Today is the first day of the rest of your life

To think that a large percentage of the planet
may miss these conclusions rolls my socks down.

I continue wondering how large that percentage is.

And I suspect that a very large percentage is
required for the continuation of the race. Human,
that is.

Oh, well. That's outta my hands...and yours...mostly.

Bottom line is, it's all very individual, up front
and personal, ain't it.

Kick your own ass. The universe neither cares
about you nor recognizes any obligation to you.
It is fixed and blind, a mad robot programmed to
kill. You are free and seeing; you must outwit it
at every poor turn.

Whatever your labors & aspirations, in the noisy
confusion of life, you must create your own
sanity, prosperity, and peace. The world is so
gorgeous it hurts. Be careful. Strive to be happy.
--Romana Machado

Read.

Via Bill St. Claire

A short story about what most think is a big deal

At least someone knows how to tell this story.

Anyone see anything essential left out?

A brief rendition of the human condition.

Via futility closet.

Robert Anton Wilson's Reality

Personally, I see two or three UFOs every week.
This does not astonish me, or convince me of the
spaceship theory, because I also see about 2 or 3
UNFOs every week --Unidentified Non-Flying
Objects. These remain unidentified (by me)
because they go by too fast or look so weird that
I never know whether to classify them as
hedgehogs, hobgoblins or helicopters-- or as
stars or satellites or spaceships -- or as
pookahs or pizza-trucks or probability waves. Of
course, I also see things that I feel fairly safe
in identifying as hedgehogs or stars or pizza
trucks, but the world contains more and more
events that I cannot identify fully and
dogmatically with any norm or generalization. I
live in a spectrum of probabilities,
uncertainties and wonderments.

Perhaps I got this way by studying Finnegan's
work. Or maybe I just drank too much linn dubh
during my years in Ireland.

Quite entertaining.

The whole reality check.

What George Carlin said

"We’re all fucked. It helps to remember that."
-— George Carlin

Sumatran quake aftershocks continue daily

Here's a list of the last 30 with date, location and magnitude.

Just the point, nothing but the point

Like I've said here before - using different
words - waving "magical parchments" like Constitutions,
petitions, or letters at The Granfalloon is about
as effective as writing a letter to Santa Claus.

Don't forget to include voting here.

If you must, just wave a flag at the idiots and
tell them they're doing a fine job for "God and
country".

Then go somewhere else and have a good laugh.

Many of you may know some confused and good
natured friends who call themselves
"Constitutionalists". They want freedom - so give
them some good news. Life has just gotten a whole
lot simpler. Don't worry about signing petitions,
writing your Congressman or any of that nonsense.
Let them know that Empires always fall because
Empires are just plain dysfunctional. History is
quite clear on this. Let them know that all we
lovers of Liberty have to do is keep speaking the
truth, so that when this Empire falls there will
be enough people dedicated to making sure that
the Empire gets replaced with nothing. Nada. Not
a damned thing.

Short and to the point, this essay.

Via Bill St. Clair

Question to The Follower

If you're going to follow someone, how can you
rightly complain if he doesn't lead you where you
wanted to go?

FBI Names 6th Counterterrorism Chief Since 9/11

The center cannot hold.

The FBI announced the appointment yesterday of
its sixth counterterrorism director since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, underscoring the
bureau's struggle to retain executives in senior
positions.

The story.

Another cover-up

In case you haven't been paying attention here,
I'll say it again.

If you wait for approval or intelligence from
anyone to do anything , particularly your government,
you may not like what you get.

Now that's putting it mildly in this case, isn't
it.

With slightly less than one hour before the
waves came ashore, Supharek said, the
[meteorological]department officials did not
expect a tsunami. There are just four people on
the department’s 900-person staff who were
earthquake experts, he said. Also a tsunami had
not hit Thailand in more than 300 years.

But sources said they did discuss the likelihood
that a tsunami could hit Thailand’s Andaman Sea
coastal towns. This was also played down.

As one commenter to the article said, "The
government’s of the world are incredibly stupid."

Read.

There's that danged Fred agin

Fred is a writer/journalist and a brutally honest
one here.

Don't that beat all.

I can't argue with a word, but I'm sure Billy Moyers
would try his damnedest.

The media can’t change. They are too close to
being part of the government they purport to
cover, too steeped in the artificial
egalitarianism of the newsroom, too afraid of
each other, of advertisers, of being racist or
sexist, too big and smug and ossified. They
cannot report anything that might disturb blacks,
women, homosexuals, Jews, Latinos, or mental
defectives. Although the rosy-fingered dawn may
now be penetrating the hitherto intractable
darkness, too many journalists live in the past.
Like IBM when it thought that the personal
computer was a funny little typewriter, they
stare into the tiger’s maw and think that it’s a
closet. They would probably invest in slide rules.

How are these hobbled organs going to compete
with the wild west of the web, with its limitless
well-argued sites espousing or denouncing every
imaginable point of view? Compete with people who
document things that the majors can’t even talk
about? A conceit of the usual media is that the
web consists of inaccurate vanity sites run by
teenage bloggers in garages. These exist. So do
very researched sites by people who know their
fields and are not afraid to talk about them. The
difference is stark. The intelligent know it.

The whole serving.

Update on the Sumatran quake geology

A little more detailed description of the details
of the Sumatran quake follows. It has been revised
from the earlier one I posted.

Something to remember. These are all quesses.
Obviously, there's been no on-site inspection.

Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks
following the megathrust earthquake show that
approximately 1200 km of the plate boundary
slipped as a result of the earthquake. By
comparison with other large megathrust
earthquakes, the width of the causative fault-
rupture was likely over one-hundred km. From the
size of the earthquake, it is likely that the
average displacement on the fault plane was about
fifteen meters. The sea floor overlying the
thrust fault would have been uplifted by several
meters as a result of the earthquake. The above
estimates of fault-dimensions and displacement
will be refined in the near future as the result
of detailed analyses of the earthquake waves.

The rest of the guess.

Ideas that bite

Personal achievement comes at the cost of being
willing to ignore what people think and say, in
following one’s own values, selfishly and
deliberately. Anything else amounts to nothing
more than making one’s life subservient to ideas
inherently contrary to happiness.

If you're not 'helping yourself' someone else will
do it for you. Invariably, if this idea of letting
someone else live your life permeates a given
population on a grand scale all sorts of Controllers
will attempt to create ever new "victims" of this
mind rape, imposing a Controller Value System for
the one these victims aren't strong enough to form
on their own.

Because nature recognized a demand and so it was
filled.

Then it becomes so easy to lay the blame on someone
else.

Maybe that's the appeal.

It's so fucking easy.

And who have you met lately that talks a language
in which he takes all the blame for what happens
to him?

Seen any that fit that 'selfless, helpless' description?

I have.

The vast majority.

Here's a sample of a book that needs to be
read by the helpless.

Go ahead and take a look at a couple of pages.

But maybe you don't want to. These are ideas that
bite.

Then come back and read Gabriel's whole essay.

U. S. sovereign debt ready for junk bond category

In the absence of such a "Marshall Plan" the
paper discusses several methods by which the U.S.
might default on its debts. That the largest
private manager of U.S. government bonds would
even contemplate default is significant in and of
itself; but that it could actually advocate it as
policy, however, should be shocking. This raises
the obvious question of what credit rating PIMCO
believes U.S. government debt actually deserves?
A triple A rating basically implies a zero
probability of default. Since this paper argues
that default is all but inevitable, it would
imply that not only should U.S. sovereign debt
not be AAA rated, but that it should fall into
the category of junk.

I've said it here before. US debt for $.xx on the
dollar anyone?

And what of USD Cash Funds? I wonder how much they
hold in US government debt.

The whole tale of woe.

Thanks to L. R. White for this.

A list of all the recent Sumatran quakes

Here are all 29 of them...yesterday and today.

I just had to tell ya

The current Rome is finished.

All washed up.

What's next?

Those of you who've been following this screed
know what I'm talking about.

Buena suerte.

Just plain damned lies

Obviously from The Conventional and Predictable
Mindset, Bill Moyers want's to 'reform' this
extinct animal called The Media as He Knew It.
He starts his speech by saying so.

