Category Archives: Economy

Save Used Water In A Bucket

Posted on by

The Alternative.in has the following simple tip to save water:

“The biggest culprits in the kitchen are those ever-flowing taps in the city and our tap-happy fingers. Every time we rinse anything under running water, we are using only a third of the water. The rest, is simply flowing unused, into the drains.
So if you are rinsing vessels, veggies – ALWAYS do it with a large container at the bottom of your sink. You can throw away the muckiest water from the first rinse. But the water from the second rinse is not icky and can be used to water your plants, or even mop the floor. We collect at least 20 litres of water from just a morning’s worth of washing and rinsing.

Keep an empty bucket next to your sink. THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO DO.” – by Anu Gummaraju

I have a few other things I do that are quite simple.

Use a shower (low-flow) or bathe from a bucket with a dipper and use the tub only for the occasional soak.

The rest of the time, the tub is a great place to store water to use in the bathroom so you don’t have to let the taps run.

Tub-water can be used to hand wash clothes, to wash the bathroom floor and sink, to water house-plants, or to flush the toilet.

A nice bonus is that if a tap leaks, you don’t need to repair it right away. You can just just turn off the valve and use water from your tub-tank instead.

 

 

 

AIDS: The Bio-Weapon Theory

Posted on by

Dr. Alan Cantwell, via Biblebelievers.org:

The Gay Hepatitis-B Vaccine Experiment

” A “cohort” of over a thousand young gays was injected with the vaccine at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan during the period November 1978 to October 1979.1 Similar gay experiments were conducted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis, and Chicago, beginning in 1980.2 The AIDS epidemic broke out shortly thereafter.

The experiment was run by Wolf Szmuness, a Polish Jew born in 1919. He was a young medical student in eastern Poland when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. His entire family perished in the Holocaust. When Poland was partitioned, Szmuness was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia.

After the war, he was allowed to finish medical school in Tomsk in central Russia. He married a Russian woman, had a daughter, and in 1959 was allowed to return to Poland where he became an expert in hepatitis.

According to June Goodfield’s account of his life in Quest for the Killers, Szmuness defected from Poland with his family in 1969, arriving penniless in New York with $15 in his pocket.3 Through scientific connections he found work as a laboratory technician at the New York Blood Center. Within a few years he was given his own lab at the center and was also appointed Professor of Public Health at Columbia University. By the mid-1970s, Szmuness was a world authority on hepatitis, and was invited back to Moscow in 1975 to give a scientific presentation. As a defector he was terrified to set foot back in the Soviet Union, but his colleagues assured him he would have the full protection of the U.S. State Department. His return to Russia was a scientific triumph.

In the late 1970s, Wolf Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars to undertake the most important mission of his life: the Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment. Szmuness specifically wanted to use gay men to avoid “serious legal and logistical problems.”4 For his study he did not want monogamous men, nor men with lovers. He chose only healthy, young, responsible, intelligent, and primarily white homosexuals. The experiment was costly and he didn’t want any uncooperative or hard-to-find gays messing up his experiment. Involved in the experiment were the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Abbott Laboratories, and Merck, Sharp & Dohme. Szmuness’ experiment was hugely successful, and his vaccine was hailed as having tremendous global implications.

The Gay Plague

The links of the gay experiment to the outbreak of AIDS are obvious to anyone who wants to see the connection. Three months after the experiment began, the first cases of AIDS reported to the CDC appeared in young gay men in Manhattan in 1979. The first San Francisco AIDS case appeared in that city in September 1980, six months after the Hepatitis-B experiment started there.5 In June 1981 the AIDS epidemic became “official.”

Were gay men given experimental vaccines contaminated with the AIDS virus? The government says no, but government agencies have a long history of covert and unethical medical experimentation, particularly with minorities. Was it simply a quirk of nature that a virus “out of Africa” would suddenly decimate the most hated minority in America?

