Woe is them, Part IV

After 26 years of showcasing Army talent, the
All-Army Battle of Bands and the Stars of
Tomorrow contests have been called off because of
a lack of funding.

Full report.

WTO talking heads

The supporters of state-managed trade make a
huge mistake -- they believe states, rather than
individuals and companies -- trade. But nations
do not trade; this is one of the glaringly stupid
myths that the world of nation states foists upon
us. What is wrong with allowing the traders
themselves to decide the terms of trade? Every
time they trade?

Full essay.

A study in cause and effect

Government affects the economy in three major
ways:

1. by taxation and spending,
2. by regulation, and
3. by control of money and banking.

Taxation is economic hemophilia. It drains the
economy of capital which might otherwise be used
to increase both consumer satisfaction and the
level of production and thus raise the standard
of living. Taxing away this money either prevents
the standard of living from rising to the heights
it normally would or actually causes it to drop.
Since productive people are the only ones who
make money, they are the only ones from whom
government can get money. Taxation must
necessarily penalize productivity.

...until all of the above grinds production to a
halt.

Do you hear that braying in the distance?

Do you have your donkey yet?

See the rest.

Update:

The peanut gallery here is putting forth a number
of distractions.

Best you fixate on the vegetable patch and that
donkey, then you'll probably survive.

So many distractions, so little time.

Denial

Roman history shows how recognition of these
things lags behind the facts. Generations passed
before people recognized that the Republic was
truly dead. America has violated the initial
conditions the founders considered necessary for
a republic.
...
The predominate reaction of the Romans to the
death of the Republic was resignation, as seen in
the popular philosophies of the Empire: Stoicism,
Epicureanism, Hedonism, and Christianity.

The author's hang up on whether or not Amurika is
or ever was a Republic is more pissing in the
wind. Does it make a difference, given the fuzzy
nature of defining an instrument of pure power?
Power by any other name is still power in my
dictionary.

As to comparing the events to Rome, they're
moving much faster now. Communication can be
instantaneous today. Information is widely
dispersed and available.

I expect the current recognition to happen soon,
much sooner than most anyone thinks.

On the other hand, denial is a big part of
earthmonkey's antics.

Read.

Via chumpfish

The Russian state wants no competition, forces Yukos bankruptcy

The creditors of Russian oil company Yukos, led
by federal tax authorities and state-controlled
Rosneft Oil Company, rejected recovery plan
proposed by the company’s management and voted to
declare Yukos bankrupt. On Tuesday, July 25, 93.9
percent of the company’s creditors voted in favor
of bankruptcy, while 5.63 percent voted against.

Full article.

To the root of our problems

Beliefs that are irrational, required, universal
and absolute will always put swords in the hands
of men. Illogical and anti-empirical beliefs
cannot be validated by external and objective
factors. Two scientists who disagree on a theory
can resolve their dispute via the scientific
method; they can defer to logic and reproducible
experiments–they do not have to bomb each other
into submission. Mathematicians can disagree over
a proposition, but in the end it is not
personal–it is not the dominance of one over the
others, but of logic and proof over one, or all.

The free market runs on the same principle.
“Value” is not decided by committees, or leaders,
but by individual decisions. If I think that my
product is better than yours, I don’t have to
blow up your offices, just appeal to the
consumer, the final arbiter. Consumers don’t have
to burn down a Ford plant if they prefer
Volvos–individual decisions determine the value
and success of each company.

In religion, politics and nationalism, things
are very different, because no objective method
exists to resolve disputes. Who can prove that
“Jewish” is better than “Christian” or “Muslim”
or “Buddhist”? How can these absolute and
irrational fantasies ever be reconciled in
reality? They are impervious to logic and
experimentation. Universal truth is willed, not
proven. This irrationality creates instability,
hostility and the endless desire for expansion.
The more collectivist a society becomes, the more
expansionistic it becomes. Witness Israel,
Islam–and America.

...and all the collectives that have gone before.

What I've been saying all along, plus...and
probably the finest piece I've ever seen on the
subject.

Highly recommended.

The will. Works every time.

We like to lie to ourselves a lot about why we
do things, because often our true purpose isn’t
very nice or noble and doesn’t fit the ideal
image we have of ourselves. You can’t know what
your will is if you lie to yourself. There should
always be at least one person with whom you are
completely open and painfully honest, and that
person should be you. Give yourself permission to
be imperfect, and realize that if what you see
when you look inside isn’t very pretty — well,
that too is your will. Besides, nobody else has
to know your ugly, secret truths if you don’t
want them to — and everybody else has their
horrid little secrets. It’s called being human.
Cut yourself some slack. It goes good on crackers.
...
If you’re going to do something, whether saintly
or despicable, do it right. Step one is to know
what you’re trying to do.

