Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Imagineering...

Greetings good citizen,

I was surprised this morning to note that an early harbinger of the onset of autumn hasn’t happened!

I’ve been living here for 18 years and for every one of those years a maple tree at the corner of my lot has turned brilliant orange for my birthday…which was yesterday.

It didn’t occur to me to look until this morning…and the tree is still solid green!

Don’t get the wrong idea. My maple tree turning colors ‘coincides’ with other trees in the area/region…and no, mine (well, the ‘notorious one’, there are a lot of maple trees on my lot.) isn’t the only one that hasn’t ‘turned’.

Stay tuned, I’ll let you know when it/they finally do turn.

(I’m sure you’ll be waiting with bated breath…)

So, what is the next thing I see this beautiful morning? My browser advises me that the markets are ‘surging’ on (and you can only wonder where they dig these people up) increased ‘consumer confidence’!

And actual check of the numbers shows somebody is exaggerating more than a little.

How much do you want to bet the ‘driver’ behind the markets is the ‘psychologically important’ 10,000 number?

Speaking of ‘psychos’, we can only wonder how long the charade of adequate public funding will last?

Tens of millions of homes are in foreclosure…so NOBODY is paying the property taxes. Even during so-called ‘good’ times, EVERY school district struggles to fund mandated programs…

Well, don’t look now good citizen, but NONE of those programs has been abandoned.

So where the fuck is the money coming from?

We (naturally) ‘assume’ the Feds are providing the funds…like they did last year.

But wait a minute Slim, there hasn’t been a ‘new’ stimulus bill…and those people who aren’t paying property taxes aren’t paying income taxes either…so where is the Fed getting the money from? (40 million US citizens on ‘food assistance’, you AREN’T paying income taxes if you qualify for food assistance!)

This is perfectly okay! Every society/government ‘lends’ to itself all the time to cover ‘budgetary shortfalls’, that must be what they’re up to now!

Except the ‘tab’ for these budgetary shortfalls now exceeds our annual ‘projected’ GDP…

To simplify what this means picture your ‘personal debt’ being equal to your annual wages.

You aren’t paying THAT off without suffering some severe financial hardship…for a real long time. (Because your ongoing ‘living expenses’ aren’t going away under the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system!)

As you can see, we have ‘money’ for some things…like keeping the ‘rabble’ pacified/fed and keeping their kids off the streets under the watchful eyes of ‘minders’ (It is difficult to call what these people do ‘teaching’…not that this is their fault.)

Funny how we always circle back to the same damn issue and that is mis-management.

What they like to call ‘incompetence’. (Which is nothing but ‘smoke’, a feeble attempt to account for horrible results by blaming it on the ‘poor execution of sound planning’ rather than the polar opposite: the faithful execution of 'piss poor planning…')

Which is to point out that the ‘bar’ has been so heavily fucked with that it is impossible to measure ‘performance’ using their convoluted ‘standards’.

If we go by their standards, the economy is ‘just fine’…hell, the banking sector is ‘solid as a rock’ (as long as you don’t look too closely!)

What am I saying good citizen?

I’m saying we have arrived at that comic line in an old joke…”I can’t be out of money, I still have checks!”

And that’s what passes for our economy is running on…kited checks.

If YOU tried the same stunt, you’d do some serious prison time…but apparently it’s okay if you’re an oligarch trying to prevent your neck from being stretched on the nearest lamppost!

And when the money goes REALLY funny, that is precisely what will happen.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, August 30, 2010

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Greetings good citizen,

Oh wouldn’t it be so much easier for those who run this country that yesterday were banished from our vocabulary?

Not yesterday specifically but the whole idea of ‘the past’.

You know if they could, they would…in a heartbeat.

It is a thought that redefines the term ‘waking nightmare’ and it’s more than a little disturbing it even occurred to me.

I bring this up because more than a couple of my, er, ‘fellow travelers’ (some of them would balk at being called ‘peers’.) Have pointed out the troubling disconnect between the market rising a hundred points while the GDP was slashed by…well, it guess it’s in ‘how’ you go about it. I use the rough number of fifty percent but the sites devoted to trading advice are saying thirty…I know I’m high but they are too low!

Which is to say the MSM, er, pretends that it (and therefore its readers) exist in the ‘perpetual now’.

Understandably, each news item exists as a separate entry; sort of floating in its own reality, what I refer to here is more diabolical. If they could ‘erase’ yesterday then today would be whatever they said it was because there would be no record of it.

And sometimes that’s just what the MSM comes across like…like yesterday didn’t happen.

Or in this case a whole bunch of yesterdays…roughly three years worth.

Which is to ask how you keep your head from exploding when (obviously clueless) pundits alternate between the ‘slow recovery’ meme and the overly optimistic ‘bright horizons’ cheerleading?

Maybe I should ask if three years has been ‘slow enough’ for ya?

How much ‘slower’ could it get?

Do you ‘feel bad’ for the pundits because the economy keeps making a liar out of them? (I don’t. They COULD try a novel idea, how about telling the fucking TRUTH for a change!)

I’ll spare you the ‘tirade’. You’ve heard it often enough already…

Okay, I’ll spare you THAT tirade…you already know I’m going to go off on something!

Hell, it’s my birthday…not that it has anything to do with any of this!

Focus.

The ‘timebomb’ is ticking good citizen. The general public has been on the ‘wrong course’ for so long that ‘patience’ is drawing to an end.

People are sick of waiting for things to ‘turn around’.

Worse, guess who’s in the ‘crosshairs’?

It’s unfair to point the cannon only at the politicians, our corporate overlords have rightly earned their ‘share’ of the spotlight.

Equally as disturbing is how the, er, RWNM has been frantically pointing to the, er, ‘tolerant’ portion of the public as being the ‘cause’ of our wrecked economy. (If you don’t send your tax return in laced with a tablespoonful of Anthrax, you’re a gay marriage supportin’, tree-huggin’ ‘librul’!)

Ironically, where do you suppose we’ll find those tough talking, war supportin’, patriotic Murikan heroes when the shit hits the fan?

Hiding behind the nearest badge…that’s where!

It is truly amazing how the general public has failed to grasp that our current problems have their ‘source’ in the ‘Reagan Revolution’, which was the beginning of the end for America.

Worse, most think our problems are a simple ‘competence issue’…if only we had ‘qualified people’ in charge!

So good citizen, how many of you are up for ‘tap dancing on a land mine?’

If it is to be, it is up to Thee!

The people ARE the Law…something the overreaching need to be reminded of every now and then!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Shameless Propaganda

Greetings good citizen,

There’s a lot of primal screams and finger pointing going on over Glen Beck’s Lincoln Memorial event. It seems a whole 2,500 ‘Tea Partiers’ attended…

With ‘grassroots’ like that it’s no wonder they regularly win elections…

So what are we looking at, really? (Why are they showing us this?)

Even the ‘zombies’ that attended know they’re being painted as ‘mindless morons’.

Propaganda is intended to work on a number of levels.

What does the ‘low turnout’ tell us? That those who made the trip were ‘party operatives’, following orders. (Hell, most of them were probably having their expenses picked up by corporate!)

The level of publicity this ‘faux’ movement enjoys also tells us it is a ‘front’, a ‘distraction’.

While the main focus comes from one of the founders/backers of the…er, ‘movement’, the rest of the MSM obligingly follows along, making us wonder if there isn’t a serious deficiency in the people who decide what is and isn’t ‘newsworthy’.

(Alas! We know that they too are simply ‘following orders’…)

Which leads us to the disturbing issue of when a ‘grassroots movement’ stops being ‘populist’? Would the Tea Partiers even exist without their corporate parent(s)?

From the looks of the much publicized (albeit lightly attended) ‘rally’, I don’t think so.

What can we take away from this?

‘They’ want you to think there is a groundswell of outrage attacking ‘government overreach’.

What do conservatives ‘fear’ most?

Conservatives fear higher taxes and closer scrutiny/more government regulation.

Um, 2,500 people is hardly a ‘groundswell’…

Funny how ‘anti-tax’ California has become the poster child for ‘failed government’.

Which is to say those who were originally outraged over ‘out of control’ government spending sort of got a wake up call when the local firehouse was left unattended every other day.

Bear with me as we shift mental gears here from ‘shameless propaganda’ to ‘economic reality check’

The latest ‘outrage’ to come under assault by conservative forces is the ‘comparatively generous’ benefits paid to public sector employees.

Naturally, this is the Union’s fault.

Employers would keep prices ‘in check’ by keeping wages, er, ‘stable’…

Well, that’s the theory anyway. When the guy down the street starts raking it in ‘hand over fist’ all bets are off!

Wouldn’t do to be left in the dust! What’s the point of being rich if you can’t get richer?

Naturally, ‘somebody’s’ going to have to ‘pay’ for that…

Yeah, they’re looking at you…

But once again I digress…

What should be lost on no one is the thirty years of ‘wage stagnation’ the laboring class/paycheck peasants have suffered.

This is why the comparatively modest gains made by the public sector appear ‘outrageous’.

It is NOT a case of the public sector being ‘overpaid’ as much as the private sector has been severely ‘underpaid’…and who is responsible for that?

The very same people that brought you the “Party of No!”

NO taxes, NO regulations (NO raises and NO job security…worse, thanks to their ‘anti-tax’ bias, there’s NO-body watching your back anymore either!)

But you were down with that, right?

That’s why there were hundreds of thousands of people at the heavily advertised ‘Tea Party’ event…NOT.

But, naturally, this isn’t the half of it when it comes to ‘propaganda’…

How do you feel good citizen when, after spending trillions (that YOU are on the hook for) to ‘bail out’ the banking sector from their own cupidity, the rest of the economy is still a disaster looking for a place to happen.

We just passed the three-year mark of the event that brought the housing market to its knees. Flipper’s default on the mortgages he couldn’t find suckers to rent/take off his hands for double what he paid. This caused all MBS to become ‘suspect’, crashing the market virtually overnight…

This also (amazingly enough) caused a 4 point drop in GDP, bringing to the fore the issue of what, precisely, the GDP tells us. Obviously not what we want to know…

So, after nearly a year and a half of ‘Green Shoots’ and a truly amazing (albeit nonsensical) ‘rally’ in the stock markets, we are once again being told that the rising tide won’t lift all boats…like the last two ‘jobless recoveries.’

