash. Bradford & Bingley has plenty - helped by Texas Pacific. It has an estimated £23 billion in savers' deposits, a sum far greater than declared bad debts. B&B's problem is the lack of profits, which alarmed the City, sending shares falling.


Being told that their savings are being used to offset B&B's understated bad debts must come as a tremendous source of fucking comfort to any Muppets still daft enough to still have money lodged with that bunch of shysters

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