Dr. D
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So there are zero writers on planet earth to give the prize to now?
Makes as much sense as anything the West does.
Fighting a defensive war is astonishingly cheaper. Compared to our present budget it would be near zero to control the coasts. Heck, remove the standing army as the founders envisioned and we already have enough guns and range-hours.
We didn’t exactly blunder into Vietnam: what’s now called the Deep State, Mr. Dullesx2 was selling it as reasonable on falsified intel, which is the obvious way to force Presidents to make decisions. (As he later found in Cuba) Kennedy was planning a P.R. op and then to pull out but he died. Instead, a twofer: profits were high plus we got to kill a bunch of people, and add some butter and you guarantee bankruptcy and end the gold backing. When that happens, the only choice is to fall back on unbacked fiat currency as happened. Without the planned over-spending, that could not happen. It wasn’t stupid, it was a plan.
When the choice is collapse or fiat, nations choose fiat and the people will force them to. However, that opens the final door to complete, whole, and limitless control and profiteering of banks and military at the expense of every other segment on earth. That has happened like every other time in history. That too has an expiration date (40 years, as advertised in the 1988 Economist) then you set up a panopticon police state and worldwide currency to swap out, as your limitless print-and-military allows you to take over the world in the 2001 Bush-Cheney play and establish an inescapable one-world currency and carbon-based tax authority. So, no accident, was in many think tanks and white papers all along.
But the best laid plans of mice and men oft a gang a gley. Without control of Russia and China, there is always a competing currency, and without taking ever more foreign resources with ever more men, like Rome or the 3rd Reich, the expensive military collapses on its own efforts. Being such feckless mouth-breathing idiots they couldn’t hold Libya and Syria, (Open arms! The invasion will pay for itself!) the planned window to conquer Iran in 2015 passed, and then a breakaway group of generals who hardly resisted before now, suddenly attempted an orderly retreat back to America First. And there we are today, as any idiot could see would fail 50 years ago.
Why? Because no matter how talented Napoleon is, if he starts taking over the world, everyone realizes they HAVE to stop him, they HAVE to get involved and fight as if their life depends on it. So Napoleon or the West can fight any one country, but not EVERY country combined, which is what is required. Still they did pretty well at killing everybody and everyone in such a way that, although they are even now proudly publishing white papers about killing everybody and taking everything over, still no one believes them. What can I say? If a guy says he’s going to kill you, then buys a gun and a gun turret, do we laugh it off as a joke? Apparently. I have no explanation for it, but eventually, like Chamberlain, enough millions are killed that they start to believe them. Maybe someday that will sink in even here, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Trying to figure out how to chart cost, as it’s localized down at the town level, yet cost-shifted all over with state funding, pension patch-overs, etc. Here’s one from LaFayette near Lexington KY:
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find an non-paper online tax history, but property taxes have been rising 10% compounded since the 90’s.
Here’s one of only 10 years, a 40% increase, with steadily dropping services.
Lindenhurst, Long Island, 50% in 10 years:
No one has that kind of pricing power. And this is only ONE kind of tax: they’re also cost-shifting out of State taxes, business and building fees, paying garbage collection, separately etc. There have been cases where if the county had a tax revolt and refused to raise taxes, the State took them over and MADE the locals pay taxes, even though they voted for fiscal restraint, although generally what happens is they keep all idiot services, and stop all useful services, like police ambulance, library, and parks, to bully the taxpayers into caving. That’s not a system that has democratic feedback.
You can tell this on the ground as the whole town is boarded up and blown away like a Mellencamp song, and the only building that aren’t collapsing are the police, fire, school, and cell phone store. Here’s one in Gary, Indiana,
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/news/ct-ptb-gary-abandoned-homes-st-0219-2-20150218-story.htmlAnd another link to the hundreds of websites photgraphing urban decay exceeding an Ayn Rand novel:
https://www.placesthatwere.com/2017/01/abandoned-city-methodist-church-gary-indiana.html
Coast to coast.There IS money, but the question is, who gets it, and what do they do with it?
Baltimore now spends $16,000/student, and is graduating NO ONE. They’re reaching the point where ZERO students pass state competency. At that point, you could just shut down, because the students who want to will just go to the library and read at home. That’s WITH a 50-100% increase in taxes.“6 Baltimore schools, no students proficient in state tests” https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/6-baltimore-schools-no-students-proficient-in-state-tests
So do schools/teachers have pricing power? Sort of, yes. I can’t think of who else can charge 50% more for zero competency. But it’s a mosaic of elements, most heading in the wrong direction. Sorry about going on, but it’s complicated and there are no more easy answers.
It’s relative pay. There used to be a bargain: you get modest/marginal pay for government jobs because you get the benefits of health care and “government” pension. Fine, we were all good with that. But even decades ago, teacher pay moved above the area average and kept the benefits. Then with compounding raises, it got high relative to the area, while the health care/pension were astronomical. Teachers, like in my own family, don’t appreciate this double squeeze. The pay is modest, it’s only what the rest of us should have gotten over these 40 years. 3%p.a., then 3% with contract-long gaps, then only for the old crew and refused to hire teachers, offloading them into assistants and other educationally-disruptive shenanigans. But the all-in cost for their health care is like $2k/month? Like another whole salary. They don’t think of it that way because they don’t see it, but that money comes from somewhere. Besides, the administrators next to them — who provide no education — are full employees paid 50-300% more. And THEN there’s the pension, which has crushed every other government. Bad enough, but worse since Bernanke wealth-transferred all savers to banks, and gave 0% for pensions/insurance. So they now make up all those pensions in taxpayer cash, not annual gains.
Here’s the problem: while (full) teacher’s incomes have risen a little in pay, and $10,000 in health care cost, the private working population that supports them has DROPPED in pay by 3% a year for years. As with every non-government, non-monopoly job. So the “average” U.S. income has become completely non-descriptive. First, the average is including Bill Gates, second, the income is wildly aggregated to high-rent, high-population areas, but third all the remaining jobs are government/monopoly jobs. Outside of those, the economy looks like the surface of the moon, both in Baltimore and in upper Michigan. Average household income outside the protected groups and areas? $21,000? $18,000? Remember, these few incomes are bringing the average up. Like I said yesterday, just like the Soviet Union: you’re either a party member in a town the party cares about, or you’re in Chernobyl.
So yes, among the protected class, the teachers — because they actually do something useful for a living — are the least protected, but that protection looks wildly, amazingly great to the rest of us, a deep resentment, and more that they actually CAN strike. Must be nice. A job you might actually keep? That has family health care? Never mind the pay, pay nothing, I’m sold. And their s–t job that they protest for, with all the harassment and chiseling away at them using every weasel cheat and redefinition a horde of useless administrators can find, is STILL a dream job to everyone else outside a city. I try not to raise my blood pressure, but it’s that bad.
So: perception. Teachers think they have nothing because the State is cheating them, part-timing them, dragging out contracts to avoid pay, but that’s only because Ben stole the money at 0%, and the protected health care monopoly is so high that their non-gold-plated, but actual non-s–t care costs another whole income. They can sort of see that on paper, but from my experience, it doesn’t really connect, not the way it does out here where we pay medical out-of-paycheck and get nothing. It may be hidden, but it’s still pay, and pay I don’t get.
As Denninger points out, stopping this one monopoly, which laws have existed for 100 years along with steady Supreme Court decisions, would solve all cost problems. But because that money is siphoned into medical lobby, they can use the money of every school district in the United States to buy Congressmen. And they do. How do you solve it? History says you don’t. You collapse. Just like we did, only it hits different locations at differing rates.
Schools and schoolteachers can ask for unlimited money because unlike the general population, they’re government employees and get enormous, stable pay, more than enough to cover what they’re asking. Or at least here in the states. And that’s at teacher level, administrators are now half the staff and get paid 3x as much.
