The Great Reading Gang-Rape Hoax Of 1982 (And Its Aftermath)

On January 18, 1982, the BBC screened a controversial documentary. A Complaint Of Rape was part of a series using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique; its subject was not simply the police but their methods. Part of a series called simply Police, this episode caused outrage and led to changes in the way rape complainants are dealt with by the police in Britain.

The outrage was due to the way the complainant in this particular case was treated. A young woman was seen sitting in a room with three male detectives who obviously did not believe her story about being gang-raped by three men. To say the detectives were dismissive would be to understate the case. Among other things, they accused her of being a prostitute. As it turned out, they were not far off the mark, but the viewing public was not to know that.

The outrage over this perceived ill-treatment was augmented by something far worse. Earlier that month, John Allen had stood trial at Ipswich Crown Court for the rape of a teenage hitchhiker. Allen had pleaded not guilty, but after the girl broke down in court he changed his plea. What happened next was extraordinary. Instead of sentencing Allen to a substantial gaol term, Judge Bertrand Richards said the girl had been “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence” then fined him £2,000. This led to the MP Arthur Lewis asking the Attorney General if the Lord Chancellor would dismiss the judge, to which he received a one word answer: “No”.

Unlike this poor girl who was clearly denied justice, the young woman at Woodley Police Station was not a rape victim, she was a head case, and a far greater danger to innocent men than they were to her. Obviously the detectives knew this, but you wouldn't know this if you read contemporaneous reviews of the programme.

If you are skeptical, see if you can find A Complaint Of Rape on the regular Internet. You won’t be able to, for good reason, any critical investigation would tear its bogus narrative to shreds. One of the men behind the programme was Roger Graef. When he was asked to comment on it in 2017, he fell strangely silent, although 9 years previously he had already backtracked slightly when he wrote an article for the London Evening Standard in which he urged women not to drink too much and give out mixed signals to men.

Roger Graef — one of the men behind the 1982 Reading gang-rape hoax.

The truth about the 1982 documentary was not long in coming out but was not widely disseminated. On January 29, the Reading Chronicle published a letter from Mrs E.M. O’Rourke who wrote “I believe there had been no rape in the legal sense, but no-one doubted the woman’s story was substantially correct”. Seven days earlier, the Bradford newspaper Telegraph & Argus published a letter from a correspondent who pointed out that “she had (a) made a similar complaint that proved groundless and (b) she had a history of mental disturbance”.

History and future! On February 1, she was arrested for creating a disturbance in the centre of Reading, and promptly Sectioned. This was apparently not the first time, nor the second, she had been taken off the street in this fashion.

In spite of non-partisan reporting by the Reading Chronicle, the country heard only the whinings of the sexual grievance industry which to this day continues to spout vacuous statistics and factoids about how many men get away with rape aided and abetted by the police.

In June 2016, another documentary with the same title was screened. This focused on an allegation made by a young Spanish tourist in Bedford who the previous June had gone voluntarily with a man who had by his own admission drunk nine pints of beer. There was no suggestion of money changing hands, but their relationship had been confined to sex in his hotel room. For whatever reason, it had not ended well, and she accused him of rape. A prompt investigation led not only to his arrest but to exculpatory CCTV evidence and an earwitness. Even so, a woman detective assigned to the case had clearly drunk the feminist Kool-Aid, but thankfully the CPS declined to charge him. Think about this, what couldn’t most men do after drinking nine pints of beer?

At the end of this second documentary, the viewer was treated to the same contrived feminist statistics: 9 out of 10 rapes go unreported. How does anyone know if they are not reported? And only 6% of reported rapes result in conviction. There is an obvious solution to this: the authorities should stop bringing so many weak cases. In addition to that, women should be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves, and gratuitous false accusers need to be severely punished.

While fortunately (grooming gangs aside) gang-rapes are rare, false allegations of gang-rapes are not. Here are a few examples from both sides of the Atlantic:

November 2005: At Oldham, Lancashire, single mother Sherelle Deblasio has sex with four men, then filled with shame decides to frame them for rape. Fortunately, three of them had smartphones.

March 2006: the outrageous Duke University hoax. The false accuser in that case received no punishment, and went on to murder her lover.

September 2009: the notorious Hofstra University case — the reprobates concerned were saved by mobile phone footage.

February 2010: Teenager Cheryll Dannatt has sex with three men, the fourth declined. The next day she tells her mother she was gang-raped.