Why did the U.S. government choose Wolf Szmuness, a Soviet-trained doctor and a recent American immigrant to head this dangerous experiment? Goodfield, who has written the definitive account of the Hepatitis-B experiment, claims Szmuness has a painful life. Confined as a political prisoner in Siberia during World War II, he was repeatedly interrogated and beaten by the Russian KGB for refusing to cooperate in spy activities. When he could not be broken, they warned him: “Say nothing of this to anyone, but remember. We will reach you anywhere in the world. No matter where you go, no matter where you try to hide, you will never be out of our grasp.”6

The experimental Hepatitis-B vaccine was primarily manufactured by Merck. However, during the experiment Szmuness was concerned about possible vaccine contamination. Goodfield writes, “This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck’s.”7

After the Hepatitis-B experiment ended, Szmuness insisted that all thirteen thousand blood specimens donated by gay men be retained at the Blood Center for future use. Due to space requirements, it is highly unusual for any laboratory to retain so many old blood specimens. However, several years later when this blood was retested for the presence of HIV antibodies, government epidemiologists were able to detect the “introduction” and the spread of HIV into the gay community.

When asked why he was keeping so many vials of blood, Szmuness replied, “Because one day another disease may erupt and we’ll need this material.“8 A few months after the Hepatitis-B experiment began at the Center, the first AIDS cases began to appear in gay men living in Manhattan. And the retesting of gay blood at the Blood Center proved that HIV was first introduced into the gay population of New York City sometime around 1978-1979, the same year Szmuness’ gay Hepatitis-B experiment began.9

Was Szmuness psychic in his prediction that a new disease would appear in the gay community? Or did he actually know or suspect that a new, deadly virus was being introduced into the gay volunteers? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions can only be surmised. In June 1982 Szmuness died of lung cancer. In his eulogy, Aaron Kellner of the Blood Center wrote: “It is the rare physician who, like Wolf Szmuness, is given the grace to touch the lives of billions of people; those living on this planet and generations yet unborn.”10

The African Origin of AIDS

Was HIV introduced into millions of Africans in the late 1970s during the smallpox vaccine eradication programs sponsored by the World Health Organisation? It is known that animal and human cells harbor all sorts of viruses, including viruses not yet discovered, and animal tissue cell cultures are often used in the manufacture of viral vaccines. Therefore, the possibility of vaccine contamination with an animal virus is a constant danger in the manufacture of vaccines.

Despite the most meticulous precautions in production, contaminating animal viruses are known to survive the vaccine process. For example, during the 1950s, millions of people were injected with polio vaccines contaminated with “SV-40”, a cancer-causing green monkey virus. Such vaccine contamination problems are largely kept hidden from the public. Yet in spite of the known danger, drug companies and physicians always pooh-pooh any suggestion that AIDS could have arisen from animal virus-contaminated vaccines. Animal cancer viruses are also contained in fetal calf serum, a serum commonly used as a laboratory nutrient to feed animal and human tissue cell cultures. Viruses in calf serum can be carried over as contaminants into the final vaccine product.

The problem of vaccine contamination by fetal calf serum and its relationship to AIDS is the subject of a letter by J. Grote (“Bovine visna virus and the origin of the AIDS epidemic”) published in the Journal of the Royal (London) Society of Medicine in October 1988. Grote discounts the green monkey theory and questions whether bovine visna contamination of laboratory-used fetal bovine serum could cause AIDS. Bovine visna virus is similar in appearance to HIV. Grote, a London-based AIDS researcher, writes:

The seriousness of this becomes apparent when we consider the manufacture of vaccines requires the growth of virus in cell cultures using fetal calf serum in the growth medium. The contamination of vaccines with adventitious viruses has been of concern for many years and the presence of virus-like structures in ‘virus-screened’ bovine serum has been reported. It seems absolutely vital that all vaccines are screened for HIV prior to use and that bovine visna virus is further investigated as to its relationship to HIV and its possible causal role in progression towards AIDS.