So how does that work exactly, that a poor population is expected to fund and ever-increase a service they pay for? That wages can fall and expenses can rise infinitely, in some sort of Australian housing levitation voodoo? It can’t. If society gets poor, teachers, administrators, policemen, and senators all must see their wages fall too. But they will never, ever cut back. They will savage every poor working mother living in her car first.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” -Dickens
While many cryptos are centralized (Ripple) or have centralized flaws (Monero supernodes) it’s by no means uncommon to find fully decentralized cryptos other than Bitcoin. And that’s taking out the non-currency cryptotokens that are probably the majority now.
Although promising, Bitcoin cannot escape the human problem: if we are corrupt, surveilling everything for power, profit, and oppression, Bitcoin will not give us a ticket of escape as it’s not anonymous and in fact will track you better than anything. If we’re not at that deep, pervasive level of Big Brother, then it will do well enough, especially with an ecosystem of competing currencies and atomic swaps making tracking and exchange-rigging harder. I still expect Bitcoin to be relegated to fewer, larger, sovereign state jobs, and the mass of daily transactions to go elsewhere — demanded by the limits of their tech — and that’s fine. As long as we have something.
But remember, the present system was put in for freedom too, but has methodically been channelled into extraction and oppression. The Whole Bill of Rights is the same. If Bitcoin gets in with perfect tracking and we get lazy to defend freedom (again) then it will be an especially diabolical tool of oppression, worse than anything we’ve seen so far, and that’s saying something.
An excellent article, more concise than I could do it for certain.
What do you have with a central bank intervening in everything, the whole economy? Soviet-style central planning. And that will work for a while, on the order created from capitalism (here meaning free action), until the whole thing becomes so out of order, prices, incentives so upside down, that it doesn’t.
And what do we have with the Fannie Mae or similar agencies owning all the houses, via mortgage bonds? Soviet-style government ownership of the land.
What do we have with bailouts, protected corporate winners and ma-n-pa unprotected losers? Soviet-style central planning and ownership of Capital.
What do we have with Dept of Education mandates right through student loans? Government provided education, with the addition, as Obama said, to work for the state in repayment.
What do we have with farm loans, subsidies, protection of ADM and John Deere? Soviet-style central planning of food collectives, long since eliminating the family farm.
We’re already there, my friends, need I add the media, the initiative for universal *government* health care?
And what will we have with a Universal basic Income? The final piece of the Soviet system: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
And we all saw how that worked out.
Everybody’s talking about the last war, about Socialism, Capitalism, Freedom. Get over it people: we lost. But since Soviet style systems are both violently oppressive, and complete economic failures, the question is what to do now.
What makes you think there aren’t good guys in the DNC like Seth Rich (allegedly), who would also like to get out from under the level of corruption they find, and thereby bring the party back to what they dreamed when they joined it. IF indeed it is corrupt as some allege, they won’t be able to admit it, but if they make a little “mistake” that cancels omerta, the Progressive wing of the party is waiting to restore it, and even people as corrupt as Donna Brazil have been hovering. Because otherwise, the lawsuit makes great risk with little sense.
I’ll have to think deeper about the foundations of belief. It does strike me that belief — Christian, Jewish, scientific — is the structure we pin all subsequent information on. It’s our paradigm, our Rorschach pattern, and the way in which we now have dozens of different, mutually exclusive realities. Don’t put your reality on me, we make our own reality now, and are reality-optional. Objective reality is an act of violence and oppression. But that only works when you’re wealthy and can buy off the consequences of your actions. Or in our case, violently make someone else do it.
Immigration? It’s completely different from our problem in the States. They are fully legal, and eminently provable with a little legwork. They are also more than willing to accept strangers, so long as they are not Christian and come from a war zone. I, for example, an employed English speaker sharing their culture, would probably be denied even if I requested asylum from Trump. But now that they’ve paid taxes and need to draw on the society they’ve been contributing to, they are suddenly denied. And people wonder why I say never trust the government with anything, they’re lying, soulless weasels? If you get to be 70, and are expelled from your own house into a land where you no longer have living connections, tell me how “the government” needs to be larger and the most trustworthy agent to help people. What can I say? It speaks for itself, Greece, Italy, China, worldwide.
Well said, and I’ve thought about it a bit, but am unable to find a simple experiment to prove or disprove it.
However, there’s something wrong about the data — where we often find they hypothesize more than they know. It was a very long time ago and all the incomplete fragments of bones in question probably fit in a football field. In a point transition like the Ice Age it’s easy to miss by 100-1,000 years, which would radically change the story.
Look at it by systems analysis in an ecosystem: if you have bison, you don’t have a double-bison and you don’t have a mini-bison. We don’t have an elephant and a double elephant. If you have a robin, you don’t have a double-robin. Why? Would would it eat? Double worms and double sunflower seeds? Because they fit within a system they can effectively only be a certain size or the whole system would need to alter around them. Then the human theory would have to also change the double-switchgrass and double-sunflowers. That seems a bridge too far.
And yet somehow we DID have a sloth and a giant sloth, an armadillo and a giant armadillo. What trees would they climb, what holes would they dig? Who would be their predators? That suggests that the whole system, their food source, their cover, everything changed at once, and of the giants only those that could evolve smaller versions survived, and so many didn’t. Same thing happened in the previous change where the dinosaurs were multiples larger than the Ice Age animals. And then after that day there was nothing that large ever again, and no people to cause it. Then the same pattern occurs where almost none of the larger Ice Age fauna persist to this day – and only in areas outside the ice field – but the smaller ones do. In the age of dinosaurs, we had 2 meter dragonflies. As insects, if they could be that large today, they would be. They can’t: they cannot breathe, they cannot fly, they cannot eat, at least no one understands how they could. Same with armadillos: if they could be that large, somewhere they would be. But as I said, although I can see the same size-event event from the Cretaceous — and even further back in the Permian — I can’t construct an adequate experiment to substantiate it.
Yeild curve narrowing to flip, dollar market tightening, and Europe seems to be bracing, particularly with DeutcheBank. But when you’ve got avalanche conditions, any snowflake will do.
They blame humans for the extinction at a time when there was a planetary climactic upheaval and the Ice Age ended. …But it just had to be the humans.
Thought experiment: if the humans killed the mastdons, sloths, and glyptodons, where a few sparse hunter-gatherers who barely occupied the landscape tracked down and extinguished every individual in every nook and cranny, every trackless forest and mountaintop, then what? Stopped? They killed massive, hard-to-kill, hard-to-eat mastadons by the hundred million but somehow couldn’t kill the bison or the elk? They killed the giant beaver but not the modern beaver? The giant sloth but not the regular sloth? Yeah, right. And when colonists got here the whole continent was teeming with life, in great variety, specifically gardened and engineered — by the same murderous humans — to be lush, diverse, and abundant. In specific methods, customs, that insured in the strongest possible terms, the eternal survival of each and every one of those creatures…and not for nothing, but violently protect them so they could eat and use them tomorrow. Yes, these exact same humans they say killed every large species on earth, that by their own evidence, weren’t populous or strong enough to clear the state of Ohio.
When are they going to stop reporting this codswallop? I’m not adding anything, their own gol-durned sentences refute them. But anything, ANYTHING! to make sure humans are bad, evil, and the enemy that must be destroyed, when two second’s thought by some dummy from podunkville can tell you it’s nonsense. A-Y-I.
Kind of makes you wonder who “they” are. If they actually felt this way, makes you wonder why they don’t do something about it, like live on a reservation as a traditionalist. Why? Because they themselves don’t believe it either. Not in their hearts, where it matters. Only in their minds, where their money and careers are.
“150,000 tons of food is tossed out in US households each day, equivalent to about a third of the daily calories that each American consumes.”