“Do what thou wilst shall be the whole of the
law” means to live on purpose, and doing that
lets you live better than you can if you just
stumble your way through.

The whole essay.

Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer

This news is a bit old...

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the
structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has
caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a
genetic disease that should be cured.

Woah, Nellie.

Then who would those of us who are less stupid
prey on?

All of us earthmonkeys need some kind of training
to do the simplest of tasks. Now that's some kinda
stupid, that is.

No, I'm afeared that we're all stupid but that
few know it. We come outta the box dumber 'n
dirt. Many, maybe most, never recover.

To those of us that do know it: Shhhh....

That's our big advantage.

Full article.

Abolish universities

I think it is time to close the universities,
and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the
RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced
organization. Universities these days have the
moral character of electronic churches, and as
little educational value. They are an
embarrassment to civilization.
...
The truth is that universities positively
discourage learning. Think about it. Suppose you
wanted to learn Twain. A fruitful approach might
be to read Twain. The man wrote to be read, not
analyzed tediously and inaccurately by begowned
twits. It might help to read a life of Twain. All
of this the student could do, happily, even
joyously, sitting under a tree of an afternoon.
This, I promise, is what Twain had in mind.

"begowned twits" indeed...hustling mind pablum.

The rest of the rant.

The Revolution continues, one at a time, quietly

The Covenant of Unanimous Consent
(link updated) is now a permanent link on the
right panel here.

You may not want to have any intimate dealings
with anyone who doesn't sign it.

Via Sunni.

Going for the gold, they are

"Thus, with no clear alternative in sight, the
financial health of other countries and
currencies is heavily dependent on the US dollar
Ponzi scheme. If the dollar goes down, they go
with it, and as with the prisoner's dilemma,
everybody is afraid to make the first move - the
first one to abandon the dollar could set off a
chain reaction that would backfire and affect
them as well. Thus, the dollar's demise might
take a bit longer than common sense would
suggest, as everybody is trying to evade the
unpopular repercussions."

He goes on to say "Nevertheless, it is
inevitable, and that is why the GCC (Gulf
Cooperation Council) countries need to
contemplate a diversification into other
currencies and gold sooner rather than later."

As soon as he said that the GCC needs to
"contemplate a diversification into other
currencies and gold sooner rather than later", my
brain went into an infinite loop, and time and
space meant nothing to me. I remember thinking,
"He just finished telling us that these
foreigners should get out of dollars and into
gold, and then he tells us that there is not
enough sheer volume of other currencies to soak
up the mountains of dollars that you want to get
out of! That leaves only gold! The guys who are
going to be charging $200 a barrel for oil going
into gold? Wowee!"

They, among many others.

Gonna be a wild ride and don't forget silver.

Full rant.

The Circus, Part I

Also unclear is why black highlighters were
chosen in the first place. Some blame it on the
closed, elite culture of the CIA itself. A former
CIA officer speaking on the condition of
anonymity said highlighting documents with black
pens was a common and universal practice.

"It seemed counterintuitive, but the higher-ups
didn't know what they were doing," the ex-officer
said. "I was once ordered to feed documents into
a copying machine in order to make backups of
some very important top-secret records, but it
turned out to be some sort of device that cut the
paper to shreds."

Bwahahaha.

"counterintuitive" = college boy word for
"stupid".

Full onion.

Via ballstonalcoholics

Woe is them, Part III

Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are
starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned
companies are doing the buying.
...
Washington is not likely to produce more money
to build roads. The federal highway fund — which
will have a balance of about $16 billion by the
end of 2006 — will run out in 2009 or 2010,
according to White House and congressional
estimates.

Pretty sweet deal for a few.

Bummint steals the money to build the roads and
continues stealing from the taxpayer while it
leases the roads, grabs more money from the road
maintainer/builder who has to grab even more
money from taxpayer/road users to make a profit
that bummint didn't. Shit, the latter didn't even
break even.

Whew! Got short of breath on that one.

There's something really wrong with this picture.

I guess I missed something here.

And what's the big fuckin' deal about where on
earth the money goes?

Would it make you feel any better that good ol'
'merikun companies get it?

P.S. Has anyone seen any of these juicy contracts?
I'd wager your bummint has some guaranteed income
clause in there for the lessees.

Full report.

Woe is them, Part II

"This fire season, we have expended $60 million
for all the resources we have ordered," said
Bobby Young, Texas Forest Service associate
director of resource protection. "For an agency
with a $7.5 million budget, this has us more than
concerned."

That ever-present "concern" again. It's pandemic.

Anyway, it's time to find a whole batch of new
folks to rip off...for a while.

Makes ya wonder how Texas survived before all
this "resource protection", doesn't it.

