Quoted without comment

"Richard sent me photos of his private parts before I'd even met him," says the redhead. "I thought this was very odd for a politician."

mildly amusing roundup

Extremists.

I can't help but think this is a contribution to the ongoing debate about hero-of-the-blog Diego Gambetta's work on engineers and terrorism. If stuff is upside down before you start the riot, fire, explosion, etc., your extremist cell could probably do with more engineers. Meanwhile, the SELF THOUGHT SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST guy next to him looks like he's on a demo to demand that ordinary decent schizophrenics can de-compensate without the EDL lowering the tone.

Due to the 30th birthday, I didn't cover this at the time, but there's a really nice piece on the Bradford EDL rally and counter-demo here. "It's the middle of Ramadan, as if we're bothered about this lot", indeed. And the EDL were the only people ever to decide that the Rubble Zone was a great place to hang out.

Something else I missed, except for the last 15 minutes: the Challenge Cup final. Lee Briers got the Lance Todd. Kevin Sinfield got his third runner's up medal. He must be really desperate to escape the fate of another Loiner, Garry Schofield, who played in four finals and never won, a record.

Elsewhere: I'm sticking the boot in over at Stable & Principled again. What is it about the Blair/Gove academies that makes them so suited to influence peddling?

IPPR: I agree with...

The Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report on the correlates of BNP membership and support (pdf).

Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It's as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a case of free-floating extremism. (A dedicated swallower of fascism; an accident waiting to happen.)

Oddly enough, this replicates an earlier result.

The Nottingham University Politics blog has a more nuanced response, but I'm quite impressed by the fact that two analyses based on two different metrics of BNP support - votes in the IPPR study, membership in mine - converged on the same result.

...from the sea

What's wrong with PROFIT?! Death to all Marxists! Hey, I usually try to remain calm, but this is getting unnerving. Everyone with any sense knew there would be an epic wingnut freakout after the US elections - the structural forces made it inevitable, after all the time spent denying plate tectonics - but who imagined that the tactical triggering event would be the healthcare bill? I was thinking in terms of carbon tax, or something that could be presented as a racist issue - immigration, perhaps.

But there you have it; you really can turn these people on and off like a tap and turn them on anything, like a hose. If there's one remark I never want to hear again after the last few years, it's the one about "if you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything".

Meanwhile, things like this happen:

“We are working taxpaying jobs, paying taxes, and we can’t get insurance because we make $6.55 an hour,” said Laura Head, 32, of Rogersville, Tenn., the first person in line Friday for the first day of the Remote Area Medical clinic, an annual three-day event offering free medical care. “This is really a great beneficial thing, but it doesn’t have to be this way; we could all have insurance.”

A single mother of three who mows yards and moves trailers for a living, Head said she arrived at the fairgrounds Tuesday, to camp out at the fairgrounds until the health fair began Friday morning. Her motivation was simple: severe, constant pain.

Close to two years ago, her boyfriend smashed her teeth, she said – but, without the $6,000 needed to have the teeth pulled she has endured infection after infection, making literally 100 visits to the emergency room for antibiotics and pain medication.

Back in February, 2008, I blogged about the French Navy dropping off a load of school books for New Orleans during a port call. I'm beginning to think that someone should write the story about one of their new Mistral-lclass Batiments de Projection et Commandement doing a free clinic on the tank deck, like the US Marines do from their LHAs in West Africa, as part of a semi-acknowledged drive for political influence in a zone of potential pre-insurgency and instability.

Or would the redcoats be more shocking? Albion would be the obvious ship, just for the name.

too many right-wing meetings

OK, so I got no takers for this prediction.

My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi.

Not surprising, really. But what I didn't expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP, the Tory leader in the European Parliament, who I had always assumed to be an uninspiring but roughly acceptable placeman. But it looks like the Borat Party's Borat is actually its leader. However:

He and the Latvian LNNK denied that it was in any way sympathetic to Nazism. “There was a commemoration of those who had served in the Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. The Labour Party has been churning this thing out over and over again,” Mr Kirkhope said.

“The truth of the matter is that attendance of the commemoration service for those who have died in wars is not just by members of LNNK — it is by others attached to the EPP because the Baltic states were taken over and oppressed by the Russians and the situation was that the Germans conscripted a number of people to join the Waffen.”

