NEOCONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR EXPRESSES ZIONIST DESIRE FOR MORE AMERICAN MARTYRS
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Bernanke makes it official. We are Japan.
Bernanke makes it official. We are Japan.
Commentary: Race to zero didn’t work then, won’t work now
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — It’s official. We are Japan.
At least when it comes to monetary policy. The Federal Reserve’s decision to slash interest rates by a half percentage point to 1% on Wednesday to help boost the economy was snubbed by the stock market, even though it had demanded the cut like a petulant child for more than two weeks. See full story
There was nothing the Fed could do, and it’s likely the European Central Bank will fall in line next week, as well as the Bank of Japan on Friday. Central bankers know they need to show coordination and the ability to do something — anything — in the teeth of this bear market.
But Bernanke is quickly running out of monetary bullets, with the risk of having to take the extraordinary step of someday lowering interest rates to zero just a bank run or two away right now. Japan, which spent five unproductive years at zero between 2001 and 2006 before boosting to a half percentage point, is now talking about a quarter point cut and possibly a return to zero, even though it didn’t work last time. See full story.
The economic theory behind zero rates, called quantitative monetary easing — a term so heinous it isn’t recognized by my computer’s spell check — allows a central bank to run monetary policy by focusing on money supply instead of the cost of the money, i.e. interest rates.
It also means that Joe the Plumber and his elderly parents would get nothing on their savings account or certificates of deposit, which so many people depend on for their fixed-income lifestyles. How’s that for an invitation to go out and spend?
Arguably, it was a dramatic easing of interest rates after the tech bubble collapsed that plunked us into the systemic soup in the first place, allowing people to take out mortgages at ridiculous rates and Wall Street to make a killing by packaging the mortgages and playing various rates off each other. But it won’t work this time around. Nobody’s lending, and nobody is borrowing.
Next week, we’ll find out how many Americans bought new cars in October. Estimates vary, but it’s likely to be about the same number of people who attend a Sen. Ted Stevens rally this weekend. Some analysts predict it will be the worst month ever for the automakers, with sales falling between 30% and 50% year over year.
Why combining General Motors Corp. (GM:
General Motors Corporation
Last: 6.66-0.10-1.49%
12:49pm 10/30/2008
Delayed quote data
12:49pm 10/30/2008
Delayed quote data
Sponsored by:
That brings us to the major problem the Federal Reserve and the Treasury face if they want to get this bailout out of the showroom. They have to get the banks to start lending the money they’ve been given by the taxpayers. Hoarding the cash, waiting for another wave of bad loans to come as the economy gets worse, just feeds the bear.
Congress is right to be concerned about this, and to force the Treasury to press Wall Street and the banks to get lending again. Instead of freaking out about banker bonuses, just tie the bonuses to how much money their institutions lend, not how much they make. Yes, over-lending got us into this mess, but the global economic engine remains stalled, and needs to be jump started.
Interest rates at 1.5%, or 1%, or zero aren’t going to do that for us. I suspect even Ben Bernanke realizes that by now. It’s time to start cracking heads.
Big pension funds and young investors might be able to wait the months or years it might take for the stock market to come back, but for many Americans, it’s not about whether to sell or hold stocks now. It’s about getting enough cash to make payments at the end of this month, tomorrow. Just ask the poor savers whose money is still tied up in The Reserve Fund, the money market fund that froze assets last month after a run. See New York Times story.
Americans are going into this election next week as angry as they’ve been in a long time. Bankers, politicians and economists would be wise not to mess with them. 
David Callaway is editor-in-chief of MarketWatch.
CIA allowed concealing torture documents
CIA allowed concealing torture documents
Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:12:52 GMT
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The CIA can hide statements made by the terror suspects that the spy agency has tortured in its secret prisons, a federal judge has ruled.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court declined to review torture allegations from men held in the CIA’s prisons-because it could put the nation at risk of grave danger if allowed to be made public.
The American Civil Liberties Union said it filed in March, a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which decide if prisoners at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, qualify as “enemy combatants.”
The judge’s decision not to look at the allegations to see if secrets are involved allows the Bush Administration to continue to hide its use of torture techniques, according to Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.
“The government has suppressed these detainees’ allegations of brutal torture not to protect any legitimate national security interests, but to protect itself from criticism and liability,” Wizner said.
The US government has come under scathing criticism for allowing interrogation techniques that at best border on torture to be used on terrorist suspects detained indefinitely at US prisons in Guantanamo, Iraq and other places.
The Triumph of Ignorance
The Triumph of Ignorance
Posted October 28, 2008
Why morons succeed in US politics.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 28th October 2008
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?(1)
Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.
There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter – stumbling a little, using long words – carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said “there you go again”(2). His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.
It wasn’t always like this. The founding fathers of the republic – men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton – were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?
On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD(3).
But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.
One theme is both familiar and clear: religion – in particular fundamentalist religion – makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.
Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of The Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory was mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy – now known as Social Darwinism – of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary(4).
Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.
But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. “In the South”, Jacoby writes, “what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order.”(5)
The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state’s public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time(6).
This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln’s career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment it is a recipe for confusion.
Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly rage against the “liberal elites” destroying America.
The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite – like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush – has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.
Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.
References:
1. For a staggering display of ignorance and bigotry, see: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lPg0VCg4AEQ
2. You can see this exchange at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=px7aRIhUkHY&feature=related
3. All these facts are contained in Susan Jacoby, 2008. The Age of American Unreason: dumbing down and the future of democracy. Old Street Publishing, London.
4. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Chapter 3.
5. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Page 57.
6. Susan Jacoby, ibid. Page 25.
Hatred of America unites the world
Hatred of America unites the world
By Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
Being hated is no fun. Few of us are like those pantomime villains who glory in the hisses and boos of an audience. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked the plaintive question: “Why do they hate us?” and another for each of the different answers I’ve heard. It’s because of our foreign policy. It’s because of their extremism. It’s because of our arrogance. It’s because of their inferiority complex. Americans really hate not knowing why they’re hated.
The best explanation is in fact the simplest. Being hated is what happens to dominant empires. It comes – sometimes literally – with the territory. George Orwell knew the feeling. As a young man he served as an assistant police superintendent in British-run Burma, an experience he memorably described in his essay “Shooting an Elephant”. Called upon to kill a rogue pachyderm that had run amok, Orwell was suddenly aware “of the watchful yellow faces behind” him:
“The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh.”
Eric Blair, as Orwell was known then, could scarcely have been better prepared for his role as a colonial official. Born in Bengal, the son of a colonial civil servant, he had been educated at Eton, where boys learn not to worry much about being hated. Yet even he found the resentment of the natives hard to bear: “In the end the sneering… faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves … [It] was perplexing and upsetting.”
That’s a feeling American soldiers in Baghdad must know pretty well. How does that old Randy Newman song go? “No one likes us – I don’t know why. / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try.”
But who hates Americans the most? You might assume that it’s people in countries that the United States has recently attacked or threatened to attack. Americans themselves are clear about who their principal enemies are. Asked by Gallup to name the “greatest enemy” of the United States today, 26 per cent of those polled named Iran, 21 per cent named Iraq and 18 per cent named North Korea. Incidentally, that represents quite a success for George W. Bush’s concept of the “Axis of Evil”. Six years ago, only 8 per cent named Iran and only 2 per cent North Korea.
Are those feelings of antagonism reciprocated? Up to a point. According to a poll by Gallup’s Centre for Muslim Studies, 52 per cent of Iranians have an unfavourable view of the United States. But that figure is down from 63 per cent in 2001. And it’s significantly lower than the degree of antipathy towards the United States felt in Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Two thirds of Jordanians and Pakistanis have a negative view of the United States and a staggering 79 per cent of Saudis. Sentiment has also turned hostile in Lebanon, where 59 per cent of people now have an unfavourable opinion of the United States, compared with just 41 per cent a year ago. No fewer than 84 per cent of Lebanese Shiites say they have a very unfavourable view of Uncle Sam.
These figures suggest a paradox in the Muslim world. It’s not America’s enemies who hate the United States most, it’s people in countries that are supposed to be America’s friends, if not allies.
The paradox doesn’t end there. The Gallup poll (which surveyed 10,000 Muslims in 10 different countries) also revealed that the wealthier and better-educated Muslims are, the more likely they are to be politically radical. So if you ever believed that anti-Western sentiment was an expression of poverty and deprivation, think again. Even more perplexingly, Islamists are more supportive of democracy than Muslim moderates. Those who imagined that the Middle East could be stabilised with a mixture of economic and political reform could not have been more wrong. The richer these people get, the more they favour radical Islamism. And they see democracy as a way of putting the radicals into power.
The paradox of unfriendly allies is not confined to the Middle East. Last week was not a good week for Americanophiles in Europe. Tony Blair announced British troop withdrawals from southern Iraq, an unfortunate signal on the eve of the American “surge”. Meanwhile, in Rome, his counterpart Romano Prodi had to resign because his coalition partners would not agree either to keep Italian troops in Afghanistan or to enlarge a US military base at Vicenza. Anti-Americanism is nothing new in European politics, to be sure, particularly on the Left. But there is something novel going on here, which extends to traditionally pro-American constituencies.
Back in 1999, 83 per cent of British people surveyed by the State Department Office of Research said that they had a favourable opinion of the United States. But by 2006, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that proportion had fallen to 56 per cent. British respondents to the Pew surveys now give higher favourability ratings to Germany (75 per cent) and Japan (69 per cent) than to the United States – a remarkable transformation in attitudes, given the notorious British tendency to look back both nostalgically and unforgivingly to the Second World War. It’s also very striking that Britons recently polled by Pew regard the US presence in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea (a view which is shared by respondents in France, Spain, Russia, India, China and throughout the Middle East).
Nor is Britain the only disillusioned ally. Perhaps not surprisingly, two thirds of Americans believe that their country’s foreign policy considers the interests of others. But this view is shared by only 38 per cent of Germans and 19 per cent of Canadians. More than two thirds of Germans surveyed in 2004 believed that American leaders wilfully lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction prior to the previous year’s invasion, while a remarkable 60 per cent expressed the view that America’s true motive was “to control Middle Eastern oil”. Nearly half (47 per cent) said it was “to dominate the world”.
The truly poignant fact is that when Americans themselves are asked to rate foreign countries, they express the most favourable views of none other than Britain, Germany and Canada.
Back in the 1990s, Madeleine Albright pompously called the United States “the indispensable nation”. Today it seems to have become the indefensible nation, even in the eyes of its supposed friends.
There are, admittedly, a few scraps of good news in the international polls. Very few Europeans, for example, would welcome China’s becoming a serious military rival to the United States. There is overwhelming European opposition to Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons. And there is a surprising amount of hostility towards the Palestinian radicals of Hamas in both France and Germany. But look again at some of America’s supposed allies. One in four Indians, two out of five Egyptians and one out of every two Pakistanis favour a nuclear-armed Iran. A third of Britons, half of all Indians and three quarters of Egyptians welcomed the success of Hamas in last year’s Palestinian elections.
Orwell would have understood. Just as it was the educated beneficiaries of British rule in Asia who were the most strident anti-imperialists in Orwell’s day, so the British Empire’s most natural allies – France and the United States – were anything but Anglophile. For it turns out that power not only corrupts, as Lord Acton famously observed, it also tends to isolate.
It’s not for nothing that they say it’s lonely at the top.
YOUR NEW PRESIDENT, ZBIG BROTHER
YOUR NEW PRESIDENT, ZBIG BROTHER
by Alan Stang
As I write, little more than a week remains before E-Day, on which most Americans will vote. Nerves are being fearfully wracked. Even people who are usually somnolent say they can’t take the stress. There is a real danger that, unaddressed, the frustration of choosing between a Communist illegal alien raised by a Communist sex pervert and a POW traitor who is a Soviet front man could lead to an epidemic of Acid Reflux Disease or even an outbreak of Restless Leg Syndrome.
The purpose of this modest piece is to reassure you. Stop tormenting yourself. Further self-flagellation is pointless. Your next President has already been selected. Didn’t you know? Sure, go ahead and vote if you like, if you have nothing else to do, if you don’t mind standing in long lines between Obamatron morons and McCrud zombies, but enjoy the reassurance of knowing that the powers above Ponzi Paulson and Helicopter Ben Bernanke and Co. have already made their choice.
He is Zbigniew Brzezinski. What? Who? Is this some kind of Polish joke? Sadly, it is not. The lustiest enjoyer of Polish jokes in my experience was a remarkably gorgeous Polish lady I knew many years ago in the Bay Area. Every couple of years, I would come through on a speaking tour and she would press me for the latest Polish jokes I had heard. Again Zbigniew Brzezinski is not one of them. He is not just a victim of partial vowel deprivation.
In 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book entitled Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, Viking Press). Let’s browse through it to find out what Zbigniew is. Zbig dedicates the book to Ian, Mark and Mika, his kids. A nice touch, don’t you think? He’s a family man. Starting on page 72 of my Penguin edition, he explains “why Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision.”
Marxism is “a victory of reason over belief. . . . To a greater extent than any previous mode of political thinking, Marxism puts a premium on the systematic and rigorous examination of material reality and on guides to action derived from that examination.” In other words, Marxism is a better system than our own. Marxism examines material reality and recommends action better than does the U.S. Constitution.
