Friday, November 20, 2009
Environmentalism, Cyber Siberia, and the destruction of the individual
Virtually all environmentalists want the world's population to drop. They're usually very reticent about saying how it should drop, in case the fallacious idea gets out that they'll be needing camps and ovens, but drop it must, if the Great Green Goddess Gaia is to be assuaged.While working out how to kill most of us, or permanently sterilize us, they hold few qualms in destroying any individuals who stand in their way, accusing them of heresy, via the emotive term of 'climate change denier', in the same way that Witchfinder Generals would burn people at the stake in the Middle Ages, after accusing their hapless blood-boiled victims of being deniers of Jesus.
Perhaps one of the worst cases of this personality destruction has been that of David Bellamy, who for many years used to be one of the most popular men on British television, and certainly a favourite in whichever household I happened to be reading Das Kapital.
Despite an avuncular appearance, a fruity voice, and an energetic and passionate view on virtually everything under the Sun, plus an absolute dearth of other talent on British television, this hugely popular author of nearly 50 books on the environment still cannot get his voice heard on the UK's airwaves.
The environmentalists have done such a great job on defenestrating him, that most people on the street actually think he is dead, despite his still being in great form, even at the age of 76. And this is just the way the Greens like it.
So why? What did this famous environmentalist do to deserve this casting out into the frozen dark void of Cyber Siberia?
Yes, you've guessed it. Because he committed the crime of all crimes. He sinned the sin of all sins. He blasphemed the blasphemy of all blasphemies.
Yes, he denied anthropogenic global warming, and then stuck to his guns after being trounced by the Green Mob.
Hell hath no fury like an environmentalist movement spurned by the greatest living British environmentalist. Hence why we have been denied this man from our screens for so many years. And why they will dance with glee on his grave when his Maker finally comes to take him.
They really don't like it up 'em.
The age of the iPhone has arrived
Okay, so some of you may have been smugly sitting out there with your iPhone for quite some time, but mine arrived today, for the first time, and I am suitably impressed.
Being able to watch YouTubes on LewRockwell is certainly a lot of fun, on the move, and once I've figured it all out, I should start being quite dangerous with it, especially once I've got the hang of Twitter.
I must say though, it's not quite as 'out of the box' as I thought it would be. To manage my tasks, calendar, and email, I've had to fiddle for several hours with all sorts of third-party software and web-syncing systems.
Even for a former hard core Unix hacker, this was less than total fun.
But we have arrived, at the end, in the 3G world. It also works as a phone.
C'est magnifique!
Being able to watch YouTubes on LewRockwell is certainly a lot of fun, on the move, and once I've figured it all out, I should start being quite dangerous with it, especially once I've got the hang of Twitter.
I must say though, it's not quite as 'out of the box' as I thought it would be. To manage my tasks, calendar, and email, I've had to fiddle for several hours with all sorts of third-party software and web-syncing systems.
Even for a former hard core Unix hacker, this was less than total fun.
But we have arrived, at the end, in the 3G world. It also works as a phone.
C'est magnifique!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Quote of the Day
Ludwig von Mises has safeguarded the foundations of a rational economic science… By his teachings he has sown the seeds of a regeneration which will bear fruit as soon as men once more begin to prefer theories that are true to theories that are pleasing. When that day comes, all economists will recognize that Mises merits their admiration and gratitude.
French economist Jacques Rueff
Inflation and the Savior State
Uncle Gary North writes a superb piece on the history of money in the Roman Empire and how the deterioration of one was intertwined with the deterioration of the other.Excellent.
I have ordered the book mentioned, Christ and the Caesars, from Mr Amazon, and I can't wait to read it.
I must say, the Northster really knows how to get me to read an article. Add a dash of Austrianism, a hint of Roman Empire, a smattering of gold coinage, a cornucopia of Latin, a touch of Byzantine empire, a cacophony of barbarism, and a fall of empire, and I'm as happy as Koala in a Eucalyptus tree.
Marvellous.
What happened to the 'Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'?
As David Kramer has reported on LewRockwell, someone really does have way too much time on their hands:
I thoroughly approve of the entry for '1'. But how could anyone possibly select 'Finding Nemo' for '42'? Madness.
I thoroughly approve of the entry for '1'. But how could anyone possibly select 'Finding Nemo' for '42'? Madness.
British government increases borrowing the day after promising to cut borrowing
Can we really take these people seriously any more, with anything they say?
Check out this quote from the linked-to article:
Let's have a first crack at it:
Charity Commission for England and Wales => Gone
Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt => Ha! Gone
Crown Estate => Sold off. Gone
Export Credits Guarantee Department => What? An MI6 cover agency? Gone
Food Standards Agency => What? You mean they're still here? Gone
Forestry Commission => Up in smoke. Gone
Government Actuary's Department => Another fiscal joke. Gone
National School of Government => It just gets more hilarious by the minute. Gone
Office for Standards in Education => You're kidding me. Gone
Office of Fair Trading => Get out of here. Gone
Office of Gas and Electricity Markets/Gas and Electricity Markets Authority => Switch to manual. Gone
Office of Rail Regulation => Railroad 'em. Gone
Parliamentary Counsel Office => Don't know what they're supposed to do. Don't care. Gone
Postal Services Commission => Post 'em abroad. Gone
Public Works Loan Board => I bet nobody there ever does any work. Gone
Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office => Biggest crooks in government. Gone
Serious Fraud Office => Biggest waste of money in government. Gone
Treasury Solicitor's Department => Sack the lot of them. Gone
UK Statistics Authority => One more statistic. Two thousand civil servants sacked today. Gone
UK Trade & Investment => Money better spent on investment. Gone
Water Services Regulation Authority => Money down the drain. Gone
After chucking out all of the tax eaters above, we can really get to town:
Attorney General's Office => M'learned opinion is that they should be. Gone
Department for Communities and Local Government => Prescott's bloated ex-fiefdom. Gone
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills => Let them all try to be real entrepreneurs. Gone
Department for Children, Schools and Families => Families can look after themselves, thanks. Gone
Department for Culture, Media and Sport => Only fascist governments try to control culture. Gone
Department of Energy and Climate Change => Ministry for watching the lights go out all over Britain. Gone
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs => Put them on the land. Gone
Department for International Development => Not our problem. Gone
Department for Transport => Ha! Gone
Department for Work and Pensions => Biggest losers in Whitehall. Sack the lot of 'em and see if any of them can hold down a proper job. Gone
Department of Health => A sickly beast. Gone
Foreign and Commonwealth Office => What? You mean we still have an empire and we're not a US satrap? Gone
Government Equalities Office => Let's equalise them with the unemployed created by Gordon's bust. Gone
Scotland Office => Hail to Scotland's freedom and independence. Gone
Wales Office => The Welsh can look after themselves. Gone
Northern Ireland Office => Let the Irish look after the Irish. Gone
Office of the Advocate General for Scotland => Is this still here after all these years of devolution? Gone
Office of the Leader of the House of Commons => Irrelevant waste of space. Gone
Office of the Leader of the House of Lords => Even more irrelevant. Gone
After that, you privatise everything that moves. You then privatise everything that doesn't move.
Result: The fastest growing economy in the world, making China look like a slug on methadone. Oh, and about three million civil servants working for a living rather than parasitising themselves onto the rest of us.
The solution to this mess is really easy. For anyone with the wit to try it.