"The Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht"? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? For a start, "Waffen" means "weapon or "armed". Did the German army of the Second World War have any unarmed ones? Of course, it's completely nonsensical as a unit designation. Kirkhope was presumably trying to skate around the phrase "Waffen-SS", which refers to the SS's field units as opposed to its "general purpose" administrative staff.

But even if we straighten out his mangled words, his argument is still ignorant and morally awful, as it rests on the long-discredited idea that all the atrocities of the Eastern Front were the work of the SS, and the regular German army obeyed the laws of war. Further, even if that wasn't wrong, he would still be hopelessly ahistorical, because the various locally recruited units the Germans set up starting in 1942 were administratively attached to the Waffen SS, not the Army. The Army did recruit a lot of foreigners as individual replacements, but it didn't create a foreign legion; the SS did.

And worst of all, the earliest Latvian SS were recruited from a vicious militia which emerged as the Russians pulled out in the early summer of 1941 and immediately started murdering the local Jewish population without even waiting for the Germans to show up. The degree of horror they achieved regularly sickened hardened soldiers and deeply impressed the SS Einsatzkommandos that followed the army; they lost no time in signing them up and using them all over Central and Eastern Europe to do the dirty work, including acting as the guard force at the extermination camps.

As if you needed any confirmation of this, the Times report has a useful photo of a Latvian remembrance day parade, complete with red-and-white flag, swastika, and Adolf Hitler's likeness. A note for the guidance of readers, and Timothy Kirkhope MEP: if you need to know if your allies might be fascists, check if they like to wave flags with Hitler's face on them. This is not an exclusive test, but the false-positive rate is essentially zero.

(Oh, and if anyone's still interested in the bet, I'm taking the Belgian guy or at least his party to place.)

Hitchens Drinks Scotch in Psychic Counter-Insurgency

More information is becoming available about the Christopher Hitchens brawl. It appears to have been a telling moment in Decency. The crucial detail is that Hitchens didn't just deface any old SSNP artefact - he scrawled on the monument to the first shots fired in resistance to the Israeli occupation of 1982. Now, I'm sure the Syrian Social Nationalist Party - funny name, funny guys - are far from ideal. Funny swastikoid logoware, want to annex Cyprus, you get the picture.

But it's hugely telling that Hitchens' squiffy decision to take The Greatest Intellectual Struggle Of Our Times outside resulted in him doing three things - thinking he was fighting fascists, while in reality he was taking the side of Ariel Sharon, with the upshot that he got a kicking about which he could moan in a publicity-generating manner.

This is, after all, precisely the pattern of his career since the neoconservative turn in about 1998; protesting bitterly that he is on the Left, while mocking and demonising anyone who didn't agree with the most aggressive hard-right US Republicans and Likudniks, and using the outrage and betrayal that resulted to prove his commitment to his new mates. Up on the Hill, they think I'm OK...they just don't say, and it is in the nature of being the pet defector that you've always got to go further than the others to maintain your position. Hence things like his bizarre appearance on Newsnight to claim that the victims of Hurricane Katrina weren't Americans.

Down at the tactical level of debate, it's notable that he spent so much time between 1998-2005 strawmanning the opinions of various deranged groupuscules onto the great majority of British voters; someone like the SSNP, or George Galloway, has always been necessary for successful Decency.

The unconscious speaks. Considering the whole affair as a weird kind of liberal-hawk psychodrama, it's significant that Hitchens took his stew of unresolved inner conflicts to Beirut, city of unresolved conflicts par excellence and a taste for high living. Both the SSNP brawl, and his self-administered waterboarding, can possibly be seen as a sort of ritual self purification through which he hopes to return to the Left (a Lacanian would call it the Father's Law), now that gonzo-reporting CPAC has become something for the mainstream rather than a move reserved for Sadly, No!.

Even More BNP Data...

Various people asked what would happen if I excluded London and Northern Ireland from the BNP analysis. Here's a table showing the R-squared for each factor, first for the whole data set and then excluding these two outliers. (After all, who needs statistical analysis to know those two are weird?)