May 2014: At the Cirencester Mad Hatter’s Ball, Cirencester, four students have sex with Miss X. Yet again, video evidence saves the wrongly accused.

Sadly, rather than tackle the problem of false rape allegations and the abuse of alcohol that leads to so many rapes — real and imaginary — the focus of the sexual grievance industry is squarely on the erosion of due process, making it easier to convict the guilty and innocent alike. In the United States it has become positively dangerous for any man especially a student to have sex with a woman who has consumed any quantity of alcohol, while in Canada no evidence is required to convict a suspect, only a story. Along with statutes of limitations, jury trials have long been abolished, making Canada arguably the most dangerous country in the world for a man to be falsely accused of rape. And we haven’t even mentioned the ludicrous #MeToo Movement yet.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, September 15, 2019.]

TRUMP — The Reckoning

Now that the Mueller Report has been published and Donald Trump has been cleared of colluding with Russia, heads will roll.

Donald Trump was nearly seventy years old when he announced he was running for President of the United States. He had been asked if he would run way back in the 1980s, and ruled it out. Having literally no political experience, he was treated largely as a joke candidate, something he took in good humour, but the joke turned sour, first when he decimated a seventeen strong field of Republican hopefuls, and then when he beat Hillary Clinton losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and thus the Presidency.

By this time, the jokes had turned to hysteria. What would any reasonable person have expected him to do at his age? With a much younger wife, a young son, an extended family, fame, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, he could have spent his golden years playing golf, doting on his grandkids, and doing anything he wanted and was able to within reason. Instead he elected to spend six hundred million dollars of his own money on a long shot to capture the Presidency, then work like a dog afterwards. Why? Because he saw his country being trashed and figured only he could save it.

Donald Trump

You can call that wishful thinking, arrogance, even a Messiah complex, but the fact remains he put his money where his mouth is and delivered the goods. He didn’t even take a salary. And he has clearly been enjoying himself in both the run up to the election and in his Presidency, but there has been a dark side, a very dark side. While Trump has won millions of fans, he has earned the scorn of the elites, the intellectuals, the mass media, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. To date he has been the victim of an albeit half-hearted assassination attempt by a deranged British national, he has been assassinated in effigy in imitation of the Ides of March, decapitated in effigy, slandered and libelled from pillar to post.

After his Republican enemies released the now notorious Access Hollywood tape, a gaggle of demented and simply dishonest, attention-seeking females came forward to accuse him of a variety of sexual misdemeanours. He has been branded a bigot, a money launderer for the mob, his sanity has been questioned, and crude innuendo has been directed at him about his relationship with his eldest daughter.

Not content with trashing the man himself, elements of the media have attacked his daughter, his son Donald as a Russian “colluder”, his wife has been branded a prostitute, even his young son Barron has not been spared. Fifty years from now or even twenty, future American historians will look back on his treatment in shame. But the biggest lie, one that should never have been credited, is that he was somehow in the pockets of the Kremlin, or Vladimir Putin in person. How this lie came about has now been thoroughly documented, not by the mainstream media but by Fox News and its pundits who have broadcast the findings of Gregg Jarrett, Dan Bongino, Sara Carter, Joe diGenova, the Judicial Watch team, The Epoch Times, and other Conservative organisations. To this list must be added the names of several leading Republican politicians, including Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Louis Gohmert, Jason Chaffetz, Trey Gowdy and Lindsey Graham.

So how did the Russian collusion hoax begin? It is based entirely on a spurious so-called dossier written ostensibly by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, a man who had excellent credentials, although in view of its contents one is entitled to ask if those credentials should not now be scrutinised carefully. The most outrageous claim of this dossier is that while he was in Moscow, Trump hired a brace of prostitutes to urinate on a mattress in the hotel suite that had been used by the Obamas.

Although there is little or no chance of his ever submitting himself to questioning by Congress, Steele has now admitted (ie claimed) in civil proceedings that he didn’t actually visit Russia to “research” this dossier but did so by telephone. This has led some people to claim the Russians have played the Democratic leadership for fools, but we have no proof that any Russians much less any working for the Russian Government had anything to do with the Steele dossier. Dan Bongino has pointed out that this Russian collusion stupidity actually originated as far back as 2007 and has simply been rewritten and tailored to fit Trump. Dick Morris, who knows how a certain person’s sick mind works, suggests it was written in-house by two Clinton henchmen.