Check out this quote from the linked-to article:
The figures are "undoubtedly once again make for worrisome reading and highlight the very difficult task that whatever party is in power after next year's general election will face in reining in the bloated deficits," said Howard Archer, an economist at Global Insight.Very difficult task? No, Mr Archer, it's a very simple task. You just go to Whitehall and then start sacking civil servants. You keep sacking civil servants until anyone outside the civil service notices. That's £300 billion in savings straightaway.
Let's have a first crack at it:
Charity Commission for England and Wales => Gone
Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt => Ha! Gone
Crown Estate => Sold off. Gone
Export Credits Guarantee Department => What? An MI6 cover agency? Gone
Food Standards Agency => What? You mean they're still here? Gone
Forestry Commission => Up in smoke. Gone
Government Actuary's Department => Another fiscal joke. Gone
National School of Government => It just gets more hilarious by the minute. Gone
Office for Standards in Education => You're kidding me. Gone
Office of Fair Trading => Get out of here. Gone
Office of Gas and Electricity Markets/Gas and Electricity Markets Authority => Switch to manual. Gone
Office of Rail Regulation => Railroad 'em. Gone
Parliamentary Counsel Office => Don't know what they're supposed to do. Don't care. Gone
Postal Services Commission => Post 'em abroad. Gone
Public Works Loan Board => I bet nobody there ever does any work. Gone
Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office => Biggest crooks in government. Gone
Serious Fraud Office => Biggest waste of money in government. Gone
Treasury Solicitor's Department => Sack the lot of them. Gone
UK Statistics Authority => One more statistic. Two thousand civil servants sacked today. Gone
UK Trade & Investment => Money better spent on investment. Gone
Water Services Regulation Authority => Money down the drain. Gone
After chucking out all of the tax eaters above, we can really get to town:
Attorney General's Office => M'learned opinion is that they should be. Gone
Department for Communities and Local Government => Prescott's bloated ex-fiefdom. Gone
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills => Let them all try to be real entrepreneurs. Gone
Department for Children, Schools and Families => Families can look after themselves, thanks. Gone
Department for Culture, Media and Sport => Only fascist governments try to control culture. Gone
Department of Energy and Climate Change => Ministry for watching the lights go out all over Britain. Gone
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs => Put them on the land. Gone
Department for International Development => Not our problem. Gone
Department for Transport => Ha! Gone
Department for Work and Pensions => Biggest losers in Whitehall. Sack the lot of 'em and see if any of them can hold down a proper job. Gone
Department of Health => A sickly beast. Gone
Foreign and Commonwealth Office => What? You mean we still have an empire and we're not a US satrap? Gone
Government Equalities Office => Let's equalise them with the unemployed created by Gordon's bust. Gone
Scotland Office => Hail to Scotland's freedom and independence. Gone
Wales Office => The Welsh can look after themselves. Gone
Northern Ireland Office => Let the Irish look after the Irish. Gone
Office of the Advocate General for Scotland => Is this still here after all these years of devolution? Gone
Office of the Leader of the House of Commons => Irrelevant waste of space. Gone
Office of the Leader of the House of Lords => Even more irrelevant. Gone
After that, you privatise everything that moves. You then privatise everything that doesn't move.
Result: The fastest growing economy in the world, making China look like a slug on methadone. Oh, and about three million civil servants working for a living rather than parasitising themselves onto the rest of us.
The solution to this mess is really easy. For anyone with the wit to try it.
Stop the world, I want to get off
I woke up this morning to a dreary grey and cold Heathrow, back in Blighty, to then face a miserable-looking passport inspector. Instead of saying, "Thank you Mr Maturin for coming back to the UK to pay my salary and pension, and for feeding, housing, and educating all of my children," he merely said, "Ok", and allowed me to proceed on my way.
I had thought US passport checkers were the most surly and miserable on Earth. I shall soon start reforming my opinion, if this sea of uniformed unhappiness continues, at Terminal Three. If you're all so unhappy, passport checkers, go and get a job doing something else. You really won't be missed. And this feeble pretence that you're now "cracking down on illegal immigration" is just so laughable, as the hordes of Asians crowded in behind me, to go and visit their relatives in Slough (where most of the passport checkers live) that I was finding it really tough to keep a straight face.
On the way back to Henley my driver then proceeded to fill me in on Gordon Brown's continuing ineptitude with the Queen's speech, where I am to be expected to spend the next ten years with my nose to a grindstone, keeping up the salaries and pensions of his government sector parasites, to the level at which they have become accustomed. Thanks, Gordon. Yet another reason to figure a way out for escaping this socialist prison that the UK is becoming.
Anyway, enough of me; what's the Bank of England been up to while I've been away? Remarkably, they've managed to massage down the inflation rate to a mere 11%.
As they had inflation at around 10% for the entire decade of Gordon Brown as Chancellor, thus creating the present bust, they have almost made things only slightly worse than this, as they have tried to reflate their way out of Gordon's bust. Which is a terrific effort.
Green shoots anyone? Yeah, really. Give it a couple of years and Britain is going to be the basket case of Europe, perhaps only superceded by the US as being the place with the most rapidly declining living standards in the world.
Nice.
I had thought US passport checkers were the most surly and miserable on Earth. I shall soon start reforming my opinion, if this sea of uniformed unhappiness continues, at Terminal Three. If you're all so unhappy, passport checkers, go and get a job doing something else. You really won't be missed. And this feeble pretence that you're now "cracking down on illegal immigration" is just so laughable, as the hordes of Asians crowded in behind me, to go and visit their relatives in Slough (where most of the passport checkers live) that I was finding it really tough to keep a straight face.
On the way back to Henley my driver then proceeded to fill me in on Gordon Brown's continuing ineptitude with the Queen's speech, where I am to be expected to spend the next ten years with my nose to a grindstone, keeping up the salaries and pensions of his government sector parasites, to the level at which they have become accustomed. Thanks, Gordon. Yet another reason to figure a way out for escaping this socialist prison that the UK is becoming.
Anyway, enough of me; what's the Bank of England been up to while I've been away? Remarkably, they've managed to massage down the inflation rate to a mere 11%.
As they had inflation at around 10% for the entire decade of Gordon Brown as Chancellor, thus creating the present bust, they have almost made things only slightly worse than this, as they have tried to reflate their way out of Gordon's bust. Which is a terrific effort.
Green shoots anyone? Yeah, really. Give it a couple of years and Britain is going to be the basket case of Europe, perhaps only superceded by the US as being the place with the most rapidly declining living standards in the world.
Nice.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Spot the difference
If you wear Maturin Towers goggles, there is no difference between the two photographs above. If anyone can explain to me the substantive ideological difference between the two images above, I'd be pleased to hear it.Answers on a postcard, please.
Thanks to Gekko
BBC tells more lies, shock
Who'd'a thunk it?
The BBC has been 'dissembling terminological inexactitudes' again, about 'rapidly retreating glaciers' in the Himalayas.
Unfortunately, the inconvenient truth is that Himalayan glaciers are stable and may even be growing again.
Oh dear.
Meanwhile, as the article says, enjoy the interglacial while it lasts, before the next Ice Age hits us. Don't worry. This will probably be my fault, for daring to disbelieve the BBC.
The BBC has been 'dissembling terminological inexactitudes' again, about 'rapidly retreating glaciers' in the Himalayas.
Unfortunately, the inconvenient truth is that Himalayan glaciers are stable and may even be growing again.
Oh dear.