If you haven’t been keeping track, this is the third jobless recovery…and you understand that without jobs THERE IS NO RECOVERY!

Why has the ‘stimulus’ done zero good (unless you work for a paving contractor and even then…a few people with money in their pockets does not an economy make.

What’s wrong with this picture good citizen?

You don’t suppose we are getting FUCKED by globalization?

What you need is an accurate picture of what’s going down.

The (flaming) asshole who owns a particular segment of the market for a given product decides to move production to a low wage nation because that is what his competitors are doing.

He fires everyone that worked for him here the second his new facility is up to speed…but he doesn’t drop his prices, not here anyway…people are already used to paying what he was charging. He uses this additional profit to subsidize the penetration of new markets…

Anyway, you no longer have a job, you can still buy the product and what you notice is the price remains the same…it doesn’t go up but it doesn’t go down either.

So you have to take a ‘new’ job…but guess what? The new job doesn’t pay what the old job did so you have to, er, ‘adjust’ your spending accordingly.

Since the Eighties, you’ve been forced to repeat this process several times, losing ground each time.

If you’ve been lucky enough to secure employment (again.)

What you DON’T see is the huge ‘shrinkage’ in overall payrolls (mostly because this ‘slack’ has been taken up by ‘bonuses’ in the financial sector.)

Some of these ‘slackers’ are pulling down 10 digit bonus checks…and we aren’t including ‘cents’ here!

Does anyone still wonder why the economy is sucking pond water?

What should blow all of your minds is two years down-range and the 2009 ‘bonus pool’ was LARGER than the 2007 pool was!

How the HELL did they manage that?

Worse, everybody and their Uncle was being foreclosed upon…so where did the money come from?

It, like so many other things in our propagandized info-sphere, remains a ‘mystery’…

Is the sad truth here as simple as ‘because they could?’

So, how will the housing market ‘recover’ if the pool of qualified buyers continues to shrink?

You don’t dare pay too much for a home because the odds of ever seeing the money again are diminishing rapidly…and who’s ‘the greater fool’ now?

Same applies to our outrageously over-valued ‘equities market’. What will happen to ‘social cohesion’ when everybody learns they’ve been played for ‘chumps’?

When you have traders pulling down billion dollar bonus checks, you can see how investment involves ‘risk’…

Where do you think your money went?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Seeds of Revolution...

Greetings good citizen,

I made a comment yesterday about the markets rising despite GDP dropping like a rock and today I’m a little surprised to see I’m not the only one to pick up on this.

My ‘out take’ yesterday was from the MSM and that too centered on the, er, ‘contrary’ opinion that our economy, three years gone, was NOT in ‘recovery’.

I said nothing about the, er, ‘assurance’ given by Bumbolini Bernanke that he stood ready to ‘step in and save the economy’, he’s out of bullets and ‘wiggle room’…all he can do now is jawbone! Perhaps he can sprinkle more ‘magic confetti’ where it is likely to do more harm than good.

For lack of a more visible/viable target, the pundits pointed to Bumbolini’s empty rhetoric as the cause of the ‘fake rally’.

Investors ‘took heart’ (because they obviously have no brains!)

But I digress…

My ‘point’ (and I do occasionally have one!) is that the ‘consensus’ is building that not only is there something very wrong with this picture BUT the claims that ‘nobody knows what it is’ are also bullshit!

Too bad we can’t expedite the process…

The pundits continue to point to the ‘symptoms’ while they pretend to be ignorant of their cause…

Well, most of know what the problem is without being told, hell, most of us have been living with the very real ‘consequences’ of globalization for decades now.

Yet ‘the crisis’ remains an enigma…

I stumbled upon this item this morning that provides a very good overview as to why ‘ignorance’ remains at epidemic levels.

The Kochtopus
August 28th, 2010


Polemical essays can be worth reading, as long as one understands that the author’s goal is to push his or her rat poison, by showing you how bad that rat poison is. With this caveat in mind, you’re all set to feast on the tidy reality offered by a strongly polemical piece.

I learned more about the Koch syndicate from The New Yorker article below than I had gathered previously, in bits and pieces.

Is the Kochtopus insidious? Sure. But in this huge piece, here is the sum total of material related to the corporate fascists backing the Obama regime:

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.”

The Soros spokesman is a great source to go to for anything approaching an objective perspective. Pfft. Ok.

The number of times Goldman Sachs is mentioned? Zero.

The number of times Monsanto is mentioned? Zero.

The number of times the Obama regime’s revolving door is mentioned? Zero.

The number of times Obama’s continuation and expansion of diabolical Bush policies into a fascist “new normal” in America is mentioned? Zero.

The number of times the fact that America continues to implode with a Democratic President and with Democrats in control of Congress? Zero.


How many other lies by omission does the piece contain? I got tired of counting after the ones I’ve listed above.

If the Democrats are the solution to the Kochtopus, the U.S. is far more screwed than even I believed possible. The Tea Party is the 2010, 180 degrees out of phase version of Hope and Change. Whether your cabin is on the port or the starboard side of the Ship of Fools, the destination is the same; oblivion. I don’t know what it will take to get the shit for brains Left and the shit for brains Right to understand that billionaires, and the governments that serve them, don’t have their best interests in mind. But, until that basic law of the universe is understood, there’s always the next election… *sigh* Good luck with that.


You have to hand it to Crypto, he saw the writing on the wall and got the hell out of Dodge! Not that there is really anywhere you can hide.

Similarly, Joe Bageant did likewise (although he took the ‘simpler’ route, following the path of least resistance. Most English speaking nations aren’t as ‘open’ as Banana Republics tend to be.)
That in itself is somewhat disturbing, that the most ‘straight-forward’ and clear headed commentary you can find comes from ex-pats.

Maybe I should take a page out of their book…

Although if I ‘vanish’ it will coincide with a noticeable uptick in ‘civil unrest.’ Unrest that will be put down using ‘unusually harsh’ measures…with a number of fatalities on both sides.

That day is probably even closer than I think. I have no good way to tell for sure.

I have been cautioning you all for a long time to ‘prepare’, if you can’t spare the cash to stockpile then you must educate yourself on what wild edibles are available locally and scope out what is nearby.

Sounds foolish to keep saying ‘the time is coming’ but that’s what the writing on the wall says. Worse, when it comes, it will hit like an earthquake, then there is no time to prepare!

All things being even, 99% of ‘preparedness’ is planning, knowing what you are going to do and how you’re going to go about it.

Still I drift from topic to topic!

This is supposed to be a ‘big picture’ piece yet it is difficult to sort the pertinent facts from the useless babbling of the psycho-pundits.

While Crypto tries to share with us a tiny fraction of the ‘what they don’t say’ puzzle, be aware this is something you need to be on top of every day.

You get more information by asking ‘why are they telling us this’ than from what they actually say.

When what passes for the truth varies too greatly from your own experience, the seeds of revolution are sown…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, August 27, 2010

What Recovery?

Greetings good citizen,

Not only has dropping (a couple of points) below the 10,000 mark magically turned the worthless stock markets back into ‘bargains’ but this not particularly surprising turn of events comes on the heels of GDP numbers that were cut in half!

What’s the message here good citizen?

The markets (and by extension the assholes who run/profit from them) CAN’T LOSE!

What you need to understand here is this outcome has absolutely nothing to do with ‘reality’, which will become plenty grim sooner than you think.

In what is seldom a ‘good sign’ we have the following ‘admission’ (albeit in the ‘opinion’ section) of today’s NY Times:

This Is Not a Recovery

What needs to be ‘parsed’ here good citizen is whether or not this is an acknowledgement of what the public already knows (the most likely explanation) or if it is intended to be a nod towards what most of us would charitably call ‘over-optimism’?

The thus far ‘invisible recovery’, now three years old, has been a figment of the media’s imagination. Further evidence that we live under the thumb of uncaring oligarchs who have total control over ‘the public square’.

There is no such thing as ‘accurate news’. You get to see world events ‘spun’ for your ongoing ‘infotainment’.

The ‘news’ is no longer intended to keep you informed, it is intended to amuse and pacify you.

Let’s have a look at a paragraph from today’s offering to put this disturbing notion into sharper focus.

I know what some players both at the Fed and in the administration will say: they’ll warn about the risks of doing anything unconventional. But we’ve already seen the consequences of playing it safe, and waiting for recovery to happen all by itself: it’s landed us in what looks increasingly like a permanent state of stagnation and high unemployment. It’s time to admit that what we have now isn’t a recovery, and do whatever we can to change that situation.


Krugman is right to call for immediate action on the economy, the threads of social cohesion are already stretched to the breaking point!
But notice how he is ‘cut off’?

Is he really ‘clueless’ about what needs doing? Or (as I think) he is being ‘censored’.

We all know what needs to be done, hell, it was one of today’s headline stories on Alternet!

Why didn’t Mr. Krugman ‘finish the statement’?

I don’t think his superiors would ‘appreciate’ his candor…

As a sidebar I was listening to Science Friday on NPR and the topic was ‘renewable energy’. One of the big stumbling blocks that went unaddressed about the incumbent’s plan to move our domestic workforce forward was to ‘tool up’ the United States and put our people back to work building renewable energy (products.)

After dipshit got elected he got ‘schooled’ as to who had already invested billions in ‘renewable energy’ and that if it was going to happen it was going to happen using Chinese technology!

You don’t suppose this is why Mr. Krugman wasn’t ‘specific’ when he insisted we do ‘whatever it takes’ to restore prosperity?

You sure as hell aren’t going to put Americans back to work ‘servicing’ a technology we don’t make here.

So what’s it gonna be good citizen. Sit there and let the economic desert swallow you up or do we, er, alter how things get done so we don’t find ourselves being evicted from a nation that no longer belongs to us?

Full disclosure: they ‘intend’ to starve our asses out! They did it to the Okies but that was just practice…this time they’re serious.

I say we hang ‘em all!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Head full of Nonsense

Greetings good citizen,

Is has been said that you can fill a man’s head quite full of nonsense and he is still capable of functioning adequately…

Such facts do not bode well for our current situation…

The markets continue to ‘circle the drain’ stubbornly refusing to sink below the ‘psychologically important’ 10,000 level.

