Murder Most Foul

"Soldiers are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns of foreign policy.” - Henry Kissenger, quoted in Kiss the Boys Goodbye.


Many people have heard of the results of the experiments performed by Stanley Milgram in the late 1950s, that demonstrated the extremes people would go to in the obedience of authority. While some have interpreted these experiments as an indication of the fact that the people involved in atrocities are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, other have trotted out the Milgram experiment in the service of a discourse which seeks to define man by his most base tendencies.

In the last year I have been reluctantly sliding to the side of those who believe that humanity is governed by its most base tendencies, and that civilised behaviour is simply the artefact of individuals taking the most expedient and adaptive route to surviving intra-species competition and the demands of social groups.

However I recently discovered a piece of information that showed human nature in a different light.

It was provided courtesy of one Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, who is considered an expert on the subject of 'killology', or the study of the psychological impact of killing another human on the person doing the killing. Dave's brief in life is to ensure that society's ordained killers do so effectively and with minimal psychological damage to themselves.

He has also written a book on the topic titled On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, in which he makes a startling claim.

While Steven Spielberg, and virtually every Hollywood director who has created a film dealing with the subject of war, has found fit to convince audiences that wars feature soldiers indiscriminately opening fire on the enemy with an impressive array of killing machines, this is not, says Grossman, an accurate representation of what actually happens on battlefields.

According to Grossman, during World War Two, Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall discovered that anywhere between 80-85% of soldiers fighting for the Allies would not fire their weapons when in combat. In fact many would chose death over shooting another human being.

To quote Grossman: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.”

This is, to me at least, a staggering piece of information. It provides a very different perspective on human behaviour to the hyper-aggressive gung-ho representation of aggressive behaviours in war favoured by the media. More specifically it indicates that in World War Two the majority of soldiers were willing to override arguably their most primal urge rather than kill another human being.

Apart from damaging the discourse that seeks to paint human beings as intrinsically selfish and destructive creatures (thereby often rationalising and indirectly endorsing these often very profitable behaviours), this insight also emphasises the fact that war is straightforward mass murder perpetrated by ruling elites on their subjects.

I say this because Grossman's insights provide substantial support for the notion that modern warfare is something that civilian populations participate in under duress, and only when placed under severe psychological pressure (an external 'threat', the severity of which is brought home with propaganda or false flag attacks), or threat of force (Allied 'malingerers' were executed in World War One).

If anyone is aware of a major conflict that was fomented at grassroots level rather than imposed or orchestrated from the top of a social hierarchy I'd be interested to hear of it.

People in the West seem curiously resistant to the concept that their leaders represent some of the most profoundly psychopathic personalities in world history. While everyone can agree that Hitler was an insanely murderous individual, the murderous behaviour of Churchill and Truman is rarely put under the spotlight.

For example we are all taught that Hitler took it upon himself to eliminate Poles, Jews and Romanies from the European continent. Hitler's utter vileness has been celebrated continuously since he died, almost as if he had somehow exhausted a portion of the overall capacity for human degradation by the time he was shot in his Berlin bunker.

However, the behaviour of Allied leaders in World War Two is rather less familiar to the average Joe. For example our high school history instruction inexplicably (and I say inexplicably with a profound sense of irony) fails to mention the fact that Churchill embraced the previously illegal practice of bombing civilian areas during World War Two with great enthusiasm ("Perhaps the next time round the way to do it will be to kill women, children and the civilian population," he mused in the aftermath of the First World War), or that Truman firebombed much of Japan to the ground before deliberately dropping nuclear weapons on two purely civilian populations.

Grossman's insights indirectly illuminate something that people in the world would do well to recognise. The tendency towards psychopathic behaviour is manifested by a relatively small segment of the population, which is in turn disproportionately represented amongst the people who occupy significant positions of power in government, industry and the economy.

While the Wikipedia labels war profiteers like banker Jacob Schiff as 'philanthropists', these individuals profited off immense carnage and human suffering during major human conflicts, and in Schiff's case bankrolled one of the most murderous and dehumanizing regimes in human history.

Unfortunately, the common man is being brought rapidly up to speed with the psychopathology of the nutty movers and shakers in the elite. The work of individuals like Grossman has succeeded in helping the military raise the percentage of soldiers willing to use their weapons to upwards of 90%.

Furthermore, the proliferation of violent media, and first person shooter games in particular, has been demonstrated by researchers (including Grossman himself) to have lowered the threshold for acting out of homicidal behaviours.

Something that intrigues me about this subject is the American Psychiatric Association recently dropped the diagnostic label of 'Psychopath' from its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This disorder has instead been replaced by 'Anti Social Personality Disorder', a watered down version of the previous psychopathic personality which equates these personality types with risk seeking personalities.

This is an interesting shift, as the DSM has never shied away from attempting to pathologise and medicate behaviours that fall within the normal range of human behaviour, yet it as it adds ever more diagnostic categories to its cannon, the one most frequently descriptive of those in power falls quietly by the wayside.

Perhaps this is being done to disguise the rather obvious fact that humanity's real enemies have rarely inhabited a horizontal social plane, but have instead tended to reside at the top of the social pyramid, from which they have for aeons directed us to slaughter one another for their benefit.

Read More...

Summary only...

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

>

Read More...

Summary only...

Wakey Wakey, Rise and Shine

If there’s one thing that I think defines humanity, it’s the ability to take absolutely anything for granted. Expose anyone to something for long enough and they’ll think its normal. A child raised in a closet and visited daily by a pink goblin for readings from Dostoevsky will grow up thinking this is perfectly prosaic.