Page 83: Marxism “represented a major advance in man’s ability to conceptualize his relationship to his world.” It carried “an essentially ethical message.” It “was derived from a totally rational method of inquiry.” P. 123: Marxism “provided a unique intellectual tool for understanding and harnessing the fundamental forces of our time. . . . [I]t supplied the best available insight into contemporary reality; it infused political action with strong ethical elements . . . .”
By the way, as you see, I am making it easy for you. I am digging out the juicy nuggets. They are embedded in a prose the pompous turgidity of which recalls Isabel Paterson’s comment that the writing of John Foster Dulles compels the eyeball to rebound from the page. Subjecting the normal mind to such an aberration should be punished as a war crime or at least a species of torture.
I honestly believe that were we to strap your eyeballs to Zbigniew’s prose, you would run screaming from the premises, unless we had prudently tied you to a chair. The next time you feel like complaining about something you see in my columns, about my language or some joke, please remember that I am providing this onerous service at no extra charge.
Zbig Brother even excuses Stalin’s purges and mass murders. Page 134ff: “Yet though Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy for both the Russian people and communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise. . . .” What? Yes. You see, “the internal violence employed by Stalin . . . had a restraining effect on unbridled nationalism.”
But isn’t Zbig today fanatically opposed to the continuing Soviet Union? Yes, he is, but not because he opposes Marxism. As we have seen, he is a lifelong Marxist. He opposes the Soviets precisely because he loves Marxism so much. He believes the Communists have misused it. He believes that he, Zbigniew Brzezinski, could impose it correctly, the way old Karl himself would have done it.
Enter David Rockefeller. David is a confessed traitor, a conspirator who is working in a secret cabal to destroy the United States. What? David Rockefeller? How do we know that? In 2002, Random House, in New York, published his Memoirs. Remember, this is not someone accusing him of something. This is David Rockefeller himself talking on page 405:
For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
Because this sleazy extrusion of an unmarried female canine is a traitor – because he loves totalitarianism – he was naturally attracted to lifelong Marxist Zbigniew Brzezinski. Zbig became David’s prime minister. In 1973, under David’s direction, Zbig formed the Trilateral Commission, which is the foreign ministry of the Council on Foreign Relations, a preeminent founder of which was Marxist Edward M. House.
Both these groups work tirelessly to promote world government, which would mean the abolition of our own. Remember, the United States government and world government are mutually exclusive. You can’t have them both at the same time. If you are working for the latter, you are trying to destroy the former.
In 1976, Zbig and David literally interviewed dour peanut farmer Jimmy Carter at David’s Tarrytown estate. They liked what they heard and installed Democrat Jimmy as President of the United States. From the beginning, Jimmy was a Rockefeller factotum. Zbig Brother was his National Security Adviser. Jimmy came close to wrecking our economy. Okay, but what does all this have to do with the 2008 campaign?
In the 2000 campaign, Zbigniew Brzezinski, lifelong Marxist, was foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain, who said this: “I am honored that Zbigniew Brzezinski will join my foreign policy team. As a former national security adviser and a highly respected foreign policy expert, his broad experience makes him an invaluable asset to my team.” So Zbig went from Democrat Jimmy to Republican John. Remember that at the top – above the candidates – you have one party with two branches.
What about this year? This year, Zbig is back, running foreign policy for Hussein. Indeed, remember Mark, son of Zbig? Mark was one of the sons to whom Zbig dedicated Between Two Ages in 1970. Mark is all grown up now and shaving. Can you imagine? Mark is foreign policy adviser to Senator Hussein. So who is foreign policy adviser to Senator McCain this year? The envelope please! El Senador Juan McCain’s foreign policy adviser this year is Ian Brzezinski, the other Zbigniew son.
That is correct. Lifelong Marxist Zbigniew Brzezinski – David Rockefeller’s Prime Minister – controls both sides of the forthcoming charade through his sons. Again, you can relax. It really makes no difference who wins. The only difference will be a difference in style, a difference in personality, natural differences peculiar to us all. Remember, David Rockefeller admits, boasts, that he and his family exercise inordinate influence over the United States. This is how he does it.
Do you need to know anything more to understand that a literal conspiracy controls both main political parties, and that at the top – above the candidates – both parties are the same? What was that you said about “change?” Remember, Zbig ran foreign policy for McCain in the 2000 campaign. This year, Hussein is just as much a factotum of Goldman Sachs and other instrumentalities of world government as McCain.
Notice that our Communist media say nothing about this. They understand perfectly well that if they sass David Rockefeller they could lose their jobs. So they specialize in arguing about lesser fry. So, sure, vote next week, but do so with the assurance that it makes no difference; that the conspiracy for world government has already chosen our next President. He is Rockefeller prime minister and Marxist Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Long live Zbig Brother!
ATTACK ON SYRIA WAS CIA MISSION TO KILL AL QAIDA IN IRAQ GHOST
WHAT A CROCK OF SH*T! THE CIA IS RUNNING
THIS WAR, ESCALATING WITH PREDATORS IN
PAKISTAN AND AGENCY CONTRACTORS IN SYRIA!
CIA led mystery Syria raid that killed terrorist
leader
By Jonathan S. Landay and Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — A CIA-led raid on a compound in eastern Syria killed an al Qaida in Iraq commander who oversaw the smuggling into Iraq of foreign fighters whose attacks claimed thousands of Iraqi and American lives, three U.S. officials said Monday.
The body of Badran Turki Hishan al Mazidih, an Iraqi national who used the nom de guerre Abu Ghadiya, was flown out of Syria on a U.S. helicopter at the end of the operation Sunday by CIA paramilitary officers and special forces, one U.S. official said.
“It was a successful operation,” a second U.S. official told McClatchy. “The bottom line: This was a significant blow to the foreign fighter pipeline between Syria and Iraq.”
A senior U.S. military officer said the raid was launched after human and technical intelligence confirmed that al Mazidih was present at the compound close to Syria’s border with Iraq. “The situation finally presented itself,” he said.
The three U.S. officials, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because the operation was classified, declined to reveal other details of the raid. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
The senior military officer said that U.S. intelligence had been tracking al Mazidih for some time, and that “the more we learned about him and how he works” the higher he rose on the U.S. most-wanted list.
“He is the guy who produced the most prolific of the foreign fighters networks,” said the first U.S. official, adding that the extremists he smuggled into Iraq were responsible for attacks that “killed thousands of Iraqis and our own U.S. forces.”
On Feb. 28, the Treasury Department announced a freeze on any U.S. assets belonging to al Mazidih and three of his associates, charging that they were smuggling “money, weapons, terrorists, and other resources through Syria to al Qaida in Iraq, including to (al Qaida) commanders.”
The Treasury Department announcement identified al Mazidih as a Sunni Muslim who was born in the late 1970s in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and was a lieutenant of al Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006. He was believed to be living in the Syrian town of Zabadani.
“Former al Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi appointed Badran (al Mazidih) as the group’s Syrian commander for logistics in 2004,” the Treasury said. “After Zarqawi’s death, Badran began working for the new AQI leader, Abu Ayyub al Masri. As of late-September 2006, Badran took orders directly from Masri, or through a deputy.
“Badran obtained false passports for foreign terrorists, provided passports, weapons, guides, safe houses, and allowances to foreign terrorists in Syria and those preparing to cross the border into Iraq,” it said. “As of the spring of 2007, Badran facilitated the movement of AQI operatives into Iraq via the Syrian border. Badran also directed another Syria-based AQI facilitator to provide safe haven and supplies to foreign fighters,” the Treasury said. “This AQI facilitator, working directly for Badran, facilitated the movement of foreign fighters primarily from Gulf countries, through Syria into Iraq.”
The Bush administration, which for years has expressed frustration over what it charges have been Syria’s lackluster efforts to stop foreign Islamic fighters from crossing into Iraq, refused to publicly acknowledge the operation.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether an order that President Bush signed in July allowing U.S. commandos from Afghanistan to attack a suspected terrorist base in Pakistan also authorized cross-border operations in other countries.
Pentagon officials were tight-lipped about the operation. But they were quick to defend the decision to cross the border, with one saying that if nations that sponsor terrorist networks won’t go after them, “we will.”
The raid into Syria on Sunday has ignited a major diplomatic storm, with Iran joining in Syria’s condemnation of the U.S.
The Syrian government charged that eight civilians, including four children, died in what it described as a daylight attack on al Sukkari farm in eastern Syria by U.S. forces that flew across the border from Iraq in four helicopters.
“The Americans do it in the daylight. This means it was not a mistake. It is by blunt determination,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al Moallem charged Monday at a news conference in London. “For that, we consider this criminal and terrorist aggression.”
The Syrian Foreign Ministry Monday summoned Maura Connelly, the ranking U.S. diplomat in Damascus, to receive an official protest, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
The Iraqi government defended the raid. Government spokesman Ali al Dabbagh said that Syria had refused to hand over foreign fighters who’d taken refuge there after killing 13 Iraqi border guards.
However, al Dabbagh said, a proposed accord governing the status of U.S. forces in Iraq “will limit this type of operation. It will limit the United States from using Iraqi land to attack others.”
“universal soldiers” and “Manchurian candidates”
vinmandev left the following comment on the Educate Yourself- Mind Control The Ultimate Terror, “OPERATION MONARCH”, link. It is like several others that have come in here through the comments. There are a lot of survivors of government mind control abuse out there waiting to tell their stories. Obviously there are a lot of scrambled brains in this group and their attempts to explain their experiences fail. But this testimony of vinmandev@yahoo.com
speaks clearly about what our government does on a daily basis to get its troops to slaughter civilians without completely losing their minds in the process. When these “universal soldiers” and “Manchurian candidates” are set free upon the United states to enforce martial law, do not count on them to act on their humanity and show you and your family mercy, expect the worst. Please read Vin mandev’s confession for your family’s sake.
There is such a program being administered by the DOD via the military. In 1986, while serving in the military, I participated in a psychological conditioning program that was administered at NAS Cecil Field, in Jacksonville, Florida. I was given electro-shock therapy and some unknown drug therapy, in conjunction with hypnosis. The purpose of all of this was to dampen, or rather dumb down your awareness of your emotional state. You still have reasoning ability, except your ability to understand your “feelings”, or rather understand your “emotional state” was inhibited. When I was “put” into a situation, where any rational person would have “intense fear”, I had none. In fact, in covert combat situations I felt no fear, no anger, and no remorse. I participated in covert combat operations where I was sent into the line of fire with limited understanding of what it meant to die. In fact, I was told that I would not survive my missions. When I was told this, I accepted it matter-of-factly. Having luckly survived my “missions” (because a chosen few in this program, are picked out to be sacrificed for the greater good, which I was told, and had no understanding of what that meant at that time), I actually had my Commander show me a copy of a condolence letter written to my parents, expressing regret at my death in a car accident (cover story if I died). This Commander was a high ranking officer, who basically handed me off to a civilian contractor. These mission were not carried out with the command I was assigned to. I would be escorted to the base airfield, and handed over to a civilian, and place on a plane with soldiers from different branches of the military. I was never given any details about my mission. I would “suit up” and be given “arms” on the plane. Before being “handed off”, I was given some sort of subliminal command that put me in a semi-hypnotic state to receive orders and suggestions. This state of mind had a profound effect on my memory. Before one covert combat mission I can remember being given a drug (via hypodermic) that made my judgement and reasoning ability extremely and acutely sharp. I’m speaking about this now because I recently recovered more memories (I was told my memories would come back, if I did commit suicide first or kill someone and end up in prison). The psychological effects are something else. Your emotional state ends up being like a 4 year old child. Handling your emotional state is the one factor I believe why veterans who were involved in this program don’t completely remember or don’t survive. After years of trying to get the Veterans Administration to treat my PTSD condition (diagnosed 15 years after my discharge, by a VA doctor), and the military to provide access to all of my military records (all I have is a document showing my interim top secret clearance when I was an E-2), I’m pretty pissed off, and ready to talk to anyone about my experiences. I signed a disclosure agreement, but hell, I know that there were 3 attempts on my life (2 while still enlisted, and 1, a month after my discharge), those bastards aren’t helping me medically at all!!
Uniting & fighting back is no longer a choice; it’s a matter of survival
Uniting & fighting back is no longer a choice; it’s a matter of survival
What Will YOU Do About The Worst Capitalist
Crisis Since The 1930s?
By Larry Holmes
October 28, 2008 — “Workers World” — – Most people have heard that the economic nightmare—the “greed and profits before society” that the capitalist system is plunging us into—is the worst crisis since the so-called Great Depression of the 1930s.
What you won’t get from the capitalist mass media is how the crisis of the 1930s transformed tens of millions of frightened workers and desperately poor people of all races and nationalities into a fighting force organized on the basis of class solidarity in an epic struggle against the capitalists and their government. By the end of the 1930s, it was not the super-rich, but the organized working class that seemed all powerful and unbeatable.
Working and poor people, devastated by the depression, entered the 1930s destitute, broken and hopeless. Yet by the time the decade was over, the working class had won great battles, first by organizing itself into Unemployment Councils and tenants unions and later into giant labor unions.
Social Security, Medicaid, millions of jobs created by giant public works programs and the right to unionize were among the major achievements of the struggles of the 1930s.
