Several times over the last few months I’ve considered putting together a post about one or other jaw-dropping new development in the banking crisis.  But then I’ve realised how difficult answering any of the really big questions, as they will affect the lives of our people, really is.  So I restricted myself to one post on the politics of sub-prime and one on the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of risk (a polite way of saying “theft”).

Now, with the sudden acceleration of events to completely undreamt of levels of destructiveness, I think it’s time to at least acknowledge the moment.

Prior to the collapse, there were five truly global investment banks cum securities trading and brokerage firms in Wall Street.  Bear Stearns and then, in one momentous day, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were despatched.  The remaining two seem to be taking on the appearance of dominos:-

“The fear is who is next,” said John O’Brien, senior vice president at MKM Partners LLC in Cleveland. “It almost feels like people scour the books and say who is the next likely target that we can put a short on. And that spreads continuous fear.”

Shares of Morgan Stanley and larger rival Goldman fell as much as 43 percent and 27 percent, respectively, even after both reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

“I’m assuming that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are lining up dancing partners. They don’t want to be ... this week’s victim,” said William Larkin, fixed income manager at Cabot Money Management in Salem, Massachusetts.

... “Seems like the SEC is a day late on the rule ... Morgan Stanley is clearly in the short-sellers’ sights,” said Andrew Brenner, senior vice president at MF Global in New York.

READ MORE...

This link will take you to the BBC-televised Q & A session held by the Mayor of London.  Basically, once every month Boris Johnson fields business questions from the twenty-five members of the London Assembly.  One of these is the BNP’s second-greatest “asset”, Richard Barnbrook.

He is evidently having a fairly torrid time in the Assembly, which is to be expected.  Bravery and doggedness, both of which Barnbrook possesses, are admirable qualities for, say, an army corporal or a even a warrant officer.  But other qualities are required in representative politics - all the moreso when one carries on one’s shoulders the burden of representing the truest interests of every native Londoner.

Click on the BBC link and slide the programme forward to precisely 2:16.07.  You will hear Barnbrook being called to ask his question of the Mayor.  But you won’t see him on the screen - presumably because he cannot bear to take his seat in the Assembly chamber without his party apparel (“banners, posters, materials, props”), although the consequences of doing so have been explained to him.

The question he wants to ask is an important one about the harm to London caused by the riotous, costly and dangerous Notting Hill Carnival.  This is the first mayoral questions since the Carnival, and no other Assembly member has the principle, never mind the political independence, to question it.  It is a right and proper use of mayoral questions to do so.  The aura of smugness of the political Establishment in London deserves to be elegantly skewered on this and a great many other issues.  But Barnbrook cannot do elegance.  He cannot even follow the precedent of the other Assembly members of all parties, and address the Mayor in a non-partisan way.  He cannot organise his own thoughts.  He quickly loses the thread, finishing without asking a proper question at all.  Naturally, he doesn’t engage Johnson for one moment.  He is easily ridiculed and very brutally despatched, to general laughter and applause.

He is a wire terrier by nature.  He will come back as game as ever, bristling with BNP indignation, having learned nothing from this or any previous encounter ... and certainly not having learned how to square up, within Assembly rules, to a class political act like Johnson.

The 130,714 Londoners who voted for the BNP on May 3rd deserve something better than this.  We all do.

Let us begin with the question ...

If National Socialism was Germany’s preferred answer to Versailles, Depression and inflation, the decadence of Weimar and the revolutionary Marxism of international Jewry, what is the answer to the globalised capital, power elitism, race-replacement immigration, hyper-individualism, racial self-estrangement, and Jewish ethno-aggression of today?

Now, the list of ills in either case - 1920’s Germany or the postmodern present - is open to debate.  Other factors that pressaged and pressage change may be added.  The order of significance - indeed, whether one factor is, alone, significant - may be debated, as we often debate here.  But what cannot be debated is that we, by which I mean all the European peoples of the West, do not face less mortal dangers than Germans did eight decades ago.  That is evident to anyone who can separate himself even a little from the zeitgeist.  But who will subscribe to the philosophical and political muscularity such disaster would seem to commend?

We have fallen a long way.  If the source of our woes is difficult to agree upon, how much more difficult the path back to a decent and free life for our children.

“Prejudice”, as it has come to be used, is frequently a Bayesian Prior Probability Distribution.

The reason it would be an insult to the prejudiced, in the old sense of that word, to lump them with folks who nowadays decry “prejudice” is that those who now decry “prejudice” are typically so irrationally devoted to their own Prior Beliefs that you can present them with an endless “conversation” which contradicts, with actual evidence, their Prior Beliefs, and they will hold firm.

