TRANSCRIPT # 27 - Surviving The Economic Crash

[Vulcan59]

Surviving the economic crash


Henry: Welcome to  signs of the times. A look at recent world events from around our kitchen table.

Joe: You are with us for another signs of the times podcast and this week it's just the 3 of us, myself, Joe, Henry and Scott and we want to talk about the economy. We have talked about the economy before, as some of our readers, listeners may remember but this week we want to talk about the economy in terms of financial collapse or an economic collapse like last time but we want to focus a little bit more on the direct effects on the population and look at some maybe past historical evidence of financial collapses and the effects that those collapses  had on the populations and  well we just gonna talk free and easy so.

Henry: So grab your smokes and have a seat.

Joe: If you don't smoke, you know, grab a glass of whiskey. If you don't drink, then you should.....

Henry: Then what the hell are you doing listening to us!!

Joe: Exactly. If you don't drink or smoke, then you haven't been listening.(laughter) By now you should be on the verge of breakdown.

Henry: The topic for this weeks podcast came from an article that a reader sent in to us. The article is called “Post Soviet Lessons for a Post American Century� . It's  written by Dmitry Orlov  and it was publish on the “fromthewilderness�  website. Now “fromthewilderness�  as our readers may know is one of those websites that's promoting the  idea of peak oil and the article is a comparison of the economic crash and the effects of it on the average citizen in the Soviet Union in the 90's and a projected economic crash that might happen in the United States in the near future and off course according to Orlov and the people at fromthewilderness, this will be due to peak oil, meaning that we are at the end of the oil reserves and when they run out, modern civilization will start to collapse because we won't have the basic energy, fuel to power it. Now we are not in agreement with the idea that that oil is running out. We don't think that it is a fossil fuel. We don't think that it is been proven that it is fossil fuel. Nevertheless that doesn't mean that the PTB won't use the idea of peak oil in order to stage manage and manipulate a crisis. They will turn off the taps and they'll say, oh sorry folks, the oil has run out where in fact that won't be the case. It will just be their way of turning the screws even stronger. But whether the crisis is from peak oil or from something else and there are any number of candidates for that, be it terrorists attacks, so called terrorists attacks, or earth changes such as earthquakes and volcanoes, the article is interesting because it gives it an interesting look at what happened in the Soviet Union and compares it to the United States looking for differences between the two. He points out that in a certain way the economic organization under communism made it easier for the people to weather the economic storm after the collapse because of the way society had been organized.

Joe: Yeah. He draws a contrast obviously between the way society was organized in communist Russia or post communist Russia and the way society is organized at the minute in modern day America. Obviously the differences here between capitalism and communism, it was essentially a nanny state but in terms of an economic collapse, the shock of a crash in the economic was lessen to a large degree because of the essentially state control of everything in terms of housing, transport, etcetera . So this were services lets call them, were not taken away from the people as they would be in a capitalist society.

Henry: Exactly. The people in the Soviet Union didn't own their homes or weren't mortgage to the banks for their homes so that when the economy collapsed, there were no banks to foreclose on mortgages so people didn't lose their homes. As well there were much lower percentage ownership of cars and a higher integration of public services, public transportation and the public transportation also continued to function during the economic crisis.

Scott: And Orlov notes that even the worst gasoline shortages that occurred resulted in only minor inconveniences to people. He talks about basically 2 times a year when they needed to go buy their seeds or when they needed to take their harvested crops and sell them and that was pretty much it. And you compare that to the US where, he goes into great detail, actually sort of humorous detail about the structure of the traffic system, the highway system in the US. He talks about the traffic engineers and how they seem to want to design roads to make people drive round in circles and waste gas.

Henry: And if you look at the way the cities are laid out in the Soviet Union, the central planners like having people grouped together so things were highly concentrated. They weren't the same kind of suburbs based on the automobile that there are in the United States. So were the peak oil manipulation to manifest and the taps turned off, and people not have any gas for their cars, how would cities function? How would people be able to get to stores, even if there was anything left to buy in the stores? The transportation system would fall apart.

Scott: As we've mentioned before, there wouldn't be anything left to buy in the stores because most goods in the US are transported by truck and off course that requires diesel fuel. Off course there's a rail system but you are talking again about generally electric trains which are powered by diesel generators, so again fuel shortage, that means no goods delivered and off course this are privately owned companies because most of the transportation companies in the US whether it's local buses or train system, or even the national bus companies like GreyHound, these are not public companies.