With the help of communist activists dedicated to fighting on behalf of the working class, people organized to stop landlords and banks from evicting families from their apartments or homes.
Workers in the auto, steel and many other industries discovered new tactics in their fight to win the right to belong to a labor union. In addition to going on strike, sometimes the workers decided to stay in the plants and factories where they were striking. They took them over until they won their demands.
A leaflet urging people to attend what became one of the most famous mass protests against unemployment in New York City’s Union Square in March 1930 simply read, “Fight or Starve.”
That was one of the biggest lessons that the working class learned during the 1930s— either we push aside all that divides us, and anything that someone can use to divide us like class, and fight like hell or we will not survive.
This lesson is as relevant today as it was 75 years ago. Whether we unite and fight back will be a matter of survival for most of us this time as well. Let there be no doubt: Unless you’re rich, chances are either you will lose your job—some of you already have too little pay—and find it almost impossible to find a job or you will lose a place to live. Many will lose their student loans. Others will lose their pensions and find themselves burdened with debt and no health insurance. Many more of us will be homeless and hungry.
The cultural ideas and norms of recent times—ideas and norms invented and perpetuated by the capitalist system, the billionaires that it serves, their media, their schools, their hierarchy where most of us work and their political system—have not prepared us to act in our own interests in concert with others.
The ideas reinforced every day are that if you fail, it’s your fault alone. The rich are rich because they’re smart. Human nature is innately bad so don’t trust those like you; you’ve got to compete with them. Along with these lies, there is the big one that “things will get better sooner or later” because “this is the greatest country and capitalism is not only the best system, it’s the only one.”
The basic conspiracy afoot here is designed to keep us divided, confined to our own personal worlds, essentially left alone to deal with the crisis and the capitalist class that’s at war with us 24/7.
With the incredible stresses of today, people certainly deserve the right to put their headsets on and zone out to the great music they’ve downloaded on their Ipods. Or veg-out on the several thousand cable stations on their TV (if their cable hasn’t been turned off due to lack of payment). Or spend hours online, which is both social yet isolating at the same time. One can, of course, abuse substances of choice, but ultimately that does more harm than help.
Most people probably think, with good reason, that capitalism’s most effective social control mechanisms are its racist police, FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, courts, jails and the Pentagon, all now under the umbrella of “homeland security.”
Obviously government repression is a problem. However, in and of itself, it’s not enough to control the masses or stop us from rebelling.
Equally, if not more effectively, are the ways in which the system works very hard to program us not to unite and fight.
What the system does is a lot like what’s depicted in the movie “The Matrix.” In the real capitalist matrix our comatose bodies are not warehoused somewhere, while our drugged minds stumble around in a computer-generated dream world. Still, the function of the real capitalist matrix is more frightening and diabolical because it’s not a movie.
The capitalist system works hard to keep our political consciousness paralyzed and in a coma in order to make us passive, regimented, disconnected from each other and thereby easier to exploit, which is what the parasitic capitalist system is really all about.
In order to unite and fight for our right to a job and a place to live, to healthcare and education, to all that we need and deserve, we’re going to have to break out of the capitalist matrix. Some will break out before others, but most of us will make it out.
In the movie, Neo is given the choice between the blue pill which equals blissful ignorance, and the red pill which is the path to the truth and to revolutionary action. With every passing day, more and more workers will take the red pill. Which one will you take?
Articles copyright 1995-2008 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
NEVER-ENOUGH, NEVER-ENDING NUCLEAR GODS
US wants bigger nuclear umbrella
Defense Secretary Robert Gates believes US should talk softly but carry a big nuke arsenal.
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US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called for the modernization of the United States’ nuclear arsenal, despite concerns the move could spark a global arms race.
Gates told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that the US needs the nuclear arms leverage to tackle what he called “threats of adversaries.”
Gates noted that the Pentagon has plans to help the US Air Force maintain and upgrade the country’s nuclear weapons, the US Department of Defense quoted him as saying.
“As long as others have nuclear weapons, we must maintain some level of these weapons ourselves,” Gates said, noting that “this will deter potential adversaries while reassuring over two dozen allies and partners who rely on the U.S. strategic umbrella for their own security.”
Referring to the earlier US pledge to reduce its nuclear arsenal by 75%, he stated, “We’ll lead the way in reducing our arsenal, but we must always hedge against the dangerous and unpredictable world.”
Concerns are growing over nuclear proliferation in the post Cold-War era as the global economic meltdown increases the possibility of instability.
The US defense secretary repeated Washington’s hostile rhetoric toward Iran and North Korea, accusing the countries of seeking atomic weapons. “There is no way to ignore efforts by states such as North Korea and Iran to develop and deploy nuclear weapons, or Russian and Chinese strategic modernization programs,” he said, adding, “As long as other nations have or seek nuclear weapons – and can potentially threaten us, our allies and friends – then we must have a deterrent capacity that makes it clear that challenging the United States in the nuclear arena, or with weapons of mass destruction, could result in an overwhelming, catastrophic response.”
Gates reassured the US allies: “Our nuclear umbrella – our extended deterrent – underpins our alliances in Europe and the Pacific and enables our friends, especially those worried about Tehran and Pyongyang, to continue to rely on our nuclear deterrent rather than to develop their own.”
The US government is incessantly making accusations about Iran’s nuclear program, but Tehran maintains it is totally peaceful and is only meant to generate much-needed electricity within the framework of the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The United States posesses about 10,000 of the world’s 27,000 nuclear warheads.
What Do You See?
What Do You See?
By Nikki Alexander
How would your mind perceive the following sequence of events if you were watching this unfold in another country?
Supreme Court judges betray their oath and prevent votes from being counted in a national election to install an unelected president. (Coordinated nationwide election fraud provides him a second term.)
Nine months later a spectacular mass murder takes place in a major city that involves three skyscrapers imploding into their own footprints within ten seconds each, pulverizing all of the non-metallic constituents into a fine powder that covers the city. Evidence from the crime scene is immediately removed and the unelected regime obstructs investigation into the crime for over one year. Without evidence or trial, foreign patsies are blamed for the crime by a Commission appointed by the unelected president.
The unelected president and his regime relentlessly invoke the memory of this shocking event to justify:
The most radical reconstruction of the Government in fifty years;
Systematic destruction of civil liberties and constitutional protections;
Systematic transfer of government services and functions to private corporations;
Ongoing seizure and privatization of public assets by corporate and foreign entities;
Dictatorial seizure of unconstitutional Executive authority with presidential signing statements;
Government surveillance of citizens: phone, Internet, banking, medical records, library records;
Government infiltration, harassment and arrest of peace groups;
Arrest and murder of journalists; seizure of their equipment and film;
Government kidnapping, detention and torture of thousands of harmless citizens;
Wars of aggression perpetrated under false pretenses;
Nationwide detention camps constructed for future purposes;
Blackwater mercenary bases within the country’s borders;
Regional Fusion Centers used by police to collect information on every citizen;
Secret Government databases mark one million citizens as ‘terrorists;’
Military units deployed to control the civilian population;
Unconstitutional Presidential control of State National Guards and local police;
Dissolution of national sovereignty through secret agreements with transnational conspirators;
Relentless propaganda that misinforms the public through controlled media outlets;
The regime is filled with ideological extremists and political appointees who hold dual citizenship:
The dual citizen Attorney General refuses to denounce torture or enforce Congressional subpoenas;
The dual citizen Secretary of DHS is granted authority to waive all laws without judicial oversight;
The dual citizen who leased the demolished skyscrapers is awarded billions of dollars in insurance claims by the duel citizen Judge who concurrently forbade victims to file claims against the government;
The dual citizen White House Chief of Staff recruits Goldman Sachs colleague as Treasury Secretary; and
Trillions of dollars disappear from Pentagon accounts under the dual citizen Comptroller of the Currency.
Congress systematically destroys financial sector regulations that protect the public;
The unelected president declares authority to suspend the Constitution and take over financial institutions;
The Federal Reserve Chairman and Treasury Secretary encourage and protect Wall Street fraud;
Trillions of dollars in fictitious Wall Street derivatives fracture the country’s financial system;
Middle class savings, pensions and retirement accounts are eviscerated;
Middle class property is devalued and confiscated nationwide through mortgage and foreclosure fraud;
Perpetrators of the fraud are rewarded with billions of taxpayer dollars;
The Federal Reserve Chairman expands his authority in defiance of constitutional mandates;
The Treasury Secretary eliminates Goldman Sachs competition and consolidates its monopoly;
The Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary use taxpayer loans to buy stock in private financial institutions; and
The national debt escalates to trillions of dollars as the currency collapses.
Taken as a whole does this look like random incompetence or a fascist coup d’etat?
Coup d’etat: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics, especially: the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.
Author’s Bio: Nikki has been a full time writer and political researcher since the 2000 coup. She hopes to return to oil painting, her former career, but can’t seem to play or do anything fun while the nation is under siege. You can help her get back to expressions of beauty by doing your part to speed up the revolution.
Bush Trying to Pardon Himself?
‘Taliban have been infiltrated,situation can destabilise region’
‘Taliban have been infiltrated,situation
THE NEWS
Sunday, October 26, 2008
By By our correspondent
Karachi
The ongoing war in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan have become a proxy war of two superpowers and other regional players, a seminar was told on Saturday.
“The Taliban have been infiltrated by Indians and Russians among others. Money is involved and the issue has become so complicated that it can destabilise the entire region” commented Syed Fakhar Kakakhel, a senior journalist belonging to a local TV. He was speaking at to Karachi University (KU) students on Saturday.
Addressing a seminar on “The War in the North-West”, organised by the KU Teachers Against War at the Audio-Visual Centre, KU, the senior journalist from Peshawar said that Russians were involved in the war to avenge their defeat in the 1980s in Afghanistan while Indians were there to destabilise Pakistan while the US had designs to rein in the growing economic power China. According to him, political stability in Afghanistan was the only solution to have peace in the tribal areas and that could only be reached through negotiations and talks otherwise the bloodshed in our neighborhood would continue to affect Pakistan.
Kakakhel said US could not stay long in Afghanistan owing to variety of reasons including its economic recession as well as involvement of other anti-US forces in the war in Afghanistan. He said Pakistan should safeguard its own interests instead of blindly following the imposed agenda.
He revealed that the US didn’t trust Pakistan any more owing to the establishment’s “dubious policies” and the US Assistant Secretary of Richard Boucher in his recent visit conveyed his government’s concerns on Pakistan’s role in the “War on Terror” to Pakistani officials. “Boucher told the NWFP Chief Minister that if they continued with the present policies of aiding militants, the next US administration would not hesitate in attacking Pakistan” he claimed. He also spoke about the trend of suicide bombings and the brain washing of youngsters for carrying out suicide attacks.
Kakakhel said the only solution to peace was initiating dialogue and engaging people in the political process. “Students are the most important people and they should be given the right to have their unions and their own leadership. Students politics should be allowed in Universities as well Madressahs so that they could have their own leaders” he suggested. He narrated details of various forces fighting in the tribal as well as settled areas including Swat and said all present militant leaders were former political activists and they could be controlled through initiating political process.
The journalist from NWFP also spoke on the role of media and said after learning the implications of their coverage of War on Terror, they had learnt a lot and now they were adopting a policy of self-censorship to create hope among Pakistanis. Another person, Wali Haider, of Roots, an NGO, who recently returned from Bajaur, termed the US attack on Afghanistan and war in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas as part of US hegemonic designs and to gain control over the region’s natural resources.
“Both US and Taliban have the same interests. They are destabilising the region and their goal is to facilitate US in controlling Central Asian oil and gas resources” he claimed. The address of both the experts was followed by a question-answer session and students from the various departments inquired about various factions of militants, their agenda and situation in the war zone in the North-West.
OPEC CUTS PRODUCTION TO FORCE OIL HIGHER AS ARAB BANKS STAGGER
Gulf Bank Customers Withdraw Deposits After Losses (Updtate1)
By Fiona MacDonald and Arif Sharif
Kuwait’s second-biggest lender by assets, is trying to stem a surge in customer withdrawals after currency losses forced the central bank to guarantee deposits.
In the first signs of a bank run in the Persian Gulf, some Gulf Bank depositors panicked and demanded their money, Fawzy al- Thunayan, general manager for board affairs, said in an interview today from Kuwait. “We can’t blame them,” he said. Trading in the Kuwait City-based bank was suspended for a second day.
While the Persian Gulf had been mostly insulated from the global credit crunch until now, Kuwait is the third state there to prop up its banking system as the end of the oil boom weighs on the region’s currency, stock and real estate markets. The United Arab Emirates said Oct. 12 it would guarantee deposits of all local banks and large foreign banks, and Saudi Arabia put $2.67 billion into the government-run Saudi Credit Bank, based in Riyadh, to provide no-fee loans to low-income citizens.
“The fear factor is now seeing its way into the Middle,” said Haissam Arabi, who oversees $1.8 billion as managing director of asset management at Shuaa Capital PSC in Dubai. “The ripple effect of the credit crunch has spread to the Middle East because we’re no longer an island economy.”
Saudi Arabia’s government injected the equivalent of $5 billion into Saudi banks on Oct. 20 to lower interbank lending rates and meet a shortfall of dollars, the first such move in 10 years, Saudi British Bank said Oct. 21.
