Now posting at

http://slackbob.blogspot.com

Moving again.

This time to here.

human lard and body part usage in the cosmetics industry

A story from the most recent Fortean Times: a group captured in Peru killing people to harvest their body fat, supposedly to sell it for $9000 a litre on the international black market. FT understandably focus on the, perhaps more likely, idea that it is the survival of pre-Columbian practices of human sacrifice. Could be, but consider the other occasions the cosmetics industry has taken part in symbolical or actual human sacrifice.

There is, for example, Skin Medica, Oprah's face skin which incorporates foreskin fibroblasts. Taken from the circumcised boy children found in America.

There is also the practice related in the "Stem Cell Swindle" documentary by the BBC, where a Ukrainian maternity hospital was telling mothers their children had died, when the fact was that the doctors had killed them and harvested their bone marrow so that stem cells could be extracted and put into the faces of wealthy wrinklies at dodgy Caribean clinics. The EU investigation found a mass grave of the dismembered children.

BBC Documentary

Radio 4's Document: about WWII brainwashing. I'll get round to posting about it soon.

Sympathy for the Devil

Today I want to talk about a much maligned man, a man probably, whatever Khalid bin Mahfouz might say - the most slandered and libelled man alive today. Assuming that he is still alive, of course, which may be doubtful.

That man, of course, is Osama bin Laden.

I should point out that I don't at all believe the official party line we've all been fed about his being a mad and dangerous fundamentalist living the goatherd life up in the Hindu Kush. The man is not an ascetic. He's a multimillionaire, a playboy, a member of the Saudi elite. This might play into the support for the official line, as the Saudi elite have been painted as Wahhabist madmen, but thats not really true either. Those who have studied the Cathars of medieval France may recognise the pattern: a gang of prohibitionist, Puritan religious fanatics who forbade any sexual activity at all but whose leaders, in secret from their followers, practiced unspeakable sexual perversions amongst themselves. So it is in Arabia: the normal people are religious, the elites employ repressive security aparatii to keep them that way, but the elites themselves are drug-addled murderous kiddie-fiddlers.

There's a woman called Kola Boof, a Somali I believe but raised by Americans, who found herself back in Africa working as an actress and being kidnapped into sexual slavery by ObL. Might not sound like a defence of him, but I'm defending him against the common slurs, not putting him forward for sainthood. This was long after his nominal conversion to fundamentalism but the man she was with when she first encountered Osama, a date of hers who was a footballer, described him as "Arab mafia", not a fundamentalist. And the description of him there is that of a "gangbanger" (as she calls him) hanging loose with his crew. His posse. I'm not entirely familiar with this jargon, but I think that's right.

Right or not, it reminds me of someone else: Mo Atta, described in Welcome to Terrorland by the staff of a restaurant who served him as all blinged up. They assumed he was a mafioso. And of course, through Wally Hilliard and the seperate testimony of his then stripper moll Amanda Keller, Atta was implicated in the supply of illegal drugs, a known mafia activity.

So my position on bin Laden is this, he wasn't a terrorist in the usual sense, he wasn't a fundamentalist, he probably didn't even know 9/11 was going to happen, although he may have done. He certainly wasn't the brains behind it. He's a patsy. He's Lee Harvey Oswald. He's Barry Seal. He's an intelligence agent who doesn't realise the plan of his handlers is to implicate him for their crimes and for him to pay the penalty. But there are no Soviets or Cubans or Columbian cartels this time to take the ultimate blame, so he's left on the loose, more or less, in his little Kush cave, to provide a continuing spectre of menace.

So have some sympathy, he's a man who's been used and abused then dumped in a cave, far away from the dope and pussy and modern amenities he's so fond of.

Certainly his career follows a similar trajectory to that of Seal and Oswald. Those two became involved in the intelligence world at an early age in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol under paedophile, bishop, hypnotist, cancer-researcher, gun runner and intelligence agent David Ferrie's tutelage. Barry took to the air like a duck to water and spent the next three decades, give or take, flying drugs, guns, explosives and anything else to and from Cuba, Arkansas, South America.