Millions of African blacks are reportedly infected with HIV. This large number could never have been infected by the simple act of a monkey virus “jumping” over to infect one African in the late 1970s. If that were the case, why don’t we now have millions of AIDS cases in the U.S.? One logical explanation for the millions of Africans infected is that the vaccines used in the World Health Organisation’s mass inoculation programs were contaminated. Was the contamination accidental or deliberate? It is well-known in vaccine circles that the vaccinia (cowpox) virus used in the manufacture of the smallpox vaccine works well in genetic engineering. Charles Pillar and Keith Yamamoto, authors of Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technology, state: “Researchers have been able to splice genes coding for the surface coats of other viruses, such as influenza, hepatitis, and rabies into vaccinia virus DNA. The result: a ‘broad spectrum’ vaccine with a coat of many colors.”11

In 1985, the Russians caused an international furore by claiming that AIDS was caused by experiments carried out in the USA as part of the development of new biological weapons. Responding to this Soviet accusation, Pillar and Yamamoto admit that “although no evidence has been presented to support this claim, manipulating genes to defeat the body’s immune system is quite feasible.”12

In Magic Shots, Allan Chase claims that during the years 1966-1977, the WHO utilised “200,000 people in forty countries — most of them nondoctors trained by seven hundred doctors and health professionals from over seventy participating countries — spent $300 million, and used forty million bifurcated vaccinating needles to administer 24,000 million (2.4 billion) doses of smallpox vaccine.”13

On May 11, 1987, The London Times, one of the world’s most respected newspapers, published a front-page story entitled “Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus.” The story suggests that African AIDS is a direct outgrowth of the WHO smallpox eradication program. The smallpox vaccine allegedly awakened a “dormant” AIDS virus infection in the black population. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, was quoted as saying, “The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV (the AIDS virus).” The Times story is one of the most important stories ever printed on the AIDS epidemic; yet the story was killed and never appeared in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine.

Despite covert human experimentation, vaccine contamination problems, and the genetic engineering of new and highly dangerous viruses, the medical establishment ignores the AIDS bio-warfare issue. For example, in the prestigious British Medical Journal (May 13, 1989), Myra McClure and Thomas Schultz wrote a paper on the “Origin of HIV” and quickly disposed of the idea that AIDS is connected to germ warfare. They simply state: “Lack of supporting evidence precludes serious discussion of such a bizarre hypothesis. This review deals with the theories on the origin of HIV that are scientifically plausible.”

Thus, medical science ignores evidence suggesting AIDS originated as a secret experiment. Most physicians and microbiologists steadfastly hold on to the illogical and improbable green monkey theory of AIDS. And the major media remain silent, often dismissing the bio-warfare theory as communist propaganda of the most malicious sort. Forgotten is the connection between the National Academy of Sciences and the military bio-warfare establishment in the development of biological weapons for mass killings.”

US Military Ran Two Drills For Nepal Disaster

Posted on by

The US Military Knew The Nepal Earthquake Was Coming:

“Eight months ago, Marines and other American personnel were in Nepal alongside troops and civilians from around 20 other countries, all responding to a fake earthquake…….

The underlying story for the training program—nicknamed Pacific Endeavor 2014—describes the current, real situation almost to the letter.

The mock quake had a registered magnitude of 8.2, knocking out roads, bridges, power lines and sewage systems, official briefings explained. Aftershocks caused even more damage and delayed first responders.

A week after this fictional disaster occurred, emergency personnel had identified nearly 6,000 of the nearly 14,000 dead, according to one of the updates event organizers handed out during the sessions. “Morgues are not accepting bodies due to insufficient space.”

“Sixty percent of buildings in densely built-up areas are destroyed or unsafe,” a mock situation report added. More than a half a million simulated people were homeless.

In the real Nepal, more than 7,000 people have died and more than 14,000 have been injured in the actual earthquake. The disaster has forced more than three million Nepalis from their homes……

The Pacific Endeavor scenario has turned out to be almost disturbingly prescient.

The Pentagon didn’t just just randomly decide on this particular mock disaster storyline. For more than a decade, the international community has worried about what would happen to the mountainous South Asian country after a major seismic event.