Wow, you’re right. It certainly is silly to throw out food, and doubly silly for journalists to report how millions need to die because there isn’t enough. And this is only half the food – another half is tossed at the field and warehouses. But because, The Guardian, you just know it can’t be news.™
“Fruit and vegetables were the most likely to be thrown out, followed by dairy and then meat.”
So…you’re saying people throw out the cheapest, most perishable food first and the expensive food later in a direct relationship with cost and/or energy input?“This waste has an environmental toll, with the volume of discarded food equivalent to the yearly use of 30m acres of land, 780m pounds of pesticide and 4.2tn gallons of irrigated water.”
…Aaaaand right off the rails. I’m having a hard time processing all that’s wrong with this. Are the acres of land and effort of discarded food wasted? Yes? Sort of?? But being a journalist, you know he’s never been outside the city, never been where those dirty people live, and understands things only in a city way. Farming isn’t manufacturing. It’s not making widgets. In fact, even making widgets isn’t making widgets. Making food is an organic process that follows nature’s rules, which includes a lot of what we call “failure” and “waste.” In a forest, 100,000 seeds are released. Two survive. A tree falls down and is “wasted”. It is eaten and re-formed back into forest. If that tree didn’t fall over, the tree-eating critters would be “wasted” and go extinct instead. So there’s your “efficiency” in human terms, which you see unceasingly from schmartz-guys, the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots who are on University Farm Boards and other “helpful” people like Monsanto. You wouldn’t want to “waste” that wheat field, would you? Then get the natural diversity of weeds out of it, thereby poisoning every hedgerow, hedgehog and fruit bat, every Christopher Robin playing pooh sticks, and every butterfly, bee, and frog all the way down to Sugary Cove-on-Dartmouth. See how we stopped that waste? Oh and we made a chemical plant, with 10,000 50-gallon drums of pure poison, gave the workmen and the township cancer, and used Syrian oil as the feedstock. All to be efficient because “efficiency” is a human term. Nature is incredibly, horribly inefficient. She is, however, deeply resilient, and all parts are integrated to the whole of creating more life. Humans are too, but once they reach the reporter-and-university level, they go clean round the bend into creating less life by being too efficient, by treating creation as a big machine, by thinking, as in their minds, the world is dead, not alive. No longer knowing what “alive” even means.
Okay college educated expert Milman, ever heard of the water cycle? It’s a thing where water goes round and round the system, not being consumed or lost? So this 4.2 Trillion gallons of water? What’s that? Did it get burned like oil, or did it go from the mountains into the sea just like the non-irrigated, non-farm water, into the air as rain? And irrigation is used badly and has its consequences, but that’s not his argument. His argument is it’s “used”, like plastic wrap, then becomes…a pollutant? It disappears from earth? Only someone disconnected from nature, even from his own schooling and intellect could say so, and the readers nod their heads.
“Rotting food also clogs up landfills and releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.”
Clogs up landfills? The way dead trees clog up forests? The food is the ONLY thing in the landfill that’s good, nontoxic, and biodegradable, that makes good soil and clean earth. So much so, people will PAY to get this food waste for the sole purpose of composting, preferably through a chicken or a pig. Landfills are made of old batteries, refrigerators, LCD panels, water bottles, he’s worried about literally the only safe, degradable part, and the smallest portion of the waste stream. This “waste” is in fact the only thing that is not a waste: it’s like saying life is a waste.
Releases methane? AGW aside, what did you think was going to happen if a human ate it? 2nd level schmartz-guy, THE CARBON RELEASED BY ROT IS THE SAME CARBON THAT WAS SEQUESTERED INTO THE FOOD LAST MONTH: it’s CO2 neutral. 3rd level schmartz-guy, since it’s carbon-neutral AND was the same carbon the plant absorbed last month, the “greenhouse gassing” consequences of essentially a very small diversion of the food chain overall—which would have happened anyway, even if the field were a forest—is going to be so close to zero as not to measure. We’re talking about measuring the methane deer pellets create. You might better speak of the oil inputs, which are optional but a function of our present unsustainable monopoly mega-corps. 4th level schmartz-guy, although methane is probably released, the amount of methane vs other possible carbon-chains are a factor of how exactly it is broken down: could be none, could be a little, but it will never be more than a rounding error. You might visit your local sewage treatment plant for the methane released but I won’t temp you to attack humans as the problem. In nature, no CO2 or nitrate like methane is a problem: it’s pure fertilizer gold, the very essense of health and nature. These are the same schmartz-guys who created planetary-level pogroms to herd humans into mega-cities where the maximum oil and waste and methane can happen, instead of into hobbit gardens where waste is but a dream.
The people, the “shoppers” aren’t the problem here; they’re not the ones who need to be re-educated, in Green Re-education Death Camps of Tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Camp_of_Tolerance . Given a chance the people would probably toss their melon rind out the window to be chewed on by possums and turned into topsoil 3 feet thick. If only we could toss city idiots like this out the window and onto the rubbish bin of history. I’ve got a better name for them: not I-Y-I, which is Nassim polite term, but Arrogant-Yet-Ignorant, A-Y-I.
Wonderfully said. Since no one will report, here’s what happened to that airstrike. The one where we declare a victory and go home (or try to).
They targeted 10 sites, yet after the Pentagon said it was a perfect mission, they only reported on 4. Who were the other 6?
Duwali airbase – 4 missiles fired, 4 shot down
Dumayr airbase – 12 missiles fired, 12 shot down
Baley airbase – 18 missiles fired, 18 shot down
Shayrat airbase – 12 missiles fired, 12 shot down
Marj Ruhayyil airbase – 18 missiles fired, 18 shot down
Damascus international airport – 4 missiles fired, 4 shot downSounds like an amazing ad for Russian military hardware and Russian alliances, and an amazing warning to warhawks in the Pentagon to check themselves.
And hold on: wouldn’t bombing a major chemical weapons manufacturing facility lead to a cloud of nerve and/or other gas killing every civilian within 20 miles? I.e. the entire capital city? Or did they know that there was nothing there already which is why they were confident it could not lead to an incident that would be recorded as the worst chemical attack of all time? You know, chemically attacking 1.7 million Syrians to save 10 Syrians from chemical attacks?
Yet this illegal, reckless, and (intentionally?) futile attack is NOT ENOUGH for CNN, MSNBC and their ilk. Denouncing Trump for bombing Syria, they also denounced him for NOT bombing Syria. Adequately. Or fully mobilizing the entire U.S. military for a ground invasion. Or whatever, as weasel-faced chicken hawks, they wouldn’t openly say what they wanted, only that Trump openly bombing a nation outside the U.N. without a declaration of war as they themselves demanded, was pointless and weak. Which is why they also wanted it, in side-by-side front page articles? Or like Veruca Salt they want a pony AND an oompa loompa?
This IS weak, and like the late Soviet Union, it IS divided, no one IS in charge, clearly, as we see: the FBI, Justice, Pentagon, CIA, all make it a point of honor to openly, proudly disobey direct orders from their boss, and with him their real employer, the American people who elected him. And which they worked tirelessly to election tamper and deny and/or remove him. And that’s perfectly okay with everybody. Is that normal for everyone in a business, a platoon, to directly countermand all direct orders? It is these days, and not just with Trump. Once you throw off the Logos, every man does what is right in his own eyes, they are not restrained by petty law and custom, by order and precedent, for they will be as the most high.
This is as true down at Taco Bell as in Federal Court, in the Justice Department, true in police departments, schools, hospitals, and even public lavatories. Order, rules, are whatever some official wants them to be during the 5 minutes they meet you. An hour later, the rules, your punishment, even their description of reality itself is all different. Railroad one guy: it’s legal, commendable! Railroad the next guy? It’s draconian, the death penalty. Look at someone wrong? Have an opinion? Lose your life, liberty, property, reputation and career. A Celebrity? Poor dear: no matter how many felonies, how many killed, or how often wrong, it never matters. Not just saying that, the number of police acquitted for killing unarmed citizens exceeds Parkland by leagues. And this licence is given not just to judges and investigators but by the people themselves.