Factor	R-Squared	R-Squared Excluding NI, London
Immigration	0.0364	0.0810
Emigration	0.0330	0.0460
Migration	0.0343	0.0843
Services % GDP	0.0639	0.0009
Industry % GDP	0.0885	0.0066
Agriculture % GDP	0.0659	0.1697
Long Term Unemployment	0.2078	0.0074
Unemployment %	0.1080	0.0235
Economic Growth %, 1991-2006	0.0782	0.0692
Density Change 1991-2006 %	0.0369	0.0035
Population Change %	0.0008	0.0160

I'm still not convinced there is any rational pattern here at all. Immigration is still astonishingly weak as a predictor of BNP membership; weirdly, economic growth is even weaker, and positive! (I'm feeling so prosperous...I'm going to join the BNP!) In fact, the only factor in the second set of numbers that has an effect measurable without going into three significant figures is the proportion of GDP accounted for by agriculture. Northern Ireland is both surprisingly agricultural (2.3% of GDP - 130% of the UK average) and unsurprisingly low in BNP members (0.0024 per 100), so we wouldn't have seen this earlier on.

The Thatcher legacy - long term unemployment as a percentage of all unemployment - was the strongest correlate with R-squared = 0.2078, but when you drop London and NI, it vanishes, as does unemployment in general.

Yet More BNP Data Analysis: Does Not Compute!

OK, so I've spent some time getting more data together on the correlates of BNP membership. I've created a table which contains the following metrics: population growth (%), change in population density (%), Gross Value Added(GVA) in 1991, 2006, change in GVA, % GVA growth, unemployment, long-term unemployment as a % of total unemployment, the shares of GDP accounted for by agriculture, industry, and services, total immigration between 1994 and 2002 per capita, total emigration per capita for the same period, total migration per capita, and BNP members per 100 citizens.

And you know what? I was expecting to find a correlation with the economic variables. I had a theory that long-term, Thatcher legacy unemployment, especially, would be a strong correlate of BNP recruitment. But nothing correlates. None of those metrics have any predictive power. Have a look at this.



Immigration per head is up the Y-axis, bigotry on the X-axis, and the data points are scaled by the unemployment rate. It doesn't seem to track any of these variables at all; I urge you to visit the visualisation home page, where you can try the different data series for yourself.

This strongly suggests that some completely different force is at work; perhaps BNP membership is driven by something else entirely. It could be the distribution of social authoritarian tendencies in the population, as Robert Altemeyer theorises. Or alternatively, it could just be that a gratifyingly small percentage of people are completely fucking stupid and pig-ignorant, that this is normally distributed in the population, and it's essentially a matter of chance what pig-ignorant fucking stupidity they get up to.

It's probably worthwhile pointing out that the average concentration of BNP members is 0.0203 per 100 citizens and the standard deviation is 0.0116. So with the sole exception of Northern Ireland, 1.54 standard deviations below the mean and therefore staggering towards the edge of the 90% confidence interval, the variation between regions is entirely explicable by chance - strong backing for the wanker theory.

(For some reason, this post has started to remind me of Donald Crowhurst's campaign leaflet, which bore the headline "YOU MAY THINK YOU ARE LOGICAL - BUT DARE YOU TAKE THIS TEST?" Inside was a sort of flowchart designed to explain logically why everyone should vote Liberal.)

The Swamping Myth

You will hear all kinds of people in authority say that immigration, or population growth, is causing people to turn into racists and vote BNP, either just because (the rightwing version) or because of "pressure" on public services (the Decent Left version).Therefore, they usually say, we need a stingier immigration policy. If you're reading this, you probably think this is crap. But now, I can prove this scientifically. Thanks to the leaked BNP membership list, we can empirically measure how many people are active racists, active and committed enough that they joined a political party and paid a subscription. Using the data by county, I established a table that matched the UK regions.

Now, if immigration or population growth really is causing people to go fascist, we'd expect to find a correlation between population growth and BNP membership. Or, perhaps, we might find that places that are losing population are economically depressed and hence susceptible. A further detail might be changes in population density; becoming more urban might lead to a perception of being "swamped", or becoming more rural/exurban might lead to one of isolation. So I drew up a table of population growth from 1991 to 2006, change in density for the same period, and BNP members per 100 citizens.

Here are the results.



Population growth is on the Y axis, bigots on the X axis; the size of each dot represents the change in density. There is no correlation whatsoever. Anyone who tells you this story is talking nonsense.