Whoever actually wrote the dossier, most of this so-called opposition research was funded by Hillary Clinton who disguised its funding by paying for it through the law firm Perkins Coie. This is not so much a campaign violation as money laundering, but as with her e-mail scandal, laws are for the little people.

Although Clinton was responsible for the Steele dossier, Republicans were initially involved, including the late John McCain. McCain may have been a war hero, but that was the limit of his humanity. If he had beaten Obama in 2008, the Middle East would quite likely have gone up in flames.

The dossier was used not only to spread disinformation in the mainstream media but to dupe the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into issuing warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Its contents were fed to the Yahoo! News hack Michael Isikoff, a so-called investigative journalist, and the resulting news reports were used to bolster its authenticity, a classic case of circular reporting. This allowed rogue operators to spy on Carter Page, and in effect on Trump himself.

If the Steele dossier and spying on Page had been the limits of the conspiracy, that would have been bad enough, but the extent of it and the names of the major players is breath-taking. We know now for certain that in addition to Hillary Clinton, the following people were involved: James Comey, John Brennan and James Clapper — the top men of the three major intelligence agencies; Andrew McCabe, the number two man at the FBI; Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, also top FBI agents; Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, the former being a senior Department Of Justice official; Susan Rice, a top aide to Barack Obama; Loretta Lynch, Attorney General in the same administration; and Sally Yates, an Obama holdover who was sacked by Trump for insubordination.

The Trump/Russia hoax has been called bigger than Watergate, in reality it dwarfs Watergate, this was America’s Gunpowder Plot because its intention was nothing less than to destroy a duly elected President and topple his administration. That amounts to sedition, some would even call it treason.

Not content with simply spreading disinformation about Trump/Russia, the conspirators used agents provocateurs to infiltrate the Trump campaign and try to set up innocent men as Russian assets. Two we know of are the academic Stefan Halper and the mysterious Joseph Mifsud.

The attempt to set up Donald Trump Junior by arranging a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was blatant. Don Junior was clearly gullible, otherwise he would have arranged for his attorney to be present, or better still his attorney and a video camera. Adam Schiff made much of this, claiming it was an attempt to collude to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Then he was hoist by his own petard when two Russian comedians phoned him at his office and offered him photographs of Trump naked! Schiff was enthusiastic, but he is so far gone he doesn’t see the double standard.

How did they expect to get away with this? As Joe diGenova has pointed out, under President Hillary Clinton, all this would simply have gone away; the problem is, she didn’t win. The conspirators also had other, greater aims besides taking down Trump, in particular covering up Clinton’s earlier crimes, stopping any future Trumps, and, some of them, of reigniting the Cold War.

It is not difficult to understand why the Deep State and its operatives hate Trump so much and moved Heaven and Earth to get rid of him. Trump is a businessman, he knows how big business operates, how it plays the system and buys influence. He intended to put a stop to that, and has done to a certain extent. He was also intent on downsizing so-called capitalist America’s massive bureaucracy. A simple but spectacular example of this is his simplification of the tax system which especially benefits small companies and the self-employed. Now, most Americans filing their tax returns need fill out only one double-sided sheet of paper instead of thirty or so pages. Think of the bureaucracy and make-work jobs that destroys.

Apparatchiks are extremely well paid, have excellent terms of service, fat pensions, and are all but unsackable. All that is changing under Trump. Now imagine he gets only so much done, and ten, twenty years from now someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg comes along, someone who like him is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice so cannot be bought, bribed or intimidated. The Hell Trump has been put through was designed to ensure that never happens. The Deep State and their allies have also sought not only to punish Trump but anyone who has the temerity to work with him.

This is why we have seen people on the fringes prosecuted for process crimes like lying to the FBI, crimes that would not have been committed but for the Mueller investigation, and crimes that are extremely minor. This is why Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were arrested by armed agents in dawn raids, tactics that may be suitable for taking down terrorists but not for men accused of white collar crimes. Manafort is now serving a heavy prison sentence for such crimes committed years before Trump announced his Presidential run. The arrest and pressurising of Roger Stone and others was done in the words of Alan Dershowitz, not only to make them sing but to compose.

Trump’s lawyers wisely advised him not to sit down for a formal interview with Mueller because it was clearly a perjury trap. In situations like this, perjury is anything the “investigators” say it is. Their utter ruthlessness is proof positive of that.