Our ability to assimilate virtually anything into our personal or social reality and put up with it has its uses. Living in a universe ravaged by forces not always conducive to the life forms that inhabit it could easily lead to this sort of behaviour as a survival trait, and has probably done exactly that.

However, when it comes to stuffing around with the human race and manipulating its members this tendency to accept anything at all that has been around for long enough becomes somewhat problematic.

Anyone who is in a position of power who is capable of contriving a particular state of affairs can rest safe in the knowledge that this state of affairs is likely to persist indefinitely if they can get just a single generation of the human species to live through it.

Take banking and money. I remember being a ten year old and asking why a piece of paper was worth something when there were other very similar pieces of paper close at hand that were worth nothing. I doubt I was the only child asking this question, as asking questions is precisely what children do before this habit is knocked out of them by their educations.

Nobody had an answer for me, and I concluded that some things (later I was to find that maybe the majority of things that bond groups of people in subservience) derive their significance purely from mass consensus and conformity. Everyone agreed money was worth something, therefore it was worth something, kind of like Garbage Pail Kid cards and marbles.

Twenty years down the line I discovered some interesting things about banking. Without going into a detailed history of banking, and the gradual evolution of common exchange systems into fractional reserve banking into central banking I’ll sum it up with the following statement made by William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England:

"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing."

Few people are aware of the fact that a number of central banks are privately owned institutions that legally and openly create money out of thin air and then lend it to governments at interest. Amongst these is the Federal Reserve Bank of America, which exists despite the best efforts of several generations of American patriots to attempt to prevent private interests from taking control of the money supply.

What Reserve Banks do, in essence, is loan money to Governments. This is all very well and good until you find out who repays those loans and the inevitable interest that comes with them. It is not, you might imagine, the politicians who sign off the loans that pay back them back. Instead it is the humble taxpayer who ends up footing the bill.

This interesting situation is only one step removed from simply printing money for one's own use, with that step being the intermediate process which sees the money finding its way into the pockets of central bankers via income tax levied on the citizens of countries.

Now before I go any further, I have to comment that I’m aware that I will, by now, probably have picked up at least one of the type of reader who either feels it is incumbent upon him or her to protect any institution that has functioned for more than a generation, or else reflexively attack any concept that generates the least bit of cognitive dissonance.

This is inevitably the type of person who would not feel put upon if the pink goblin mentioned earlier visited its reproductive apparatus rather than Dostoevsky upon their ears, so long as said goblin wore a suit and whispered sweet nothings in an Oxbridge accent.

Unfortunately, this piece might pick up more than one reader of this variety. I blame it on our education system where asking questions and challenging authority was never really part of the agenda.

Getting back to the point. Humanity finds itself in a rather bizarre situation. A relatively small group of people controls the money supply for profit. One of the more ridiculous things about this state of affairs is that most of the money now created is actually debt (with only the product of mints having any value).

Every time the European Reserve Bank or Federal Reserve Bank inject another hundred billion dollars into the world economy (to alleviate the debt crisis) they do so under the condition that interest is paid back on that debt by the lenders, i.e. the taxpayer.

Those who have re-conditioned themselves to actually question the world they live in will most likely ask the following question: “If someone lends our government $100,000,000 dollars at 20% interest, where will the $20,000,000 in interest actually come from? Aren’t we ultimately required to pay back more money than actually exists? Won’t we end up lending another $20,000,000 to pay back the interest, thereby generating more debt and a never-ending vicious circle?”

The answer to that question is a rather perfunctory “yes”. Of course few people ask that question, partially because they never learnt how to do that sort of thing and partially because the ancient laws against usury (lending at interest) are so clearly silly and outdated, and anyway they’re just so proud of their new car/house/phone that they’ll spend the next forever paying back.

The situation created by this cycle of debt, and its inevitable conclusion is quite disturbing. The more debt banks generate, the more people will be pulled under this debt, effectively paying the modern equivalent of a tithe into the pockets of bankers who expend an absolute minimum of effort to produce money out of thin air.

People at the top of the social heap are less likely to be affected by the ever increasing debt. However, the waters of debt slavery will continue to rise, lapping at ever higher levels of social privilege until only a tiny percentage of the planet’s population does not spend its existence totally drowned and enslaved by debt (and instead concerned that their exhaling will result in an increase in hurricanes).

If this situation doesn’t scare you, allow me to acquaint you with a basic principle shared by the most ruthless totalitarian societies in history: that is to destroy the economic independence of individuals, first by destroying agricultural subsistence farming, and then by generating unavoidable individual participation in the economic system (the compulsory hut tax imposed on black South Africans to get them to work on the mines is but one example).

If you’re prepared to accept the age old truism that money is power then you’ll quickly realise that we’re in a lot more trouble than just perpetual debt cycles. Throw in another handy axiom along the lines of ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ and maybe one or two things happening in the world will shift into crisper focus.

The strangest thing is it that this situation and its origins aren’t even really a secret. All this information is available on the public record, but those in power are so confident in the efficiency of their propaganda machinery, humanity's unwillingness to ask questions unless prompted, the ability of the scoffers of this world to live in complete denial and ignorance whilst attempting to ensure that they do not do so alone, and the general tendency towards public supine supplication to the latest anything that they haven’t been required to make much of an effort to hide it.

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Thomas Jefferson

Footnotes:

1. Until the invasion of Iraq six countries in the world did not possess central banks. All of the remaining central bank-free nations enjoy the status of international pariahs, and include Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Libya.

2. Several presidents of the United States have attempted to revert to government controlled interest-free money supply. These included:
James Madison, 4th President of the Unites States
Quote: “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.”

