Author: White Whale

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/gop-monetary-madness.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1221-L23&nl=el

For the record, I personally never predicted hyperinflation. It is plainly the case that the bulk of money creation happens through the fractional reserve banking system, and banks are not loaning out much money. We are PRIMED for hyperinflation, but that will only happen if the economy starts expanding significantly again, and that will only happen if we have a non-Socialist in the White House.

For the rest, though, Krugman is plainly wrong. The Fed caused the bubble AND the crash that started the recession of 1929. Herbert Hoover and to a much greater extent FDR EXTENDED the recession into a massive depression through idiotic monkeying with the economy that had never been tried before, which failed utterly–creating by far the worst Depression America has ever experienced–and which is only considered successful because of ideologically motivated hacks like Krugman who write the economic histories. Put bluntly, all socialists think FDR’s policies SHOULD have worked, so they proclaim them as successful, and ignore and bury all evidence to the contrary.

Here is the simple fact about Austrian economics: it is based on the latent idea that all money creation is theft. If they did not quite put it that way, it was understood. Gold is capital. You have to buy it. You have to save money, and invest it. Fiat money is not capital. It is created ex nihilo, and the power to do so is the power to summon wealth to you without creating it, without contributing ANYTHING to our actual sum of productive capability, intellectual or physical.

Let me offer up an example that to my mind is quite stunning. We are in the course of building and deploying a new class of aircraft carriers, the Ford class: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford_class_aircraft_carrier. Research and development for the class of carriers was about–I just closed the link–about $14 billion, and each carrier actually build will be, after cost overruns, about 10 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? There are an army (navy) of people looking this thing over, making sure the government doesn’t get screwed by the contractors. Congress has to approve these expenditures, at least in terms of allocating money to the DoD.

Compare that to the decision of Ben Bernanke to create $600 billion ex nihilo. That is the equivalent of 600 [edit: make that a mere 60] state of the art aircraft carriers, of the sort no nation but perhaps China would even contemplate building. This money was created, again, FROM NOTHING. Zip. They write the check, and now it can be cashed.

Who was this money given to? We don’t know. Can we ask? Yes, but we get only fragmentary reporting, after the fact, and that only because a Socialist–Bernie Sanders–was for once asking good questions, and got reporting inserted into the supposed Wall Street reform bill. I say supposed, since we can assume from the fact that the large firms on Wall Street supported it, that they viewed it as a competitive advantage.

THIS IS LUNACY. We have unelected people created incomprehensibly large amounts of money whenever they want, giving it to whomever they want, and doing so without supervision or even adequate reporting. From what little we do know, they are not even confining their activities to our borders, and are bailing out banks around the world.

Anyone who fails to condemn this very simply is not capable of the operation of common sense; or, they are aspiring totalitarians.

At 76, plainly this could be a factor. Yet, it could also be an asset. Towards the end of your life, do you become more or less concerned with appearances and your reputation? The fact that he is in his twilight years could well be argued to increase his claim that he will do what no American President has done to any significant extent in this century–at least since Harding: dramatically decrease the size AND POWER of the Federal Government.

I will add, too, that with regard to the newsletter issue, the best policy is to deny, deny, deny. We all know the game that is being played, and you can only win it with evasion and dishonesty. It was the Clinton policy, and if he were running, Clinton would easily be reelected today. Even if confronted with video to the contrary, he needs to deny, deny, deny, then focus on the fact that he is not and never has been a racist, but that our current President plainly has, speaking in his own book in a derogatory way about his maternal grandmother as a “typical white woman”, spending his time hanging around radicals, and in particular spending hours weekly with the demonically racist and hateful Jeremiah Wright.

I try to avoid hyperbole, but waking up this morning I see both that a provision has been inserted into the most recent National Defense Authorization to seize and hold without Miranda, without Habeas Corpus, and without limit, anyone American citizen SUSPECTED of being an accomplice to, or participant in FUTURE terror acts. Essentially, any American can be detained without due process for any reason indefinitely. The military can do body snatches, and make people disappear, legally, just like they used to do all over Latin America.

This is unfuckingbelievable. That the goddamn idiots supposedly representing our interests signed on to this is simply inexplicable. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it is truly beyond my capacity to understand how anyone could fail to see how this power could be abused, and how PATENTLY unConstitutional is it.

Here is a link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alton-lu/the-national-defense-auth_b_1180869.html

What is further inexplicable to me is why it is on HuffPost and not Drudge and The Blaze and Lucianne and Foxnews.

