Monday, May 31, 2010

May 2010 headlines in review...

It was a hell of a month, beginning with May Day...

Immigration protests throughout the Southwest... A failed terrorist attack on Times Square...

Meanwhile, with the benefit of comedic cover, Obama made several startling admissions in his Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner speech. Among them, he sent a message to citizen militias (aka "the Jonas Brothers") at time-stamp 4:57 of...

C-Span: President Obama Remarks at White House Correspontents' Dinner

Boys don't get any ideas; I have two words for you: predator drones... You will never see it coming... You think I'm joking.

And on the subject of illegal immigration, he made a crack that while his popularity ratings have dived in the U.S., he is still very popular "in the country of my birth" (time-stamp 1:30), finally giving a confirming nod - again, with comedic cover - to the "birthers" whose allegations of his foreign nativity have not subsided.

Andy Martin, the self-proclaimed "King of the Birthers," recounts a history of the movement...

Contrarian Commentary: The Birth of 'Birther Nation'

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Now on to more serious matters. In the aftermath of May the 6th...

AP (May 9): Federal Reserve opens credit line to Europe

Bloomberg (May 10): EU Crafts $962 Billion Show of Force to Halt Crisis

EU Chronicle: Euro's Death-Spiral

Reports of Euro death may be premature. For, as Washington caved to Wall St. pressure to maintain its financial arsenal, Deutschland fought back...

Businessweek (May 19): Germany Bans Naked Short-Selling, Swaps Speculation

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In other news: street battles in Bangkok. Here's a video that isn't quite getting as much attention as the Tehran Neda video of last year...

LiveLeak: Red Shirt Protestor Shot In Head With M-16 In Bangkok **VERY GRAPHIC**

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There has been much beating of war drums over the sinking of a South Korean ship in the Yellow Sea in March, but the case against North Korea is unconvincing...

Global Research: Did an American Mine Sink the South Korean Ship?

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By far the most depressing story of the year...

Gulf Tribunal: What in the hell is going on?

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Wired has been covering a good deal of DARPA's neuroprosthetic and soldier "enhancing" research...

Pentagon Turns to Brain Implants to Repair Damaged Minds

Total Recall: Pentagon Looks to ‘Optimize’ Troops’ Minds

Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push

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File under miscellaneous...

As UK elections were underway, Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party (anti-Euro and anti-EU) crashed into a field... and miraculously survived! A Phoenix?

Telegraph (May 7): Nigel Farage of Ukip Plane Crash - in pictures

More on the contra-Fed counterfeiter...

LA Downtown News: What Happened in Unit 701

FOX News provides evidential support - in the manner in which the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was treated as an intelligence operative - for conspiracy theories surrounding everything from 9/11 to the Ft. Hood shooter to the X-mas undie bomber...

The American Terrorist

Either publicly admitting alien presence will destabilize society or will be used to institute a New World Order (or both)...

Examiner: UFODC-Obama adviser says documented UFO?ET landings on U.S. Capitol "could destabilize society"

But here is real potential for societal destabilization...

Gaurdian: Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

A case for revisiting Bernard Mandeville?

The Fable of the Bees

Monday, May 17, 2010

May the 6th, 2010

Financial World War is being waged. The contestants of this conflict may be difficult to pick out, since the factions are geographically dispersed, but there are certain dates that stand out. July 16, 2008: the day the Bank of International Settlements' Basel II mark-to-market capital requirements went into effect (as spelled out in Code of Federal Regulations), which is considered to be the "detonator" that exploded on September 15, 2008 with the fall of Lehmen Bros.
( Henry C. K. Lui explains in his Asia Times piece: Monetarism Enters Bankruptcy, Part 3 - Credulity caught in stress test )

May the 6th, 2010 was another day of infamy, on two fronts... Only this time, the volleys were flying not from Basel to Wall St., but from Wall St. to Athens, collaterally hitting Berlin and Brussels in an campaign to destroy the Euro, and simultaneously from Wall St. to Washington D.C., in an effort to maintain its arsenal of financial instruments.