In the last hundred years, earthquakes in Nepal have killed more than 27,000 people, Nepali authorities explained as American officers developed the final training plan. Over the past four decades, the same number of people died in more than 15,000 recorded natural disasters?—?including quakes and floods.

In 2012, the United Nations Development Program ranked Nepal 11th in nations at risk for major quakes, the representatives from Kathmandu pointed out in their briefing slides. “[The] World Bank … classifies Nepal as one of the global ‘hot-spots’ for natural disasters.”

Most notably, the Bihar-Nepal Earthquake destroyed a fifth of all buildings in the Kathmandu Valley and razed a quarter of the structures in the capital in 1934. In 1997, the U.S. Agency for International Development had even funded a study to see just how bad the situation would be if a similar seismic shock hit the country.

Two years later, California-based nonprofit GeoHazards International concluded that 40,000 people would die and nearly a million would be displaced by a equally massive earthquake…….

In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Army’s main headquarters for the Pacific region held two separate disaster preparedness drills of their own in Nepal. And along with the Marines, the Air Force participated in the 2014 iteration of Pacific Endeavor..”

Quake Experts Visited Nepal Days Before Quake

Posted on by

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

50 earthquake and social scientists were in Nepal the week before  the earthquake that devastated Kathmandu.

They were anticipating a quake but didn’t expect it so soon.

ABC News reports:

Nepal’s devastating earthquake was the disaster experts knew was coming.

Just a week ago, about 50 earthquake and social scientists from around the world came to Kathmandu, Nepal, to figure out how to get this poor, congested, overdeveloped, shoddily built area to prepare better for the big one, a repeat of the 1934 temblor that leveled this city. They knew they were racing the clock, but they didn’t know when what they feared would strike.

“It was sort of a nightmare waiting to happen,” said seismologist James Jackson, head of the earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge in England. “Physically and geologically what happened is exactly what we thought would happen.”

This should ring alarm bells for anyone with an interest in weather modification by the government or in geo-engineering.

And sure enough, digging around we find that the disastrous Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, which killed over a quarter of a million people, had also been anticipated…and prepared for….just the day before it happened.

Global Research has this:

On the day prior to the earthquake, “on Monday [January 11, 2010], Jean Demay, DISA’s technical manager for the agency’s Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane.” (Bob Brewin, op cit, emphasis added)

The Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project (TISC) is a communications-information tool which  “links non-government organizations with the United States [government and military] and other nations for tracking, coordinating and organizing relief efforts”.(Government IT Scrambles To Help Haiti, TECHWEB January 15, 2010).

The TISC is an essential component of the militarization of emergency relief. The US military through DISA oversees the information – communications system used by participating aid agencies. Essentially, it is a communications sharing system controlled by the US military, which is made available to approved non-governmental partner organizations. The Defense Information Systems Agency also “provides bandwidth to aid organizations involved in Haiti relief efforts.”

[Lila: underlining is mine.]

British Empire Worse Than “Oriental Despots”

Posted on by

Here are some interesting facts about “benign” British rule in India:

In 1900, the average per capita annual income in various countries was as follows:

U.S.  –     $220

U.K. –     $180

France – $156

Germany – $124

Holland –  $110

Norway – $100

Austria –  $84

Italy  –    $80

Spain –  $80

Russia – $55

Belgium –  $14  (?)

British India – $5

(Source: William Digby, ” ‘Prosperous’ British India: A Revelation From Official Records,” 1901, cited by Taraknath Das in “Young India’s Reply to Count Tolstoi, Part III” in  The Twentieth Century Magazine, Volume 2.)

This was a decline from $9 per capita yearly income only 20 years earlier.

That is, Indian incomes were halved during just 20 years of British imperial rule.

The cause was glaringly evident – the huge tribute paid every year to the British, amounting to $175 million dollars.

(Source: Rev. J. T. Sunderland in “The Causes of Famine in India.”)

The tribute was only the latest form of plunder.

In just over half a century after The Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British plundered between $2.5 billion and $5 billion from Indian peasantry.

