Sunday, April 29, 2007

Another look at the Big Bubble

The last to suffer will be those who most richly deserve to – the Fed-allied financial interests who have facilitated the entire scam by luring people into unmanageable debt.
Nevertheless both groups will suffer.

Some will call it The Cleansing of the Gene Pool.

Now here's the real issue:

How is someone that gives you what you want
at fault...without even twisting your arm?

See how they run, the ones who play The Ever
Present Blame Game when not a shot or a
threat was heard in advance.

There's more.

See the whole post


Saturday, April 28, 2007

The Nature of Power

The corrupting nature of power arises from two sources: (1) presuming the propriety of exercising coercive authority over others (which IS corruption); and, (2) the enjoyment of immunity from the consequences of the exercise of power. When a president and a prime minister are applauded for expressing condolences to the 32 victims of the VPI shooting - while insisting upon the continued slaughter of tens of thousands of equally innocent people in Iraqi - one has a pretty good measure of how deeply such corruption has seeped into people's minds. --Butler Shaffer
The Dark Age is upon us.


Friday, April 27, 2007

An idea whose time has come

One can only hope for an epidemic of this...
Low-fare airline Ryanair has explained its refusal to appear before MPs by saying it had "far better things to do than waste time at a House of Commons committee".



Ryanair has better things to do than talk to MPs

The carrier had been asked to give evidence to a transport committee
Full article.



Ripped from The Freeway To Serfdom



Thursday, April 26, 2007

Are you ready?

Things might not get this bad, on the other

hand a little voice tells me it's probable...
The progression from financial crisis to subsistence crisis will be very swift. It will only take the amount of time that the worldwide inventory of goods is exhausted, since many factories and production centers will become embroiled in payment disputes with their customers and suppliers, so that deliveries are delayed first, then canceled. Then the factories start closing rapidly. Just in time manufacturing assures us that we only have a couple of DAYS of goods at inventory depots. People will initially think the Fed will fix things, but the Fed will find out that it cannot replace the money that was to clear here there and everywhere fast enough to prevent the death of that money, and hence find the money DIED. It rapidly becomes a worthless notional amount tied up in disputes, large and small, effectively serving to paralyze commerce.



Now then....

What can we do to plan for this?
The whole thing.

Update:

The more I think on this, the more probable it
becomes to me simply because virtually
no one understands the effect of a currency/
piece of paper (there will be many others,
probably all) that no one wants.

When it's all over the words on most everyone's
lips will be, "What happened?"

Then's when you'll hear all the "expert analysis".

I don't know why I think all of that will be so
hilarious.

I suppose it's a design feature.


A positive view, the coming essay question

Adem's up and running...
For the past 100 years, we've lived in a secret hidden context of oligarchy that many of us at this point have been programmed to take for granted. Food comes from the supermarket. We drive 10 miles to work or more, in cars made by "the big three" or now maybe "the big six". We sit down and work in a giant office building in cubicles. Then we go home and watch tv, broadcast by a few companies. Even our elections run on this model. Multiple choice.

Well, the world is about to become an essay question. And the powers that be want you to be afraid of that, because they are. People who even address the possibility of these interlocking, related systems collapsing mention it with an air of dread.
See it here.


Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Rhyme

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
--attributed to Mark Twain.
With the Crisis of the Third Century, however, this vast [Roman] trade network broke down. The widespread civil unrest made it no longer safe for merchants to travel as they once had, and the financial crisis that struck made exchange very difficult. This produced profound changes that, in many ways, would echo the character of the coming Middle Ages. Large landowners, no longer able to successfully export their crops over long distances, began producing food for subsistence and local barter. Rather than import manufactured goods, they began to manufacture many goods locally, often on their own estates, thus beginning the self-sufficient "house economy" that would become commonplace in later centuries, reaching its final form in Manorialism. The common free people of the cities, meanwhile, began to move out to the countryside in search of food and protection. Made desperate by economic necessity, many of these former city dwellers, as well as many small farmers, were forced to give up basic rights in order to receive protection from large land holders. The former became a half-free class of citizens known as coloni. They were tied to the land and, thanks to later Imperial reforms, their positions were made hereditary. This provided an early model for serfdom, which would form the basis of mediaeval (sic) feudal society.
...
Large landowners, who had become more self-sufficient, became less mindful of Rome’s central authority and were downright hostile towards its tax collectors.
link.