Falling Oil Prices
Crude oil prices are down 57 percent from their peak of about $147, eroding budget surpluses in Persian Gulf states. The six Arab Gulf economies, which pump almost 23 percent of the world’s oil, need prices to remain above $60 to $65 a barrel to sustain spending, investment bank EFG-Hermes Holding SAE said in a report Sept. 23. Oil fell to a 17-month low of $63 today.
Kuwait’s Central Bank Governor Sheikh Salem al-Sabah said yesterday that 48-year old Gulf Bank lost money on currency derivatives after the euro declined against the dollar, state news agency KUNA reported. Gulf Bank will absorb the losses until it can work out an agreement with clients, Sheikh Salem said.
Gulf Bank remains solvent despite the defaults on currency derivatives contracts, the state-run Kuwait News Agency cited Kuwait Finance Minister Mustafa al-Shimali as saying yesterday. Kuwait’s central bank will propose a bill to parliament to guarantee all bank deposits in Kuwait, KUNA reported yesterday.
Gulf Bank had assets of 5.1 billion dinars and deposits of 3.2 billion dinars at the end of March, according to Bloomberg data. It has 44 branches across Kuwait, its Web site says.
Estimated Losses
While the company declined to disclose the size of its currency losses, they may have been as much as 200 million dinars ($746 million), according to Ibrahim Dabdoub, chief executive officer of National Bank of Kuwait SAK, the country’s biggest bank by assets, said yesterday.
Kuwait’s benchmark share index fell 2.2 percent to 9,889.3 today, extending losses for the year to 22 percent. The credit crisis has also resulted in a collapse of share prices in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia’s benchmark share index falling 52 percent this year and Dubai’s by 51 percent, as the global meltdown battered local sentiment as well.
Falling share prices in the Middle East have forced banks to write down the value of their investments. Emirates NBD PJSC, the U.A.E.’s biggest bank by assets, said Oct. 22 it will take 273 million dirhams of writedown in the third quarter, while third- ranked Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank PJSC took a 208 million dirham loss for the same period.
Frightened
Khalid Al-Matrook, a 33-year-old civil engineer, was among customers standing outside Gulf Bank’s head office in Kuwait City today. He said he was frightened by yesterday’s news of the currency defaults.
“I am withdrawing my 12,000 dinars now and I am not going to spend one penny of it,” said Al Matrook, sipping coffee outside the bank building. “I am going to deposit it in NBK (the National Bank of Kuwait) or Commercial Bank.”
About 40 stock traders in Kuwait marched from the Kuwait Exchange to the Seif Palace, where the cabinet sits. They are demanding that Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al- Sabah act to halt the decline in share prices in the country, stock trader Mohammed al-Dosari said today in an interview.
“I used to have 400,000 dinars to trade with, and now I only have 20,000 dinars,” said al-Dosari. “This is a big national disaster. We don’t want the government to make the market go up, we just want to stop this panic.”
“Everything is operating as normal,” said al-Thunayan. “The central bank is giving us support on all fronts,” he said, adding that none of the board has resigned.
Investigation
Governments around the world have moved to shore up banks weakened by the financial crisis. The U.S. government plans to spend $125 billion out of $700 billion approved by Congress to buy shares of nine of the largest U.S. banks. France said Oct. 20 it will provide BNP Paribas SA, Societe Generale SA and four other French banks with 10.5 billion euros ($14 billion).
Gulf Bank’s losses from derivatives trading is being investigated by the central bank and will be announced when the probe is completed, said Abdul Majeed al-Shatti, head of the Kuwait Banks Federation told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV today.
Finance companies worldwide have taken $681 billion of losses and writedowns following the collapse of the U.S. subprime- mortgage market.
Zionist Propaganda, Setting Stage For Next Aggression “Hamas Preparing For Strategic Terror Attack”
LIKE THE US AIR RAID ON SYRIA, MORE ZIONIST CAMPAIGNING FOR MCCAIN!
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Hamas Preparing For Strategic Terror Attack
Jerusalem – Israeli intelligence sources say Gaza’s ruling Hamas faction is preparing to carry out a large-scale strategic terror attack inside Israel.
In the assessment of security sources, the terror attack would mainly aim to kidnap a soldier or soldiers in order to heighten the pressure on Israel to carry out a prisoner exchange deal, in light of the deadlock in the negotiations to free Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Cpl. Gilad Shalit. He has been held captive by Hamas in Gaza since 2006.
Israel likewise is preparing to counteract a terrorist infiltration into a community and kidnapping civilians into the Gaza Strip, dead or alive.
Within the monitoring of Hamas’ actions, it has been determined that has smuggled motorcycles into Gaza from Egypt, using tunnels. The IDF has observed intensive training being conducted by a group of motorcycle riders in the southern Gaza Strip.
Using motorcycles in terror attacks is taken directly from Hezbollah’s military doctrine. In the past, it has carried out a series of terror attacks and assassinations using motorcycle riders and bombs.
At the same time, Israeli intelligence sources say Hamas has prepared several dozen car bombs that are supposed to serve for breaching fences or exploding against IDF outposts along the Gaza border.
In recent months, Israeli security sources report, 100s of tons of standard-issue explosives and fertilizer for manufacturing explosives have been smuggled into the Gaza Strip, all in order to arm the car bombs.
As part of the preparations in the central Gaza Strip, Hamas’ Nusseirat battalion carried out a simulation of kidnapping an Israeli soldier, in which about 400 soldiers of the battalion participated.
One scenario exercise included the kidnapping of a soldier, carrying out the activity inside the Gaza Strip, near the fence separating it from Israel. Another scenario included breaching the border fence and kidnapping soldiers from a vehicle moving on the road on the Israeli side of the border.
Apparently, in recent weeks Hamas has built huts near the border and placed lookouts in them. Some of the huts are believed to be intended to conceal the digging of tunnels from Gaza into Israeli territory for the purpose of transferring terrorists or bringing in explosives to blow up the tunnels.
IDF lookouts report intensive intelligence gathering being carried out by Hamas about the IDF activity along the border with Gaza by day and night. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad militiamen are believed to be studying the IDF’s observation equipment and examining its weaknesses.
It is believed they are examining, for example, how to circumvent the observation equipment by making quick dashes toward the fence in daylight hours, placing a bomb next to the fence without the lookouts having a chance to observe them.
They are also examining the IDF’s response time and its ability to identify these bombs.
The IDF has also identified visits by senior members of the Hamas’ military wing in the border area, including people who would not dare approach the border prior to the tahdia (quieting in Arabic).
Hamas’ preparations for carrying out a strategic terror attack correspond with the report that the Israel’s General Security Services arrested Jamal Abu Dawaba, a member of the organization’s military wing from Rafah.
He was arrested about a month ago with the bedouin who accompanied him. It appears that he was sent by senior figures in the Hamas military wing through the tunnels from Gaza to Sinai, and from there into Israeli territory, with the aim of kidnapping a soldier under the guise of carrying out a drug deal. He planned to drug the kidnapped soldier and bring him into the Gaza Strip through a tunnel in Rafah.
The IDF’s Southern Command plans to cope with the threat by raising the level of alert, changing the patterns of activity and changing the rules of engagement.
David Bedein can be reached at bedein@thebulletin.us. His Web site is http://www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com
‘Sub rosa SOFA brings darkness to Iraq’
‘Sub rosa SOFA brings darkness to Iraq’
Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:13:07 GMT
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The controversial US-Iraq security agreement includes ‘some secret provisions’, which would flagrantly violate Iraq’s sovereignty.
Secret provisions have been incorporated in the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which would violate Iraq’s sovereignty in a more direct manner than the provisions disclosed by the Iraqi media, the Saudi daily Okaz reported on Sunday, citing “informed political sources”.
According to the report, although “the secret provisions” would have more adverse consequences for Iraq in terms of the country’s sovereignty and independence, a majority of Iraqi lawmakers have been kept entirely unaware of them.
Based on those provisions, the US would be granted the permission to build military bases, camps and prisons inside Iraq. The scope of the immunity from legal prosecution for the US forces–the most controversial provision of SOFA– would also be extended to include all US security, military and civilian firms as well as the US army’s contractors.
Under the terms of SOFA, Iraqi officials would be prohibited from meddling in operations carried out by US forces or limiting their authority. The US would also be allowed to attack any country, which “represents a security threat to Iraq” from the country’s soil.
After signing the deal, Baghdad would be obliged to ask for Washington’s approval before concluding any regional or international agreements with third countries.
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According to the Okaz report, SOFA would bring the Iraqi key ministries of defense and interior under US control for 10 years to facilitate “the training of the Iraqi forces.”
The Saudi newspaper also claimed that under the secret provisions, no timetable would be set for the withdrawal of US troops form Iraq and any pull-out would depend on several conditions.
The conditions for any US withdrawal include the readiness of Iraqi forces, the success in fighting terrorism, the removal of “the neighboring countries’ security threats”, national reconciliation and a consensus among all Iraqi political groups on the issue. Washington would be entitled to stay in Iraq, if even one of those conditions were not fulfilled.
Based on those SOFA provisions which have made public, the US forces must leave the war-torn country by early 2011 without any preconditions.
The report also ruled out the possibility that the US and Iraq would reach an agreement before the term of US President George W. Bush in office ends.
The failure to sign the deal, according to the daily, should be considered as a setback for the Bush administration which is seeking to play the card of SOFA to strengthen the position of the Republican Party before the upcoming US presidential elections.
Al Jazeera Report On US Attack In Syria
Bretton Woods II. The Final Solution ?
On November 15th the Group of the 20 largest economic nations will sit down at the National Building Museum in Washington.This marks a momentous event as world leaders come together and try and come up with a solution to the current Global Financial Meltdown.The really interesting aspect about this one will be exactly what each will be bringing to the table.
Each of the 20 nations have already enacted unilateral legislation and protectionist measures in a probably vain attempt to save their own respective asses. Currencies are down the river along with Banking and Industry so what exactly will be the cures that will come out of all this ? Pardon me if I seem a bit cynical, but my prognosis for this meeting is that there will be no cures for the people who are unemployed and / or homeless, starving, desperate, bankrupt. If anyone is to be saved it will be the same institutions that have been the beneficiaries so far in this, the greatest redistribution of wealth in World History. Banks will go away happy, secure in the knowledge that their bonuses have already been sent offshore, Presidents will go away happy as they dupe their public in to thinking that they have found the cancer and successfully operated on it . This will be a consolidation of power in to the hands of the Few. The cure will probably be presented in Newspeak that there are hard times ahead but our Governments are behind us all the way. We will be told that we can have it all back to the unsustainable way it was before but we will have to make sacrifices, except for the Financial Bosses of course. There might even be a new currency proposed. What would that do ? Change the lipstick on the Pig, who is still carrying a sack of IOU’s on his back.
This begs the question: How is all the Debt between the member countries going to be addressed. A currency manipulation can still restore some sort of seeming order in this chaos but only for balance sheets and not the Real Economy. The IMF and the U.S. can print money until they are blue in the face but that’s not wealth, it’s just paper. Once it’s in the real economy it can only lead to hyperinflation. Expect a so far unsurpassed sleight of hand to address this. I reckon we have only seen the beginning of the sheer nonsense we have been subjected to by the likes of Paulson, Bernanke and the various heads of countries who have never seen the problem for what it was. Guys, it’s not just the fact that you’re Banking buddies blew it and had to sell one of their yachts; it’s the fact that your friends, along with yourselves, have robbed the world of the wealth it had and put it in to your own pockets. It really is time to hold these crooks accountable. Bretton Woods 2 would be more useful as Nuremberg 2 but with the losers, not the Victors, behind the judges’ bench.
U.S. threatens to halt services to Iraq without troop accord
EITHER SIGN SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement), OR LOSE LIMITED ELECTRIC AND WATER WE HAVE ALLOWED YOU.
U.S. threatens to halt services to Iraq without
troop accord
By Roy Gutman and Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD _ The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn’t agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.
Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.
In addition to halting all military actions, U.S. forces would cease activities that support Iraq’s economy, educational sector and other areas _ “everything” _ said Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s Sunni Muslim vice president. “I didn’t know the Americans are rendering such wide-scale services.”
Hashimi said that Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, listed “tens” of areas of potential cutoffs in a three-page letter, and he said the implied threat caught Iraqi leaders by surprise.
“It was really shocking for us,” he said. “Many people are looking to this attitude as a matter of blackmailing.”
Odierno had no comment Sunday, but U.S. Embassy officials told McClatchy that a lengthy list of the sort Hashimi described has been passed to the Iraqi government. Among the services the U.S. provides are protection of Iraq’s principal borders, of its oil exports and other shipping through the Shatt al Arab into the Persian Gulf and all air traffic control over Iraq.
The status of forces agreement, which calls for a final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, was supposed to resolve a number of contentious issues between the two countries, but its completion 10 days ago has instead provoked a political crisis within Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government and between Iraq and the United States.
Fearing a major battle in the Iraqi parliament, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki solicited proposed amendments from his cabinet and called a meeting to review them Sunday afternoon.
However, the two main Shiite parties, Maliki’s Dawa party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, were unable to produce their full lists of demands, and he postponed the meeting until Tuesday, other cabinet members said.