We need to be clear: OF COURSE the law will apply initially only to people like whoever they blew up in Yemen. Bad guy. His death was a benefit to the world. I get that. But if there is no DUE PROCESS in place, what is to prevent a situation like that in Enemy of the State, where an innocent person is targeted for political reasons, and not reasons of national security? What, in other words, is to prevent someone with the inclination and capacity for secrecy to do so from creating literal gulags in the American hinterlands, or transferring political opponents to Guantanamo Bay? My argument for Gitmo all along was these were bad people and they were NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS. With citizenship, though, you get all the RIGHTS which are enumerated under the Constitution, which include the right to a trial by jury.

Then I read our fucking First Amendment rights are under attack, in another foolish bill sponsored by Democrats: http://copyrightem.com/internet-copyocalypse-senate-bill-968-online-threats-to-economic-creativity

The pretext for this bill–and that is all it is–is that foreign nations are allowing the piracy of copyrighted materials–typically presumably movies and music–and that we need a means to stop this. However, the powers invested in the Attorney General in this bill are large, and largely discretionary. In pondering that, consider that he was quite willing to countenance the murder of a Border Patrol agent so that he could work to undermine the right to gun ownership in this country. He is an unprincipled asshole, with an anti-freedom agenda.

In effect, he can DECLARE a website to be a “pirate” website, and shut it down, with substantially NO supervision. This is a patent violation of the First Amendment. The way our system is supposed to work is you bring suit against someone for violating the law, go through due process, THEN you get them shut down. This is how it is supposed to work. It is not that there are procedures by means of which you can shut down offending websites.

This goes way, way too far.

What a crappy way to start the day. These things are quite real, and they are not getting covered by ANY media to the extent their potential importance warrants. Huffpost hit story one, but not story two.

Again: I understand the theoretical underpinnings of both laws. If the people governing us were saints, we would need NO legal restrictions on them, as they would invariably do the right thing. But reading history is a terrifying thing, and it is abundantly clear that large things start as small things. When Hitler’s party won roughly one third of the vote–the largest single segment, but far, far short of a majority–he was put into a Cabinet as Prime Minister with a lot of other ministers who were expected to check him, and subject to a Chancellor–Paul Hindenburd–who could veto him. Little by little, though, he took power, took power, took power, and eventually upon Hindenburg’s death was able, through trickery, to assume “emergency” powers that he never afterward relinquished.

I choose not to believe in organized conspiracies, but this sort of shit makes me worry. For his part, I can’t believe Romney will do ANYTHING serious to shake the status quo. He will say what he needs to say to get elected, make some cosmetic alterations in office, but we will have to count ourselves lucky if after 2 years in office we have our monthly borrowing down to $100 billion a month. That is not the scale of change we need. Yes, he may stop Obamacare, but the extent of the disaster we face will not be much altered by simply slowing the pace of the wreck.

Most of us think some period of seven days a week, 10-12 hours a day of work is hard. It isn’t. Our deployed soldiers pretty much ALWAYS work 7 days a week, and at a rock bottom minimum 10 hours a day. When on longer patrols, they go out 48 hours straight at a time. The guys I talked with last night said they only got about 5 hours of sleep on average for the year they were there, and keep in mind their days not infrequently included getting shot at, and witnessing and inflicting death.

A Seabee I talked with said they worked 12 on/12 off for his year there (7 days a week, of course) and got rocketed nearly every afternoon. Since it was always just after the late afternoon mosque meeting got out, it was predictable, so not really dangerous (they of course had bunkers/shelters), but that the concussion rockets in particular still shocked your system. No doubt no few of them literally crapped their pants, which is not at all a sign of anything but an organic reaction to severe stress.

Our men and women are professionals. Of course there are all sorts of gripes and genuinely bad decisions, but the rank and file still warrants our admiration.

As I see it, there is likely no more sure means of learning to conquer self pity than service in the military. We know so little of how hard they work because they don’t bitch about it. They bitch about overall strategy, specific individuals, the rules of engagement (if fired on, they can only fire back if someone gets hit), but never in my experience the hours of work, which are staggering by civilian standards.

I was talking with a group of infantry guys that had literally just gotten back from Afghanistan. One of the more lovely details of Afghan behavior they mentioned was that pedophilia is apparently endemic. Men rape boys often, and not even their own kids.