We have an Emperor Nero or early Robespierre government. There is no logic in them. No Logos. When you expel Logos actively, joyfully, you get the anti-Logos: pure random chaos, disorder, violence, and death. No one can work with anyone, trust anyone, restrain anyone, work together, or plan. You get the Reign of Terror and the purges of the Lion’s Mouths under the Council of Ten.
This was well engineered to bring down the U.S. in a repeat of the Russian Revolution of 1918, and it’s going relatively well. When the people themselves have no order, it’s hard enough to hold the people. But when the government doesn’t either, and fights itself while lying, there’s less hope than ever. Because while government can be reformed, it takes generations of work to re-instill the Logos, rules, law, customs, order, consequences, back into the people. Sometimes it seems nothing can purge them of these delusions of theft and power but fire.
But one way or the other, we’re in it now. The Civil War is at home. Syria is just an example of our domestic war. Remember the L.A. Times reporting the CIA-imbedded resistance openly shooting the Pentagon-imbedded Kurds? Two agencies killing each other with bullets? That went on every day before and since, politically, socially, economically, and now militarily.
The airstrike in Syria — real or fake — is that war. A war of order and law vs unrestrained will-to-power. And that battle of Logos and anti-Logos is worldwide.
I gotta call shenanigans on the air quality article. But: The Guardian. Say no more.
Okay, so you think 95% of the world’s population lives in cities? Just offhand I’m guessing most of Africa has tolerable air quality and that’s 1.26 billion. There are 854 million rural in sub-Saharan Africa alone. That’s already 10% of the world. Too small? There are 127 million rural in the EU (variously defined). 60M in the U.S., 30M in Mexico, Then add South America, China, etc. There’s a trend of being 25% rural. Is the air of deserts and fields and farms of the world too polluted for you?
So, lying about air quality by defining it as white room conditions it never was, lying by claiming air is more dangerous than it is, or lying about demographics to sound alarming? If it’s The Guardian, probably all three.
These are the same people who tell you E Bola will be a world-wide pandemic in months, NYC is underwater in 2012, and N. Korea has a missile that can hit Miami and/or the moon. But no matter how many thousands of times they’re wrong, outed as data-fabricating frauds, people believe them! Remember Thalidomide, safe nuclear energy too cheap to meter, oat bran, Vioxx (52,000 heart attacks), the carb-based food pyramid, Yoshitaka Fujii (183 false medical studies), Global Cooling, 8000 fake science journals, a published study on Star Trek’s warp drive, Einstein’s static universe, 200 word-soup generated studies published, Roundup is safe as water (official), liver death from child ADHD drug Cylert, electroshock therapy, I did not have sex with that woman (j/k), Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, 13 years of East Anglia emails, Elon Musk, cold fusion, is there anything people won’t believe?
Well if an EXPERT said it, (who discredit themselves in the very next news story in which you are reading this) it must be true! Followed by how it wasn’t true, and they were doing it for the money, every. single. day. of my adult life, which now seems like ten thousand years.
Am I on crazy pills? They’re not even hiding it. Why should they? Facebook sells cash advertising to “41 million 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States and 60 million 25- to 34-year-olds. The catch: [there are only] 31 million 18-to-24-year-olds last year and 45 million 25-to-34-year-olds.”
Tomorrow Brian Williams will report live from the moon that the North Korean missile hit JFK’s beach house on the Sea of Tranquility and no one will blink.
The air quality on earth isn’t good, but I don’t think we will help it any with our endless, trivial, pointless, bald-faced, transparent lies. Lying might — I kid you not — start a 20 year war that kills 6 million people, and we wouldn’t want that to happen.
Did anyone see this?
https://didthesystemcollapse.com/
Silver is already $18 in Asia, and that’s the official price, not price-in-scale. So if there’s a $2 arbitrage, how come no one fills it? Free money! But not if metal is undeliverable from NY-London.
Look at the exceptional health and nutrition of an average American male in 1953. What’s gone wrong? And if what we’re doing now is wrong, and then was right, why don’t we go back to do what worked? Anyone? Bueller?
“to Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium in London” …Except he wasn’t, or at least Britain declines to officially claim so. There’s still great wrangling about bringing the case to court which would lead to official legal disclosure. This is why propaganda works so well: we inferred, suggested, speculated Russia did it, then left it hanging. Then the next time, we just say, “Isn’t this like the other 67 times gas was used in Syria?” and the case closes itself. QED. If it’s so clear, why won’t the U.K. conduct and official legal investigation with the inclusion of Russia and prove it in the legal record? Odd, ain’t it?
Holter is correct in 20,000 tons and possibly 30,000 for Russia. How? China was pulling 1,000T/mo out of London for years, AND have the world’s largest internal mining, 1,000T/yr for 20 years(??) none of which is exported. The gold is kept not on the books of the CNB, (which would drive up the Yuan) but in Sovereign Wealth Funds and other proxies, but don’t kid yourself are totally the Chinese government.
However, he and others make the point that there’s a 300:1 leverage of COMEX paper contracts to real silver. Hey true! Establishment apologist and Sach’s man Jeff Christian said so years ago. However, they should bloody well know better: ALL commodity exchange contracts exceed the base supply, that’s the point. You have the real users underneath, which in theory trade real goods, AND a supply of speculators on top adding liquidity and price discovery. In addition, unlike wheat, gold for example isn’t consumed. It can close a Comex contract, then the owner re-supplies it to the exchange to close the next contract. Got it?
HOWEVER…. Gold and especially silver ARE completely, totally rigged and BECAUSE of the 300:1 ratio. The ratio of outstanding contracts to base commodity is orders of magnitude higher than any other commodity. Say there’s a 20% float in bacon, but a 2,000% float in gold, and a 5,000% float in silver. So with speculators being 90% of the market, and miners/jewelers being 10%, who do you think sets the price? Yeah, it’s like that. And that’s BEFORE the concentration of position where JPM probably owns over half the market and 3 other banks own the rest. Can you push the price if you and two other guys own 90% of the chips and are playing poker in as a team to fleece one underfunded rube, the public? You bet.
But wouldn’t jewelers just demand delivery and drive up the price? Don’t be ridiculous: physical delivery hasn’t happened since like 2013. You ask for delivery and you’re banned from the exchange or suddenly go bankrupt. Presently there is a side industry of people who claim delivery, feign ignorance, and are bought out at a pleasant cash premium NOT to take delivery…off the books in London’s LME –the definition of a default on the exchange. No one cares. It’s not in their interest to care. It’s a “National Security Interest.” The U.S. can’t have the US$ collapse right now as silver goes to $500 because the U.S. military would collapse with the US$, and China doesn’t want to raise the price so long as they’re winning and still getting a few ounces delivered on the side.
Am I crazy? Ask anyone who sources tonnes, not ounces, like Holter or Rob Kirby. They’ll tell you the premiums are like $1500 in gold, depending on size, and barely available then. China’s using the low list price to buy cheap dore directly from mines worldwide, which they wouldn’t if it were available, and couldn’t if the price rose to a probable real level, like $7,000. So why wouldn’t they play along? If they break the price and drive the US$ down 7-fold, they’ll be blamed for the worldwide financial crash. Let the U.S. hang itself. “Never Interfere With an Enemy While He’s in the Process of Destroying Himself.”
I know these minutia of leverage, commercial vs traders, etc. are arcane, but he and others should be way more careful. They carelessly misdirect where the real rigging is and how, which is no service and can let small investors get fleeced.