Left to our imaginations is what is left in the US to support that kind of valuation? Is half of our 10,000 point Dow due to this being the home of both Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett?

What does the Dow at 10,000 mean?

Ironically, there isn’t ANY explanation for that…none.

How do you like it now?

If a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck then a buck should be a buck no matter where you go.

Yet the Japanese buck is only worth a penny US.

Why? Because Dirtbag says so!

Is that ‘disturbing’ good citizen? You bet it is!

Because ‘Dirtbag’ (who pulls this shit out of his backside) has also decided to repossess your house and cut-off your unemployment because he doesn’t NEED your services anymore!

What you are witnessing here good citizen is the ‘rule of man’ writ large. It don’t have to be logical nor does it have to make sense…are you looking for ‘fair’ in this mess? Don’t make them laugh!

Fair has nothing to do with it, it is the polar opposite of fair. This is hooray for me and fuck everybody else!

And if we don’t like it…

You know what you can do about it…

Is it any mystery why most modern judges have bodyguards?

Retribution is a terrible (albeit necessary) thing.

What you need to understand is both the ‘cheaper there’ and ‘the global race to the bottom’ are totally ‘artificial’.


So what are you going to do about it good citizen?
Because it won’t stop until YOU stop it.

You know it. I know it and more importantly, they know it.

How many of them will we bag ‘right away’ (when things reach critical mass’?)

Maybe ten percent…out of three hundred thousand, ten percent will be a pretty good haul.

How many will we bag total?

This is where I personally think the cheaters have seriously underestimated the public’s thirst for vengeance…I think the total catch will be in the 120 to 140 percent range!

Which is to say a lot of ‘technically innocent’ people are going to pay the price for going along to get along.

How many will ‘get away’?

One or two percent…max.

Why so high a capture rate? They aren’t nearly as ‘smart’ as they think they are.

Ironically, the ones who do ‘escape’ will be savvy enough to ‘blend in’.

What should bum these psychopaths out is the new government agencies will be on high alert for their variety of ‘anti social’ behavior for a real long time.

They will literally ‘unlearn’ their greedy ways. If they fail they will be exiled.

The fiendish part of exile is not being sent to a desolate location naked and alone…because it is unlikely you’ll be alone for a quite a while…

The truly devilish part is being sent to such a place and having people 'just like you' to rely on.

Naturally, all of these ‘rugged individuals’ will know better than any of the rest just how to take care of things in a limited resource environment.

What do you suppose the first order of business will be (for every one of them…)

Yup, making sure that ‘they’ have enough.

Make no mistake about it, if they’re ‘big/bad’ enough, they’re going to take what they want and fuck everyone else!

Just the kind of ‘survival situation’ you always wanted to be in…

This ‘game’ will get more diabolical as it progresses with the bottom line being he who can go the longest without sleep will probably win the day…not that certain ‘alliances’ aren’t possible.

It will be like today’s (considerably less than) ‘reality’ shows, you’ll never be sure who is conspiring with whom and in the end the only one you can trust is yourself.

Who do you trust when the pit is full of snakes?

That question doesn't have a good answer.

So, how many 'wannabes' will get themselves exiled?

That’s a whole different equation and it should ‘consume’ another 20 percent of the population…although that could be high due to the ‘sheep effect’…people who parrot conservative values if only to appear to be on the side that was ‘winning’.

They don’t really care one way or the other…and it’s hard to decide if this isn’t worse than diehard conservatism because it is the pinnacle of stupidity.

Not that being stupid is a crime.

It’s the ‘moral ambivalence’ part of the puzzle that most of us would find reprehensible. This brand of ‘allegianceless neutrality’ is how we ended up in the shit in the first place!

Stupid may not be a crime but ‘I don’t care’ is definitely a ‘sin’…

Until recently, most of us were guilty of being ‘uncaring’. Funny how having the rug pulled out from under you can force you to re-examine your priorities…

People are starting to wonder what can be done about our badly broken political process and how to effect meaningful change.

If we don’t do something and do it quick, it may be too late.

It’s gonna be a real bitch when you can’t venture beyond your own doorstep without a white flag in your mitt.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Informed consent

Greetings good citizen,

As you know I’m chock full of little sayings and one of them I haven’t had cause to use in quite a while charged to the forefront this morning.

Are you ready?

It’s stupid really…and it is a sad indictment of our species to even go there but, it is what it is.

‘You can’t make (fill in the adjective here) decisions without accurate information’ (but, sadly, we do it all the time because most things can’t wait until the truth is dragged out into the light, kicking and screaming…)

The sad part here is the notorious ‘poor quality’ of the information we do have access to.

The hope here is that those actually acting upon the part of the story you’ve been allowed to glimpse have ‘more’ information than you do. The scary part is this is often a ‘sometimes yes and sometimes no.’ proposition.

Worse, we are often subject to the ‘prejudices of the observer’ so the information is ‘tainted’ from the get-go.

That said, and totally ‘tangential’ to the subject, is the debate over ‘hyper-inflation vs. deflation’.

I have stuck to my guns because it is picking fly shit out of pepper to argue that ‘falling value’ is any different from ‘increased worthlessness’.

WTF is wrong with these people?

Anyway, at least Mr. Panzer agrees with me:

Hyperinflation is a fiscal phenomenon borne out of a bankrupt state that can’t service its debts. Monetization is a trigger while a rise in consumption and velocity is a psychological effect, as Hazlitt notes. After all, if massive inflation is coming, what's the first thing you want to do? You’ll position yourself in hard assets well ahead of thinking “I need to spend now because this money will be worthless later.”


It’s not ‘too much money chasing too few goods’ as the idiots explained it back in the Eighties, it’s people trying to ‘rid’ themselves of increasingly worthless ‘cash’ as fast as they could/can.

To claim that lower producer prices is the cause of this is, well, insane (not that there is any shortage of whackos out there…)

This, ironically, brings us full circle to our original premise…you can’t make, er, ‘decisions’ without, er, ‘solid’ information.

Yet we do it all the time.

Because we have to…

Indecisiveness has its price too.

Did I mention that this little tidbit had a ‘dumb’ side to it? There it is. Probably why I haven’t wheeled out this little nugget in a long time, it’s a ‘paradox’.

Conundrum or not, it is still something important to be mindful of.

Which is to say your decisions will only be as good as the information they’re based on.

Garbage in = Garbage out.

Shifting back to our supply line example here, hyper-inflation is driven by scarcity. As more and more people try to ‘convert’ their cash into a dwindling supply of resources, prices go ballistic.

So the knot heads preaching the ‘danger’ of falling prices have it exactly backwards, it is the rapidly shrinking ‘supply line’ that will be the cause for, er, ‘panic’.

What, good citizen, have I been telling you for over three years now?

That ‘collapse’ will come when the global supply lines ‘crash’. (There are dozens of ‘drivers’ of this scenario but the end result is the same…)

Ironically, the single largest likely driver is the ‘value’ of the global reserve currency.

Any ‘disagreement’ about the value of the dollar could trigger the ‘vaporization’ of the world’s financial markets.

You can play out this ‘thought experiment’ in your own head, good citizen.

How likely do YOU think it is that the USA will ‘default’ on its debts?

Thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Only a Game

Greetings good citizen,

The markets seem poised to drop below the 10,000 mark (again,) maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but soon.

Some of the ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’ is coming from the (badly mis-managed) housing sector where an extreme dearth of ‘qualified buyers’ has intensified an already disastrous situation.

Worse good citizen (I know, things are already bad enough without throwing ‘worse’ on the pile) is the recent, how the hell do you phrase this? ‘Gobbling up’ of competitors, originally touted as the ‘green shoots’ of economic recovery, properly called ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’ has produced the same ‘end results’ it always produces. Once the separate entities are ‘joined’, the ‘redundancies’ are eliminated, making the over all pie that much smaller.

Why moronic economic analysts fail to see/report the inevitable consequences of this activity remains a mystery (albeit a shallow yet opaque one.)

We are left once again to ponder just who is the moron?

Worse, we are left to ponder just who is ‘stupid’ enough to have been buying equities while the crazy train was clearly headed off a cliff?

Could the ‘obvious answer’ be as close as the nearest mirror?

Yes, good citizen, there is very little difference between forgery and counterfeiting.

Which is to say theft is theft (and yes you can still be ‘ripped off’ even if you don’t believe in ‘private property’! This blows the Libbie’s mind because they are unable to differentiate between personal property and communal property. They KNOW the difference but they CHOOSE to be ‘dense’ on the subject.)

We have once again veered off to the dark side of the hoary rock we know as capitalism. I am tempted to go Henry C K Liu on you and launch into a ‘history lesson’ about the, er, strategy behind ‘trust busting’ but it is difficult too draw proper parallels from that situation to our modern problems…although they are highly relevant.

So, against my better judgement, I’ll attempt the ‘Reader’s Digest’ version.

As you may not know, capitalism has been on the brink of collapse since it’s inception. While the market crash of 1929 is widely known a the start of the ‘Great Depression’ there was a similar severe economic upheaval shortly after the Civil War (just as the Great Depression followed WWI.)

Totally ignorant historians gloss over the true forces behind all three ‘economic collapses’. What were those forces? The ‘inevitable’ consolidation of ‘market share’ that caused all of the money in the economy to flow to the top and stay there.

What was the ‘solution’ to this economic imbalance? Trust busting! The government stepped in and broke the stranglehold of the Robber Baron’s by ‘forcing’ competition into the marketplace.

Where are those laws today? You’d have to sift through the scrap heap of history to find them and if you did find them they would be ‘irrelevant’, they are US laws that don’t apply to ‘global trade’.

Which is to point out that today’s ‘Robber Barons’ merely kicked things up to the next level…there isn’t an effective ‘international government’ to regulate them so they can engage in the highly profitable (for them, destructive for everyone else) ‘global race to the bottom, unhindered.

This may not be apparent to the average Joe in the street but our idiot politicians (obviously) lack the mental horsepower to recognize what they have failed to prevent.

Figuring things out isn’t what politicians do well.

Understand, by the 1880’s the Robber Barons has a stranglehold on ALL commerce via their control of the nation’s transportation system. Automobiles were still rich man’s toys, oil was just beginning to replace coal as the fuel of choice in Marine applications and this nation’s commerce moved on rails.