Oh, well. It'll survive when it's gone too.

Full report.

The Hive Mind

Will The Hive Mind turn the Middle Eastern
deserts to glass?

I'll give that an 80% probability.

All is not right with this world.

Woe is them, Part I

In a survey in March, the NCSL found that at
least 10 states expect to have deficits in 2007.
The next year, the number jumps to at least 19.
...
The state, like others in the Northeast, is hard
pressed to find more revenues. In the past, Reed
points out, New Jersey has relied on tax hikes on
the wealthy. "Now there are reports that high
taxes are influencing wealthy people's decision
on where to live," she says. Yet another sign
that the tax-the-rich strategy is a problem: "The
state has the largest decline of high-paying
jobs. Most of the new jobs are lower wages," says
Reed.

You don't say. Voting with their rich feet, an
idea whose time has come. Time to dance like a
butterfly...

First they left New York for New Jersey, now
they're leaving New Jersey. Does anyone know
where they went from Detroit?

Karma.

Warms my cockles.

All is right with the world.

Full article.

It's official

Always late, the "official" announcement, and a
rather wishy-washy report at that.

A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and
welfare timebomb could send the economic
superpower into insolvency, according to research
by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal
Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent
of the US Federal Reserve.
...
According to his central analysis, "the US
government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it
will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this
context, are current and future generations to
whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised
future net payments of various kinds''.

All this from a foreign source. Do you suppose
the Amurikun MSM would ever report this?

I don't.

Full report.

Why is this?

"The member of a primitive clan might express his
identity in the formula 'I am we'; he cannot yet
conceive of himself as an 'individual,' existing
apart from his group." --Eric Fromm

Update:

[See comments on this post.]

Rick and Devlin, both good friends and otherwise
Bright Sparks, are believers in the Group Mind-
Fuck, both the generic and the specific kinds.
They don't agree with Eric and me and they know
how I feel and think about it, therefore their
comments are directed at the hapless passerby
here. It's to these hapless folks that I direct
the rest of this post.

Are you a bee, a sheep or a lemming?

I thought not.

Then simply stand in front of the mirror each
morning and say, "I'm not and I won't."

It's that simple.

I never said it'd be easy and I won't.

Now we'll watch the unfolding of The Greatest
Mind-Fuck in history brought to you by The All
Glorious Tribes kicking each others' asses.

Best not to be near if you can avoid it. Doubtful,
this.

Now I'm going back to my cave.

Give me a holler when it's over...of course,
that's if you're still here.

Who's the enemy?

It's time to stop blaming wars on loose
historical facts, but instead blame them on the
regimes that start them. After all, history
doesn't start wars; governments do.

Governments.

Governments.

The Greatest of All Granfalloons.

Got it?

Now, who's your enemy?

Full article.

The coming world

I've seen this seething undercurrent up close.

Fascinating.

When international agencies jet their
consultants to the gleaming glass towers of the
elegant quadrants of town to meet with the local
"private sector," they’re talking to only a
fraction of the entrepreneurial world. The
emerging economic powers of the developing world
are the garbage collectors, the appliance
manufacturers, and the illegal construction
companies in the streets far below.
...
The American [past] experience is very much like
what is going on today in the Third World and the
formerly communist countries: The official law
has not been able to keep up with popular
initiative, and government has lost control.
Third Worlders are organized in modern-day claim
clubs, and their governments have begun to give
them preemption rights.

Full essay.

Statist dreams and the results

Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be
two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists.
The Anarchists want the government to be nothing,
and the Socialists want government to be
everything. There can be no greater contrast.
Well, the time will come when there will be only
these two great parties, the Anarchists
representing the laissez faire doctrine and the
Socialists representing the extreme view on the
other side, and when that time comes I am an
Anarchist. --William Graham Sumner

Statists come in many flavors. Socialist is just
one of them. Outside of that, Sumner is right.
Anarchy is the only possibility now that the
statists have bankrupted government. Like most
individuals, they won't or don't know how to
manage money. It's not important to them and so
they bring on their own destruction, like idiots
shooting themselves and their Subjects in the
foot with their amateur fast-draw, in a futile
attempt to install Statist Heaven. Then one day
the Subject, limping down the sidewalk, notices
that hole in his foot and figures out how it got
there.

Paybacks are a bitch.

Now if you don't believe government is dead, you
haven't been paying attention.

Doesn't that make us all practicing anarchists?

This Emperor has no strings

If string theory made a prediction that didn't
accord with physical reality, stringsters could
say it's correct in one of these other universes.
As a result, writes Prof. Smolin, "string theory
cannot be disproved." By the usual standards,
that would rule it out as science.

Full article.