Abraham Lincoln,16th President of the United States
Quote: “The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than the aristocracy, more selfish than the bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.”

James A Garfield, 20th President of the United States
Quote: "“Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States


“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”
Sir Josiah Stamp President of the Bank of England in the 1920’s

Read More...

Summary only...

Postivism and the Presumption of Impossibility

“Innocent until proven guilty”
To me the presumption of innocence has special meaning when applied to our attempts to understand the universe we live in. The statement recognises that one should not reach a fixed conclusion on a matter until one has indisputable proof that one is correct.

If this phrase were to be converted into an attitude towards approaching knowledge, it might be called the presumption of possibility and read “possible until proven impossible”. A presumption of possibility would indicate that we are free to explore the universe as we choose, using whatever methods we deem appropriate so long as they cause no harm to the other inhabitants of this planet.

Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the so called ‘experts’ of this planet operate according to an inverted dictum, the presumption of impossibility, that instead states “impossible until we get around to proving it impossible - probably using inappropriate tools for investigation and validation”.

My discussion here is generally targeted at a particular, and regrettably common, breed of scientist – though this argument will extend to any individuals who feel it necessary to anoint themselves, each other, or those predisposed to likeminded forms of group-think, as experts.

Here’s the problem with science or any other academic discipline maintaining the presumption of impossibility:

Adopting this position means that human knowledge becomes constrained by the intellectual habits and proclivities or a small group of people who are convinced that they have a handle on truth. Until these people investigate or arrive at a conclusion on a field of human knowledge it is regarded as being bunkum, and those who approach it by other means are castigated and laughed off. This means that in order for the human race to openly recognise something operating in this universe without facing scathing attacks or ridicule they must first wait for scientists to acknowledge it.

Which reminds me of nothing so much as having a slow kid in your class at school, who slows down the whole class because he is only able to learn by adhering to an effective but ultimately rigid and ponderous processes of working through the syllabus.

Of course this can sometimes be helpful, as this slow individual forces others to work through the material more slowly and methodically than might have been the case otherwise. However many vigorous ‘truths’ require absolutely no intellectual pre-digestion, are eminently self-evident and need not depend on consensus for verification (which can be really irritating if you happen to be in the business of identifying and verifying truth for others).

A further problem is that in the case of all too many ‘experts’, the slow kid thinks he is a genius. This translates into a situation in which the slow kid, thinking he is a genius and his methods superior, believes that alternative and quicker ways of learning are nonsense and that nobody else in the class can understand anything until he has understood it. Worse, if the slow kid doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t exist.

Please excuse my less than reverential attitude to science.

You see, my problem is that I don’t like organised religion one bit, and what drives me up the wall is that the current gatekeepers of human knowledge claim they don’t either. This irony is a little too much for me to take sitting down, as they seem oblivious to the fact that they are the de facto inheritors of the mantle of omniscience and self-conferred superiority to which the clergy once laid claim.

The way they see it, they proved that the sun was at the center of the solar system, found out that life was not created in seven days, and then having arrived at a set of insights that had been obvious to the Mayans and Sumerians all along, usurped the role of their much hated church fathers and turned on them. In doing so they seem to have missed the point that their similarities to the clergy far outnumber their differences.

Take the language. The clergy of old used to read out of Latin bibles and conduct sermons in Latin. Nobody understood what they were on about, but that was, in part, the point. If their sermons had been understood by their congregations people would have done what people do and started arguing.

Argument implies that there are two or more sides to an issue, and the clergy didn’t like this very much because they wanted people to think there was only one side to an argument – their side. So as time wore on it became virtually illegal to preach (or later print) the gospel in a commonly understood language, and the only people who could understand what priests were saying were other priests, who tended to share vested interests.

Sure there was the odd genius who picked up Latin and could dispute certain points, but if their disputations became to vociferous you could always burn those people’s material, and as a fail-safe the people themselves. All in all it was a good place to be in. The priests claimed fundamental knowledge of the universe and its workings, preached this to the common people in a language they couldn’t understand, and did away with the odd heretic now and then.

Compare this to science. If you have ever been around a scientist when they have had the opportunity to use a Latin word to describe a thing or process, you can’t help but notice the sense of satisfaction this gives them. Science has apparently taken the lead from the church and created an advanced and sophisticated Latin jargon that could just as easily be replaced by common English nouns, verbs and adjectives.

However, this will never be the case as communicating with one another in a dead language appears to give many scientists the most profound sense that they levitate above the common herd, and are privy to secrets of the universe that can only be communicated in Latin. Sound familiar?

Another thing scientists have inherited from the clergy is the urge to purge heretics by stirring up the odd inquisition. Whenever somebody dares to challenge the stranglehold that established scientific paradigms have on human knowledge, or imply that there is something that exists in the universe despite science’s inability to slap it down with the flyswatter of positivism, calls will inevitably be heard for this person’s head.

Take, for example, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who had the audacity to challenge the dominant Darwinist discourse by proposing the existence of morphogenetic fields. The response of the scientific community to this unwarranted display of independent thinking was the epitome of careful, studied, open-mindedness: Nature magazine called for Sheldrake’s books to be burned. They may even have asked him to give back the letters after his name.

Now from where I stand this behaviour doesn’t make sense coming as it does from a group of people who are supposed to be searching for truth . What this reaction essentially said is ‘we won’t tolerate divergent viewpoints’.

If science is concerned with furthering human knowledge, then it should allow individuals to question established truths as this is how we avoid getting stuck in a quagmire of secure, but potentially false certainty. If these challengers of established truth are mistaken in their scepticism and this is very clear, then it can be dealt with calmly and with little emotion. Even theories that have structural weaknesses can contribute to an evolving understanding of the universe merely by attempting to understand what these weaknesses are (something that is well understood so long as defective theories toe the official line).