The largest ‘cost factor’ of any given item had become the cost of getting it to market. A trivial amount you think? This factor alone funneled most of the ‘free cash’ in our society into the purses of a handful of businessmen…who were already richer than they needed to be.

No irony should be lost on the fact that capitalism keeps creating exactly this situation, over an over again!

All of the money keeps flowing (and subsequently gets stuck) at the top, causing the rest of the economy to collapse!

To ‘rescue’ capitalism (from itself) the ‘trust busters’ seized the monopolies and broke their stranglehold on the nation’s economy. (Once they had competition, prices had to come down.)

This is one of the ‘beauties’ of globalization, the multi-national ‘parent’ corporation is invisible to the national regulator who only sees the shell created specifically for the host nation.

Just because they don’t ‘look’ co-joined doesn’t mean they aren’t.

Bottom line good citizen, what is the ‘objective’ of the board game Monopoly?

Your mission is to ‘bankrupt’ all of the other players.

While it is a ‘fun’ intellectual exercise, it is not particularly desirable in ‘real life’.

Yet modern business majors have no problem with executing socially dangerous/disastrous strategies to maximize their bonus pool!

It is not a ‘game’ but the fools in charge fail to recognize the ‘consequences of their actions.’

These will be the same people who will loudly proclaim they were just ‘serving the shareowners’ as the rope is slipped over their heads.

It’s ‘only a game’ until its not.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, August 23, 2010

Breaking Bad

Greetings good citizen,

It’s one thing for me (of the ‘non-mainstream ideas’) to say it but quite another to see the big boys taking up the same Battle Cry

That said, it is very likely you’ve been thinking along the same lines that this headline declares:

The Economy Is Getting Worse and Worse -- And No One's Doing a Thing About It
The economy is already down, and it can go lower. And no one seems willing to fix it.


Um, as you can see it is a two-part question that appears to call into question the ‘competence’ of our leaders.

Naturally, is there anything our leaders can do to fix the economy? Bizarrely, they are the only ones capable of restoring ‘balance’ to global trade. Which is to point out our problems are ‘legal’ more so then mechanical…at least for the moment.

Of course, our ‘lawmakers’ are dithering around, pretending that some segment of the population is opposed to taking necessary action to rebalance the economy.

Ironically, those opposed to restoring ‘general prosperity’ are the same tiny minority that benefits from the rapacious exploitation of cheaper labor pools due to currency manipulation.

Worse, they are also the largest contributors to political campaigns, bare none! These people single handedly keep K Street in business.

Which brings us full circle to the treason argument…and the real mystery of why nobody is prosecuted for this blatant crime?

There is no ‘dancing between the cracks’ here good citizen. Our elected representatives ARE ‘selling their votes’ for personal gain and that my friends is treason.

Worse, it doesn’t matter what letter comes after their name, D’s are just as guilty as R’s.

This line of questioning inevitably leads in the disturbing direction of ‘What should we do about our badly broken political system?’

Is there anything that CAN be done?

No.

Which is to say ‘repair’ is neither possible nor desirable. All of the pieces of the current system are corrupt, using even a tiny bit of the old system contaminates the replacement.

NOBODY has faith in the system the founders set in place, even the most ardent (self –professed) ‘patriots’ know it is corrupt beyond belief.

The only reason it hasn’t been abandoned already is due to the corruption. Those who benefit from it wouldn’t have it any other way!

Worse, the more corrupt it gets the more ‘profitable’ it is for the, er, supporters.

Thus, A Simple Plan.

We would no longer have ‘politicians’ seeking to sell their vote, the entire lawmaking process would be removed from the influence of, er, ‘private parties.’

There would be no more legislators that could ‘exempt’ themselves (or anyone else) from the law.

Here’s a novel concept…those charged with upholding the law would be themselves be subject to the same laws!

Which is to say ‘politics as usual’ would cease.

It would no longer be possible to sell your vote because it takes a lot more than your vote or that of all of your friends to influence the outcome…because we would ALL vote directly on the law.

The only way to eliminate corruption is to make the stakes too high. You can bribe a handful of people but it gets mighty pricey when the number for ‘assured success’ starts getting up into the tens of millions.

We would no longer have ‘elected’ politicians, we would have leaders who have proven themselves as the best people for the job through an open competition.

The big difference is these leaders would be no different than anyone else as far as the law was concerned. They would have no power to alter or even suspend the laws; it’s not their job.

Better, it would not be within their power to enter into ‘trade agreements’ that decimate the natural balance of commerce that is crucial for a prosperous society.

And, of course, under A Simple Plan ‘profit’ would be redefined as the benefit reaped by society rather than the dollars funneled into an owner’s pocket.

That’s the part of this puzzle that should have you all howling mad!
Our economy was ‘broken’ by greedy shit weasels that ALEADY HAD more money than they knew what to do with!

They already had more money than they could spend and these selfish fucks STILL destroyed our economy so they could screw their employees out of their Social Security checks!

What say you good citizen? Will we run out of rope or will we run out of lamp posts first?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Intellectual Rigor

Greetings good citizen,

For today’s ‘off the reservation’ excursion I thought we’d have a quick look at the, er, what do they call it now? It used to be the ‘Global War on Terra’ but now I think it is called something more succinct like ‘The Republican’s last stand’ or the Gigantic Hole in the Money Bag…something like that.

Good to his word (and disturbingly enough, his predecessor’s word as well) Wham-Bam Obama has ‘ended’ our, er, ‘excursion’ into Iraq by ‘re-purposing’ (a.k.a. re-naming) our combat forces in Iraq as ‘advisors’.

All freaking 50,000 of ‘em…and that’s not including contractors.

Worse, it isn’t ‘really’ over. It seems our ‘brand’ of democracy (the latest version, where WE select who runs and who doesn’t) isn’t working as well as our, er, ‘managers’ would like.

But one can appreciate the difficulty one might encounter ‘installing’ (read: ramming down the public’s throat) a government that will imprison its own people ‘on the invader’s command’.

The trick is to make it not look like a ‘lap dog’ while it behaves like one.

Apparently, this is what ‘victory’ is supposed to look like.

Bizarrely, this is the same ‘benchmark’ they’re shooting for in Afghanistan.

A ‘lap dog’ government that the public accepts (read: fears/obeys!)

All they have to do is, er, ‘crush’ the ‘insurgency’ (because the corrupt lap dogs are already in place.)

While ‘assassination’ is unacceptable in conventional warfare it has become apparent that ‘insurgencies’ are not considered ‘real war’.

So the theory is if you exterminate enough ‘mal-contents’ your puppets will rule unopposed.

Disturbingly, it is the ‘extermination’ part of this puzzle that is feeding the ranks of the insurgency. The more you ‘murder’ the more people that join the insurgents.

Which brings us to another deeply disturbing aspect of the current ‘conflict’. We defeated the Afghan government in a few weeks during the initial invasion. We installed ‘our man’ in Kabul weeks later.

Yet here we are, ‘exterminating civilians’ eight years later and nobody sees anything ‘wrong’ with this picture?

Remember, we ‘invaded’ (Afghanistan) to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice, a task that has not been accomplished to this day. Alternately, ‘while we were there’ the Bush administration attacked Iraq to prevent ‘non-existent’ weapons of mass destruction from raining down on the Middle East (thereby disrupting global energy supply lines…)

I don’t need to remind you that NOBODY was prosecuted for either of these crimes and, hey, we used the same ‘tactics’ we’re using in Afghanistan in Iraq. It has been an eight year exercise in ‘terrorizing’ the civilian population of a sovereign nation into obeying our (puppet government’s) will.

Damn that nobody in the tone-deaf MSM looks at what’s going on over there and says, “Gee, there’s nothing stopping them from doing the same thing here!”

Doesn’t it strike you as ‘odd’ that not a single pundit has pointed to the genocide being committed by our armed forces in our name?

Which brings us full circle with the issue of ‘how bad do I need this job?’

I can point this out because I don’t have an ‘editor’ who has to clear what I write.

But again, good citizen, is it just me or is it more than a little disturbing to see how little ‘intellectual rigor’ is displayed by the MSM?

The clamps have been screwed down tight for a real long time good citizen…that’s why what you see here ‘looks’ bat shit crazy.

It is a discordant shriek as opposed to the ‘nothing to see here’ monotone those who report for the MSM are required to maintain (if they want to keep the paychecks coming…)

When your job depends on doing what’s expected of you ‘by your employer’ and not by what your customer desires, you tend to ‘go with the flow’ rather than ‘make waves’.

To be honest good citizen I couldn’t do what these no-minds do. I suspect few could.

So we return to the issue of whether or not bloggers provide a, er, ‘reliable’ mirror of what’s going on in the world.

Like many things good citizen, it is an issue you must decide for yourself…

You sure wouldn’t want to take the MSM’s word for it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Long live the King!

Greetings good citizen,

Three sites focused on the conservative ‘attack’ on Social Security today while a forth warned of the ‘Hive Mind’ in an entirely separate issue.

Is social security ‘in peril’, good citizen?

The government benefits program has, as we all know, been severely mismanaged but it isn’t anything a couple of tweaks couldn’t put right…

However, the ‘genuine’ security of society hasn’t been more perilous since the Dark Ages.

(There is very good reason to turn the social clock backward a thousand years for our comparison. Government, without our consent, has already re-established monarchy. The new ‘Royals’ are just itching to reveal themselves to us good citizen but they know this would be suicide. The deeply disappointing Obama administration is obviously a ‘puppet government’ taking its orders from a master other than the one that elected it.)

Which brings us back to the issue of the government program and the ‘political will’ to fix it…

Obviously Social Security would be ‘scrapped’ out of hand if it weren’t for the massive social upheaval such an, er, ‘edict’ would create.

Which is the ‘good news’…the fuckers still fear us, as well they should.

Since the ‘political will’ to fix social security DOESN’T exist we are left with the only remaining alternative…it won’t be fixed.

Sidebar: Please make a mental note to think in terms of ‘us vs. them’ because that’s what we’re up against.