Meanwhile, as the article says, enjoy the interglacial while it lasts, before the next Ice Age hits us. Don't worry. This will probably be my fault, for daring to disbelieve the BBC.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Gold & Silver surge, dollar falls, Obama in Asia
Mr Schiff passes forth his latest comment, Gawd Bless 'Im:
Monday, November 16, 2009
Prominent Russian Scientist: 'We should fear a deep temperature drop -- not catastrophic global warming'
Don't worry folks, about the forthcoming global cooling. I'm sure the ecomentalists will blame it on global warming.
Plus, to add to the taxes on using carbon fuels, there will be further taxes on NOT using carbon fuels, to offset the global cooling caused by the global warming ... the climate change ... the ... errr ... something evil caused by capitalists.
Confused? So is every brain-dead religoid marxoid anti-scientific state-worshipping Gaia-worshipping environmentalist, in the world. But don't worry. None of them have any brains, just PhDs in politics and sociology, or great big chips on both shoulders because daddy didn't love them enough (if mummy bothered telling them who daddy was). Boo hoo.
Why have one tax where two taxes will do?
Homework essay: Define scientific falsifiability (and its applicability to the 'global warming' debate or lack thereof)
Plus, to add to the taxes on using carbon fuels, there will be further taxes on NOT using carbon fuels, to offset the global cooling caused by the global warming ... the climate change ... the ... errr ... something evil caused by capitalists.
Confused? So is every brain-dead religoid marxoid anti-scientific state-worshipping Gaia-worshipping environmentalist, in the world. But don't worry. None of them have any brains, just PhDs in politics and sociology, or great big chips on both shoulders because daddy didn't love them enough (if mummy bothered telling them who daddy was). Boo hoo.
Why have one tax where two taxes will do?
Homework essay: Define scientific falsifiability (and its applicability to the 'global warming' debate or lack thereof)
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Is Obama Commodus or Caracalla?
I thought I might roll out an old favourite article of mine:
=> Parallel Lives: Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar
So if Abraham Lincoln is Caesar, then who is Obama?
Hmmm...
He's certainly no Marcus Aurelius. Surely it's got to be Commodus?
=> Parallel Lives: Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar
So if Abraham Lincoln is Caesar, then who is Obama?
Hmmm...
He's certainly no Marcus Aurelius. Surely it's got to be Commodus?
The Golden Antidote
Another excellent Walter Block podcast, this time a prescient warning from 1999:
=> The Golden Antidote
This starts with the following Woody Allenesque monologue:
To be a liberal you have to believe the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of government funding,
You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but that being gay is natural,
You have to believe that businesses create oppression and that governments create prosperity,
...,
To be a liberal you have to believe that there was no art before federal funding,
To be a liberal you have to believe that taxes are too low but that ATM fees are too high,
To be a liberal you have to believe that second-hand smoke is more dangerous than HIV,
And you have to believe that the reason why socialism hasn't worked anywhere that it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge,
You also have to believe that gold is a barbarous relic that must be expunged from the monetary system
You know, I'm really beginning to warm to Professor Block.
He tops off the monologue above with a later line about the double coincidence of wants problem, involving a chicken owning pickle wanter in search of a pickle owning chicken wanter.
Try saying that after a Martini! ;-)
Yes, it's ten years old, this podcast, but still worth a listen for its wide-ranging discussion points.
=> The Golden Antidote
This starts with the following Woody Allenesque monologue:
To be a liberal you have to believe the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of government funding,
You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but that being gay is natural,
You have to believe that businesses create oppression and that governments create prosperity,
...,
To be a liberal you have to believe that there was no art before federal funding,
To be a liberal you have to believe that taxes are too low but that ATM fees are too high,
To be a liberal you have to believe that second-hand smoke is more dangerous than HIV,
And you have to believe that the reason why socialism hasn't worked anywhere that it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge,
You also have to believe that gold is a barbarous relic that must be expunged from the monetary system
You know, I'm really beginning to warm to Professor Block.
He tops off the monologue above with a later line about the double coincidence of wants problem, involving a chicken owning pickle wanter in search of a pickle owning chicken wanter.
Try saying that after a Martini! ;-)
Yes, it's ten years old, this podcast, but still worth a listen for its wide-ranging discussion points.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Songs for the barricade
In Uncle Murray's magnificent magnum opus, Man, Economy and State, with Power and Market, he introduces the character 'Jones', an acting man who must decide between watching a baseball game, playing cards, or taking a drive. These different possible actions keep moving up and down Jones's ordinal scale of most desirable thing to currently do, as he moves through the evening, in the subjective utilitarian reality of Austrian human action choice.I felt a bit like that on the beach, today. My ever-revolving list of iterations were (1) Order a cold Heineken from the beach butler, (2) Go for a swim, (3) Order a burger with french fries, (4) Listen to a Walter Block podcast, (5) Avoid looking at the impossibly curvaceous, slim, golden-skinned, blond-haired girlfriends of what appeared to be a former company of Russian Spetznatz troops, discussing all sorts of 'business', on the beach.
Imagine men who are built like tanks, covered in tatoos and scars, and wearing grey vests and cut-off grey camouflaged beach shorts, and I think you'll get the picture.
Rather remarkably, it was incredible how many times listening to a Walter Block podcast won out over avoiding looking at the impossibly curvaceous and slim blond-haired women.
I must say, however, that these Eastern European ladies all seem much nicer than the leathery Western European ones, who appear to be able to work out your net income and capital property value at five hundred yards, with a single penetrating glance.
You feel like your wallet has been squeezed and molested, when they run their eyes (very briefly in my case) over you. Ah well, I'm probably only jealous that I don't appear to come up to muster wearing my Jean Baptiste Say "Markets Clear" T-shirt, gaining about a 3.42 nanosecond glance before my case is presented, tried, and dismissed.
Anyhow, enough of that nonsense.
While I was pondering whether to listen to another Walter Block podcast or go for another swim, I wondered about creating a song list for the barricade, when the revolution comes. Just like the Desert Island Discs program, I thought I'd limit myself to just eight tracks, to listen to when the balloon finally goes up. If you have an alternative list, I'd be pleased to see it:
1. 1973, James Blunt, All the Lost Souls
2. No One Knows, Colin Hay, Are You Looking At Me?
3. Shiver, Natalie Imbruglia, Counting Down the Days
4. You Get What You Give, New Radicals, Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too
5. Life is a Highway, Tom Cochrane, Mad Mad World (I watched this one performed live about a hundred years ago with English Bay, Vancouver, as a backdrop, while the Sun set into the Pacific. If you know Tom Cochrane, then you'll realise just quite how good that was.)
6. No Tomorrow, Orson, Big Idea
7. Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy, Big & Rich, Horse of a Different Color
8. Superman, Lazlo Bane, All the Time in the World
Prizes will be awarded if you can work out which song goes with each of the following women: Pauline, Caroline, Vanessa, Carol, Christine, Anne, Katherine, and Kathy, in no particular order.
Well, while you're on the barricade, you may as well have something to remind yourself why you're there.
Report on LvMI UK
Bad news, folks.
I have spoken to my control from Auburn, and from what he tells me I personally would have to do to get a Von Mises Society going in England, which would achieve the aims I would want for it, would require too much energy and time on my part for me to be able to do it.
However, if anyone else wants to form such a thing, then I would be happy to join.
The first step might be for a rogue UK Austrian individual with a spare £50,000 in their pocket to sponsor a Mises Circle event, say in London, and to take it from there.
In the meantime, because of a lack of Austrian economics professors in England, who would be the probably best strong 'root' of a Von Mises Society, perhaps the better things to do are to:
1. Help the LvMI in Auburn, especially by helping it fund the enrollment and education of UK people into the Mises programs, to then enable them to become Austrian professors in England, to then form the nucleus of a future much more effective Von Mises Society.