Henry: Yeah and the way the capitalist economy and capitalist companies  corporations are organized, the board and the management has the power to lay off  everybody right away and to close the company almost over night. That didn't happen in the Soviet Union because of the central planning. People continued working even if they weren't receiving their salaries regularly.

Scott: Which brings us to the point of labor in the Soviet Union versus the US. Orlov writes that in the Soviet Union, basically the majority of the people were skilled labor. The Soviet Union exported all kinds of things in addition to oil, weapons and industrial machinery and you compare this to the US where, basically manufacturing jobs are being sent overseas to Mexico, India in terms of especially software engineering and that sort of things and so which are left with this sort of a skeleton which consists of basically the rich executives. And so he comments that this whole process has become known as the brain drain where in essence America's extraction of talent from foreign lands has benefited the US at least up until now but is obviously  has not benefited these other countries and as we shown recently on the signs page, this policies so to speak seems to be beginning to reverse.

Henry: And then he speculates that were there to be a severe economic crisis in the United States these highly trained people from around the world would return to their countries to escape it.

Joe: One of the interesting points that he makes is that when he visited Russia during this economic collapse, he noted that it was the middle classes who seem to be  suffering the most. He kind of made the comment that they were scavenging in the trash and the dumps to try and piece together a part of their lives, the part of their lives that they lost. It's kind of interesting in terms of when we look at America and what might happen in America because in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina when we saw maybe in microcosm similar effects to an economic collapse, we saw that it was the lower classes who in response to this crisis, where there was no food and no jobs and etcetera, they for this period of days, it was essentially like the end of the world or the end of their normal lives had come. It was the lower classes who tended to band together and network and try and sort things out for themselves which obviously the US government at the time, in stories that were carried at that time, the US government tried to clamp down on this and prevented from actually happening. So what we are really saying here is that, while we are not trying to suggest that communism,  this isn't about communism being as opposed to capitalism or anything like that, but simply to draw a comparison and to look at the foreseeable effects and the big fall that a lot of people in America will be in for in the event of an economic collapse because they are so immersed in an entire capitalist system where they have all of the perks where they are completely dependent on their lives in terms of their SUVs and their subscriptions at the local sports club and their jobs. Their entire lives are caught up in all of this consumerism and having all of these things and when all of those things are taken away, well then peoples entire, their basis for reality or what they believe to be their reality has been completely removed [Henry: Their whole identity.] off course that isn't their reality, I mean that is the reality, but it's not  the reality, they have been force fed this reality and have been forced to believe this is what is all about. This is the important thing and the thing they don't realized is that this can be so easily and so quickly removed.

Henry: We haven't even touch on the question of violence which is somewhat endemic to the American society back from the mythos of the wild west up to today with the close binding of the idea, the right to carry a firearm and political freedom in someway. American culture is ripe with violence and what's going to happen when all of these stops of society are pulled out and people are left to fend [Joe: For themselves] for themselves. Orlov also points out that Soviet society was much less mobile than American society and people in neighborhoods tend to lived there for a very long time if not their entire lives. And so everybody kind of knew one another. If it was only through the faces on walking the streets you'd recognized one another so that when times were difficult, there was a social system there, a social network for people to rely upon. This is also the case in apartments where you had multiple generations of families living together which is quite the extreme from what we see in the United States with the single family dwelling and the basic economic unit of the mother/father and 2.5 kids.

Joe: There is a thing we have to remember in all this that as Roosevelt is alleged to have said, “nothing in politics happens by accident. If it happens that way, then it was meant to happen that way� . We can maybe take that a little bit further and suggest that  it not just politics because, well maybe it is politics because the word politics comes from the Greek word for citizens.  So essentially he could have been saying that whatever happens in the lives of the citizens anywhere on the planet doesn't  happen by accident, if it happens it happens because it was planned to happen that way. The thing is that in terms of the economic collapse in Russia and preceding kind of fall of communism of the Soviet Union, a few years and even a few months before it happened, very few people if anyone in terms of the ordinary citizen, could have foreseen that or would have expected that. If you had suggested it that at that time that things were about to collapse in terms of the entire social order and the political structure they would have laugh at you. So these things happened overnight essentially. So it bears kind of stressing that again in the words of Roosevelt, this things are planned to happen and they can and do happen overnight not by pure chance but because they are planned that way.