As I look at this, several things seem clear. First, Afghanistan has no weapons of mass destruction, and no ready means of getting them. Second, no attacks have originated out of there in ten years, other than of course local terror attacks on Afghanis themselves. Third, if we left completely, it is unclear to me that any serious national security threat would emerge.

While I do not think leaving completely would be prudent, I will say again that I think we should bring 2/3rds of our men back. This was the plain sentiment of these guys. The Taliban deserved to get hit for what they did in facilitating the attacks by Bin Laden’s team (who must have had help from an as-yet unidentified entity, as I have argued often). But it is not our job to civilize a nation that in large measure remains very primitive and rooted in ancient customs.

One of the principle challenges I have faced throughout my life is an inability to take pleasure in my accomplishments. I have a very strong will, but that has thus far proven insufficient over the long term. As I grow older, it seems increasingly clear to me that the link between discipline and long term accomplishment is pleasure. You need reinforcement. You need something to tell you that all the pain you just went through MEANT something. I have never had that. I have pushed myself through all sorts of tough times, and my emotional tone stays the same. This, I have decided, is actually my principle challenge. My task is not pushing myself harder, but learning how to regularly match challenge and following gratitude and pleasure. As far as that goes, cultivating pleasure in general. The capacity for work is directly proportional to your capacity not just for rest, but pleasure. In effect, I need to recondition my motivational complex, and have started doing that, with some success. I have been going slower but steadier.

As an example, I rowed 5,000 meters on a Concept 2 today and all the way through, rather than pushing as hard as I could, I just imagined how I was making myself healthier, building will, and that I could take just pride in finishing. Now, I have done a LOT–1,000 plus–really, really hard workouts over time. For years I got up early and worked out HARD. But I was always emotionally numb. The only feeling I felt was aggression. There was no qualitative pleasure for me.

I have a book on my shelf entitled “The Decline of Pleasure”, written several decades ago. I truly think this is a common problem. The social sources of this malady I will leave for another time. I know my own personal history well enough.

This thought is passed along in the vague hope it may be useful to someone.

I’m purging my shelves of books I haven’t touched in forever, and came across a book titled “Speaking of Siva” (Saivite is pertaining to Shiva/Siva), with South Indian poems of devotion.

Two:

The sacrificial lamb brought for the festival
ate up the green leaf brought for the decorations.

Not knowing a thing about the kill,
it wants only to fill up its belly:
born that day, to die that day.

But tell me:
did the killers survive,
O Lord of the meeting rivers?

And:

The crookedness of the serpent
is straight enough for the snake-hole.

The crookedness of the river
is straight enough for the sea.

And the crookedness of our Lord’s men
is straight enough for our Lord!

Bit slow today, checking some things off lists. The entirety of Peter Bauer’s “Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion” is quite wonderful, and well worth the read. As I argue constantly, to fail to consider the consequences of actions you conceive to be well intentioned, is to not be well intentioned at all, but self important and narcissistic, if not outright power mongering. YOU MUST CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES, to all people, and over time.

Here are a couple quotes from the concluding chapter of a book in which he has ably demonstrated that foreign aid frequently does little but support income inequalities, autocracy, and continued generalized poverty, all claims that fly in the face of “conventional” wisdom, then (1981) and now.

what explains the curious situation of contemporary economics, especially the acceptance of evidently insubstantial, even bizarre, notions?

The expansion of the subject since the Second World War and the circumstances surrounding it must be considered together. Unlike the expansion in the natural sciences in recent decades, especially in physics and chemistry, the expansion in economics (and other forms of social study) was not an instance of the growth of knowledge leading to a quantum jump in the number of people and money attracted. The expansion resulted from the belief that economists could help significantly in solving social and political problems; and that their capacity to do so depended largely on their numbers and on the money at their disposal. . . But, as the term is usually understood, economic problems are different. Economic problems do not typically present themselves because of perceived gaps or inadequacies of knowledge. Rather economic problems are said to exist wherever there are differences between proclaimed norms and observed reality. Such problems evidently cannot be solved by improvements in knowledge alone. Indeed, as suggested in chapter 1 (and noted repeatedly elsewhere), economists and other social scientists generally create problems rather than solve them [emphasis mine].

In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.

“When certain policies widely canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living standards. . . fail to bring about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful instruments for its promotion.”

Can there be a shorter summary of what is wrong with the leftist mindset, which does the same things over and over and over, always getting the same result–failure–and yet which fails to learn the lesson? As Bauer says, economics is not actually complicated. It is made complicated by people whose jobs depend on a lack of transparency.