P.S. right now the longs vs shorts in the silver market have flipped, which hasn’t happened ever? Or at least on the modern charts. On paper, it says that unlike how JPM and the riggers have been shorting silver down every. single. day. since 1980, right now they’re net long silver. Don’t get jumpy, though, they have been since February and haven’t cashed in on a price rise yet. But what did I say about extremes and reversals? The low is made high and the high, low.
We’re certainly in the 9th circle of hell, where the same torments happen day after day…
Despite a reflexive rejection of anything with the name Medium.com, again a proper article. Most everything is a lie, a misdirection, or hidden, but at least down here on the ground we need to plainly say what we want and believe. Rule of law, no foriegn wars, bring the troops home, use the money on our shattered economy…I detect a campaign here.
“Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. … And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure.”
Maybe they should notice that’s how very, V E R Y much people hate you. How vile, despicable, and discredited you are, with all your kind. But no. They will say it’s because they’re awesome geniuses, and everyone who doesn’t think like them is a stupid, racist, redneck. ‘Cause that’s how you win hearts and minds, right? With thoughtless insults and approbations?
Hey would this have anything to do with “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda”?
How about “NAFTA will give us more jobs, not less”?
“We found the yellowcake on a bench in Prague”?
“The Iraqis will greet us with open arms and the invasion will pay for itself”?
“13 Twitter trolls fixed the election where $6 Billion was spent.”?
“The NSA is not spying on you.”?
“Trump isn’t being wiretapped.”?
“he NYT doesn’t hire known plagiarizers and protect them”?
“We didn’t rig the California primary.”?
“It’s Greece that’s being bailed out, and they’ll recover soon.”?
“We didn’t hire a Buzzfeed reporter who approved all his stories through the campaign candidate and was quoted as saying ‘Don’t tell anyone I’m a hack.'”?
“Refugees raised in war zones who have no skills and don’t speak the language are loving people who will cause no cultural stress.”?
“Adding 5 million refugees will not impact budgets or remove services from EU citizen’s safety net.”?
“Russia walked through all of Britain’s CCTV cameras, and lick-and-sticked the world’s most dangerous verve agent on the doorknob of a house, which has no known antidote, but killed no one but a hamster.”?Or my personal favorite: “Assad gassed his own people (in 10/12, 12/12, 3,3,3,3,3/13; 4,4,4,4,4/13;5,5/13; 9,9,9,9,9/13; 4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4/14; 5,5,5,5,5,5,5/14; 7,7/14; 8,8,8/14; 2,2/15; 3,3,3,3,3,3/15; 6,6/15; 8/15; 4/16; 8/16; 10/16; 11/16; 1/17; 3,3/17; 4,4/17; 1/18; 2/18; 4/18)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_chemical_weapons_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War
None of which have ever been proven, and most of which have never been investigated. So if you feel you’ve seen this story before, you’re right! Now you’d think if this happened 67 times, at least ONCE it could be investigated and officially attributed to Syria, but no. P.S. AND they gave up their chemical weapons under full U.N. confirmation and review in 2013.Mightn’t this have something to do with how no one but the protected 1% believes the New York Times reporters, AT ALL, anymore? And mightn’t that extend to how much credibility you have concerning Trump? In fact, considering the aforementioned, couldn’t it actively make people like and believe Trump simply BECAUSE you don’t like him? I mean, since everything you say is the opposite of the truth, if you say he’s bad and incompetent he must actually be….what?
Just 60 seconds, top of my head greatest hits of these peripatetic, pathological, psychotic liars, roving the earth like a demon horde, starting wars, killing people, jailing them, aiding the evil and oppressing the truth.
Waiting for your answer, but I know you’ll have to offer it for review and editing by the opposing candidate, then deny it.
Clickbait: Russia Furious As U.S. Navy Destroyer Approaches Syria Without Notification!!!
They were so unhinged with raging fury (in a tweetstorm) they said this:
“It is common in international practice potential participants of events in the area should be notified accordingly in advance. We have not been notified, although we had legally ratified the agreement…”
Oh, Snap!!! They sound cheesed off indeed! Furiously reminding a nearby navy of common international practice that might prevent misunderstandings. This is almost like the time they sailed their ships, their SHIPS!!!! mind you, through the “TransManche zone” (as the EU calls it). How dare they ply the open seas without incident? Provocative I tell you, and suspicious. We all know nations that remind their neighbors of longstanding treaties and international laws are up to no good! This international law must be stopped at all costs!!!
I’d “/sarc” but I’m not sure anyone can tell anymore.
Bitcoin, the biggest bubble? Didn’t the SEC regulator Giancarlo himself point out that it’s smaller than even ONE Dow company, where the whole NYSE galaxy of stocks is 1/10th the size of the bond market? That sounds pretty small, and a lot smaller than say the 2000 NASDAQ, or ’29 Dow among other bubbles. SMH. But everything written now is clickbait, or as we used to call it, “shameless, bare-faced lying.”
Here’s a piece that looks like another clueless Bitcoin Obit, but actually lays down the real, technical limitations:
https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdecIt’s hurts me to say that, being “Medium.com”
Again Keen is correct as far as it goes, and that’s why we haven’t had inflation. If I print billions but hide it under a rock, is that inflationary?
But not forever. There are several styles of inflations, created by interactions of the few moving parts (to paraphrase Jimmy Carter). There are war inflations, shortage inflations, and seldom but sometimes, overheating economy inflations. “Inflation” itself refers to the ‘increase-in-the-money-supply’ rise in prices.
But “inflation”, as we hear of it, hyperinflation is not these things. It’s total loss of confidence in the government or the government/economy combo. The people repudiate the currency and look for alternatives, leading to bad wrangles with the government. In Weimar, the classic example, the government printed enormous quantities of money with no ill effects for years…until they didn’t. Then suddenly, in a few weeks, what worked for the previous 2 years stopped working before the Bank could respond or figure out why.
There’s a Twitter meme on this today I can’t find.
This is pretty common of hyperinflations. Seems like today they can stretch them out longer–first in slowing the event, then like Argentina, keeping it going for years, not months.
So I’d expect a repudiation of the US$, or even the UK Pound, but not internally at first, and not from the West. From China vs the West in imports, then leading to problems that can’t be contained, finally arriving with the people too.
Again, hyperinflation is strangely the LACK of money. Prices rise and people are desperate to get currency to pay bills at the same time. The economy slows and tanks and does NOT increase (opposite of some other inflations) yet import costs and lack of confidence leads to prices and velocity increasing.
People trapped in the spiral look for gold, nearby currency (US$ in Argentina), and now cryptos, as in Venezuela today. It ends when the government gives up their bad behavior and allows the free market to work again. Confidence returns, but no one trusts the currency and it has to be backed with something tangible, usually gold (which is an international good). Then the whole thing starts again.
Deflation now? Sure. Always? Maybe not. Fiat has always ended in repudiation, but the Core currency is always the last to fail.
The Chinese aren’t stupid. I very much expect they hold very few U.S. Treasuries despite the trade deficit. How? They buy interest in a copper mine in Africa or South America. They contract not to buy today but to deliver UST’s $500k/mo for 20 years. Now not only have they offloaded their risk, pre-offloaded the useless UST’s, but also still have them back home too to use as leverage against the U.S. Or that’s how I would do it anyway.
“We have lost 3.5 million jobs (to China). Some 70,000 manufacturing plants have closed. Why would anybody be fighting Trump to do a reversal of us being in a merchandise trade deficit of $365 billion? Tell me any two people that would do business with each other and one side takes a huge loss and keeps taking it. . . So, why would people argue and fight and bring down the markets because Trump wants to bring back jobs and readjust a trade deficit that, by any standard, is destroying the nation?” Who’s to blame for the lopsided trade deficits destroying the middle class of America?
Oddly they seem to be fighting FOR the war and AGAINST the economy? Explain? Then explain why this strategy against every American, if not every living creature, is still working so well.