Self evident truths discussed amongst intellectuals should not, I think, result in serious divisions if they are genuinely self evident. It certainly doesn’t need to be responded to with anger, hysteria and calls for book burning unless what the individual in question has done is provoke a sense of uncertainty in an intellectual paradigm which is adhered to with religious devotion.

Although one could easily continue on a lengthly diatribe dealing with the way science has developed into a caricature of that which it opposes (to the extent that its has shaped it’s world view largely on the basis of reactions to Christianity) at the end of the day this would lead us rather slowly to what I believe to be the root of the problem - positivism.

Early in the history of science the fathers of modern science decided that their search for truth was going to start off in the phenomenal world. Fair enough. Science grew as a direct reaction to thousands of years of Church usage of a wide variety of unseen critters inhabiting the ether to scare the crap out of people, keep them obedient and take their money.

By denying the existence of an unseen realm and an angry God committed to sending any who disobeyed his representatives to the deepest reaches of hell, the forebears of science effectively divested those representatives of their power and freed themselves up to go about their business without being summarily tortured and killed.

At the same time as this was going on various rationalist philosophical movements (no great fans of the church themselves) were attempting to work out how best to define the universe and how to study it.

From this intellectual melting pot emerged the philosophy of positivism that basically set out some fundamental assumptions that scientists would adhere to when trying to understand the universe.

In essence positivism dictated that the only things that were ‘real’ were those available to the five senses and measurable. There is nothing at all wrong with positivism as an epistemology (a way of determining what constitutes knowledge in particular domain and how it can best be derived) and it has obviously useful and practical applications. However there is something dramatically wrong with positivism as an ontology (a pronouncement on the nature and character of reality).

It is technically impossible to make a catergorical, comprehensive statement about the nature or purpose of reality. The reason for this is that despite Descartes attempts to separate intellect and body (thus implying the false notion that the human mind is independent of the phenomenological world) we are not located outside of reality and therefore able to analyse it objectively, we are 100% part of it and this makes the type of ultimate objectivity and detachment that positivism proposes logically impossible (think an eye seeing itself or a knife cutting itself).

In fact there are dozens of competing ontological viewpoints of reality ranging from the Aboriginal Dreamtime to whatever you might think up on the spur of the moment, and none are ultimately provable or disprovable – although some are creative, sensitive and refined whilst others are nihilistic, arrogant and destructive.

As science grew its epistemology somehow became confused with a valid ontology and from there grew into an evangelical ideology that sought to convince those who would listen, or couldn’t escape listening, that the universe existed entirely within the field defined by the measurement systems used by scientists. In essence, the moment that science asserted positivism as being the ‘true’ ontological position, it became a religion.

The adherence to positivism became so fervent that several scientific disciplines, including psychology, followed hideously distorted developmental paths as scientists attempted to impose positivistic thinking on all they encountered. In the case of psychology this led to the development of the still dominant biomedical paradigm which seeks to reduce all psychological problems to the level of linear biological causality.

You don’t need to be an intellectual to see that this approach is flawed, yet to this day the biomedical paradigm sits poking its pharmaceutical finger into holes in the dike of human consciousness, holding back the tides of life, without yet having understood that what may actually be required of us is simply that we move to higher ground.

Fortunately, over the last few decades a chorus of voices have erupted from various disciplines claiming that the universe is far more subtle and complex than scientists had at first thought, and that the art of reductionism was at heart the art of reducing complex processes to the level at which they could be crammed into the cramped and limited confines of positivistic mindsets.

Second order cybernetics theorists, for instance, did the people of this planet a huge favour by pointing out that the process of recursion (by which interacting with a system in any way at all automatically incorporates the interactor into the system) made any type of objective categorical statements about the nature of the universe logically impossible.

A couple of thousand years after Lao Tzu said in the Tao te Ching that ‘the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao’, cybernetic thinkers reached the point where they felt safe proposing that at best we may hope to focus on aspects of our universe, and that what we find is necessarily a partuclar 'version' of the truth, not to mention the product of our method of enquiry and line of investigation, rather than anything remotely approaching a comprehensive picture of the nature of our universe.

What this means is that a person asking positivistic questions will by necessity find positivistic answers, as the method of investigation precludes finding any other type of answer. If you believe something doesn’t exist, haven’t developed appropriate methods of investigating it, ridicule existing non-paradigmatic investigative tools and then roundly attempt to ignore it once it has failed to immediately respond to inappropriate investigative techniques, chances are you won’t find it.

Finding a positivistic answer thus implies that the questioner has succeeded admirably in establishing a version of the reality that resonates with his or her preconceived epistemology and ontological stance. If anything this indicates that preconceptions about anything need to be dropped if we are to approach truth. A mind that is conditioned in any way appears impressively capable of finding the projections of its conditioning.

Nevertheless it will probably take scientists a while to catch up with the insights offered by cybernetics. As Max Planck observed, a shift in paradigm often requires a whole generation of scientists to die out, so prone are they to objectivity and critical analysis of their own ideas.

And while we wait, the powers that be will continue trying to convince us that our five senses delineate the official boundaries of the reality in which we find ourselves. Whenever I think about this I have an image of the Far Side cartoon which shows a colony of penguins in the Antarctic with one penguin saying to another ‘do you also dream in black and white?’.

If you refuse to regard your own epistemological and ontological stance critically and further choose to limit your perception of possibility to what you are accustomed to seeing, and what you are accustomed to thinking, without understanding that you have no objective conception of the extent of your evolution or the possible under-development of subtler senses, then you will utterly fail to see that the limits that you place on knowledge are both arbitrary and intellectually infantile.

