A Nation Undefended

 

Simon Sheppard

Birmingham, England, 21 June 2026. A solitary inebriated white lad is mobbed by black men, struck to the ground by two of them, and a female police officer rushes up and aggressively manhandles and arrests him. A second female police officer follows the black group to ask if they are alright. Police charged him with assaulting a police officer and “have no concerns over the officer’s actions.”

Who defends a nation? It’s not women, or children, or recently arrived immigrants. It is always the men who resist invasion and plunder. At certain times, men are called upon to become warriors.

So it makes sense that if alien forces seek to subdue a country, to take it over and exploit its resources, men would be the primary target. Incapacitate the men by modern, surreptitious methods such as psychological warfare (4GW) and practically all resistance is removed. Co-opt the institutions, and demean and traduce the males, emasculating them, and malevolent forces can progress unimpeded.

Recently I witnessed the sharp end of this, and detailed some of the travesties against men I encountered here. To illustrate, let me turn some tables, exchanging the sexes.

Consider cuckolding by women, a “sex offence” by definition. David Buss, probably the best-known evolutionary psychologist, has detailed that female extra-marital trysts tend to occur during the woman’s fertile period, when she is ovulating. Statistics involving DNA tests over more than a decade indicate that about 1 in 6 children in Britain have a different father than the one they believe. This is wrongdoing on a massive scale. Firstly the woman has broken what is supposed to be a solemn vow. Secondly and much more seriously, if she falls pregnant, a man is tricked into expending resources on a child which is not his. His responsibilities last from infancy to adulthood (and perhaps beyond), and those considerable financial and emotional investments arise from betrayal.

Suppose then that we were to apply the new standards to this crime, the standards which are currently being applied to men. That is, retroactively applying laws based on what are often dubious memories of events alleged to have occurred up to forty years previously. This, incidentally, is contrary to the Statute of Limitations if not the now abrogated British Constitution. Another class of “crimes” which are certainly contrary to Common Law is the new offences invoking what they think you intended to do, what you were thinking at the time, or your motivations, instead of what you actually did.

Suppose that the State were to DNA-test anyone under 40 to establish whether their mother had engaged in this deceit, and imprison the women for fraud if they had. This is comparable to what is being done to men, and men have been imprisoned for domestic violence even when their spouse has objected to the prosecution. Except that in this hypothetical but entirely feasible scenario, the crime would be proven scientifically and irrefutably, with DNA evidence.

Or, turning another table, imagine that the thousands of “asylum-seekers” arriving on British shores were not almost entirely composed of young, military-age men, but instead consisted of petite and feminine young women, from the Orient say. The female instinct is to intensify male breeding competition (selecting for fitness), but if the situation were reversed women would never countenance such competition. There would be no ranks of women holding “Refugees Welcome” signs and similar advocacy.

What a disaster the emancipation of Jews and women has been! It’s said that “Doing what’s popular is rarely doing what’s right, and doing what’s right is rarely popular” but giving women the vote in 1918 was neither right nor popular.

Female influence has led to a dearth of critical thinking and objectivity. Instead there is sycophantic woman-worship, with men expressing emotions which are overwhelmingly borrowed second-hand from women. Instead of caring wives and mothers we have women addicted to smartphones and fussing over dogs and cats. Instead of warriors we have simps pushing prams.

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Robert FAURISSON - The Auschwitz Swimming Pool

The German-Australian revisionist Frederick Toben has brought to our attention the fact that today, beside the swimming pool at Auschwitz I, there stands a signboard bearing, in Polish, English and Hebrew, a notice intended to have the visitor believe that the pool was in fact a simple reservoir for the fire brigade. It reads as follows:

Fire brigade reservoir built in the form of a swimming pool, probably in early 1944.

He asks when exactly this signboard appeared. I myself have no idea but the inscription is just as fallacious as any number of the Auschwitz museum’s other allegations or explanations. One fails to see why the Germans, rather than settling for an ordinary reservoir, would have made one in the fashion of a swimming pool... complete with diving board.

The pool was a pool. It was meant for the detainees. Marc Klein mentions it at least twice in his recollections of the camp. In an article entitled ‘Auschwitz I Stammlager’ he wrote:

The working hours were modified on Sundays and holidays, when most of the kommandos were at leisure. Roll call was at around noon; evenings were devoted to rest and to a choice of cultural and sporting activities. Football, basketball, and water-polo matches (in an open-air pool built within the perimeter by detainees) attracted crowds of onlookers. It should be noted that only the very fit and well-fed, exempt from the harsh jobs, could indulge in these games which drew the liveliest applause from the masses of other detainees (De l’Université aux camps de concentration: Télmorgnages strasbourgeois, Paris, les Belles-lettres, 1947, p. 453).

In his booklet Observations et réflexions sur les camps de concentration nazis he further wrote:

Auschwitz I was made up of 28 blocks built of stone laid out in three parallel rows between which ran paved streets. A third street ran the length of the quadrangle and was planted with birch trees, the Birkenhaller intended as a walkway for the detainees, with benches; there also was an open air swimming pool (booklet of 32 pages printed in Caen, 1948, p. 10; its text is a reproduction of the author’s article published in Etudes germaniques, n° 3, 1948, pp. 244-275).

M. Klein, professor at the Strasbourg medicine faculty, took care to point out that his first statement had been submitted “to the reading and scrutiny of Robert Weil, professor of science at Sarreguemines lycée,” who had been interned in the same camps as himself (p. 455).