While the Russian Czar only took 1/10th of the produce of his Eurasian subjects and allowed for variations in production, the British took 20% of the production and made no allowance for failures of crops and natural disasters. Poor peasants paid as much as 65% of their net income in land revenue.

All told, there were more famines in India under British rule than in all the centuries before under Muslim rule.

British writers themselves pointed out that Britain’s “famine relief” programs were paid from taxes on the Indians themselves so that it was a matter of taxing the starving to feed the dying.

(Source: “The Causes of the Present Discontent in India,” C. J. O’Donnell.)

While famines under previous rulers had struck at the rate of roughly 1 in 50 years, under the British, they struck every 9 years and their toll in numbers was much higher. They also affected a much larger area.

In just 40 years between 1870 and 1910, famine took the lives of 30 million Indians.

(“The British Empire and Famine in Late 19th Century Central India,” Laxman S. Satya).

As for the total number of “avoidable deaths” through out the two centuries of British empire, estimates run into the hundreds of millions, and at an upper end, the figure of over a billion.  This, not the racist fantasies of propagandists like Jean Raspail, is genocide and race war:

British-ruled India provides the most appalling example of imperial lies in a quantitative sense. For two and a half centuries every British schoolchild has been told the dreadful but substantially fictional “story” of the Black Hole of Calcutta – how in 1756 the ruler of Bengal incarcerated 146 British prisoners (including a woman) in a small cell overnight and in the morning only 23 (including the woman) had survived. This story demonized the Indians, victims for two centuries of genocidal British rule in South Asia (1757-1947) – whilst the appalling rapacious taxation, famine and commerce-spread disease in British India has been substantially deleted from British history.

The horrendous “forgotten history” of British-ruled India commenced with the Great Bengal Famine in rapaciously over-taxed Bengal in 1769/1770 (10 million victims or one third of the population dying) and almost concluded with the World War 2 man-made Bengal Famine (which peaked in 1943/1944, took 4 million victims, was accompanied by horrendous sexual abuse of huge numbers of starving women and was very likely due to a deliberate “scorched earth” British war-time strategy to prevent Japanese invasion of India). [1] In between these 2 disasters a succession of appalling famines killed scores of millions; mercantile spread of epidemic diseases such as plague and cholera killed millions; and grinding poverty from British taxation was such that the annual death rate before 1920 was about 4.8%, falling to a still genocidal value of 3.5 % in 1947. The current annual death rate in India nearly 60 years after independence is about 0.9% – a huge improvement but still about 3 times greater than what it should be.”

 

 

Nepal Earthquake Deaths Reach 2,500

Posted on by

The 7.9 earthquake that hit Nepal two days ago has now exacted nearly 2500 deaths, making it the worst since a 1934 earthquake took the lives of over 8,500 people.

The earthquake set off a monstrous avalanche on Mt. Everest, destroyed the 200 foot Dharahara  tower  built in 1832, and has racked up reconstruction costs estimated at 20% of the country’ GDP.

India, Pakistan, the UK, and the US have all pledged aid, although, as yet, nothing has reached.

Some conspiracy researchers are adding this disaster to an earlier volcanic eruption in Chile in 2008  ; an earthquake in Haiti in 2010 that killed over 230,000 people; earthquakes followed by a tsunami in  China in 2010; as well as earthquakes in New Zealand that devastated Christchurch, as evidence of a pattern of increasing seismic activity world-wide.

For example, the number of big earthquakes doubled in 2014.

The increase could be triggered by purely geological events, but some think they could be precipitated accidentally or intentionally by weapons testing/research or, at least in the US,  by fracking for oil.

 

The Declining Value of Elite Credentials

Posted on by

Of Two Minds.com:

“Economist Michael Spence developed the job market signaling model of valuing employees based on their credentials in the 1970s. The basic idea is that signaling overcomes the inherent asymmetry of information between employer and potential employee, i.e. what skills the employer needs and what skills the employee actually has is a mystery to the other party.

