Increased threat of threat level increase

Released in 1995, Die Hard With A Vengeance is the third in the series of Die Hard films starring Bruce Willis. The story portrays Willis and the omnipresent Samuel L Jackson (a year after the two appeared in Pulp Fiction) chasing around New York trying to solve a series of puzzles to stop a terrorist who turns out to be stealing gold from the New York Federal Reserve. President of the New York Fed at that time was William J McDonough, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1995 and a member of the Bilderberg Group. McDonough is also a member of the Rockefeller-founded Group of 30 (G30), another influential round-table group based in Washington with a specific focus on economics. A few days ago the chairman of the bank, Stephen Friedman, resigned over his ongoing ties to Goldman Sachs. The controversy saw Friendman involved in the decision to allow Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company and to grant them government aid. While there are rules about central bankers owning shares in the private banks who own shares in the central banks, Friedman is only one of many whose paths move easily between the elite corporate and government worlds.

Realistically, the chances of terrorists actually pulling off a heist at the NY Fed are approximately the same as those of you catching flu from eating pork. Therefore, perhaps it is appropriate that as pork flu hysteria is winding down the World Health Organisation told us it could be back 'with a vengeance' this autumn. The WHO made this statement on the same day as Mexico started lifting restrictions brought in to try to stop the spread of the virus, and the BBC changed the title of their story from 'Mexico to begin lifting flu curbs' to 'Five new UK flu cases confirmed'. These are stonewall examples of how the PR organisations and major media of the world have participated in a deliberate attempt to scare people, to convince people of a threat regardless of whether it is real or plausible.

A quick look at the current threat levels shows that the WHO have us at level 5, one step below the declaration of a global pandemic of pork flu, MI5 and the Home Office have the UK at the second highest level, 'severe', of terrorist attack and the Department of Homeland Security has the US at the third highest level, 'elevated', or yellow, in terms of the national threat level, but at the second highest level, 'high' or orange, for all domestic and international flights. Further confusing matters, while 'severe' is only the second highest threat level in the UK, it is the highest threat level (red, of course) on the scale used by the Department of Homeland Security. The implication of this is that the UK actually has the capacity to be at greater risk of terrorism than the US. Or that all these threat level indicators are nothing short of politically convenient lies. Even further complicating matters, we were told in October 2008, more than six months ago, that in the UK we were at 'the severe end of severe', a 'near critical' level of threat of terrorist attack. Needless to say, there has not been a terrorist attack in the UK since then, and the only major terrorist plot broken up by the police turned out to be based on virtually no evidence whatsoever. A handful of telephone conversations and one e-mail, the content of which was not made available to defence lawyers, was the excuse for holding and now trying to deport a dozen innocent Pakistanis here on student visas. Indeed, even when lowering the threat level (which occasionally happens and is even sometimes reported), the message is clear. After the 'attempted car bombings' in London and Glasgow in 2007, the level was raised to 'critical' for a brief period before being relaxed to its current level of 'severe'. Jacqui Smith made efforts at the time to make it clear that the threat had not gone away, and was 'serious and real'. Without such threats, we wouldn't be so easily convinced that we need an elite to run rule over us, or be so motivated to actively take part in the mechanisms of control wielded by that elite.

To a large extent, we are taught to control ourselves, and fear is critical to that teaching. For one, we're taught a model of animalistic behaviour where fear is something innate and instinctive rather than something conditioned by hundreds of statements that the threat 'is real' repeated millions of times. It is perfectly natural to be scared. Indeed, in some circumstances it is. But where it isn't the role of genuine feelings is taken by official threat levels and colour-coded diagrams. Most people haven't really got a clue how threatening terrorism, climate change, pork flu, bird flu, overpopulation, resource depletion or economic collapse really are they have little choice but to form their opinions on the basis of official propaganda. However, there is a choice. You could choose not to give a toss, which spiritually is probably the best option and will grant you the least stressful and therefore most enjoyable life in many respects. Or you could choose to actively disbelieve what are either lies or utter stupidity.

