THE MUDDLE-EAST

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“Thank God we’re surrounded by water!”

The Americans, for various reasons, are now well ensconced in many countries in the Middle East. From their traditional ties to Israel, for example, to their occupation of Iraq and everything in between, they appear set for the long stay in that region of the World.

It can seem sometimes that we hear about all kinds of events from there everyday and when you put it all together it begins to sound like a tinderbox. In an effort to understand it all better, I dug out a map of the region and looked at where each of these places were in proximity to each other. I want to explore that now.

You could begin almost anywhere but let’s take Syria to start with and work on from there. Syria is bordered by Turkey to the North and the area either side of that border is occupied by the Kurdish people who want independence from both countries. President Erdogan is damned if he’s going to let that happen so he has got involved in the Syrian war. The Americans have bases in Turkey and in fact they have nukes there pointed at Russia. But Turkey borders Iran to the East and has Armenia and Georgia to the North, two countries that had a fair old fling not too long ago.

To the South-West of Syria lies Beirut, a spot that has had its fair share of gunfire down the years, Jordan lies due South and Syria has Israel bordering it as well on the much disputed Golan Heights. To the East of Syria lies Iraq, a country invaded and destroyed by America and now a hot-bed of dissent and death. Finally, Syria’s tiny window to the sea looks across at the divided island of Cyprus. All around him then Assad has turmoil and that’s just outside his country. Inside it, there are seven declared armed groups all kicking the shit out of each other. Meanwhile the US, Russia, China, NATO & the EU are all playing geopolitical chess with Syria’s future. Oh! And did I mention that the Saudi’s are casting their long shadow over the whole mess also.

The United States makes no secret of its intention to start a war with Iran and indeed if Hilary had been elected they would be bombing Tehran right now. The Iranians are bordered by a hostile Turkey, a fucked-up Iraq and they face Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait and Oman across the Persian Gulf. To the North and East they have Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. So as regards America’s desire to wage war against Iran, the Yanks now have land borders with the Persians on two sides, Iraq and Afghanistan. They have airbases in both Turkey and Saudi Arabia, a big CIA monitoring station in Pakistan and that’s before you look at the Carrier Fleets that could utilize the Arabian Sea. So President Hassan Rouhani is surrounded by Americans in all directions.

Iraq is a basket case, I think we can all agree on that so let’s look instead at Saudi Arabia. It’s a huge country, that’s for starters, though it is sparsely populated by sixty-million people. At present they are engaged in an unsightly spat with Qatar and embroiled in a dirty war in Yemen to the South. They have an uneasy relationship with the Yanks and know that their people would not tolerate American troops on the soil/sand of that country. Israel to the North is a significant nuclear power and the hatred by Wahabi Saudis of anything Jewish is legendary. Currently both countries appear to be toeing the American line making it seem as if they are in full agreement but I wonder? Saudi Arabia has the Persian Gulf on one side and the Red Sea on the other. Across that sea lies Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia, none of whom are all that peaceful, if you’ll excuse the understatement.

Lebanon, officially known as the Lebanese Republic, is a sovereign state they say. It is bordered by Syria to the North and east and Israel to the South, while Cyprus is west across the Mediterranean Sea. It is a country of six million souls that was wracked by civil war for so long. The Israelis invaded it twice, it has a sizable Palestinian population and a private Shia army known as Hezbullah, now active across the Syrian border as well. Life in Beirut is a tricky minefield of chance at any given time.

Then there’s the religious groupings to consider. Islam is not a single entity and even the Sunni Muslims have a distinct group out of Saudi Arabia called the Wahabis who seem to think everybody else is an infidel. Then there are the Shia Muslims of Iran, Iraq and Syria who have fundamental differences with the Sunni’s of the Arabian Penninsula. There are a smattering of Christians around and then there’s the Jews just to throw a match on the tinder. Don’t forget the stateless Palestinians or the new phenomenon of ISIS with their proposed Caliphate to span many borders. Oman, to the South, is keeping its head down while maintaining relations with both Saudi Arabia and Iran at the same time. The whole sorry edifice is mind boggling and dangerous, is it not?

Then there’s Egypt itself. They have the Suez canal to the East, Sudan to the South and then a long Western border with what’s left of Libya. On the other side of the canal they have borders with Israel and Saudi too. Besides Egypt, Libya has Sudan, Chad, Niger Algeria and Tunisia for neighbours. The Muslim world is large and inter-twined. The Americans are in Libya and Sudan, some in Egypt, they are in Israel naturally, have a small force in Syria, have big forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, have bases in Qatar and Turkey and a strong intelligence set up in many others. The dead hand of the Yank is around the throats of all of them even as they despise each other.

