[Paleopsych] Gary North: Repeat After Me: "I Am Getting Safer And Safer"

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Gary North: Repeat After Me: "I Am Getting Safer And Safer"
Gary North's REALITY CHECK, Issue 365, July 30, 2004

      Vice President Cheney says we are safer than we were on
9/11.  (http://tinyurl.com/6zvcd)  Senator Kerry says we are not
safe enough, but we could be.  (http://tinyurl.com/4mv8f)  It's
an election year.  "Vote for us.  Be safer."

      Ignorance is bliss.  Until it kills you.

      There are some bad things going on out there.  Sometimes the
media focus on them.  More often, however, they focus on
innocuous things or highly improbable things and call them
looming emergencies.  Something big is always going to kill us,
one of these days, we are told: the hole in the ozone layer,
global warming, man-made carbon dioxide in the oceans, whatever.
Unless the government. . . .  If only the government would. . . .

      In contrast, there is a tendency for every influential
institution to downplay the really bad things that really do
threaten society -- things for which there is no known solution
by a government agency or a United Nations treaty, things that
would require a reversal of existing government policy, for the
government to do less, not more.  If a potential disaster can't
be used to justify the expansion of the government, the media
ignore it or else bury it on page 17.

      To illustrate my point, I shall select a back-page industry:
cruise liners.


A SLOW BOAT TO CHINA, IF THINGS GO WELL

      Have you ever taken a cruise?  I have.  Three, actually.  I
was a speaker at conferences on board cruise ships.  So, I got
free tickets.  That was back in the late 1970s.  Been there, done
that.

      The cruise industry's ads on TV feature young, nubile
couples -- rarely seen on actual cruises -- frolicking in the
surf.  These ads are in fact aimed at graying people with lots of
money, who will spend most of their daylight hours on board
either snoozing in deck lounge chairs or eating.  They don't call
these ships "The Love Bloat" for nothing.

      The Securities & Exchange Commission requires a publicly
traded company to send out a fat, unreadable prospectus before
selling any stock.  The cruise ship industry is not similarly
regulated.  A case in point. . . .

      Does any cruise line mention the existence of 100-foot waves
that appear out of nowhere on calm seas, without warning, and
sink any ship in their path?  No?

      Also unmentioned is the fact that these waves are continual
phenomena, not "perfect storm" phenomena.

      I did not know of their existence until a week ago.  Lew
Rockwell posted a link from the BBC News on his site.  It was at
the bottom of his home page, which gets changed every day.  I
might easily have missed it.  Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan
Rather missed it.  You probably did, too.

      If you think the media tell you the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, front and center, think about the
following news report.  Think about the fact that this is
probably the first time you have heard about it, unless you visit
Lew Rockwell's site regularly.

                          **************

Freak waves spotted from space


The shady phenomenon of freak waves as tall as 10 storey
buildings has finally been proved, the European Space Agency
(ESA) said on Wednesday.

Sailors often whisper of monster waves when ships sink
mysteriously, but, until now, no one quite believed them.

As part of a project called MaxWave - which was set up to test
the rumours - two ESA satellites surveyed the oceans.

During a three week period they detected 10 giant waves, all of
which were over 25m (81ft) high.


Strange disappearances

Over the last two decades, more than 200 super-carriers -- cargo
ships over 200m long -- have been lost at sea. Eyewitness reports
suggest many were sunk by high and violent walls of water that
rose up out of calm seas.

But for years these tales of towering beasts were written off as
fantasy; and many marine scientists clung to statistical models
stating monstrous deviations from the normal sea state occur once
every 1,000 years.

"Two large ships sink every week on average," said Wolfgang
Rosenthal, of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany.
"But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air
crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."

To prove the phenomenon or lay the rumours to rest, a consortium
of 11 organisations from six EU countries founded MaxWave in
December 2000.

As part of the project, ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning
satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the oceans with their
radar.

The radars sent back "imagettes" - pictures of the sea surface in
a rectangle measuring 10 by 5km (6 by 2.5 miles), which were
taken every 200km (120 miles).