2. Help Sean Gabb with his endeavours, with the Libertarian Alliance (orthodox wing), and try to add Austrian influence to it.
3. Similarly, for the Libertarian Alliance (provisional wing).
Oh well, reality hurts. But it's the thought that counts.
I have spoken to my control from Auburn, and from what he tells me I personally would have to do to get a Von Mises Society going in England, which would achieve the aims I would want for it, would require too much energy and time on my part for me to be able to do it.
However, if anyone else wants to form such a thing, then I would be happy to join.
The first step might be for a rogue UK Austrian individual with a spare £50,000 in their pocket to sponsor a Mises Circle event, say in London, and to take it from there.
In the meantime, because of a lack of Austrian economics professors in England, who would be the probably best strong 'root' of a Von Mises Society, perhaps the better things to do are to:
1. Help the LvMI in Auburn, especially by helping it fund the enrollment and education of UK people into the Mises programs, to then enable them to become Austrian professors in England, to then form the nucleus of a future much more effective Von Mises Society.
2. Help Sean Gabb with his endeavours, with the Libertarian Alliance (orthodox wing), and try to add Austrian influence to it.
3. Similarly, for the Libertarian Alliance (provisional wing).
Oh well, reality hurts. But it's the thought that counts.
Polymath Block adds a new discipline: Sociobiology
In the same way that intelligent people compete for sexual success, without really being aware of the underlying self-organising system of evolution, Walter Block postulates that socialism may be hard-wired into the human brain because of the evolutionary success of explicit co-operation and implicit co-operation.Listen in, from about 16 minutes onwards, to the following podcast, for his sociobiological explanation:
=> Libertarianism: Is it Conservatism’s Future? (MP3)
Essentially, a million years ago, there were two ways for a proto-human tribe to survive against the lions and the sabre-toothed tigers. One was explicit co-operation, where if I helped you, then next week you helped me. This 'Reciprocation' feature is hard-wired into humanity and is used by sales people today to sell you stuff you perhaps realise afterwards you didn't want (e.g. giving away small 'free' samples of shampoo - you then 'reciprocate' later by buying a full bottle of the new shampoo from these 'benefactors').
Those who didn't reciprocate, for instance if you looked after them when they were unwell and they then refused to look after you when you were unwell, were quickly shunned, isolated, and kicked out of the tribe.
This explicit co-operation, driven by the underlying evolutionary mechanism of gene survival, worked well enough for 50 to 100 related people, in the typical primitive pre-Neolithic tribe. This then is the behaviour, which lies at the root of socialism. It is why socialist society can survive at the primitive agragrian autarchic level of a village or a small valley, with a single overlord, who is probably also literally 'Head of the Family'. The emotion and the memory of reciprocation holds everything together, in the tribe, through thick and through thin.
But what does this primitive tribe do if it finds a rival tribe over the hill, carrying lots of juicy Wildebeest carcasses? It forms a hunting party and tries to wipe out the other tribe in order to retrieve the Wildebeests. These people are 'others' and therefore it is okay to kill them, so long as the tribal chief commands it.
But this kind of tribal aggressive behaviour, perhaps the root of national socialism, completely wipes out a far more powerful form of co-operation, that of implicit co-operation, i.e. the free market, another self-organising Hayekian system with remarkable similarities to evolution.
If instead of trying to wipe out the other tribe, we open trade negotiations with them instead (something which happened only in the last 100,000 years or so, when Cro-Magnon eventually grew intelligent enough to work this out), 'selling' what we had too much of (say, ivory tusks) for what the other tribe had too much of (say, Wildebeest carcasses), enabled us to become much wealthier over time, rather than by using the older techniques of brutal theft and murder.
Even better, would be to codify these 'trading' practices and these 'property rights', to help people do what felt unnatural, with the natural urge being to steal from and murder those in the other unrelated tribe, and to take their stuff. These codifications of 'unnatural' behaviour thus become the roots of the earliest religions, which has to keep being drummed in to hard-wired people, to stop them falling into 'evil' (i.e. property theft, envy, and murder). I don't think it's any coincidence that those with strong religious beliefs are often the most market-oriented in society, and those that are the most atheistic are often the most socialist.
But if these 'unnatural' rules are adhered to, the self-organising system of the market is formed, working to the same general principles as the self-organising system of evolution, with which it is closely related (as it were).
Those who most clearly used these 'moral' techniques of implicit co-operation and trade quickly became the dominant tribes, and thus quickly we reach the earliest cities, which start off as enhanced trading posts lying upon natural communication points abutting rivers and coasts.
Obviously, underlying all of this is the more primitive hard-wiring which still makes us want to hit people over the head to then try to steal from them, and this is what lies at the root of the first states, where 'strong' individuals take over these early cities through armed force, to live as gilded parasites on the backs of all the other traders. (We could argue here that they were merely providing security services, but we can leave that discussion for another day.)
Hence, we reach the stage of Kings, armies, Pharoahs, and other assorted bands of robbers writ large, as the hard-wiring keeps re-arising after oscillatory periods of intellectual liberty. Hence, the United States has an ideological epiphany with the writings of Englishman Thomas Paine, but then subsequently falls under the Pharaonic communist spell of Horus-God, Obama, who can right all evils with a single glance. Look, the US economy is recovering, my children, and I will create the jobs necessary to keep this recovery going, ...for Lo, I am the one true God, the blessed, the merciful, the deliverer of winds, and of all other sweet goodnesses - Weep ye children of America, for I have come among you...
And if you believe that nonsense, you'll believe the Moon is made of cream cheese.
So the sociobiological approach is a bit of a tale of woe, I'm afraid, but it does explain an awful lot, especially why only one in a hundred people is a believer in freedom rather than a believer in some form of socialism, which makes our fight against them all that more Sisyphusian, as we constantly face the uphill struggle of overcoming primitive hard-wired genetics.
However, if Thomas Paine could do it, with such spectacular results, then at least we ought to try.
Socialists are primitivists. They should have our pity. And if we can help some of them shake off their hard-wiring, then one day we could finally shake off their dreadful stone age instincts which keep giving us war, slavery, and poverty.
For much more on this kind of line, I must recommend Hayek's 'The Fatal Conceit'. It is doubtful if Professor Hayek wrote all of it, however, it is still worth reading for all that.
Pip pip!!
Friday, November 13, 2009
Heaviest element yet discovered: Governmentium
Lawrence Livermore Laboratories has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science.
The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 – 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of morons promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
We asked the scientists involved whether it was dangerous:
"It causes a cancer," said one expert, with a beard, "but of a special kind. Instead of causing plain simple bodily cancer, like other heavy elements, it acts instead as a cancer throughout the whole of society, feeding upon free radicals and chewing them up through university professorship salaries to become further morons within the Governmentium mass."
"It is incredibly dangerous," said another scientist with a beard, "because once you are afflicted with it, you think it's a good thing and try to spread even more of it around to deflect the blame. Both of us have had to grow beards to try to offset its effects, but even we are feeling tempted to recommend that Governmentium be compulsorily administered to all children, from the ages of 3 through to 21, and then again in all hospitals, for every kind of treatment. Keep clear."
So there you have it folks, the new heaviest element of all time, Governmentium. I suppose we'll discover a use for it one day, but in the meantime, as the men with beards say, stay well clear.