Tuesday, April 24, 2007

March Home Foreclosures Up 47 Percent Year-on-Year

U.S. home foreclosures rose 7 percent in March from February to 149,150, reflecting the struggle of subprime borrowers to keep their homes, real estate data firm RealtyTrac said Wednesday.

The figure, which comprises default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions, was 47 percent higher than a year ago, the Irvine, California-based company said.
All of it.


Monday, April 23, 2007

A peek behind The Fig Leaf

The significance of gold is not to be found in its role to limit the rate of growth in the stock of money, but in the fact that it removes the power to create money from the government, and transfers it to the people where it belongs.

Monetarists insist that we need 'experts' to regulate the money supply. Well, we don't. Ordinary people, in providing for their every-day needs, can do the regulation themselves. Whenever they think there is too much money in circulation, they will take some of their gold coins to the goldsmith and have them converted into jewelry and plate. And whenever they think there is too little, people will respond by taking their jewelry and plate to the Mint and have them converted into the coins of the realm. There is great inner wisdom in these arrangements. Just as we don't need the government to regulate the soap supply of the country, we don't need it to mess around with the money supply either. The unfettered market mechanism is all one needs. Government regulation of the money supply is but a fig leaf for pilferage.
Read.


The Illusion, a photo

Sunday, April 22, 2007

The Control Cult

Whatever explanations or remedies various “experts” offer for the problems that beset mankind, the common thread connecting them is that both human and physical nature are capable of being causally understood and, therefore, subject to interventionist correction. Universities are the temples of faith in this proposition, with students enrolling for their stated purpose of “making the world a better place.” It is not surprising, therefore, that immediately following these atrocities, the Virginia Tech campus became an attractor for the proponents of this Weltanschauung. “If the university had intervened after this man turned in some disturbed writing to his English professor;” “if we can just control guns;” “if police had had access to his mental health records beforehand”: these were the oft-repeated concerns of those who are convinced that the world is predictable and, hence, controllable. In the latter vein, NBC news anchor, Brian Williams, reportedly vocalized the catechism in proposing a new federal program to monitor the mental health of all college students, in order to prevent occurrences such as this one.
...
But recent inquiries into the nature of “chaos” and complexity are revealing the baseless foundations of this faith in control. Our world – including each human being – is simply too complex, too subject to a myriad of too many influences over which we can never have sufficient awareness to predict outcomes. If physical and human nature are too complicated to be predictable, the rationale for state control is swept away. To the controllists, the expression of this fact is a heresy that must be exorcised from our thinking.

Those who cling to a faith in their dying secular deity remain convinced that all that is needed to make a complex world more predictable is more information. This is the essence of much of the babbling of tongues disguised as “expert analysis” in the days following the killings at Virginia Tech. What we tend not to understand is that the more information we possess about anything, the more questions and uncertainties that arise. Albert Einstein understood this quite well in saying that “as a circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.” Bertrand Russell provided the social meaning to this when he declared: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
...
There is nothing this [control] crowd fears more than the specter of ordinary people retaining decision-making authority over their own lives.
That's why I enjoy continually pointing
out that soon there will be nothing
they can do about it.

The whole essay.


Saturday, April 21, 2007

An idea for your local government...

...when you can no longer support them
financially or any other way.

Posted widely around town...

This place has only one ordinance:

Anything is permitted here so if you're
going to get nasty, you'll probably get
whacked.

Y'all have fun now, but learning how
to be polite will extend your odds of
survival greatly.



Friday, April 20, 2007

Fred on honor

It is worrisome to those affecting aristocracy that aristocracy doesn’t necessarily convey intelligence, schooling, decency, courage, or common sense. In fact, Sir Wagadoodle might be inferior in all of these to a hansom driver or a scullery maid. The aristocrat’s superiority, although usually enforceable, is also usually imaginary. The notion of honor provides a wall. He is the sort of man who don’t take nuffin fum nobody, but with nice elocution.

Honor is important to militaries, which need to regard themselves as distinguishable from hit men for the Mafia. They aren’t, of course. Both kill people they don’t know on orders from people they don’t know in order to make a living. Is this not literally true?
Full essay.


Thursday, April 19, 2007

Insanity revisited yet again

The loudest message sent by what happened at Virginia Tech yesterday is that government cannot and will not protect you....
...and won't let you protect yourself.



Apparently those in power want you dead.



What other conclusion is possible?