With the steps they’re taking, one day they will find out that pesticides are counterproductive, and other measures work fine that are unable to be gamed by the organism. For example, after 10,000 years, soap still works. After lifetimes of panic over kudzu, fireweed, and other invasives, they seem to establish an agreement, a balance with their neighbors and with zero advice from so-called experts.
But of course, that’s not the point. With attention to detail, that is, doing our job, organics equal the yield of pesticides AND GMO’s. It was never about the yield; it was never about the work. It certainly by God was never about saving people or feeding them — clearly that’s idiotic when the poisons you use drain off into every water right down to the ocean, into the air, into every farmer, every child, every food, everywhere, killing everything by drams. No. The point, and what it does very very successfully, is to transfer MORE of the farmer’s (worker’s) money away from him and TO the chemical industry. And that it does fantastically. Once you start, you break the tilth, then you’re hooked. Without it, your yields will drop until the area recovers, just like debt, heroin, sugar, or any other addiction. Go look at the highest yields per acre for corn, etc in competition. What do they use? So if they can quadruple yields just by adding together some ordinary single digit exploits, what are we doing poisoning every human on earth and all the bugs too? Well you tell me. And quick. I’m in the fields and that cancer clock is waiting.
I guess that’s the question. They are certainly trying everything to start a war now, and yet another group within the same institutions is trying just as hard to stop them. That’s why foreign and even domestic policy seem so schizophrenic. But China is on top and doesn’t want a war. Napoleon said “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.” If the West is losing, why act? That’s not the Art of War, the Eastern way. They’ll calmly let us fall apart and enjoy the peaceful use of the brand-new cities and high-tech that we’ve lost because our oligarchs are violent mouth-breathing dummies who steal too much.
The West tried to have a nuclear war with incendiary provocations against Russian allies Libya, Syria, Ukraine, put nuclear missiles 10 minutes from Moscow, (apparently) staged fake chemical attacks a dozen times, bombed Russian soldiers in Syria, and ambushed a Russian MIG and shot down the Russian rescue helicopter, illegally embargoed them, attempted to throw them off the Security Council, is right now breaking the Chemical Weapons treaty, and told China to get out of the China Sea. That’s just some and just the last few years. You know, if Russia had the slightest interest in war, we’d have one.
And that’s why they have to start this idiotic, suicidal war virtually no one in any western nation wants: BECAUSE they are losing every minute to China and Russia, then Turkey and Iran, and now even embarrassing midgets (no offense) Philippines, Pakistan, Hungary, Ecuador, and so many more. When Pakistan tells you to suck it, you know you’re a has-been. And like I said, once you’ve destroyed everything, the military and your violent reputation is all that’s left. When countries laugh at that, your currency is dead, and with it your power. Then your own people come and get you.
In my opinion, in their psychosis of entitlement they both believe that the West is far stronger than it is, and the East is far weaker than it is, and they would consider it an absolute benefit-only-to-be-dreamed-of to kill most of their own annoying western population. “You can’t oppress me, I got rights, why did you steal my house and drive my daughter to prostitution, blah blah blah.” This is like every. empire. ever. And like every empire ever, they are completely, catastrophically wrong being such pencil-necked chicken hawks that never got a bloody nose in their life. Luckily, although they are EVEN STUPIDER – so far, far stupider! — than the dumbest MAGA supporter from southern Indiana, the population at large is smart enough to know which way the wind blows and to get out of the rain. They don’t want war, and voted against it the last 4 Presidents. The generalized business interests don’t want war either, which leaves only the achingly dumb entitled apparatchiks, the billionaires, and *some* of the military against everybody else in America. That’s why step by step they’re losing, will lose, and in fact lost some years ago, but it’s ugly and very slow.
Europe is not so lucky. As we see in Britain, and indeed France sending troops 2,500 miles to fight Turkey, the single largest army in Europe(!!) who will happily shoot the crap out of them, the European people are frighteningly less able to resist — savaged by a 50% unemployment rate and a dead economy — against the warmongers in Brussels who are taking all wealth, making every instigation even against even their own members, and making any form of open discussion more illegal than Goebbels and Stalin ever dreamed. Unseating the elected Italian P.M in minutes without discussion or redress, felony charging the top French candidate, imprisoning comedians at will, are you kidding me? What does it take to get you guys alarmed?
The U.S. has cycles of isolationism (i.e., realizing we shouldn’t be in other people’s business) while we figure things out, and this will be one of those times. Asia will be happy to exist and prosper until they too get so drunk on power they colonize the Pacific rim and take MENA. But Europe, I fear for you. This looks like one of those collapses of ethnos vs ethnos you have, and with no structure within and no way to project power without, will be dark days indeed. You may know better than I, but I don’t see anything pulling you back from the edge but us and we can’t even help ourselves right now.
And that’s the optimist’s message. It can get worse than that real easy.
Fun fact: Students didn’t really organize or do anything: the D.C. rally had been permitted for that size months before Parkland. Actually, they can’t organize much, since teens don’t have money and can’t rent cars, buses, or book hotel rooms without their parents. It was paid for by outside financiers for their own reasons. And so unsurprisingly, the media teen march was a normal event, officially 200,000, with majority adults, not kids. But truth hardly makes good press, does it?
So are we hoi polloi not doing anything, or is it that the only people acting are oligarchs for their own interests? We polloi are broke, working, and don’t have money for super-fun-time hotel vacations unless the Koch brothers give it to us, with $500 day paid protest ads on Craigslist. Changes the perception of what’s going on, doesn’t it?
So many topics today. “Too much debt and not enough money remain a diagnosis for deflation and not inflation.’ Yes, maybe? But there are several causes and flavors of inflation. In particular a hyperinflation is the repudiation of the government, and its currency too. What they never catch is that hyperinflations happen with a terrible economy, high unemployment, and while prices are high, actually there is an acute shortage of money. That’s why there’s the temptation to print even more. It’s not your “oil prices raised all prices” or “the economy in S.F. is super-hot” inflation.
Opioids caused by doctors? Gee, who knew? And “This was before the FDA”. You mean the FDA that raised the number of opioid doses states (doctors) were legally allowed 10 fold after we got those poppy fields in F-stan? And then they suddenly prescribed all of them. Yeah, the government and that FDA sure has been a big help! Not like those dummies in 1800. You see now we get the same deadly service AND we pay an agency to not stop it too. Double the cost, half the results. Winning!
Bitcoin, wow, it’s a wreck. Forbes here says you owe taxes. That’s reasonable. However, neither Congress nor the IRS have ANY definition of crypto or the taxes owed. Cryptos have been defined as 1) Nothing, 2) Poker chips 3) Commodities 4) Currencies and 5) Securities. Newsflash: all 5 of these have different rules and different tax rates. Long-term gains? Short-term? International? On what schedule? Are we supposed to just make it up? Why? If I told you soda was taxed but didn’t tell you how or how much, how are you supposed to remit? Their answer, as typical for government: that’s your problem. Pay 100% of your gains just to be sure. Pay $1 and we’ll forgive our friends and sue our enemies. …And that’s just with currencies; “tokens” aren’t cryptocurrencies. What’s your dry-cleaning receipt worth? Should you file gains on your coupons? Gift-cards? Deferred cable bills? How about a car-wash coin? If a car wash goes up, do we file gains on the value? At what rate? What do you mean it’s different? If a token is good for –exactly nothing– but to provide this one service, then how can it be a currency, much less a stock security?
Oh, and I’d say none of this has gone to court yet, but it has and all the cases ruled oppositely — especially the FL Federal ruling that said they were poker chips, i.e. nothing. Under our system that IS the law. So the IRS now charges gains on non-cash poker games? But Florida says legally they can’t! Somehow seems worthy of a mention, doesn’t it Forbes?