In 1985, at Ernst Zündel’s first trial in Toronto, I spoke of M. Klein’s recollections but the real specialist on the history of the Auschwitz I swimming pool was at that time none other than the Swedish revisionist Dietlieb Felderer. If I remember correctly, the Canadian press headlined an article on his testimony about it. Moreover, in his writings he often returns to this and other quite concrete, quite precise subjects just as disquieting for the supporters of the exterminationist argument.

N.B. The water of the swimming pool can obviously be used by firemen in case of emergency. In his booklet, M. Klein wrote that “there were firemen at the camp with very modern equipment” (p. 9). Amongst the things that he had not expected to find on arriving, in June 1944, “at a camp whose sinister reputation was known to the whole world thanks to the Allied radio broadcasts,” one may note, for the detainees, “a hospital with sections specialised in line with the most modern hospital practices” (p. 4), “vast and well fitted-out wash houses along with communal W.C.’s built according to the modern principles of sanitary hygiene” (p. 10), “the micro-wave delousing process which had just been created” (p. 14), “the mechanical bakery” (p. 15) the legal aid for the detainees (pp. 16-17), the existence of “dietetic cooking” for some of the sick, with “special soups and even a special bread” (p. 26), “a library where numerous reference works, classic textbooks, and periodicals could be found” (p. 27), the daily rolling by, next to the camp, of “the Krakow-Berlin express” (p. 29), a cinema, a cabaret, an orchestra (p. 31), etc. M. Klein also notes the horrible aspects of life in the camp and all the rumours, including the “horrific stories” of gassings which he seems not really to have believed until after the war, and then only thanks to the testimonies in the “various trials of war criminals” (p. 7).

Addendum of 27 July. A wartime detainee and, like M. Klein and R. Weil, a Jew himself, confirmed, in a short testimony written in 1997 entitled “Une Piscine à Auschwitz,” that he saw, in July 1944, dozens of his fellow prisoners busy at work on the said pool which, he pointed out, had “a diving board and an access ladder”; he could have added “along with three starting blocks for races.” He wrote that towards the end of that month “a newsreel director had some deportees filmed swimming there.” As one might expect, he enlivened his account with the regular stereotypes of the SS men’s or kapos’ brutality and he saw in the making both of the pool and of the film nothing but a propaganda operation. His report ends with two interesting remarks. First, that in 1997 no guide was “aware” of the pool (which nonetheless was before the guides’ very eyes and of which a photograph accompanies the article: we read that this picture, showing a swimming pool full of water, was taken in that year) and that the author would like to know just where the newsreel might be today. His question is akin to those put by some revisionists: might the film not be “at the headquarters of the International Red Cross”? Doubtless he meant: at the International Tracing Service (ITS) located at Arolsen-Waldeck in Germany and operating under the direction of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with headquarters in Geneva. Since 1978, this body has barred revisionists from its archives, which are known to be an exceptionally rich resource. For its part, the Auschwitz State Museum probably possesses documentation relevant to various aspects of this swimming pool’s construction, e.g. the project, the plans, the financing, the requests for and the supply of building materials, the requisition of labourers, the inspection visits.

Reference for this account: R. Esrail, registration no. 173295, « Une piscine à Auschwitz », in Après Auschwitz (Bulletin de l’Amicale des déportés d’Auschwitz), n° 264/octobre 1997, p. 10.
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Swimming Pool, Auschwitz Camp, June 1996. ‘Inmates from Auschwitz and surrounding camps enjoyed swimming and sunbathing beside the pool on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Although not as popular as sports like soccer, some competition was organized where inmates from different countries of origin, and different camps, raced in individual and relay events.’ Above photo and caption from www.air-photo.com, below photo provided by an anonymous donor.

The Fable of the Ducks and the Hens

Many, many years ago
When animals could speak,
A wondrous thing the ducks befell;
Their tale is quite unique.

Down by a pond dwelt all these ducks,
— Ten thousand at the least —
Their duckish joys were undisturbed
By any man or beast.

One day down near the entrance gate
There was an awful din.
A hundred hens all out of breath
Were begging to come in.

“Oh let us in!” these poor birds cried,
“Before we do expire!
’Tis only by the merest INCH
That we escaped the fire!”

Their feathers burned, their combs adroop,
They were the saddest sight.
They’d run a hundred miles or more,
All day and then all night.

“Come in! Come in!” the ducks all quacked,
“For you our hearts do bleed!
We’ll share our happy lot with you;
Just tell us what you need!”

And so these poor bedraggled hens
Amongst the ducks moved in.
“For after all,” the ducks declared,
“We’re sisters ’neath the skin.”

Before too many months had lapsed,
The hens were good as new.
They sent for all their rooster friends,
And those were welcomed too.

To please their hosts, these chickens tried
To waddle and to quack.
To simulate the duckish ways,
They quickly learned the knack.

This pleased the flock of ducks because
It gratified their pride.
But hear my tale and learn how they
Got taken for a ride.

The ducks, it seemed, spent all their time
In fixing up the place;
In growing food and building homes
And cleaning every space.

They asked the hens what they would do
To earn their daily bread.
“We’ll teach and write and entertain,
And buy and sell,” they said.

And so these hens began to teach
The baby ducks and chicks.
They traded food and eggs and things,
With many clever tricks.

They wrote great books and put on shows
— Of genius they’d no lack.
It wasn’t long till chickens owned
The Duckville Daily Quack.

One day a mother duck who took
Her ducklings to the lake,
Was flabbergasted when one said,
“A swim I will not take!”

“Why duckling’s ALWAYS swim!” she gasped,
“It’s what you’re built to do!
Like bunnies hop, and crickets chirp,
And cows most always moo!”