The Switzerland of the Middle East (for some periods of Swiss history)

There is a fascinating post at Pat Lang's about a study trip to Lebanon which involved meeting some interesting and alarming people (Samir Geagea, described here as "a bit Lyndon LaRouche" - well, whatever hard things have been said, quite understandably, about the latter, he never commanded a militia that cut huge crosses in the bodies of its enemies). Bashir Assad's wife is apparently an Obama Girl, Walid Jumblatt is losing his wits, Saad Hariri is an arrogant twit, Rafiq Hariri's sister is considerably smarter than Saad, Siniora is a Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and all the Hezbollah representatives they met were very impressive indeed, once they laid off the war porn propaganda pix.

Apart from this Lebanese version of the Spectator at its best, I was interested by this:

Amin Gemayel was not particularly forthcoming, and seemed badly out of touch. When pressed for details on a number of points he was completely at a loss. He seemed to resort to stock politician phrases even in personal conversation. My impression was of a man losing vitality. I tried to push him on the question of what a real 'national defense strategy' would be, seeking some common ground between him and Hezbollah. He replied that he envisaged a 'Swiss model' of every citizen owning a gun. Incredulous, I asked him if that would really deter Israeli or Syrian aggression. He responded evasively, citing the importance of various UN resolutions. When I cornered him privately after the session, he said that in the 1970s they had tried to acquire Crotale air defense systems but were thwarted by Israeli pressure, indicating that similar factors were at play today.

Not that he means much these days, but I can't see what the objection to a "Swiss model" would be. In fact, Hezbollah's total strategy down south appears to have been exactly that in 2006. And given that Lebanon will always be surrounded by bigger powers with dubious intentions, and it is unlikely to be allowed to create a manoeuvre-warfare capability even if it can afford to (see above), it's hard to see what other policy is available.

Further, the availability of cheap ATGWs and electronics is a big boost to the strength of such a force, and there is no shortage of people to use them. In some ways it's a lot like the development of another well-known army in the Levant, which was founded on the guerrilla wing of an integrated political party/economic development organisation/rebel army. Can anyone guess which it was? Of course, the Israelis concentrated on buying tanks - but then, they weren't in the mountains. The other good thing about such a policy is that it would be a handy way of dealing with the existence of militias - wrapping them into some sort of national command structure.

And, of course, Lebanon used to call itself the Switzerland of the Middle East. The similarities are actually more than you think - cantons of differing linguistic/religious identities, mountain frontiers, a profitably discreet and profitably dubious banking sector. You can even ski. But, you know, Switzerland as an island of perfect peace is quite a new idea, created by its neutrality in the world wars - before then, well...there's a reason why the pope has Swiss guards, which is that back in the day, Swiss mercenaries scared the hell out of Europe so much that some international treaties specifically bound the parties not to recruit them for use against Christians. (Savages, well, that was OK.)

The overall impression is that the system is gradually working its way back into equilibrium, not least as a result of Bush no longer having an active policy. "Have you figured them out?" asked Zaphod. "No, I've just stopped fiddling with them.."

Dan predicts a riot

Responding to Dan Hardie's latest BNP screed, I think there are several important points here. First of all, Dan Dsquared is half-right that BNP voters don't matter. There are not enough of them ever to get elected to run anything, and their candidates usually manage to teach their own electors a lesson about voting for nutcases with impressive speed. He is also right that it is a much more serious problem that there are significant numbers of racists about than that they vote BNP.

He is wrong, though, that this is a nonproblem. Quite simply, you don't need many people to cause serious trouble, and the BNP as an organisation is good at this. It has repeatedly shown itself willing to advocate violence, and also to use what can only be described as tactical psychological warfare. This is not a serious problem in some places, but it could be a very serious one where there are concentrations of BNP wankers near concentrations of target groups, and a really, really serious problem where there are concentrations of BNP wankers near concentrations of jihadi wankers.

Part of the problem, and something that the usually statistically sharp Dsquared doesn't pick out, is that even council-level statistical aggregates don't give enough granularity to track this. Further, the government doesn't have a good record in terms of situational awareness outside London - the fuel wankers of 2000 caused as much trouble as they did largely because the crisis didn't begin in London, and the 2001 riots similarly took everyone by surprise.