And when I study that map I really despair. Then I look at our little storm-drenched island far from the madding crowd and somehow I feel grateful. Apart from the Sammies up North, it’s all pretty straightforward. I mean, which would you prefer, the BREXIT problem or the problems of any one of those Middle-East countries?

I rest my case.

 

 

MONETARY SLAVERY

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I penned a piece not long ago about money and ever since I have been searching for the documentary film that sparked my interest in the topic. Last night I stumbled on it and it is worth a look if you really want to understand the phrase, “Money is the root of all evil.”

Entitled, “International Monetary System – New Economic Slavery,” it is only fifty minutes long so think of it as a well spent hour out of your life. You’ll discover how a bloke who had defaulted on his mortgage got away with it when the bank took him to court. More importantly though there is an excellent explanation on why money is not what you think it is.

There’s a line in it where the narrator explains that in the days of slavery, the colonial power had to feed and house the slaves. Monetary slavery however expects the slaves to house and feed themselves and indeed makes a profit from that as well. The cash in your pocket is someone else’s debt and your debts are other people’s cash. Interest on loans, (manufactured money), is the guarantee that defaults must take place no matter how hard we try and the socialization of private bank debts in 2008 was the silent invasion of this country designed to enslave Irish citizens.

I use the word ‘designed’ because it was all part of a much larger global plan. When a country is made indebted, its citizens dumped into debt, then wages can be driven down and the Government can be forced to sell the Nation’s natural resources to service the debt while its citizens can be forced to work those resources and the profits earned from this go into the pockets of the new foreign owners.

It is the blueprint for a national rape, a recipe to plunder a country, ruin its infrastructure, steal resources and enslave peoples worldwide. If you do not inform yourself with this film or ones on the same theme, then you will be baffled at what if happening all around you. There is a true evil at play in today’s world in the form of a small cabal of individuals who are assuming it is their right and responsibility to control us all and they are well on the way to doing so.

Therefore I ask you all to watch “International Monetary System – New Economic Slavery,” and educate yourself because if we don’t make an effort, we will wake up one day and wonder how it all got so bad.

A NEW DEVELOPMENT

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If you google, “Retired CIA agent, Malcom Howard,” you will get 386,000 references. I would caution however that none of them are in any way mainstream and you will not see this story reported in your newspapers or on TV news either I suspect.

The question is then, is this just bullshit or is there possibly something to it? You see Malcom Howard made a deathbed confession when he, (apparently), came clean and admitted that the CIA blew up Building 7 of the World Trade Centre that fateful day in 2001. The report is dated July 18th 2017.

“Mr. Howard, who worked for the CIA for 36 years as an
operative, claims he was tapped by senior CIA agents to work on the project due to his engineering background, and early career in the demolition business.” according to this report.

For those who don’t know or just forgot, Building 7 was not hit by an aircraft, didn’t come down until after 5.00pm (LT) that afternoon though the BBC reported it as having fallen a good twenty minutes before it did so. In an interview after the event, the new owner of the World Trade Centre, Larry Silverstein explained that he’d had a chat with the authorities in New York that afternoon and according to Larry, “We said that there had been so much death already that day that the best thing we could do is just ‘pull it’ so they went ahead and pulled it.”

Now ‘PULL IT” is a term used in professional demolition and refers to the detonation of previously placed explosives at strategic positions in a building, usually to take out the load bearing supports. Malcom then fills us in when he says, “It was a classic controlled demolition with explosives. We used super-fine military grade nano-thermite composite materials as explosives. The hard part was getting thousands of pounds of explosives, fuses and ignition mechanisms into the building without causing too much concern. But almost every single office in the Building 7 was rented by the CIA, the Secret Service, or the military, which made it easier.”

So Malcom and his colleagues had done their job. He said that, “When the building came down, it was such a rush. Everything went exactly to plan. It was so smooth. Everybody was evacuated. Nobody was hurt in WTC 7.” But in the days afterwards as he and his mates watched endless re-runs of the day’s events on television, they began to worry, he says. “There were so many loose ends, so much evidence left behind. We thought the public would be all over it. We thought there would be a public uprising that the media couldn’t ignore. They’d be funding investigations and demanding to know why they were being lied to. We thought they’d find chemical composites in the area that would prove Building 7 was blown up. We thought there would be a revolution. It would go all the way to the top, to President Bush. He’d be dragged out of the White House.”