It isn't hard to imagine world leaders instituting a hierarchy of threat levels of economic problems, particularly given the plan, endorsed at the London G20 meeting, to create an 'early warning system' responsible for 'financial stability'. As with so much of this philosophy, it involves a kind of doublethink, in that the economic system, whether we're talking share prices or the value of assets in the derivatives market, is tied to widespread confidence in its operations. If people believe in the economy and keeping spending in the expectation that if everyone else keeps spending we should all have enough money to get by, then for the most part people accept the ever increasing debt burden and resultant inflation. This enables ever-increasing speculative values of businesses and assets based on predictions of future revenue, which enables more money to be borrowed and therefore more debt to be created. However, in times of collapse and recession people stop borrowing and spending so much because it ceases to be normal behaviour. The major media was talking about the risk of recession throughout 2008, but it was only towards the latter half of the year that economies actually started shrinking. It took a while to convince people to stop borrowing money and spending it, even though it was headline news for months. To be clear, the parroted risk of recession is in part what caused it to become a reality, in that a deliberate collapse of confidence necessarily preceded the very real 'negative growth' seen in major economies over the last year.

Given this established link between confidence and perceived value and status of economies, an early warning system is only ever likely to increase the possibility of recessions, or mini-recessions (brief decelerations in economic growth), and thus increase instability. The leaders of the world know this because they couldn't manage the system without partly understanding how it works. Gordon Brown in particular was a highly successful chancellor for a decade before transforming in the Crisis Management Consultant we see before us today. Indeed, since Brown took over from Blair it has been virtually non-stop catastrophe. In his first month alone he had to deal with 'terrorist attacks' on London and Glasgow, the widely predicted threat of major flooding which turned out to not be quite as bad as they thought, and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Pork Flu is just the latest in a continuous stream of crises that have enabled a vastly unpopular Prime Minister to remain in position to make vastly unpopular decisions. Explaining the paradigm of control perhaps a little too explicitly, Brown gave an interview to Time magazine shortly before the G20 meeting:

The big issue here is that we have a globalization that has brought 4 billion people into the world economy, where 10 or 15 years ago there used to be only about a billion. So you have this enormous change that has taken place in the world economy, but we have a global financial system without an effective form of supervision. We've got huge climate-change and energy problems that can only be addressed at a global level. And we've got problems of poverty that need some international response...

... Sometimes it's a crisis that forces change. The world that emerges out of this crisis won't be the same. - Gordon Brown, Time

In such a climate where the main way in which leaders maintain their power is by scaring people into submission it is unsurprising that recent research found that the economic recovery was being hindered by people's anxiety and fear about things like crime and terrorism. A study by the Mental Health Foundation also found that 77% of respondents felt the world had become a more frightening place over the last 10 years. This is, of course, testament to the efficiency and efficacy of official propaganda.

There is, however, a very real threat of increased threat levels, by which I mean that there is a very real movement in politics and politicians towards a view of political activity as crisis management. The next election in the UK will be fought almost entirely on how much the economy has recovered and therefore how well Brown and his cohorts have done in managing the 'financial crisis'. If there was an election next week, the Labour party would lose to the Conservative by default, as the present consensus is that Brown has managed the problem poorly. Brown is risking his professional future on increasingly ludicrous policies - only this week it was reported that the Royal Mail's already crippling pension scheme liabilities are to be converted into little more than a Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, Allen Stanford (a former US govt. informer with connections to the international drug trade) is accused of doing exactly the same thing.

If we believe in the ever-increasing threat levels then we will become increasingly submissive to the policies of what even Gordon Brown is calling a new world order. The major threat is not from the various apparently malicious entities co-opted or created by fearmongerers and crisis managers, but of us buying into this crap and letting them continue to use it as their primary means of maintaining and extending control. Both fear and the sense of lacking I described in A Wider Strategy of Tension, operate at one stage removed, one degree of separation deferred. Fear is always of something that isn't present and immediate, because if it were present and immediate one would no longer be fearful, one would be reacting to it. If something is lacking then by definition it must not be present and immediate. This is in part what enables both of these feelings to be used as the excuses and motivations for control.

Take terrorism for example - if you asked someone who was actually in the midst of a terrorist attack what they thought of biometric ID chips, extraordinary rendition, lengthy or indefinite detention without trial, increasingly sophisticated spying technology, the erosion of dissent and the narrowing of the political spectrum they'd probably tell you, quite rightly, to shut up and get the hell out of there. However, if on the same day as a 'major terrorist plot' is broken up in a series of dawn raids led by the finest intelligence available you ask people about these things and the conversation is not only possible within the context but much more likely to result in people advocating the policies. The threat of terrorism is in many respects more important politically than actual terrorist attacks, though attacks are very useful to the state. The website of the Republicans in Congress (GOP.gov) has a page devoted to 'detainees' titled 'Never Again'.