Read More...

Summary only...

In Quotes

"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers...The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or what is most important of all, the banker of the backer. Enthroned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understanded [sic] of the people."
J.R.R. Tolkien, Candour Magazine, 13 July 1956, p. 12


"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
Amschel Mayer Rothschild, 1773-1855

“The ferment that reigns among the people is their work....They began by casting odium on religion..They invented the rights of man ...and urged the people to wrest from their princes the recognition of these supposed rights. The plan they formed for breaking all social ties and destroying all order was revealed in their speeches and acts. They deluged the world with a multitude of publications; they recruited apprenticeships of every rank and every position; they deluded the most perspicacious men by falsely alleging different intentions.” The Duke of Brunswick, Light-bearers of Darkness, p.10

"There are a certain number of people who have arrived at the highest degree of imposture. They have conceived the project of reigning over opinions, and of conquering, not kingdoms, nor provinces, but the human mind. This project is gigantic, and has something of madness in it, which causes neither alarm nor uneasiness; but when we descend to details, when we regard what passes before our eyes of the hidden principles, when we perceive a sudden revolution in favour of ignorance and incapacity, we must look for the cause of it; and if we find that a revealed and known system explains all the phenomena which succeed each other with terrifying rapidity, how can we not believe it?"
Mason de Luchet - In Essai sur la secte des Illumines, 1789

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Thomas Jefferson

"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
Benjamin Disraeli, 1844

"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
John Swinton, former New York Times editor, in a speech during a banquet with colleagues (c. 1880)

"The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."
John Sherman

"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
James A. Garfield

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."
Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H.L. Mencken

"Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd."
JP Morgan

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd US President

"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs the Bill, the invisible government of the Monetary Power will be legalised... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill."
Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.

'I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately.
Some of the biggest men in the U.S.,
in the field of commerce and manufacturing,
are afraid of something.
They know that there is a power somewhere
so organized, so subtle, so watchful,
so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive,
that they had better not speak above their breath
when they speak in condemnation of it.'
The New Freedom, Woodrow Wilson, 1913

"The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."
Woodrow Wilson

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
Woodrow Wilson

"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection."
John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York (1918-1925), in speech on March 26, 1922

"The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilisation."
Otto von Bismarck

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands."
Arnold Toynbee, "The Trend of International Affairs Since the War", International Affairs, November 1931, p. 809

"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."
Benito Mussolini, 1883-1945, Fascist dictator of Italy

"From the days of Sparticus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
Winston Churchill

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

"A world society cannot be haphazard. Since there are no precedents, it cannot be traditional at this stage of development. It can only be deliberate and experimental, planned and built up with particular objectives and with the aid of all available knowledge concerning the principles of social organization. Social engineering is a new science."
Scott Nearing, advocate of World Government - United World, 1944, p.221

"Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas."
G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health, former director of UN World Health Organization

"We shall have a World government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent."
James Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950

"The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury...and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest."
Wright Patman

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
Aldous Huxley's lecture to The California Medical School in San Francisco in 1961

"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands."
Spiro Agnew, U. S. Vice-President, 13 November 1969

"Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history."
David Rockefeller, on record as stating in 1973 about Mao Tse-tung: (NY Times 8-10-73)

"...In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
Richard N. Gardner, in "Foreign Affairs," April 1974

"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control. Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."
Congressman Larry P. McDonald, 1976, (killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets)

"Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich."
Leon Uris, Trinity, a Novel of Ireland, 1976

"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable."
U. S. Privacy Study Commission, 1977

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
William Colby (Former CIA Director)

"The Trilateralist Commission is international... [and] ...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical."
Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona), in his book "With No Apologies"

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill ... All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."
Alexander King, Bertrand Schneider - founder and secretary, respectively, of the Club of Rome - The First Global Revolution, pp.104-105

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieve/review by the authorities."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member, founding member of the Trilateral Commission, National Security Advisor to five US presidents

"It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any outcropping of what is now called 'a conspiracy theory of history.' For a search for 'conspiracies,' as misguided as the results often are, means a search for motives, and an attribution of individual responsibility for the historical misdeeds of ruling elites. If, however, any tyranny or venality, or aggressive war imposed by the State was brought about not by particular State rulers but by mysterious and arcane 'social forces,' or by the imperfect state of the world -- or if, in some way, everyone was guilty -- then there is no point in anyone's becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, a discrediting of 'conspiracy theories' will make the subjects more likely to believe the 'general welfare' reasons that are invariably put forth by the modern State for engaging in aggressive actions."
Murray N. Rothbard

"...those who formally rule take their signals and commands, not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men (plus a few women). This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied; it is one of the secrets of the American social order. A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed. A third secret is implicit in what has been said - that there is really only one political party of any consequence in the United States, one that has been called the 'Property Party.' The Republicans and the Democrats are in fact two branches of the same (secret) party."
Arthur S. Miller, George Washington University law professor, The Secret Constitution and The Need For Constitutional Change, p.3

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like."
William O. Douglas 1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice

"The destruction of the large traditional family was necessary not only for the indirect effect on economic growth via the reduction of fertility but also for its direct effect in producing a society more attuned to the modern economy."
Frank W. Notestein, quoted in John Caldwell's Limiting Population Growth and the Ford Foundation Contribution, (1986) p. 26.

"Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order."
Mikhail Gorbachev, before the UN, December 7, 1988

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. ... It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
David Rockefeller, Bilderberg Meeting, June 1991 Baden, Germany

"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government."
Henry Kissinger, Speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992. Bilderberg meeting.