With thanks to the Objective Analyzer
The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 – 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of morons promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
We asked the scientists involved whether it was dangerous:
"It causes a cancer," said one expert, with a beard, "but of a special kind. Instead of causing plain simple bodily cancer, like other heavy elements, it acts instead as a cancer throughout the whole of society, feeding upon free radicals and chewing them up through university professorship salaries to become further morons within the Governmentium mass."
"It is incredibly dangerous," said another scientist with a beard, "because once you are afflicted with it, you think it's a good thing and try to spread even more of it around to deflect the blame. Both of us have had to grow beards to try to offset its effects, but even we are feeling tempted to recommend that Governmentium be compulsorily administered to all children, from the ages of 3 through to 21, and then again in all hospitals, for every kind of treatment. Keep clear."
So there you have it folks, the new heaviest element of all time, Governmentium. I suppose we'll discover a use for it one day, but in the meantime, as the men with beards say, stay well clear.
With thanks to the Objective Analyzer
Yet more layers of bureaucracy planned to protect the 'Too Big to Fail's
Peter Schiff lays into the US Senate:
Thursday, November 12, 2009
The US creates its own NHS
It just seems bizarre to me.
The NHS in Britain is a rotten over-manned, over-paid, over-pensioned, filthy, disgusting waste of taxpayers' money, where you have to beg to be lucky enough to be placed on months-long queues for the simplest of treatments.
Doctors are arrogant, impossible to sack, massively compensated, and you're lucky to get more than two minutes with one before they're pushing you out of the door with a Big Pharma script in your hand.
If we had a National Food Service in the UK, the NFS, we all know that we would be queueing all week for filthy rotten potatoes, but still we put up with the same kind of miserable 'service' from the producer-led NHS.
And America wants to have the same system over there.
Oh Dear Lord.
They fight a revolution to get the British government out of their lives, and 250 years later they are copying the worst examples of British government stupidity.
Yes, we all know Obama is an Acorn-Chicago-Machine communist. But for the rest of the US government to push through this horrible health bill, to create an American NHS, is simply incredible.
If I was a Texan, an Alaskan, a Californian, a Hawaiian, or best of all a Vermonter in the "Green Mountain Boys" liberation army, I would be brushing off my legal text books on secession.
Its time has come.
The NHS in Britain is a rotten over-manned, over-paid, over-pensioned, filthy, disgusting waste of taxpayers' money, where you have to beg to be lucky enough to be placed on months-long queues for the simplest of treatments.
Doctors are arrogant, impossible to sack, massively compensated, and you're lucky to get more than two minutes with one before they're pushing you out of the door with a Big Pharma script in your hand.
If we had a National Food Service in the UK, the NFS, we all know that we would be queueing all week for filthy rotten potatoes, but still we put up with the same kind of miserable 'service' from the producer-led NHS.
And America wants to have the same system over there.
Oh Dear Lord.
They fight a revolution to get the British government out of their lives, and 250 years later they are copying the worst examples of British government stupidity.
Yes, we all know Obama is an Acorn-Chicago-Machine communist. But for the rest of the US government to push through this horrible health bill, to create an American NHS, is simply incredible.
If I was a Texan, an Alaskan, a Californian, a Hawaiian, or best of all a Vermonter in the "Green Mountain Boys" liberation army, I would be brushing off my legal text books on secession.
Its time has come.
The cure for Randianism
Surely, there can only be one cure; a single viewing of 'Mozart was a Red', by Murray N. Rothbard:
Better than sex.
Here's the text.
Better than sex.
Here's the text.
The cure for socialism
I was asked a curious question the other evening, about how it is possible for someone to be a hard-core Stalinist socialist one day, and then a hard-core Austrian anarcho-capitalist the next.
Well, it's very rarely an overnight thing. However, there are cases where such people have been instantly transformed simply by reading Human Action, understanding the reasoning behind the Socialism Cannot Calculate argument, and then instantly flipping straight across to full anarcho-capitalism. But this didn't happen for me (alas).
Instead, it was a decade-long road of mistakes, false trails, cul-de-sacs, and finally waking up one day and realising that government is not only unnecessary, it is positively a cancer which should be eradicated.
There's two other things to understand, too. First of all, very few people change their political stripes once they have reached the end of puberty, because of chemicals released by the body during this period which 'freeze' certain parts of the brain. For instance, if you learn a foreign tongue before the age of 12, it is likely you will speak it like a native and have no accent. If you learn a foreign tongue after the age of 18, it is highly likely you will always keep an accent.
But we're not after most people. A twenty-year-old who is a committed socialist is almost certainly a lost cause, and not worth the candle. They may come across of their own accord, but that's entirely down to them. I'm certainly not going to lift a finger to help these cretins, as the energy they soak up is just too high. If they're intelligent enough, they'll eventually work it out for themselves.
What we are after, however, are those uncommitted people who just want to see a better world. We have to rescue them before they are sucked into the socialist maw by constantly deriding and laughing at the stupidities of socialism, and pointing out a better way.
A very very few people can be persuaded to change their spots, but so very few it is not worth spending much time on the matter. (Though those that do change, say, after the age of 25, are often our greatest fighters, in the manner of anti-smoking zealots who used to be heavy smokers.)
The second thing is this, you have to realise that those who do change from one extreme to another, are most likely possessors of highly volatile minds. This is a polite way of admitting that I could in some ways be judged as being 'slightly short of a few bob in loose change', as could many of my fellow 'changelings'.
But it's certainly a factor to be considered.
Obviously, we 'changelings' consider ourselves highly intelligent, creative, passionate, innovative, soulful, and magnificent. However others just call us lunatics. But we can live it, so long as we realise it's a possibility.
(Though as Professor Thomas Szasz would say, 'mental health' may simply be an invention of the state to describe behaviours not wanted by the state.)
However, given that, where does one begin to cure one's self from socialism?
I think the root of this must be George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although Orwell himself remained a socialist until his dying day in a curious case of cognitive dissonance, this dystopic vision of the future rings so true as to the final nature of a socialist world, that it drives a fantastic nail into the heart of socialist ideals.
I think the next nail must be Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which describes the process via which 'well-meaning' government always comes to mean men with guns shooting people in the head for daring to disobey.
Next up, is Alexander Dolgun's story, An American in the Gulag, which caused the first major crack in my own Stalinist edifice. Much more compelling than anything Solzhenitsyn ever wrote, Dolgun is unusual in being one of the very few men to come through the dreaded Sukhanovka KGB prison.
Once this book shook my Stalinism, the rot was in, and although it was to be a long road to Austria, the journey had finally begun.
I suppose I must include Atlas Shrugged, which pushed me into all the works of Rand, though I always felt she was missing something, and wondered why she had proven incapable of writing a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, turning instead to non-fiction to avoid having to write about how John Galt could run a successful American state without succumbing himself to the ring of power.
But Rand is, and always will be, a cul-de-sac. She is a statist and a collectivist, and a world entirely peopled by Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart clones, all smoking one very rational brand of cigarette, to provide fires in their mind, would be a very dull and oppressive place indeed, probably even worse than living in a Gulag.
At least in a Gulag, as Alexander Dolgun testifies, there is still some room left for a little freedom and rebellion, if only behind the closed curtains of your own mind. The Randians wouldn't be happy until all rogue mental patterns, daring to deviate from the orthodox line of a long-dead woman, had been entirely eradicated by the comrades.
But Atlas Shrugged helps, as does her much more readable earlier work, Anthem, which I wouldn't be surprised to know had been read by George Orwell before he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I think by this time you will be turning for home on the last lap of the race, having done the hard yards already, especially if by this point you have discovered Mises.org.