Another reason his enemies have gone all out to stop Trump is to cover up the crimes of Hillary Clinton. When she was Secretary of State, she set up a private e-mail server in her home on which she conducted Government business. This was uncovered accidentally by Judicial Watch. This is such a big thing because the e-mails of a public servant belong to the state. A humble police constable or low level local government administrator who did what she did would be sacked. But Hillary Clinton was using her private e-mail too for correspondence that must remain secret because lives could literally be at stake. And, as the YouTube vlogger HA Goodman has pointed out repeatedly, Clinton or someone close to her found a way to transfer top secret information from JWICS onto the regular Internet. JWICS is a high security American Government Intranet, so communications cannot be transferred onto the Internet accidentally; such transfers must have been manual. This alone constitutes serious espionage, and it begs the question why?

The answer to that question is simple, Clinton was peddling influence through the foundation she and her husband set up after he left office. Eric Trump summed it up with a question, what service or goods did they supply that made them so rich? The Clintons are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, yet when they left the White House, he had lost his law license and was at best looking forward to making a living on the rubber chicken dinner circuit, a perk of the Presidency. That would certainly have kept him in cigars, but would it have stretched to a private jet? If Jason Goodman and especially Charles Ortel are right, the corruption of the Clintons and their associates is off the scale.

The third reason the Deep State was and remains so anxious to take down Donald Trump is because there are lunatics in high places who seek to reignite the Cold War. Indeed, there are some who even want to see war with China. How insane is that? It isn’t for those who make money out of it, only for us peasants, especially those who are sacrificed in these obscene, never-ending, no-win wars.

It is difficult to assess how much damage these people have already done. We know for example that Chinese agents hacked Clinton’s e-mails while she was Secretary of State. And this absurd mantra of “Russia, Russia, Russia” has even pushed Trump in the direction of confrontation instead of cooperation with Russia because every time he backs off , he is attacked as a Putin puppet, absurd as that is.

There are signs though that big change is coming, and it may be coming sooner than anybody thinks. Trump himself has said what happened to him cannot be allowed to go unpunished, and that nothing like this must ever be allowed to happen to a future President. The Democratic leadership and the mass media may howl and scream in unison, but there is already more than enough damning information in the public domain for Trump and his new Attorney General to do what he promised back in 2016: drain the Swamp.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, April 23, 2019 and republished shortly by The Duran].

Who Hacked America?

In spite of the Mueller Report delivering nothing on “Russia, Russia, Russia!” there is still hysteria about Russian interference in the American electoral process. The puerile nature of this apparent interference was discussed here last month, but leaving aside the Internet Research Agency and assorted fake Facebook advertisements placed by sockpuppet accounts, what is going on in the cyberworld? Who else is playing silly, expensive or even dangerous games? Here are a few suggestions in no particular order:

Scotsman Gary McKinnon hacked into 97 US military and NASA computers over a thirteen month period in 2001–2002. He said he was looking for evidence of UFOs and other fringe subjects. His was said to have been the biggest military hack of all time — one man.

In October 2012, the South Carolina Department Of Revenue was hacked; this affected over three and a half million accounts.

In August 2013, hackers targeted Yahoo. Although based in the US, this Internet giant has branches worldwide. According to a report by National Public Radio four years later, it was likely that every Yahoo! account in existence at the time had been hacked.

Also in 2013, the social network site Tumblr was hacked, which led to the compromise of over 65 million passwords.

In May 2014, eBay was hacked, and 145 million users had their data compromised.

Navinder Singh Sarao was said to have helped trigger a multibillion dollar Wall Street crash. He was living with his parents in Hounslow, West London at the time of his arrest in April 2015. Although not a hacker, he made (and apparently lost) millions by manipulating markets with a sophisticated computer program of his own design. Last year, someone hacked the Pentagon compromising the personal information of over thirty thousand staff. Has Rachel Maddow even mentioned this?

Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta’s personal Gmail account was hacked, and there is no suggestion this was masterminded by Vladimir Putin. Clinton was herself hacked, but not by Russia, by China or some agency of the Chinese Government. This was announced to the world by Congressman Louis Gohmert. The entity concerned managed to blind copy her e-mails to another address.

How the brilliant cartoonist Clay Jones sees the hacking controversy.