“You’re NUTS!” her son replied,
“That stuff is all OLD HAT!
It’s wrong for birds to swim — besides,
It’s damn cold on my prat!”

“Oh fie!” the mother duck exclaimed,
“You’re talking like a fool!”
Up quacked the other ducklings then:
“He’s right! We learned in school!”

“Such things must stop!” the mother cried,
“Those hens can’t tell such lies!
For sheer ingratitude and nerve,
I’m sure this takes the prize!”

But she was wrong, for even then
The hens did thump the tub,
Demanding they be let into
The Duckville Swimming Club.

“But you don’t swim!” the ducks exclaimed,
“To join, why should you care?”
“That’s not the point” the hens replied,
“To exclude us isn’t fair!”

The younger ducks, who’d been to school
Agreed right there and then,
“To keep them out is bigotry!
’Twould just be ANTI-HEN!”

Outnumbered by the younger ducks,
The old ducks soon did lose.
The hens could join the Swimming Club,
If they would pay the dues.

That night the Duckville Daily Quack
Contained this banner spread:
“Reactionary Ducks are Licked!
Duckville moves Ahead!”

Down at the Duckville Gaity,
The young set laughed with glee,
At cracks about “old fuddy ducks”
In burlesque repartee.

Next day the hens were at the Club;
A petition they’d sent round
They objected to the Swimming Fund
With fury and with sound.

“You use our dues to fix the pond,
To keep it neat and trim
And this is wrong” they said, “because
You know we do not swim!”

“God help us!” cried a wise old duck,
“These chickens have gone mad!
We’ll take this thing to court, by George,
And justice will be had!”

But when they went before the judge,
Imagine their dismay!
A CHICKEN judge decreed that they
A heavy fine must pay!

“Minorities must have their rights!”
The judge declared right then.
“To use hens’ dues to fix the pond
Is very ANTI-HEN!”

Once more the Duckville Daily Quack
Emblazoned ’cross the page:
“Old Fuddy Ducks Refuse to See
The Great New Coming Age!!”

In Duckville’s church, on Sunday morn,
The preacher spoke these words:
“Discrimination’s got to stop!
Remember, we’re all birds!”

The wisest duck in all the town
Sat down in black despair.
“I’ll write a book,” he thought, “and then
This madness I will bare!”

“Let swimmers swim, let hoppers hop,
Let each go his own way
Let none coerce a fellow bird!”
Was what he had to say.

“’Twas wrong to force the hens to swim,
So here’s the problem’s crux:
It’s just as bad for hens to try
To CHICKENIZE our ducks!”

“I can’t print that,” the printer said,
“’Twill put me in a mess!
My shop is mortgaged to the hens —
The chickens own my press!”

This worried duck then tried to warn
His friends by speech and pen,
But young ducks fresh from school just jeered,
“He’s a vicious ANTI-HEN!”

Now up the stream a little way
Was Gooseville, on the lake
The hens had come to Gooseville too,
But the geese were more awake.

When the hens began to spoil the young
And Gooseville’s laws to flout,
The geese rose up in righteous wrath
And simply threw them out.

Of course you know where they all ran
— On Duckville they converged.
“We’ve got to take these REFUGEES”
Was what the hens all urged.

The Duckville Daily Quack declared:
“Those geese will stop at naught!
They plan to conquer all the world!
Atrocities they’ve wrought!”

“That’s right!” the young ducks all agreed,
“We’ll help our fellow birds!
Those geese have plans to conquer us!
We’ve read the Quack’s own words!”

They let the hens from Gooseville in,
The whole bedraggled pack
And every hen took up a job
On Duckville’s Daily Quack.

When Duckville’s Mayor’s term was up,
The Quack put up its duck.
A vain and stupid duck was he
— A veritable cluck!

But when he praised the wild young ducks
And cursed the evil geese,
The Quack declared he was “all-wise”;
His praise would never cease.

The hens chipped in to help this cluck
Give grain away for free.
The old ducks sadly shook their heads—
The writing they could see.

And sure enough, this stupid duck,
He was elected Mayor.
From this point on, the Duckville ducks
They never had a prayer.

The Mayor said, “Gooseville must go!
We’ll wipe them off the map!”
While Duckville slept, the scheming hens
For Gooseville set a trap.

They called the geese by filthy names;
They filled their pond with sticks.
They helped the weasels catch the geese,
And other hennish tricks.

The geese got mad and threw some rocks.
“IT’S WAR!” the Quack announced.
“We ducks must fight those evil geese
Till they’ve been soundly trounced!”

The ducks (who knew not of the tricks
Indulged in by the Mayor)
Were filled with “patriotic zeal”
And pitched right in for fair!

Now when the ducks had whipped the geese
The Mayor called “Retreat!
Our Henville friends should really take
Goosevilles’s big main street!”

The hens are back in Gooseville now;
They starved and beat the geese.
They prayed for peace — but organized
The Henville ARMED POLICE!

They drained the Gooseville swimming pond;
And “De-goose-ified” the schools.
They wrung the neck of Gooseville’s Mayor
On lately made-up rules.

They formed a council of the hens—
“UNITED BIRDS” the name.
The other birds who joined the thing
Did not perceive the game.

No sooner had they set this up,
Than they announced their plan
To seize up Swanville as a home
For all their hennish clan.

They took a vote amongst themselves,
And every one approved!
“Swanville was for hens!” they said,
“Way back, before we moved!”

And so they kicked the swans all out
With Duckville’s help and power
And Duckville could not understand
Why swans on them turned sour.

By this time, Duckville was a mess —
The young ducks had gone mad.
They stole and laughed at truth and law;
They’d gone completely bad.

