Comic Relief

Image credit: Peter of England's Youtube channel

If you want some comic relief, try the following folks. First, there is Peter of England's Youtube Channel. He's still at it, showing how the evil system is going to collapse any day now. Naturally he asks for donations and money for his web seminars. Strangely, no "Re"s are accepted, only worthless fiat money.

Another dim duo is the two guys behind the fake "common law court" -- whose last meeting (seriously) was in a pub between a Tesco and a bait-and-tackle shop, rather appropriately. They want 20,000 GBP. Why? To "fight the system", of course.

Here is the court's web page (they won all their cases against everybody, of course) and here is the qualoos! thread about their adventures. one of the two founders, Robert Sproul, explains everything on Youtube...

Yet the  two blokes who established this "court", Sproul and Smith, despite declare right on its website its decisions are "final and not subject to appeal" (so there!) are on trial for extortion, having tried to "collect" million in their court's "judgments" from people they dislike by sending them threatening letters. Amazingly enough, that didn't work. 

Facebook Conspiracy Theories

Credit: "Know Your Meme"

In the last few posts we noted the views of conspiracy theorist / scammer Peter of England, the seemingly truly insane "Baron" David Ward. We noted previously the action of many other conspiracy theorist 'Freemen' and similar persons, who think there is a massive conspiracy to hide the fact the government has no power to tax them.

Conspiracy theorists can be dangerous: "freemen" like John Paterson, a vile antisemite who thinks everything he dislikes is the fault of the Jews, can (say many groups) engage in terrorism. He is mentioned here not because he is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist per se, but because sued JOHN PATERSON, his government strawman corporation, for 10 billion pounds. As is so often, the belief in one conspiracy (the 'strawman' and 'birth bond' ones) leads to belief in others (here, the perennial favorite 'Jews control the world'). What would Mr. Paterson do with the money, considering that it is all worthless fiat currency, is rather unclear. But at least the Jews won't have it, so that it some consolation.

As you can see, they all use Facebook to spread their beliefs. Why is Facebook (and similar social media) such a haven for conspiracy theorists? The main reason is confirmation bias. As one repeats lies or stories to oneself and only hears the same lies from similarly-minded people, no wonder it becomes a truth in one's eyes, and all contrary evidence is dismissed as "false flag misinformation" and the like.

The Internet and social media did not invent this phenomenon, of course, as every cult in history attests. Conspiracy theory belief is in fact much more prevalent than commonly supposed, with people all across the policial, ethnic, and educational spectrum believing in conspiracies.The difference being more, research shows, in the exact conspiracy believed in, but not in the conspiracy theory mindset itself. But with social media allowing direct "producer to consumer" (so to speak) spread of conspiratorial ideas, people can -- and do -- surround themselves only with those they agree with, those who know THE TRUTH(TM), and literally block out all dissenting information.

No wonder conspiracy theories on social media proliferate.

Peter of England, Flat-Earther

Credit: Peter of England's facebook page, Aug. 20th, 2016

Y'all are not going to believe this, but Peter of England, or more accurately Allan Peter Smith, has finally found the real culprits behind all the evil things going on in the world. It is BIG GLOBE: the dark evil forces that convinced us the Earth is a sphere, when THE TRUTH(TM) is that it is flat. There is a video saying so right on youtube, so it must be true!

It is THEM(TM), notes his Facebook post, who are the real reason justice does not exist, politics are unfair, elections are rigged, Hillary Clinton will (apparently) die before Jan. 2017, and, oh, incidentally, nobody will accept his fake bank's "checks", nor his fake "credit cards", nor his imaginary "Re" currency -- not even himself. (Yes, for some reason, Peter demands his followers pay him in Sterling, not in "Re").

Still, there is no doubt the "Re", Peter's invented currency, is a good investment. In these troubled times, it remained steady against all major currencies: it is still worth exactly as much as it was worth six month or a year ago: 0.0000000 Sterling, 0.0000000 USD, 0.0000000 Euro, etc. You just can't argue with that track record.

I suppose his little scam has just about ran its course, and even his most dim-witted, naive, or desperate ex-followers had finally realized the WeRe "checks" and "credit cards" are worthless, and Peter is just a two-bit scammer. Peter decided, it seems, to go out in a blaze of glory.

Either that, or the "Flat Earth" schtick is what con men call the "blow off" -- ending the scam once it was milked dry, by getting rid of the marks (victims), preferably without them even realizing that they were scammed. Perhaps Peter is trying to get his victims to believe that his "bank" failed because he is insane, getting them to pity him, instead of realizing the truth: that he was, of course, out to scam them from the start.

P.S.

So, is the Earth flat? Short answer: NO. Long answer: more interesting than you might expect.

Is Peter Doing this on Purpose?

The old story -- whether true or not, I have no idea -- is that the English in the Nigerian scam emails is deliberately bad, so as to weed out those who are too alert to fall for this obvious scam. It seems Peter of England is doing the same thing, only in his videos, not his emails (not that they are much better).