But he says his job was on Building 7 only and explains that even if the CIA brought down buildings One & Two, he wouldn’t necessarily know about it because they operated a cell system of teams. In a recent article entitled, “This just won’t go away,” I covered Buildings 1 & 2 and indeed Buildings 3, 4, 5, & 6. The only conclusion I could draw was that while we don’t know exactly what happened that day, we do definitely know what didn’t happen. What didn’t happen was the official account of the events as reported by NIST. Now this guy has broken ranks and spilled the beans on one of the events. As regards NIST he says that, “There could never be a real investigation. The entire shadow government, as you call them now, are implicated.” The 79-year-old, spending his final weeks at home, said he doesn’t expect to be taken into custody following his confession because “then they’d have to go after everyone else. They will just use the media to attack me. They are all on the payroll to suppress everything around 9/11.” That is why your mainstream news will not tell you anything about this.

I have heard other commentators remark that if 9/11 was a home-grown operation then it was big, complicated, required top class professionals and lots of them and the timing and co-ordination had to be nearly perfect to fit the story that was going to be told in its aftermath. As Mr. Howard said, The World Trade Center 7 operation is unique among his demolitions, as it is the only demolition that, “We had to pretend wasn’t a demolition job”. There have been other whistle-blowers on the fringes of 9/11 but this is the first one we’ve seen who claims to have played an active role. He’s 79 now so he was 63 back then and he’s kept quiet until now even though he freely admits to having been uneasy about the whole operation. He’s only opening up now because he’s dying anyway so there’s nothing they can do to him.

One wonders then will there be others who partook and are now cruising into old age, who may also come out and confess about the events of that day. If so, and it’s a big if, the 9/11 story will gather a head of steam, which will demand the true story be told.

I did say this just won’t go away.

CAR INSURANCE RIP-OFF

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Motor Insurance was made compulsory under The Road Traffic Act 1961. Personally, I am delighted that is the case because at least if you get that unexpected shunt up the rear, the likelihood is that the other driver will be able to pay you for it.

Regular readers will know that I drive an eighteen-year-old Ford Fiesta and do so with a smile on my face. The car has many things to recommend it such as its unattractiveness to car thieves, its lack of modern digital electronics making it easy and cheap to maintain and its reliable if unspectacular performance guaranteed not to attract police attention. She has sailed through five NCT’s to date, the last one being only last week so she’s in PMO and legally fit to be on the road.

Last year my fully comprehensive insurance with bonus protection and two named drivers was €340. This was expensive given the car barely covered 2,000 miles all year but I paid up anyway. This year though the exact same lads quoted me €740 for the coming year. “Why?” I asked the voice on the other end of the phone this morning. “Rates have just gone up, that’s all,” says yer wan. Naturally I phrased the question slightly differently several more times only to meet the same stone wall-(ing).

Timely is it not that only this month we learned that, “The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has issued summonses to motor insurance providers compelling them to appear before them to give evidence regarding suspected breaches of competition law in the sector.” One doesn’t want to be too disparaging just yet but if my experience is an example of a wider national increase of such magnitude then I wish the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission the best of luck with their investigation.

But I think there is a much more fundamental and wider issue here. If our Government use their authority to introduce a law that will cost us a lot of money every year, then they must also have the responsibility to legislate the companies they force us to pay in order to protect the citizen from unscrupulous overcharging. But our Government shrug and tell us there’s nothing they can do for us in this regard. I, for one, find that answer unsatisfactory. We elect and pay our politicians for the sole purpose of making laws. Even when they enact unpopular laws they tell us it is for our protection. They inevitably add the they have a duty of care to us.

But what good is that if we are being robbed because of one of their compulsory laws? We have heard all the usual drivel about the markets and how competition offers the best price, etc, etc. However, that only works when the citizen customer actually has the choice not to make any purchase at all. When the Government decrees that you must buy from one of the providers, they create the perfect conditions for a cartel to develop and that is why I believe they are solely responsible for the outrageous quote I’ve got this year.

And it begs the question as to whether we would voluntarily pay for such car insurance if it were not compulsory? How would it be if the Government met the representative body of all the car-insurers and told them they’d rescind the law to see what would happen in true market conditions? If the insurance companies are not telling porkies then they should be delighted to get out of car insurance. If though, they started a price war between themselves and ran expensive adverts on TV to lure us back to insuring our cars voluntarily by offering really low premiums, then we’d know for sure what’s going on right now, wouldn’t we?