On the Athens front, as the Greek economy crashed and the streets descended into chaos, austerity measures were taken up by Parliament under the leadership of Prime Minister Papandreou, a graduate of the London School of Economics. Just prior to the debacles of early May, Papandreou described his government's situation to the Brookings Institute while on a state visit to Washington in March...

Despite the deep reforms we are making, traders and speculators have forced interest rates on Greek bonds to record highs. Many believe that there have been malicious rumors endlessly repeated and tactically amplified, that have been used to manipulate normal market terms for our bonds. Partly as a result, Greece currently has to borrow at rates almost twice as high as other European Union countries...

And when you have a common currency that is simply not viable. So we will have a very hard time in implementing our reform program if the gains from our austerity measures are simply swallowed up by prohibitive interest rates.

This whole affair has a horrible sense of déjà vu. The same financial institutions that were bailed out with taxpayers’ money are now making a fortune from Greece’s misfortunate while those same taxpayers are paying the price in deep cuts to their salaries and social services. So unprincipled speculators are making billions every day by betting on a Greek default...

Yet, our correct decisions may still be undermined by speculation, and to me this is a challenge to our democratic institutions. An elected government making huge changes with the consent
(sic) of its people is being undermined by concentrated powers in an unregulated market, powers which go beyond those of any individual government. (Pgs. 10-11)

Now rest assured, Congress and the Fed are going to do something about this...

NYTimes: In Greece's Crisis, Fed Studies Wall St.'s Activities

Greece’s problems deepened on both sides of the Atlantic as the Federal Reserve disclosed it was investigating Goldman Sachs and other banks that helped the country mask its debts, and investors grew increasingly leery of lending any more money to a nation flirting with default.

Congressional Research Service: Greece's Debt Crisis: Overview, Policy Responses, and Implications

Through the crisis, it has been reported that Greek governments, underwritten by prominent financial institutions including Goldman Sachs, used complex financial instruments to conceal the true level of Greece’s debt. (Pg. 12)

We note that Goldman Sachs is the primary target of these accusations and investigations, so it is of special interest that as Congress was debating the break-up of "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions, Wall St. markets should have entered into something of a precipitous stock-warp in the space of ten minutes, as noted by David DeGraw and Max Keiser in...

AmpedSatus: High Frequency Terrorism: How the Big Banks and Federal Reserve Maintained Their Death Grip Over the United States

In the aftermath of Goldman Sachs’ public flogging before the world in Congress, and while under investigation, on the very day that Congress was voting on the “break up the too big to fail banks” amendment and cutting behind the scenes deals to gut the audit of the Federal Reserve, the stock market had its greatest sudden drop in history, plummeting 700 points in ten minutes...

Tyler Durden makes the case that Goldman Sachs was instrumental to this chaos...

ZeroHedge: Where Was Goldman's Supplementary Liquidity Provider Team Yesterday? A Recap Of Goldman's Program Trading Monopoly

We have long claimed that Goldman is the de facto monopolist of the NYSE’s program trading platform. As such, it is certainly the case that Goldman was instrumental in either a) precipitating yesterday’s crash or b) not providing the critical liquidity which it is required to do, when the time came. There are no other options.

( What a stock market melt-down sounds like: Panic and Loathing from the S & P 500 Pits )

And so it goes... everyone is pointing fingers at Goldman...

Kathemerini: PM hints at action against U.S. banks

Prime Minister George Papandreou indicated yesterday that Greece might take legal action against certain US banks which, he said, bear “great responsibility” for the debt crisis engulfing his country...

Papandreou also referred to an investigation by Greece’s Parliament into deals struck by Greek authorities in 2000, with help from Goldman Sachs, that allowed them to mask the extent of the country’s debts through the use of complex financial instruments. “We are looking into the past – how things went in the wrong direction and what kind of practices were negative practices”...



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On a somewhat related note, another aspect of the Senate financial reform bill under consideration is the reinstatement of the Glass-Stegall separation of banking from speculative financial institutions. Lyndon LaRouche has been vigorously campaigning for this, and so it was the main topic during his web-cast on May the 8th.