Then he goes on to say...

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to
squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt
instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses
and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers.
Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions,
the courts and the Constitution struck those
weapons out of their hands. But they’ve found new
ones now, in the name of “national security.” The
classifier’s Top Secret stamp, used
indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a
writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially
labeled “secret” there hovers a culture of sealed
official lips, opened only to favored media
insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and
spin, of misnamed “public information” offices
that churn out blizzards of releases filled with
self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally,
just plain damned lies. Censorship without
officially appointed censors.

We can always relie on the Special Interests of
Power to promote themselves in the most positive
of lights. It has always been so, feeding the
public mind just enough to distract or entertain
it. The public info peddlers have developed it
to a fine art.

We'll have to look elsewhere, won't we.

What would happen, however, if the contending
giants of big government and big publishing and
broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to
eye in putting the public’s need for news second
to free-market economics? That’s exactly what’s
happening now under the ideological banner of
“deregulation.” Giant megamedia conglomerates
that our founders could not possibly have
envisioned are finding common cause with an
imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce
not the sons and daughters of liberty but the
very kind of bastards that issued from the old
arranged marriage of church and state.

Real free market "deregulation" has happened already
outside of Bill's purview, it seems.

Now anyone with some blogspace can report what they
see fit to report.

Even to bashing old media dinosaurs that wouldn't
know a free market even if it jumped up and bit
'em on the ass.

Now that's deregulation, without anyone but
the participants doing anything but helping themselves.


In case you want to wade thru these many yards of
wet cement, there it is.

I didn't.

Earthquake update

Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks
following today's earthquake show that
approximately 1000 km of the plate boundary
slipped as a result of the earthquake.
Aftershocks are distributed along much of the
shallow plate boundary between northern Sumatra
(approximately 3 degrees north) to near Andaman
Island (at about 14 degrees north).

Seen here.

One report said that there were no reports from
the Maldives.

There never will be a report from the Maldives
because all human life is gone, swept to sea by
the tsunami.

Too bad. They were such beautiful little islands.

Edit:

It looks like I was wrong about the Maldives. That's
good news.

In the Maldives, where thousands of foreign
visitors were holidaying in the beach paradise,
damage appeared to be limited.

Full story.

Big earthquakes in Sumatra area

Post removed.

I didn't want to start a panic by people reading
the old warnings thinking they were new.

I doubt most folks look at the date of a post.

Bah. Humbug

Simply put...

Bah. Humbug.

And put the "X" back in Christmas.

But it kept us all busy and distracted making,
buying, and exchanging silly shit. What else
should we have been doing with our time and money?
Coming up with a cure for old age and death?

Aside: That's what death is, a disease that hasn't
been cured, at least for the mass market. I expect
there are immortals walking amongst us. If you think
about it, you might be able to guess why they're
silent about their secret.

Right about here, I can hear a number of Dull Sparks
stand up in the back of the room again and holler,
"Yea, there orta be a laaawww!"

Here you might respond, "About what?"

Dull Spark says, "Does it matter?"

It's because of the Dull Sparks that I cringe
every time I make a personal value judgment like
this.

Ya know what I mean?

Ta hell with it. I'm doing it anyway.

Bah. Humbug.

A wise man says...

"Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living.
The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
--Mark Twain

But you can beseech your Glorious Leaders to provide
it for you...for awhile.

You won't like the results.

A do-it-yourself project

But as I finished reading the Economist article,
I couldn’t help but ask myself: just how
different is the free world? We’re all human
beings. North Koreans who truly believe Kim Jong
Il to be the world’s greatest composer of opera
and the finest golfer ever to hit the links are
not fundamentally different from you and me.

Is there something about human beings that, when
circumstances trigger it, make us want to worship
other human beings? I fear that the answer is yes.

Don is right. Anyone reading my blog for a while
knows I agree. In spades. This worship could easily
be our death knell, or at the least our trap in some
surreal dead end.

At the end of his post, Don says, "Heaven help us."

But isn't that the problem with just a different
twist on the same 'worship', the same give-upitis?

Isn't it exclusively a do-it-yourself project?

Fuel-Cell Vehicles Close the Gap

Fuel-cell vehicles may finally be moving from
the laboratory to the showroom. Premium-priced
cars running on hydrogen could arrive in
dealerships in 2005, and researchers say advances
in technology could speed the vehicles toward
becoming cost-competitive.

Fuel-cell vehicles, which generate power by
converting hydrogen into electricity and water,
have been in development for more than 20 years
as replacements for petroleum-powered cars. This
month, vehicle manufacturer Zap said it would
begin selling fuel-cell vehicles to consumers in
the second half of 2005.

Read it all.

Have you seen a Black Triangle?

I haven't.

What is your gummint hiding?

The United States is currently experiencing a
wave of Flying Triangle sightings that may have
intensified in the 1990s, especially towards the
latter part of the 1990s. The wave continues.
The Flying Triangles are being openly deployed
over and near population centers, including in
the vicinity of major Interstate Highways. The
behavior of these Triangular aircraft does not
conform to previous patterns of covert deployment
of unacknowledged aircraft. Neither the agenda
nor the origin of the Flying Triangles are
currently known.

Map #1: Triangle sightings in the NIDS database

Read.

Party Leaders Humiliated by ID Card Revolt

And rightly humiliated.

At least some are objecting.

That's a start.

I expect Orwell is again laughing uncontrollably
in his grave.

(UK) The Government's flagship plans for ID
cards suffered a rebellion last night as more
than a quarter of the Commons failed to turn up
to vote for the Bill.

Labour and Tory MPs defied their whips in droves
by openly voting against the ID cards plans or
making their disquiet known by not voting at all.

The huge scale of abstentions by both the Tories
and Labour will be acutely embarrassing to Tony
Blair and Michael Howard, who both pitched their
personal authority behind the ID cards plans.

But MPs argued that the cards would breach civil
liberties and would be too expensive. The
proposals were described as "intensely
authoritarian" in the Commons yesterday.

Read.

Where will you be when they come for you?

Government routinely breaks the laws. So says
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in the current issue
of Cato Policy Report and in his book,
"Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the
Government Breaks Its Own Laws." Judge Napolitano
reports on cases of torture, psychological abuse,
and frame-ups of innocents that he discovered as
the presiding judge. Any American naive enough to
trust the police and prosecutors should read what
Napolitano has to say.

Torture has become routine in American prisons.
The goal of the torturers is guilty pleas and
false testimony against innocent defendants. The
torturers succeed. Napolitano reports that "fewer
than 3 percent of federal indictments were tried;
virtually all the rest of those charged pled
guilty."

Does anyone seriously believe that the police
are so efficient that 97 out of 100 people
indicted are guilty?!

Could it be that 'government routinely breaks the
laws' because they made 'em so they're theirs to
break?

After all, it is their ball game, isn't it...umpires
batters, pitchers, everyone.

Now tell me they can't do as they fucking well please.

Worth the read.

British Civil Service deletes millions of emails

'Nothing to do with the Freedom of Information
Act coming in, honest...'

Bwahahahah.

Do you believe that?

I don't.

They don't want you to know anything.

Controllers thrive on disinformation, lies, and
deceit, don't they.

How else would they get you to do what you really
aren't interested in doing?

Think about it.

The Cabinet Office denied on Monday that
millions of emails are being deleted in response
to a law that will make government information
available to the public from 1 January.

The Civil Service department insisted the move
was part of an ongoing management policy to avoid
wasting taxpayers' money and not a way of ducking
the Freedom of Information Act (FoI).

All of it.

The endlessly cooking Universe

These relatively nearby finds appear eerily
similar to the universe's first galaxies. They
have the same mass (equivalent to about 10
billion Suns), the same elemental composition
(roughly that of the Sun), and the same age of
stars (approximately 1 billion years old).

"It's almost like looking out the window and
seeing a dinosaur walking by," says Tim Heckman,
an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, Maryland, US.

Maybe when you're a dinosaur, everything looks
like a dinosaur.

Wake up and smell the roses, Tim. The Big Bang
is a theory.

Just another example of the lack of simple tests
to prove the Universe was always here and the
ease of believing everything that was spoon-fed to
you.