He just published a video of his WeRe "bank card" on YouTube:

But -- whether deliberately or not -- as the Quatloos! posters found out within a few hours (all the images below from the Quatloos! thread here), his "card reader" is in fact an off-the-shelf machine from a company called "onliner" that uses a key fob (keychain-held activator) for financial transactions of various sorts, apparently as a sort of credit-card-on-key:

What is more, Peter can be seen palming just such a key fob in the video in which he claims the machine in the video is "reading" his WeRe card:

How do we know for sure it's the key fob, and not the WeRe "bank" "card", that is activating the "card reader"? Well, quite apart form the fact that the machine Peter is using is not a card reader but one intended to be activated by key fobs, the WeRe "card" has a different name on it, the machine "reading" the card shows the name Martina Stein -- which is the default name used as a "demo" by the key fob reading machine on their own web site -- as also seen in the image above. 

Not that someone would expect a card from a "bank" that, according to Peter himself, uses magical "energy units" and that presenting a check for payment in Re "currency" automatically will pay the debts because "of the law of conservation of energy" to actually work. But one would expect some more effort. 

Here is a youtube video that explains the entire fake in detail:

Ah well. I suppose his idea is that if you watch that video and actually think his card works, you are ripe for the taking. 

Peter of England, and the WeRe "Bank" Scam

Credit: Peter of England's Facebook Page

Peter Smith, a.k.a. Alan Peter Michael Smith and, most famously, as Peter of England, is either insane, or else a very clever scammer. His audacious (one must admit) scam is to open his own "bank" -- the so-called "WeRe Bank".

The idea behind the WeRe "bank" is the old 'banks create money out of thin air' story, only this time Peter took it one step further and added, 'then so can I!'. Essentially, you send him a promissory note for 150,000 pounds, thus "creating" assets in the WeRe "bank", and in return receive a checkbook for your new "account". You can now, according to Peter, pay all your debts (esp. mortgage and council taxes) in WeRe checks.

This would make some economic (if not practical or legal) sense if the promissory note were real - that is, if you actually took out a loan for 150,000 pounds, got the money, and used it to pay your other creditors, although why you would use a shady character like Peter of England to do so and not a reputable institution is another issue. Peter's selling point, however, is that the mere fact that you signed a promissory note creates 150,000 pounds even if you never pay back a penny. So it is a "promissory note" that from the start you promise not to pay.

There seems to be a small flaw here somewhere - to wit, Peter "forgot" that the only reason real mortgages or other loans are treated as having value is because the lender actually pays the money back over time. The mortgage crisis (which the likes of Peter love to go on and on about) was caused, inter alia, by the fact that mortgages were given to people who the banks should have known would not be able to pay them back. Once that became clear, those mortgages became worthless, as bad loans.

If Peter's 'banks create money magically' theory were true, there would have been no mortgage crisis, since whether or not the lender actually pays back the mortgage would have been irrelevant. What's more, even if Peter were correct and the banks did create money for nothing, scamming everybody, it would still be morally wrong to do the same - just like the fact that some people make money by extortion or blackmail hardly justifies one doing it.

After all, doesn't it logically follow from Peter's own two claims:

1) 'The banks are scamming you'
2) 'I, Peter of England, can do the same thing the banks do'

that

3) 'I, Peter of England, am scamming you'?

In other words, it's a something-for-nothing scam of the usual type, which is seen on his own forum, the aptly-named (in its something-for-nothing intention) get out of debt free (GOODF) forum. Needless to say, as the quatloos! thread on the subject (150 pages!) notes, it doesn't work. Peter's shady past and lack of license to run a bank aside, the WeRe "bank" has no assets except for the worthless "promissory notes", nobody accepts the worthless "checks", and those who attempted to pay anything with them in the real world found out it doesn't work in short order, as the "checks" bounced.

Peter has a different explanation for why it doesn't work. Naturally, it's all an evil conspiracy involving everybody in the world except Peter and his "clients". Here is his latest Facebook post (see above for a link to his Facebook page), about the REAL MEANING(tm) of the recent meeting between American leaders and 'president Xi' (that is, Xi Jinping of China):

Roman Number Xi (XI) = 11 = President Xi

President 11 = President XIAIIB = Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank = Solomonic Kabbalistic Numerology encoded as follows:

-A = Aleph but can be Tav so 1 or 22

B = bet 2 or 21so 

AIIB = 22112 for "Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank" read as follows: This is a direct numerological clone of the 11 Symbol of Twin Towers, 11 Downing Street, Armistice Date of WW1 11/11/11

...and so on (and on and on, as one can see in his Facebook page).

When he is not discovering the REAL MEANING(tm) of everything, he is threatening his perceived enemies (the banks, most of the world's famous people, Quatloos! posters, etc.) with everything from lawsuits to arrests and summary executions for being part of the worldwide conspiracy that keeps the people in chains, presumably by not allowing them to magically eliminate their debts by saying Shazam! - or whatever the magic words that make you debt-free are supposed to be. There is some disagreement among the GOODFy, or perhaps GOOFy, community, whether those words are 'Magna Carta', 'accepted for value', 'unilateral contract', 'X of the family Y', 'wet ink signature', 'flesh and blood person, not a strawman individual', or something else.

One wonders if Peter is a scammer pretending to be insane, or truly insane. The evidence, I think, is inconclusive: on the one hand, he took a lot of naive people's money for nothing; on the other hand, he has a long record of similar (and even less logical) statements, all of them having the paranoid's mark of, as Aldous Huxley put it, 'living in a world of terrifying significance', where everything has deep, secret meaning, in this case 'Solomonic Kabbalistic Nuremological' one, whatever that is.