Credentials (diplomas, certificates, grad point averages, test scores, etc.) send a signal that transfers information to the employer about the opportunity cost the potential employee sacrificed for the credential.

It is important to note that the credential doesn’t necessarily signal the employee’s actual skills or knowledge– it only signals the amount of human and financial capital the employee and his family invested in obtaining the credential.

Signaling boils down to something like this: if Potential Employee A graduated from a prestigious Ivy League university, and Potential Employee B graduated from a lower-ranked state university, this doesn’t signal that Candidate A is necessarily more intelligent than Candidate B; it does signal, however, that Candidate A probably worked harder to get into and graduate from the prestigious school.

The signal is: Candidate A will work harder for the employer than Candidate B, all other qualifications being equal.

The Signal Value of credentials is the entire foundation of higher education. The higher education system does not actually test or credential the body of knowledge or working skills of graduates; it simply accredits that the graduate sat through a semi-random selection of courses and managed to pass the minimal standards–or alternatively, that the graduate gamed/cheated the system to gain credit without actually doing any real learning.

The reason tens of thousands of parents are sweating blood to get their child into an Ivy League university is the signaling power of that degree is widely viewed as having the near-magical ability to guarantee lifelong highly compensated employment.

But the power of higher education credentials is eroding for systemic reasons.

1. Credentials of all sorts are in over-supply: there are more people holding credentials than there are jobs that require those credentials.

2. Higher education does not prepare graduates for the real world of work in the emerging economy, so the signaling value of a diploma has been lost.

3. The opportunity cost paid by those graduating from college is now more noise than signal.

4. The intrinsically ambiguous signal value of a credential cannot be substituted for real-world accreditation of real skills and working knowledge.

In essence, the failure of signaling to accredit actual skills and knowledge bases is being acknowledged by employers. This accreditation is precisely what diplomas fail to do. Specialty programs (nursing, medicine) accredit the skills and knowledge of the graduates, but this is not true of the vast majority of diplomas and credentials.

The job-market value of a college degree was relatively high in the 1970s when Spence developed the Signal Model because the number of workers with college diplomas was still relatively modest (around 15% of the workforce). The most basic function of the market–supply and demand–worked in favor of what was relatively scarce–a college diploma. As a result, the assumption that the applicant had worked hard to obtain the degree was more signal than noise.

Nowadays, conventional credentials such as college degrees are in over-supply: around 40% of the work force has a college diploma of some sort, and an increasing number of college graduates are taking jobs that do not require a college education.

This is reflected in the declining wages of college graduates: Even the Most Educated Workers Have Declining Wages.

While the cost of higher education has skyrocketed (tuition is up 1,100% since 1980), the educational yield of higher education has declined. The national study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, found that over one third of college students “did not demonstrate any significant improvements in learning critical thinking and other skills central to success in the new economy” and concluded that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”.

From this dismal record, we can extrapolate that another third gained marginal utility from their investment of tens of thousands of dollars and four years of study.

Google is widely viewed as a bellwether of the new economy. It is noteworthy, then, that Google has found that academic success has little correlation with being productive in the workplace. Lazlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, made the following comments in an interview published by the New York Times in June 2013:

One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.s (grade point averages) are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.s and test scores, but we don’t anymore. We found that they don’t predict anything.What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Signaling an ability to grind though four or five years of institutional coursework is no longer enough; the signaling needed to indicate an ability to create value must be much richer in information density and more persuasive than a factory model diploma.”

 

Buiter’s Bunny Boiler – Part II

Posted on by

Willem Buiter, once a critic of the banksters, albeit, as much as an insider can be,  is now doing their bidding:

Bloomberg, via LRC/North:

“In a new piece, Citi’s Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates.

Fundamentally, the ELB problem comes down to cash. According to Buiter, the ELB only exists at all due to the existence of cash, which is a bearer instrument that pays zero nominal rates. Why have your money on deposit at a negative rate that reduces your wealth when you can have it in cash and suffer no reduction?