Not that it was very obvious in the north that something was up - I remember the Bradford Mela a week beforehand going on in near-perfect peace under the usual racing charcoal sky. The reaction loop, though, is a lot shorter than that of national politics or administration.

My own experience of the Bradford riot really bears all these points out. That morning, I was on my way to an ANL demonstration against the planned BNP march. All was reasonably calm, and the main news story in Yorkshire was mild indignation that the Bradford Festival's last day had been cancelled due to the demo. There are a lot of different stories about the kick-off, but my own recall was this - during the afternoon, there had been no sign of the BNP, but a succession of rumours that They Were Coming!, each of which set the crowd bubbling. I remember that there was a sudden ugly surge as a group of men with short hair appeared, who turned out to be from the No Platforms campaign rather than the BNP.

During the day, the composition of the crowd had gradually altered from a lot of teacherish ANL types, some Pakistanis, and some professional lefties, to a lot of young men and the professional lefties. I don't remember anyone who looked especially Islamic - most of them looked like they came from your friendly local Subaru tune-up joint. I didn't, as it happened, see a single fascist all day - eventually, around 4 o'clock, I assumed my civic duty was done and headed for the station. I'd just seen the leader of Bradford Council making a speech, so I figured it must be all over.

It was at that moment that the trouble began. Suddenly the police who had pulled back to their vehicles in Market Street began struggling into their kit, radios quacking. And then there was a horrible yelling, and I saw a crowd dashing out of Centenary Square towards the bottom of Ivegate, led by a folk singer I'd been talking to earlier with his guitar on his back. Then, I looked up Ivegate to see the mob turn and rush back down the hill towards me. At this point I started running away, looking up to see I was running right towards a line of cops with dogs. They didn't molest me as I swung left into Hustlergate to let the mob pass.

After that, I helped the folk singer, who was complaining bitterly that the cops had grabbed him by his bad shoulder and he was disabled, over to a St John's Ambulance post, and decided to get out of town on the next train, which turned out to be the last train allowed to leave the station.

The other thing about the day that sticks in my mind was that I had earlier been interviewed by a German TV crew. I made the obvious points that the BNP and the NF before had never been allowed to get a footing in Bradford, etc. The producer suggested they interview me with "any of your Asian friends", and I had to confess I had none. Which would probably have made the best possible reportage on the whole sad business, had they gone ahead and filmed it.

If you want something more useful, I'd point out that the good news is that in Yorkshire, the BNP's successes have so far been in the urban-rural periphery. Not to be confused with the suburbs, it's a feature of Yorkshire urban geography that we have a lot of smaller chunks of industrial or post-industrial town that overlap with the countryside. It's these semidetached areas, like Cross Flatts as opposed to Keighley, where they tend to do well. I suspect this may be a stabilising factor.

We are the goonsquad and we're coming to town

A sinister tale from Iraq. But does anyone else find the scariest bit that the mystery voice who threatened her identified itself as the "Kata'eb al-Jihad"? Yes, that's Kata'eb as in the Lebanese Phalange's Arabic name. Not that the originals would have had any truck with jihad, but it strikes me that it's a great name to adopt if you want to terrify anyone in the Middle East, and also that the environment of Iraq is an excellent one for the growth of good old-fashioned fascism.

And then I remembered that a plane that flew a huge quantity of cash out of Iraq to Beirut turned out to have a Lebanese Forces MP aboard, a plane owned by something called Flying Carpet in Beirut owned by one Mazen Bsat.

Or perhaps, it's our own side's supersmart electronic warfare? I ask only having read this report about Coalition electronic/information warfare in Iraq. Yes, they really are flying EC-130s around fiddling with the GSM network when they could just hook in to the SS7 switch's lawful intercept function. But what amused me was the special "network exploitation system" that allows you to become the sysadmin...errr...so long as it doesn't attack one of your own radio nets.

Wouldn't it just be less stupid to teach some people Arabic?

Thax loss

My thoughts on the Thai coup, free signup required. Which will explain the title.

Interesting to see the classic model coup in action again. Turkey in 1997 had the so-called "virtual coup", when the army didn't actually leave barracks but did cause the government to fall by indicating its displeasure. But this was your Bolivian original, complete with tanks parked at key road junctions.