Hashimi said that Iran, a longtime backer of both parties, is pressuring Iraq’s leaders not to accept the agreement.
The dispute “is real and factual. The government is not manipulating this dispute,” Hashimi said. He said he hadn’t yet seen the objections to the accord, even those from his own Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.
Political party heads, including Hashimi, say that Maliki is responsible for the agreement, but Maliki has been unwilling to back the accord unless his Shiite coalition and other party members join him to take the political heat.
An additional complication is the decision of Hashimi’s Iraqi Islamic party to suspend all “official communication” with U.S. military and civilian officials until it receives an explanation and an apology following a joint U.S.-Iraqi military raid against party backers in Anbar province in which one man was killed.
It’s unclear what will happen when the Iraqi cabinet offers a list of proposed changes and Maliki winnows them down to proposed amendments.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, “I don’t think you slam the door shut” on amendments, but Hashimi said the U.S. is “adamant in saying, ‘We close the door, we are not accepting any sort of amendment.’ “
He said that if the United States met Iraq halfway and accepted amendments to the controversial articles of the accord, it would make it “rather easy” to submit the agreement to the parliament.
The alternative to a new agreement governing U.S. forces, an Iraqi request to the U.N. Security Council to extend the U.N. mandate, which now expires on Dec. 31, is also highly contentious.
One of the biggest concessions Iraq won from Washington in the negotiations over the forces accord was a stipulation that private contractors such as Blackwater that have been accused of killing Iraqi civilians would become subject to Iraqi law.
Immunity from prosecution for private contractors _ and for all official U.S. entities _ under Iraqi law was promulgated by the U.S. occupation government in June 2004, and ending that order is the subject of another confrontation between Iraq and the United States, Hashimi said. He said the United States insists that it would reject any Iraqi request to change the mandate.
Ironically, Iraqi politicians of practically every stripe agree that the proposed agreement would be a major advance toward restoring Iraq’s full sovereignty and a vast improvement over the initial U.S. proposal made last spring.
He credited President Bush with changing the U.S. position as a result of twice-weekly conference calls with Maliki.
RAW and Afghan Agency Funding Pakistan Terrorism
RAW and Afghan Agency Funding Pakistan Terrorism |
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| Written by http://www.daily.pk |
| Sunday, 26 October 2008 15:59 |
| Pakistani investigators have made a major breakthrough and uncovered several leads that link terrorists and criminals inside Pakistan to the Indian intelligence and the secret service of Hamid Karzai. An Indian explosives expert is leading groups of terrorists inside Pakistan. The recruited suicide bombers have been brainwashed to believe they are on a religious duty. Others are plain criminals. The new information confirms the suspicions that the so-called ‘Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan’ is heavily infiltrated by foreign spy agencies in Afghanistan and has little to do with the Afghan Taliban.
Three arrested members of a militant gang especially deputed by the so-called ‘Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan’ have disclosed that RAW has been funding suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan and that the Indian agency has funneled PKR 680 million through its contacts in the NDS, the Afghan secret agency. The gang of three persons has brazenly admitted that they belong to a group of persons who had been deputed to ‘destabilize democratic Pakistan’ in order to create a confrontation with the Pakistani military. They were told to carry out their activities under the pretext of ‘enforcement of Shariah’ in the country. Operators of the Federal Investigations Agency [FIA], a Pakistani intelligence agency, working beyond the call of their duty, came into contact with a source ready for a tip-off against a reward. The tip-off led to the arrest of Khurram Ishtiaq, Ghulam Mustafa and Shamim. The persons had been working under Qari Hussain, second-in-command to Baitullah Mehsud. All of the three had been arrested on Aug. 13, 2008, while they were on the prowl for a target. The militants had been arrested ‘red-handed’ as they possessed complete suicide kits, including two jackets and 70 kilogram of explosives and detonators. The accused were hardened militants and took a lot of time to break and make confessions. They revealed that Qari Hussain had been working to help three adjutants—Farukh Usman alias Shahjee, Tayyab alias Baba; Ustad, the trainer to destabilize the elected government. Qari Hussain, the leader, prepares suicide bombers and dispatches them throughout Pakistan. He also manages funds for the splinter groups from RAW which works in collusion with the Afghan intelligence agency NDS. Farukh Usman works as Qari’s deputy and runs the sub-setup to carry out attacks in Lahore and Punjab in general. He was the mastermind of suicide attacks on the FIA building, Naval War College, Model Town, Lahore High Court and PAF bus in Sargodha, investigations have revealed. Tayyab alias Baba mainly deals with Rawalpindi/Islamabad. He was the man behind blasts at Aabpara Market and Marriott Hotel. The third person known only as Ustad is an expert at making bombs. He is said to be of Indian origin and he ‘works with a vengeance’. He is the man who leads suicide bombers to the marked site of the blast. The investigation revealed that there are two sub-teams: three persons of one team work under Ustad. Two of the arrested persons—Shahmim Alam alias Sohail alias Kashif alias Uncle and Khurram Ishtiaq alias Ibrahim—have been active members of the TTP and worked under direct guidance of Ustad. Shamim was the facilitator. His task was to distribute funds to suicide bombers at the behest of Qari Hussain and Tayyab alias Baba. Being educated and a well-dressed civilian-look-alike, he was assigned another important job of providing ‘reconnaissance of the target area’. He possesses the canny ability of mixing up with urbanites. Khurram Ishtiaq alias Ibrahim is a well-trained militant. His job is to harbor suicide bombers at a secret venue until they are led to the area of operation to carry out the job. The third person of this setup, Sajid, is a resident of Ali Khel, Waziristan. It is not certain whether his services were ‘utilized’ and in what way this was done. Another team which works under Farrukh Usman alias Shahjee includes Bablu, Rehan, Ghulam Mustafa alias Asif (the third arrested person) and Abdul Rahim. Bablu’s assignment is to provide explosives at the nick of time when the suicide bombers have been finally prepared to perform the ‘sacred feat’. Ghulam Mustafa and Abdul Rahim, both diehard terrorists, serve as guards in the rear ensure that none of perpetrators develop cold feet at the last minute and try to escape. In that case, there is only one choice left and that too leads the would-be perpetrator to heavens. Former boss of the FIA, Tariq Lodhi, had recommended a reward and commendation for the team that arrested these terrorists. But sources say the FIA new chief, Shoaib Suddle, turned it down on the grounds that agency operators just did their job and no reward should be given for performing a duty. The team members disclosed that they had arrested two prime targets during the government of former President Pervez Musharraf and both had a head money of $5 million each but the reward money was shared by two other premier spy agencies instead of passing some of the reward money to the individuals who had arrested them on their own initiative. The team has long been working on the militants but they got the culprits apprehended through a middleman who was ready to divulge more but “only if he was rewarded for the catch.” Afghan Money Helping Terrorists, Zardari Tells Boucher On Oct. 19, President Asif Ali Zardari met U.S. assistant undersecretary of state Richard Boucher and told him that terrorists in the tribal areas of Pakistan are being funded from Afghanistan and other countries. Zardari told Richard Boucher that the money provided by Afghan drug traffickers was being used in terror related incidents in Pakistan. Drug smuggling through Pakistan had been eliminated, he said, adding these smugglers were now funding terrorists for activities in the country. “The responsibility now lies with the U.S. to take notice and initiate action against these smugglers so that terrorist networks in Pakistan can be dismantled,” he stressed. Pakistan has suffered more than any other country in the war on terror in terms of loss of lives and property, he noted. All the resources are being utilised to crush terrorists, he said. He urged the U.S. to take steps to end terrorists’ infiltration from the Afghan side to the Pakistan tribal areas. It is not clear how Mr. Boucher responded to the charge that terrorism inside Pakistan is being supported from a U.S.-occupied Afghanistan. |
The Grand Merger!
The Grand Merger!
By Rev. Richard Skaff
October 25, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse“Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.” Michael Mukasey, US Attorney General saying former justice Department staffers won’t be criminally prosecuted for politicizing hiring practices.
In the last forty years the boundaries between government and corporation have been slowly eroding. However, in the last eight years and during the reign George W. Bush, the process has accelerated tenfold and was taken into new levels that have never been seen in the history of this nation.
In addition, this administration has successfully and systematically dismantled the bill of rights, our civil liberties, as well as our financial, personal and national sovereignty.
While George W. Bush was talking about the US as a unilateral superpower, he was behind the scenes dismantling this superpower and rendering it into a broke, weak and ailing tiger that will be forced to join the new world order instead of being the world order.
Lawlessness in government has become the rule of the land. Loyalty to the party superseded the loyalty to the country, which is a déjà vu phenomenon in the archives of fascism. The stench of our political sewage system has contaminated our nation and the world. Mendacity became truth, and manipulation became intelligence and virtue.
Macchiavellian politics has reached new height of deception, corruption, and propaganda. Our supreme court became politicized with unscrupulous appointees who were co-opted to implement the new laws for the new world order. Our intelligence agencies have been methodically politicized and corrupted for many years to a point of no return. Cash became GOD!
Ralph McGeehee a 25 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency enlightened us with this following paragraph from his 1983 book “Deadly Deceits,” which edifies a familiar pattern of deception that we have witnessed but we never understood. He stated the following about the CIA:
“The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the president, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering “communist” weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the “intelligence” it feeds to policymakers.
Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of the whole cloth “intelligence” to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers leak this “intelligence” to the media to deceive us all and gain our support.” [1].
The resurrection of governmental intervention, and the rise of corporate socialism.
Lawlessness in government and in capitalism combined with bogus wars based on fake intelligence, and a colossal disinformation campaign have led our nation into this current financial abyss. Whether this crisis is contrived or not, the public will suffer the consequences.
Will people learn from their mistakes and rise up in revolt to throw out their elected officials. Probably not! The masses always prefer wily and brutal leaders who will lead them into the Promised Land, will act on their behalf, and will do the thinking for them. Critical thinking is a frightening phenomenon, because with it comes decision making, action and responsibility. However, the cost for this acquiescence is great and long lasting, resulting in a lifetime of serfdom.
The critical questions to ask next are the following:
Has the current financial crisis achieved its goal of consolidating further the wealth in the hands of the few, and succeeded in creating the neo-super financial corporations that extend their global tentacles worldwide, in order to exploit, indebt, impoverish and suffocate the life out of every nation?
Was this crisis also designed to cause the final merger of the new hybrid beasts of the half politician-intelligence operative and the half CEO who will operate the super-corporation?
Does this financial meltdown target the final consolidation of government and corporation creating a new era of corporate socialism that will dominate the world for the years to come?
Did the deliberate assassination of the dollar by our leaders will help create a novel currency that will connect the world closer than ever, and will befit the new order?
On November 15, 2008 George W. Bush will be hosting a major economic summit in Washington, which will mark the renewal of a Bretton Woods like system that will attempt to rectify the power of the United States as a leader for the new world global monetary affairs, or will reduce it to a regular player in a new global establishment.
The summit will allegedly set up a new system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulate the international monetary system, and determining a new currency as the neo-reserve currency of the world. This new currency might replace the hyperinflated and ailing dollar that was deliberately murdered by the moles in the Bush administration through financing of illegitimate wars and profligate spending.
The economic summit will include many world leaders with a special invitation to China and India to help the Anglo-American establishment resolve the financial crisis they created with unscrupulous accounting practices, disinformation to the public, gambling with other people’s money, cheating, lying, lawlessness, unaccountability, resulting in a capitalist system that has gone awry.
By Rev. Richard Skaff, Journalist and author of “The Human Manifesto.”
References:
1. R. W. McGeehee-1983. Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA.
Sheridan Square publications Inc. N.Y. New York, 10013
2. Associated Press, October 22, 2008. World leaders to meet on economy in Washington
How to Live in Your Car
How to Live in Your Car
Living in a car isn’t something that anyone would recommend. However, when you get laid off, your emergency fund runs out, your home is foreclosed (or you get an eviction notice) and there’s nobody to help, living in your car might be the only choice, especially if you don’t feel safe at a local shelter. Unfortunately, in many places, sleeping in your car is not only frowned upon, but also illegal. Here’s how to get by until something better comes along.
Remember, you are not alone and you have a vehicle.
[edit] Steps
- Find a safe and inconspicuous place to park. First, check to see if there are any organizations in your area (or a nearby area) that designates parking lots specifically for people in situations like yours; it’s not only legal, but the organization might screen the people who use the lot, or even designate a women-only lot.[1] If there are no such lots available, and you live in a city, look for streets with no sidewalks, no overlooking windows, and adjacent to woods; the area should be sparse enough to avoid nosy onlookers but populated enough that the car does not stand out.[2] Parking lots of big-box retailers (especially those that are open 24 hours and have restrooms, such as Wal-mart) are great to clean up in and have security. As long as you spend a couple of dollars there and don’t park in one place too often.
- Camp sites are another option, although they usually have time limits and are almost as expensive as a hotel room. Some offer a shower for a nominal fee.
- National Forests have some free camping with a limit of 14 days.
- If there’s no restroom, having a creek nearby helps for rinsing purposes. Know how to safely defecate outdoors and make a poop tube.
- Five gallon bucket with a lid and lye in for odor.