It's so easy to be a sponge and accept everything
without question, ain't it.

And the universe just keeps cookin'.

Read.

Thinking about using Napster? - think again

See what one dude thinks about 'em.

This is good use of the net. Unearthing liars,
bad cons, and crappy business practice.

Years ago, when I had a crappy Compaq laptop and
some questions on how to fix it, I emailed Compaq
numerous times and received no response.

Now ask yourself. Would you buy again from someone
who treated you that way?

You can guess what I didn't do when it came time
to buy another.

I've since had two Dell laptops with no problems.

Clint's Napster complaint.

Your protectors fail agin

Does that surprise you?

First there was the CIA missing the fall of the
Soviet Union then WMD in Iraq, apparently attempting
to see shit that justifies only their preconceptions.

Then the myriad NASA failures.

Then there was Celebrex.

What's next?

Don't you wonder what it is that you're paying for
here?

Do you ever wonder how many failures your protectors
don't advertise?

WASHINGTON - An Alzheimer’s disease prevention
trial was suspended after researchers said there
were more heart attacks and strokes among
patients taking naproxen, an over-the-counter
pain reliever in use for 28 years and commonly
known under the brand name Aleve.

The rest.

Free or not...you decide

We live on a Planet of Free Will.

You don't believe that?

You're free to think so.

See what I mean.

Exercise it well and often.

It's your destiny, whatever the hell that means.

Ve haf vays of silencink and vatchink you.

...or maybe not.

And there was some info left out.

There's always some left out.

Shhhh. Don't tell anyone.

It's a secret.

Bwahahahaha.

The secret.

Time waster

All this blah, blah, blah and "higher" mathematics
when it's all so simple.

Markets go up on greed, down on fear and sideways
on indecision.

But if you're into confusion and blah, blah you
certainly are welcome to it. I didn't waste my time.

1. Since in the limit N --> infinity, the model
operates on a purely deterministic basis, it
actually challenges the purely external and
unpredictable origin of market prices. Our model
exploits the continuous mimicry of financial
markets to show that the disordered and random
aspect of the time series of prices can be in
part explained not only by the advent of "random"
news and events, but can also be generated by the
behavior of the agents fixing the prices.

—A. Corcos1, J.-P. Eckmann, A. Malaspinas, Y.
Malevergne and D. Sornette, Imitation and
contrarian behavior: hyperbolic bubbles, crashes
and chaos

China and the US - Siamese twins

The Sino-US power duopoly constitutes the most
disruptive force in world economic life since
cheap British textiles crushed India's weaving
industry at the outset of the 19th century. An
impossibly high threshold confronts any other
part of the world seeking economic success. Not
in their wildest imaginings could American
planners have invented a more effective way of
projecting US power and suppressing prospective
challengers.



Something like a folie a deux unites US neo-
conservatives who fear China with America-haters
who hope that China will undermine US world
influence. Before radical Islam appeared on the
radar, the likes of William Kristol and Robert
Kagan warned in 1996 of the "emergence of China
as a strong, determined, and potentially hostile
power". As recently as December 13, Mark Helprin
complained in opinionjournal.com that "China is
now powerful and influential enough ... to make
American world dominance inconceivable".
Nonsense. It is China's success that is
inconceivable without US world dominance. If US
financial markets were to break up, China would
go into a tailspin.

Trade trumps war.

Oooooha.

In addition, like I've said here before, without
the continuing success of China-Mart, er, Wal-
Mart, China will hurt...and bad.

Why else would China peg their currency to the
falling dollar other than to assure their current
selling power? A rising yuan would probably sink
China's boat. But no peg lasts forever. See
Argentina.

War and revolution have destroyed the savings of
generation after Chinese generation. It may seem
disadvantageous for Chinese to sell goods to the
US in return for paper assets, but beauty is in
the eye of the bondholder. People who just have
struggled up from poverty place great value on
knowing that their children never will know what
it is to be poor. Once they have made themselves
secure, Chinese business people take risks on a
scale that astonish their counterparts in other
countries.

Fact. I know from personal experience about the
risk the Chinese are willing to take. They are
generally the most astute businessmen on the
planet.

They've got a job ahead of them buying enough of
that US debt with their hard-earned Wal-Mart dollars
to keep the whole thing afloat.

They will try.

Interesting analysis.

A new look at freedom

"The creation of freedom is best served by the
efficient and profitable defence of property."
-- Andrew J. Galambos

Notice no mention of government was made for that
defence.

Why would you expect the biggest thieves in the world
to protect your property or your freedom?

Rote babblers

We've been force-fed this crap thru our pubic
edjykashun that we took as The Gospel.

Remember that 99% of scientists today repeat
what they "know" from something they read. So
there are VERY FEW of them that have first hand
information regarding what they are spewing. I
call them "Text Book Geniuses". They can
regurgitate what they have read but few have
taken the painful route to research the many
issues for themselves. Ph.D.s all lined up in a
row saying the same things does not make
"science" ... it makes a mutual admiration
society club house where popular vote wins ...
not the scientific method ... and since they have
long since eliminated the "competition" they are
free to say whatever they want unopposed. This
does make one wonder whether Astronomy qualifies
as a "science".

Arthur Koestler has said as much before.

The rest.

Uncovering some myths

That mastodon died 3,600 years ago, flash frozen
while eating tropical plant life. It was flash
frozen so fast that it's eyeballs did not have
time to deteriorate. Flash frozen so quickly that
the meat was fresh enough to be carved up and
sold for human consumption in Russian markets.
Yes, there were hundreds of these animals frozen
in a similar manner.

Odd. Zecharia Sitchin contends we had a visit by
the planet Nibiru 3,600 years ago gleaned from his
translations of the ancient Sumarian texts.

Strange coincidence?

Read.

Celebrex and FDA killing folks

So much for the continued illusion of government
protection in anything.

Time to wake up.

But the sleep is deep...

Celebrex, a huge-selling painkiller sold by
Pfizer, more than tripled the risk of heart
attacks, strokes and death among those taking
high doses in a national trial, the company said
Friday.

The results raised new questions about how well
federal drug regulators protect the public and
worsened drug makers' already dismal
image.

I can hear the buzzing in the background about
reform of the FDA.

Sheeit.

Flush it.

Full report.

Mandatory Shoe Policy

Comply, slugs.

The left foot must first be placed into the
footwear and the approved fastening device
(shoestring, shoelace, bootlace, cord, tie, etc.)
must be tightened and securely affixed in the
standard, federally approved double bow
arrangement (See Section 143.2(e), Paragraph
3.7.1, "Illustrated Instructions for Manipulation
of Bindings for Human Podiatal Coverings." The
Right shoe may then be applied and fastened to
the right foot only after the left shoe has been
applied to the left foot in the previously
mandated manner. Failure to follow the
prescribed order of events will result in fine
and/or imprisonment.

Enforcement of the new shoe-putting-on regulations
is covered under a section known as the "Know Your
Shoe Customer Law." Shoe store sales staff will
be required to watch potential shoe purchasers for
"patterns of unusual behavior." Any attempt to
shod right foot piggies before putting on a left
shoe must be immediately reported to the footwear
detectives, known legally as "shoe gumshoes."

The rest.

Colloidal silver

See the new links on colloidal silver science in
the right panel.

This is new science even tho you may not think so.

But make up your own mind.

Believe me, you have one of your own.

Private currencies - the future

A poll by national T.V. Azteca, revealed that
96% of viewers approved of the monetization of
the silver ounce, when asked if they were, or
were not, in favor.

Everbody wants their gummint to do it for 'em
because they don't think it'll work without it.

So you're gonna wait til pols get off their asses
to do it?

Bwahahahah.

Your gummints have already 'monetized' the
worthless crap paper money they issued by blowing
smoke up the collective ass that it's the only
money.

Bullshit.

Start buying silver coin now, offering it in
payment for goods or services.

You people running businesses: start pricing in
silver and/or gold also, offering a choice...or
any other currency, private or gummint issued.

Just do it.

This is real democracy in action where one coin/unit
equals one vote.

You don' need no steenking bahdges.

This applies to all of you, not just Mexicans.