Cash therefore gives people an easy and effective way of avoiding negative nominal rates.

Buiter’s note suggests three ways to address this problem:

Abolish currency.

Tax currency.

Remove the fixed exchange rate between currency and central bank reserves/deposits.“

So  perhaps that was what that scandal with Helene Mees was all about.

A little arm-twisting by the powers-that-be?

While Mees has agreed to a deal that keeps her out of jail, she is said to be planning a suit for defamation against the economist.

 

Parasite Planet: Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers

Posted on by

Writing about parasites on the body-politic reminds me of an on-going infestation closer home. In fact, in my home. In my garden, to be precise.

I’m talking about the eastern lubber grasshopper, which, as grasshoppers go, is a rather fine looking specimen: Yellow, with black and red markings, he grows to a plump three inches, which is about three inches more than I care to see.

I didn’t know the name until recently, but the face is familiar from a couple of months back, when I saw a whiskered gold-and-black snout peering out from behind a window-bar. Being generally well-disposed to all God’s creatures outside the human world, except cockroaches and  slimy things- that-go-squish, I let him hop along without interfering.

Too bad. It turns out that the eastern lubber is a nasty pest that defies the birds around here because he gives off an evil-tasting  juice when he’s crushed.  That explains why he can hop along without flying. He knows no one wants to eat him.  The books say he hisses when he’s cornered, but so far I haven’t seen any sign of it, and if  he does, I hiss pretty well myself.

What I’ve caught the lubber doing so far is bad enough, hiss or not.  He and his mates turned a stately crinum – a purple Queen Emma, at that –  into a moth-eaten wreck, with broken leaves and chewed-up buds.  Some tender bromeliads now look like half-eaten salad and even the Black Magic Ti’s in the corner of the yard are pitted and pock-marked.

All while I was researching politics and not paying attention.

It turns out that there’s not much that can be done to eastern lubbers, once full-grown. The time to have caught the suckers was in the spring, when they were newly-hatched.

Too bad that then they were cute little bugs that just begged for Jain treatment.

 

Summers in a lush, semi-tropical yard take the Jain out of you and put in a Japanese killer.

Look out! Samurai lawn-woman!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTSv5Gihgz028vEX4Z7v1t5ishob61-BPH0Q1OAWWoS5zcJFEvE

Oh-oh-oh..

If you’re old enough to remember John Belushi, you know what I”m talking about.

Seriously, though, in gardening, blood-lust is the way to go.

Chemicals kill too many things that need to live and organic baits aren’t fast enough, although I’m told something called Nolo bait works slowly to cut back the lubber population.

I took the cave-woman route and prowled around in the afternoon, bathed in sweat in 90-plus humidity, brick in one hand, a long bamboo stick in the other, nudging and prodding leaves to uncover my prey.

Lubbers, fortunately, are not just show-boats who stick out with their gaudy ensemble, they’re cocky, stupid show-boats, who don’t even think to hide.

Prodded with a stick, they slide, swing under a stem, and hop, sometimes quick enough to get away for a few seconds, but downright lethargic next to your average, in-shape cockroach.

Unlike cockroaches, lubbers die easily. A sharp prod disembowels them. One hit of a brick, and their head and chest cave in.

Filled with loathing and rage on behalf of my violated crinum, I rubbed the edge of the brick vindictively back and forth through my victim’s entrails to make sure that there would be no last-minute heroics.

He didn’t die alone.

Over the past couple of days,  a reign of terror has been unleashed on the lubber population here. Fully a dozen have met a gruesome fate at my hands, with little remorse shown.

I intend to smash and eviscerate every single future lubber I see, with no quarter given for age or sex.

Somewhere in all this, I’m sure, there’s a lesson about karma, human-life, and the powers-that-be, to whom we’re not much more than garden pests and useless feeders to be exterminated.

But, right now, I’m not in the mood to hear it.

I’ve got me some lubbers to hunt.

Priapus: The God of Modernity

Posted on by

Update: Again, the needful clarification:

I don’t support Esolen’s position on gay marriage, just because I agree with the accuracy of his exposition of Christian doctrine.