- Once you find a spot, try to arrive late at night, and leave before 7am. This will draw as little attention as possible to yourself.
- If you can establish rapport with the manager of a retail store or restaurant, they may not give you problems about staying overnight, especially if they see your presence as a form of overnight security.[3]
- A free hospital parking lot is another option. If approached by a guard, you can say that you’re waiting to visit a sick relative.[4]
- Find a place to shower. The most logical place is a gym. This will help you keep your sanity and give you a purpose to your morning. Don’t settle for the first gym you find. If you look around, you may find nearly deserted gyms in which you can shower and fully clean yourself without embarrassment.
- The next best choice is to check into a cheap motel or hostel once or twice a week and clean up thoroughly there (if you can afford it).
- Public pools tend to have showers, depending on whether they have private stalls or are set up gang style, they may provide a discrete place to shower.
- At a truck stop, you can ask around for a shower coupon, if you feel safe allowing people to know that you’re without a place to stay. Truck stops are good to sleep at too.
- Some toll roads, especially state turnpikes, have large rest areas with free showers for truckers. Since these are usually open 24 hours, these plazas are also good places to sleep.
- Rest areas on National highways are good for a few hours and most have security.
- Keep an eye out for community college athletic field houses– they don’t always check IDs, and can be a good free shower option.
- Be discreet. Keeping your situation under wraps minimizes the embarrassment and helps avoid becoming a target for police officers and criminals alike.
- Rotate among several parking locations to avoid getting noticed.
- When you move around in the parked car, move slowly to avoid rocking the car.
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Consider using a car cover. Not only will it maintain privacy (especially since condensation on the windows will otherwise make it obvious that you’re in there) but it will also keep the car warmer during winter. This is not a viable option, however, when it’s hot outside.
- When it’s sunny in the daytime, use a sunshade for the windshield.
- Keep the windows cracked open while you sleep, not wide enough for someone to reach in, but enough to allow fresh air and reduce condensation on the windows.
- Get the things you’ll need. The basic essentials for living in a car are a blanket, a pillow, and a mattress or some other padding. Due to the angles involved in the seating setup, you may develop dull back pain from the cramped quarters. Should this happen, be sure to have pain medication on hand. Once you have your sleeping gear, you’ll want a blanket to place over the back seat, and draped over the two front seats. This will block light and people’s views.
- Find alternate ways of generating electricity. A cigarette lighter converter is one option. These are useful for powering low consuming devices (100 watts), but if you plan on using your vehicle for cooking, then you’ll need to draw power more directly from your battery or you’ll blow the fuse. You will also need a much more expensive converter, and need to idle the vehicle while drawing this power. An alternative is to use gas, but do not use this inside the vehicle for safety reasons.
- Have a place to store items that is portable. Get bags you can fill with your soaps, clothes, cell phone, etc. Keeping things in order will save you a lot of hassle. A vehicle may seem like a small space, but losing things can be extremely easy. Also, keeping things neat inside the car will draw less attention from people passing by who happen to look in the windows. Hiding your bedding might be a good idea (consider the trunk). There’s not a lot of extra room in a vehicle for a week’s worth of clothes, so consider finding a hiding place to keep them. The laundromat is great, but don’t waste a load by throwing in too much, or not diluting the soap first. When you’re not in the car, leave windows cracked and dryer sheets scattered about to keep the interior smelling decent. Wash your sheets once a month, or else you risk smelling like a homeless person, which will blow your cover and get you treated like a homeless person.
- Keep dirty clothes separate in plastic bags so they do not smell up all your clothing.
- Evaluate your food options. Peanut butter, tuna and crackers are great staples. Have a box for food so it does not get smashed. Gallons of water are a necessity for a lot of things.They will be limited by the lack of refrigeration. Fast food is expensive when you’re living off of it. With old fashioned (large flake) rolled oats, powdered milk, bottled water, plastic cups, and chocolate protein powder, you can ensure that you always have a nutritious snack to fall back on.[5]
- Before you start living in your car, use your permanent address to:
- Rent a P.O. Box or a Private Mail Box (PMB). Although PMBs tend to be more expensive, you can receive packages at them and some services will let you use a address format which makes it appear to be an apartment, which is useful for when someone requires a physical address.
- Sign up for a gym membership. (This however, can be expensive, and if your resources are limited, you may find it to be a drain.)
- Renew any paperwork that will require an address to process soon.
- Put valuables in a safe deposit box at a bank.
- If you have friends or family who can’t (or refuse to) help you with your living situation (or you refuse to ask them for help) think about at least asking them if you can use their address.
- Stay positive. Keep reminding yourself that the situation is only temporary. Spend each day hitting the pavement and looking for jobs. Use the local library and bookstore not only to search for jobs, but also to become more knowledgeable in ways that will help you get through this and find a job. Most importantly, talk to people like social workers and religious organization workers who will sympathize and understand, and try to help.
[edit] Tips
- If your car has the capacity, install a hanging bar. This will provide a bit more storage space as well as keep clothes wrinkle-free for job interviews, etc.
- Tint your windows for privacy, tinting works better than barriers(blankets etc.) because it enables you to see out while others cannot see in, this could be helpful when trying to leave unnoticed. Barriers also attract attention and advertise what you are doing, tinted windows are very common on many cars.
- If you wear contact lenses you will need a disinfectant for your hands. Better yet, wear glasses.
- Get an automobile association membership. This will help you if you drain your battery, or break down.
- Make sure you have vehicle documentation and insurance. Without it, your problems will increase.
- Personal safety should always be your number one priority. A knife used for food can be used as a weapon so can a tire iron used to change your tire.You may want to learn your state’s gun laws and purchase a handgun or other firearm if you do not already own one. Criminals seek out people who appear vulnerable, or travel alone. Sometimes, the sound of a cocked gun will be sufficient enough to deter a potential mugger. Be aware that having a gun in the car carries its risks. If you are startled awake and point the gun at the wrong person (i.e. a cop tapping on the window), you can wind up being shot yourself.
- If you are spending the night in your car and you have been drinking alcohol, do not have the keys in the ignition, If it is winter and you need to run the car for heat, move over to the passenger or back seat.
- The garbage truck or other neighborhood noises can wake you up. Consider earplugs.
- Pay attention to your instincts. If a parking spot feels weird for any reason, find yourself a new one.
- If you are on food stamps, and can’t afford deodorant or car deorderizer, baking soda is really good substitute that Food Stamps can buy. Also cheap dollar store hydrogen peroxide along with baking soda, are a phenomenal toothpaste. If for some reason you cannot bath for a day or two, baking soda will make your hair clean and grease free.
- Apply for HUD Housing in remote areas of the country where there is no waiting list.
[edit] Warnings
- Never sleep in the driver seat if you can avoid it. Your body will quickly associate that seat with sleeping, creating risks when you are driving – especially when you’re tired. Recline the passenger seat or lie down in the back if there is room.
- If you are sleeping in the car on a regular basis, do as few other things in the car as possible. Don’t eat, read, or anything else that will cause you to spend more time than necessary in the car. The more time you spend in it, the more smells will accumulate.
- If you use a car cover, never run the car or smoke while it is on. You could easily suffocate or get carbon monoxide poisoning. Also, do not use it on a warm day without adequate ventilation.
- Be careful who you tell about your living in a car. If they’re not likely to provide assistance, then don’t bother, because you might end up endangering yourself.
- Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t even bring any alcohol into your car. If cops find you with alcohol in your blood or in your car, you could get in serious trouble, even if you’re not driving at the time.
[edit] Things You’ll Need
- Car with insurance and license
- Blankets and pillows
- Towels and wash cloths
- Water
- Gas
- Food
- Gym membership (you will stay clean and work off stress)
- Automobile association membership (if your car insurance doesn’t include Roadside Assistance)
[edit] Sources and Citations
- ↑ http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/05/19/homeless.mom/index.html
- ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/us/02cars.html
- ↑ http://www.pitch.com/2008-09-04/news/joco-s-hobos-when-a-working-man-doesn-t-have-a-home-in-johnson-county-a-wal-mart-parking-lot-is-the-next-best-thing/2
- ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/us/02cars.html
- ↑ live-frugal.blogspot.com/2008/02/stealth-living.html
Giving Ghostwriting a Whole New Meaning
Giving Ghostwriting a Whole New Meaning
Adam Pearlman
Bin Laden to come up with book on al-Qaeda
~the article linked to above comes from GEO (click on their name to learn more about their game)
This new book should help clear up some of those silly rumours that OBL is very likely dead or in secret captivity and that al-Qaeda doesn’t really exist (except as a CIA asset, recruiting and using patsies), while confirming once and for all that religious Muslims really are responsible for 9/11. I wonder who the “young man with the [vague] Middle Eastern background” is who is ‘helping’ him write it and will translate it into English afterward. Surely not Adam Gadahn Pearlman! 
Since the article, or its source, doesn’t actually name the “young man”, I hope you will forgive my suspicious frame of mind and fruitless speculations.
And, I wonder, who will distribute it and who will get the proceeds from sales of this upcoming al Qaeda novel, I mean biography? Intelcenter? Or will it be a free pdf online? Just wondering.
Whose “influence apparent in groups in Pakistan”?
Whose “influence apparent in
groups in Pakistan”?
“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.” ~Sir Walter ScottHere we go again, trying to bring a news report from the realm of clouded war-mongering propaganda to on the ground reality, as much as possible. In bold print are snips from the article as originally written, followed by how we think it should be read (not in bold print):
When first we practice to deceive.” ~Sir Walter ScottHere we go again, trying to bring a news report from the realm of clouded war-mongering propaganda to on the ground reality, as much as possible. In bold print are snips from the article as originally written, followed by how we think it should be read (not in bold print):
Almost three years ago, Sajjad Khan used to buy supplies for the Pakistani Taliban with U.S. dollars that he says came from al-Qaida.
>…Sajjad Khan used to buy supplies for the Pakistani Taliban, he says, with U.S. drug money that came from the CIA.
Al-Qaida’s influence runs like a thread through the myriad of militant groups on the Pakistani border — it ties the groups together, yet is often hard to discern. The hidden nature of al-Qaida’s presence makes it harder for the U.S. and Pakistan to fight, especially when the two countries disagree on which groups pose the greatest threat.
>The CIA’s influence runs like a thread through the myriad of militant groups on the Pakistani border, yet is often hard to discern. The hidden nature of the CIA’s presence makes it harder for ordinary Pakistani’s to protect themselves, especially when they disagree on which groups pose the greatest threat–the CIA, RAW, Mossad or sell-outs in their own government and military–and who is or is not being influenced by them.
“Al-Qaida is strictly behind the scenes — as a force multiplier, providing training, expertise both in combat arms and propaganda,” says Bruce Hoffman, terrorism expert at Georgetown University in Washington.
>”The CIA is strictly behind the scenes–as a force multiplier, providing training, expertise both in combat arms and propaganda,” should have said Bruce Hoffman, terrorism propaganda expert at Georgetown University in Washington.re wildly disparate and their relationships increasingly complex.
>See beginning quote from Sir Walter Scott: “Oh what a tangled web we weave…”
>….Experts say some groups are virtually fronts for the CIA, but others have a tenuous relationship that might be limited to the ideology of self-defense.
Al-Qaida’s training is showing up in increasingly audacious suicide bombings and more sophisticated attacks within Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the Taliban-led insurgency is claiming more U.S. lives almost by the day.
>CIA’s Mossad-influenced training is showing up in increasingly audacious suicide bombings that were unheard of here before and more sophisticated attacks within Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the American-led invasion is claiming more innocent lives almost by the hour.
Now, please consider carefully these questions every time you hear about another suicide bombing in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine:
Why are suicide bombings publicized [as such] before any proof is brought by investigation? If the purpose of the suicide bomber is to end the occupation of his country and to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society why are the targets so disparate and scattered, without a clear relation to the occupation?”
Then consider the very real probability that the “Islamist” suicide bomber concept is, and was originally, a fabrication by those attacking Muslim populations and countries, used to demonize Islam and make Muslims appear unreasoning, fanatical and murderous to one audience, while simultaneously being promoted as heroic to another audience, thus drawing in misguided volunteers. Consider that this is used to shift blame and help justify ongoing war and occupation.
Always look to see who benefits most and who is in the best position to carry out attacks, especially in sensitive areas that are very well guarded and extremely difficult, if not impossible, for those to whom blame is immediately assigned (without immediate proof) to have accessed.
They range from the tribal homegrown Taliban to an Afghan father-and-son team where the father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, once visited the White House and met U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Experts say some groups are virtually fronts for al-Qaida, but others have a tenuous relationship that might be limited to ideology.
Syria condemns ‘US village raid’
more about “BBC NEWS | Middle East | Syria condem…“, posted with vodpod
Eight die in US attack inside Syria
Eight die in US attack inside Syria
Posted: 27 October 2008 0321 hrs
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DAMASCUS: American helicopter-borne troops launched an assault on Sunday on a building in a Syrian border village with Iraq, killing eight civilians, official Syrian media reported.
The government has summoned the official US and Iraqi representatives to protest, state television and the official SANA news agency added.
“Four American helicopters violated Syrian airspace around 16:45 local time (1345 GMT) on Sunday. They penetrated eight kilometres into Syria,” the official media said.