When your gummint issued paper hits the fan,
you'll wish you had.

Remember Argentina.

Now isn't the name of that country a coincidence
here. ("Argentum" means silver.)

Full essay.

...and more...

And the gold standard? Forget it: the objective
is to get the government out of the process. And
if you argue that government is not necessary for
a gold standard, then quit bitching and create
one privately. That’s what private currencies are
all about: if you have a better idea, then
implement it and sell it to others.

Private currencies are on their way. And smart
cards are an important part of that process.

A lot of what's required to do it.

Here's what Bob said

"When a government first takes your money by force
and then disarms you, it does not have your best
interest at heart." --'Bob'

Why is it that almost no one sees what's going on
here except Bob and an inconsequential number of
other ornery fucks?

Think about it.

And don't ask me who the hell Bob is.

The Idiot Intellectual

The Idiot Intellectual will believe anything
they are told spoken in an academic tone, and are
too stupid to question any of it. Even a rebel is
more respectable

...

The Idiot Intellectual becomes entrapped in the
surreal by having a false personal stake based
upon emotion. Individual self-concept is buried
beneath a mountain of pseudo-logically derived
inanities. The resultant blindness is consistent
inconsistency.

...

The idiot intellectual will regurgitate anything
presented in a prior approved format. Political
correctness is a prime example. No matter the
absurdity, anything masquerading in those terms
will receive automatic acceptance. Creativity,
despite mediocre attempts and pretenses, does not
exist for such mental blobs, whose main use is
fodder. Unlike others, the Idiot Intellectual has
begged to be meat, and deserve no other use nor
consideration. By discarding their intrinsic
worth, the Idiot Intellectual is doomed to ignite
like a two dimensional paper cartoon[5]. Death to
the stupid[6]!

Now go forth and read this fine piece.

After Yukos' funeral

MOSCOW -- Yukos, Russia's largest privately
owned oil company, will be broken up on Sunday.
After stumbling under debilitating back-tax
claims of over $28 billion, the company's most
important production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, will
be sold at auction with Kremlin-controlled
Gazprom the likely winner.

...

It took the Kremlin over a year to crush Yukos
and harass the company's core shareholders.
Exorbitant back tax claims, the arrest and trial
of top company officials such as Mikhail
Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, and the freezing
of Yukos' assets and bank accounts have brought
Yukos to its knees. Yukos' publicly trade shares
have taken the wind out of Russia's once booming
stock markets.

But all is not smooth sailing for the Russian state's
theft by taxation.

Yuko's was reported to produce 2% of the world's
oil.

What percentage of the world's oil do you suppose
bureaucraps can produce?

Expect higher oil prices if Putin succeeds.

Think about it.

Full report.

A lesson in self-defense

"The lesson the porcupine teaches is that you
don't have to be strong enough to defeat a
predator to avoid being that predator's lunch. It
suffices to be an expensive meal. Predators tend
not to dine on porcupines because a serving of
porcupine tends not to be worth the mouthful of
quill that it costs." -- John T. Kennedy

A nation of guns at home comes to mind here.

Via Bill St. Claire

Microsoft buys Giant

I've been using Giant AS for some time and I like
it. It finds shit that Spybot or AdWare doesn't.

Of course, MS doesn't yet know how to detect spyware
so I can see why they would buy Giant. I'm beginning
to wonder if MS really gives a shit about Secure
Systems and just want to control the whole process.

I don't have much confidence in Microsoft so this
buyout doesn't impress me as a confident user of
Giant.

I'll continue using Brand X.

Microsoft said it plans to offer tools based on
Giant's technology that will help protect Windows
PCs from spyware and other deceptive software.
The technology complements security features
available in Windows XP Service Pack 2, the
company said.

The report.

Are you prepared to live forever?

De Grey, you see, is not, as he is sometimes
mistaken to be, a professor of genetics at
Cambridge but a half-time research associate with
a day job managing a genetics database.

Pay attention here. Watch these people on the
fringes. They will be the new Renaissance Folks.
The Academics are generally dolts.

To distinguish themselves from the charlatans
and hype purveyors, mainstream academics tend to
be circumspect about the work they do in the
biology of aging. But in the past 15 years, the
field has been revved by startling breakthroughs.
The human genome, our entire complement of DNA,
has been decoded, opening the possibility of
tinkering with our genetic makeup. And scientists
are learning to manipulate embryonic stem cells
to make them grow into any kind of tissue. The
long-term implications of these discoveries have
barely been teased out by biologists, who tend to
be cautious by nature and training. So the
speculative arena has been left largely to a
theoretician, de Grey, who wouldn’t know a DNA
analyzer from a protein sequencer but who is
promoting the unthinkable: that the human race
is on the verge of figuring out how to live darn
near forever. [My emphasis]
...

De Grey’s scientific career, like everything
else about him, smacks of oddness and self-
invention.

More evidence of genius. Learn to spot 'em. This
is important. Very important.

He is essentially self-taught,...

The Big Clue above just jumped up an' bit me on
the ass! Do you see it? This fucker don' know what
can't be done, then proceeds to do it...well, at
least he talks about doing it.

Sorry to let you down here.

[hypothesis]
The secret to aging will also be found in the ingestion
of colloidal gold, maybe even in colloidal silver.
[/hypothesis]

You probably heard it here first.

Take a look at the entire article.

A small light in the darkness

A few civilized English Lords rule...

Detaining foreign terrorist suspects without
trial breaks human rights laws, the UK's highest
court has ruled.

You go, boys.

Full story.

Movin' on up

Just because the social system treats us as if
we're all the same, doesn't mean we are.

Stretch out!

Drive thru a coupla stop lights with the top down
saying, "Ahhh, that feels good." But watch for The
Man, el ratero.

Just try not to fuck with anyone else in the process
unless they fuck with you first as you buzz about
minding your own business.

What could be more basic?

What could be more civilized?

Commenting and trackback

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been
added to this blog.

I like the commenting process much better but in
adding Haloscan, the previous comments were
automatically deleted.

Boo, hoo. I liked 'em.

With improvements sometimes come trade offs.

Fat bacteria?

The notion of obesity as an infectious disease
is unconventional, Atkinson said, but he added,
"Fifteen years ago if you said ulcers were due to
bacteria, people would have said you were nuts,"
and yet that's now known to be the case.

I like the "unconventional" part of that.

Then again, we're exceedingly good a laying off
our problems on some 'outside factor', aren't we.

I can hear the Fat Ones say, "I knew it wasn't
my fault."

What might be the truth?

All the report.

A Firefox tip - IE users weep

Let's say you make a new folder in your Firefox
bookmarks.

I've got one that's called "blogs" which has
bookmarks to 16 blogs in it, ones that I look at
everyday.

I right click on that folder and select "open in
tabs".

All 16 then begin opening in one window with a
tab for each one.

And by the way, Firefox doesn't let pop-ups thru.

Oooohaa.

Opining children

"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions
that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is
far too short for us to think through even a
small fraction of the topics that we come across."
-- Julian Simon

I can't argue with that.

I wonder how many opinions we're living with,
treating them as if they were facts.

It's a wonder we've survived so long, isn't it.

Leaving the Matrix

The article in the link below is designed for those
looking for a better life, one free of the demands
of Power.

I suspect most of us who've spent some time on the
internet believe that it is, and will be responsible
for some very major changes. If you know how to
us it to your advantage, you can live long and
prosper.

The new age of information is here, as happened
with the invention of the printing press. The
presses devasted the then current power structure,
largely making information controlled by the Holy
Roman Church irrelevent.

A whole new class of information was born, big
changes arose and many more individuals benefited
at the expense of the power of the Church.

The net will more than likely do the same to the
nation state, laying waste to it as ever more migrate
to Cyberspace to make their living, taking their
assets with them.

The net will allow almost anyone to benefit at some
point as both computers and internet service becomes
faster and cheaper and available anywhere and anywhen.

At that point, the nation state becomes irrelevent
also, being unable to extract enough blood from its
citizens to stay solvent.

See the details in this visionary philosopher's
excellent article.(PDF file.)

Overcoming evil, whatever that is

"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and
evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." -- Col.
Jeff Cooper

But evil is best overcome by not fighting it and
withdrawing support in all ways.

