by Jerry Ahern
Tim said, “I can’t see how that suction could be real.”
John agreed, “I don’t think it ever really happens. Frankly, I never noticed a difference in the difficulty of withdrawing a knife with a blood groove versus one without. My thought is if your knife can cut its way in, it can just as easily cut its way out, with or without a blood groove. Now, to the second theory, I am going to change the term from ‘blood groove’ to a ‘fuller.’ This one has a grain of truth to it. While a fuller does play a functional role on a short knife, it is really insignificant. I think the fuller plays more of a strictly decorative role on knives or swords under two feet long. It has what I call ‘the GDI’ factor.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
Rourke laughed, “It stands for Guys Dig It. They look really cool and dangerous, most of the time whatever has the GDI going for it really doesn’t have much function; on a smaller knife the blood grove is like that. On a bigger blade, however, it stiffens and lightens the blade.”
“Does a lighter blade feel stiffer?” Jack asked.
Rourke nodded, “I think it just feels stiffer to the user who is waving it around—because it’s stiffer for its weight. Years ago, I read a report by a twentieth century master bladesmith named Jim Hrisoulas; I think he explained it well. He said a blood groove potentially could serve two functions. You see, if you are forging a blade with a fuller, that actually widens the blade, so you use less material than you would if you forged an unfullered blade. If you’re doing stock removal, the blade would also be lighter, as you would be removing the material instead of leaving it there.”
“It does stiffen the blade. He said that in an unfullered blade, you only have a ‘single’ center spine. This is especially true in terms of the flattened diamond cross section common to most unfullered double-edged blades. This cross section would be rather ‘whippy’ on a blade that is close to three feet long. Fullering produces two ‘spines’ on the blade, one on each side of the fuller, where the edge bevels and comes in contact with the fuller. This stiffens the blade; the difference between a non-fullered blade and a fullered one is quite remarkable.”
“He also said that when combined with proper tapering, proper heat treating and tempering, a fullered blade will, without a doubt, be anywhere from twenty to thirty-five percent lighter than a non-fullered blade and without any sacrifice of strength or blade integrity.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The next afternoon, accompanied by Rubenstein, Croenberg entered John Rourke’s home with a slight bow and click of his heels. He produced a silken bag with a bottle inside and he said, “I brought a bottle of very old Remy Martin V.S.O.P.—a brandy I have saved for a special occasion. Being here with you two certainly qualifies. Do you have a snifter?”
“No, unfortunately I don’t,” Rourke said.
Croenberg waved his hand in dismissal, “How about any short-stemmed glassware that has a wide bottom and a relatively narrow top. The large surface area of the contained liquid helps evaporate it; the narrow top traps the aroma inside the glass, while the rounded bottom allows the glass to be cupped in the hand, thus warming the liquor. Most snifters will hold between six to eight ounces, but are almost always filled to only a small part of their capacity,” Croenburg said, clearly pleased with his status as a connoisseur.
“I believe so, let me look,” Rourke said with a smile and went to the crystal cabinet. “How about these?”
“That will do nicely, John. Paul, would you care to join us?”
“Yes, thank you. Let’s step out on the patio,” Paul said. “I also brought a gift.” He produced three fine cigars and a polished cutter from his pocket. He withdrew a small black box from his other pocket and sat it and the other items on the counter in front of Rourke.
“For me?” Rourke asked.
“Yes, Emma told me your other one has just about given up the ghost,” Paul said. “I know you will probably have it restored but maybe this will serve you in the interim, or you might just decide to retire the old one all together.”
Rourke took the top of the box off, inside was a Zippo lighter with a street chrome finish. In two lines on the front part of the upper case was engraved, “THE SURVIVALIST.” Below is was the JTR brand Paul had seen on the Fighting Bowie knife made by Martin Knives so long ago. John stared at the lighter, and looked at Paul, “Thank you my friend, I really appreciate it.”
“Go ahead light up; it’s ready to use. Truthfully, that old battered one needs to be retired,” Paul said with a smirk. “It is becoming an embarrassment. Now you have a new one that I’m sure in no time will be almost as battered as its predecessor.”
As the three walked outside, John Rourke picked up the cutter from the counter and snipped off the tip of one of the cigars. Stepping through the door he flipped the Zippo’s top open, rolled the striker wheel, producing a blue yellow flame. Rourke smiled to himself, it was the first time in a long time he had lit a thin dark cigar from an un-battered Zippo lighter.
As they took seats around the patio table, Croenberg asked, “Have either of you ever wondered if a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world? Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes? The answers are yes there is, and yes they do. Have you ever heard of something called The Cabal?”
John nodded, “Yes, in the twentieth century there was one. I don’t know if it was an urban legend or simply part of one of the conspiracy theories that were being floated around. Frankly, I never put much faith in the story or really even understood what it was about.”
Croenberg took the proffered cutter from Paul and snipped the end of his cigar. Pulling a wooden strike anywhere match from his pocket, he struck it on the sole of his left shoe then held the tip of the cigar in the flame until it blackened. “I know you have your Zippo, but the best way to light a good cigar is with the flame of wood after all of the sulfur has burned off,” he explained.
Taking a deep inhalation, Croenburg nodded his approval to Paul. “Excellent. Now, a Cabal is simply a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views or interests, often by intrigue. Cabals most often are rather secret societies composed of a few designing persons, but at other times are manifestations of emergent behavior in a society on the part of a community of persons who have well established public affiliation or kinship. The term can also be used to refer to the designs of such persons or to the practical consequences of their emergent behavior, and also holds a general meaning of intrigue and conspiracy.”
Paul lit his cigar and said, “I know the use of the term usually carries strong connotations of shadowy corners, back rooms, and insidious influence.”