Update:



Now another fool wants to continue the

War on Guns.



We all know how well all the other wars

initiated by these zombies went, don't we.



To name only two examples:



Guns and drugs are everywhere.



Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The Solution

Put 15 people in a room to come up with a solution
for runaway collectivism and each solution involves
someone else taking it up the ass.

You will all suffer because every Tom, and swingin' Dick
has Their Plan for You simply because you let 'em.

Isn't that how you got in this mess in the first place?

Make your own plans.


Monday, April 16, 2007

Another big reason for more dollar fall

While the world press has focused on Iran's plans to move ahead with enriching uranium, Tehran continues to wage economic war against the U.S. dollar behind the scenes.

Tehran has reached a decision to end all oil sales in dollars, according to statements by Iran's central bank governor, Ehrabhim Sheibany, in Kuala Lumpur at the end of last month.
You can bet US gunboat diplomacy is on the way

Uranium is a scapegoat.

It's the dollar, stupid.

Full article.


We're all New Dealers Now

It's mind-boggling to believe that anyone
has a solution to this.


Sunday, April 15, 2007

In memoriam

Again, this year, I'm adding myself to the
already long list.

Fuck the IRS.


Future Google

Another recipe for failure

I'm going to quote Ringo Starr again:

"Everything government touches turns to crap."

I'm also going to call that Ringo's Law.
The Government has already said it will need to build a new generation of nuclear power stations to meet Britain's electricity demands, but has met with opposition from environmentalists who object to the harmful radioactive waste produced by fission.
This time the environmentalists are right.

Of course the government will build them.
And they will certainly need to be in charge,
wise as they believe themselves to be.

Praise be, Aaaamen.

The players change. The results stay the same.

Boom! or Boom?

Take your pick.

Read.


Saturday, April 14, 2007

Fred looking at the surreal

“Tiny cameras the size of a fingernail linked to specialist computers are to be used to monitor the behaviour of airline passengers as part of the war on terrorism.” To find out whether they look nervous, see.

Yay-yesss! Rejoice! Brethren, we are now stark bonkers. In the hills, not of Galilee but maybe of Yorkshire a new industry is come unto us. Not a sparrow shall fall without some damnfool otherwise-unemployable at Homeland Security watching. Henceforth God will be seen as comparatively inalert, perhaps reading computer magazines and dozing off on his watch. Yes, the Divine will be replaced by tiny little cameras. For a price.
Full rant.


Don Imus







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Friday, April 13, 2007

The Global Warming Jihad

In my college days, I was introduced to a book, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. Titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, it remains a worthwhile chronicle – at least through the mid-nineteenth century – of some of the consequences of mankind’s periodic collapses into mass-mindedness. If Mackay was around today, he would be able to devote a chapter to the emergence of the latest secular religion: environmentalism.
See it all.


A beginning

This is a call to disobey - rationally and responsibly you should break laws. Note: I am not advocating action that will get you thrown in jail. That said, what better place to demonstrate your rational mind overcoming fears and latent social programming than at an empty intersection? The drivers around you will scoff at your blatant disregard for the law. They will shake their heads and call you crazy because your actions will have made them uncomfortable. Their discomfort will not easily subside. Like a thorn in their minds it can fester and spur change.
You'll be amazed what it'll do for you.



Try it. I think you'll like it.



Full post.


Thursday, April 12, 2007

The philosophy of liberty

Maybe in another couple of hundred years...

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Money

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying gold money, for it is man's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper money is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce. Paper money is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: "account overdrawn".

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming fodder for the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "who is destroying the world?" You are.

You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you are damning its life-blood - money. Throughout man's history gold was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose methods remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. So long as production is ruled by force and wealth is obtained by conquest, there is little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters and despised the producers. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of gold and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide - as I think he will.[My emphasis]
No doubt about it in my mind.

They will learn the hard way.
When gold ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns - or gold. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.

"account overdrawn", time's up

Whole speech.

Now let's listen to the obfuscations in the
comment section.

Aside:

Thanks for reminding me, flinny.


Monday, April 09, 2007

When confusion will be king

Some have noted that it's getting very weird.