Shun it.

Think about it.

Via Bill St. Claire

Time to take the chains off

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle
without referring explicitly to everyday life,
without understanding what is subversive about love
and what is positive in the refusal of constraints,
such people have a corpse in their mouth."
-Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

Definitely ghoulish and rightly so. (No, I didn't say
'girlish'. Read it again...aha, gotcha!)

Doesn't this apply to all political action,
whether talking about or voting for one or the other
of the liars wanting your Undying Support?

On the other hand, there a number of folks dying due
to the support of the current liar-in-charge, aren't
there.

The ghoulishness continues.

Via ohhhh

The day they went home

Farfetched?

Think again.

Via chumpfish.

Concepts

"No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates
it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge."
-- Ayn Rand

War

"Don't talk to me about atrocities in war; all war
is an atrocity." -- Lord Kitchener

Fractals

Beautiful, eh?

Take a look at Jos Leys Gallery.

It can't be done...or can it?

"...in the hills overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico,
a retired scientist named Edmund Storms
has built a different kind of fusion reactor. It
consists of laboratory glassware, off-the-shelf
chemical supplies, two aging Macintosh computers
for data acquisition, and an insulated wooden box
the size of a kitchen cabinet. While JET's 15
European sponsor-nations have paid about US$1
billion for their hardware, and the US government
has spent $14.7 billion on fusion research since
1951 (all figures in 1997 dollars), Storms's
apparatus and ancillary gear have cost less than
$50,000. Moreover, he claims that his equipment
works, generating surplus heat for days at a time.

Storms is not an antiestablishment pseudo
scientist pursuing a crackpot theory. For 34
years he was part of the establishment himself,
employed at Los Alamos on projects such as a
nuclear motor for space vehicles. Subsequently he
testified before a congressional subcommittee
considering the future of fusion. He believes you
don't need millions of degrees or billions of
dollars to fuse atomic nuclei and yield energy.
"You can stimulate nuclear reactions at room
temperature," he says, in his genial, matter-of-
fact style. "I am absolutely certain that the
phenomenon is real. It is quite extraordinary,
and if it can be developed, it will have profound
effects on society."

Then further on in the article, Russ George from
SRI says...

Any production of helium would be stunning proof
that fusion is occurring, because helium only
results from nuclear reactions. No known chemical
interaction can create it."

Then why not just call it an unknown chemical
reaction that generates heat and leave it at that?

What's the fixation with the word 'fusion'?

I still say the great discoveries in this and any
other areas will be made by amateur tinkerers using
shoe strings and completely untied to the billions
ripped from the taxpayer and managed by bureaucraps.

These tinkerers are the people who don't know what
can't be done.

And if it doesn't work, the only ones who lose are
those directly involved.

And in the latter case, what would be the sense in
taking a whole lotta taxpayers with no interest down
the tubes together?

The whole report.

The Hive

"Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone
anywhere." -- Milan Kundera

Scary, eh?

What's with this fucking hive mentality so many are
promoting? Do they think they're bees or what?

But there's always escape for The Determined Ones.

Worshipping The System

As regards my previous post, John Barlow's experience
is relevant.

Now read his experience, follow the case to the end,
and come back and tell me I was wrong in that post...

Pissing in the wind.

I have better uses for my ire.

The System doesn't give a shit about your "rights".

Neither should you.

To the whiners

Why is there so much whining going on about all the
unconstitutional acts going on around us?

The Constitution is being ignored.

It is an imperfect document as all are.

So get over it and if you don't want to get over it
take a look at this.

I guess you'll just have to take care of yourself.

Waving a "magic parchment" ain't gonna git it, is it.

Now hear this

In case you haven't noticed, the links on the right
panel are always being added to as I find ones of
value.

I have also added links to my previous blog there.

More unconventional wisdom

Stay tuned. You'll hear a lot more on the
subject of unconventional wisdom here.

Infectious disease was the leading cause of
death in children 100 years ago, with diphtheria,
measles, scarlet fever, and pertussis accounting
for most them. Today the leading causes of death
in children less than five years of age are
accidents, genetic abnormalities, developmental
disorders, sudden infant death syndrome, and
cancer. A basic tenet of modern medicine is that
vaccines are the reason. There is growing
evidence that this is so, but perhaps not quite
in the way conventional medical wisdom would have
it.

...

There is a growing body of evidence that
implicates vaccines as a causative factor in the
deteriorating health of children. The hypothesis
that vaccines cause neurologic and immune system
disorders is a legitimate one - vaccines given in
multiple doses, close together, to very young
children following the CDC's Immunization
Schedule. This hypothesis should be tested by a
large-scale, long-term randomized controlled
trial.

...

A communitarian ethic increasingly governs
health care in the U.S. It places a greater value
on the health of the community, on society as a
whole, than on the health of particular
individuals. Public health officials have put
together a vaccination schedule designed to
eliminate infectious diseases to which the
population is prey. These officials recognize
that these vaccines will harm a small percentage
of (genetically susceptible) individuals, but it
is for the common good. The communitarian code
posits that it is morally acceptable, if
necessary, to sacrifice a few for the good of the
many. Or as one observer more bluntly puts it,
"Individual sheep can be sheared and slaughtered
if it is for the welfare of their flock."
[my emphasis]

Isn't it time to remove yourself from the collective
and do your own thinking?

All of the article.

Then dig around this site for awhile.

via Bill St. Clair

Email from my Imusil inquiry

Click here for my first post on Imusil.

Below is an email receipt from my later inquiry.
It appears they're going for FDA approval.

What a waste...of millions of dollars and years of
testing.

From: IMPY@NETVISION.NET.IL
Marvin

To: jomama
Subject: Fw: Imusil Inquiries.


Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 13:38:31 -0800

STATEMENT ON TETRASIL® AND IMUSIL®
-------------------------------------------------

Thank your for your interest in Aidance
products, makers of Tetrasil® Multi-Purpose
Topical Ointment, www.Tetrasil.com

The Imusil® product, for treatment of HIV and
AIDS, is still under development.

It is essential that the proper clinical studies
be made to guarantee the treatment's efficacy and
safety. Premature use, before the proper
protocols are established, could jeopardize a
patient's health, the product's development, and
delay its introduction to the general public.

At Aidance, we certainly take very seriously the
grave and compelling conditions of individuals
battling HIV and AIDS. However, in order to help
the most people in the safest way, we need to
proceed in a responsible fashion. To achieve
this, and bring the product to market, we are
seeking investors, institutions, and donors to
fund the proper studies and clinical trials.

If you know any potential investors (minimum
$50K) who may be interested in our efforts,
please refer them to us. You will be doing a
great service to the world. These potential
stakeholders may reach us at
aht_info@marantech.com or call at (401) 223-3000.
In the future, as more information becomes
available, it will be published on www.Imusil.com.

Sincerely,

Aidance Management



ADDITIONAL FAQ's ANSWERED
-------------------------------------------------
Aidance has made no claims about an injectable
form. We are hoping to conduct double blind
clinical trials in the near future (funding
dependent). There was an offshore clinical study
on a "Compassionate Care" basis, of an injectable
form of the active ingredient Tetrasilver
Tetroxide (TsT). Even though the data gathering
protocols were not followed to Aidance's
satisfaction, and results were inconclusive by
U.S. standards, the results were nonetheless
encouraging. Imusil® is the current product now
being developed with TsT for treating internal,
systemic and life-threatening conditions.

Tetrasil's current formulation is to treat
topical pathogens causing unwanted skin
conditions only. HIV is a systemic life
threatening condition beyond the scope of the
Tetrasil® topical ointment. FDA approval process
has not yet been sought for Tetrasil® topical
ointment or the Imusil product (still under
development).

Aidance is confident in the safety of the
topical usage based on the success of earlier
dermal, oral, ocular, ingestion toxicity and
genotoxicity studies of the active ingredient,
Tetrasilver Tetroxide (TsT). The success rate of
TsT against a broad spectrum of pathogens for in-
vitro experiments is very high. The anecdotal
evidence from users of Tetrasil® is also very
convincing.