The folks they decry as “prejudiced” on the other hand, usually have mountains of evidence backing them up with on-going evidence supporting their Prior Beliefs.

Beyond the apparent stupidity of such people, they are also hypocrites acting like morally vain Church Ladies of Holocaustianity, which makes them particularly insufferable.

Danish patriot and blogger, Balder, had circularised a very good and comprehensive piece on the racial and political street violence now on the rise in and beyond Copenhagen.  The addition of immigrant, mostly Moslem, gangs to the brew moves things a stage further than the old antifacist vs NF street violence in England that I blogged about here a few days ago.  So does the fact that “large numbers of young Danes are volunteering for the new movement, hoping that they will be able to contribute to the fight against the muslim invaders”.

GW

DENMARK: STREET WAR BETWEEN HELLS ANGELS AND IMMIGRANT GANGS SPREADING

Clashes in Denmark between bikers, hangarounds and patriots, versus immigrant gangs and left wing extremists.

The biker group Hells Angels seem to be coming back at the at the moment still dominating immigrant gangs, with their new support group AK81, which is increasingly gaining support from Danes who are not first and foremost interested in bikes or crime, but who have grown increasingly hostile to especially muslim immigrants, after ever increasing street violence, knife attacks, robberies and rape from the side of muslim immigrants.

The rates for violent crime and especially rape related cases have gone up dramatically with the increasing number of muslim immigrants. Large numbers of Danes, not otherwise interested in motorcycles or gang related criminal activity, are reported to sign up under the new banner of the HA support group AK81 ‘81? being synonymous with the letters HA), and AK probably referring to the famous AK 47 ‘Kalashnikov’ submachine gun, as well as meaning Always Ready [Altid Klar] in Danish.

For many years motorcycle gangs such as the illustrious Hells Angels and muslim dominated street gangs managed to exist side by side in relative peace, in the struggle for control of the market for illegal drugs, especially cannabis, but also other forms of crime.

The later years the ethnic Danish gangs such as Hells Angels were increasingly coming under pressure from the muslim gangs, who showed to be far more relentless in their methods, and much less afraid of the possible judicial consequences of their actions, besides being much more numerous, and able to draw upon support from much of the immigrant community not otherwise involved in similar crime.

READ MORE...

Back in 2005, the New South Wales Labor government attempted to bring in a religious hate speech law.  Former MR contributor Steve Edwards joined the campaign to thwart the plan with this article.  It was published in Policy, the journal of the right-liberal Centre for Independent Studies.

The campaign was successful, though Steve took the opportunity to write a further piece for Policy six months later, this time on the Danish Cartoons Affair.

The hate-speechers went away to lick their wounds.  But they are believers in the political ratchet, and they didn’t give up.  Now the proposal is back, prompting Steve to return once more to the pages of Policy.  Here is his new article.

GW

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

THE TROUBLE WITH RELIGIOUS HATRED LAWS

Religions and their followers should receive no special protection from spoken hostility, argues Steve Edwards

reedom of speech and conscience are invaluable and timeless principles. Thomas Paine summarised them crisply in the eighteenth century, in the introduction to The Age of Reason:

I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

Governments should play very little or no role in determining what people are allowed to say and hear, regardless of whether this may be ‘offensive’ to the traditional enemies of liberty—primarily religious fanatics—or to those of a weaker ‘moderate’ disposition who would passively give up ‘their’ freedom (and ours too) to buy a little peace and quiet. Yet today there are few legal or moral principles that have come under greater sustained attack.

Under the guise of maintaining ‘religious harmony,’ Western governments are being pressured by a worldwide coalition of United Nations bureaucrats, third-world tyrannies, and ‘progressive’ academics and think tanks into passing legislation with the aim of criminalising the ‘vilification’ and even ‘defamation’ of religions—mainly Islam—and their followers. The instigators of this global confederacy are not arguing for anything particularly new or interesting, yet their goal would reverse hundreds of years of intellectual development in the pursuit of an unnecessary and unattainable ‘social peace,’ signed on the terms of theist zealots. As freedom of speech and conscience arguably provided and still provide the foundations of limited, anti-despotic government—and indeed the necessary breathing space for some of the most important social advances in the past two centuries, with entire nations and even civilisations climbing out of obscurantism and penury—it could be argued that the Enlightenment legacy itself is now under threat.

The accused

The list of people who have been prosecuted or censored for various speech crimes against religion and religious believers has grown at an impressive clip in recent years.