“American soldiers” who had emerged from helicopters “attacked a civilian building under construction and fired at workmen inside, causing eight deaths,” the reports said.
“The helicopters then left Syrian territory towards Iraqi territory,” SANA said.
The news agency said one person was wounded in the attack on the village of Al-Sukkiraya, around 550 kilometres northeast of the capital in the Abu Kamal area.
Earlier, the private television channel al-Dunia said nine civilians died in the attack.
Syria summoned the US and Iraqi envoys to Damascus to protest against what it called a US military attack and to demand that Iraq prevent US forces from “launching aggression against Syria” from its territory, the official media said.
“We are in the process of investigating this” reported attack, Sergeant Brooke Murphy, a US military spokeswoman, told AFP in Baghdad.
The Iraqi defence ministry refused to comment, on the grounds the incident took place on Syrian territory.
US commanders say Syria is the main transit point for foreign jihadists crossing into Iraq. Washington has blamed Damascus for turning a blind eye to the problem.
On October 16 Iraqi forces arrested seven Syrian “terrorist” suspects at a checkpoint near the city of Baquba, a hub of Al-Qaeda fighters, the Baghdad defence ministry said.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani told US President George W. Bush last month that Iran and Syria – long targets of US blame over the deadly unrest in Iraq – no longer pose a problem.
Iraqi officials have also said that Syria has been increasing border security.
Syria’s first ambassador to Iraq in 26 years took up his post in Baghdad this month, marking the official end of more than two decades of icy relations.
On September 28 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice confirmed she had met her Syrian counterpart, Walid Muallem, to discuss Middle East peace efforts despite renewed criticism from Washington over Syrian policies.
Syrian and US diplomats said the talks touched on Iraq, Lebanon and Middle East peace negotiations.
It was Rice’s second meeting with Muallem since November 2007 when they held talks on the sidelines of a conference on Iraq. The two first met in May last year during another gathering on Iraq.
Their talks came after US President George W. Bush slammed Syria in his farewell address to the UN General Assembly.
“A few nations – regimes like Syria and Iran – continue to sponsor terror,” Bush charged.
Washington has also accused Damascus of failing to give adequate cooperation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in its investigation into a mystery facility bombed by Israel in September last year that US officials have charged was a nuclear plant.
Chilly relations between Syria and the United States grew more tense after Washington accused Damascus of being behind the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. – AFP/de
Lessons from Argentina’s economic collapse (Welcome to the New American Reality)
Lessons from Argentina’s economic collapse
Esteban Morales
(Editor’s note: the article that follows is a very sobering account of the effect that the collapse of the Argentine economy (1999 – 2002) had on its citizens, as seen through the eyes of one of them. The economic collapse wiped out the middle class and raised the level of poverty to 57.5%. Central to the collapse was the implementation of neo-liberal policies which enabled the swindle of billions of dollars by foreign banks and corporations. Many of Argentina’s assets and resources were shamefully plundered. Its financial system was even used for money laundering by Citibank, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan (sound familar?). The net result was massive wealth transfers and the impoverishment of society which culminated in many deaths due to oppression and malnutrition. I am not sure the same thing is about to happen here, but I am sure that there is a distinct possibility that it might. Just food for thought – JSB)
Wednesday, 13 December 2006
For western countries such as the UK, the first major problems of Peak Oil, assuming there are no oil shocks, will not be the shortage of oil but the economic crises that will occur. Argentina is a recent example of a country that suffered a serious economic crisis, and although Argentina and the UK are not identical, anyone interested in how economic crises can affect individual lives will be very interested in the following vivid description of life for an Argentinian following the economic collapse.
My brother visited Argentina a few weeks ago. He’s been living in Spain for a few years now.
Within the first week, he go sick, some kind of strong flu, even though climate isn’t that cold and he took care of himself.
Without a doubt he got sick because there are lots of new viruses in my country that can’t be found in 1st world countries.
The misery and famine lead us to a situation where, even though you have food, shelter and health care, most others don’t, and therefore they get sick and spread the diseases all over the region.
What got me started on this post is the fact that I actually saw this coming, and posted on the subject here at Frugal’s, months before the new viruses spread over the country and the news started talking about this new, health emergency, which proves that talking, thinking and sharing ideas with like minded people (you guys), does help to see things coming and prepare for them with enough time.
So I started thinking about several issues, what I learned (either the hard way or thanks to this forum) after all these years of living in a collapsed country that is trying to get out an economical disaster and everything that comes along with it.
Though my English is limited, I hope I’m able to transmit the main ideas and concepts, giving you a better image of what you may have to deal with some day, if the economy collapses in your country.
URBAN OR COUNTRY?
Someone once asked me how did those that live in the country fare. If they were better off than city dwellers.
As always there are no simple answers. Wish I could say country good, city bad, but I can’t. Because if I have to be completely honest, and I intend to be so, there are some issues that have to be analyzed, specially security.
Of course that those that live in the country and have some land and animals were better prepared food-wise. No need to have several acres full of crops. A few fruit trees, some animals, such as chickens, cows and rabbits, and a small orchard was enough to be light years ahead of those in the cities.
Chickens, eggs and rabbits would provide the proteins, a cow or two for milk and cheese, some vegetables and fruit plants covered the vegetable diet, and some eggs or a rabbit could be traded for flower to make bread and pasta or sugar and salt.
Of course that there are exceptions.
For example, some provinces up north have desert climate, and it almost never rains. It is almost impossible to live of the land, and animals require food and water you have to buy. Those guys had it bad, no wonder the northern provinces suffer the most in my country.
Those that live in cities, well they have to manage as they can. Since food prices went up about 200%-300%. People would cut expenses wherever they could so they could buy food. Some ate whatever they could, they hunted birds or ate street dogs and cats; others starved.
When it comes to food, cities suck in a crisis. It is usually the lack of food or the impossibility to acquire it that starts the rioting and looting when TSHTF. When it comes to security things get even more complicated.
Forget about shooting those that mean you harm from 300 yards away with your MBR. Leave that notion to armchair commandos and 12 year old kids that pretend to be grown ups on the internet.
Some facts:
1) Those that want to harm you/steal from you don’t come with a pirate flag waving over their heads.
2) Neither do they start shooting at you 200 yards away.
3) They wont come riding loud bikes or dressed with their orange, convict just escaped from prison jump suits, so that you can identify them the better. Nor do they all wear chains around their necks and leather jackets. If I had a dollar for each time a person that got robbed told me, “They looked like NORMAL people, dressed better than we are”, honestly, I would have enough money for a nice gun. There are exceptions, but don’t expect them to dress like in the movies.
4) A man with a wife and two or three kids can’t set up a watch. I don’t care if you are SEAL, SWAT or John Freaking Rambo, no 6th sense is going to tell you that there is a guy pointing a gun at your back when you are trying to fix the water pump that just broke, or carrying a big heavy bag of dried beans you bought that morning.
The best alarm system anyone can have in a farm are dogs. But dogs can get killed and poisoned. A friend of mine had all four dogs poisoned on his farm one night, they all died.
After all these years I learned that even though the person that lives out in the country is safer when it comes to small time robberies, that same person is more exposed to extremely violent home robberies. Criminals know that they are isolated and their feeling of invulnerability is boosted. When they assault a country home or farm, they will usually stay there for hours or days torturing the owners. I heard it all: women and children getting raped, people tied to the beds and tortured with electricity, beatings, burned with acetylene torches.
Big cities aren’t much safer for the survivalist that decides to stay in the city. He will have to face express kidnappings, robberies, and pretty much risking getting shot for what’s in his pockets or even his clothes.
So, where to go? The concrete jungle is dangerous and so is living away from it all, on your own.
The solution is to stay away from the cities but in groups, either by living in a small town-community or sub division, or if you have friends or family that think as you do, form your own small community.
Some may think that having neighbors within “shouting” distance means loosing your privacy and freedom, but it’s a price that you have to pay if you want to have someone to help you if you ever need it. To those that believe that they will never need help from anyone because they will always have their rifle at hand, checking the horizon with their scope every five minutes and a first aid kit on their back packs at all times…. Grow up
SERVICES
Whatever sort of scenario you are dealing with, services are more than likely to either suffer in quality or disappear all together. Think ahead of time, analyze possible SHTF scenarios and which service should be affected by it in your area.
Think about the most likely scenario but also think outside the box. What’s more likely? A tornado? But a terrorist attack isn’t as crazy as you though it would be a few years ago, isn’t it?
Also analyze the consequences of those services going down. If there is no power then you need to do something about all that meat you have in the fridge, you can dry it or can it. Think about the supplies you would need for these tasks before you actually need them.
You have a complete guide on how to prepare the meat on you computer… how will you get it out of there if there is no power? Print everything that you consider important.
WATER
No one can last too long without water. The urban survivalist may find that the water is of poor quality, in which case he can make good use of a water filter, or that there is no water available at all. When this happens, a large city were millions live will run out of bottled water within minutes.
In my case, tap water isn’t very good. I can see black little particles and some other stuff that looks like dead algae. Taste isn’t that bad. Not good but I know that there are parts of the country where it is much worse. To be honest, a high percentage of the country has no potable water at all.
If you can build a well, do so, set it as your top of the list priority as a survivalist. Water comes before firearms, medicines and even food.
Save as much water as you can. Use plastic bottles, refill soda bottles and place them in a cool place, preferably inside a black garbage bag to protect it from sun light. The water will pick some plastic taste after a few months, but water that tastes a little like plastic is far way better than no water at all.
What ever the kind of SHTF scenario you are dealing with, water will suffer. In my case the economical crash created problems with the water company, that reduces the maintenance and quality in order to reduce costs and keep their income in spite of the high prices they have to pay for supplies and equipment, most of which comes from abroad, and after the 2001 crash, costs 3 times more.
As always, the little guy gets to pay for it.
Same would go for floods or chemical or biological attacks. Water requires delicate care and it will suffer when TSHTF in one way or another. In this case, when you still have tap water, a quality filter is in order, as well as a pump if you can have one. A manual pump would be ideal as well if possible.
Estimate that you need a approximately a gallon per person per day. Try to have at least two-four weeks worth of water. More would be preferable.
POWER
I spent WAY to much time without power for my own taste. Power has always been a problem in my country, even before the 2001 crisis.
The real problem starts when you spend more than just a few hours without light. Just after the SHTF in 2001 half the country went without power for 3 days.
Buenos Aires was one big dark grave. People got caught on elevators, food rot, hospitals that only had a few hours worth of fuel for their generators ran out of power.
Without power, days get to be a lot shorter. Once the sun sets there is not much you can do.
I read under candle light and flashlight light and your head starts to hurt after a while. You can work around the house a little bit but only as long as you don’t need power tools.
Crime also increases once the lights go out, so whenever you have to go somewhere in a black out, carry the flashlight on one hand and a handgun on the other.
Summarizing, being in a city without light turn to be depressing after a while. I spent my share of nights, alone, listening to the radio, eating canned food and cleaning my guns under the light of my LED head lamp. Then I got married, had a son, and found out that when you have loved ones around you black outs are not as bad. The point is that family helps morale on these situations.
A note on flashlights. Have two or three head LED lights. They are not expensive and are worth their weight in gold. A powerful flashlight is necessary, something like a big Maglite or better yet a SureFire, specially when you have to check your property for intruders. But for more mundane stuff like preparing food, going to the toilet or doing stuff around the house, the LED headlamp is priceless. Try washing the dishes on the dark while holding a 60 lumen flashlight on one hand and you’ll know what I mean. LEDs also have the advantage of lasting for almost an entire week of continuous use and the light bulb lasts forever.
Rechargeable batteries are a must (ed. Get a solar powered battery charger) or else you’ll end up broke if lights go out often. Have a healthy amount of spare quality batteries and try to standardize as much as you can.
I have 12 Samsung NM 2500Mh AA and 8 AAA 800mh for the headlamps. I use D cell plastic adaptors in order to use AA batteries on my 3 D cell Maglite. This turned out to work quite well, better than I expected.
I also keep about 2 or 3 packs of regular, Duracell batteries just in case. These are supposed to expire around 2012, so I can forget about them until I need them.
Rechargeable NM batteries have the disadvantage of loosing power after a period of time, so keep regular batteries as well and check the rechargeable ones every once in a while.
After all these years of problems with power, what two items I would love to have?
1) The obvious. A generator. I carried my fridge food to my parents house way to many times on the past. Too bad I can’t afford one right now.
2) A battery charger that has both solar panel and a small crank. They are not available here. I saw that they are relatively inexpensive in USA. Do yourself a favor and get one or two of these. Even if they don’t charge as well as regular ones, I’m sure it will put out enough power to charge batteries for LED lamps at least.
GAS
Gas has decreased in quality as well, there is little gas. Try to have an electric oven in case you have to do without it.
If both electricity and gas go down, one of those camping stoves can work as well, if you keep a good supply of gas cans.
The ones that work with liquid fuel seem to be better on the long run, since they can use different types of fuel.
You can only store a limited amount of compressed gas and once you ran out of it, you are on your own if stores are closed of they sold them out.
Anyway, a city that goes without gas and light for more than two weeks is a death trap, get out of there before it’s too late.
