“Conspiracy theorists concentrate their time on transmuting the "base matter" of current events, official stories, propaganda and public relations into the gleaming golden truth buried within. They do this through the very right-brained activity of uncovering and inventing connections between disparate elements.
They create
story-systems to understand and explain events - essentially a religious activity.
For whatever reason, it’s much easier for us to deal with our internal contents
by projecting them into the world around us. These outward signs inevitably
become carriers of the archetypal content and psychodrama latent in the seeker.
Conspiracy theory
also overcomes the strictures of literalism and the problems of simplistic
thinking by experimenting with multiplicity of meaning. Ordinary events, people
and signs become symbols bristling with complex, malleable, even contradictory
meanings. Mystery is revived and idealized. Facts become more than the sum of
their parts. Theory becomes poetry and even theology.”Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness. - James Thurber
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. - Archibald MacLeish
None of us are responsible for our birth. Our responsibility is the use we make of life. - Joshua Henry Jones
Visualizing a Plenitude Economy: The Secret To Creating Jobs...
Renaissance 2.0: Understanding the Financial Empire...
Bike to the Future!
Cannabis revealed...
Introducing artist Drew Morrison...
Extreme tech log cabin...
2 dogs dining in a restaurant...
What most schools don't teach...
Give me liberty...and give it in a classroom!
Monsanto gets owned by an 11 year old...
Mega canyon found beneath Greenland...
Rise of the super bugs...
Why Tesla was a brilliant geek...
Does Iran have free energy technology?
The riskiest places in the world...
You are now entering the Big Internet Museum...
Photocarver...
Below the boat...
From box to boat in 10 minutes...
10 signs that you're fully awake...
A vampire walks into a bar and asks the bartend for a glass of hot water...
Robotic animals...
Tearing down a building without your knowledge...
Life isn't unfair...
Protect your 2nd amendment!
LED pixel art...
Pregnancy is beautiful...
10 facts about the Earth you may not have known...
Using LinkedIn to your advantage...
14 martial arts movies every guy (and gal) should see...
Grand Theft Iron Man...
General Motors is becoming China Motors...
Bang your coworkers...
Make your outdoor parties epic...
Detoxify yourself from mercury...
Basics of beneficial weeds...
Rings over Guatemala...
The mighty Wurlitzer organ...
Magic stair trick...
What could the massacre of 40,000 elephants tell us?
North Pole moving towards Russia!
Magnetic silly putty power...
Got chemtrail flu?
Russia is preparing to attack the US...
Are you ready for the Tri-bul-ation?
Third Reich -- Operation UFO...
The Nephilim Agenda...
10 Facts About Fluoride You Need to Know
If you drink water from a municipal supply in the US, you're probably drinking fluoridated water; here are 10 eye-opening fluoride facts that are imperative to understand...
One of Your Body's Best Early Warning Signals - Yet Ignored by Nearly Everyone
Almost everyone makes the mistake of rushing past these red flags in their haste to "get back to" what they were just doing. Be smarter, and get on the fast track back to health at the first hint of trouble...
Health Science Institute eAlerts
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The muck and the mire
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A little girl sits at a kitchen table. In front of her is a glass of fresh, cold milk.
Scenes of Americana don't get much more wholesome than that.
But it's an illusion. Because that glass of milk is far from wholesome. In fact, it isn't even healthy.
Oh the irony...
What makes that milk so unhealthy is exactly what we've been brainwashed into believing is the only thing that makes it safe enough to drink: pasteurization.
In fact, pasteurized milk should never pass that child's lips. Or your lips. Or anyone's. That's because it's fresh, cold junk.
Now, for years, we've all heard just the opposite. "Pasteurization kills bacteria." "It is what makes milk safe and wholesome."
Don't believe a word of it.
Let's start with the "wholesome" lie...
Pasteurization strips away nutrients like CLA, an essential fatty acid that boosts metabolism. Milk, straight from a healthy cow, contains FIVE TIMES more CLA than it does after it's pasteurized.
Other valuable nutrients are also depleted. They include...
* Vitamin C
* Amino acids
* Key enzymes
* Magnesium
* Calcium
That's right -- calcium! And the missing magnesium makes it harder for your body to absorb what little calcium survives.
Also missing: bacteria. The whole point of pasteurization is to kill bacteria. But that includes beneficial bacteria that your digestive tract needs to function smoothly.
So everything that would actually make milk a healthy choice gets destroyed during the process of pasteurization.
And it doesn't stop there. Because dairy farmers who pasteurize their milk also do much, much worse.
Factory farms are filthy places, which tends to make the cows unhealthy. So farm workers dump antibiotics in the animal feed. And, of course, traces of the drugs end up in the milk.