The hens were selling loco weed
In every nasty den.
But ducks who dared to mention this
Were labelled “ANTI-HEN.”

The hens all preached of “Tolerance”;
They invoked the “Golden Rule.”
But they subsidised the indigent,
The greedy and the fool.

At last the very dumbest ducks
Began to smell a rat.
“This Mayor is no good!” they cried,
“And we will soon fix that!”

But the hens had planned for even this
— A candidate they had,
Whom even wise old ducks believed
Just never could be bad.

This hen-tool duck had whipped the geese;
A soldier duck was he.
Although the hens had set him up,
The ducks all thought him free.

This hen-tool got elected
Through ignorance and greed,
Through hennish lies in press and speech,
And bribes of “chicken feed.”

The hens now kicked the ducks around
Without a blush of shame,
Until the Mayor ran the town
In nothing else but name.

They pumped the swimming pond all dry;
They taught the ducks to crow.
While duckish numbers dwindled,
The hens began to grow.

The hens stirred up the happy crows
From out the piney wood
To fight and mix and marry ducks
In the name of “Brotherhood.”

Lincoln Rockwell

Male Genius - Edward Dutton

Commentary by Simon Sheppard

An enlightening talk by Ed Dutton on intelligence, sex differences and the influence of feminism on truth and science

Audio: Newton, Male Genius and Women in Academia

Most browsers will play this MP3 file, or right-click to save

https://www.heretical.com/sgs-2026/duttonmg.mp3

This excellent talk was extracted from a longer interview Dutton did with a Barbadian (?) gentleman. The latter had an insufferable and sometimes unintelligible voice, but neglecting that, the interview had so much good information that it was deemed worthy of editing and reproducing here.

Among its revelations is that at one point Oxford University decided to admit women, on equal terms, then relented because of its adverse effects. Contrast that with today, when women comprise the majority in our universities. With great precision Dutton describes the origins and consequences of female influence in academia.

An interesting topic raised is hyper-empathy, as should be expected in a super-feminine environment. Often the terms sympathy and empathy are confused, but sympathy involves consideration and caring for others, while being empathetic is the ability to perceive others’ emotional and psychological state. For example, sociopaths* can use their empathic abilities to determine what someone wants to hear, perceiving their unstated motivations and insecurities, then coldly manipulate them using that knowledge. That is empathy without sympathy. Hyper-empathy results in exaggerated or false attribution of motives and intentions to common signals. Just looking at someone can be given all sorts of wild interpretations.

* Confusion also exists, at least in informal use, between sociopath and psychopath. A common-sense distinction can be that even as the sociopath possesses psychopathic traits, he stops short of breaking the law, while the psychopath with his lack of conscience commits crimes to satisfy his ego and secure other benefits.

Dutton’s particular field in psychology seems to be intelligence and he will surely be aware that although average male and female intelligence is similar, male variation is far greater. Also male and female brains are different: the width of the corpus collosum and disparity in the balance of grey and white matter have often been quoted, but I am not up to date on this. In the unedited interview Dutton opined on the weak correlation between homosexuality and intelligence, also religion and black slavery, topics perhaps of special interest to his interviewer. He fell foul of a common failing of academics, that of straying outside their field, in this case making rather too definite pronouncements about schizophrenia which I suspect a psychiatrist would question, or at least seriously qualify.

Another trap into which people can fall is to fit things into the frame of their own particular speciality. Often genius is defined as exceptionally high intelligence. I don’t think this is right: in other words, and to the contrary, there is a less than perfect correlation between exceptional intelligence and genius. A university friend once told me, “The most important thing I’ve learnt at university is how stupid intelligent people can be.” It may be that some aspects of genius can’t be quantified, no matter how hard psychologists try. The best description of a genius I have heard is “Someone who changes our way of looking at the world.”

Of the remainder, I am somewhat doubtful of Dutton’s explanation of the origins of patriarchy, in particular, that males preferentially selecting religious females as mates has been a significant evolutionary influence. For a start, as Darwin said, “It is the female which usually exerts a choice.”

[In modern time, perhaps, but even than, by some coincidence the female usually exerts choice of more powerful man. 😉VB]

 Moreover, incredible as it may seem, people really believe the gumph they see on screen and TV featuring some athletic woman single-handedly fighting off three soldiers or whatever. Reality is very different. For the entirety of our phylogeny, until very recently, a man had absolute authority to strike his wife or children if he felt it necessary. This may not have been resorted to very often, but the implicit threat was always there, in accord, I might add, with the natural order of things.

A significant omission is at the end, in discussing the decline in male testosterone levels. Dutton fails to mention the many potential biological origins of this, such as effluent from the contraceptive pill and constant exposure to plastics, to name but two. However the listener is reminded of the profound nature of this hormonal change, undoubtedly having enormous societal effects.

Such matters aside, Dutton has earned my admiration for his erudition and fortitude in exploring these topics. No doubt if his conclusions were in accord with the prevailing feminist narrative he would be favoured with much greater prominence. Originally with filedate 22 Sept. 2024 and 75 minutes long, the talk has been reduced to 25 minutes in ten sections separated by a very brief pause. The sections are as follows:

Male-female differences in intelligence;

Instinct and intelligence are inversely correlated, 0:18;

Isaac Newton, cognitive deficits, autism, low empathy, 0:55;

Undermining genius, declining intelligence, 3:40;

Oxford University, males and females working together, genius, 10:20;

Autism, extreme male-female brains, empathy, 14:29;

Evolutionary origins of empathy and patriarchy, 15:38;

Male and female hierarchies, 19:55;

Physical attractiveness, "the mind [brain] is 84% of the genome", 21:06;

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***

A university friend once told me, “The most important thing I’ve learnt at university is how stupid intelligent people can be.” 