A DIFFERENT MENALITY
I was watching the People & Art channel with my wife the other night. It was a show where they film a couple for a given period of time and some people vote on who is the one with the worst habits, the one they find more annoying.
We were in our bed, and this is when I usually fall asleep but since the guy was a firearms police instructor I was interested and managed to stay awake.
At one point the guy’s wife said that she found annoying that her husband spent 500 dollars a month on beauty products for himself. 500 USD on facial cream, special shampoo and conditioner, as well as having his nails polished! If you are that guy and happen to be reading this, or if you know him, I’m sorry, but what an idiot!!
“500 USD, that’s a small generator or a gun and a few boxes of ammo” I told my wife.
“That’s two months worth of food” she said.
We were each thinking of a practical use for that money, the money this guy was practically throwing away.
Once the SHTF, money is no longer measured in money, but you start seeing it as the necessary goods it can buy. Stuff like food, medicine, gas, or the private medical service bill.
To me, spending 500 dollars on beauty products, and to make it worse, on a guy? That’s simply not acceptable.
The way I see it, someone with that mentality can’t survive a week without a credit card, no use in even considering a SHTF scenario. And this guy is a firearms instructor?… probably the kind of guy that will say that a handgun is only used to fight his way to his rifle… and his facial night cream…
Once you experience the lack of stuff you took for granted, like food , medicines, your set of priorities change all of a sudden. For example, I had two wisdom tooth removed last year. On both occasions I was prescribed with antibiotics and strong Ibuprofen for the pain. I took the antibiotics( though I did buy two boxes with the same recipe just to keep one box just in case) but I didn’t use the Ibuprofen, I added it to my pile of medicines.
Why? because medicines are not always available and I’m not sure if they will be available in the future. Sure, it hurt like hell, but pain alone isn’t going to kill you, so I sucked it up. Good for building up character if you ask me . Make sacrifices so as to ensure a better future, that’s the mentality you should have if you want to be prepared. There’s stuff that is “nice to have” that has to be sacrificed to get the indispensable stuff.
There’s stuff that is not “basic need stuff” but it’s also important in one way or another.
My wife goes to the hairdresser once every month or two. It’s not life or death, but it does make her feel better and it boosts her morale. I buy a game for the Xbox or a movie to watch with my wife every once in awhile, just to relax. 7 or 10 dollars a month are not going to burn a hole in my pocket.
Addictions such as alcohol, drugs or even cigarettes should be avoided by the survivalist. They are bad for your health, cost a lot of money that could be much better spent, and create an addiction to something that may not be available in the future.
Who will have to tolerate your grouchy mood when your brand of smokes is no longer imported after TSHTF?
GRAY/BLACK MARKET
Once the SHTF the black/gray market will take no time to appear all around you.
In my country, gray markets were even accepted in the end. At first it was all about trading skills or craft products for food. Districts and towns would form their own barter markets, and created their own tickets, similar to money, that was used to trade.
This didn’t last long. Those tickets were easy to make on your home computer, there was no control and eventually people went back to paper money.
These markets were usually placed on warehouses or empty land, and were managed by some wise guy and a few thugs or hired security.
Anyone can go rent a kiosk inside these markets for about 50-100 pesos (about 20-30 dollars) a day and sell his goods and services.
Piece within these markets is usually respected… lets just say that these managers don’t call the police if someone tries anything funny, like stealing, fighting or taking advantage of women. That’s not good for their business and anyone that tries to mess with their business finds out how much pain the human body can actually experiment or gets a free ticket to meet the Lord.
Sometimes even uniformed cops manage security on these markets, for a small fee of course. As always, you still have to be careful. They may still try to pick your pockets or even attack you once you leave the market. Once you leave the market, you are on your own, as always.
This market evolves, and now a lot of different products are available. Today I visited my local market, a warehouse that is fairly well set up and cleanly managed. They had problems for selling stolen merchandise and fake Brand name clothes a few days ago.
What can be found at a local markets? Mostly food and clothing. Some have more variety than others but cheese, canned food, spices, honey, eggs, fruits, vegetables, beer, wine and cured meat are generally available, same as bakery products and pasta. These are less expensive than those found at supermarkets. Fresh fish is sometimes available but not always, people don’t trust much products that need refrigeration, and they get those at supermarkets instead.
Clothes are also popular and you can find copies of brand name clothes, imitations, or even original stolen new clothes, the same goes for shoes and snickers. Children clothes, underwear, socks, sheets and towels are all very popular. Some sell toys, but they are always China made, mostly poor quality though there are some few exceptions.
Others sell tools, also made in China can be found as well, but they are of poor quality.
Some offer their services and repair stuff or offer work as handyman.
You would be amazed of the junk that these guys manage to fix: TVs, CD players, Power tools, etc. They even manage to solder the small integrated circuits boards sometimes. Give one of these guys a screw driver and a bar of chocolate and he will fix a nuclear submarine.
After food and clothes, the 3rd most popular item has to be CDs and DVDs, movies, music, play station 2 and Xbox games, programs, it all ends up there just one or two days after the official release in USA. Seems that they have a guy hidden under Bill Gate’s desk or something.
Anyway, almost everything can be found there, and if you want, you can ask around, talk to the right guy and buy illegal stuff like drugs or black market guns and ammo. The quality of the drugs is questionable, of course, and a lot of addicts die from the mixtures these guys sell. Guns are mostly FM High Powers, Surplus 1911s and Colt .45s, Sistemas, and old Colt Detective revolvers in 38 special that found their way from police and military armories into the black market. Condition isn’t very good but if you have money you’ll be amazed of what you can end up with. Everything that is used by the military and police, including SMGs a, Browning 50 BMG Machine guns, and even frag grenades, is available in the black market, if the customer has the amount of money and a little patience, of course. The big guns may take a while, but the handguns and grenades are readily available.
Russia criticizes U.S. sanctions against arms exporter – 2
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(Adds Foreign Ministry, Rosoboronexport statements in paras 8-10, 14-16)
MOSCOW, October 24 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s foreign minister said on Friday that the sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia’s state-run arms exporter contravene international law, and will harm ties with Washington.
The economic sanctions against Rosoboronexport were imposed under the U.S. Non-Proliferation Act on Iran, North Korea and Syria.
“The United States introduced these sanctions without any basis in international law. We will take this into account in our relations with the United States,” Sergei Lavrov told a news conference.
Sanctions were also imposed on the same grounds against Venezuela, China, North and South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Syria, as well as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
Washington says the sanctions target firms that sell items that could “make a material contribution to the development of weapons of mass destruction or cruise or ballistic missile systems.”
Lavrov insisted that the sanctions would not force Russia to make concessions on Iran’s nuclear program.
“If some people in Washington think that this will make Russia more amenable to U.S. approaches with regard to the Iranian nuclear problem, they are mistaken,” he said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in an official statement on Friday that the sanctions against Rosoboronexport were “an unfriendly act” that would harm discussions on the Iranian nuclear issue.
“We consider this recurrence of American unilateral sanctions against a Russian organization to be an unfriendly act, which will have a negative impact on our dialogue with Washington, including in the context of discussions of the Iran Six international mediators on the resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem,” the statement said.
The ministry also said: “It is high time for the United States to make up its mind on whether it is ready to continue cooperation within the Iran Six, working on the basis of coordinated approaches.”
The Iran Six international mediators are Russia, the U.S., China, France, Great Britain, and Germany.
The sanctions against Rosoboronexport are valid for two years, and bar any U.S. aid, contracts or arms sales to the blacklisted entities. The order was signed on October 16, and came into effect on Thursday.
A Rosoboronexport representative on Friday called the sanctions a “manifestation of unethical competition.”
“We view the imposition of sanctions with regard to the sole Russian facilitator of arms sales as a manifestation of unethical competition,” Vyacheslav Davydenko told reporters.
The company said in an official statement that it links the U.S. sanctions to the rise in Russian arms exports.
“The United States is deliberately trying to use administrative resources to hold Russia back in the implementation of foreign trade and foreign policy activities, in particular in the sphere of military-technical cooperation with foreign states,” Rosoboronexport said.
The company noted that the U.S. State Department announced the sanctions almost immediately after the publication of results showing Russian arms exports grew 23% in the first nine months of 2008. The company said this “did not suit the United States, frustrating its plans.”
In July and December 2006, the United States also imposed sanctions on Rosoboronexport for allegedly passing on equipment to Iran that could be used to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Author of Neoconservative Theory
FROM A Geostrategy for Eurasia.
From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997
“AXIAL EURASIA”
A country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and historical legacy.
A sustainable strategy for Eurasia must distinguish among the more immediate short-run perspective of the next five years or so, the medium term of 20 or so years, and the long run beyond that. Moreover, these phases must be viewed not as watertight compartments but as part of a continuum. In the short run, the United States should consolidate and perpetuate the prevailing geopolitical pluralism on the map of Eurasia. This strategy will put a premium on political maneuvering and diplomatic manipulation, preventing the emergence of a hostile coalition that could challenge America’s primacy, not to mention the remote possibility of any one state seeking to do so.
[THE ESSENCE OF THE "PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY" AND NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY OF UNITED STATES]
By the medium term, the foregoing should lead to the emergence of strategically compatible partners which, prompted by American leadership, might shape a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system. In the long run, the foregoing could become the global core of genuinely shared political responsibility.
[IN OTHER WORDS, A NEW WORLD ORDER BASED ON AMERICAN MILITARY DOMINANCE IN EURASIA]
Obama & The ‘Predicted’ World Crisis
Obama & The ‘Predicted’ World Crisis
Obama & The ‘Predicted’ World Crisis
OBAMA & THE ‘PREDICTED‘ WORLD CRISIS
By Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2008
Articles May Be Reproduced Only With Authorship of Br Nathanael Kapner
& Link To Real Jew News (SM)
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Unique Source: Brzezinski Seizes Control Of US Policy @ Rense.com Here
IT ALL BEGAN WHEN former State Department chief, Colin Powell, endorsed Barack Obama for president on Meet The Press, October 19 2008. Obama responded by saying, “Powell will have a role as one of my advisers.”
Attached to his endorsement of Obama, Powell leaked an Obama-camp agenda about a coming crisis:
“There’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January which we don’t even know about right now!” View Entire Story Here.
On the very same day, (what a coincidence!), while at a Seattle fund raiser, Obama’s VP pick, Joe Biden, expanded on Powell’s prediction, by saying that the ‘crisis’ will be one of “international” proportions:
“There are going to be a lot of tough decisions Barack’s gonna have to make, including foreign policy. Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.
I guarantee you it’s gonna happen. And he’s gonna need you to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially that we’re right. So there’s gonna be some tough decisions. They may emanate from the Middle East. They may emanate from Russia’s newly-emboldened position because they’re floating in a sea of oil. View Entire Story Here.
Then Obama chimed in two days later on October 21 2008:
“The point that Joe made is very similar to the one that Homeland Secretary Chertoff made yesterday. This is that whoever is the next president is going to have to deal with a whole host of challenges internationally.” View Entire Story Here.
Trilaterist & former State Department chief, Madeline Albright, who supports Obama, agreed with the Obama camp, saying, “Obama will be tested.”
SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA BEGIN AS FIRST REVEALED by historian, political analyst, and Washington insider, Webster Tarpley of Rense.com - a new ruling elite is now in place in Washington. This power bloc is headed by the founders of the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller & Zbigniew Brzezinski. Obama is no more than a “blank slate” for this new ruling elite.
As the name “Trilateral” reflects, the mission of the Trilateral Commission is to divide the world into three regional super-governments, as an interim step toward world government. As the appellation “Commission” reflects, the instrumentality of a “shadow government” is implied. (More on this soon).
Brzezinski is a known Russophobe, a maniacal adversary of Moscow. Brzezinski’s agenda is to take control of Eurasia, which Brzezinski looks upon as the “center for global power.” The contender for global power, Russia, (as Brzezinski views Russia), has made significant inroads in Eurasia since the Georgian conflict on 8-8-08.
Brzezinski is not unaware of the announcement by Russian President Dimitry Medvedev of his Five Points Of Russian Foreign Policy. Medvedev made the Five Points public following Russia’s trouncing of Georgia when Georgian troops invaded S.Ossetia:
“A single-pole world is unacceptable. Domination is something we cannot allow. We cannot accept a world order in which one country makes all the decisions, even as influential a country as the United States of America.” View Entire Story Here.
ON OCTOBER 24 2008, Washington, (translate Rockefeller-Brzezinski), initiated sanctions against Russia’s state-controlled arms exporter, Rosoboron Export.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, responded by saying that “the sanctions imposed by the US on Russia’s state-run arms exporter contravene international law and will harm ties with Washington.” Lavrov concluded his remarks by saying that the US sanctions was “an unfriendly act.”
And so my friends — the ‘predicted’ world crisis, leaked by the Obama camp on October 19 2008 — has already begun…
[The following video of a Lyndon LaRouche speech on May 7 conveyed the same warnings about the planned implementation of Brzezinski’s world war. NO ONE CAN SAY WE HAVEN’T BEEN WARNED! Lest you forget, Brzezinski was also the author of the “war on terror,” way back in 1979, with the implementation of his reckless crack-pot scheme for the CIA to train and arm thousands of Islamic militants with the skills of modern techno-terrorism and the latest tactics in guerilla warfare.]