An unnamed questioner brought up a recent conversation had over the subject of Glass-Stegall with an individual from the British Finance Ministry (at an affair at the London School of Economics) who sugested that such a move to reinstate Glass-Stegall by the U.S. would be considered as a "hostile action" by Britain and other European countries...

He went so far as to say, that someone from the British Foreign Office would be contacting their counterpart in the U.S. State Department to make this position clear...

Lo and behold, almost immediately following his swearing in, Foreign Secretary William Hague raced across the pond to meet with his U.S. counterpart, Hillary Clinton...

BBC: Early harmony in US-UK relations

The swearing in of new government ministers at Buckingham Palace early on Thursday evening, and the kissing of hands with the Queen meant Mr Hague needed to fly first to New York, and then catch the train to the nation's capital to see Hillary Clinton on Friday...

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Controlled Aversive Environment: NYC

New York City residents have been subjected to quite a psy-ops campaign of late, a "controlled aversive environment" constructed out of the materials of the current and final season of 24, with a plot-line starkly complimenting the events of May the 1st...

NYTimes: Police Find Car Bomb in Times Square

The writers of 24 seem gifted with an uncanny penchant to parody current events. For instance, in last year's season, the March 2, 2009 episodes featured the spectacle of an African dictator seizing the White House and holding the Hillary-esque President Taylor hostage. In the current season, President Taylor is at the UN holding historic peace talks with the President of the Islamic Republic of... (name withheld - but obviously a fictional Iran). During the course of the talks, Jack Bauer and the Counter-Terrorism Unit, with its surveillance drones and its back-door access to every security camera in the city, are racing the clock to prevent the detonation of a nuclear dirty bomb in Manhattan. How curious, then, that on May the 1st, as the real President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is in New York for talks at the U.N., there should be a bomb scare in Times Square... The bomb wasn't much to speak of - described by many counter-terrorism experts as a laughable, fire-works fizzler. Nevertheless, the initial reports undoubtedly would have sparked fears of a dirty bomb, especially among those who had been primed by watching 24.

In the ensuing pursuit of the bomber, police released a video of a white man changing his shirt and looking in the general direction of the car-bomb. Contemporaneously - indeed, many news-casts immediately following the May 3rd episode of 24 led with this video - Jack Bauer has gone rouge, running around Manhattan, breaking things, changing clothes, shooting people, while being pursued by every branch of law enforcement, federal state & local.

As it turns out, the white man in the video apparently wasn't the terrorist, as authorities have now honed in on a U.S. citizen of Pakistani heritage. But the capture of this individual also bore a certain parallel to the current season of 24, in which urban surveillance drones have figured prominently...

The Nation: Were US Special Forces Involved in the Arrest of Faisal Shahzad?

Reports are emerging suggesting that secret US military intelligence aircraft were used to find and locate Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a crude car bomb in Times Square. The CBS affiliate in New York reported today: "In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport."...


Facial recognition software is another gizmo featured in this season of 24. The technology can be taken a step further, however, to behavior recognition software... So, much as the Christmas undie bomber was used as an excuse to install naked body scanners in airports nationwide, so shall it go with the May Day bomber. The sales pitch:

AFP: Police cameras to flood Manhattan to prevent attacks

New York officials say they could stop attacks like the attempted Times Square car bomb by expanding a controversial surveillance system so sensitive that it will pick up even suspicious behavior...

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And now, for a final word...

New York News Today: The Tau of Terrorism

The terror is up and close, all the time .We are in the grip of terrorism mentally and geographically. The incidences of wanton and indiscriminate killings , once taken as the violence of another kind by the thinkers of the day were later so designed by their perpetrators that a better definition was called for ... The operators of terror always execute their plans to a T as goof ups in this business are not pardonable. From the moment of its tee off till date the growth trajectory of terrorism is continuously on rise. Like a winner of the first few rounds it looks more confident. On the other hand, its opponents, our self proclaimed leaders of peace, are grimacingly worried and scared in their overly securitized environs. Terror is moving more freely on the surface than the forces fighting against it, what if it is born and brought up underground. To strike effectively it has to travel faster then the chasers...