Around 30,000 separate imagettes were produced by the two
satellites during a three-week period in 2001 -- and the data was
mathematically analysed.

ESA says the survey revealed 10 massive waves -- some nearly 30m
(100 ft) high.

"The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected," said Dr
Rosenthal.


Wave map

Ironically, while the MaxWave research was going on, two tourist
liners endured terrifying ordeals. The Breman and the Caledonian
Star cruisers had their bridge windows smashed by 30m waves in
the South Atlantic.

The Bremen was left drifting for two hours after the encounter,
with no navigation or propulsion.

Now that their existence is no longer in dispute, it is time to
gain a better understanding of these rogues.

In the next phase of the research, a project called WaveAtlas
will use two years' worth of imagettes to create a worldwide
atlas of freak wave events.

The goal is to find out how these strange cataclysmic phenomena
may be generated, and which regions of the seas are most at risk.

Dr Rosenthal concluded: "We know some of the reasons for the
rogue waves, but we do not know them all."

       http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3917539.stm

                           ************

      Had this not been published on the BBC News Web site or some
equally establishment source, you would have thought this story
was an urban legend.  It isn't.

      Presumably, this phenomenon has been with us from the
beginning of the oceans, yet it has never gotten into the
public's consciousness, from long before Christopher Columbus
until today.  Of course, there is always tomorrow.

      Think about this.  How did this story NOT get into the
public's consciousness?  This is "The Perfect Storm" in the form
of a soap opera rather than a George Clooney movie.  "Tune in
tomorrow!"  This is "The Poseidon Adventure" every two weeks.

      As for the media?  Silence.  "A story not worth pursuing.
No news value here!"

      Critics of conspiracy theories usually argue, "No group
could keep a story like this hidden.  The story would leak out."
But would it?  Would anyone believe it if it did?

      Stories that are sufficiently threatening to scare lots of
people into not spending money, or scare them away from
employment in a particular industry, or get them to lose faith in
the establishment's reliability are simply not passed along.
Even when they do leak out, the public resists thinking about
them.  The stories are just too unnerving.  People think: "If I
can't do anything about this, I prefer not to believe in its
existence.  I would rather not believe it than believe it and
feel completely vulnerable."


THE WAR ON TERRORISM

      There is a lot of media attention on terrorism these days.
The 9/11 Commission has issued Part 1 of its report.  It blames
everyone in Washington, which means no one in particular.  It
calls for another layer of bureaucracy to solve the problems of
the existing layers of bureaucracy.

      Tell me: How many of the federal government's 15 separate
and competing intelligence agencies can you name, besides the CIA
and the FBI?  If you got NSA ("No Such Agency"), you're doing
better than most Americans.  Twelve to go.

      The Commission's report suggests that an Intelligence Czar
should be appointed to oversee these huge, long-established,
independent bureaucracies.  That will fix things -- just like the
Energy Czar in 1974, William Simon, whose primary task was to
reduce America's dependence on imported oil.  We are more
dependent on imported oil today than we were in 1974.

      William Lind is a specialist on fourth generation warfare:
the kind of war the Vietcong waged against us a generation ago
and unnumbered insurgency groups are waging against us today in
Iraq.  For anyone interested in fourth-generation warfare, start
here:

          http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind-arch.html

      In a July 29 column, Lind analyzed the 9/11 Commission's
report.  He thinks it is typical of Washington reports.  He
thinks its main recommendation will lead to more intelligence
failures: centralization.

      When bureaucracies fail, one of their favorite ways to
      deflect demands for reform is to offer reorganization
      instead. That appears to be what has happened in the
      report of the 9/11 commission and Washington's response
      to that report. Worse, the reorganization envisioned is
      to further centralize intelligence by establishing a
      national intelligence director and creating a
      counterterrorism center. One is tempted to ask, if
      centralization improves performance, why didn't the
      Soviet Union ("democratic centralism") win the Cold
      War?