Oswald went into the armed forces, was taught how to speak Russian and put in air traffic control radar for the U2. Then, the theory goes, he was sent to Russia as a faux defector to give them the ability to shoot down the U2 and scupper Eisenhower's peace notions. Between army and defection he'd worked at an intel-linked photo analysis business. After defection he waltzed back into America without so much as a by-your-leave, started working with the anti-Castro Cubans with their known intelligence links, for Bannister, for del Charro linked companies and so on. Even while he was in Russia people were using his name and papers to lay a false paper trail for him. His entire adult life he moved in a web of intrigue.

So it is with old Osama. He grew up the scion of a rich family, albeit the youngest son by an unfavoured wife, and he did what his equivalent in the west would do, the Old Etonian domination of MI6, the Yale domination of the CIA and so forth. He went into intelligence, back when it was the done thing for the Saudi rich to support the Mujahids in Afghanistan. He was young and enthusiastic, he got a bit more involved than most and went to visit their quaint little training camps. Got himself onto the CIA's database of supporters, The Base aka al-Qaeda. During this period he must have made ties with his fellow intelligence agents and anti-Soviets in the CIA. He later bragged to Boof that he had been a psychic spy and an agent trainer for the CIA, the latter claim at least not being far from his official role of recruitment and logistics.

After that he went back to his playboy, dope fiend lifestyle, living it up like the mafiya he was, wives and molls and terrorist covert ops buds all over the place. Even tried to set up as a businessman. A right little James Bond. Stayed in touch with his family, although they were later forced to deny it. Kept receiving money from the Saudi government, although they claimed to have revoked his passport.

Then his covert ops group was hung out to dry by the US over the embassy bombings, whether he was really behind them or not is immaterial, and he was sent to the world's biggest Agency safe house and open-air drug den: Afghanistan. Forced to STAY there. Forced to smuggle cameras past the Taleban, who were not in fact particularly fond of the foreign forces on their soil, whoever they were really working for, because those bearded worthies feared the theft of their souls.

I'm guessing he didn't get so much pussy from then on.

But the Agency kept him safe. When the Talibs tried to extradite him for the embassy bombings, America bombed them. When they tried the same thing after 9/11? Bombed 'em again. A message was being sent: when we say "we want to bring him to justice", we don't mean "we want to bring him to justice". So, the Talibs go tthe message. Between the two they kept him safe.

It may surprise some to know that there were differences between "al-Qaeda" (the bin Laden special ops group) and the Taleban, the government of Afghanistan. Now they were fundamentalists. They have no history of doping, whoring, or living la vida loca. They were ascetics. They seized power because they were popular. They were a small group of students who rode a wave of popular discontent into power as a result of two incidents of children being kidnapped into sexual slavery by warlords. I'm naturally in sympathy with a gang of bearded, Spartan teetotalers. This is what led to their downfall. They thought they had enough power to force the warlords to stop the drug trade as well as the kiddie-fiddling. They almost totally eliminated heroin production in their part of Afghanistan. That, I believe, was their ultimate mistake.

Nearly every American war centres on drugs, the rest on oil. Somalia - oil. Vietnam - drugs. Kosovo - drugs. To stamp out drugs was to America what a red flag is to a bull. Afghanistan, the producer now of 90% of the world's heroin, is an obvious candidate. Again. The part of Afghanistan not under Taleban control had maintained its role in the drug trade. So, I believe one of the factors behind 9/11 was to evict the Taleban and restart drug production. To free the paedophile narco war lords from the religious dictatorship of the Taleban.