Consider in that regard this quote he excerpts from a Professor Leontief.

Continued preoccupation with imaginary, hypothetical, rather than observable reality has gradually led to a distortion of the informal valuation scale used in our academic community to access and to rank the scientific performance of its members. Empirical analysis, according to this scale, gets a lower rating than formal mathematical reasoning. Devising a new statistical procedure, however tenuous, that makes it possible to squeeze out one more unknown parameter from a given set of data, is judged a greater scientific achievement that the successful search for additional information that would permit us to measure the magnitude of the same parameter in a less ingenious, but more reliable way. . . a natural Darwinian feedback operating through selection of academic personnel contributes greatly to the perpetuation of this state of affairs. Thus, it is not surprising that the younger economists, particularly those engaged in teaching and academic research, seem by now quite content with situations in which they can demonstrate their prowess (and incidentally, advance their careers) by building more and more complicated mathematical models and devising more and more sophisticated methods of statistical inference without ever engaging in empirical research.

This is how smart people become stupid: they makes things so complicated that the forest is lost for the trees. This is exactly the same dynamic in play with Global Warming. Rather than planting thermometers all over the poles, which is where the warming is supposedly happening, they develop statistical algorithms to in effect guess what the temperatures “must” be, based upon the sensors they have hundreds of miles to the south. This is not science. Statistics can NEVER substitute for measurements, when measurements are possible.

As I have said often, you can “prove” anything, if you start from the right premises. Garbage in, garbage out.

First off, I have no emotional stake in this election. If Romney or Gingrich or Perry get the nod, I’ll just hope for the best. At the same time, what DOES bother me emotionally is the sheer quantity of stupidity out there. Stupidity is like a blackness hanging in the air, killing everything good in the world. And plainly there are those who feed it. This bothers me.

In any event, the following is a response to this link: http://news.yahoo.com/paul-builds-campaign-doomsday-scenarios-161301486.html

So you count as definitive the opinions of an analyst from JP Morgan Chase, whose firm quite literally IS the Fed, or a very important part of it? Here is how our system works: a dozen or so massive banks work in committee in the morning at the Fed, vote themselves money, then go across the street and spend it. What do you think “quantitative easing” was? We know $600 billion or so was spent. On what? To whom was it given? Anyone? Any answers? You don’t know because this is not public knowledge. Money is created and distributed to ANYONE THEY WANT. There are no rules. There is no oversight.

If you want to understand how our system actually works, read my treatise here, collated from previous work, without effect, for the unwashed fools camping out in our major cities: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

It is quite literally the case that were we to end the leaks in wealth creation caused by the fractional reserve banking system and the Fed which enables it, then ALL OF OUR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS WOULD BE SOLVED. We would be able to work 5 hour work weeks, have zero national debt, and zero unemployment. These are not small problems; they are the only problems that, in the end, matter.

For the simple reason that substantially all contemporary economists lack either the balls or the insight to recognize this, by definition only marginalized people will speak openly of these facts. That Paul is getting support likewise means that many, many Americans are openly rejecting our rapidly failing status quo, which is all to the good.

Paul has my vote. I will add that because no conservative will be able to contemplate voting for Obama, Paul will get all those votes, and very large segments of Obama’s alienated followers. He is in my view electable. Our problems are huge, and even if the mainstream establishment and media refuse to acknowledge this, most of us care about the future and are not stupid.

Read these lyrics, from “Fantastic Voyage” by Coolio:

I’m tryin’ to find a place where I can live my life and
maybe eat some steak with my beans and rice, a
place where my kids can play outside
without livin’ in fear of a drive-by
and even if I get away from them drive-by killers
I still got to worry about those snitch-ass niggas
I keep on searchingc and I keep on looking
but niggas are the same from Watts to Brooklyn
I try to keep my faith in my people
but sometimes my people be acting like they evil

Is the task of decent people to prevent open discussion of this problem, or to recognize patent and inescapable reality, and working from a point of KNOWLEDGE to help free the millions of ordinary, law abiding black people who just want to be free from constant fear?

How many “liberals” live in the ghetto? None, if they can help it. It isn’t safe there, and the schools suck. This is a national shame, and it will not get fixed as long as our media is obsessed with message control rather than fixing actual problems.

Fuck all you pieces of shit. Every time some little boy or girl is crying because of their horrible lives, you are there justifying it, and making sure nobody anywhere tells the truth about it. This is evil, not compassion.