“The world can therefore seize the opportunity (Persian Gulf crisis) to fulfill the long-held promise of a New World Order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind.”
President George Herbert Walker Bush

"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities."
President Bill Clinton, 3-22-94, MTV's "Enough is Enough"

"The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission - founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberg Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."
Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D. Former German Defense Ministry Official and Advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner

"One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death."
Psychologist Barbara Marx Hubbard - member of Task Force Delta; a United States Army think tank

"The near monopoly of power once enjoyed by sovereign entities is being eroded ... states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies ... Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker ... The goal should be to redefine sovereignty for the era of globalization, to find a balance between a world of fully sovereign states and an international system of either world government or anarchy."
Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Feb. 21st, 2006

"Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly."
Charles H. Fort

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
Sir Winston Churchill

"History teaches us that man learns nothing from history."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
Marshall McLuhan, communications theorist

"I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world — in the field of advertizing — and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours."
Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

"There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything, and to doubt everything. Both ways save thinking."
Alfred Korzybski

Read More...

Summary only...

Mexican Twist

An old chain mail doing the rounds on the net, with my own custom-made ending:
Near a boat docked in a tiny Mexican village, an American tourist compliments the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish, and asks how long it took him to catch them.
"Not very long," answered the Mexican.
"But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American.
The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family. The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs . . I have a full life."
The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer everyday. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."
"And after that?" asked the Mexican.
"With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise."
"How long would that take?" asked the Mexican.
"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American.
"And after that?"
"Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, youcan start selling stocks and make millions!"
"Millions? Really? And after that?" said the Mexican.
"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends."

“Eh Senor, I think you are mucho estupido. I already got all that stuff. I don’t need no big company, I got my family and my fishing. Why go to all that trouble?” asks the Mexican.

“Smartass spic,” replies the American, “you should have listened to me – I’ll show you how its done.”

The American takes a flight home and soon after arriving calls up some fellow MBA buddies from Harvard. He organizes a meeting with them and by pulling few strings get his hands on the funds to set up an fish import/export company. Within weeks they have set up a deal with commercial fishermen in China who use trawlers to catch huge amounts of fish at extremely low costs. It takes only a month for them to stockpile several warehouses full of Barracuda, Snapper, Tuna and other fish. Once this has been done the new company uses the remaining funds to set up a chain of fisheries in Mexico – with one, of course, in the Mexican fisherman’s village.

The fish store that opens in the Mexican’s village is soon a massive success. They sell fish at almost 50% of the local prices and still make a tidy profit. This soon puts pressure on the fisherman who has to spend extra hours at sea in order to maintain his previous income. He is also forced to go out in unfavourable weather because failure to bring in a catch will be detrimental to his family, as it will force him to increase the price at which he sells his fish. Despite his best efforts he slowly loses business – eventually retaining only a small loyal base of customers made up mostly of family members and friends. This is just enough for him to live marginally below the poverty line. He goes to the government to ask for social welfare benefits only to find that unemployment benefits have been cut by the government who were forced to do so as a precondition to receiving a development loan from the World Bank. He sells his guitar, in the family for 200 years, for $10 to an American tourist so that he can buy food.

Desperate the Mexican works through the hurricane season, eventually losing his life in a major storm.

His wife is left penniless, and his sons are forced to beg on street corners. His daughter moves to Mexico city to work as a prostitute for American businessmen. The Mexican government invests some of the money from the World Bank development loan in his village. Within a year a massive shopping mall is opened. The Mexican’s widow finds work as a cashier in a department store in the mall, earning $3 a day. She works 12 hour shifts (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.) six days a week, so she has little time to sleep or spend with her children. Daily siestas are cancelled because they are unproductive. The widow is still unable to make ends meet so she takes out a bond on her little hut and patch of land by the sea. Within weeks the interest rate is raised and she can’t afford the bond repayments – her hut is repossessed and sold to an American with an MBA who plans the development of a cruise line dock.

The widow is forced to move into government funded housing – a one bedroom house for herself and her four children. The house is built fifty miles from the mall where she works, forcing her to spend half her money every month on transport.

Meanwhile back in America the MBA students sell their fishing business for $10 000 000. They all retire, apart from the tourist who retains his shares and sets up a mining company to take advantage of mineral deposits in the shallow Caribbean waters. His mining activities soon result in the poisoning of all the coral reefs surrounding the Mexican village, which results in the virtual extinction of marine life in the village’s vicinity. This is good for the American because some of the subsistence fishermen were still hanging on and eating into his profits.
His fishery now monopolizes seafood sales in the village. Another piece of good news comes when the Chinese lower their prices. They are able to do so because they have done away with cheap labour and have instead instituted slave labour on their trawlers.

At the end of the year the Mexican minister of Economics looks at growth figures and is surprised and impressed by the increased economic growth rate in his country. Clearly getting the development loan from the World Bank was the right thing to do. He wonders how Mexico might have ended up in if the Americans hadn’t stepped in to help.

Read More...

Summary only...

I, Tripod

Let us imagine a world. We’ll call it ‘Bob world’.
Bob World is populated by sentient three legged creatures called ‘Tripods’.
These tripods have been living on Bob World for a very long time. They started off living pretty much like animals, but have recently accelerated their rate of technical innovation and have consequently found themselves living in large cities and wearing ties.
They believe this is evidence of evolution.

Tripods live very strange lives.

Generally they have a pretty good time of it until they turn six, doing whatever they want and being whoever they want. At the age of six this stops, and the young tripods depart on a long course of education in academic and practical subjects that will facilitate integration with Tripod society when they reach their twenties.