In contrast to Esolen, I fully support the right of homosexuals to marry and adopt children and raise their own children in any way they want.

I go even farther.

I think polygamists, poly-amorists, and every other bi- or trans group should be free to form their own types of marriages/group couplings…or unions… and create churches that agree with them, if they want to.

But I do object to attempts to rewrite traditional Christian teaching to make it approve these practices and I affirm my right to state that those unions are not consonant with the traditional teaching of Christianity or the major religious traditions.

Apparently, in some circles, that still makes me a “bigot” and “hater.”

One thing is true. I am bigoted in favor of truthful statements and I hate falsification of history and mendacious media campaigns.

ORIGINAL POST

I just discovered an interesting conservative Christian magazine – Touchstone, which claims to be a defense of “mere Christianity” – C. S. Lewis’ term for unadorned traditional Christian teaching.  An article there argues that the real god behind the “environmental feminism or eco-feminism” of the New World Order is not the goddess Gaia, as its naive proponents believe, but the God Priapus.

Anthony Esolen on the real god behind Gaia – Priapus:

“We may never budge one inch on what is essential. We will not tell a lie, even to please the world and win us the accolades of faculty bishops and historians everywhere. We will not move.

In our day, the issue is not Christology. We’re not so sophisticated in our heresies. The issue is sex. We’re encouraged to pretend that the child-making act is not essentially ordered to child-making. We must pretend that it’s only the friction of erogenous flesh. We must pretend that a man can be made into a woman by a saw and a trowel, and a woman into a man by pinning the tail on the donkey, or by just thinking it is so. We must pretend that a child in the womb is just some stuff or other. We must pretend that boys and girls do not deserve a married father and mother, promised to one another for life. If we are Christian, we must say to Christ, “Thus far and no farther! You can have all the world, but these few inches are mine.”

Demands of the New Religion

Now let us be quite clear. We have not chosen this fight. The new religion has come to us, and it demands total submission. It demands that we cease to worship God, and that we cease to tell the truth. We have come to the cleft in the road, what Lewis called the great divorce. God will, if we allow him, heal our evil ways; Jesus came to call sinners. But God can no more accept evil in his household than he can cease to be God. He is holy. He will wash our grubby robes white in his blood, but Truth cannot lie. He cannot declare the unclean to be clean. He can only make it clean by his grace.

The new religion of sex requires us to take down the Cross and erect something else. We must not do so. It requires us to abandon our fellow men to lusts that destroy the common good, as even sociologists, often the slow kids on the block, have begun to see. We must not do so. It requires us to subject our bodies to the phantasms of homeless postmodern man. We must not do so. It requires us to avert our eyes as our little brothers and sisters are dismembered. We must not do so. It requires us to wink as the minds of children are subjected to confusion in order to ratify the choices of adults. We must not do so. It requires us to subordinate political liberty to sexual license. We must not do so.

It requires us to spit upon the Cross, to sink our fingers in the blood of innocent children, to harden our hearts against the crushed lives of brothers and sisters who learn to their dismay that Priapus is a stupid and stupefying idol. It requires us to like ourselves rather than love our neighbors. It requires us to tell a deadly lie.

Raise One Sword

We must not do so. We shall not do so. Truth is truth to the end of time. Even if the battle appears lost, let each Christian raise one sword at least against the lie. Even if the fight is fierce, the warfare long, let each Christian remember that our Captain triumphed in and through the hour of his utter defeat upon Calvary. We set our faces like flint. While there is breath in our lungs and blood in our hearts, we will not cease to tell the truth, and we will not bend one inch in homage to the idol.

The Lord does not require that we win. He requires that we be steadfast. The battle is not ours but his. Yet let us not suppose that we are doomed to lose this fight. The gates of hell are not iron; the gates of hell are straw. For a vanguard has gone before us that our opponents cannot see, whose very existence they do not suspect. It is that great cloud of witnesses—and they are armed in the full array of God.”