I wish I could tell you that antibiotics are the only junk that gets into the milk. But we've barely gotten started. And fair warning -- some of these items might turn your stomach...
* Growth hormones
* Painkillers
* Pesticides
* Herbicides
* Blood
* Pus
* E. coli
* Fecal matter
Could it get any worse? Yes it could. Here's the final insult...
Cows would naturally graze on grass if allowed. But factory farm cows never see a pasture. Workers feed them genetically modified corn and soy. But some farmers have found an even cheaper, lower-quality feed... Candy.
Seriously. They feed their cows candy and sugar-rich kids' cereals. The very same things you're trying to get off your child's plate!
So to start, after its pasteurized, that milk is pretty much nothing but low-quality fat and sugar -- and then we add the lovely list of ingredients above.
Suddenly that kitchen-table scene seems much more Amityville horror than pure Americana...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's a killer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forget about trans fats, sugars or allergen warnings.
The FDA is ignoring the greatest threat to your health when it comes to what they require on food labeling.
If they weren't busy signing loyalty pledges to their big business benefactors, boxes of cereal and loaves of bread would come with the following warning:...
"May cause heart disease, depression, Alzheimer's, cancer, or gastrointestinal disorders."
Does the word "glyphosate" ring a bell? If not, I'll bet you're probably familiar with glyphosate's brand name.
Glyphosate is the killer ingredient in RoundUp weed killer. And RoundUp is everywhere. Your neighbors spray it in their yards and gardens. It's used in parks, golf courses, and other public areas.
And, of course, farmers spray millions of acres with glyphosate in the U.S. and around the world. After all, it's a very effective weed killer.
Just one problem. One huge and very serious problem...
Because of its pervasive nature, traces of glyphosate creep into our food. And if you eat packaged foods that include soy, sugar, corn, wheat, or canola, you're essentially eating RoundUp.
A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows us why this glyphosate exposure is devastating.
Glyphosate inhibits an enzyme that helps us detox. When glyphosate undoes the action of this enzyme, food chemicals and environmental toxins become more active in our bodies.
And the damage takes a terrible toll.
Brace yourself. Here's a quote from the study... "Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body." (Emphasis added.)
Researchers believe ingesting glyphosate plays a role in gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
And virtually every one of us may be picking up traces of glyphosate every day. Don't count on the FDA to change the labeling requirements any time soon. Monsanto won't have it!
But with a little diligence, you can dramatically reduce your exposure. Read more about simple ways to avoid RoundUp-laced foods here.
Scientists on Unparticle Hunt Give Earth a Spin
 It may be under our feet, buried deep within
the Earth's surface: A previously undiscovered force of nature that could
send a generation of physicists back to the chalkboard. A team led by an
Amherst professor is searching for such a force -- and it's using the Earth's
mantle as its laboratory. [See Full Story] | |
| Pulling a Mob Job on America | ||
| by Chris Mayer | ||
You know the routine. Mobsters shake down, say, a restaurant owner. They drink all the booze and eat all they want and pay nothing. They rob the cash register. They even go out and borrow money against the place and spend it. When they've finally bled the thing dry and the business is about to collapse, they burn the place down and collect the insurance money. That's pretty much what Goldman Sachs did to AIG. The taxpayer footed the bill. We are fast approaching the fifth anniversary of the day the U.S. government stepped in to bail out AIG, the insurance giant. It happened over the weekend of Sept. 14, 2008. And even though I feel like I know the story, I keep learning new wrinkles about the whole debacle. It really was a mob job on the U.S. taxpayer — and just one of many during that whole crisis. I'll explain and show how this is still going on… I was in Pompano Beach, Fla., this week with the family, visiting my 91-year-old grandmother. And I picked up a copy of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History. It's great beach reading. Taibbi is a Rolling Stone correspondent and wrote the now immortal description of Goldman Sachs as a "vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Hunter S. Thompson, probably the greatest writer ever to write for Rolling Stone, would be proud. Taibbi is a worthy heir. The book, published in 2010, is mostly a collection of pieces that appeared in Rolling Stone from 2008-2010 reworked and updatedwith new material. Taibbi has style, and I like his prose. He has a gift with metaphor and simile. He calls the crazy tactics of one hedge fund "the financial equivalent of performing open-heart surgery with unwashed hands, using a Super 8 motel bedspread as an operating table." He says Bernanke's claim that a weak dollar only really affects Americans going abroad "is a bit like saying a forest fire only really sucks if you're a woodpecker." Some people are turned off by his style, which involves occasional profanity. (His chapter on former Fed chief Alan Greenspan is titled "The Biggest Asshole in the Universe.") But I like it because it has the effect of unmasking these criminals so we can see them for what they really are. Most of the government officials and corporate bigwigs under analysis are just high- class thieves. Besides that, Taibbi does a lot of terrific investigative reporting. He's more than a stylist. And I think his perspective is spot on. He fully appreciates that what we live in is an economy that is fast becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare. Here is Taibbi: "Your average working American looks around and sees evidence of government power over his life everywhere. Hepays high taxes and can't sell a house or a car without paying all sorts of fees. If he owns a business, inspectors come to his workplace once a year to gouge him for something whether he's in compliance or not. If he wants to build a shed in