Finally, way back in March 1995, a Russian by the name of Vladimir Levin rather than Vladimir Putin was arrested at Stansted Airport on suspicion of hacking into Citibank and stealing money — a massive financial fraud. He was eventually extradited to the United States where after a plea bargain he was sentenced to three years behind bars and ordered to pay restitution.

It would seem then that over the past quarter century, American companies and Government institutions have suffered far more damaging attacks than those supposedly inflicted on the country by the Kremlin, yet the hacks continue. This tends to indicate that rather than scapegoat the new Russia, the American authorities should pay more attention to improving their own security. Using AVG might be a good start!

[The above article was first published on Medium, June 1, 2019.]

Basic Income — Reductio Ad Absurdum

Andrew Yang’s proposed freedom dividend should he win the Presidency has attracted a certain amount of ridicule and a great deal of contempt in right wing circles, but the arguments against it are largely misguided. Most of these arguments are pseudo-moral rather than economic, they go something like this: anyone of a certain age who is able-bodied should be gainfully employed. Those who are not gainfully employed are sponging off the system.

Andrew Yang is on the right track.

For working class people, especially those holding down more than one job, this is an appealing argument — why should people get stuff for free when I am treated like a dog? However, this particular argument soon falls apart when one considers the large numbers of people doing make-work jobs or those which are actually socially harmful. An extreme example of this would be a burglar or a drug trafficker; these people may work hard, but it would be better for society if they didn’t work at all. Less obvious are the many people working in the grievance industry who actually make bad situations worse, and if you think fund managers benefit their wealthy clients, you haven’t read The Shares Game which points out that the best route for the average investor is simply to buy a tranche of shares and hold onto them. A quarter of a century after this iconoclastic book was published, the author was vindicated in spectacular fashion when a competition in South Korea showed that a parrot picking out shares with its beak outperformed most of the so-called professional investors.

There are plenty of other people making a comfortable living out of ignorance or gullibility, professional psychics and other flim-flam artists, for example.

People who adhere to pseudo-moral arguments to attack Andrew Yang are not asking the right question, namely what is the purpose of (paid) work? The answer is not to ennoble people with some ludicrous idea about the dignity of labour, but to produce the goods and services the community demands. Once this is acknowledged, most people will recognise work for what it is — a necessary evil, the curse of the drinking classes. The central bank — the Federal Reserve in the US — has two primary goals: to maintain a low rate of inflation, usually 2%, and to promote something called full employment. Again, paid employment is seen as a duty of those lower down the food chain. People of independent means are not required to work. How many unemployed billionaires are there?

Do we want to bring about full employment, so-called, at any cost? The best way to do that is to start a war, and at times people have actually called for this. Now let us consider Andrew Yang’s argument.

Advances in technology, in particular, automation, are destroying jobs. Should we strive to create new jobs, or is there a better way? Imagine a world in which all the paid work currently undertaken in the United States and elsewhere was performed by robots. Yes, this is an unlikely scenario, but imagine it: robots do all the work. How is purchasing power to be distributed? If robots can grow wheat, bake bread, and sell you the loaf, which is collected by your own personal robot, where do you get the money to pay for it?

Andrew Yang proposes a tax on Amazon and other mega-corporations to fund his freedom dividend; this is the one place he goes wrong. The freedom dividend must be paid out of newly created debt-free money as proposed by the great Major Douglas nearly a century ago.

The cost of the freedom dividend would be a lot less than we are led to believe by the apparatchiks. For one thing, it would enable most if not all state benefits to be gradually phased out. This would reduce bureaucracy enormously, and benefit fraud with it. Petty crime would undoubtedly fall, and the burden on both social services and charities would be reduced.

Best of all, the freedom dividend would destroy the poverty trap and enable many people at the bottom of society to supplement their basic income by performing low paid work, work which under the current régime is not economical for employers to farm out.

Although the goal of the freedom dividend is to provide a universal basic income, it cannot be universalised at present. The United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, certain Middle East nations and possibly China would be able to implement some sort of freedom dividend, but for it to be extended to the rest of the world would require a greater investment in infrastructure and resources than at present. But, it must come, because for those at the bottom of the food chain, the alternative does not bear thinking about.

[The above article was first published on Medium, September 13, 2019.]