P.S. Shut up Google employees, like everyone else you both didn’t want to know and didn’t care. At all. A 5-second search on your own platform would show you Google is evil as h311 and always has been. That’s what happens when you’re mainlined child of the “Alphabet” agencies, always have been, and been doing nothing but developing targets then later the drones to kill those targets. You blind, loud-mouthed, paid-off, sanctimonious twits are the symbol of all that’s wrong these days. If you cared you’d be camped out next to J.A. and E.S.
I’m astonished they can still say “military grade nerve agent” that kills no one. NO ONE. Please tell me how that can possibly be military grade.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t a “military grade” nerve agent kill everyone it comes in contact with, even accidentally? Otherwise, what good is it?
The blindness to the obvious here is amazing. Since it all went so wrong — or so right — how did this substance possibly test as one of the many Novichoks and yet be less harmful than staph? Is there a flaw in the testing that makes a similar toxin read, or was it very, very and very precisely dilute? Because beyond making in in a garage — which is what those chemicals were invented for — it would have to be diluted to EXACTLY the level that would sicken the Skripals, be transmissible, and still not kill half the town which would inspire some REAL investigation and white-hot blowback.
Again, when is a deadly agent not a deadly agent, at all? You tell me.
I was going to post that Bitcoin chart. Fascinating, isn’t it? Is it truly scaled, or as I suspect, wedged in to look similar as the drop was far greater? In any case, the SNB shows what China, the U.S. and Japan already know: the sure road the wealth is to print phony digits and buy real goods. They can even drive the price up (or down) with their own bidding! I mean, amazing no one catches on, but even if the Franc went to $0.01 you’re still getting something for nothing. How is that wrong? And how do we tolerate it, ’cause I don’t. Are they mad?
Although we’re still near 24,000, it’s about time this market fell. Crikey.
Ehsani needs to brush up on his “Confessions of an Economic Hitman.” None of this is by accident, and the ultimate, universal destruction of subsidies and “socialism” is well-known for 150 years. If Egypt stopped what they were doing and became a viable, productive threat, they’d bomb them into the state of Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Point taken. So point that flashlight at the monsters, will ya?
I have great tolerance and restraint for scientific opinion, but the earth has been wildly warmer than 2c many times according to 100% of their own records. Antarctica had forests. The planet regulated itself and nothing happened. So why this time?
What if I said “if water cools and freezes to white it will cause a runaway chain reaction of solar reflectivity”? You’d say, “That’s winter. It happens every year and warms again.”
Same thing with Ice Ages and the interglacial warming periods. I can’t help but say this is really, really bad science. I can’t say something will *never* happen, but they’re falsifying their own argument in 10 words or less there. If you want to shut down worldwide carbon usage by raising taxes on the world’s poorest using a one-government taxing authority which will kill billions, you’ve got to give me more than that today is different from the entire scientific body of previous evidence, or “this time it’s different.”
…Especially when the same people joyfully bomb millions daily and won’t lift a finger about the environment anywhere else. They only care when dollar signs are involved, and look: there’s one now.
Yes, still snowing on the coast, but average weather here.
Since I make fun of Keen regularly, have to post that his mortgage article is timely and accurate, with all (most) proper parts and drawbacks listed, viz, that it’s de facto a pyramid scheme. In the States, the mortgage interest exemption is both a subsidy to housing (really banks, of course) but also a direct transfer from renters (the poor) to owners, especially expensive ones (the rich). Go us! And now that Bush destroyed ownership, we have more renters than ever to pay the rich!
In the same vein, Amazon’s subsidy works out great for middle and upper middle class Americans who buy on Amazon all day, while the poor are locked out and transferring their postal money to the classes above them. ‘Cause, free market, amirite? Now why on earth would DJT go after them just because they are a nationwide monopoly using stock/bank financing and government contracts to run an perennially money-burning venture with no profits to cause “dumping” and therefore run all competitors out of business, while sucking billions in tax subsidies, Wal-Mart style? I mean, aside from how every part of that has been illegal for 100 years under the Sherman anti-trust act, AND they daily attack the hand that feeds them, isn’t a totally government-subsidized, taxpayer funded, illegal job-destroying monopoly the American way? I thought the whole point of the system was to create a plantation society with a company store. Or perhaps that’s not what the voters want?
“More: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down… d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake. Sir Thomas More, A Man For All Seasons
It’s hard to say he’s incommunicado as he can still write, but close. Armstrong used an IBM typewriter for years, locked up illegally for contempt for refusing to play ball while Clapper walked around free. So why doesn’t Assange paper-memo the words and have someone outside post it? Is it because they’d illegally imprison/shoot/drone that person too?
And CNBC, if we don’t have news, we make it up. I didn’t check, but by the narrowest parameters, their article that Bitcoin has had the worst quarter is possibly true, but achingly disingenuine — and for a change, they claim to have looked at a chart! But in 2011, BTC fell from $1,000 to $200 and stayed there for two years. That’s an 80% fall, or twice as hard, and I expect twice as damaging.
What else does that say? It also fell from $3,000 to $2,000 and $5,000 to $3,000 in 2017 alone, so when a 33% Fib swing is an almost monthly occurrence, a 50% Fib yearly or bi-yearly wouldn’t be out of line. That’s not to say it’ll go up or down, but that BTC and the other cryptos have a very high beta and should be treated as such. You wouldn’t rate Twitter’s IPO on the basis of IBM’s history, or compare Santander to the US 30-year bond. So why compare Bitcoin as if it should have the beta of the S&P? Why? Because although their ability to manipulate it increases daily, they still need to smash it and get in, but Jaimie Dimon was burning credibility by posting a new Bitcoin obit every month. Here’s the next best thing. Stay out peasant, stay in the U.S. Dollar. Can’t you see how awesome the U.S. economy is doing? It’s huuuuuuge.
And it’s not like Facebook, Google, Bank of America will tell you how you may or may not spend your own money…oh wait, since Operation Chokepoint and Parkland, they are. While charging outrageous fees and creating felonious accounts, they are cutting advertising, credit card, and bank clearing of products they don’t approve of. Thanks, mom! You’re right, I should be allowed to think or act for myself! …And they wonder why people want a different financial clearing system. Sheesh.
Make space? And here I was squatting on your site just because it said, “Comments: please post here for free and save us regulars from lonliness.”
Maybe this is an overly-polite request to run us off to make room commenters who play well with others?
Least toxic poison ever:
Maybe they should have tried salmonela? Much more deadly. If this is Russian quality you have nothing to worry about.
Just what I was going to say. Now that they “know” it was the front door (having tea until you thought to check it 24 days later?) it should be easy-peasy to CCTV the world’s most universal invasive surveillance state, and get manhunt photos for the Bobbies.
Oh wait: no CCTV? No manhunt? No deaths? In fact, Yulia Skripal has disappeared and Britain refuses access to Russia’s citizen? They’re in breach of international Chemical Weapons Treaty by refusing to provide evidence? That’s quite a deadly, hazardous, Pearl Harbor-making event if no one was killed — at all — by a nerve agent that basically a garage-made pesticide. So maybe it wasn’t even dangerous, because, facts? Yes, there is now *zero* chance that the official U.K. story is plausible, but like a bunch of dummies people still defer and hedge and politely imply that it was. ‘Cause WWIII? Pish posh.
Speaking of, anyone see any footage from the last 5 U.S. events, FL, NV, AZ etc? Cause it seems like somehow accidentally, every time something happens, the cameras happen to be more off than the London Bridge. More malfunctioning than U.S. Police department cams. Maybe they should fire their security provider.
I’ve been pondering this Facebook thing, where everybody knows — and has always known — and yet it’s in the news. And with a British company as the vanguard. Wha? But as it pops into a world-wide Facebook tale, something hidden underneath the dang und strum appears: CA and the Brexiteers are accused not of rigging the election, exactly — heavens no! that would require us to put in paper ballots and honest polling instead of a system so sloppy that (as the U.S.) the world monitors refuse to oversee it! — but that Facebook and Cambridge so overwhelmed those poor, bewildered, besotted, benighted darlings that their senses were just overcome and they voted Brexit without really meaning to.