Dutton has earned my admiration for ...

***

Mr Dutton, in desire to proof his thesis that fasting lowers intelligence, support himself with experiments which shows that results of hungry children in mathematical tests were below the standard. Alternative interpretation, that hungry children prefer to think about food than mathematics, somehow doesn't occur to him.😉 VB]

My Own Obituary - Simon Guy Sheppard

‘In Memoriam’

In March 2026 an editorial in Heritage & Destiny, the magazine I wrote for, unpaid, for several years, reported that I was dead. This perverse assertion inspired a response, giving me the opportunity and rare luxury of writing my own obituary! When it became clear that a retraction would not be forthcoming, I was encouraged to post this online. Only the tribute at the end, though true to actual events, is invented.

Simon Sheppard, whose mysterious death took place within the pages of H&D, was a controversial figure in Britain’s political microcosm. Indeed Mark Cotterill, editor of that magazine, proclaimed him to be the only person in Britain to challenge the establishment head-on, particularly regarding the Holocaust narrative.

Sheppard was born in Yorkshire during a period of post-war optimism but his fate as a ‘ruined son’ was sealed by the departure of his father at age three. With a mentally unstable mother he was described during an early police encounter as a “crazy mixed-up kid,” walking out of and being expelled from various schools. After finishing his education and gaining electronics qualifications at college, he relocated to London to work in the music business. Moving through several recording studios, including a spell in Paris (meeting Andy Warhol at a society event attended by Princess Grace of Monaco shortly before her death), he eventually left a job as a recording engineer to study mathematics at the University of Sussex. His entertaining ‘Music Biz Memoirs’ are still online on the heretical.com website.

After his degree, Sheppard started a computer organisation and shortly thereafter began designing circuits and writing software assisted by Dutch fellow squatters in the centre of Amsterdam. When that business died, a skunk works was formed and this led to the publication in 1994 of two medical papers. These together have earned him over two hundred academic citations.

Sheppard’s path to controversy began with his next course of investigation, a ‘back to basics’ approach to human sexuality, the Dutch environment being especially propitious in this regard. The seeds of this focus had been laid during lectures at Sussex on Sex Differences and a late lecture by one of the foremost biologists of our time, John Maynard Smith. Darwin was also a strong influence, particularly his emphasis on the evolutionary role of sexual selection. Sheppard’s series of experiments on the streets of Amsterdam is documented in his magnum opus, The Tyranny of Ambiguity.

Terms are used such as ‘brainwashing’ and ‘emotional manipulation’ but the proper description, Sheppard believed, is ‘conditioning.’ It was the discovery of the psychological mechanisms which can distort our perception of history and turn normality on its head which truly set him at odds with the mainstream.

Returning to Britain in early 1996, there followed several encounters with the State, at one point sharing a cell with a half-Egyptian who admitted to having spent years robbing rural telephone boxes with the aid of a car jack. He had never been caught and was serving two weeks for driving while disqualified, while Sheppard was just starting a nine-month sentence for distributing a leaflet. He also spent five weeks in prison for a H&D article local librarians had taken exception to before being granted immediate release following an appeal to the Parole Board.

His first psychology paper was published in 2014 but Sheppard regarded his novel approach, Procedural Analysis, as his life-work. Indeed he had been told several times that he would be famous after his death. He said that it was frustration at the lack of notice of his work that inspired his more provocative leaflets and publications. This ultimately led to calamity, as a mistake during an experiment capable of bypassing the controlled media and becoming world-famous allowed a feminist police detective and a Jewish judge to neutralise him in many people’s eyes.

Time will tell what Sheppard’s legacy will be. At the time of his reported demise he was occupied with submitting his third medical paper and two new psychology papers which, as an independent researcher amid stifling academic conformity, was practically a full-time job. Perhaps the most telling of the tributes he has received came from North Yorkshire Police, who said “We spent many hours following Sheppard around the countryside while he fed mints to horses. It was time well spent in our book.”

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Funny Money

 

Simon Sheppard explores basic economics

A story is told of the German inter-war era, 1921-1923, when hyper-inflation raged. The Reichmark had so devalued that the banknotes which comprised a worker’s weekly pay had become too heavy to carry, so one employee took a wheelbarrow to collect his wages. Stopping on his way home to buy some vegetables, the man parked his wheelbarrow outside the shop and went inside. He emerged a few minutes later to find a pile of banknotes on the pavement. A thief had stolen the wheelbarrow and left the cash!

There are pictures of children during this period using bundles of banknotes as toy building bricks. The rate of devaluation had got so bad that customers at a restaurant would negotiate the cost before eating, because by the end of the meal the price would have risen. Similar hyper-inflation occurred more recently in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), where it became cheaper to use banknotes for toilet paper and toilet paper was almost impossible to obtain. A bus fare from work in the evening cost more than it had that morning.

Such are the effects of hyper-inflation. But how does it arise? To understand this we need to recall the original definitions of the words we use, because many words have been redefined to no longer mean what they are supposed to mean. While many have heard of the hyper-inflationary periods in history such as the time of John Law in France and the German period quoted above, even many Economics graduates are unacquainted with the basic financial concepts detailed here.

For a start, prices do not inflate, they increase. The original and proper definition of inflation is an expansion of the money supply. An increase in prices is merely a consequence of that. An ‘inflation rate’ (price increases) of 5% annually means that the people’s savings are worth 5% less – buy 5% less goods – at the end of the year than at the beginning. Prices have not gone up so much as the value of the money has gone down. Money has been created, added to the supply and that has diluted the money already in circulation.