While Imusil® is not yet available, the
Tetrasil® product for topical application may
offer significant relief to HIV and AIDS patients
contending with a variety of topical skin
conditions.

Thank you.

Radical traffic management

A thinker's traffic manager...

Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-
lane roads of northern Holland, where he works as
a road designer. He wants to show me a favorite
intersection he designed. It's a busy junction
that doesn't contain a single traffic signal,
road sign, or directional marker, an approach
that turns eight decades of traditional traffic
thinking on its head.

...

In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped
the traffic signs and signals from its major
intersection and cut the number of serious or
fatal accidents a year from three to zero.

My, my. Whoda thunk everyone thinking for themselves
would ever work?

Full report.

Via sunni

War is the health of the state

"The Pentagon revealed that China launched a
nuclear submarine capable of firing
intercontinental ballistic missiles into the
United States. In case of attack, take cover
inside a Wal-Mart. China would never bomb their
best customer." -- Argus Hamilton

Bwahahahah. Not a bad idea, Argus.

But let's expand on this.

China effectively owns Wal-Mart now. I expect that
someday they'll buy it outright.

Will they then rename it China-Mart?

Then why would they attack? That would be exceedingly
bad for business, wouldn't it.

Now come up with your own plan to avoid war on the
planet. You can see it, can't you?

So tell me now.

What's the big fuss about globalization?

What sense does it make to kill active or potential
customers anywhere?

Now you global corporate types...go forth and put
the heat on the war mongers.

Go on now. What're you waiting for?

Via Bill St. Claire

The Institution of Order

To those who feel that their values are the
values, the less controlled systems necessarily
present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because
such systems respond to a diversity of values.
The more successfully such systems respond to
diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by
definition, according to the standards of any
specific set of values- other than diversity or
freedom as values. Looked at another way, the
more self-righteous observers there are, the more
chaos (and "waste") will be seen. -- Thomas Sowell

This took me a while to sort out.

Kind of any eye opener, isn't it.

But there is another kind of chaos that comes after
the futile attempts by the 'self-righteous' in
instituting maximum order.

It's the disorder brought on by those who chose not
to participate.

The Godlike

A week in the United States, such as I have just
spent, is enough to make anybody feel a trifle
fed up with God, or rather with the relentless
invocation of the deity by American politicians,
led by their president. No public occasion would
be complete without the blessing of the Almighty
being besought for whatever endeavour tops the
agenda, most prominently the war in Iraq. The
appeal to faith, seldom mere ritual, is usually
founded upon conviction.

I couldn't agree more but I would go much farther.

The appeal to politics is just a faith of a different
sort and just as annoying, but when combined, it
makes smoke come outta my ears.

Two belief systems, both pedaling their new road
apples.

Aack!

These people are the new junkies.

They have no life of their own and they're bound
and determined to insure that no other drug will
survive.

They will lose.

Words describing my disgust at the fools escape me,
living as they do completely in Dreamland, waiting
for their Saviors.

When the Roman Empire fell, it left behind The Holy
Roman Catholic Church.

What'll it be this time around?

Full article.

Facts

"Science is facts. Just as houses are made of
stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile
of stones is not a house and a collection of
facts is not necessarily science."
-- Henri Poincare

Yet so many hyumans are baffled by the meadow
muffin salesmen pontificating "facts".

Unwanted third parties

Yet what do these various proposals to regulate
trade all have in common? They are all attempts
to prevent people from cooperating with each
other. The critics of recent developments in
international trade relations, though they have
couched their arguments in sophisticated economic
rhetoric, are ultimately relying on the tribe
mentality: It's us versus them, and anything
that they are for must be bad for us.

Read that again.

There's that ol' us and them crap again.

And, believe me, there are many thousands of laws
on the books which prohibit cooperation without
unwanted third parties.

Now what do you suppose the unintended or intended
consequences of preventing people from cooperating
are?

Think about it.

Full story.

Getting there

I left the convention thinking how even though
people are going through the same struggle as I
am, it really does not matter in the end. Real
change may ultimately be a personal action,
rather than a collective one.

By jove, I think the dude's almost got it!

Indeed, grab something you can literally get a
handle on, your very own life. Politics is a group
mind-fuck.

We'll all 'get there'...one by one...in our own
time.

The essay.

A little recent history and a lesson or 5

According the CIA's official history, Meyer, a
Fortune magazine editor whom Casey recruited as a
senior aide, scoffed at the agency's estimates of
Soviet growth. He explained:

"Everything I had been able to learn about
the Soviet economy, including visiting the place,
told me it couldn't be growing at the rate the
CIA said it was ... It simply couldn't be true. I
know what an economy looks like when it's growing
3% a year, and that isn't what it looks like ...
You cannot have food shortages growing worse,
production shortages growing worse, bottlenecks -
all those things we knew were going on - and
still have an economy growing at the rate the
agency said it was - which the US was barely
doing at that point ... It couldn't be true."

Meyer left the CIA more than 20 years ago, and
the Clinton years restocked the CIA with the same
sort of second-string academics against whom the
Reagan people had rebelled. The howls of pain
attendant upon the accession of Porter Goss as
the new director of central intelligence suggest
that a similar rebellion now may be under way. In
any case, Meyer's conclusion that Europe is
beyond repair is consistent with his earlier
reading of Soviet decay.

So goes it as regards the state, all socialist
to some degree or other as they feed on their
subject victims from democide to vampirism,
sucking the life from them. And making a mega-state
in an attempt to save it is futile.

The victims will soon be sucked dry.

von Mises was right long before anyone else figured
it out.

The entire article.

Would he listen?

Someone needs to tell Bush that terrorists are
stateless and that invading states creates
insurgencies. In Iraq our soldiers are not
fighting terrorists. They are fighting an
insurgency that Bush created by invading Iraq.
Bush's pre-emptive wars are a good way to
depopulate the US and bankrupt our country.

The whole article.

More on Democrazy

"Democracy is all the true believers getting together
to vote on the Truth."

Ain't that the Truth.

Via Orlin Grabbe

Imusil® - Aids cure and a whole lot more

[hypothesis]

This here visionary philosopher is going on record
to state that this medication, if it ever gets widely
produced, will destroy the anti-biotics industry.

One injection of Imusil will kill virtually every
pathogen suffered and known to man and then some.

The FDA will not approve it so all legal injections
will have to be done outside the US. I'm talking
about one injection or IV treatment for the
complete cure. I expect an injection directly into
cancerous tumors will be needed to kill them.

[/hypothesis]

More people have died from HIV/AIDS over the
last twenty years than from any other disease in
human history. IMUSIL® (TST formulated for
intravenous use) may offer an alternative to
other anti-HIV drugs (which are highly
susceptible to HIV mutation, can cause severe
side effects in patients, require daily dosages,
and are very costly). Currently, over 40 million
people worldwide suffer from this pandemic,
mostly outside the US. Estimates show that a
global campaign against the epidemic needs $7-10
billion annually for an effective response in low-
and middle-income countries.

Because IMUSIL operates on an entirely different
principle from other drugs (including antibiotics
and antiretroviral drugs), the Company's
compounds may offer an important alternative in
the global fight against infectious diseases.

About the cure.

More info to come.

Disobedience

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read
history, is man's original virtue. It is through
disobedience that progress has been made, through
disobedience and through rebellion.--Oscar Wilde

The detritus of war

These men will come to hate. It will not be the
Iraqis they hate. This we do not talk about.

See who Fred is talking about.

Something politically incorrect this way comes

CONSERVATIVE, n.
A statesman who is enamored of existing
evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who
wishes to replace them with others.

..From Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary

Microsoft flexing muscles

They're gonna lose. Very weird and out of touch with
blogspace along with their politically correct
ineptness. It won't be a place I will likely visit.
Too many nicely painted white picket fences.

Aack!

Earlier today, I posted comments from a
BoingBoing reader about the fact that MSN Spaces,
Microsoft's new blogging tool, censors certain
words you might try to include in a blog title or
url. If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's
the point of having one? This demanded a full
investigation.

...

The conclusion? A mixed bag of results that
manages to do what most attempts to automate
censorship do -- make fools of the censors.

Full story.

Are Amerikans really like this?