This is something that confused me. Assuming ObL was involved in 9/11: why? The connections Hopsicker has uncovered are unquestionable, but they're all drug lords, fraudsters, and those who protect such people. Money. Why would this gang of swindlers and "legitimate businessmen" get involved in terrorism? I can see why the CIA might, and these people are all affiliates to that sort fo intelligence meta-group, but still. But this is why: a 90% state in the global heroin trade. Afghanistan now produces more than it did before the Taleban decided to ruin the party, mostly under the control of the brother of the "president" of Afghanistan and his mate Dostum the War Lord.

Paedophiles, drug dealers, terrorists, intelligence agents. We just need some old SS men and the party would be complete. Reminds me of the Cocaine Coup. Speaking of Nazis, the Nazis were notorious sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood. Otto Skorzeny went to work in the Arab world after the war, too. And as long ago as the first world war the Kaiser was putting about rumours that he was a Muslim to try ot gain war supporters. Then the Germans started all that trouble in Bosnia, which ObL's al-Qaeda group was deep in. That was the BND, of course, the successors of the Gehlen Org. Then there were all those German neo-Nazis involved in the OKC bombing with Mujahid Menepta/Melvin Lattimore and the rest of the Arab connection.

On the subject of Hospicker, he's recently linked Hilliard and the SRI, which was used for both psychic and mind control experiments by the CIA and company. Then we have ObL's aforementioned claims of working as a CIA psychic spy. Maybe he was just chatting up the girls with his big war talk. Chances are psychic spying doesn't work anyway, at least that's what notorious Satanist Michael Aquino claims.

So don't blame ObL, he was just doing his job. And where would we be without him? There's a literary reference I'm not well enough read to know of: a monk hears someone say "el diablo est muerte" and says "God no!".

And don't fall for any us vs them rhetoric either. Remember 9/11: not the evil muslims do, but the meeting between GWB's dad and ObL's brother. When they're talking to you, them is the muslims, but when they're in those meetings them is you. Fascist patriotism. When Franco was accusing the Spanish Republic of betraying Spain and claiming do defend Spain himself, he was using Fascist patriotism. The image of patriotism without the reality. Franco had his Italian aeroplanes, his German tanks, his Morrocan soldiers flown to Spain in British aeroplanes fueled by American oil companies who had redirected shipments from the legitimate government, and supported by the Vatican, and later with weapons brought through Portugal to avoid blockade.

What is lacking is sign of any local support at all, despite the nationalist rhetoric and eventual "Nationalist" title. Even the rural, conservative, right wing Basques fought against him. One of the reasons for the three year long civil war, as opposed to the planned immediate coup (and ultimate the reason for the African troops of Franco) was the reluctance of the Spanish troops to fight. Some were told they were on a drill, not a coup. Others had to be got drunk before being sent out so they wouldn't realise what they were doing. It at least one place they changed sides, in others the refused to fight and handed out weapons to civilians or were easily overcome by armed trade unionists.

But now I'm a fair way from ObL.

Acer Aspire Sound Solutions

Not a normal blog post but I have had great difficulty on occasion finding solutions to my Ubuntu problems (although it was much harder as a novice ten years ago with dial up and command-line only slackware, of course). So should anyone else have the same problem, how to get the built in mic working on an Acer Aspire laptop, they may google and find this.

Might not work for them, but even so. I've seen plenty of other explanations, but none of them worked for me.

Open Volume Control, which should be a speaker icon in the top taskbar, click preferences, tick any unticked boxes with "recording" or "options" next to them, which in my case means having three under recording and two "input"s under options. Next, as some of the other fixes state, increase volume on "capture" and "capture 1" under the recording tab (which should have appeared by now) but if you put both to max expect inexplicable white noise, so don't. Click, if necessary, the little mics next to the speakers below the sliders so they don't have the little red crosses on them. You'll have to do this, it would seem, every time you want to record something, I haven't found out how to avoid that yet. Finally there are two options under "options", both labelled input. with the options "mic" and "front mic". Make the top one front mic and the bottom one mic, if you do it the other way around it squeals.

Should do it. Might not.

How do banks run out of money?

