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Sod the European Union and loss of sovereignty. News arrives this morning that two state owned investment funds - The China Development Bank and Temasek, the investment arm of the Singaporean government, have between them taken a 10% plus stake in Barclays Bank.

Now, there's nothing new, or inherently threatening, about overseas money investing in UK companies, but in this case there are two issues.

First, these funds (as with the Qatari bid for Sainsbury's last week) are themselves so wealthy because of state protectionism. China in particular is not operating on the same economic "rules" as most of the west, what with pegged exchange rates and state control of assets generating this cash.

Second, Barclays is a bank, and as such in an incredibly privileged position. It is part of a cartel of a few organisations that effectively have the ability to create our money. A few choice quotes should suffice to show how awkward this could be...

Reginald McKenna, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915 and later Chairman of the Midland Bank, at the time the world's largest bank:

"I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."

Meyer Amschel Rothschild:

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."

Robert Hemphill (a director of the Federal reserve Bank of Atlanta in the 1930s):

"This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon."

Franklin D Roosevelt:

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."

It's not that there should not be overseas investors in our commercial banks and so on. But that our commercial banks should not have the ability to create fiat money on their own initiative but in our name. We must either privatize the money supply or nationalize it - but if we allow other governments to take over the function through acquisition we can forget worrying about losing sovereignty to the EU and other such arguments, we will have handed real sovereignty, through control of our money supply, to foreign governments.

Technorati Tags: fiat money, monetary reform

The Independent today reports that US researchers have found that Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects.

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 11 July 2006
A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claim today.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory. They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".

Only a few millennia late. Maybe we can have 'shrooms' legalised again as a religious rite/right.

Technorati Tags: drugs laws

Remind me again, was it not Frankenstein's monster that was brought to life with jolts of electricity? So, is giving Cardinal O'Brien a pacemaker not "an unprecedented attack on the sanctity and dignity of human life" after all...

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Cardinal O'Brien gets pacemaker:

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has had a pacemaker fitted following recent heart problems. Cardinal Keith O'Brien was fitted with the device under local anaesthetic at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The 70-year-old, who suffers from a heart murmur, had experienced dizzy spells in recent weeks and fainted prior to Palm Sunday mass.

On Friday he will attend a public meeting to campaign against the government's Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. At his Easter Sunday mass the cardinal accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of "an unprecedented attack on the sanctity and dignity of human life", and warned the research could lead to experiments of "Frankenstein proportions".

Here's another thing about the Conservative party and their tenuous claimed link with the Co-operative Movement. It is no coincidence that the international rainbow flag for peace is also the international co-operative movement's flag. Nor that it was the Co-operative Womens' Guild that instituted the idea of wearing white poppies to promote peace instead of red ones that commemorated the "glorious dead". It is axiomatic that the Co-operative Movement strives for peace - the very phrase "Peace and Co-operation" encapsulates the ethos.

So, will Dave be wearing red, for the more traditionally Conservative Remembrance of War, or white for the traditional Co-operative Promotion of Peace? I think we can probably predict pretty well which it will be, don't you?