“Sex On Trial” (3) — Review

Unlike the first two episodes, this one concentrates solely on one incident, the disgraceful and quite sordid Steubenville High School rape case. What actually happened here has been thoroughly documented, conveniently by the perpetrators themselves. Briefly, a teenage girl went to a party, got blind drunk or was got blind drunk, and was then “used” by a couple of high school football players. The rape consisted of digital penetration, and even the district attorney who prosecuted the case said they didn’t appear to realise what they did constituted rape. (It does in Ohio, but not in every jurisdiction).

Besides the usual suspects, the outrage generated over the case was down to a) the perception that it was being swept under the rug by the authorities and b) the sympathy engendered for the two convicted in juvenile court. Though the verdict was just, one can sympathise to a degree with two high-spirited but utterly stupid high school kids being branded as rapists over what they considered “fun”, even though they received extremely lenient sentences.

The two Steubenville rape case defendants.

Perhaps a comparison with the far more notorious Vanderbilt University rape case is in order. This saw the three main defendants awarded sentences of fifteen, fifteen and seventeen years respectively, but these sentences were warranted on account of the treatment they meted out to the unconscious victim, who in addition to being drunk was almost certainly drugged to ensure she remained unconscious the whole time.

The most interesting aspect of the current case was the testimony of an expert witness concerning alcohol-induced blackouts. Although it was rejected in this instance on purely evidential grounds, the science behind it is sound. Namely, someone who has consumed a lot of alcohol may do things consciously and voluntarily, but the transition from short term memory to long term memory is blocked, so a woman may wake up the next morning and genuinely believe she has not consented to sex. To this one should add the well recognised fact that alcohol breaks down inhibitions, including sexual inhibitions. Members of both sexes may engage in behaviour after a few drinks they wouldn’t dream of when sober. One should add further that women have a lower tolerance for alcohol than men.

A striking example of alcohol-induced blackout occurred in June 2018 when a woman named Amanda Barrow was filmed performing a sex act on a total stranger on a train at Aldermaston. Like the imbeciles they are, the British police wasted no time tracking down the perpetrator of this outrage to public decency. When she appeared in court, Miss Barrow did not dispute it was her on the film but said she had absolutely no memory of the incident.

If she was telling the truth, and she almost certainly was, this sort of blackout/amnesia could and probably does account for the majority, perhaps the vast majority of rape cases in which women claim they were too drunk to consent. This means that Steubenville aside, there are very likely hundreds of innocent men behind bars convicted of rape in the UK alone. Evidence from other sources including Operation Matisse, bears that out. Sadly, instead of highlighting this reality, the series continued to plug the ludicrous rape culture narrative of Lisa Avalos, whose voice can be heard at the start of the programme claiming that only 3% of rapists are ever brought to book.

[The above article was first published on Medium, May 26, 2019.]

Akhmejanov And Parry — Bringing Russian Culture To London

While politicians on both sides of the Atlantic seem intent on demonising Russia, two men in London are going in the opposite direction.

Marat Akhmejanov from the former Soviet Union and Londoner David Parry have been working together for some time. Akhmejanov is a long time UK resident who publishes the quarterly OCA Magazine. He is also the founder of the Eurasian Creative Guild whose projects include publishing, film, graphic design, and all things literary from across Eurasia.

Marat Akhmejanov — founder of ECG.

Parry is best known as a man of the theatre with ties to especially Azerbaijan. In 2013, he put on the first ever London/UK/Western performance of Citizens Of Hell by the politician/playwright Elchin Afandiyev.

David Parry — tireless champion of the arts.

The Eurasian Creative Guild’s London Facebook group alone now has several thousand members. It meets at Rossotrudnichestvo which translates as Russia in the United Kingdom; this is based in Kensington, close to High Street Kensington Underground Station.

Alexander Muzykantov

The ECG’s London meeting earlier this month included a programme by the talented pianist Alexander Muzykantov. At this meeting, Marat and David both promised further expansion of the output of Guild members and the bridging of the gap between Western Europe and the far reaches of Asia. Their next big London event will be the ECG Film Festival; held from May 22–9, this will share a venue with the Romford Film Festival, which was first held in 2017.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, January 28, 2019.]

The Rights And Wrongs Of Andrew Yang

The Democratic Party has a heavy but pathetic line-up of 2020 Presidential contenders. With two exceptions.