If you have a problem with why the, er, ‘owner’ class would resent/fear the laboring classes, you need to study history, especially the ‘revolutionary’ parts, more closely…

The ONLY difference between a modern ‘wage slave’ and the traditional ‘bill of sale’ type is the property owner was obliged to care for you…the wage slaver only captures the ‘useful’ part of your life, the rest is all yours!

However, it does provide us with interesting window as to how ‘justifiable homicide’ came to disappear from common law.

If you were going to treat people the way they treat us, you’d want to make sure that all murder was illegal.

There’s probably be a lot of criminal cases that would have been decided differently if the jury were allowed to consider whether or not the victim ‘had it coming’.

Mind numbing to think that revolution and murder are (relatively) rare events…

Just saying, ya know?

Of more immediate concern is whether or not anything even remotely resembling civilization will survive the return of monarchy.

Understand that the return of the king automatically ‘extinguishes’ your property rights. In fact it pretty much throws the entire Constitution right out the window…including the All men were created ‘equal’ clause originally used to defeat monarchy.

You may not feel any different but you had better believe you’ve been knocked down several pegs as far as your legal standing is concerned.

It will be amusing to watch the shit weasels scrambling as they try to figure out who they need to bow to…(kings never work alone.)

It is probably equally as ‘amusing’ to most of you reading this, thinking to yourself, “This guy is cracked, if somebody had named themselves King we’d all know it by now!”

But would we?

Put yourself in His Majesty’s position, how anxious would you be to paint a bull’s eye on your back, especially in light of all of the ‘unpopular’ changes you have planned for the peasants?

Heavy is the head that wears the crown! The king ‘may’ make himself known AFTER he has restored ‘proper proportion’ to the kingdom…

That’s code for killed off most of the ‘surplus’ peasants.

Poor men want to be rich and rich men want to be king…

So it was, so it shall ever be!

Until we adopt a system that prevents ANYONE from seizing power…

A Simple Plan is just such a system.

It always struck me as peculiar that our education system has consistently failed to point out the disturbing similarities between monarchy and capitalism.

The ‘head’ of a company is called the ‘president’ but s/he isn’t elected to the post. The ‘junior’ officers are also appointed to their posts and have zero say regarding any final decision…

Weird how they use ‘democratic’ job titles but there is nothing ‘democratic’ about how an enterprise is run.

In fact, none of the ‘rank and file’ employees are consulted on any aspect of how the company is run.

Sure, there is a semblance of inter-play but mostly it is ‘token’; just as our form of government lends itself to ‘the illusion of participation’. It ‘looks like’ we’re running things but the truth is another matter entirely.

Two hundred and thirty years of uninterrupted tyranny should be proof enough for anyone.

While ‘perfect liberty’ may not be achievable; we sure as shit can do a lot better than what we suffer now!

The (deliberate) mismanagement of our society has gone on far too long. It’s time to chart a new course, to light anew the beacon of hope we once represented to the world.

Because is sure as fuck ain’t coming out of China!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Friday, August 20, 2010

Anybody's Game...

Greetings good citizen,

The markets tanked yesterday and they’re tanking again today…because Asian markets (which had a positive close yesterday) followed European and US markets today! (Now our markets are ‘following’ the Asian lead…argh!)

How long do you think it will take before those shares become ‘bargains’ again?

Honestly good citizen is there any reason in the world for the Dow to be over 600? (And maybe that’s too generous…)

If you really want to ‘blow your mind’ have a look at the other ‘markets’ in the world and try to figure out how traders arrived at their ‘value’.

It don’t make any fucking sense!

Why doesn’t it make any sense? Because everything is ‘marked to fantasy!’

Our ‘world’ has become an accountant’s nightmare…but this isn’t just an accountant’s dilemma.

You who toil for payment are at a decided disadvantage due to the ‘floating’ nature of moola! Since you never get ‘more than you bargained for’ the opposite result prevails.

Why are YOU always scrambling for a (fill in the blank)? It is mostly because you don’t have an ‘income stream’ at your command. Cock-eyed capitalists would call your paycheck your ‘income stream’ but you don’t have any control over that, the capitalist does!

The capitalist controls their income stream, you can’t!

Ya know, every time I point something like this out it probably dawns on you that since capitalism is the only game in town, maybe it would be better to join ‘em than to remain a ‘paycheck peasant’…

Here’s another ‘bitch slap’ for you, what keeps capitalism chugging along is all of the ‘wannabes’, busting their ass to get the necessary ‘leg up’ it takes so they can make the leap from employee to employer…

This is damn near impossible under the best of circumstances and positively suicidal during an economic contraction like we are currently experiencing.

But this brings us back to the reason ‘capitalist utopia’ doesn’t (and can’t) exist.

There isn’t enough ‘market share’ to support all of the ‘would be’ owners.

Bizarrely, ‘spirit in the sky’ can’t fix this problem so you’ll just have to trust in s/he/its desire to make sure YOU prosper! (Fuck everybody else! Spirit in the Sky loves you, you and only YOU!)

This is a perfect example of how badly ‘damaged’ the capitalist mind is…and, as CK Michaelson asks today, ‘we let these people vote?’

This is not to accuse ALL of the faithful as being ‘demented’ so much as their judgement is questionable considering this need to believe in the, er, ‘supernatural’…which isn’t actually very ‘natural’ at all.

Which is to say I cannot wrap my head around ‘eternal bliss’ any more than I can conceive of ‘unending torment’ (considering ‘normal’ is what happens ‘all the time’.)

A red-hot poker up your backside, ‘all the time’ would eventually become ‘normal’.

This is just a little rift on another concept most of us would have a difficult time with…’eternity’.

Don’t go there.

Stop already!

No irony should be lost on the fact that mankind’s, er, ‘affinity for self-delusion’ has caused some people to conclude that our species is ‘unsalvageable’.

What’s really funny is this all boils down to crazy people calling the rest of us crazy!

Who’s right? It doesn’t matter.

The ‘true’ crazy people are going to go down with this train wreck, those of us who believe the situation is ‘salvageable’ will move forward.

Naturally, there will be more than one camp moving forward, each of them convinced they know what’s best for the future of mankind.

Worse, every one of them is willing to fight for their ‘beliefs’.

(This too has led many to conclude that our species isn’t worth saving…but then you have your idiots like me, those possessed of that ‘other kind’ of faith.)

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t fight for what we believe.

Not everybody who ‘survives’ the coming disaster and the subsequent ‘purge’ that will inevitably follow has mankind’s best interests at heart.

Which is to point out that the monster who seeks to enslave us all will never be slain, despite the ‘ferocity’ of the purge!

This is why A Simple Plan has many ‘safeguards’ built in to protect the citizen from the machinations of the ‘self-interested’ (those who would put their own interests ahead of those of society…that same monster that wants the rest of us to work for them and not for ourselves.)

Society, by nature, is ‘socialist’ and we are social creatures.

We all do better ‘co-operating’; competing only succeeds in ‘looting the planet’ for personal gain.

Take heart good citizen, the day is approaching when the ‘reset button’ will be hit and then its anybody’s game!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Hang 'em High!

Greetings good citizen,

In yet another conundrum the US is following the European markets into the toilet, the Dow is down almost 200 points at the lunch hour here on the East Coast.

Uncharacteristically, there are no ‘explanatory articles’ accompanying this, er, dive. Perhaps we are supposed to ‘figure it out for ourselves’ for a change…

There was mention of ‘worse than expected’ unemployment data but who would be ‘surprised’ by that? It’s the third friggin’ year of the (latest) downturn, truth be told, we haven’t ‘recovered’ from the market crash of the early 1980’s!

There’s a lot of truth in the remark, ‘been down so long it looks like up to me!’

Perhaps more disturbingly is the fact we’ve been ‘mis-lead’ for so long that we don’t remember there used to be a time when things actually worked/made sense.

Why is it ‘nobody’ can figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with our economy?

Are our elected officials REALLY that stupid?

More disturbing is the opposite…is the general populace of this country really that far gone?

Are you people so ‘mesmerized’ that you can’t see what’s right in front of your eyes?

Have you been so distracted by the ‘uncompetitive’ meme that you’ve lost sight of the ‘real’ wealth of nations?

YOU HAVE BEEN LIED TO!

YOU HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED!

Worse, you have been SOLD OUT (which is TREASON) by the very people you elected to ‘protect’ you!

Isn’t it odd that you never see the T-word used by the MSM? You know why that is, don’t you? It is because every school child knows that the penalty for treason is death by hanging!

The ‘fine line’ here is who was ‘following orders’ and who was giving them?

The MSM is just as ‘guilty’ as the politicians they were supposed to be covering…should we hang them as well?

I suspect everybody who had a hand in deciding what is and isn’t ‘newsworthy’ should swing.

Not that all journalists are, er, ‘innocent’.

But I digress, let us return to the matter at hand.

How do you ‘fix’ the economy?

I got bad news for you people, the lying, cheating bastards responsible for this train wreck isn’t going to be fixed if you leave it up to them!

What was the ‘cause’ of the now huge ‘economic desert’ the fuckers have created?

The ‘global race to the bottom’ where ‘everybody’ was going to benefit…and we’re all seeing how well that worked out…not!

As far as these assholes are concerned neither you or your kids WILL EVER WORK AGAIN! (And it’s not their friggin’ problem! It’s yours!)

Can’t afford what they’re selling? Tough, the people they ‘sold’ your job to can…sort of redefines the term ‘win-win’ doesn’t it?

What can we do about this?

First things first, there has to be a whole bunch of hangings…which doesn’t sit well with peaceful, law-abiding folk. So we have to skip to a ‘more humane’ way of clearing the decks of our deeply corrupt society.

Exile.

Prison is ineffective; the best possible outcome of a prison term is to keep the offender locked up long enough so they lose their vitality.

Exile is a ‘one way’ solution.

You may survive but you most likely won’t, especially if you think you don’t need anybody.

This is the ‘special hell’ reserved for the self-important.

But I digress; we have an economy to fix.

Let’s suppose we’ve ‘cleared the decks’ (well enough so we can start moving forward.)

What’s the first ‘roadblock’ to full employment?

Which is another way of asking why doesn’t everybody capable of working, work?

Do you know the answer to this puzzle?

It’s as simple as the guy cutting the paychecks ‘pockets’ the difference between what he pays his employees and what he can get for the products those employees produce for him…it is not in his ‘interest’ to have one more employee than his sales will support!