his backyard, he needs a permit from some local thief in the clerk's office." For most people, a run-in with government officialdom is something to be avoided. It means you are in for a costly experience, if not outright financial ruin -- even when you've done nothing wrong. But then there is what Taibbi calls the grifter class. These people use the government as a way of making money. This is a large and sweeping cast that includes people at the top of the financial/power pyramid -- such as the senators, representatives and upper-level officialdom and the sharks at gangster firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and the like. But it also includes lowlife crooks snookering everyday folks, bribing people, falsifying appraisals and generally acting like scum. More from Taibbi: "The new America… is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservative and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government… This stuff is difficult to unravel, often fiendishly so. But those invisible processes, those unseen labyrinths of the Grifter Archipelago that are indifferent to party affiliation, are our real politics. Which make sense, if you think about it. It should always have been obvious that a country as rich and powerful as the America should be governed by an immensely complex, labyrinthine political system, one that requires almost unspeakable cunning and wolfish ruthlessness to navigate with any success." If you can play the game, you can make a lot of money and take almost no risk. The taxpayer will pick up the tab. One example Taibbi spends a good bit of time on is the whole housing bubble. I enjoyed reading some of the craziness of that era. The home in Fort Myers, Fla., that sold for $399,600 on Dec. 29, 2005, sold again the next day for $589,900 and was in foreclosure a month later. Or the $615,000 house sold to a glasscutter where the mortgage was 96% of his take-home pay. And then the Wall Street magic that turned this huge pile of | ||
| mortgage garbage into AAA-rated securities. Taibbi details the inner workings of it all in an accessible and fascinating way. He describes it as a "financial sewage system designed to stick us all with the raw waste and pump clean water back to Wall Street." The amount of fraud and greed and thievery involved by all parties is still breathtaking to read about, even though I lived through it. And this brings us to AIG. The chapter on this episode is called "Hot Potato." In a sense, AIG was the firm that got stuck with the hot potato. It is a riveting story, actually, and I can't do justice to it here. But it encapsulates the mafia-style economy we find ourselves in. Essentially, at the end of the tale, AIG owed Goldman Sachs tens of billions of dollars. AIG couldn't pay it. So… Well, here's Taibbi describing the showdown: "When the CEO of Goldman Sachs stood up in the conference room of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and demanded his money, he did so knowing that it was more profitable to put AIG to the torch than it was to try to work things out. In the end, [CEO Lloyd] Blankfein and Goldman literally did a mob job on AIG, burning it to the ground to for the 'insurance' of a government bailout they knew they would get…" And they got it. Now, you might claim the taxpayer made money on the deal, as was widely been reported late last year. The idea is ridiculous, because AIG was clearly a heist in which AIG had no choice and the price offered was a fire sale price. (Not that we should feel sorry for AIG, which was a gangster firm with its own crooks). Besides, where is the check for the taxpayer? I never got it. The truth is the government used our money for free and taxpayers will never see it. The whole perspective this book offers is important. Because if you think of the economy as this vast thing where success or failure is a matter of serving customers well, then you are deceiving yourself. (I've written about this before, about how America's largest companies are basically products of state privilege.) This perspective is good too because the reality of the thing shatters many illusions. Think Obamacare is a socialist redistribution scheme? Take another look. What it really amounts to is the largest corporate giveaway and pork-filled legislation in the history of the country. The book also pops a lot of inflated reputations, like Warren Buffett's. My view of Warren Buffett as a person has basically plummeted in the last half-decade or so. Buffett and his firm Berkshire Hathaway benefited immensely from government bailout money. Wells Fargo, of which Buffett is a major shareholder, got $50 billion in bailout money. In fact, many Berkshire holdings were direct beneficiaries of bailout money. And Buffett himself used his influence to make sweetheart deals with the government. It makes you want to throw up, then, when Buffett's vice chairman, Charlie Munger, said of struggling Americans during the housing bust that they should "suck it in and cope." Yeah. Buffett lobbied hard for taxpayer bailouts. He is, today, just another grifter -- like Goldman Sachs -- using taxpayer money and his influence over those in power to enrich himself and his corrupt firm. (As an aside, the hero worship around Buffett is sickening and sophomoric and really should end. Buffett was a great investor, perhaps the greatest that ever lived. But that doesn't make him a good person, or a wise person, or even a great investor today. I know he's giving his money to charity. Maybe he should start by giving it back to the people he stole it from.) Honore de Balzac, the French novelist, once said that behind every great fortune there is a crime. Sadly, in the U.S., this is more and more often the case. (By the way, Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece is called "Ripping off Young America: The College Loan Scandal." It shows again the same grifter dynamics at work. You can find it easily online.) Anyway, Griftopia is a great book. I enjoyed it immensely and recommend it to anyone who wants to get a better understanding about how things work. |
Introducing Frank Karsten's... Democracy is Inherently Broken
 |
| Frank Karsten |
Over the last 150 years, government debts have grown inexorably. During that period, average government spending increased from 12% of GDP to a hefty 47% among major Western countries.
At the same time, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations ballooned from one to a whopping 200 books. This shows that government interference into the private lives of individuals has mushroomed and that democracy is a danger to liberty.
When they overspend, over borrow, or overprint money, their successors will have to deal with the negative consequences, and in their turn feel the same perverse impulse. Despite austerity rhetoric, government debts keep rising in most democratic countries. "Austerity" is a code word for "spending less than we had wanted, but more than in the past." In the end, they wind up raising taxes, rather than lowering expenditures to cut deficits.
Democracy is like going out to dinner with a group of people and deciding in advance to split the bill equally. If you order a nice $10 dessert, you pay only a fraction of the cost and the others pay the rest. So everyone will eat and drink more than they would have done if they had paid their own bill.
The result is a much higher total bill -- and no one will be in a position to do anything about it.
In a democracy, voters have the chance to put their personal desires on the collective tab. Welfare recipients demand higher welfare payments, parents want "free" education, farmers lobby for higher subsidies, and so on. Everyone tries to live at the expense of others. But in the end, almost everyone loses, just like the dinner companions in the example above.
The politician that promises the most, no matter how unrealistic, usually wins the elections.
If democracy has built-in perverse incentives, what would be the alternative? People tend to think that the only alternative to democracy is dictatorship. They're used to equating democracy with freedom. But this is nonsense.
Democracy is rule by "the people", i.e., the majority. The logical alternative to majority rule is self-rule. In other words, personal liberty. Instead of the government spending tax money and making decisions for people, individuals should spend their own money and make their own decisions.
Democracy is a form of collectivism in which the individual is subordinate to the wishes of the collective. It's a one-size-fits-none system in which billions of free individual choices are reduced to a small number of coercive decisions by politicians.
A much better alternative to such a centralized system would be to have many decentralized systems. This would create a market for governance where new types of government could be tried and tested, e.g., startup "countries" like Shenzhen and Dubai.
Getting back to the example of the dinner table: If people could split up into many different tables, the diners at each table would feel the negative effects of their spending much more strongly. Then the feedback mechanism would work far better. In addition, the tables would compete with each other, so tables spending irresponsibly would be quickly deserted. Thus, decentralization and competition would foster responsible behavior.
In the U.S. democratic system, one state or group can live at the expense of the other. In the European Union, one country can burden the other countries with their debts and the more frugal countries can't escape.
But Switzerland, geographically positioned in the center of the EU, was never part of this collective folly and suffers little from the economic crisis (their current unemployment rate is a modest 3.1%). The country must live within its own means, and others cannot spend at the expense of the Swiss.
The Swiss democracy itself is a very decentralized one. It consists of 26 regions known as cantons, or provinces, that on average have 300,000 inhabitants. These cantons enjoy remarkable autonomy, and they compete on matters like taxes, regulation, health care, and education. Because of that competition, people and businesses can not only vote with their pencils, but also with their feet. That fosters sensible governance, which has led to the prosperity and social stability the country is famous for.
Switzerland has a direct democracy at the federal, cantonal, and municipal level. One could, therefore, counter that this Alpine country offers an argument for more democracy. But its success seems to stem from its decentralized structure with relatively small units.
In governance, "small is beautiful." Of the 20 most prosperous regions in the world, many have fewer than 8 million inhabitants. A number of those, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, and Monaco, are not typical liberal democracies.
The current economic crisis cannot be solved by more democracy, centralization, and government interference. There are currently only about 200 countries for 7 billion people. That is far too few. We need a better market for governance in which more countries compete for companies and people. This will drive down taxes and foster economic growth and social stability.
Democracy is broken because it's a collectivist system, like socialism and fascism. We have to break it up in order to fix it.
Peace, love and happiness...until next time!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.