“Yes,” Croenberg said. “The word was first associated with a group of ministers of King Charles, including Sir Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Ashley, and Lord Lauderdale; coincidentally their initials spelled CABAL, they were the signatories of the secret Treaty of Dover. It allied England and France in a prospective war against the Netherlands. However, that Cabal never really unified in its members’ aims and sympathies, and fell apart by 1672 and ran out of power.”
Croenberg lifted the glass of brandy and dipped the cigar tip in the liquor, “Look, most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control. And today we live in a system in which the super-rich pull all the strings. When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people who have a few million dollars. These ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in banks around the world to buy all of the goods and services produced in the world during the course of an entire year; and, still be able to pay off the entire national debts of every country. That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible.”
“Under this system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments. Just look around—everyone is
drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier. But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth; they use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations. The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet.”
“They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks, and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our educational system.
They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.”
“When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. It is just that most people don’t want to admit the truth. The ultra-wealthy don’t run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won’t be taxed, in offshore accounts. According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 45 trillion dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.”
“Your U.S. Gross Domestic Product stands at about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn’t hit 32 trillion dollars. And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for; and, it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc.”
“The global elite have really hoarded an incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times. These individuals and their families have as much as 32 trillion dollars of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to 280 billion in lost income tax revenues. One of my reports estimates the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts—excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts, and racehorses—at between 21 and 32 trillion dollars. The research was carried out by a young investigator from our own Department of the Treasury; he was a remarkable young man. He compiled his research using data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and central banks.”
“You said ‘was,’” Rourke noted.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
“I did,” Croenberg continued, “he was found the victim of an apparent suicide. He supposedly overdosed, but I know that not to be the case. He was a strong amateur athlete and notably against drugs. He even refused offers from me to share this fine brandy. I’ll come back to that point.”
“In any event,” he continued, “as I mentioned previously, the global elite just don’t have a lot of money. They also basically own just about every major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet. According to him, more than 40,000 transnational corporations conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich discovered that a very small core group of huge banks, and giant predator corporations, are attempting to dominate the entire global economic system. His analysis of the relationships between several hundred transnational corporations has identified a small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. He found that this core group consists of just 150 very tightly knit companies.”
“When he further untangled the web of ownership, all of the ownership was held by other members of that group and they already control forty percent of the total wealth in the network.”
“In effect, less than one percent of the companies were able to gain control of forty percent of the entire world economy. These elite often hide behind layers and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune 500 corporation in the world.”
“That amount of power and control is hard to even contemplate much less describe,” Paul said.
Croenberg agreed, “Its roots go back a long way. Back in 1922, a New York City Mayor named John F. Hylan first brought it to light. He said the real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which ‘like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation.’ He said that at the ‘head of this octopus are special interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually runs the United States government for their own selfish purposes. ’”
“He saw they were practically controlling both parties, drafting political platforms using the leading men of private organizations, and plunging into high public offices only those candidates amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.”
“Those international bankers and special interests controlled the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country and, we now know, the world. They used the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refused to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques of that invisible government. It operated under cover of a self-created screen and seized the executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection.”
“These international bankers created the central banks of the world, including the Federal Reserve, and they used those central banks to get the governments of the world ensnared in endless cycles of debt from which there is no escape. Government debt is, after all, the way to ‘legitimately’ take money from everyone else, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.”
Rourke shook his head; the data was confusing. “I thought all of that ended the Night of the War. You’re saying it didn’t?”
“No, the Cabal, like the rest of the world was stunned and crippled. In fact, I don’t think many of the original families survived. Of course, that is impossible to verify. The world entered a period of darkness and records simply are not available to examine. I can tell you this, there is a Cabal. I don’t know whether it is the remnants of the original one or if someone discovered their hidden resources and activated a new one. But it is a verifiable fact; the Cabal... a Cabal exists.”
“For more than a century now, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized power that they intend to wield over American political and economic institutions as well as those in all of the other countries. They are in fact part of a secret Cabal characterized as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will.”
“You know, even today, almost all members of Congress absolutely refuse to criticize the Federal Reserve System,” Paul said.
Croenberg nodded again, “The last to do so was probably your Congressman Louis T. McFadden who spoke to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1932. He claimed America had one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. His was talking about the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. He said the Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, had cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt. It had cost the country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. He went on to say, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘that evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. ’”
“He claimed it had done all of this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the ‘moneyed vultures’ who controlled it. While most Americans believed that the Federal Reserve is a ‘federal agency,’ that wasn’t true. The stockholders in the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks are the privately owned banks that fall under the Federal Rese
rve System. These banks include all national banks, chartered by the federal government, and those state-chartered banks that wish to join and meet certain requirements.’”
“His point was these ultra-wealthy international bankers have not just done this kind of thing in the United States, but their goal was to create a global financial system that they would dominate and control. These ‘financial capitalists’ had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. That system was controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”
“Congressman McFadden asked, ‘Have you ever wondered why things never seem to change in Washington D.C. no matter who we vote for? Well, it is because both parties are owned by the establishment. It would be nice to think the American people are in control of who runs things in the U.S., but that is not how it works in the real world.’ In the real world, the politician that raises more money wins more than eighty percent of the time in national races. Our politicians are not stupid—they are going to be very good to the people who can give them the giant piles of money that they need for their campaigns. And the people who can do that are the ultra-wealthy and the giant corporations that the ultra-wealthy control. Are you starting to get the picture? There is a reason why the ultra-wealthy are referred to as ‘the establishment.’ They have set up a system that greatly benefits them and allows them to pull the strings.”
“I know that no one owns Michael,” Rourke said. “But going on your premise, who’s running the world? And why haven’t we heard about this before ?”
Croenberg said, “Silence is a commodity that can be bought and paid for by these people. Those they cannot buy, like my researcher, they kill.”