Therefore, we don’t need to follow Referendum, Democracy, and can ignore the vote again!!! Q.E.D.
Oh yes, if you haven’t been following amid the distractions, they’re neck-deep in it now, using FB and CA to reverse the vote without having to, you know, actually vote again. …Which means they know the vote is so overwhelming, they would lose again despite a 2nd running start.
Nice try, May! And your savaging of Corbyn is so outside the norm, so beyond the pale, it is even drawing attention from the sleepy Americans, where they see the same playbook run by the same people here: the corporate Democrats vs the people’s Progressives. Same bald, ugly, slanderous plan as McCarthy: paint all the progressives, anyone for the people and against the corporations, as a pinko red commie spy. Even as Russia is now ‘Capitalist’, and the West is now ‘Socialist’, but don’t let that stand in your way. Always stay classy U.K.!
“Mr. Hines, I ain’t been here long. What is these goddamn reds?”
“Well, sir, Hines says, ‘A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re paying twenty-five!” –John Steinbeck, The Grapes of WrathThe odd part is, despite the hyperbole (do we have any other communication anymore?), the Dow is still around 25,000.
25,000
All the same things are true: broke consumers, nosebleed debts, total lack of production, shattered real economy, 100M not in workforce, blinding gov’t resistance, record margin debt…for 20 years. So if it hasn’t mattered since 1999, why should it matter this week? Dow 25,000? Even back as far as 2001 it should have been Dow 6,000 or 3,000, and that was before we were gutted by the wars, the factories, erosion of middle class wealth, and the devastation in commerce and real estate.
So record plunge? Are you kidding me? We’re 1,000 points or 5% from the relative high. A thousand sounds like a lot but that’s not even a correction. That’s just standard saw tooth action of the Elliot Wave.
How do they do it? Well, every market is rigged, and most markets have paid fines admitting it’s rigged, yet no one goes to jail and the beat goes on. So why would we stop now? They are not going to stop until something stops them. PetroYuan? You out there?
Finally clicked: sun filter. That’s not a CO2 device. So aren’t they saying that scientifically the sun is more intense than it used to be (as V says, never needed one before). Certainly until 2000 it would take 6-8 hours to burn. Now I can burn in 20 minutes. If so, what does a provably more intense sun say about CO2 gobal warming? Is this why all planets are heating, not just ours? Is now a good time to cut bait and finally admit this?
No, they will never give up the low-income cost-increasing tax/power grab. Never. Why? Think of all the people you can kill “helping the environment”. They’ll cheer, as Ehrlich does. Listen to their talks and papers: killing humans is always the right thing to do. It’s always the right time to Kill All the Things™. And if they don’t die naturally, we’ll coat them in plastic and kill them all by accident.
This is a world wide death cult every bit as toxic as the SS or Voldemort’s. No? Check out the 6 Million deaths and the parabolic increase in human slavery. But not the ‘happy’ kind we used to have. Sex-and-death slavery. And the people who are against the death-and-slavery are the ones you fight. That’s you. Your country. Your culture. Your people. Your government. You. What do you think happens to people like that?
“The worst thing is the deafening silence, the way everybody just looks away, pretends like “ain’t my business” or, worse, actually takes all this grotesque spectacle seriously. What is wrong with you people?! WAKE UP!!!!!!!” –Saker
Wot I said:
UK Government Preparing To Confiscate Russian Capital “Of Dubious Origin”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-26/uk-government-preparing-confiscate-russian-capital-dubious-originUK gets poor, looks around for who has the most assets for the least trouble. Politics aside, if your main (only?) line of work is to hold assets for other people, perhaps it is not the best long-term solution to be known for stealing the assets of other people. They get cranky that way.
On precaution, it’s not legally viable to prove a negative. It also can be tricky to “prove” things in science. However, the many tests that are done are paid for, politicized, and leave the profiteer in control of what is released and what is not. Surely that is not fair law either. That’s ’cause no one cares about the truth, the law, or life itself, clearly evidenced.
I can tell you anecdotally that bugs have been falling for some time here, (10-ish years?) and birds mostly only this year. While I might suspect the stronger sun and wild swings for the bugs, as far as I can tell, there has been no significant change to pesticides, or none admitted, at least. It’s a progression, not a collapse, yet we see a collapse, not a progression.
Don’t worry, no one will care about that either until they can’t eat, then suddenly wonder why. Why? Because you’ve been openly destroying all life on earth, whatever the kind, type, variety, or genus for over 100 years. Did you think you were going to stop eating, you know, food, drinking, you know, water, and using, you know, wood and moving to a Star Trek Replicator? Or did you just not care how your bread was buttered? What am I saying? Butter comes from a package in a store, children literally don’t know what a cow is and don’t know that milk makes whipped cream then butter…even back in the 90s. So If you don’t know how anything works — anything, even what the food that creates you is — how can you know when it’s broken?
“Brawndo: It’s What Plants Crave”
““Hotter days, longer periods of drought … are becoming the new normal”
That’s odd, seems more like colder days, more snow and precipitation are becoming the new normal, in Greece, Spain, the Sahara, U.K…
Nice tax grab guys, but guess what? We know from yesterday that you don’t care. You joyfully, exuberantly authorized and subsidized the death of every insect, bird, animal, and plant in your home countries, decade on decade, and you expect me to believe you care about Madagascar? Please. You’ve been using this same good cop playbook my entire life, diverting what small donations there are into hollow promises run like Oxfam. Plant a single tree in France, put back one hedgerow, and maybe we can talk. Til then you’re all hollow, useless hacks.
As usual, complain bitterly about extinction of polar bears, rainforests, and whales, but when it comes to your own back yard where it costs 50 cents…well you know what to do. KILL ALL THE THINGS!!! Again, seriously, any 13th century peasant known enough not to cut out the hedgerows and that the salt marshes are useful, and he’s an illiterate mud-mover. Talk about I-Y-I, if these guys get any dumber, they’ll need help feeding themselves. If they get any more biophobic, there won’t be any life on earth to feed them with. …And yet it never, never stops. Why? The people don’t want it, so who does?
Claire is remarkably uneducated in just so many ways. Yes, some central banks are de jure government owned, but the one she highlights, the Fed, is a government-enshrined private banking interest-group, or a public-private partnership if you’re generous. It would be foolish to BE generous, however, as the government, supposedly the senior partner, has not and can not audit the junior partner, which seems legitimate grounds for suspicion. The thought that adding the Central Bank somehow becomes a vast bulwark against private banks…who own the central bank as a legal fig leaf, seems a bit rich.
Okay, we don’t really expect her to know, but this beating the weeds for “what on earth could anyone do” other than a central bank, clearly she knows nothing of money or history, because anyone who ever read anything, ever, would know you could use a gold standard — non-bank money; money of other people, Costa Rica does and the U.S. did 1700-1800; notes issued on private banks as the U.S. did in the successful period 1840-1913; a Treasury-issued money, as Kennedy planned; and moving forward, cryptocurrencies as well as things I haven’t thought of. Yes, that the world would fail and somehow private banks don’t own or influence the Fed cartel they are 100% stock-holding owners of is not exactly the consensus opinion, which is saying something. P.S. Advocates of End the Fed know all this and would have told you, if you read a single site from one of them. Apparently, all you need to be a journalistic expert is a keyboard and a childish disregard for the truth. If you don’t know, make it up! No one can tell anyway.
I love how Parliament is shocked, SHOCKED! I tell you, that Facebook is mis-using data, then exempt themselves from any rules or restraint. ‘Cause us, right? When did we ever follow the law? Laws – insider trading laws, gun laws, spying laws, are for peasants.