The first thing these young tripods have to do is get themselves a ‘conform’, a set of clothing which makes them indistinguishable from their peers. Conforms are big on Bob World, and are used by armies, police, security, navy, the air force, and low level employees of large companies.

Tripods have a fantastic time in school; they get to stand in organised lines, follow strict schedules, and develop self control. In between they also learn some stuff; how to compete, the importance of ambition, and that you get approval if you can repeat to the teacher what they told you very accurately.

Some young tripods are incorrigible and immature and only want to do things like play and have fun. In years gone by a long stick soon sorted out this propensity for young tripods to block their own development, but fortunately that was stopped. Now naughty young Tripods who don’t tow the line are give Ritalin, a wonderful drug that makes them far more amenable to school life and has been shown to virtually cure young tripods of that annoying condition known as ‘childhood’.

Tripods are soon exposed to TV, and boy do they love it. TV is full of exciting stuff like people hitting each other, killing each other, fornicating and manipulating each other. If a tripod is lucky he’ll get given a computer games station where he can participate in all this killing and hitting which means he doesn’t have to feel left out. TV is also full of nice stuff that you can buy, and young tripods soon realise that if they push their parents hard enough they can get that stuff.

Food also becomes interesting when a tripod gets into school. Suddenly the world is full of chips, sweets, cooldrinks, chocolate and fun. There are special restaurants for children and retarded tripods, like O’Donalds, where you can go play and eat yummy, cheap factory food. Its easy and its quick and you get free toys.

Soon the young tripods start growing up in earnest. If they eat meat this can be accelerated because the good corporate farmers are putting growth hormones in their cows, so when it helps young tripods reach puberty at 9, that’s just a bonus. At around this time they begin to feel very insecure, and go in search of themselves. A lot of them are getting quite fat from all the nice factory food and they soon notice that television and magazines are full of thin people. Many of them discover wonderful solutions for this problem like diets, bulimia, anorexia, dissassociative disorders and non-nutritive sweeteners. Young tripod girls start wearing make up- chemicals you can put on your face every day so you don’t have to look like yourself and you don’t look too young or too old.

As for psychosocial development - society is full of wise guidance, available for free on TV, magazines and radio. Music becomes important, and interesting because it is full of alluring things like pain, revenge, violence, money, sex, drugs, alcohol and good looking people having fun. (Especially that wonderful, creative platform for lobotomised tripods known as Hip Hop.)

Clothing also becomes important at this stage, and young tripods learn to compete mercilessly to become the most expensive voluntary walking billboards for clothes manufacturers they can possibly be. The important message they learn here is that you must conform to be unique – which is a very good message when you think about it.

Things at school really hot up for tripods at this time. They are almost eighteen and need to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives. Choosing something you like is important, but it is also important to have a nice car and a big house – these things are not cheap. As the tripods get older some of them start to realise that their schools give them prizes if they can repeat what they have been told really accurately. If they are lucky they get to put special stuff on their conforms which lets everybody see how special they are.
Soon they have to write a big test to finish school, it’s a once-off, all-or-nothing event to separate the chaff from the wheat. The young tripods are close to adulthood!

When a young tripod turns 18, it gets to vote. Voting is great because of the awesome political system that has been developed call ‘duhmediocracy’. In this clever system you get to choose who dictates to you and makes all the important decisions. Marvellous really. Most of the time you have as many as two choices for who you want to rule you - it’s a big advance from the despotic days of the past. Some dumb tripods don’t vote because they think that when you vote you’re always voting for a politician.

And just like that…. the young tripods are out of school, and now its time for university. University is great, there is so much freedom, you can do what you want, and although you were worried for a while you soon realise that there are still people around to tell you what to think. They are called experts. Experts know everything. If the media has left any gaps in your knowledge, experts will be happy to fill them; which is good because a young tripod is at this stage usually quite involved in going to parties and doesn’t have much time to think about things. There’s also a sneaking suspicion that thinking about things might make the tripod feel uncomfortable or even depressed and that might bring down the party.

University goes on for three to five years, and by and by some tripods fall by the wayside (where they have to do boring jobs as punishment for not repeating everything properly) leaving behind a select few, who are rewarded for the repetitions with a hat. When you get a hat from an institution in tripod society you know you have really made it. Hats can tell you everything about a person you need to know (and before you thought it was only clothes that did that!). Generally speaking, the more important a person is, the more strange their hat looks. Religious leaders get the best hats (they speak directly to Bob) but Universities give you some letters to put before or after your name, because their hats aren’t practical for everyday wear (although the use of short graduates as tables needs to be investigated).

Ahhhh… work. Nothing quite like it for the young tripod. If the tripod has gone to university he can quite soon afford to get a bond on a house, put a deposit on a car and start living the good life. Sure the tripod will work seventy hour weeks more often than not, the important thing is the tripod has been given the opportunity to buy as much stuff as it wants. And as a bonus the tripod doesn’t have to pay for everything immediately; it can spread payments for important things like houses over thirty years! As long as the tripod doesn’t try change its job or drop out of the tri-rat race everything will be fine. When you come to think of it life is just great for a working tripod.

Working so much can be a bit of a pain when it comes to having to cook for yourself, but luckily all this has been taken care of by industry. It turns out there are factories out there that just churn out tasty food that can be cooked in a nuclear oven in just a few minutes. And even better they put nice tasty flavour enhancing stuff on the food so it tastes even better than boring fruit and vegetables. At this age tripods can sometimes start getting really fat because of the tasty foods they eat. That’s fine because when you start getting fat you can start buying special food made in factories that stop you from getting fat - it's wonderful! They have special chemicals they put in it instead of sugar and fat and normally you can consume it straight out of the container – it's as easy as eating fruit. Some cynical tripods say this stuff is bad for you, but the officials and the media say that they are lying and don’t know their facts. As a tripod you know you can always trust someone who is an official or an expert. (People in power are also inherently trustworthy, if they weren’t trustworthy they would never have got into power in the first place.)