So from then on it's a swift gallop through Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt), The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Mises), Human Action (Mises), and finally, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market (Rothbard).
To finally kill off any remaining shreds and hangover vestiges of socialism, you must then hammer in the final stake through the heart, in the form of Socialism, by Von Mises himself. (IMHO, his finest work.)
From then on, there are hundreds of books to read and soak up. I'll let you work out your own non-fiction ones, but the fictional ones to read are Lord of the Rings, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, anthing by Robert Heinlein (especially the Moon is a Harsh Mistress), all of the Harry Potter novels, and Time Will Run Back, by Henry Hazlitt.
There's many, many, many other books that will help. For instance, The Prince, by Machiavelli, Democracy the God that Failed, by Hoppe, and A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, also by Hoppe.
But by this point you should be well saved. So I'll leave it for you to work out where to go next.
Happy reading!
Right, it's getting on for 6pm, here, as the peachy round sun drops down over the western Gulf. So I'll be off for a rather large G&T, down by the beach, to whet my appetite for dinner.
By Gad, it's a tough life here in Maturin World.
Pip pip!!
Well, it's very rarely an overnight thing. However, there are cases where such people have been instantly transformed simply by reading Human Action, understanding the reasoning behind the Socialism Cannot Calculate argument, and then instantly flipping straight across to full anarcho-capitalism. But this didn't happen for me (alas).
Instead, it was a decade-long road of mistakes, false trails, cul-de-sacs, and finally waking up one day and realising that government is not only unnecessary, it is positively a cancer which should be eradicated.
There's two other things to understand, too. First of all, very few people change their political stripes once they have reached the end of puberty, because of chemicals released by the body during this period which 'freeze' certain parts of the brain. For instance, if you learn a foreign tongue before the age of 12, it is likely you will speak it like a native and have no accent. If you learn a foreign tongue after the age of 18, it is highly likely you will always keep an accent.
But we're not after most people. A twenty-year-old who is a committed socialist is almost certainly a lost cause, and not worth the candle. They may come across of their own accord, but that's entirely down to them. I'm certainly not going to lift a finger to help these cretins, as the energy they soak up is just too high. If they're intelligent enough, they'll eventually work it out for themselves.
What we are after, however, are those uncommitted people who just want to see a better world. We have to rescue them before they are sucked into the socialist maw by constantly deriding and laughing at the stupidities of socialism, and pointing out a better way.
A very very few people can be persuaded to change their spots, but so very few it is not worth spending much time on the matter. (Though those that do change, say, after the age of 25, are often our greatest fighters, in the manner of anti-smoking zealots who used to be heavy smokers.)
The second thing is this, you have to realise that those who do change from one extreme to another, are most likely possessors of highly volatile minds. This is a polite way of admitting that I could in some ways be judged as being 'slightly short of a few bob in loose change', as could many of my fellow 'changelings'.
But it's certainly a factor to be considered.
Obviously, we 'changelings' consider ourselves highly intelligent, creative, passionate, innovative, soulful, and magnificent. However others just call us lunatics. But we can live it, so long as we realise it's a possibility.
(Though as Professor Thomas Szasz would say, 'mental health' may simply be an invention of the state to describe behaviours not wanted by the state.)
However, given that, where does one begin to cure one's self from socialism?
I think the root of this must be George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although Orwell himself remained a socialist until his dying day in a curious case of cognitive dissonance, this dystopic vision of the future rings so true as to the final nature of a socialist world, that it drives a fantastic nail into the heart of socialist ideals.
I think the next nail must be Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which describes the process via which 'well-meaning' government always comes to mean men with guns shooting people in the head for daring to disobey.
Next up, is Alexander Dolgun's story, An American in the Gulag, which caused the first major crack in my own Stalinist edifice. Much more compelling than anything Solzhenitsyn ever wrote, Dolgun is unusual in being one of the very few men to come through the dreaded Sukhanovka KGB prison.
Once this book shook my Stalinism, the rot was in, and although it was to be a long road to Austria, the journey had finally begun.
I suppose I must include Atlas Shrugged, which pushed me into all the works of Rand, though I always felt she was missing something, and wondered why she had proven incapable of writing a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, turning instead to non-fiction to avoid having to write about how John Galt could run a successful American state without succumbing himself to the ring of power.
But Rand is, and always will be, a cul-de-sac. She is a statist and a collectivist, and a world entirely peopled by Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart clones, all smoking one very rational brand of cigarette, to provide fires in their mind, would be a very dull and oppressive place indeed, probably even worse than living in a Gulag.
At least in a Gulag, as Alexander Dolgun testifies, there is still some room left for a little freedom and rebellion, if only behind the closed curtains of your own mind. The Randians wouldn't be happy until all rogue mental patterns, daring to deviate from the orthodox line of a long-dead woman, had been entirely eradicated by the comrades.
But Atlas Shrugged helps, as does her much more readable earlier work, Anthem, which I wouldn't be surprised to know had been read by George Orwell before he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I think by this time you will be turning for home on the last lap of the race, having done the hard yards already, especially if by this point you have discovered Mises.org.
So from then on it's a swift gallop through Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt), The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Mises), Human Action (Mises), and finally, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market (Rothbard).
To finally kill off any remaining shreds and hangover vestiges of socialism, you must then hammer in the final stake through the heart, in the form of Socialism, by Von Mises himself. (IMHO, his finest work.)
From then on, there are hundreds of books to read and soak up. I'll let you work out your own non-fiction ones, but the fictional ones to read are Lord of the Rings, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, anthing by Robert Heinlein (especially the Moon is a Harsh Mistress), all of the Harry Potter novels, and Time Will Run Back, by Henry Hazlitt.
There's many, many, many other books that will help. For instance, The Prince, by Machiavelli, Democracy the God that Failed, by Hoppe, and A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, also by Hoppe.
But by this point you should be well saved. So I'll leave it for you to work out where to go next.
Happy reading!
Right, it's getting on for 6pm, here, as the peachy round sun drops down over the western Gulf. So I'll be off for a rather large G&T, down by the beach, to whet my appetite for dinner.
By Gad, it's a tough life here in Maturin World.
Pip pip!!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Lord Mandelson to become Minister of Information
Spot the difference:
Perhaps the most corrupt man in Britain, Lord Rio of Hinduja, is to become the British government's official minister of propaganda.
The descent of the once-proud Labour Party into fascist degeneracy really is quite profound. As a former once-proud member of the Labour Party myself, its current promotion of crookery and outrageous lying, after 12 years of abject failure, really makes me quite sick indeed, in the manner of being sick at the realisation of one of your own children becoming a foul murderer.
What a terrible shame that a political movement that was borne out of a justified feeling that the world was wrong and that this wrong should be righted, has descended to such abject crassness and mendacious 'Big Lie' cajolery.
Perhaps the most corrupt man in Britain, Lord Rio of Hinduja, is to become the British government's official minister of propaganda.The descent of the once-proud Labour Party into fascist degeneracy really is quite profound. As a former once-proud member of the Labour Party myself, its current promotion of crookery and outrageous lying, after 12 years of abject failure, really makes me quite sick indeed, in the manner of being sick at the realisation of one of your own children becoming a foul murderer.
What a terrible shame that a political movement that was borne out of a justified feeling that the world was wrong and that this wrong should be righted, has descended to such abject crassness and mendacious 'Big Lie' cajolery.