Scott: Getting back to what Henry was talking about, about the differences in the cultures and society between the US as it is now and the Soviet Union before this economic collapse, money in the Soviet Union as Orlov writes, didn't have the same value in terms of, in the US now it's, money is everything, money is power, money is social status, and in the Soviet Union he writes that if you're neighbors, your friends fell on hard times, it was perfectly normal for people to just spread the wealth basically because everyone had these jobs and everyone had like a  fixed income and all these normal everyday items had  fixed cost and it was just sharing [Henry: Money didn't have the same meaning for people] yeah and..

Joe: It was a means to an end and not an end in itself. So just having money for the sake of having money was not the point. The point was that the money was used for feeding yourself and there was no real necessity to kind of have vast amounts of money. Obviously this was obviously regulated as well by the whole idea of communism because the state controlled wages and jobs etcetera, etcetera.

Scott:  I mean the Soviet Union wasn't exactly a communist state. It was more like a welfare state that was run by an elitist group which, when you think about it, it's pretty much the exact same thing as the US. Off course you have this difference in terms of the way people value money and the materialism in the US is so much greater than in the former Soviet Union but at the same time you have this identical structure of the power elite who have the wealth, they have the political clout and they pull all the strings. That's essentially the same. What's not the same is that in the US, basically everything is as Orlov notes, nicely setup to make an economic crash far more miserable.

Joe: Yeah and that's in terms of it having always being the way of there being a political elite that controls things regardless of the type of society or the type of government that they are ruling over. This is very true because we can see that from history that there's being a small group of power elite who have simply huge this various forms of, in recent years anyway, this various forms of government, these supposedly opposing forms of government ie, communism and capitalism or socialism. The thing is that while that, for  the people, that might be an obvious difference that there is difference in their lifestyles etcetera but the fact is at the top level where these societies or forms of government are being orchestrated, there is no difference. We are talking simply about a global elite who always had  the same goal which was to rule over the people in whatever way they saw fit or in whatever way best fit the times that were in it.

Henry: Which brings us back to the subject that we have talked about quite often in the past and we will no doubt repeat often in the future, the question of psychopaths and ponerology. It's clear to us that both the capitalist system and the communist system are psychopathic systems but don't think that an economic crash is going to some how save us from this. If we read the descriptions of what happened in the Soviet Union that Orlov gives, we see that there is very very fertile ground for the psychopath to maintain power.  As he says, it's not a civilization that collapses so much as an economic system and as it collapses, in the crevices of the crumbling structure, you get new economic forms emerging one of which at the beginning is barter and the barter is based on people having hoarded or stockpiled consumer items that people need such as soap, razors, toilet paper, these kind of things. They take on a value that they don't have in normal society. They become more valuable than money but the kind of people that are able to maneuver in this kind of situation are going to be the kind of people who only think about themselves, who have no conscience.

Joe: Well yeah, we have a good example of that in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina where, we have already mentioned that these people from New Orleans who banded together and tried to make kind of their lot a little better were attacked essentially by the National Guard under the instructions of the US government. There was another incident where you had a mayor of one of the local towns who was [Henry: Blocking the bridge so that people couldn't leave New Orleans? Wouldn't let them in into his town?] well yeah, there was him but there was another guy that I was thinking of.  Might have actually been in New Orleans, will have to look that up. I think that it was an official of New Orleans who had realized that members of FEMA or representative of FEMA had come down and cut his communications lines essentially to the outside world just arbitrarily with no explanation and he had to post one of his policeman, an  armed guard or policeman on the door with orders to shoot anyone that came along and tried to cut the communication lines again. This is an example of the thinking and the type of people that Henry is talking about that spring up and see this suffering of all the people as an opportunity for them to capitalize on. And so in the event of economic collapse, people need to be aware that there are going to people out there who are going to be watching you for example the ordinary person on the street who is maybe concerned about his neighbors who are in a bad way or who need help etcetera, etcetera and they are going to be doing everything they can to profit from the situation and screw you over.

Scott: So the picture looks rather grim indeed. Despite of the comparisons that Orlov makes at the end of his article, he makes some conclusions that are well rather optimistic. [Henry: Feel good conclusions for his American audience we'd call them.] Yeah and he talks about how Americans are, they are far better at communal living than Russians ever were.  They are generous and they have an altruistic impulse to give to other people. I am an American and I've lived there for a good many of years, and I would have to say that, my personal experience and from talking to everyone I knew that, basically that's just not true and...(laughing)