An old truism long forgotten: banks don't fail without fraud.

In the S&L period this was remembered, although it didn't stop that Bush having it away with four hundred million dollars. This time around, although a large number of the world's leading finanacial institutions have now been nationalised having wasted all their money, no-one seems to suspect that the money has gone anywhere suspicious. Money lost, they say, not money stolen. But all money lost is money gained by someone else.

The Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, loaned several milliards (thousand millions) to a russian chap called Lebedev who now owns the Evening Standard. Not a penny was ever paid back, nor is it being sought through the courts now that the government owns the bank and the russian is a media mogul. That's how billionaires become billionaires and banks go bankrupt.

HBOS, another one gone into the custody of the state, http://www.ianfraser.org/?p=856#comments;, a single branch lost £250 million, not through incompetence but by forcing companies out of business, largely by lending them money then forcing them to pay fees to companies associated with the branch manager (and defence contractor EADS). The Reading branch, the manager of which, one Lynden Scourfield, evidently took suitcases of cash and the services of ladies of dubious repute from the managers of these companies, notably one David Mills, not the same Mills formerly married to Tessa Jowell, proprietor of a company called Quayside who billed themselves as "turnaround specialists" and were in receipt of forced payments from the clients of the bank. Payments were taken from the accounts of clients of the bank to pay off Quayside even when the law prohibited it. Companies were required to hire Quayside as a condition of their loans, and to appoint Quayside staff to their boards.

The biggest of these scams, draining the bank of over £100 million was a Manx luxury jet company, which had an approved overdraft of only £800,000. There were few if any paying customers and yet the company, pushed by Quayside, branched out into luxury yacht rentals. Similar, now I think about it, to Hilliard's enterprise Florida Air, a plane company with no legit business based in the Manx tax haven, home to various semi-private intel outfits, such as a company which prints money for third world countries. Literally, makes the bank notes. It went bust, having supposedly burned through over £100 million in less than a year and, at the end of it all, only a single jet could be seized to pay debts to the bank.

The yacht, you'll be glad to know, had been in Mister Mills' name all along and stayed very much in his hands. In fact, never had it a single paying customer for rental.

Certainly a lot of money was pissed away, but plenty went properly missing too. Other companies were driven out of business only for their assets to be bought at fire sale prices by the Quayside boys.

It's true as the late Postman Patel used to say that the banks had pissed their money away in dividend payments back when they were pretending to make profits, thereby dispersing their capital, but it's equally true that people inside the banks have been filling their boots for many a moon. The big government hand outs will only encourage them.

fempols

A couple of scandals which are hardly surprising but don't get any coverage:

Patsy Hewitt's kid, a coke head.

Tessa Jowell, whose husband took the big Italian bribe, made a habit for a while of paying of her mortgage in cash then re mortgaging. Suitcases full of cash? Given that the police can seize any amount over £1000 held in cash until a magistrate can be convinced it's of legitimate provenance and banks are required to initiate money laudering investigations for amounts over £4000, perhaps it's relevant that such investigations of likely to be investigated in inverse proportion to the size of the cash deposit. Well, at leas tshe didn't claim it on expenses.

Remember why tarzan started shaving? I never bothered.

the man who paid the men who stare at goats

I don't know if you know this, but that Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation refered to in the Chinese press release as signing a deal with the SRI isn't a local provincial concern, but the self-proclaimed "World's Local Bank" HSBC, plc.. The company was founded in the aftermath of the opium wars, on territory won in those wars, and largely ran as a funder for the opium trade in its early years. Sutherland, the accepted founder of the bank, was also on the board of P&O shipping line, which at that time was importing opium into China.

HSBC also owns the Midland Bank, formerly renowned as MI6's bank of choice.

On an unrelated note there's a very interesting bit in the third part of the Evidence of Revision series about Murchison's Hotel del Charro and its links to Nixon, Marcello, Hoover, DH Byrd (described as a "Murchison underboss"), and so on.