How is creating money even possible? Because what we commonly call money is not really money, not any more. Up until 1914, a one-pound coin was called a sovereign and made of gold. British coins in circulation such as florins and half-crowns really did contain silver. Over the pond, the dollar was originally a fixed weight of silver, with silver having an established price ratio to gold. Containing precious metals, these coins were real money, with inherent value. As a last resort the coins could be melted down and used as a source of the valuable metals they contained.

Banknotes began as receipts for deposits of gold and silver. Nowadays what we call “money” is not real money at all. That is how the supply of it can be increased by simply printing it, or more usually, making an entry in a ledger. Debts and credits are created with the press of computer keys, which is only possible because we have ‘fiat currency.’ The word fiat is derived from the Latin factum or ‘thing done’ which basically means that the value of the currency is what the government says it is. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the currency is that the government accepts it in payment of taxes. A better word for the promissory notes which the government issues might be scrip.*

Governments cannot create gold and silver out of thin air so the temptation to employ fiat currency becomes irresistible, especially when they want to finance a war or further a particular agenda. In fact almost all of government power now derives from the ability to create “money” out of nothing. Cash to pay for foreign wars, police, prisons, propaganda and so on is effectively created out of thin air and without having to ask the taxpayer to pay for it all. The power to create scrip enables the government to assume responsibilities and take powers unto itself for which it has neither mandate nor authority.

Governments have succumbed to the temptations of fiat currency and have run up debts so huge that they defy comprehension. Some years ago it was revealed that the interest paid on the UK national debt was £100 million per day, and the time is approaching when the tax raised will not even cover the interest on the debt. More borrowing will be required simply to service the debt. Governments are so profligate that money is borrowed to give away in foreign aid.

To appreciate the enormous sums involved, consider that £500 in new £50 notes is roughly 1mm thick. Then a million pounds would be a pile about 2 metres high. A trillion (1012) pounds would be two million metres or approximately 1,250 miles high. It is inconceivable that the trillions in UK and US debt will ever be repaid.

Negative interest rates turn reality upside-down in a different way: a lender pays the borrower to use his money. Such lunacy can only exist in the bizarro world of central banks and artificial currency creation. Interest rates express the amount of risk and the value of time, so a negative interest rate says: “The risk is zero and time is worth less than nothing.” Negative interest rates were openly declared by the Japanese central bank and some European banks, but any interest rate which is less than the rate at which prices increase is effectively negative.

The creation of scrip, that is inflating the money supply, is really a hidden form of taxation. Each iteration of this process reduces the value of the notes already in circulation. Hence in the 1960s an ordinary working man could buy a house with a ten-year mortgage; his wife did not need to work. Now, both man and wife must work and commit to a 25 or 30-year mortgage. While we have wondrous new amenities like mobile phones, the internet, big screens and a countless number of TV channels, our actual wealth has fallen.

Neither is the creation of money confined to central banks. Even high street banks routinely create credit in the system known as fractional reserve banking. In this, typically 10% of a bank’s deposits are held in reserve while the other 90% is issued as interest-bearing loans. The 90% loaned will shortly find its way back to a bank, and that bank will itself only keep 10% in reserve. After only six iterations of this, a bank has been able to make loans of five-fold the original deposit. The only way to avoid this circular system is to borrow money from a bank and store it, for example under a mattress. The fractional reserve system relies on the depositors not all asking for their money back at the same time, which is why a bank run is so disastrous: it is not that the money is tied up in property or other illiquid assets, the secret is that the money does not exist at all.

For hundreds of years in Britain usury was forbidden by the Church. The original definition of usury is making money from money, which is what interest is. Money is not a good, it is a measure. But distorting the measure has such great advantages that the temptation to do so is overwhelming. Today usury is rampant and practically every word of importance has had its meaning corrupted. In addition to public debt there are insolvent pension funds and massive private debts such as corporate bonds. Calls, puts and all manner of derivative trades are made in a highly leveraged financial system. Several quadrillion (1015) dollars exist in derivative contracts, much of it apparently on Deutsche Bank’s books.

This situation is unsustainable; while it is possible to conjure fiat currency out of thin air, it is not possible to create wealth out of nothing. Wealth so produced is as notional as the “money” which purchased it. Sooner or later the bill will come due.

In past times the conditions which led to hyper-inflation were limited to one country at a time. France, Germany, the US, Argentina and Zimbabwe have all experienced financial upheaval at one time. In the present day however, the conditions which give rise to hyper-inflation are occurring simultaneously all over the world. Many countries are engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’ as they seek to exploit the advantages of creating currency while it retains some value. For example, the Swiss central bank bought 5% of Apple Corp., which it achieved simply by creating Swiss Francs for that purpose.

Additionally, any significant failure could start a domino effect and cause the entire financial system to crumble. Proponents of sound money are astonished that this unsustainable state of affairs has lasted as long as it has, but there are ‘plunge protection teams’ and all manner of manipulations taking place behind the scenes to keep the financial system limping along. Salient among these is artificially low interest rates. The normal means of arresting an inflationary spiral is to raise interest rates, as Paul Volker did during the Reagan years, but the debts are now so huge that a significant increase in interest rates would lead to mass bankruptcy.