      What American military and national intelligence really
      require is that bureaucratic anathema, reform. And
      reform in turn means not centralization and
      unification, but de-centralization and internal
      competition. What did us in both on 9/11 and in the
      run-up to the Iraq war was an intelligence process that
      valued committee consensus and internal harmony above
      the open rough-and-tumble disagreements that surface
      new ways of looking at things.

            http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind33.html

      The media have given a lot of attention to the report and to
terrorism.  But there is one aspect of the terrorist threat that
the media refuse to talk about: suitcase nuclear weapons.  For
this threat, there is no deterrent other than product scarcity
and price.  For this threat, there is no reliable defense.

      If a terrorist group sets off a real, live nuke along the
lines of the one in Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," the
world's economy will go down.  The second bomb, exploded a week
later, will keep it down.  The third bomb will destroy the modern
division of labor.

      It takes no strategic genius to know where to explode them.
It only takes familiarity with "Diehard III."  The locations are:
(1) 33 Liberty Street, New York City (the New York Federal
Reserve Bank), (2) the City of London (the Bank of England), and
(3) Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany (European Central Bank).

      Mentally move from "nuclear explosion" to "fractional
reserve banking."  Then move from "we interrupt this broadcast"
to "ATM machine."  I don't mean move mentally.  I mean move.  The
moment you hear about a nuclear explosion, get into your car and
drive to the nearest ATM.  Take out the limit.  You can always
redeposit the money later.

      Two days after a nuclear bomb hits an American city, your
credit cards will be rejected by all card-swipe machines.  My
credit cards will be rejected.  All God's chillun's credit cards
will be rejected.

      These two words -- "card rejected" -- would shut down the
West.  Who has a month's currency in small bills in ready
reserve?  Nobody will be able to pay anybody with digital money.
The long-feared inter-bank cascading cross defaults will take
down the banks.  http://tinyurl.com/3rn5m

      The U.S. government would then create a national rationing
system.  It would put a moratorium on debt collection: no
evictions, no cessation of municipal services, and rationing in
terms of last month's consumption, minus 20% (initially).

      The credit markets would be gone.  That would be the end of
everyone's productivity and lifestyle.  It would cripple the
division of labor.

      I have talked about this scenario with Sam Cohen, who
invented the neutron bomb.  Sam and I disagree.  I think we would
get total panic and economic breakdown on the day the third bomb
went off.  He thinks it would take only one bomb.

      I wish I could remember the arguments I used on Sam to prove
to him that he's wrong.


JOE DOUGLASS LOGS IN

      Dr. Joseph Douglass has specialized in matters of government
intelligence and counter-intelligence for over three decades.
His book on chemical and biological weapons, "America the
Vulnerable," was published in 1987.  I read it when it first came
out.  I was persuaded of its accuracy.  It is still in print.

      His assessment of the 9-11 Commission report is worth
considering.

      The good news is at least this will provide the news
      media and their hundreds of hired talking heads
      something to use to fill time other than the two
      political conventions.

      This has proven to be the case.  More than this, says
Douglass, is unlikely.  Here's why.

      First, as usual, Washington investigations are mainly
      held to create the impression that our elected
      representatives and government officials are hard at
      work protecting the citizenry. In reality, they
      invariably seem to spend monstrous amounts of money,
      work hardest making certain no sacred cows are gored,
      including themselves, and garnish millions of dollars
      worth of free publicity and newspaper headlines. Rarely
      if ever is anyone held accountable. Rather, the
      "system" is blamed, reorganizations are proposed as a
      fix as though merely shuffling the deck of cards will
      change the luck of the draw, and the size of government
      continues to grow.

      Douglass rounds up his usual prime suspects: chemical and
biological weapons, which he thinks are state-sponsored; the drug
trade, which he thinks is partially state-sponsored; and nuclear
weapons, which are obviously state-sponsored.  There is an on-
going link, he argues, between the state manufacture of terrorist
weapons (the production system) and the criminal underworld (the
distribution system).