Still, there's a lot of virtuality to such a coup. What function do the tanks serve? Nobody apparently expected any resistance from the army, and the townspeople spent most of the spring and summer demonstrating against Thaksin. This blogger was taken "to the tanks" by a cabbie. Clearly, they mostly serve to demonstrate that this here is your genuine putsch, no random mob violence.

Speaking of which, autumn's here and the time is right for fighting in the streets, boys. I'd give this a mark of about 4 out of 10 for revolutionary violence - after all, they successfully identified the TV station and stormed it, having comprehensively terrorised the police. But, being Hungarian irredentist fascists in 2006, they didn't have enough clue to broadcast their own message rather than just take the TV off the air.

St. Helena and a Nonexistent State

St. Helena, the British island in the Atlantic Narrows where Napoleon was confined, is not well known as a centre for dubious financial activities, unlike many other bits of residual empire (the Caymans, Gibraltar, Turks & Caicos, British Virgin Islands etc). This appears to be changing. A website has appeared advertising something called safeholder.com, which claims to offer

a new offshore banking program under the auspices of the Serbian Republic of Krajina (RSK), which is the internationally recognized government of Krajina and Slavonia. The banking licenses are offered to corporations and citizens resident anywhere in the world except the Republic of Serbia & Montenegro and the Republic of Srpska. The license permits operation of all banking and related financial services worldwide except in the aforementioned countries and subject to the laws and public policies of other states. Where no law on the matter exists or there is no conflict, the banking program of the RSK would be applicable according to international law authorities.

There is one immediately obvious problem with this story. The RSK does not exist. It was the self-proclaimed government, between 1992 and 1995, of the tranche of Croatia occupied by Serbian forces during the civil war. In 1995, the Croatian army retook the areas it supposedly governed, expelling much of the population and landing several of its own leaders before the Hague Tribunal. Either the RSK's banking code exists in some curious fashion, floating above the false world of being like Mohammed's coffin, and permitting anyone canny enough to engage Safeholder.com's services to escape more earthly jurisdictions, or else it is unenforceable and anyone who invested money in such a bank will never see it again. Whichever one of these options is pursued, it don't look good.

What kind of banking legislation the RSK might have elaborated in its brief flicker of existence can perhaps be guessed. In fact it's stated. Safeholder compares itself favourably to a variety of well-known extreme tax havens - Nauru, Niue and Montserrat, for example - for speed of establishment, confidentiality and easy terms. Anyone with US$5000 can hope to establish a bank with them within 10 days, with the following capabilities:

Engage in Private & Internet Banking

Take deposits and make loans worldwide

Offer payment services and transfer funds

Issue payment tools such as credit cards and checks

Issue bank guarantees

Issue letters of credit and other financial instruments

Issue bank references

Open correspondent bank accounts

Offer complex financial transactions

I think they must have forgotten "bilk clients" and "launder money". After all, they also claim you might want to set up a casino!

The fact that the licence is said (more than once) to exclude the countries - Serbia and the Republika Srpska in Bosnia - that would appear to be the RSK's successor states should tell us enough about their governments' opinion of this scheme. Fascinatingly, the website includes a nice picture of an RSK banknote.



It really ought to be a nine-bob note, but it's certainly just as dodgy. The folk responsible for this are one Mike Olsson, a Swedish citizen, and one Mirko Miskovic...and one Jonathan Levy. This is the WHOIS record for safeholder.com:

Domain Name: safeholder.com

Registrant Contact:
Safeholder, Ltd. safeholder@gmail.com
Safeholder Ltd
Association Hall
Main Street
Jamestown, SH STHL 1ZZ
SH
+1.2902660

Administrative Contact:
Safeholder, Ltd. safeholder@gmail.com
Safeholder Ltd
Association Hall
Main Street
Jamestown, SH STHL 1ZZ
SH
+1.2902660

Technical Contact:
Safeholder, Ltd. safeholder@gmail.com
Safeholder Ltd
Association Hall
Main Street
Jamestown, SH STHL 1ZZ
SH
+1.2902660

Billing Contact:
Jon Levy jonlevy@hargray.com
Jon Levy
37 Royal Pointe Dr.
Hilton Head Island, SC 29926
US
+1.5132840011

Record created on 2004-03-09 07:30:56.
Record expires on 2007-03-09 07:30:56.