Well, guess what? Commerce isn’t about him…or his fucking shit weasel ‘shareowners’ either!

Have you noticed how the word ‘own’ has been slowly removed from the common speech? We don’t have ‘shareowners’ anymore; they are called ‘shareholders’.

Well, eradicating the word while re-enforcing the principle is a farce at best but sadly good citizen the ‘joke’ has been on you!

So, ‘eliminating’ the owner opens the door to something we should have enjoyed all along…full employment.

No longer the ‘president/CEO’, the ‘manager’ of any given enterprise will more closely resemble any other ‘worker’…their compensation will consist of a paycheck (and that’s the end of that shit!)

More interestingly, ‘resources’ will return to their ‘original’ state…which is to say they will be ‘free’. Are you going to be able to ‘help yourself’ to whatever you want?

It would play hell with the supply chain (and win you an express trip to exile) if you did. So then, like now; ‘free’ would not imply ‘free to you’.

The ‘new’ average individual would understand this, the unenlightened pinhead would most likely already be ‘dancing with the Gila monsters’. Funny how their reputations would precede them…(a word of warning for those who would heed it…)

Even with, er, ‘profit free’ commerce we would still be unable to produce ‘everything’ with domestically available inputs. There is a ‘reason’ for global trade…ironically caffeine and nicotine are chief among those reasons…

Here is another curious ‘by-product’ of ‘free resources’, there would no longer be any ‘need’ to tax. Better, there would also be a different mechanism to ‘drain the swamp’ so the corrupt couldn’t accumulate pools of money to buy off non-existent politicians with.

Six ways to Sunday my friends, you have to close ALL the ports!

That’s why ‘money’ won’t be transferable between individuals…YOU won’t be able to give anybody a single penny.

No cash, none whatsoever!

Stick ‘em up!

To which the response would be ‘now what’? You don’t have any cash to surrender nor can you get any…there’s no way the thief can tap your account and you can’t transfer funds to them either…so what’s the point?

The worst that can happen is the thief can force you at gunpoint to use your credit to buy him/her something…and it better be something wicked good because theft is ‘rewarded’ with ‘instant exile’.

Are you going to dime that bastard out? You bet your ass you are! They’ll never bother you again.

It just keeps getting better.

But again I digress!

Things would be ‘radically different’ if we simply altered the focus of commerce from the benefit of the owners to the benefit of society.

The greedy few have ripped us off for so long they should be marched wholesale into the wastelands so they can all rot together!

A ‘trial’ is reserved for cases where ‘A shadow of doubt’ exists, otherwise ‘nominal ownership’ is an instant conviction.

There is a widely held fallacy that owners ‘create’ jobs, this is untrue. Need creates demand and demand creates jobs…the only thing the owner does is corral market share (‘services’ demand.)

If ‘customers’ are compensated well enough, demand will be sufficient to keep all workers busy (and thereby paid!)

Poverty is everywhere a ‘management’ issue. If poverty exists at all, commerce is being mis-managed.

Understand the single factor driving high unemployment is employer greed. The employer wants profits, even if they don’t spend them!

It should blow all of your minds that some people in this world are billionaires! That they have somehow been allowed to accumulate thousands of millions of , er, funds while ordinary people are committing suicide because they can’t pay their (artificial) debts.

Where did that money come from?

It came from lower prices you never saw and pay increases you never got!

Should we hang those suckers too?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Hell in a bucket...

Greetings good citizen,

‘Hell in a bucket’ is proceeding apace if you peruse the local court docket. I notice there is an upsurge in prosecutions for petty theft, locally anyway.

So, is theft like cockroaches, for every one you see prosecuted there are a thousand more that go unapprehended and a thousand more (each) that go unreported?

That’s a lot of theft good citizen and while we’re on the subject of court dockets I’d like to address what appears to be the single largest/most popular ‘crime’ of the current times…

Unregistered/uninsured, driving after your license has been revoked/suspended…

While DWI runs a close second, continuing to drive without, er, ‘paying’ has become a very popular pass time, definitely bigger than baseball!

Aside from the fact that the cops only bag a tiny percentage of these ‘offenders’ we have to pause for a moment and ask if life hasn’t become ‘too expensive’ for the majority of us…

You do, on occasion, see the rare ‘I forgot’ type where the only listed violation is an expired inspection sticker…but ‘usually’ it is a ‘full boat’. No sticker, no registration and no insurance with more than a few having a suspended/revoked license too boot!

Life’s ‘big three’ ain’t cheap and there is only one factor you can, er, control…what you put in your mouth.

The roof over your head and wheels under your ass can quickly chew up the average paycheck with very little left over.

Worse, it is ‘impossible’ in most metro areas to do all three on the Federal minimum wage. (Even with a ‘free’ automobile. Repairs on anything you can get for free are more than enough to put you on a perpetual ‘starvation diet’.)

The barely street legal shitbox is the payday lender’s wet dream!

More people are driven (literally!) into destitution trying to keep shitboxes on the road.

And we haven’t even factored in registering or insuring said shitbox!

Why do we subject ourselves to this? No wheels = no job!

A situation that isn’t getting any better as the ‘economic desert’ continues to expand at an accelerating pace…


Uncle Tom isn’t helping his prospects for re-election by cheerleading the ‘persistently invisible’ recovery either.

Which, naturally, leads to the subject of why the government seems incapable of dealing with this train wreck of an economy?

And the answer is the people they take their marching orders from don’t want it fixed!

The already rich will throw our entire civilization under the bus to fatten their worthless bank accounts…

Actually, that’s not right…this isn’t about money and they know it…it’s about power.

Those whose power relies on fossil fuels need to ‘stretch out’ the supply so their power will last a while longer…and they don’t give a fuck who freezes or starves to death in the process.

We’re dealing with psychopaths here, the same kind of psychopaths who cut down the last palm tree (large enough to make an ocean going canoe out of) on Easter Island to roll their fucking statue to the coast!

Be VERY careful of who you bow to…they just might be nuts!

Ironically the statues survive to this day, their civilization, on the other hand, is toast.

And guess who is headed in the same direction? (For pretty much the same reasons…)

We are long overdue for a change in the way things are run. As a species we can no longer tolerate the leadership of those who think the only thing that matters is their own selfish desires/whims!

This is the ‘bottom line of every post I create…THERE IS A ‘BETTER WAY’ and we can start down that path tomorrow!

I don’t propose this for me, I propose it for ‘us’.

Disturbingly, Marx didn’t devise communism ‘for himself’ either. He attacked the wrong issue and society suffered…his bad.

Communism, like capitalism is ‘money based’…A Simple Plan is law based.

The common ownership of the means of production is meaningless as long as the ‘self interested’ continue to make the laws…


Worse, the formation of a ‘party’ at the outset turned an inclusive arrangement into an ‘Us vs. Them’ proposition…there are no ‘parties’ under A Simple Plan (and forming one will get you exiled!)

It’s not about ‘no rules’ it’s about ‘no rulers’!

I shouldn’t be too surprised that most of you ‘don’t get it’…neither the Greeks nor the Romans could conceive of a society without slaves…

So maybe its just me that’s messed up…but I kind of doubt it.

If we made slavery ‘voluntary’ I’d be it would be the world’s shortest que! Just behind the line for voluntary castration…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Illumination or obsfuscation?

Greetings good citizen,

It’s difficult to tell what’s more frightening, the lies or the fact that those in charge are the ones resorting to this tactic…

Today’s headlines proclaim that ‘increased industrial production’ is boosting the economy…

I combed the story thoroughly and found a deeply disturbing lack of specifics.

The article does not say ‘where’ this boost in industrial activity supposedly occurred nor does it tell us what ‘sectors’ (presumably plural) were involved.

How disturbing is it that my reports of the eminent breakdown of the social fabric are more credible and verifiable than their ‘allegations’ of ‘economic recovery’?

Okay, bad enough we have the bought and paid for MSM feeding us bullshit but then we have the deeply disturbing dis-information coming out of ‘high profile’ internet sites…

Don’t take my word for it good citizen, read the article (it is mercifully brief) and decide for yourself how ‘helpful’ it is…

[snark] I was just blown away by how this ‘simplified’ the whole de-flation issue [/snark]

In truth good citizen I’m still trying to figure out what this post has to do with what is essentially shrinking purchasing power…

In real terms, prices are indeed ‘falling’ but this is ‘invisible’ to you because your purchasing power is falling faster! (This matches the ‘reality’ you see with your own eyes!)

How these fools can launch into diatribes about money while ignoring money’s essential ‘meaninglessness’ is a conundrum.

It is another example of currency manipulation writ large!

The lack of consensus surrounding money is nearly as disturbing as the, er, ‘overlord’s’ need to lie to us.

It is a myth shrouded in an enigma…

And if you keep leaving it in your driveway, your karma is going to run over your dogma.

Which brings us to our next, er, exercise in perception management

We are told that the financial sector has greatly increased in importance. This is concentrated in the South East and we hear loud wails from its chieftains that huge wages and bonuses are necessary to attract the best and brightest of the world to extract more from our economy to bet on its products.

It seems to me that if you bring in a lot of people from elsewhere into the highest paid jobs in our economy somehow this will reduce opportunities for the native population (me, my family and my relatives). If their profits and incomes have the effect of reducing ours this will exacerbate the effect. We are less likely to stay free from debt or to accumulate capital or savings.


What Demetruis describes above are the very real consequences of the ‘Global Race to the Bottom’…a race that nobody ‘wins’.

But despair not good citizen! I’m a big fan of solutions; Demetrius submits the following:

The only way to deal with the present situation is to change the world as it is. There is not much chance of this in terms of growth. But we can no longer go back to the near past or any time when social mobility was greater. New means will be necessary or perhaps old ones with an ancient tradition.

I am thinking of establishing a war band in my own area and if I can persuade other war bands to accept my leadership as a Warlord we could be in business. What I can promise, for the survivors, is social mobility on a scale undreamed of in the recent past.

Anyone interested?


I got your back, buddy!

On a more sober note we have this post with which we can use to measure our progress towards becoming a full blown ‘Banana Republic’…

Oddly, coinciding with the Reagan revolution is the appearance of local cops wearing bullet-proof vests.