Of course, if another attack like 9/11 did take place the only permitted response in our present political dialogue is 'we haven't done enough'. The notion that whatever it is we're doing to try to prevent terrorist attacks actually isn't working (whether that's because the terrorists are state sponsored or for any other reason) and we should therefore repeal the legislations and dismantle the institutions just isn't mentioned, isn't part of the conversation.

Similarly, any notions that the economy is centrally controlled are dismissed, even though the supply of money and what it is possible to do with it are centrally controlled. Just this week carbon trading markets were defended by the very people making money from them. In July 2007 the global carbon market was said to be worth around $30 billion, it is now reported at four times that. Reuters (Rothschild owned) reported:

Carbon markets are vital in the fight against climate change, and "inherent" volatility and spikes in permit prices are drivers of innovation rather than signs of manipulation, traders told UK policymakers on Tuesday. - Yahoo News

This is a straightforward deception - rather than answer the question as to what causes the price of carbon to fluctuate so much (the suspicion being speculators trying to manipulate the market), the response is to redirect the entire discussion to the effects of those fluctuations, saying that they drive innovation. The man most prominently quoted in the story is Louis Redshaw, head of envrionmental markets at Barclays Capital (Rothschild controlled). Redshaw moved to Barclays in April 2004 from EDF, the French Energy conglomerate with long standing business ties to NM Rothschild of London. Redshaw (a name not dissimilar to 'Red Shield') said nearly 2 years ago:

Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world's biggest market over all. - Redshaw, July 2007

I suggest that this is not a prediction, but a self-fulfilling prophecy. Assertions that carbon will become the world's largest derivatives market are not far-fetched, given the involvement of the international banking cartel. Though there is not, as yet, an institutional threat level for climate change, the issue is treated in an essentially identical way to terrorism or pork flu. It is classified as a threat in a way entirely conducive to the policies and desires of the existing superclass. Egypt is currently enacting the potentially suicidal policy of slaughtering every last one of their 300,000 pigs. This will have the net effect of weakening one of the few African nations with the ability to stand up against tyrannical globalists, as well as conveniently enabling the portrayal of the people of Egypt (a largely Muslim country) as a bunch of illiterate, ignorant peasants.

Just as such mechanics of power have existed for centuries, so to have those offering alternatives. One lesson comes from the Greek hedonists Epicurus and his student Lucretius.

Do you not see that nature is barking for two things only, a body free from pain, a mind released from worry and fear for the enjoyment of pleasurable sensations? - Lucretius, On the Order of Things

This is a clear derivation of Epicurean teaching:

When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul. - Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

The point is that rather than being a slave to fear and the fleeting fulfillment of desire, one can recognise a pleasure in tranquility (ataraxia) whereby essential physical needs are satisfied and the absence of want enables sustainable happiness.

We must also reflect that of desires some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only. And of the necessary desires some are necessary if we are to be happy, some if the body is to be rid of uneasiness, some if we are even to live. He who has a clear and certain understanding of these things will direct every preference and aversion toward securing health of body and tranquillity of mind, seeing that this is the sum and end of a happy life. For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and, when once we have attained all this, the tempest of the soul is laid; seeing that the living creature has no need to go in search of something that is lacking, nor to look anything else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled. When we are pained pleasure, then, and then only, do we feel the need of pleasure. For this reason we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a happy life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing. - Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Politically, hedonism has great potential. As the Greek says, not hedonism in the sense of drinking and fucking like rabbits and spending as much money as possible but hedonism in the sense of making pleasure a default psychological-spiritual state, instead of fear and desire. Without the fear there's no motive for us to control ourselves in the ways we're taught to do so. Without the sense of lack there's no excuse for massive institutions against which even a democratic majority has little chance of success. Humans are capable of creating and sustaining 'the good life', either individually or socially, without the need of state or corporate involvement. I imagine if Epicurus were alive today he'd be saying the same thing.