Strangely enough, someone of the same name registered cabindapetroleum.com, which claims to be the only licenced gas and oil exploration company in the Republic of Cabinda, based in Jamestown, St. Helena. Cabinda, my well-informed readers will no doubt be aware, is a small exclave of Angola north of the Congo River which contains much of Angola's oil reserves. It is not a republic, and is something like a joint venture between the Angolan government and ChevronTexaco, who are extracting the oil. Unlike Mr. Levy's organisation, which is extracting the urine. After all, there is no reasonable prospect that they will ever be in a position to explore for oil there - and much as I dislike and distrust the Angolan government and their oil pals, I would rather not see anyone lose their savings in this venture.

It could be worse. Cash invested in such a thing is likely to go missing, but where would it go? There's only been one effort to work out what all this means, before this post, which was by the St.Helena Herald. At this (pdf) link, you can read a long interview with Olsson by a local reporter. I liked this exchange for the sheer informational blankness Olsson practices - read, and feel your IQ drop ten points. "RR" is the Herald's reporter, "MO" is Olsson.

RR. I’m giving you an example as to how it could work, what
kind of regulations do you have in store to ensure that it doesn’t
happen it terms of money laundering?
MO. Its not dependent on St Helena law, that’s what I’m telling
you, its dependent on the law of the country where they are
operating from, because most countries got, have nothing to do
with because one of the requirements is that the company be in St
Helena because we got a competent authority that are supervising all
banks, you can not operate that bank in St Helena so they would not
have anything to do with money laundering or anything like that in St
Helena.
English Common Law
RR. So, just moving away. Why quote English Common Law on
your website?
MO. Because English Common Law is applicable to St Helena.
RR. In terms of, in what reference?
MO. In places where we don’t have legislation
RR. I understand that, in what reference are you quoting English
Common Law on your website in relation to Safeholder?
MO. It mainly has to do with Trusts
RR. Trusts?
MO. Trust legislation is actually in English Common Law, it means
that you can, um, put money in a Trust that is not your personal
belongings. You set the rate, the identity from yourself, and this has
been very common in the United States for example where the
insurance premiums are so big.
RR. Yes I understand that, so you are saying that it is do with Trust
purposes so if you want to invest in a Trust?
MO. Umm.
RR. So why, to quote your initial product line, include international
Capitalization and Hedge Funds. Is that what you are talking about?
MO. Sorry
RR. Is that what you are talking about when you say Trusts?
MO. Umm, Hedge Fund is a form of Trust, it’s a fairly specialized
more a short term Trust, the Hedge Fund. For example, we know that
George Sores is the biggest Hedge Fund Administrator in the world.
RR. Umm
MO. If you understand.
RR. Yes I understand, so what other kinds of Trusts, apart from Hedge
Funds are you interested in, or is Safeholder interested in?
MO. Capital Protection Trusts.
RR. Which you discussed earlier?
MO. Sorry?
RR. Which you discussed earlier?
MO. They are all similar, different ways of doing it; the same with
Bailment Accounts, Hedge Funds, yeah
RR. Umm
MO. A variety of different products.
RR. Just looking at a bit of history here how did you get involved in
the Safeholder organisation operation?
MO. Working together with two barristers which I have know for the
last ten years.
RR. So obviously you built a relationship with the Republic of Serb-
Krajina?
MO. I don’t have a relationship with Republic of Serb-Krajina at all.
RR. So whats the relationship? Obviously you are talking to them as
part of Safeholder and as the Operations Director you don’t have a
relationship with them at all?
MO. NO, no, not directly because in that sense not relative for the
operation of the business.
RR. Sorry, could you clarify that for me please? I’m a bit confused
with that statement, could you clarify please.
MO. Its not relative for the product, we have lawyers that are looking
at the legality of everything that happens in the business, I have full
confidence in them. So I don’t have to have any personal relation
with RSK at all.
RR. But surely as the Chief Operators Officer you would obviously
have to oversee every part of the business?
MO. Not every client, that would be impossible.

Is that completely clear? And is the Jonathan Levy who's peddling the oil of ancient Cabindan snakes the same man who appears in this curious conference, this rather embarrassing Counterpunch story, the Serbian Unity Congress's website and this manic conspiracy site?

Stand by for more thrilling revelations.

Hat tip to Jasmina Tesanovic. BTW, check out Doug "AFOE" Muir in the comments.