Joe: Well, yeah, the thing is like, if you are so, if you have been thought and if you have learned that for example your SUV is a major part of your life and you really really needed it [Henry: Major part of who you are!!] yeah and that you come, exactly, exactly, see it as part of yourself almost, when you no longer have that SUV or you no longer can run that SUV, you are going to tend towards kind of being concerned about having that back and we are just using SUV here as an example here, but there's other frills that we can site of capitalism that are completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things [Henry: And it goes beyond..] that  people are going to be extremely concerned about and [Henry: And it goes beyond frills to even peoples jobs.] well yeah and the thing is that, the idea that people who have been so kind of programed in this way, would immediately turn around and become altruistic and not be concerned about getting fuel for their SUV and would possibly not rob their neighbor of fuel or try to screw them over. And this is again, we talk about people who would be altruistic, there may well be, there certainly will be people who will be motivated to care for their suffering neighbors etcetera, but there will be a lot of people who because of the nature of the capitalism of the US and the fact that it has been directed by a bunch of psychopaths, a lot of people in the US and also in Western Europe, but we are talking specifically here about the US and an economic collapse there, a lot of those people there are essentially “psychopathized�  in a way in their thinking and in their attitudes by the people who have governed them and have set the social norms, and the social policies, and what people need and what they don't need, etcetera, etcetera and none of it is, it's all well and good while it's all available, freely available for at least a portion of the American people but when that's taken away, people are going to be in shock. To avoid that shock or to at least lessen that shock some what, there needs to be a serious re-structuring of perspective before that happens.

Henry: Americans consider that their country is the most advanced, the most free, the most everything and when the collapse comes, they will be given a very rude awakening as to the facts. There are many signs that we talk about, we have been talking about for many years such as September 11 and the legislation such as the Patriot act that was brought in after that. The signs are  there for the people who want to look and see what is really truly going on, but most people it's really going to take a tremendous shock such as that we are discussing tonight to wake them up.

Joe: And what we are trying to do is give some kind of fore warning to these people, to you the listener if you are in America about what you can do to avoid this tremendous shock or as we say to at least lessen this tremendous shock and to start to sit up and take notice of what is going on and to look at what your life is and look at what your priorities are in your life because what's the point in being so concerned with so many kind of material goods and materialness, not material necessities but material frills when they may well be taken away in the blink of an eye basically. It serves no one to be so rapped up in believing that they need these things when all the signs point to the fact that someone is planning to take them away.

Henry: And here Orlov does gives a hint to a possible way out when he discusses the difference of reactions among the people who were very very identified with the Soviet system and those people who had more a, you know, we really don't care about the whole thing, who weren't identified with it and he talks about a “dophernism�  as a dominant ideology and he says “dophernism�  means in a rough translation, not giving a rats ass. It's the people who even though they were highly educated would take very very humble jobs so that when they left their job they'd go and do what was really important which was talking with their friends, exchanging and just sitting and watching life. And it is this capacity to be able to just sit back and watch what is going on, not identifying with what you are seeing, that is going to enable people to have the flexibility and the fluidity to be able to response as this crisis unfolds.

Joe: And you are talking here about responding in a way that is essentially the complete opposite of what American capitalist society has taught people, which is to network in a way that is somewhat altruistic, and to, it is almost a communism as it should have been and the idea of people working together for the good of the people who are working together. But off course we like to reiterate that we are not  espousing communism here but simply using it as an example.

Scott: We are also not espousing pitching your DVD player in the garbage can and burning SUV. The point is that a lot of people send us emails, oh you are so negative, why are you focusing on all this bad stuff. The point is as Henry says is that the signs are all there. We can see what's coming and when you read an article like this one by Orlov, you have an opportunity to and it's an opportunity to, if you can't prepare financially and I mean, how do you prepare financially? He made a few suggestions in the article related to bartering that Henry talked about, I think he recommends getting boxes and putting goods that would be tradeable and packing them in boxes, nitrogen packing which off course everyone can just get an tank of nitrogen, no problems.

Joe: Yes. We are just talking about being smart here. We are not talking about like stocking up for the end of the world because we are not suggesting that it's going to be the end of the world, but we are talking about being smart and simply taking precautions. For seeing and recognizing the signs and for seeing the potential disaster that is coming down the line and taking some reasonable measures to lessen your suffering. And off course as we've said, one of the major things that you can do to lessen your sufferings is to sit up and take notice and realign your perspective.

Scott: And it's, you can in a sense, psychologically immunize yourself from a great deal of the shock if you're seeing the signs now and you're thinking about it and you are preparing yourself not just in a physical way but a emotional and mental and psychological way and it will be much easier to survive.