We have been conditioned by a steady diet of Hollywood disaster films to think of collapse as a momentous affair, following a critical event such an asteroid hitting the earth or a volcano erupting. It is certainly true that crisis can occur suddenly, but some events do not feature daring heroics and dramatic adventures for a thrilling ninety-minute cinema showing. A character in a Hemingway novel described going bankrupt in two stages: “Gradually and then suddenly.” Financial collapse is likely to be less of an event than a process, and that process is already underway.

* Scrip describes subscription receipts, provisional or supplementary certificates issued to existing shareholders. On the basis that we are shareholders in our nation’s wealth, the definition stands.

Peter Schiff relates how his father Irwin Schiff (who died in prison as a tax rebel) compared the change from gold-backed banknotes to fiat currency as follows: depositing a coat at a cloakroom desk and receiving a ticket saying ‘IOU One Coat.’ Then later taking the ticket back and the cloakroom clerk scribbles out the ‘IOU’ and hands back the ticket, keeping the coat.

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The Signal - Guy de Maupassant

The petite marchioness of Rennedon was still asleep in her snug and scented bedroom. In her big, soft, low bed, under cambric fine as lace, light and caressing as a kiss, she was lying alone and peaceful, deep and happy in a divorcée’s sleep.

Voices woke her, raised in the little blue drawing-room, and she recognized her dear friend, the petite baroness of Grangerie, arguing with the chambermaid, who was barring the door of her mistress. So the petite marchioness rose, drew the bolts, turned the lock, opened the door, and pushed her head through, just her blonde head, half-hidden under a cloud of hair.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘Why are you here so early? It’s not even nine o’clock!’

The petite baroness, pale, nervous, upset, replied:

‘I must speak to you. A dreadful thing has happened.’

‘Well, come in, then, ma chérie.’

The baroness entered, the two women embraced, and the petite marchioness got back into bed while the chambermaid opened the windows, letting in air and light. When the maid had left, Madame de Rennedon said:

‘Go on, then, tell me what’s happened.’

Madame Grangerie started to cry, shedding those lovely transparent tears that make women even more attractive. She stammered, careful not to rub her eyes in case they reddened: ‘Oh! ma chère, it’s dreadful, dreadful, what’s happened to me! I didn’t sleep a minute last night, not a minute, you know, not a single minute. Look, feel my heart, see how it’s beating.’

And, taking her friend’s hand, she pressed it to her breast, that round firm shield of a woman’s heart, so satisfying to men that they often don’t bother with what’s beneath it. And yes, her heart was beating very hard. The baroness began to tell her story:

It happened yesterday... about four o’clock... or half past four, I can’t be sure. You know my flat well, you know that my little drawing-room, where I always sit, overlooks the Rue Saint-Lazare from the first floor. And you know how I love to sit at the window and watch the world go by. It’s so gay, the district around the station, so bustling, so alive... And I love that! Well, yesterday, I was sitting on the little chair that I’ve had put in the window-recess. The window was open and I was letting my thoughts wander, just enjoying the fresh air. You’ll remember how fine it was, yesterday!

Suddenly I notice that, on the other side of the street, there’s another woman at her window, a woman in red. I was in mauve myself, you know, wearing my pretty mauve dress. I didn’t know this woman, some new tenant, only there a month, and because it’s rained for a month, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her before. But I realized suddenly that she was a tart. At first I was disgusted and shocked that she was there at her window like me, and then, bit by bit, I found it amusing to watch her. She was leaning on her elbows, watching out for men, and men were looking up at her, all or almost all of them. You’d have said that they were alerted by something as they approached the house, that they smelt something the way dogs smell game, because they raised their heads suddenly and very quickly exchanged a glance with her, like a kind of Masonic question-and-answer.

Her glance said: ‘Do you want it?’

Theirs answered: ‘Too busy!’ or: ‘Another time!’ or: ‘No money!’ or: ‘How dare you, you hussy!’ It was the eyes of respectable family men, making that last reply.

Well, you can’t imagine how droll it was to watch her having her fun, or rather plying her trade! Sometimes she suddenly closed the window and I saw a man going in through the door. She had reeled him in, that one, like an angler taking a fish. Then I started to check my watch. They stayed from twelve to twenty minutes, never more. She really fascinated me in the end, this spider-woman. And she wasn’t bad-looking either, you know.

I asked myself, how does she make herself so easily understood, so quickly, so completely? Does she make a movement with her head or hand as she looks at them?

So I lifted my opera-glasses to see how she did it. Oh! it was quite simple: first a glance, then a smile, then a very small movement of the head that asked: ‘Do you want to come up?’ But so small, so casual, so discreet, that it took a lot of skill to carry off like that.

And I asked myself: Could I do it as well as her, that tiny jerk of the head, both challenging and charming – because it was very charming, the way she did it.

So I went to try it in front of my mirror. Ma chère, I did it better than she did, much better! I was delighted, and I returned to sit at the window.

She wasn’t hooking anybody now, the poor girl, nobody at all. No, she was having no luck at all. How terrible it must be to earn money that way! Terrible, but entertaining too, because, you know, some of them aren’t so bad, the men you see in the street.

Now all of them were passing on my side, not a single one on hers. The sun had moved, you see. They came along one after another, young men, old men, dark, fair, grey, white.

I saw some very nice ones among them, very nice ones indeed, ma chère, much better than my husband, and than yours, your ex-husband that is, since your divorce. Now you can please yourself.