      A fourth issue concerns what is known about the
      possible existence of nuclear warheads already in the
      United States under the control of foreign intelligence
      service agents or terrorists. This issue was first
      raised by Col. Stan Lunev, formerly with Soviet
      military intelligence, who defected from Russia in 1992
      shortly after Boris Yeltsin took the helm. Another
      source, retired FBI agent Paul Williams, has reported
      in his book that bin Laden and company purchased a
      significant number (20) of suitcase nucs from the
      Chechen Mafia as the Soviet Union was changing back
      into Russia and has smuggled several of the warheads
      into the United States already. Presumably, they are
      just waiting for an opportune time to set them off. For
      an overview, see J. R. Nyquist's "Is al-Qaeda Preparing
      a Nuclear Hit?"

      Nyquist's article is a truly depressing piece.  Douglass
takes it seriously.  Nyquist writes:

      A new book by terrorism expert and former FBI
      consultant Paul Williams says that al Qaeda acquired 20
      nuclear suitcase bombs from the Chechen mafia between
      1996 and 2001. This agrees with similar statements made
      by Yossef Bodansky in his 1999 book, "Bin Laden: The
      Man Who Declared War On America." In saying that al
      Qaeda poses a nuclear threat, Williams takes his
      analysis a step farther. He says that al Qaeda has
      almost assuredly smuggled suitcase bombs into the
      United States. He also says that these bombs are in the
      10 kiloton range, capable of inflicting millions of
      casualties. Williams believes that al Qaeda will use
      several of these devices in simultaneous attacks
      against urban targets by the end of 2005.

                     http://tinyurl.com/4rgv2

      I remain open to the suggestion but skeptical regarding the
specifics.  I don't think Western intelligence operators have
penetrated al Qaeda.  That such a transaction for a single bomb
is possible, I have little doubt.  That it is only a matter of
time seems obvious, which is why the mainstream media refuse to
touch this story.

      Douglass then asks two rhetorical questions:

      Does not the public have a vested interest in knowing
      what the U.S. intelligence assessment of this reported
      threat really is? Is the Senate Committee convinced
      that U.S. intelligence now is doing all that they could
      reasonably be expected to do?

                     http://tinyurl.com/6cuo8

      Here is the problem: having a vested interest and admitting
that one has a vested interest are two different things.  If a
person's vested interest is such that he would be wise to make
major changes in his lifestyle and spending habits, let alone his
geography, the average person decides that the price of his
vested interest is just too high.  This is why men die without
writing wills.  It's a lot easier to pass along one's vested
interest -- in this case, to Tom Ridge, who gets paid to worry
about such matters.

      As for the Senate Intelligence Committee, this is an
oxymoron: Senate, intelligence, and committee.


ADVANCE WARNING?

      If any national political leader believed that a nuclear
bomb had been smuggled into his country, would he warn his people
about this?  Of course not.  The warning would create such
horrendous economic effects -- call this the ATM effect -- that
it would paralyze the country.

      The movie "Deep Impact," about a comet heading for earth, is
like all of the other movies about the Great Collision, beginning
no later than George Pal's "When Worlds Collide."  Everything
runs smoothly until the object actually hits the ocean, creating
a huge wave.  When the wave comes, everyone is still living on
the Eastern seaboard -- or, in the case of the Pournelle/Niven
novel, "Lucifer's Hammer," the West Coast.  But it would never
happen this way.  The entire economy would collapse long before
the comet/meteor/planet struck.  The division of labor would
disappear, along with just about everyone living in an urban
society.  Who would go to work?  Who would not clean out his bank
account?  What bank could survive?

      I have seen no report from any official source about what
the government is doing to deal with the problem of suitcase
nukes.  I have seen nothing from any official source on the steps
that we citizens should take in order to prepare for the
detonation of a suitcase nuke.

      Maybe they are training uranium-sniffing dogs.

      This much, I do know: the U.S./Mexican border is a sieve.
Ranchers on the American side of the border are being threatened
by the illegal aliens who are entering across their property.
The media give no coverage to this story.  It has been going on
for years.  http://tinyurl.com/4g7ba

      Dr. Douglass makes a crucial point: it is possible, even
likely, that the same underworld network that is bringing in
illegal drugs is capable of bringing in biological weapons.