Joe: We've mentioned the idea of peak oil but we don't believe that peak oil is reality but that it may well be used to precipitate or as a plausible excuse for an economic collapse. But there is also the idea that peak oil is quite closely tied to the 911 event because one of it's major exponents is Mike Ruppert on whose website this article appeared and Mike Ruppert was obviously a major 911 investigator and then did this complete turn around where he kind of decided that people shouldn't investigate 911 anymore because peak oil was coming. Now that was a very smart, if you are dumb enough, it was a very smart way to sidetrack the whole 911 investigations and kind of ramped up the fear factor and scare people away from investigating 911. But there is also the possibility and there is also any number of other ways that an economic collapse could be precipitated. One of them being the all to common terror attacks these days. Another major terror attack in the US could also be used as a plausible excuse to send the economy into free fall. There is also natural cataclysm, earthquakes another hurricane or even a meteorite impact but maybe that is later on down the line.

Scott: Further more, say you go and you prepare yourself physical and mentally and emotionally and however you need to prepare yourself for the economic crash and nothing happens. Say we are totally wrong about all this, seeing the signs and all this stuff, say we are dead wrong. Economic crash never happens. Well what have you lost by preparing?

Joe: Well exactly because if an economic collapse doesn't happen, the steps we're proposing that people take, need to be taken anyway because what we are talking about here is sitting up and getting your nose out of the X-box, or DVD player or out of your neighbor's wife's chest!! [Background coughing!] And well this can only be a good thing because we are talking about reality here and the fact that  regardless of whether there is an economic collapse or not, people are completely living in a world of illusion in terms of their priorities, or what they hold dear in life, what they think life is all about. You can rest assured that if an economic collapse doesn't occur, something else is going to occur. That's one thing we can say with certainty. That something major is going to happen over the next few months or next year and whatever it is, it's not going to be good and everybody is going to need their wits about them and they going to need to be sitting up and looking before hand at this coming along so that it doesn't slap you in the face, just like that.

[c.a.]

Some insight (to the post from SuperModerator Vulcan59), from the Money changers, Gerald Celente, and economist professor of mathematics Antal Fekete.

Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute
Economic trends
_http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Celente

Celente says that the U.S. economy would totally collapse by 2014 following the impacts of the banking crisis of 2008. It provides that the unemployment rate in the city of New York should be similar to that of Mexico City. He says the U.S. is on the verge of another revolution.

Antal E. Fekete
_http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antal_E._Fekete

While it may be attached to the Austrian school of economics (he claims to Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises , while criticizing some of the views of the latter), sharing the Austrian support to the gold standard , his views on fractional reserve banking is different from that of Murray Rothbard . Gold is more to him a means of preserving the value of a medium of exchange. Coin has a dual nature: it must allow the transfer of value in space and in time. From there arise two types of currencies, historically illustrated by the coexistence of money stock ( polloi , which is derived the term pecuniary ) and currency salt ( sal , which is derived the word salary ), then the currency and money the gold coin, the first type of currency is intended to further the exchange and the second conservation value. He rejects the proposal rothbardienne gold standard 100%:
What we need is a gold standard made ​​with elastic traffic real effects 1 .
Indeed, Fekete is a supporter of the Doctrine of the real effects ( Real Bills Doctrine ), money creation theory of classical economics (notably developed by Adam Smith ), now superseded by the quantity theory of money . The real effects are not likely inflationary , since they appear together with new goods appear, and disappear from the market when the final payment (gold), they travel spontaneously and do not even require bank, since it that are IOUs 2 .
The fractional reserve system is quite viable provided it is based on the gold standard and the effects exchangeable for the loans. There is a fractional reserve system honest and dishonest fractional reserve system, banks that practiced since the end of the gold standard, in collusion with governments that use the banking system to sell the debt .
Fekete sees a danger in falling interest rates, which he said may cause deflation rather than hyperinflation and a destruction of capital, particularly in a regime of non-convertible currency, including critical issues for funds pension, the gold standard is for him a means to protect themselves from deflation and lower interest rates, and gold should be an alternative to bonds.
He distinguishes between "non-convertible currency" and "fiat money" (fiat currency-), the first (like the dollar) too increases apparently less arbitrary and obscures the second since this increase is effected by operations 'open-market (net purchases of Treasuries by EDF ), the new currency spreads in the bond market without the risk of "flight to real property" and contributes to the continued decline in interest rates. The mechanism of "cavalry" lasts longer with the first type of currency.