More on the coming bankruptcy of Empire

A diversion of dollars to help fight the war in
Iraq has helped create a $530 million shortfall
for Army posts at home and abroad, leaving some
unable to pay utility bills or even cut the grass.

In San Antonio, Fort Sam Houston hasn't been
able to pay its $1.4 million monthly utility bill
since March, prompting workers in many of the
post's administrative buildings to get automated
disconnection notices.

Read.

"Benevolent global hegemony"

"Benevolent global hegemony," as William Kristol
and Robert Kagan memorably put it in their 1996
foreign policy manifesto, is just a fancy phrase
for bankruptcy. By the time our indubitable
"benevolence" is globalized, the costs of
hegemony will have driven us into complete
insolvency.

Doncha just love the intellectual flatulence
put out by policy wonks like Kristol and Kagan.

...as "benevolent" as a rogue elephant in a clay
pot factory, to put it kindly.

It's not likely we'll have to wait til it's
globalized for that insolvency.

Full article.

Why Politicized Science is Dangerous

The past history of human belief is a cautionary
tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow
human beings because we believed they had signed
a contract with the devil, and had become
witches. We still kill more than a thousand
people each year for witchcraft. In my view,
there is only one hope for humankind to emerge
from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted
world" of our past. That hope is science.

But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for
truth is confused with political advocacy, the
pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for
power."

What that means is that every dollar government
shits out for some Grand Plan has strings
attached.

He who has your gold, makes the rules.

How does that make you feel?

Full rant.

Machu Picchu

I spent some time on this 222 megapixel photo,
manipulating buttons at the bottom, clicking on
it and the smaller version in the top left
corner.

In the end, I had a fine virtual helicopter tour
of the ruins at no cost.

Try it.

The ruins.

What the Big Peepers have been doing for a long time

I'm posting this primarily because it appears
almost no one is aware of it, blaming the rash
of bummint spying on just The Current Bozo in
Charge.

It's The System, Dull Sparks...and all the while
you're hoping in earnest that The Next Bozo will
fix it all...and few are willing to pull the
plug on it.

Where is the goddamn plug?

Hint: In your wallet is one place.

Full Wikipedia entry.

What the 'Struggle' Is All About

The Bush administration has finally confirmed my
point. Showing the same irresoluteness that kept
shifting the rationale for the war against Iraq,
the White House has now changed the name of the
conflict that was, according to Mr. Bush, to last
forever. The “War on Terror” is now redesignated
the “Global Struggle Against Extremism!” No
announcement has been made as to who won the war
that was as magisterially ended as it had begun.
Nor is there any explanation as to why the
administration has deviated from White House
Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s previous political
marketing advice: “you don’t introduce a new
product in August.” The War on Terror has been
meeting with increased consumer sales resistance,
leaving those who trade in death and destruction
to come out with new and larger repackaging.

Neither the people of Iraq nor American soldiers
will notice any change in their daily lives, of
course. The killing and destruction will
continue, but under a different rationale. Have
you observed how quickly the media and
politicians incorporated the new terminology into
their public liturgies, substituting the word
“extremism” where “terrorism” was once employed?
Well-trained actors are quick to adjust to script
changes.

I'm gonna take a wag here and predict that “Global
Struggle Against Extremism!” won't fly long. The
phrase is too long and doesn't roll trippingly off
the tongue like the "Warn terr". What's more the
former sounds like a bastardized IWW slogan.

The World's Biggest Soap Opera continues...

Stay untuned.

Full essay.

Via Bill St. Clair

The real DDT story

They're after you and, no it's not just the
mosquitoes.

Full post.

Not likely seen on TV news

Don't ask me who "Z" is.

Mexicans have a finely tuned sense of justice
here, don't they.

"One more message, dirtbags, so that you learn
to respect."
Note attached to the severed heads of
policemen/soldiers found in front of government
buildings in Acapulco Mexico. Courtesy of Z.

Via globalguerrillas

The Practice

Fiscally, the state is completely terminal.
There is no way in God’s green acre that the
national debt is ever going to be paid off –
we’re going in completely the wrong direction for
that! And all debts that escalate end up in
bankruptcy.

So when a statist says to me that we need the
government, or the government should do ‘X’ or
‘Y’, it could be arguable I guess, but it seems
rather… irrelevant. It’s like getting a call from
a man who’s jumped naked out of plane telling you
he needs a parachute. Sure you do. But you
haven’t got one, and it’s far too late to reverse
that now, isn’t it?

The facts are clear, the math is clear, the lack
of political will is clear, the self-interest of
our rulers is clear – the government is dead.
Dead, dead, dead. Sure, might look OK from the
outside, but it’s already starting to smell.

Now that you've seen the results, see the cause.

Read.

Update:

By the way, the economic collapse of Amerika will
not be reported on the 11 o'clock news.