2012 so on it's early?

'I can see your house from here'

Whilst I was living in Christchurch (NZ) I was struck by how relatively blasé the locals were about living on the Ring of Fire.

Admittedly, procedures were in place in the event of a geological hiccup and low-rise building is very much the norm. However, a heck of a lot of that building was on top of cliffs, underneath cliffs or on soft, easily liquified ground. A couple of locals who visited my home were thoughtful enough to take the piss out of the month's supply of tinned food I had sitting in a cupboard.

The thing is, whilst tsunamis were seen as being very much on the cards, few people believed that Christchurch would ever be hit by a major earthquake - what with the nearest seismic fault being 80 or so miles away

Only, as it turns out, Christchurch sits directly, and I mean directly, on top of a major, previously dormant, fault and it hasn't stopped rumbling since it kicked off all of a sudden last September

Being a curious soul I've been wondering ever since how it is that a significant rupture in the Earth's crust would burst into life after being quiet for at least thousands of years?

The answer could have been, and still could be, a stochastic 'shit just happens' explanation and what happened to Christchurch is a localised one-off event with no systemic implications for anywhere else

However, some on-line Earthquake buffs (e.g.) have been suggesting that there is a spike in global seismic activity which has been building up over the last 2-3 years. The problem with knowing if they're onto something or not is the risk that these doom-sayers could be indulging in the kind of subjective, dot-joining based activities that veteran conspiraloons know and love

And then this chap posted this vaguely-frantic video a couple of days ago...

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Michael Hudson gives me the horn pt.328

Curiously for a conspiraloon economician, Michael Hudson does not promote precious metals with every waking breath, he clearly believes that the megarich vs poor paradigm isn't a false one and he does not appear to be focused on engendering a sense of collapsafarian despair in his listeners...

Hudson isn't going to sell very many Krugerands or water filters with talk like that

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Listening to this latest dose of Hudson I was reminded, as I usually am when listening to Georgists, of the land ownership systems adopted during the Gold Rushes of the 19th Century.

Because the mining camps were set up in wilderness areas, beyond the reach of established governing systems or landlords, the miners got together and made up the rules for themselves.

The rules were simple enough; one person, or small group, could stake only one claim and the claim was no bigger than that person or group could work. If claimants did not work the claim they lost it

Whilst not a perfect system, it did restrict the scope for rent, speculation and generally poncing off people who actually worked for a living

Anyone who tried accumulating claims so that they could rent out or speculate with them, whilst sitting on their arse, ran a real risk of being hit repeatedly on the head with pick axe handles

Of course, this kind of thinking was suppressed as soon as the camps got properly civilised

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It always baffles me when people 'of the right' dismiss the very notion of social welfare as being an unworkable utopian fantasy because they believe it results in a system where people are paid to do nothing

As if spongers being paid to do nothing is somehow a pitfall unique to left wing systems

Whenever anyone plays that card I find myself thinking of people like this twunt...

The Duke of Twuntminster

He left school with only one O Level, in spite of the best education money could buy, has done nothing especially productive or clever in his adult life and yet is one of the richest land-owners in the country. He lives entirely off the labour of others and has done absolutely nothing to deserve that privilege. Thanks largely to the fact that he'll pay fuck all tax, in life and death, he and his progeny will continue to accumulate capital and increase the amount they leach off everyone else in a way that simply isn't possible for us paeons

Whatever your political persuasion, I believe it's pretty difficult to make a case for parasitism of this nature. Those who have 'left wing' sensibilities will see it as unfair. Those with a 'right wing' point of view should see it as a pretty shit way of allocating scarce resources or stimulating productivity. The fact that many ordinary people with right wing views don't get what's going on is one of the triumphs of the plutocratic class

Though, for the life of me, it's sometimes hard to put my finger on which of the members of that class are the ones who are actually smart enough to keep this charade going

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