I gotta say I can't find anything to argue about
in Billy's analysis of this.

Are you ready for the consequences?

...A European is disarmed in the face of a
dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that
he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is
right. An American rebels to the bottom of his
soul."

Ayn Rand wrote that thirty-three years ago. You
know what? More and more when I read that, I see
in Americans now what she saw in Europeans, then.
Lots more and more.

From Billy Beck.

googleblog

This is somewhat old news but google has their very
own blog.

googleblog

"The Greatest Bull Market of all Time is about to Commence"

Nigel has got it quite right, despite all the
incomprehensible letters behind his name, but I
expect silver to be a better buy. It's now at $7.99
per ounce. How do you get change when you're buying
a loaf of bread with a gold coin that's trading for
$850? Will there be bread?

See here.

As the dollar continues its steep descent to 75
on the Dollar Index, and the syndicated US
propaganda machine's hacks, and talking heads,
continue in their shallow "analysis" of the
markets, the momentous importance of the world
reserve currency's demise, and the underpinning
fundamentals behind it, are all but glossed over,
in order that Joe Public does not really
understand the fate that will shortly overwhelm
him. The DJIA, SPX and NASDAQ enjoy their pre-
festive season bear market rally, and everyone is
provided with the apparent impression that all is
just fine and dandy on the good ship "USS
America". The key thing is that consumers must
not lose confidence in the all-important
Christmas - New Year spending spree, and suddenly
start to demonstrate a modicum of financial
prudence.

Almost an HIV cure?

After getting three under-the-skin injections of
the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the
patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped
by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients
still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients'
T-cell counts stopped dropping.

The article.

Via Gabriel Mihalache

What's an expert?

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes,
which can be made, in a very narrow field."
--Niels Bohr

I contend none of us live long enough to make all
the mistakes which can be made.

If that's true, there are no experts.

Via mysmallboat.

The Glories and Pathologies of Texocentrism

You might wonder what this has to do with Texas.

Just read it all.

There is another factor. Left-liberalism in our
time lacks a robust theory of what holds society
together. Having a distaste for consumer culture,
capitalism, and the bourgeois works of peace
through churches, families, and localities, and
hit with doubts about the viability of full-blown
socialism, the typical leftist is left with no
viable model of makes the world livable,
peaceful, and civilized.

The political right, of course, has long
suffered under the delusion that all good things
come from the barrel of a gun. But even for the
left, supposedly against political violence, it
always comes back to the same ideal of a world
run by a benevolent despot. Their hope for a
political messiah never quite goes away.

Even if the impulse can be explained, it is a
sick view of the world that confuses the mass
violence of war with the bringing of civilization.

Such is the ultimate nature, the Ruling Concept,
of all politics.

All of Texocentrism

Via Roderick T. Long

What writing is all about

Via mysmallboat.

"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible
words, or your reader will be sure to skip them;
and in the plainest possible words or he will
certainly misunderstand them." -- John Ruskin

These are the difficult things to do and the things
I'll always be working on.

Good, original writing is a bitch to get right.

What blogging is all about

Take a look at what Jonathan Wilde at Catallarchy
has to say about blogging.

He gets it right on...

As I’ve written before, the blogosphere is a
market, not a democracy, and its free-market
qualities result in the diverse, bottom-up
spontaneous order we enjoy. Those same qualities
also make the blogosphere radically egalitarian.

...

The blogosphere is one example of the counter-
intuitive idea that markets are much more
egalitarian than centralized structures.

When I first heard about blogging I thought, "who
the hell would wanna do that?" Now I'm a junkie,
trying to uncover that Bad Con we all live in,
posting it to whomever might find value in it.

In Meatspace I'm Clark Kent. In Cyberspace? Well,
sometimes I stumble on my cape.

Why not blog yourself?

When you do, come back and leave your blog address
here in a comment section. I may link to it.

Self-expression.

It rules now.

More than ever before.

MSM (Main Stream Media) is on its deathbed and doesn't
know it yet.

Think about it.

Offshoring inevitable, so get over it

Offshoring inevitable, so get over it.

"The movement of jobs from high cost to lower
cost countries is now inevitable and attempts by
Western governments to stop it happening are
doomed to fail.

Some higher cost countries have tried to pass
laws to stop the export of jobs but if successful
this would force a higher cost base on firms
which would then lose out to more competive firms
not so restricted. The final result of trying to
stop jobs being exported could be even the loss
of even more jobs."

Axiomatic, my dear Watson. Business moves to where
it gets the most for its money.

Think about the consequences.

Fear and loathing.

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday
called for new security measures to guard against
attacks on the United States that use the
Internet, which he called "a potential Achilles'
heel."
...

Mr. Tenet pointed out that the modernization
of key industries in the United States is making
them more vulnerable by connecting them with an
Internet that is open to attack.

The way the Internet was built might be part
of the problem, he said. Its open architecture
allows Web surfing, but that openness makes the
system vulnerable, Mr. Tenet said.

Access to networks like the World Wide Web
might need to be limited to those who can show
they take security seriously, he said.

...

The national press, including United Press
International (UPI), were excluded from
yesterday's event, at Mr. Tenet's request,
organizers said. [My emphasis.]

Odd. Maybe there was a fly on the wall at that
event and we'll hear more later.

Tenet calls for Internet security, By Shaun
Waterman, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, Published
December 2, 2004

Thanks to L. R. White for this.

Fear - The Race's mortal enemy.

First there was the Black Book of Nazi crimes and
now The Black Book of Communism.

Why do so many 'just follow orders'?

Fear.

Show me a man without fear and I'll show you one
that won't follow anyone.

"Nearly 100 million deaths. Not casualties of
war, but civilian slaughter. Deaths in gulags and
concentration camps. Deaths from a bullet to the
head. Most of all, deaths by starvation - the
result either of planned famines, meted out as
punishment to internal foes (as in Stalin's
USSR), or unintended consequences of central
policy."

...

Why would this scholarly book - with its "just
the facts, Ma'm" approach and its extensively
documented claims - ignite a firestorm?

Partly it is because many crimes of Communism
have gone unexamined, due both to bias among the
intelligentsia and lack of access to archives of
Communist countries. As such, this book is a
shock to those who haven't been paying attention.

The entire review.

Living Democracy

"As democracy is perfected, the office of
president represents, more and more closely, the
inner soul of the people. On some great and
glorious day the plain folks of the land will
reach their heart's desire at last and the White
House will be adorned by a downright moron."
--H. L. Mencken

Damn, that dude was a visionary.

Via Bill St. Claire

The powers that be have lost control

Liz Michael - The American Empire On Its Deathbed

I doubt they've ever had control...

All the various moves you are seeing now are not
the moves of someone "in control". They are the
moves of a group of people that have suddenly
discovered they have lost control. And are
desperately trying to get it back.

Totalitarians in control wouldn't be intimidated
by a little anthrax spread around Washington DC.
Totalitarians would stand and fight. The Congress
did not stand and fight. They RAN, and they ran
like scalded dogs. The rest of the government
also ran. These are the actions, not of people in
control of a master plan, but of people in panic:
people who have suddenly discovered they DON'T
control what's going on.

Liz is right in this. I've said it a number of times
myself in various ways here and on my previous
blog.

We live in anarchy. Always have and probably always
will.

Almost no one knows it.

...

These people are not only afraid of foreign
terrorists. These people are afraid of you and
me. They are afraid of the press. They are afraid
of the political activists. They are afraid of
the pacifists. They are afraid of their own
shadows. They are not in control of anything.

Liz is right about a lot of things but fooling
around in politics (running for office) is like
taking up lodging in a house of vampires.

Pretty soon you are one.

We know how that works, eh?

Some very old human traditions

A discovery at the Pyramid of the Moon...

With the excavation of the pyramid nearly
complete, one important conclusion is emerging:
combined with past burials at the site, the new
find strongly suggests that the Pyramid of the
Moon was significant to the Teotihuacano people
as a site for celebrating state power through
ceremony and sacrifice. Contrary to some past
interpretation, militarism was apparently central
to the city's culture. [My emphasis]

...