Well, I said to myself, if I made the signal to them, would they understand me, even though I’m a respectable woman? And suddenly I was seized by an insane longing to make the signal, oh such a longing, like one of those pregnant women get... a terrible longing, you know, one of those longings... that you just can’t resist! I have them sometimes like that, you know. It’s so stupid, isn’t it? I think we’re very like monkeys, we women. Someone once told me – it was a doctor who said it – that a monkey’s brain is very like ours. We always have to imitate somebody. We imitate our husbands, while we love them, in the first month after the marriage, and then our lovers after that, our friends, our confessors, when they’re good ones. We adopt their ways of thinking, their ways of talking, their words, their gestures, everything. It’s stupid.

Anyway, when I’m very tempted to do something, I always do it.

So I said to myself, let’s see, I’ll try it on one man, only on one, just to see. What could happen to me, after all? Nothing! We’ll exchange a smile, and that will be it, I’ll never see him again. And if I do see him again, he’ll not recognize me, and if he does recognize me, I’ll just deny that I know him. So I start looking out for the right man. I wanted one who was good-looking, very good-looking. Suddenly I see a big fair one, a very handsome young man. You know how I like the fair ones.

I look at him. He looks at me. I smile, he smiles; I make the gesture, oh so subtly, so very subtly. He nods at once and my God, he comes straight in, ma chérie! He comes right in by the main entrance of the flats! You can’t imagine what I felt right then! I thought that I’d go crazy! Oh! what a fright! Just think, he’d speak to the servants, to Joseph, who’s completely devoted to my husband! Joseph would certainly believe that I’d known this stranger for a long time. What could I do, tell me, what could I do? And he’d be ringing the bell very shortly, in the next instant! What could I do, tell me? I thought that it would be best to run and meet him, tell him that it was a mistake, beg him to go away. He’d have pity on a woman, on a poor helpless woman! So I rushed to the door and I opened it just as he was lifting his hand to the bell. I stammered, completely beside myself: ‘Please go away, monsieur, please go away, you’ve made a big mistake, I’m a respectable woman, a married woman! It’s all a mistake, a dreadful mistake, I thought you were one of my friends, you look so much like him. Have pity on me, monsieur!’

So he bursts out laughing, ma chère, and he says:

‘Well, darling! You know, I’ve heard that one before. You’re married, so you’ll charge two louis instead of one. Don’t worry, you’ll get them. Come on, show me the way.’

And in he pushed. He closed the door, and as I stood there, terrified, in front of him, he embraced me, took me by the waist and led me back into the drawing-room, whose door I’d left open.

Once he was in, he had a look around, just like an auctioneer, and said: ‘Well, this isn’t bad, your set-up, it’s very smart. You must be short of cash at the moment to play the window game!’ And me, I started to beg again: ‘Oh! monsieur, please go away, please go away! My husband will be back soon! He’ll be back very soon, he always arrives at about this time! I swear to you that you’ve made a mistake!’

And he replied calmly: ‘Come on, beautiful, enough of that. If your husband comes back, I’ll give him hundred sous to pop across the way for a drink.’

Then he sees Raoul’s photograph on the mantelpiece and asks: ‘Is that him, then, your husband?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s him.’

‘He doesn’t look up to much. And that girl there, who is it? One of your friends?’

It was your photograph, ma chère, you know that one of you in a ball-gown. I didn’t know what I was saying any more, I just stammered, ‘Yes, it’s one of my friends.’

‘She’s very nice. You’ll have to introduce us.’

And right then the clock started to strike five o’clock, and Raoul comes back every day at half past! If he came back before the other left, well, think of it! So... so... I lost my head... completely lost it... I thought... I thought... what... what the best way... was... of... of... getting rid of him as... as quickly as possible... The sooner it was over with... you understand... and... and well... well... since he had to have it... he had to, ma chère... and he wouldn’t have left without it... Well, I... I... I bolted the door of the drawing-room... And that was it.

When she stopped speaking, the petite marchioness of Rennedon burst out laughing, laughing madly, her head buried in her pillow, making the whole bed shake. When she had recovered a little, she asked:

‘And... and... he was a good-looking lad?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then what are you complaining about?’

‘But... but... look, ma chère, it’s like this... he said... that he’d come back tomorrow... at the same time. And I’m... I’m out of my mind with worry... You’ve no idea how determined he is... and how strong-willed... So what can I do, tell me, what on earth can I do?’

The petite marchioness sat up in her bed to think it over, then she said abruptly:

‘Have him arrested.’

The petite baroness was astonished. She stammered:

‘How? What do you mean? What are you thinking of? Have him arrested? On what pretext?’

‘Oh, it’s quite simple! You go to the chief of police and tell him that some man has been following you about for three months, that he was brazen enough to come to your flat yesterday, that he threatened to come again tomorrow, so you’re asking for the protection of the law. You’ll be given two policemen to arrest him.’

‘But, ma chère, if he spills the beans...’

‘He won’t be believed, you silly thing, after you’ve got your story straight with the chief of police. You’ll be the credible one, you’re a respectable woman, without a stain on your name.’

‘Oh! I wouldn’t dare.’

‘You’ll have to, ma chère, or you’re in big trouble.’

‘But just think what he’ll do... he’ll say what I got up to... when he’s arrested.’

‘So what? You’ll have plenty of witnesses for your good character and you can get a court order against him.’

‘What kind of court order?’

‘He’ll have to pay damages. In a case like this, you have to be merciless!’

‘Oh, yes, speaking of damages.... there’s something that’s worrying me a lot.... a lot, you know... He left me... two louis... on the mantelpiece.’

‘Two louis?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was all?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not much. I’d have been humiliated by that. Well?’

‘Well, what should I do with the money?’

The petite marchioness hesitated a few seconds, then answered in a serious voice:

‘Ma chère... You’ll have to... you’ll have to... buy a little gift for your husband... It would only be just, after what’s gone on.’