Days in the office
Well, here in Dubai I've had a pretty rough day because an evil New Zealander forced me last night to sample of couple of thimblefuls of amber nectar.Being more of a Martinborough Pinot Noir man these days, followed by creamy Stilton and a light cigarillo, I perhaps had one or two more than I should have had, so I needed to concentrate a little more on my business dealings today, than perhaps I would have wished.
I blame Peter Jackson, for encouraging all of these New Zealanders to believe that they are all Men of Gondor or Dwarfs of the Iron Mountains, therefore able to quaff flagons of strong ale before striding out to deal with Orcs.
Ah, well, Lissenen ar' maska'lalaith tenna' lye omentuva.
Fortunately, because it's nearly the weekend here, we all managed to slip down to the beach by 3pm, to soak up a few rays of lovely November sun and to get the beach butler to bring us down a few cold drinks, to quench our pre-Orc quest.
So fear ye not, fellow seekers of Mordor's ultimate Leviathanesque destruction. Things aren't too disastrous in Maturin World, today.
Now, after my bath to wash off all of that salty sand, surely it's time for a stiff one before dinner?
Pip pip!!
Bernanke is the apprentice of Gutenberg the printer
Marc Faber predicts that the future value of the dollar is precisely zero.
The interviewer, aghast, asks "zero against what?"
"Vell," says the Good Doctor, "against everyzing":
More here.
The interviewer, aghast, asks "zero against what?"
"Vell," says the Good Doctor, "against everyzing":
More here.
Climate change study shows Earth is still absorbing carbon dioxide
Not that it matters anyway, because there's still the question of explaining why the last ice age had much higher carbon levels in the atmosphere than we have now, but yet another scientific study has shown that the ecomentalists are a bunch of religoid gangsters, with fingers stuffed in their ears shouting "Cannot hear, Cannot hear, Cannot hear".
Superb.
Superb.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The second American revolution has begun
Uncle Gerald Celente calls the first three shots which have already happened, in the second American revolution.
He also predicts that as Obama's ratings continue to drop, then some significant 'event' will take place, to re-boost these ratings.
He skirts away from saying that the Bush administration deliberately caused 9/11, to overcome the malaise caused by the dot-com crash, but he does say that he puts nothing past the US government to renew itself in a time of crisis.
Crivens!
He also predicts that as Obama's ratings continue to drop, then some significant 'event' will take place, to re-boost these ratings.
He skirts away from saying that the Bush administration deliberately caused 9/11, to overcome the malaise caused by the dot-com crash, but he does say that he puts nothing past the US government to renew itself in a time of crisis.
Crivens!
The only way is up - or is it? Gold at $1100 dollars an ounce
Marc Faber thinks you should wait until gold drops to $800 dollars an ounce before you buy any.Hmmm...
Personally, I don't think we'll ever see gold go below $1,000 dollars ever again. However, Dr Faber is a very rich man and I am a very poor man, so maybe he knows something about IMF and World Bank policies that I don't, so I wouldn't entirely rule out a very short-term drop below a thousand again.
In the meantime, however, not being the greatest market timer in the world, I'm going to keep buying gold with every spare penny I have.
It's only a bubble when every idiot in the street is buying into it, and as Mark Dice has found, there are still plenty of zombies out there who think gold is only something you wrap chocolate sweets in.
Probing the depths of public ignorance on gold money at $1100 dollars an oz
Mark Dice, hero, fails to find the bottom of the depth of public ignorance on gold as money.
He tries to sell a 1 oz Canadian maple leaf solid gold coin for $50, in the smart part of town, and finds no takers.
The Fedsters and other counterfeiters really have got their serf zombies nailed.
Simply fantastic:
He tries to sell a 1 oz Canadian maple leaf solid gold coin for $50, in the smart part of town, and finds no takers.
The Fedsters and other counterfeiters really have got their serf zombies nailed.
Simply fantastic:
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Socialism cannot calculate
Above is a photo of the Boeing 777 I flew to Dubai in on Saturday. Look at the tremendous number of operations going on. There is luggage being loaded, food being loaded, (most importantly) drinks being loaded, and passengers about to be loaded. That's not to mention the 600 channels of entertainment, including the latest Harry Potter film, and quite a good romp called 'The Ugly Truth'.The flight crew are preparing their route and doing their pre-flight checks. The cabin crew are with us in the lounge getting us ready for the journey, and the plane itself is the direct descendant of the Wright brothers plane, made out of string and balsa wood, which hopped about on a Carolinas beach a mere 100 years ago.
(To put that into context, think about Roman imperial society in 100 AD, and then Roman imperial society in 200 AD. Any differences coming to mind? No? Thought not. This is because the socialism of the late Roman empire crushed all innovation and created a stagnant society ready for brutal crushing in the metal-crusher of history - but I digress.)
All of the progress in the photograph above is down to capitalism, particularly that of capitalist America before the two-headed monster of the Republican-Democrat government machine succeeded in destroying it and allowing China to take up the mantle.
Socialism cannot even calculate how many tons of coal to mine in any given year, in a coal-bearing area, to feed a single iron foundry.
This is the genius of Ludwig von Mises. Of his many astounding accomplishments, perhaps his greatest was the epiphany that socialism cannot calculate.
ANYTHING.
Without a free market there is no way of knowing what is the best use of scarce resources.
As an experiment for yourself to check this, play any 'Tycoon' computer game in 'Sandbox' mode (i.e. communist mode) and see how boring it gets, and how quickly it gets boring, and then take a look at the convoluted and stupid worlds you build when there is no competition forcing your hand to be efficient and productive, even when you have unlimited cash to build said resources, without any need to generate any kind of investment return.
This is why socialism appeals to people with the sandbox mentality of young children. Because it fails to take into account any kind of reality, in which real resources are scarce, and in which 'perfectionism' cannot be achieved in anything like a realistic time frame.
Mises realised all of this before computer games.
Mises truly was one of the greatest men of all time. Personally, I think the only man who came anywhere close, previous to this great Austrian, was Thomas Aquinas. Before that, probably Aristotle. Before that, perhaps the un-named Prometheus figure who invented fire-making, and before that, perhaps a close relative of the Bonobo chimpanzees who was the first brave 'man' to decide to come down from the trees and out from the forest.
We really are not worthy.
Just a random thought.
Uncle Gerald tells it like it is
US citizens should stuff cotton wool in their ears before they listen to 40 minutes of Uncle Gerald in full flow.
Brutal.
Brutal.
The Man Who Predicted the Depression
A superb article in the Wall Street Journal, on Ludwig von Mises' 1920s' prediction of a forthcoming economic crash.
The Austrian crusade may finally be beginning to get somewhere after 80 years of being right all of the time, and subsequently being ignored for being so damned smug about it.
(BTW, in case you're wondering, the Persian Gulf sea, just off the Hilton Jumeirah in Dubai, is superb at this time of year. Wearing my 'Murray Rothbard: Enemy of the State' drew a few confused looks, but what the heck.)
The Austrian crusade may finally be beginning to get somewhere after 80 years of being right all of the time, and subsequently being ignored for being so damned smug about it.
(BTW, in case you're wondering, the Persian Gulf sea, just off the Hilton Jumeirah in Dubai, is superb at this time of year. Wearing my 'Murray Rothbard: Enemy of the State' drew a few confused looks, but what the heck.)
Saturday, November 07, 2009
The power of language
Followers of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), will know all about the power of language, but for those less familiar, take a look at the following paragraphs I found in The Labourgraph, this morning:
US unemployment hits 10pc for first time since Ronald Reagan was in power
“While the US may be officially out of recession, there are too few signs yet that employers have confidence enough to begin taking on new staff,” commented Howard Wheeldon, BGC Partners’ senior strategist.