Everything and everyone but The Unaccountables
will be named responsible and severely punished,
grinding on the neck of most of the inhabitants
of the planet with that jackboot that Orwell wrote
about...and all in the name of "doing something"
...until the money runs out.
And believe me when I tell you that you will want to know what happened to the economy, as that is what everybody will soon want to know, and it will be a very popular subject on the TV news shows and with Congress for a long, long time. Or, as Mr. Panzner himself put it in his book, "The dangers that a few observers had foreseen - which were discounted, misunderstood, or overlooked - will be the only thing that growing numbers of Americans will be able to think about."
See it all.


Sunday, April 08, 2007

Giuliani wired wrong

Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. --Rudy Giuliani, 1994
Ripped from Pro Libertate


Saturday, April 07, 2007

A good, little citizen

"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps." --H.L. Mencken


Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Economics versus Politics

Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling. One is amoral, the other is moral. Economic laws are self-operating and carry their own sanctions, as do all natural laws, while politics deals with man-made and man-manipulated conventions. As a science, economics seeks understanding of invariable principles; politics is ephemeral, its subject matter being the day-to-day relations of associated men. Economics, like chemistry, has nothing to do with politics.

The intrusion of politics into the field of economics is simply an evidence of human ignorance or arrogance, and is as fatuous as an attempt to control the rise and fall of tides. Since the beginning of political institutions, there have been attempts to fix wages, control prices, and create capital, all resulting in failure. Such undertakings must fail because the only competence of politics is in compelling men to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they are inclined to do, and the laws of economics do not come within that scope. They are impervious to coercion. Wages and prices and capital accumulations have laws of their own, laws which are beyond the purview of the policeman.

The assumption that economics is subservient to politics stems from a logical fallacy. Since the state (the machinery of politics) can and does control human behavior, and since men are always engaged in the making of a living, in which the laws of economics operate, it seems to follow that in controlling men the state can also bend these laws to its will. The reasoning is erroneous because it overlooks consequences. It is an invariable principle that men labor in order to satisfy their desires, or that the motive power of production is the prospect of consumption; in fact, a thing is not produced until it reaches the consumer.
...
The imperviousness of economic law to political law is shown in this historic fact: in the long run every state collapses, frequently disappears altogether and becomes an archeological curio. Every collapse of which we have sufficient evidence was preceded by the same course of events. The state, in its insatiable lust for power, increasingly intensified its encroachments on the economy of the nation, causing a consequent decline of interest in production, until at long last the subsistence level was reached and not enough above that was produced to maintain the state in the condition to which it had been accustomed. It was not economically able to meet the strain of some immediate circumstance, like war, and succumbed.

Preceding that event, the economy of society, on which state power rests, had deteriorated, and with that deterioration came a letdown in moral and cultural values; men "did not care." That is, society collapsed and drew the state down with it. There is no way for the state to avoid this consequence – except, of course, to abandon its interventions in the economic life of the people it controls, which its inherent avarice for power will not let it do. There is no way for politics to protect itself from politics. [My emphasis]
Regular readers will know Chodorov was right.

The state, as God, must remake man in its
image and, paradoxically, it does so with
a vengeance, consuming itself.

Full essay.


Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Google Earth listens

I wrote earlier about their error here.
This weekend, there has been a lot of discussion about our imagery of New Orleans in Google Maps and Google Earth. I thought I'd give you some background that may clear things up, and also let you know about new imagery of the region now available.
It's a new world.

Spit out your complaints.

Shun the ones that don't listen.

Talk up the ones that do.

Now Google needs to do something
about the censorship in China and
elsewhere.

From Google's Blog.


Monday, April 02, 2007

Follow the money

It's an old tired song, that, but almost
always forgotten...

Try to keep your eye on this ball as the
distractions multiply like rabbits.
Although the US sought a way to re-establish its influence in Iraq, Saddam’s switch to the Euro on November 6, 2000, would lead to the US invasion. The dollar sank away and in July 2002 the situation got that serious, that the IMF warned that the dollar might collapse. A few days later the plans for an attack were discussed at Downing Street. One month later Cheney proclaimed it was sure now, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. With this pretext the US invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. The US switched back the oil trade into dollars on June 5, 2003.

There is a huge difference between trading Iraqi oil in euros and trading it in dollars. This will be explained below.
Highly recommended.


Sunday, April 01, 2007

Good comedy

"Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth."
Most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business, as if nothing had happened." --W. Churchill
And that's the stuff of good comedy.

What Winnie said is true, but what's truth?
That's a tough one.

What Winnie's saying is that a person
actually sees the truth then reacts
in that manner.

Earthmonkey at his finest.