These two exceptions are Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. Gabbard did two tours of the Middle East in a medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard and came home with some strong anti-war views. Although she labels herself a progressive, she is unlikely to make much headway and has already been smeared from pillar to post by the same vested interests who have attacked Donald Trump unremittingly since before he ascended to the Presidency. Leaving that aside, Gabbard is economically illiterate; she supports the minimum wage, something that always sounds good to the oppressed working class, but does far more harm than good.

Andrew Yang Andrew Yang is a different kettle of fish though. The first Chinese-American to run for the Presidency, he understands business, and also understands something about economics. Yang has captured the imagination of progressives including comedian Jimmy Dore because he advocates and says if elected he will institute universal basic income for American citizens. This concept, which is actually hundreds of years old, goes by a number of names including Social Credit — after the great Major Douglas — and in Yangspeak, the Freedom Dividend.

As might be expected, conservatives blinded by their wage-slave mentality claim it will never work, some even ridicule it, yet something they never seem to realise, and probably Yang doesn’t either, is that there is a vast army of parasites out there who are essentially paid for doing nothing. If some of them actually work hard, the only people who benefit from their money manipulations are themselves. If you still don’t understand, check out Tony Levene’s classic book The Shares Game, or ask yourself if share trading is so beneficial to the economy how a parrot picking out trades with its beak can outperform seventy percent of professional investors?

Yang’s championing of basic income is motivated by what many people perceive foolishly as the “threat” of automation. The reality is that automation and the resulting increased output of goods and services benefits society as a whole, but, and here is the big but, it destroys many traditional jobs that have provided people with good or even exceptional livelihoods. If you want to see this expressed visually, go to YouTube and view street scenes from around 1895 when the motor car as we know it first became a regular visitor to our cities. At first you will see only or mostly horses, but fast forward five years at a time and you will see more and more motor vehicles and fewer horses until eventually, today, in most cities the only horse you will see is a police horse or one drawing the occasional novelty funeral procession.

Horses were big business for most of human history, but now the blacksmith, the stable owner, the groom, the rider, these are all gone. The rise of the motor car destroyed the livelihoods of those working in an entire industry, yet who would go back? The reality is that a world of seven billion people and rising could not exist without modern technology including the internal combustion engine and cars galore. There would be mass starvation without them.

Although Andrew Yang recognises this, what he does not understand is money. When asked where is the money to come from to fund his Freedom Dividend, his reply is a value added tax. No, no, no!

Leaving aside the Libertarian observation that taxation is theft, taxation reduces purchasing power. The valued added tax foisted on the UK, Australia via Malaysia and so many countries both in between and elsewhere is not the way to do it. As is now recognised though it was long denied, the vast majority of money in existence comes from the banking system, which creates it out of thin air then lends (ie sells) it to the rest of us: individuals, businesses, corporations, and governments. As Alessio Rastani said after the last big stock market crash, “Goldman Sachs rules the world”. He has faced criticism for that statement, but if he had said instead central banks rule the world, no reasonable person would have been able to criticise him.

Currently, central banks including the Federal Reserve create money by a conjuring trick known as quantitative easing. They may dress this up by claiming corporations deposit securities with them in exchange for cash, but the bottom line is the money appears out of thin air. To finance his Freedom Dividend, Andrew Yang needs to abolish the Federal Reserve and restore the right to create money to the US Congress, where it belongs. Good luck with that project.

In fact, all governments create a certain amount of their own credit through the coin and note issues. Why can’t they create it all? The scare story we are repeatedly fed is that to do that would cause hyper-inflation. No! Inflation is not caused by increasing the money supply, it is caused by printing money (including electronically) out of all proportion to the goods and services in circulation. Furthermore, we have inflation already, and a certain amount is not bad for the economy. One of the roles of central banks including the Bank Of England, is to ensure a 2% limit of inflation by controlling (ie manipulating) the money supply.

Even if he were to win the Democratic nomination and by some miracle defeat Donald Trump in 2020, Yang would still have a mountain to climb. Trump hasn’t taken on the money creators, but the hatred and vitriol that has been spewed on him has been a wonder to behold. Yet the only alternatives to basic income are slavery and war. A full discussion of this would take us far afield, but back in the 1930s, Major Douglas explained how a continued shortage of purchasing power leads to war.

Also, the institution of basic income is the only way to truly liberate the underclass, the large and slowly increasing body of mainly men who are unemployable at a living wage because no employer in his right mind would employ them. Check out this half hour video for a comprehensive exposition.

[The above article was first published on Medium, April 21, 2019.]