This “suggests that those working in the wider economy are still concerned that the stimulus benefit enjoyed in recent months can be turned into sustainable growth,” he continued.
Notice, "the stimulus benefit enjoyed", allied to the highest US official unemployment figures for 26 years (with the real jobless rate probably twice that).
I must say, as an NLP practioner myself, and someone used to its powers, this clever use of language even took me by surprise.
You might even believe, from the messages being put out by governments all over the world, that everything is so good that we should all burst spontaneously into song, singing "climb every mountain".
It is clever, though. You have to hand it to these bought-and-paid-for intellectuals, for being able to machinate this nonsense without their own brains melting.
US unemployment hits 10pc for first time since Ronald Reagan was in power
“While the US may be officially out of recession, there are too few signs yet that employers have confidence enough to begin taking on new staff,” commented Howard Wheeldon, BGC Partners’ senior strategist.
This “suggests that those working in the wider economy are still concerned that the stimulus benefit enjoyed in recent months can be turned into sustainable growth,” he continued.
Notice, "the stimulus benefit enjoyed", allied to the highest US official unemployment figures for 26 years (with the real jobless rate probably twice that).
I must say, as an NLP practioner myself, and someone used to its powers, this clever use of language even took me by surprise.
You might even believe, from the messages being put out by governments all over the world, that everything is so good that we should all burst spontaneously into song, singing "climb every mountain".
It is clever, though. You have to hand it to these bought-and-paid-for intellectuals, for being able to machinate this nonsense without their own brains melting.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Mises slideshow
Jeffrey Tucker has put together an amazing slideshow of Ludwig von Mises images. I particularly like the ones where he is with Hayek:
Reserve Bank of India’s Gold Purchase From the IMF - Bye bye dollar, hello gold
Michael Rozeff helps me in my ponderings about what's going on in the world gold market versus the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.
Forget that. Gold is gradually becoming the world's reserve currency.
Forget that. Gold is gradually becoming the world's reserve currency.
Have the central banks given up?
With gold at $1,092.90/oz this morning, I was wondering whether the central banks (plus the Basel BIS, the World Bank, and the IMF) had all just given up.
For decades they have striven to keep gold below $1,000 dollars, to hide their counterfeiting practices from seeing the light of day.
Even with the forthcoming pre-announced sale of a further 200 tonnes of gold by the IMF (to whoever wants it, probably the Chinese government), has the heart gone out of the fight to keep the gold price down below the magically psychological $1,000 dollars?
If they have given up, what is the 'natural' ceiling, if gold were to be treated like copper or zinc, or any other regular metal commodity? (If it's such a barbarous relic, then why do all the Keynesians in central banking care so much about the price of gold?) Is the natural price of gold 'On the Moon' at $6,000 dollars, or somewhere in the $2,000 - $3,000 dollar range?
I suppose we shall see once the IMF has off-loaded its 200 tonnes.
Have the central banks actually run out? Gold leasing has been a joke for decades, with central banks giving away their hoards of treasure in the full expectation that they would never see them again. Is Fort Knox empty?
Who knows? They certainly won't allow an audit. If James Bond were to pay it a visit today, what would he find? Tumbleweed? Crickets?
It's all very interesting. If gold breaks through $1,100 without any sign of a central bank intervention then it will get even more interesting.
Will we ever see $1,000 dollar gold ever again? Have the central banks resigned themselves to locking the price of gold to under $2,000 dollars an ounce? If they have, this doesn't have the same 'ring' as $1,000 dollars, and I predict that if the price gets to the $1,900 mark, then it will sail through $2,000 like a train through cobwebs, despite any feeble attempts of the central banks to halt the onslaught.
So this morning, in the manner of Gandalf the Grey, I shall ponder these riddles.
For decades they have striven to keep gold below $1,000 dollars, to hide their counterfeiting practices from seeing the light of day.
Even with the forthcoming pre-announced sale of a further 200 tonnes of gold by the IMF (to whoever wants it, probably the Chinese government), has the heart gone out of the fight to keep the gold price down below the magically psychological $1,000 dollars?
If they have given up, what is the 'natural' ceiling, if gold were to be treated like copper or zinc, or any other regular metal commodity? (If it's such a barbarous relic, then why do all the Keynesians in central banking care so much about the price of gold?) Is the natural price of gold 'On the Moon' at $6,000 dollars, or somewhere in the $2,000 - $3,000 dollar range?
I suppose we shall see once the IMF has off-loaded its 200 tonnes.
Have the central banks actually run out? Gold leasing has been a joke for decades, with central banks giving away their hoards of treasure in the full expectation that they would never see them again. Is Fort Knox empty?
Who knows? They certainly won't allow an audit. If James Bond were to pay it a visit today, what would he find? Tumbleweed? Crickets?
It's all very interesting. If gold breaks through $1,100 without any sign of a central bank intervention then it will get even more interesting.
Will we ever see $1,000 dollar gold ever again? Have the central banks resigned themselves to locking the price of gold to under $2,000 dollars an ounce? If they have, this doesn't have the same 'ring' as $1,000 dollars, and I predict that if the price gets to the $1,900 mark, then it will sail through $2,000 like a train through cobwebs, despite any feeble attempts of the central banks to halt the onslaught.
So this morning, in the manner of Gandalf the Grey, I shall ponder these riddles.
Strikers win again in moribund Britain
The British government once again caved in to strikers in a stitch-up deal with the postal unions.
With so much bad news around, and with Christmas coming up, the Labour Party will not want to have been accused of 'Cancelling Christmas' with a failure of the delivery of tens of millions of Christmas cards, so their chief fixer Lord Rio has 'sorted' it.
No doubt we'll never know how much taxpayer has just been ripped off by, with various pension deals and other hidden pork placed into the mix, but as is usual with the Labour Party and government monopolies, the strikers have won.
Just get rid of the monopoly, Mandy. Then we'll never have this problem again.
With so much bad news around, and with Christmas coming up, the Labour Party will not want to have been accused of 'Cancelling Christmas' with a failure of the delivery of tens of millions of Christmas cards, so their chief fixer Lord Rio has 'sorted' it.
No doubt we'll never know how much taxpayer has just been ripped off by, with various pension deals and other hidden pork placed into the mix, but as is usual with the Labour Party and government monopolies, the strikers have won.
Just get rid of the monopoly, Mandy. Then we'll never have this problem again.
Bank of England signals the end is nigh for quantitative easing
A heroin addict found a couple of years back that their usual level of heroin intake, which had been working NICE-ly for a decade, was failing to deliver its usual kick.
They then experienced a junkie's crash, and found themselves looking face-up from the gutter.
To get out of this mess, they upped the heroin dosage, picked themselves out of the gutter, crawled onto the pavement, and got on with life again. Friends even said that they detected the 'green shoots' of a return to clean living.
The heroin addict told these same friends that they were now thinking about reducing their daily dosage.
Yeah, right.
They then experienced a junkie's crash, and found themselves looking face-up from the gutter.
To get out of this mess, they upped the heroin dosage, picked themselves out of the gutter, crawled onto the pavement, and got on with life again. Friends even said that they detected the 'green shoots' of a return to clean living.
The heroin addict told these same friends that they were now thinking about reducing their daily dosage.
Yeah, right.
We can leave if we want to
That very nice man, Mr Jonathan Pearce, writes an interesting article on the possibility of the UK leaving the satanic EU, now that the Stupid Party has ruled out a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
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