In 2005 and 2006, British National Party leader Nick Griffin was twice placed on trial, at great expense to himself and to British taxpayers, for ‘inciting racial hatred’ through comments he made in a speech that Islam was ‘a wicked, vicious faith.’ In the wake of Griffin’s subsequent acquittal, then-chancellor Gordon Brown said ‘mainstream opinion in this country will be offended by some of the statements that they have heard made,’ and called for a tightening of Britain’s ‘racial hatred’ laws.(1)

In 2006, the Swedish foreign minister, Laila Freivalds, resigned after it was discovered that her department had pressured a web-hosting company into shutting down a site that was about to display a set of anti-Muhammad cartoons.(2)

In 2007, a demonstration planned to take place in Brussels to promote the ‘single aim of preventing Islam becoming a dominant political force in Europe’ was banned by the city mayor, Freddy Thielemans, on the pretext that to allow the rally, organised by a coalition called Stop the Islamisation of Europe, to go ahead would ‘disturb public order.’(3)

READ MORE...

In memory of 9/11 from The Political Cesspool comes an interview with Kevin MacDonald in 3 parts…

READ MORE...

Dr K R Bolton FCIS

This is nearly, not quite, a first for MR.  When we started out in life, our categories were worked out to include New Zealand Politics.  But only one entry, dated 18th October 2005 and by JJR, has ever been posted.  Kerry Bolton, however, is on the spot and can provide some authoritive commentary.  This piece, like JJR’s post, concerns the travails of the nationalist, anti-Big Business politician, Winston Peters.
GW

The harassment, persecution and attempted prosecution of Winston Peters for alleged irregularities concerning donations either directly or indirectly to Peters and the NZ First Party have become a red-herring for the major issues facing NZ. But then again the General Elections themselves are re-herrings in regard to dealing with actual issues, and are relegated to banal party promises on tax reductions.

Peters has long been wholeheartedly hated by the usual combination of the Left and Big Business. Peters is the only politician to have taken on Big Business interests and now stands accused of accepting donations from several businessmen, principally Owen Glenn, and Robert Jones, although neither are supporters of the Party.

Glenn is, or rather was, a supporter of the Labour Party and is said to have contributed to a fund for the purposes of helping Peters’ attempt to over-turn the Tauranga election victory of National’s one-term ineffectual and clownish Bob Clarkson who defeated Peters in his own traditional stronghold at the 2004 Election. Glenn is supposed to have made the contribution on the basis that it would serve the interests of a Labour Government, which was obliged to accept NZ First support in Parliament.

Although Prime Minister Helen Clark has doggedly stood by Peters amidst the furore of allegations of financial mismanagement, if not corruption, it should be kept in mind that Labour before the necessity of seeking NZ First support, hated Peters just as much as others of the liberal-Left and Big Business. Clark often damned Peters for what she called “playing the race card”, in wanting to limit Asian immigration and in his opposition to free trade agreements with Asia.

What is also salient about the whole circus is the unconcealed satisfaction, the outright gloating, the universal glee, of the news media in seeing Peters pilloried.

The most damning evidence supposedly has come from Owen Glenn who took time out from Monaco to come back to NZ and testify that he had been asked personally by Peters for a donation, and has apparently provided documents to ‘prove’ this. Glenn states that he came back to defend his ‘reputation’ and was rather indignant that Peters had brought his character into question by the implication that he’s lying.

Glenn is also stating that Labour Party president Mike Williams invited himself aboard Glenn’s yacht for a stay in the hope of getting a job with Glenn’s business empire. Williams was able to counter this with his own documentation showing that Glenn invited him, and that Glenn was interested in being appointed honorary consul to Monaco on the basis that it would give him a diplomatic passport and would be useful for his business operations. Therefore, there is in this instance at least a convincing scenario of Glenn having given misleading statements to the Parliamentary Privileges Committee. Certainly the Williams explanation seems more plausible than that of Glenn’s.

What has been missing from all this, and for some reason Peters has not used the evidence, is the background of Glenn himself. According to several pages in “Absolute Power”, a recently published biography on Prime Minister Helen Clark by investigative journalist Ian Wishart, editor of the independent “Investigate” magazine, Glenn was involved in fraudulent business dealings concerning his shipping company, and paid $1,500,000 to US authorities in an out of court settlement to avoid prosecution. He is also claimed to have been associated with organised crime in the USA. He is also said to have kept a coked-up Black hostess, and is described allegedly by a former US associate as an “arrogant jerk”, descriptions far removed from the way he is being portrayed as the soft spoken and deeply hurt paragon of nobility by the news media. If Wishart’s allegations are not true, they would clearly be libellous and one wonders why Glenn – given his concern for his good reputation – has not sued Wishart or indeed even attempted a denial?

The whole Peters saga stinks of a conspiracy to bring down the only political leader effectively opposing the sell-out of NZ, who has been a thorn in the side of our local plutocrats for many years.

Kerry Bolton is the editor of Restoration Magazine.