Teotihuacan, the 2,000-year-old, master-planned
metropolis that was the first great city of the
Western Hemisphere, has long been perplexing to
Mesoamerican archaeologists. Located 25 miles
north of the current Mexico City, this ancient
civilization left behind the ruins of a city grid
covering eight square miles and signs of a unique
culture. But even the Aztecs, who gave the city
its present name, did not know who built it. They
called the monumental ruins "the City of the
Gods." The Pyramid of the Moon is one of the
site's oldest structures, and has long been
suspected to be its ceremonial center.

...

The filled-in burial vault contains the remains
of twelve people, all apparently sacrificed,
together with a large variety of offerings and
the remains of various animals of clearly
symbolic importance. Ten of the human bodies were
decapitated. Sugiyama, the excavation director,
believes that the signs of violence and
militarism in the burial are especially
significant.

Hmmmm. Do you see a faint light here? What do you
suppose the reasons for the slaughter were?

...

All the human remains had their hands bound
behind their backs, and the ten decapitated
bodies appear to have been tossed, rather than
arranged, on one side of the burial. The other
two bodies Sugiyama describes as "richly
ornamented" with greenstone earspools and beads,
a necklace made of imitation human jaws, and
other items indicating high rank.

"The mosaic figure was found on top of 18 large
obsidian knives, carefully set in a radial
pattern. Nine of these had a curving form, while
the nine others had the form of the feathered
serpent, a symbol of maximum political
authority," noted Sugiyama. "Evidently this
offering in some way formed the central symbolic
meaning of the grave complex." Sugiyama said.

Political assassinations? Who do you suppose the
victims were, terrorists or pols/priests?

...the ultimate result of power, finely honed
and served with lopped heads.

The entire report.

Score one against activism?

Score one against activism?

I wondered if 'activism' was the real reason Sean was
axed. Then I came across this key paragraph:

But other activists saw a much broader effort
under way to change the leadership of many U.S.
pension funds, which in the last few years have
struggled because of market losses and increasing
liabilities.

I suspect that was the real reason for him being
pushed out the door. The Big Cheeses don't want
to start a panic by revealing the real reason.

Expect continued market losses. The Dow is going
nowhere and has been for a long time.

Also expect a large number of pension funds to go
tits up.

Hidden plans for your "money"?

Gold and your paper money.

Excellent article here...

It looks as though the US strategy in this
transcontinental currency battle is to give the
euro's masters what they want - except way too
much of it, way too quickly - in order to
overload the euro system and make it collapse.

...

The European Central Bank (ECB) was instituted
by the euro's creators to preside over an orderly
transition away from a dollar-dependent world to
a more versatile arrangement wherein the euro
fulfills a quasi-reserve function that will
eventually give way to gold being the ultimate
international currency reserve, with all the
fiats freely floating against gold instead of
against each other.

Interesting idea but rather unbelievable as
governments like to control everything from
people to currency. How will they control gold?

When they no longer have control of their currency
(because gold will then be the leader) they will
be entirely obsolete, rather than almost obsolete.

Sounds like the ECB wrote their suicide note here.

Think about it.

But the road there is a long and winding one,
and not even all of those currently "in charge"
(international central bankers) are fully aware
that this is the ultimate goal. Rather, that
unstated goal was wrapped up implicitly in the
ECB's role of guaranteeing price stability,
rather than using interest rates to jump-start an
otherwise faltering economy as the Federal
Reserve Board does in the United States.

"Price stability" means that the currency is
intentionally not used as a means for gunning
Euroland's economic engines. This goal is
designed as a precaution to avoid the excesses
caused by overprinting, which has been the United
States' main tool for papering over any possible
recession, or even looming depressions - so far.

...

The lower the US lets its currency fall, [I've
said it here before: "...as if they had a choice."
-jo ]the more temptation the Asians feel to dump
their US debt holdings, as they see their US "assets"
depreciate with every tick lower by the dollar on
its journey into forex "Hades". At some point,
this temptation will become overwhelming.

And I've already said that a number of times here.

...

No matter which way this battle turns out, if
you put a good portion of your assets in gold,
you can afford to sit on the sidelines and simply
"watch the game". Whoever wins or loses, you will
be safe from the carnage on the playing field.
While the euro's rise against the dollar
certainly gives US gold investors a boost, even a
total collapse of the euro system will be good
for gold.

In that case and assuming no other 'gold backed'
currency shows up, gold and/or silver would be the
only other option.

$1.3 million con.

Thieves dress in NATO outfits, steal $1.3 million

Looked so easy, didn't it.

I wonder how they knew these soldiers were
masquerading. Did they have toy guns or what?

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Thieves
masquerading as NATO soldiers stole a million
euros ($1.3 million) from a Bosnian security van
on the last day of the alliance’s peace mission
in the country on Wednesday.

Standing alone

"Men have been taught that it is a virtue to
agree with others. But the creator is the man who
disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a
virtue to swim with the current. But the creator
is the man who goes against the current. Men have
been taught that it is a virtue to stand
together. But the creator is the man who stands
alone." -- Ayn Rand

Do you know how to stand on your own and not mouth
the thoughts of others?

The thinking process

"The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle
endlessly over the nature of the thinking process
in man, but no matter how violently they differ
otherwise they all agree that it has little to do
with logic and is not much conditioned by overt
facts." --H. L. Mencken

How have we managed to survive so long?

There's something going on here.

Does anyone know what it is?

What are these boys up to? More cover-ups?

Shortly after dawn on a recent morning, two
dump trucks and a water tanker pulled up to a
new, unmarked complex of buildings at East
Potomac Park, the grassy peninsula near the
Jefferson Memorial. The drivers exited their
cabs, knocked at a gatehouse with blacked-out
windows and waited for a security guard to emerge
from behind a locked door.

A few minutes later, a panel of 10-foot-high
security fence slid open, and the trucks
disappeared inside, leaving the joggers and
cyclists along the waterfront none the wiser
about their mission.

What goes on beyond the fence is a mystery. The
multi-agency review normally required to erect
anything on federal parkland did not apply to the
beige, metal buildings. The Navy, which operates
the site at Ohio and Buckeye drives SW, calls the
work a "utility assessment and upgrade" and
volunteers nothing more.

"As a matter of policy, we can't go into the
particulars," said a Navy spokesman, Lt. Cmdr.
Joseph A. Surette.

All of it.

Did you know?...

What I thought were some interesting facts about
Wal-Mart...

"If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it
would rank as China's eighth-biggest trading
partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada,"
Xu said.

The Chinese story.

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United
States after the Federal government with over
925,000 employees. Each year, the company hires
550,000 more employees - three times the number
of people the U.S. military recruits every year -
replacing those lost to rapid turnover and
replenishing its workforce.

More Wal-Mart facts.

Why Harvard was absent from John Mack's eulogy

And yet another fine example of what happens to the
unconventional scientist going against The Institution.

And great changes are never advertised nor welcomed
by the institutionally empty-minded.

But Harvard’s narrower — and narrow-minded —
thinkers looked at Mack’s approach as violating
the medical school’s professional-research
standards (although in fact it was their world-
view that he challenged). Given the opportunity
either to renounce his views or to resign from
the faculty, Mack instead fought a bitter battle
with a committee that was obviously stacked
against him. The committee’s report was scathing
in its critique of Mack, ignoring virtually
everything that he and his lead lawyer, Boston
litigator Roderick MacLeish Jr., had produced not
only to support his work and his successful
clinical results, but to highlight his right,
under principles of academic freedom, to continue
his research unhindered by the university.
(Disclosure: I served as an informal legal
adviser to Mack at the time.)

Several months after the investigative committee
commenced its work, which would ultimately take
15 months, word of this extraordinary inquisition
leaked out and spread like wildfire on the then-
fledgling medium of the Internet. In some
academic and legal circles, Harvard’s
investigation was viewed not as an effort to
uphold intellectual standards of excellence and
accuracy, but as something rooted in fear,
ignorance, or jealousy of Mack’s pursuit of
questions that more rigid minds could not or
would not comprehend.

The entire report.

Against the grain

"Whoever originated the cliche that money is the
root of all evil knew hardly anything about the
nature of evil and very little about human beings."
-- Eric Hoffer