When you get down to it, tripods really, really like to eat. Especially other living things. All those annoying competitors in the environment? Kill ‘em, sauté ‘em, bake ‘em, roast ‘em or eat them raw – just stick on a good sauce and they are one step closer to extinction. Environmentally conscious tripods stick some of the living thing on farms and put them in cages where they are safe from other animals and can’t run away. They give them medicine to make them big and more fertile and then they kill them. Which is alright really, Almighty Bob said so in the Foible. Also Tripods know that if you can do something, it probably means you should do it.

Middle age is a happy time for tripods. They work, smoke, work, eat, work, get drunk, have sex, sleep, watch as much TV as they want and sometimes work-out. If they feel sad they can take a pill, if they get sick they can take a pill, if they’re getting fat they can take a pill, if they’re tired there’s caffeine. The important thing is that the work and pleasure are never ending. The cars become faster, the houses bigger. Some tripods have tripods of their own. At this point many tripods start thinking seriously about becoming rich because they don’t have enough money to be happy.

Some tripods can become really rich. The best way to become really rich is to sell stuff to people. The problem with that is people don’t always want the stuff you have to sell. Luckily there’s this great thing called advertising (which makes TV so much more interesting). You can say anything you want on an advert, it doesn’t (and maybe shouldn’t) have to have anything to do with what you’re selling! The best thing to do is to sell Tripods ideas and not things. Tell them what they want and who they should be and they will generally want it. Also as you become richer it is a good idea to buy out your competition. Once you control a market you can do whatever you want and make things any price you want. Sometimes all this buying and selling does bad stuff to the environment of Bob World, but that’s ok because someone else can sort it out later. Anyway any rich tripod can afford to buy expensive filtered water and air conditioners.

To become really, really rich you need to be famous or control famous people.
You can do it with movies, sports or music. Doesn’t really matter. People like famous people, and if you own famous people you can make them do stuff and then tripods do the same thing. Yep being in the media does a lot for a tripod’s prospects for domination and the fulfilment of ultimate ambition.

To become, really, really rich, a tripod has to get hold of a bank. Banks are great because they create money. They can lend out ten times whatever they have on deposit and then charge interest on it. Helping all those young tripods buy houses and cars – it brings a tear to a rich tripod’s eyes.

To become super-rich a tripod needs to get involved in war. Wars are patriotic and help good tripods kill bad tripods. Weapons companies can sell to both sides so they both have a fair chance. Sometimes weapon companies have to step in to create a little conflict when things are in a bit of a lull – it’s terribly therapeutic to get all that simmering resentment out into the open. Sure a few hundred innocent tripods die, sometimes a few million innocent tripods die, but that is just war. Its inevitable. Anyway anytime some demagogue gets out of control and kills too many people you can say he was just a lone lunatic. If you’re making money from war selling to both sides you’re automatically on the winning side - so you get to help write the history! (And you get to hand out the gold stars at schools to little itty bitty tripods who agree with and perpetuate your version… superb.)

The best possible thing for a tripod to do is to get involved in banking, war, media, business and politics all at one time. A select few tripods are doing this, and they find that it really helps to be able to push the tripod masses in the right direction when it looks like they are starting to think too much or going off course. Some idiot tripods think that this is wrong, but that is because they are paranoid. Hell they’re probably poor and that just serves them right.

If errant tripods get a little too insistent and start rocking the boat a bit too much you can always take action, because they’re normally relatively isolated. In the old days tripods used to just take whichever tree was handy, a couple of spare nails, and hey presto they’d nail the annoying tripod to the tree. Or burn them if a good flame was handy. Now tripods have better weapons so one can just kill trouble-makers (even popular ones) openly and then, just for fun, say one didn’t do it. If you’re a compassionate super-rich tripod you can just use the media people that work for you to discredit the boat-rockers. That way you don’t have to kill them and they have to go find proper jobs and be productive. Whatever happens always assure the tripod public that everything is fine and that if it isn’t it is someone else’s fault. Tripods want things to be fine almost as much as they want to eat the other inhabitants of Bob’s World, so more times than not they prefer to believe people who tell them everything is fine.

Most tripods don’t ever make it into the ranks of the rich. They make do with their lives and as they move into the late stages of middle age they sometimes start feeling not so well. Luckily doctors are their to help them when they’re in trouble and can cut them open to fix anything that goes wrong. Doctors know that tripods are basically machines, and tripods know this as well because doctors and experts have told them this. Sure the occasional tripod’s body attacks itself from within and kills the tripod, but that’s just how it is, probably the tripods own fault anyway. The important thing at this stage of life for a tripod is to take plenty of medicine and see plenty of doctors.

Now the tripods gradually start getting old. This can happen quite quickly and sometimes doctors are needed to cut the tripods face or body up and stretch it back to the shape it used to be. At this point tripods usually feel quite tired, so its good that they can stop working and are free to do as they please.

Usually what they please to do is to sit around for a few years and wait to die. Clever tripods have invested in after-life soul insurance with Bob’s self-elected representatives – the clergy. These tripods live out their years happy in the knowledge that the best is yet to come.

One thing most tripods are sure of is that they are free.
Which, when you think about the way they live, is glaringly obvious.

Read More...

Summary only...