Monday, May 3, 2010

Militia Revival Update

In our original post on this subject - Militia Revival Cometh - we expressed the following hope:

But, let us hope that things won't get out of hand, that Obama has the good sense not to push too hard, as Clinton did, and that the militias forming in the coming months and years will stick to the standard of only firing in self defense.

Of late, there is increasing evidence that our hopes may be dashed...

Public Intelligence: Drone aircraft are patrolling U.S. cities

Indeed, we believe we may have spotted one over Cincinnati, Ohio in mid-March.

Other preparations for civil war...

InfoWars: U.S. Army trains to take on Tea Party

Examiner: Special army unit to be deployed on American soil just before Nov. elections

Add to this rumours of an assassination plot...

EIR: Stop the British Assassination Plot Against Obama!

"The tell-tale sign that a violent operation is being planned against the President appears in a current diatribe by 'former Alabama militia member' Mike Vanderboegh, who is being pointed to as the individual who called for bricks to be thrown through the windows of Congressional offices," LaRouche said. While nominally eschewing assassination, Vanderboegh identifies himself as a hater of Abraham Lincoln, whom he accuses of having caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans by waging the Civil War, and of doing untold damage to the U.S. Constitution. "It is clear that Vanderboegh is indeed calling for Obama's assassination," LaRouche continued, and "his appeal to the British-created Confederacy is a clear marker that we are dealing with a British operation."

For more, see the video edition...

LaRouchePAC: Environment for a British Directed Assassination

More on "Sipsy Street Irregular" Mike Vanderboegh in a moment. But for some back round on the alleged British hand in the American Militia movement, a 1997 article by Anton Chaitkin in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review details the basis for these claims, particularly in the section: Britain's U.S. Militias and Oklahoma City

Mike Vanderboegh's rebuttal and version of these events...

Sipsy Street Irregulars: To be denounced by Loon-don LaRouche is, well, an honor

These suspicions are not just coming from LaRouche, however, as this missive would indicate, coming from his own ranks regarding the planned armed march in Washington, D.C. on April 19...

ThreePercenter: Armed march in D.C. a trap...

Moreover, the tone of the following post, being his report of the April '09 Machine Gun Shoot, would seem to betray an eagerness for the war going hot...

SSI: Knob Creek Vignettes: "Obama, count your children."

A sustained and very intoxicating high: sitting at the Shotgun News table (in a chair with my cast-bound foot up) watching millions of rounds of ammunition move inexorably into the trunks and cargo spaces of waiting vehicles... That observation post near the choke point of the entrance allowed me to see, and even cheer, the folks stuggling by with cases of ammo on their shoulders, rolling on two- and four-whelled dollies, chugging past on mechanical mules and their trailers, even loaded out on exhibitor pickup trucks, beds full, chassis sagging, springs down on the axles. It was like watching a Ho Chi Minh trail for good guys.

You know, in every modern American war, when the enemy was getting pasted with a particularly effective artillery barrage or airstrike, it was the wont of GIs and Marines to holler out in approval: "Kaiser, count your 'children!'" or "Hitler, count your 'children!'" or "Tojo (Chairman Mao, Uncle Ho, Saddam), count your 'children!'"

At one point, a mule went slowly by, packed sky-high, hauling an equally burdened trailer and , delighted, I hollered out "Obama, count your 'children!'" People looked at me like I was nuts. Other people laughed and nodded.

Now note the location, Knob Creek Range, KY (some 15 miles SW of Louisville - it's entrance is about a mile from where route 44 meets the Ohio River). It is adjacent to Ft. Knox. This puts the following post in perspective...

SSI: The Ft. Knox Contretemps: "Army preps for Tea Party 'terrorists'."

Notwithstanding Vanderboegh's post-election missive, Resolve - where he calls for "No Ft. Sumters" - the question arises: are we veering upon a trajectory whence Ft. Knox becomes the Ft. Sumter of the present age?

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Related: this is probably nothing, but nonetheless reinforces the spectre of an Obama assassination plot (and the name rings a bell)...

Coshocton Tribune: McVey's gun was loaded, Asheville police say

His booked face and his face booked...

Asheville Citizen-Times: Authorities scrutinize Joseph McVey's acts, Facebook posts before Asheville