One need not defend oneself from an honest man…so what do bullet-proof vests tell us?

Once you’ve read the article it will be apparent why I singled this first disturbing development out.

If you’re a ‘chicken shit’ DON’T BE A COP!

Flipping that rock over, the incidents of police brutality have increased dramatically since body armor became ‘standard equipment’ for local law enforcement.

One can be sure the founders would have taken a particularly dim view of this disturbing development…but the founders have been dead for 200 years!

No irony should be lost on the fact that the fuckers who claim to speak for the founders are the same ones conspiring to strip you of your freedom!

In retrospect, Ben Franklin doesn’t come out looking too good regarding his comment on what the original Constitutional convention accomplished.

Did he know what he was implying when he said, ‘A Republic, if you can keep it!’

Was he referring to what all other nations modeled after this one have become?

How could he have known about ‘Banana Republics?’

With that mystery we conclude today’s offering.

Thanks for letting us inside your head,

Gegner

Monday, August 16, 2010

War is Coming...

Greetings good citizen,

Our nation is already embroiled in two ‘wars of choice’ so some of you might be mystified by the title of tonight’s piece.

At a quick glance you’d think I’d been living in a cave for the past decade, war is here!

But the astute among you know exactly what I’m referring to (and it ain’t Halo Reach…nor is it the latest release of Starcraft, which ominously issues the same warning in its advertisements.)

It is ‘class war’ good citizen and its going to be bloody.

For some incomprehensible reason, our self-professed ‘betters’ have taken into their heads the notion that they need to ‘thin the herd’ before it goes on a rampage.

Notice the ‘beating of the drum’…global warming and peak oil.

What is the surest solution to both issues?

Fewer ‘end users’.

Reduce the number of end users drastically and you’ll see dramatic improvement in both situations.

Little problem there…the military is made up of soldiers drawn from our ranks and lead by (largely clueless) officers drawn from theirs.

No matter how effectively you ‘indoctrinate’ raw recruits getting them to fire on their friends and neighbors will produce serious, er, ‘defects’ in a majority of soldiers.

First time they are following orders, the second time they may decide the ones giving the orders are more suitable targets; then you have your soldiers firing on you!

Hopefully most will question orders that contradict their oath to protect the citizens of this nation…but that’s not how the game is played. The man points out the ‘enemy’ position and orders you to fire…and if you don’t you face summary execution.

One of the goals of modern warfare is to turn soldiers into mindless robots, it is this goal and not ‘soldier safety’ that is behind the push to ‘automate’ warfare.

Talk about your ‘slippery slope’ good citizen, we do not possess the kind of government that can be trusted with the control of mindless killing machines.

Worse, those killing machines are here today in the hands of people accountable to no one.

Understand good citizen there is theory and there’s reality. ‘Theoretically’ there is somebody in charge of watching over pretty much everything…but that is not the case in ‘reality’.

What am I saying?

Things are a lot farther gone than you suspect.

Bulls in China shops come to mind…the only things that will survive are the things too high for the bull to reach…think about that and be disturbed.

Ironically, only one bull can reach the upper shelves of the China shop and that is ‘The Giant’ usually referred to as ‘the sleeping giant’.

It has another name…it is called the general public.

Here we once again encounter the ‘confusion’ (created by the elite) as to who fits into what ‘class’ with many people erroneously thinking they belong to a higher caste than they actually do.

The dividing line is simple…if you gain the bulk of your income from a paycheck, you’re a peasant. If the bulk of your income comes from profits/dividends/rents, you’re a tyrant (and a thief!)

It is astounding how many of the ‘fallen’ fail to appreciate that they too are nothing more than ‘the hired help’.

But hey, this is mostly the media’s fault. According to them, ‘most of us’ are ‘middle class’, them lowly ‘workers’ don’t count.

I can’t emphasize enough just how ‘unstable’ this situation is…especially if you are a ‘paycheck peasant’.

Because guys that don’t even draw paychecks have painted a bulls-eye on your back.

They want you dead…maybe not you specifically but pretty much everyone like you, although they are prepared to suffer enough of you to keep the lights on and the trash picked up.

Which returns us to the ‘confused’ portion of the population.

Looking across this charred landscape you know where you’re standing.

What you need to decide is where you want to be when the shit starts.

If your income is directly derived from ‘vending’ to the (perceived) tyrants, you WILL be targeted as a ‘sympathizer’.

When I say ‘targeted’ we aren’t talking about simply being ‘shunned’ socially here…we’re talking being burned out! How you’re going to afford private school after being burned out will become a serious dilemma. Continuing to send your kids to public schools after being burnt out is a death sentence!

Um, I think you can see how this sort of thing could ‘escalate’…

You’re probably asking yourself where I come up with these ideas…and the answer is History. It has all happened before…and it’s happening again, despite the tendency of the media to deny it in hopes of preventing it.

Which brings us to a final factor, what will sell papers when bloodshed becomes commonplace?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Failure to Plan...

Greetings good citizen,

After opening lower the stock market has returned to positive territory (again, for no discernable reason.) Perhaps more striking are the headlines of the NY Times today where a ‘breakthrough’ on Alzheimer’s research trumped what everybody already knows, that the economy is sucking pond water.

As most of us are aware, this latest ‘downturn’ is merely a continuation of something that started shortly after Reagan took office, a sort of ‘perpetual’ rolling recession. It all started with the ‘churning’ of the workforce as employers ‘re-educated’ their workers in the ‘value’ of loyalty.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a writer (although not so much as a blogger) it is to resist leaving a piece and returning to it later.

Picking up an unfinished work leaves a, er, ‘bump’ in the structure of the piece itself. It starts with one train of thought then takes an unexplained ‘turn’ as it launches you down another.

I mention this because I did ‘start’ a post for yesterday but I didn’t finish it as evidenced by the fact that the markets closed in negative territory yesterday…not that it matters.

So, rather than abandon yesterday’s piece I decided to trim it a little and add another perspective, altering where I was headed with yesterday’s post.

(In the period between, er, civilizations I am attempting to clarify the advantages of A Simple Plan so the concepts can become more generally accepted than the crazy ideas that hold sway today.)

Understand good citizen, it is not ‘bad luck’ that has resulted in centuries of human suffering, it is ‘batshit whacko’ leadership that is largely responsible!

It is NOT POSSIBLE to have normal functions at the base of the organization when the ‘tip of the spear’ doesn’t know what direction ‘forward’ lies.

Some people ‘get it’, which brings us to tonight’s offering that points to the error of logic that is committed when we ‘assume’ those in charge ‘have a plan’.

There is no plan to ‘rescue’ the larger economy. In the end the whole ‘globalization thing’ wasn’t about lower prices, it was all about higher margins and lower wages.

If the economy shrank, so what? The cocksuckers who cemented their control over the market place ALREADY HAD more money than they could spend! If they ‘short-circuited’ the processes of the democratically elected governments of the world, what of it?

Money rules my friends and let the damn bodies hit the floor! (As long as it isn’t THEIR bodies…although they know they play a very dangerous game!)

Worse good citizen, things didn’t get as bad as they are today ‘by accident’. These events were set in motion over the dead bodies of the ‘old guard’.

Funny how things progress when ‘opposition’ gets ‘eliminated’; those who control the media use that control to sweep their, er, ‘machinations’ under the rug. Notice how ‘vague’ most obituaries have become. It wouldn’t do to have the public asking too many uncomfortable questions…

But I digress, somewhat.

The central point is recognition of where the ‘threat’ lies but it is also important to lay out the ‘scope’ of the threat.

The government you were taught about in school no longer exists…worse, the institutions intended to ‘safeguard’ the operation of our government have failed.

As the realization that our government has been hijacked spreads we remain powerless to do anything about this turn of events because those who ‘hold’ power ALWAYS have the law on THEIR side.

Yes Bub; that means exactly what you think it means…if they decide to lock you up, protest all you want, you’re getting locked up!

Se habla ‘enemy combatant’?

Understand there wasn’t any such thing until this most recent band of criminals decided they needed the ability to make people ‘disappear’ behind something sturdier than the cloak of ‘national security’.

Like money itself, ‘enemy combatant’ isn’t well defined…it certainly isn’t defined well enough for you to be able to deny being one if they accuse you…

If you aren’t afraid good citizen you should be. Just because the shadow of suspicion hasn’t yet fallen upon you doesn’t mean it isn’t going to.

And when it does it will be too late.

What should be increasingly clear to everyone reading this the term ‘accountability’ has ceased to mean anything. Those who have seized power are not accountable to anyone, well, almost anyone. There are ‘ringleaders’…and these ringleaders have, er, ‘operatives’ at their command. It is the operative’s job to insure that nobody gets too far out of line or strays too far from the established agenda…

An agenda-- trust me, NONE of us voted for.

Here I speak of ‘fiat accompli’, not that I can ‘prove’ a word of it. You will have to use your own judgement to assess the validity of this ‘speculation’.

Not that this admission makes you any less a…’subject’ of a ‘rogue’ government.

The question, as always is ‘what are you going to do about it?’

This brings us full circle to A Simple Plan. One of many ‘alternatives’ and the only ‘holistic’ solution I am aware of.

There certainly isn’t a shortage of half-baked, ill-conceived or ‘fantasy based’ solutions…in fact there are far too many, most of them circulated by people who don’t want anything to change!

They want you to believe what we have is ‘as good as it gets’ and can’t be improved upon.

Were that true good citizen, we’d be extinct already!

Where is the problem good citizen? Is the problem with the people? Oddly, this is what the status quo would have you believe; that the problem is ‘insoluble’ because it is human nature to be ‘greedy’.

Sounds ‘reasonable’, doesn’t it?

Can you ‘solve’ this problem?

If so, how?

You ‘solve’ the greed problem by outlawing ‘ownership’ (it’s the stupidest idea ever and the foundation of all grief…yet the first thing a Libertarian (who only champions ‘liberty’ for themselves, fuck you!) will ask is if you ‘own’ yourself?

Guess what, you DON’T!

What ‘numbnuts’ is asking is if you’re ‘free’ to do what you want with your life and the answer is a definite NO.

That merciless task master Mother Nature has a long list of things you MUST attend to or you will perish…so how ‘free’ are you now?