CELENTE: Part 1 'The Whole Financial System is a CASINO' Published on Apr 15, 2012 by SGTbull07
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5othnG9naE&feature=uploademail

CELENTE: Part 2 - Fascism USSA: "The only way out for Psychopaths is War"
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=X5othnG9naE&annotation_id=annotation_816257&feature=iv&v=V_O_PKbieGQ

Antal Fekete Interview Onnouscachetout January 4, 2012
Interview December 15, 2011 in Paris. any comments, or argument against argument-thank you go to the dedicated thread here:
_http://www.onnouscachetout.com/forum/topic/21004-interview-video-de-antal-fek ...=player_embedded&v=9CXK_xsfmu4#!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9CXK_xsfmu4#!
 
Top 5 Places Not To Be When The Crash Comes
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hVf4SStB-M&feature=player_embedded

Surviving the Economic Crash:Podcast 2005-12-17
http://www.sott.net/sott/podcast/sott_podcast_27_20051217.mp3

A reader sent in an interesting article by Dmitry Orlov that compares the former Soviet Union to modern-day America, which is currently falling into an economic abyss. This week, we analyse and discuss the implications of Orlov's article. We also address one of the biggest questions people have about the economic crash: how can I prepare in order to survive the turmoil I see ahead? To answer this question, we expand on Orlov's historical observations to provide a solution that is surprisingly simple - and probably not what most people have in mind...

Session 29 March 1997
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,23797.0.html

Q: Hello

A: Hello

Q: And what name shall we use this evening?

A: Sannorri

Q: And where are we transmitting from?

A: We do not know where "you" are transmitting from, but we are translating the density communicators through that locator you know as Cassiopaea!!

Q: (Terry) Does that mean we are talking to the Cassies, or are we talking to someone else? They never did like that before!

A: Variety is the spice of life.

Q: (Laura) Well, we have a variety, we have a new person! We're allowed to do it, so can they, I guess!

A: Yes.

Q: (Laura) All right, now, let me get my questions. The first question I want to ask tonight is about Susan Brana of Gain Systems who has been corresponding back and forth with Ark... OK, what is the source of the funding behind them? {Sue Brana and Gain Systems was the same person who funded Nick Begich to write “Angels Don’t Play this HAARP.  She had approached us about doing some “secret work” in relation to “developing technology from crop circles”.}

A: We know this, but, any guesses?

Q: (Laura) OK, they want us to play 20 questions. Do we have any guesses?

A: Ask Lindemann.

Q: (Laura) Well, we know who's behind it now... Rockefeller! So we're talking Rockybucks and his bunch.

A: Are we? Or, is that unsubstantiated rumor?

Q: (Laura) Well, yes, it could be unsubstantiated rumor, we don't know that it's the Rockefellers behind Lindemann. OK, let me ask this. Is it the United States government?

A: There is no such.

Q: (Laura) Well, let me try this another way. Is this SB a legitimate source of funding for...

A: It is "legitimate," as it can indeed provide unlimited funds. But, the real question is: Do you want to take advantage?

Q: (Jan) What is the price tag attached?

A: Depends upon results of experimentation.

Q: (Laura) No, I asked what's the price tag? Does it depend upon the results of our experimentation, or theirs?

A: Ours.

Q: (Laura) Yes.

A: If you discover something truly "earthshaking," well...

Q: (Laura) In other words, if we discover something truly earthshaking, the price might be very high. Is that it?

A: Maybe. Or, you could be sequestered.

Q: (Terry) In other words, put out, taken away... caged and used! (Ark) Anybody can be sequestered away from what is necessary...

A: It is possibility. {Checked gauss meter - didn't seem to be registering, and was adjusted}

Q: (Laura) OK, do you have any other comments to make about SB? What did they say now, that maybe the same funding as Lindemann was behind them also. How about, what would you call it... the Quorum. Is the Quorum behind it?

A: Yes.

Q: (Laura) OK, is the Quorum the group we're supposed to be looking for? (Terry) We have to go back and ask about the Quorum. We've got so many characters, it's worse than X-Files!

A: No, more interesting.

Q: (Terry) Yes, it is, definitely!

A: World banking conglomerate.

Q: (Terry) World bank. (Laura) I do not wish to be 'owned' in that way...

A: Not easy to avoid.

Q: (Laura) Well, I know it's not easy to avoid.

A: Will become even more difficult soon.

Q: (Laura) Well, they didn't say impossible... they just said difficult. But, on the other hand, I don't know if I want to do more difficult... well, we've got so much difficult... (Terry) ...That it's easy now!

A: Many interesting things to happen.

Q: (Laura) To happen? Where, when, how, why, and to whom?

A: You. And everyone else in your realm... Expect revelations.