      The anthrax letter attack seems to me to display the
      systemic problems within our government even more than
      9-11. It is important to understand how serious the CBW
      (chemical and biological warfare) threat is -- not the
      CBW threat as described in government announcements and
      the media, but the threat as represented in data that
      often does not get into intelligence estimates.
      Information on the CBW threat that goes well beyond
      nerve agents and anthrax and plague has been both
      suppressed and/or deliberately not collected since
      1969. The history of this is extensive. The conclusion
      that comes out of this material is that it would be
      child's play, notwithstanding the Department of
      Homeland Defense and remedy of the various "structural
      problems," to mount a massive terrorist attack on the
      U.S. homeland using advanced CBW agents and without the
      government seeing any warning or afterwards being able
      to link the attack with any perpetrator. Recall from
      the above that terrorists or saboteurs and sufficient
      CBW agents can be brought into our country using drug
      trafficking networks and mechanisms.

                     http://tinyurl.com/45oa5

      The war on terrorism is being brought to us by the same
high-efficiency organization that has waged the war on drugs for
five decades.  We should expect similar results.


ARMED AND DANGEROUS

      The U.S. government has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.  This
has turned the entire Muslim world against us.  A July 23 press
release reveals the results of a Zogby poll conducted in June.

      Arab views of the United States, shaped largely by the
      Iraq war and a post-Sept. 11 climate of fear, have
      worsened in the past two years to such an extent that
      in Egypt -- an important ally in the region -- nearly
      100 percent of the population now holds an unfavorable
      opinion of the country, according to two polls due out
      today.

      Both surveys were conducted in June by Zogby
      International and polled Arab men and women in Saudi
      Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the United
      Arab Emirates.

      The findings reflect the concerns raised in the Sept.
      11 commission report released yesterday, which
      emphasized a losing battle for public opinion. "Support
      for the United States has plummeted," the commissioners
      wrote.

      "What we're seeing now is a disturbing sympathy with al
      Qaeda coupled with resentment toward the United States,
      and we ought to be extremely troubled by that," said
      Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor who
      commissioned one of the surveys.

                     http://tinyurl.com/43na8

      We now face a determined and growing number of enemies who
are willing to die for their cause, who seek vengeance, and who
may be supplied with weapons of mass destruction by unnamed
states whose leaders have scores to settle with the United
States.  This country is no longer loved, let alone well-loved.

      We are not told officially what the worst-case terrorism
scenarios are.  We are also not told officially what things are
still being done poorly, and how a specific rearrangement of
priorities and authorities will restore national safety.  The
experts interviewed on TV tell us, "We can't be 100% safe."  True
enough.  The question is: "What, precisely, are we 80% safe from,
meaning what are we 20% vulnerable to?"

      Americans don't seriously believe the war in Iraq can come
home.  They don't think that Osama & Co. can get to us.  They
really don't believe in weapons of mass destruction in enemy
hands.  They do not believe that the mass production of such
weapons by the Soviet Union (R.I.P.) could lead to a black market
transfer of a nuclear bomb to a Muslim terrorist or a disgruntled
Communist posing as a Muslim terrorist.  They do not understand
that a state-built nuke delivered by a non-state terrorist
removes the supplier from the short list of counter-attack
targets.

      If you don't think North Korea would become a supplier if
push ever comes to shove, then you are not familiar with that
branch of the Kim family.

      There comes a point where an aggressive foreign policy
starts producing negative results.  That point came for this
country no later than 1898.

      But there were no suitcase nukes in 1898.


CONCLUSION

      We do not hear anything specific about portable weapons of
mass destruction that already exist or are cheap to create, such
as anthrax.  We assume that because such weapons have not been
used yet, they will not be used, ever.

      We hear nothing about the steps being taken by government
agencies to reduce this kind of threat.  There are two possible
reasons for the silence: (1) The authorities will not tip their
hand on the nature of our national defenses; (2) The authorities
really don't have a handle on the extent of the threat, and they
don't want voters to know this.  Either way, the real threats are
not discussed publicly.  The public worries about subway bombings,
but not very much.

      I worry about two words: "card rejected."  This is the
overhanging legacy of government-licensed fractional reserve
banking.  Call it digital fallout.  It can kill you.