Understand, Mother Nature OWNS you (and the only way you can wriggle free is to STEAL freedom from others.

That’s what the fucking ‘Libertarians’ won’t admit to you. They are no better than the Capitalists when it comes to ‘slaving’. If there are going to be slaves, they have both set themselves up to be ‘masters’.

How does ‘outlawing’ ownership solve the greed problem? If you can’t ‘own’ something you can’t ‘sell’ it, it can only be shared.

So we arrive at the next ‘dirtbag’ protest, Why should I do anything if there’s nothing in it for me?

Get cold enough and you’ll build a fire (or go looking for one if you’re a real useless scuzball.)

Same thing if you get hungry. You know food isn’t trying to find you so you’re going to have to go find it. And when you’ve found it, guess what? You’re ‘rewarded’!

There is ‘something in it for you’ after all, but it takes ‘doing’.

And this is something neither the Libby nor the Capitalist wants to do, they want you to do it for them!

So, does our ‘solution’ lie in money or does it lie in ‘appeasement’? No, the solution lies in the law! In order for the problem to remain ‘solved’ we need to keep the law beyond the reach of the sleazy and the shiftless…in short, the ones looking for an ‘easy out’.

In fact, we need to give them an ‘easy out’ (it’s just not the one they have in mind.)

Those unwilling to do their share of grunting and sweating need to be ‘accommodated’ and A Simple Plan accommodates them!

It does so by providing them with a place where they can be ‘on their own’ (to reap the full benefit of their laziness.)

Here’s a bizarre thought for most of you. How did the law (and, by extension, the justice system) get so screwed up?

Easy! It happens when the ‘average’ person loses their direct control over their life. This is what happens when you have a system that supports ‘professional’ lawmakers.

You’re, er, commanded to follow the laws decreed by these, er, idiots without ever being consulted and that’s just about a ‘wrong’ as it can get.

NOBODY should be expected to live under laws that they find objectionable.
It never ceases to amaze me that for all of the cries of ‘liberty’ out there it seems nobody has a clue what tyranny is!

More to the point, is it necessary to have ‘full time’ lawmakers?

That particular question pretty much answers itself as most of these slackers do nothing for many multiples of two or four years.

So, to ‘safeguard’ society the law must reside where no individual or group can touch it. The only group capable of altering the laws is the ENTIRE group that must live under them!

See, problem solved!

Money is a legal construct and, misused, can do far more harm than good.

This re-enforces the concept that our social problems all lie within the laws and how those laws are made/administered.

The people make the laws and by doing that, ALL of the people have the responsibility to enforce the laws.

You don’t need to defend yourself from an honest man good citizen, only a scoundrel wants to disarm you.

I’m all right, you’re all right is a legal concept as old as time itself, it shouldn’t be abandoned.

Time to give it a rest.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Creeping Death

Greetings good citizen,

Once again the headlines don’t quite jive with what’s happening in the markets. Yes, the markets are in negative territory, but not nearly as negative as yesterday…

Worse is today’s headline that asks if the (thus far invisible) ‘recovery’ has succumbed to a global economic ‘slowdown’. Yesterday’s import figures tell a rather different tale.

OUR imports are still quite robust! The damning part of this equation is how the trade deficit can persist at roughly $50 billion dollars while most of us are flat broke?

What are retailers thinking?

Understand that retailers KNOW we’re broke, why are they re-stocking their shelves, or more perplexingly, where do they think demand is going to come from…

Naturally, we could be seeing something else entirely, How much of this uptick in imports is due to price increases, the same factor driving profits while payroll/the amount of money circulating through the economy dwindles.

More disturbing is the trend of passing off heavily massaged data, produced by ‘creative accounting’ as economic fact when nothing at all has been done to alleviate the pervasive economic imbalances that plague both the domestic as well as the global economies.

What’s really pissing people off is unemployment is stuck at 10+ percent while we import billions of dollars worth of shit we (were) perfectly capable of making for ourselves!

I say ‘were’ because the equipment necessary to make the junk we now import was either exported with the jobs or it was scrapped…so we couldn’t make this shit for ourselves if we had to.

Sweet arrangement for the capitalist (as it insures we have to buy from them) but as you can see, it sucks for the rest of us!

In my travels today I observed the most damning indictment of the Obama administration to date.

Talk about icing on the cake, this goes all the way back to the president nobody remembers voting for as well as explaining why the past three administrations ‘sleepwalked’ through their dual term presidencies.

We are witnessing the consequences of what happens when we allow the ‘unaccountable’ to make decisions in our name without ever consulting us.

What’s the point of voting when both ‘sides’ take their marching orders from the same oligarchs?

Sadly good citizen, the only ‘option’ left to us is to wipe the slate clean and start over with a new, different way…a way where you aren’t left wondering ‘how the hell did THAT happen?’

In a world where the media isn’t beholden to advertisers for support, the ‘noise machine’ will quickly shrivel and die.

That world good citizen is the world of ‘A Simple Plan’.

Today’s offering will include a hint regarding where to find a copy of ‘A Simple Plan’, part of the reason for creating this site was the plan kept ‘disappearing’ when I posted it as a document on Conceptual Guerilla.

It’s August now and I haven’t seen any new posts or activity over there…(Joe was supposed to be back in July…oh well!)

So the ‘hint’ is that the copy of ‘A Simple Plan’ is among the first posts made to this site. Simply go to the beginning archives of this blog and one of the posts is titled…well, you can read.

Um, the ‘shit’ is getting more bizarre with each passing day.

You’d be a fool not to recognize this as ‘the beginning of the end’

The world as you know it is about to disappear, never to be seen again.

I say ‘good riddance’ but I lament in advance the needless suffering and heartache this transition will inflict upon mankind.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Stupid is as stupid does...

Greetings good citizen,

The Dow is down 90 points as of lunchtime here on the East Coast and the morons at the NY Times are attributing this to today’s Fed meeting.

Mind you, there isn’t an ‘up’ index on the entire freaking planet at the damn moment but the ‘self-important’ in New York are (naturally) obsessed with what happens here in the USA.

Is this a ‘testament’ to ‘American Exceptionalism’ or is the media playing to the fact that most U.S. Citizens can’t see/don’t care about anything beyond the end of their own noses?

Left to your imagination is whether or not the Fed has enough ‘credibility’ left to keep this house of cards from collapsing the week after next?

As it stands right now, most of us would feel compelled to look outside and check for ourselves if Mr. Bernanke commented it was a ‘pleasant day’ outdoors.

Which is another way of saying that the man’s definition of ‘normal’ deviates considerably from the common understanding of the term…

In his defense, he isn’t in a position that allows him to admit to what everybody else knows for a fact. I mean the man admits things are ‘unusually uncertain’ and the markets drop 200 points!

How ‘credible’ can his ‘opinion’ be when an off-hand remark can cause trillions of dollars in market losses?

More succinctly, how ‘reliable’ can this crud we call ‘money’ be when it fluctuates in value according to the opinion of a banker? This is the foundation of our fucking civilization here and the actions of a single individual ‘dictate’ the ‘health’ of the world’s economy!

Is I just me or does anybody else think there’s something radically wrong with this picture?

I am alluding to the, er, ‘unnatural’ level of faith required to maintain the ‘status quo’. If it ‘made sense’ (and I’m sure most of you ‘think’ it does) it wouldn’t seem nearly as ‘weird’.

Not only are we taught to ridicule ‘outside the box’ thinking but we are also taught not to question the existence of the damn box! As far as the ‘status quo’ goes, THERE IS NO BOX, things are as they ‘should be’…

Unfortunately, the ‘natural order’ is mighty unnatural…nor does it withstand close scrutiny…but what do you want for ‘nothing’ (cause there’s nothing in it for you.)

Um, this is the second day in a row that I’ve gone off the deep end and it reads like the mad ravings of a ‘mal-content’ (which is precisely what most conservatives would dismiss it as.)

I tend to agree that it is ‘pointless’ to complain about the way things are if you are incapable of offering a ‘viable alternative’.

In some cases it really is what it is and there isn’t a ‘fair’ solution to the problem.

Thus the ‘title’ of this blog…A Simple Plan. I can ‘bitch’ because I have created an ‘alternative’, a holistic one that works for everybody.

A Simple Plan is so good I’d enjoy living under it! (And that’s the first test of any social scheme! Admittedly, most social schemers design plans that benefit themselves and in this I am no different, I’ll be a lot better off than I am now.)

The exception here is so will (almost) everybody else! You’ll be a lot better off than you are now and more importantly, so will your kids!

Bizarrely, that one tenth of one percent responsible for making everybody else impoverished, they’re probably going to die (rather unpleasantly.)

This is not ‘revenge’; it is a bed of their own making. They will finally be ‘free’ to prove their claim that they can ‘thrive’ without anybody else’s assistance.

Good luck with that!

Will ‘everybody’ love ‘A Simple Plan’? Let’s not be stupid. I believe there is an ‘evolutionary divide’ within our species where most of us understand the value of society and a very small minority is incapable of wrapping their heads around anything larger than ‘I’.

The heinous part of this divide is the ‘natural tendency’ on the part of the majority divide to believe the minority divide can be ‘saved’.

Worse, let there be no doubt that the minority is not hindered by this ‘weakness’. They have and will ‘exterminate’ anyone or anything that stands in their way.

Like cattle to slaughter the ‘threat’ the ‘share and share alike’ majority presents to the ruthless and self-centered minority is the principle reason our civilization is headed off a cliff.

The ‘I/me’ crowd is comfortable with the idea of killing off as many of the competition as they can, leaving them free to pick up the pieces after society ‘cleanses’ itself.

I’m sure this variety of ‘plain talk’ is still shocking to some of you but as events unfold the ‘conspiracy’ becomes easier to see.

It all makes sense if you are willing to look at who benefits.

A very small minority that righteously fears being stripped of what they have claimed as their own.

Is it a conspiracy? Consider if you will just how many ‘crimes’ have been swept under the rug to get where we are today…

It’s a fucking conspiracy all right!

If you haven’t taken the time to read A Simple Plan you SHOULD make it the very next thing you do.

If, after reading it, you don’t understand it, e-mail me, I’ll answer your questions.

I can be reached at gegner@usa.com

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner