Max and Minimax
Zany madcap financial commentator Max Keiser has an unparalleled track record of economic and geopolitical forecasting. So much so that the BBC gave him his own show called 'The Oracle'
Max's portfolio of uncanny predictions and empowering analytical insights include...
- prophesying that the Euro was shortly to become the world's reserve currency, a couple of months before it went tits up
- declaring his support for US Presidential candidate Barack Obama on the basis that there was a very good chance Obama would bring about 'change'
- predicting that the US Comex gold and silver exchange would default catastrophically in 2008, which it clearly did, without anyone noticing
The man is a soothsaying sensation, though it's not immediately clear if he is simply a brilliant analyst, gifted with superhuman psychic abilities, or whether the Universe actually submissively conforms to His Will
From the moment Keiser started his 'Buy Silver, Crash JP Morgan' campaign a couple of months back I've been watching global silver prices like a hawk
Keiser's plan was simplicity itself. JP Morgan has (allegedly) been driving the price of silver down by selling billions of dollars of silver it didn't actually possess. If enough people were to call JP Morgan's bluff, buy physical silver and drive the price up, JP Morgan's positions would collapse and the price of silver would skyrocket - destroying an evil bank and enriching those who killed it in the same act
A brilliant plan. Of course, if JP Morgan were to ever implode the resulting costs and losses (plus a dollop extra) would simply be assumed in all our names by government. But, nevertheless, a really, really brilliant plan
So, how's it doing? How much money have the legions of junior league silver bugs who have followed Max's call to 'Buy Silver, Crash JP Morgan' made so far?
Yup, The Oracle is still truly at the peak of his powers
Actually, anyone who joined the 'Buy Silver, Crash Morgan' campaign would have potentially enjoyed an even bigger (negative) return than -10.48% over the last 30 days
Silver coins, even those without a collectable value, sell for a mark-up of 15% or more over the scrap value of their silver content. Max presumably knows all about the excellent mark-ups in the bullion biz, as his site is, coincidentally, sponsored by bullion dealers
On top of the dealer's margin, if you buy a silver coin in Europe it is liable for VAT of, typically, 20%
So, if you bought a 1oz silver coin for something like £24 a month ago, it is now worth a shade under £17 today. Your £7 loss being shared out amongst the bullion dealer, the government's creditors, and speculators like JP Morgan
Sweet
And, yes, the fiat price of silver, and most other needful things which can't be printed into existence, will very possibly rise ahead of wages and interest on savings but timing, as they say, is everything
In the meantime, as fundamentally worthless as fiat currency is, the Max Keisers and JP Morgans of this world will still sell their grannies for a pot of it
Or, as a fellow conspiranaut said "If you want to put your hand in our pocket Max, give our nuts a scratch while you're at it...." .
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With these Orwellian headlines the Guardian is really spoiling us. First there was this a few weeks ago...
and now this gem...
The problem with the Guardian of course is that it is the largest-circulation, allegedly left-wing newspaper in the UK and a natural focal point for people who would like to see a gentler, fluffier world
Personally, I would describe the Guardian as an authoritarian allegedly left-wing newspaper
...and there's nothing fluffy about authoritarianism
A little while back a friend complained to me about the media treatment of an issue he is interested in and he said, in an exasperated tone, 'Even the Guardian is deleting my comments!!'
when my laughter had died down a little, and he was able to get a word in edgewise, he followed up with something like 'Come to think of it, that is a pretty knob end thing to say...'
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Those of us who remember the early days of Blogger will recall what a Pain in the Arse it used to be. Blogs would disappear for days on end, comments would disappear, the formatting of posts would get shredded for no reason at all. You got, as they say, what you paid for
For the last few years the service has been relatively sweet, with only the occasional, bearable niggle
Lately, however, Blogger has implemented an anti-spam filter which you can't turn off and which takes an arbitrarty and sometimes retrospective approach to sandboxing comments
The main reasons why I try and keep this blog going, even though I have competing calls on my time is the fact I enjoy the occasional outbreaks of informed, amusing and profane commenting that sometimes appear under my posts. It's heartening to be reminded that there are at least some people out there who are sceptical of Official Narratives but, at the same time, don't chug down and regurgitate Alternative Narratives without checking them out beforehand
Blogger is now getting in the way of that. Moderation fecks up the flow of commenting and Blogger is effectively imposing arbitrary moderation on commenting whether I like it or not. It doesn't help that Blogger does not inform me when a comment has been retrospectively removed. The comments aren't being erased permanently but as I'm not (quite) sitting on a computer permanently there may sometimes be a delay before they are released
S.
Eco-sustainable Planned-opolis....
I was going to compare and contrast competing Visions of the Future by pasting up the Suicide Booth scene from Futurama, but the only online clip I could find that hasn't been taken down by the copyright bots was in Czech
Mind you, whilst unintelligible, it does have a charm of its own
And one of these days I would like to sit down and compile a list of all the characteristics of the genre of propagandistic film-making that I will forever associate with the Blair years in the UK.
There's a shared look and sound to the style of films I have in mind and they are often associated with the kind of 'Common Purpose'-esque, public-private initiatives which piss me off something rotten - however mumsy the voice over
Whilst I appreciate that many loons out there like to describe this propaganda as 'communist' or 'marxist', they're wrong. It is the product of an unholy merger of corporate and state power, and that is fascism, well mostly
I appreciate that it's easier for people who don't see themselves as lefties to identify anything they perceive as evil as being 'Marxist' or 'communist' (and for lefties to identify anything evil as being 'fascist') but the situation is a little more complicated than simplistic use of poorly defined or understood terms like 'Marxism' is capable of describing
The fact that unaccountable foundations, pressure groups and think tanks, like the one that made the video at the top of this post, are funded by big corporations as well as government should be a bit of a fucking clue as to the nature of The Beast.
If your definition of communism encompasses activities that are promoted by and benefit large, privately owned corporations and billionaire individuals it might be worth your while contemplating the internal contradictions in that point of view. I can understand how people might argue that a bastardised form of communism might, like so many other 'isms', be co-opted as a tool of those private corporations and billionaires but are those corporations and billionaires themselves communist? What word would you, should you use to describe them?
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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-
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...
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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-and if George's counter-intuitive contradiction of what he and others have been claiming for years is a little difficult to swallow, here's some independent corroboration of George's new 'Cold is Warm' paradigm from some twunt who doesn't understand how fridges work...
With All This Global Warming, Why is it So Cold?
Eric Haxthausen
"The explanation that is gaining currency among climate scientists is that low levels of Arctic sea ice during the summer are causing more heat to be absorbed in the Arctic during the fall, and changing atmospheric circulation pattern, driving cold Arctic air into Europe and the Eastern United States and funneling warm air up into the Arctic regions.
This warm Arctic-cold continents pattern is likened to leaving the refrigerator door open. The room gets colder but the fridge warms up."
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Fortunately, there is, however, a planet-saving solution at hand.
Scrolling near to the bottom of this page of real-time UK electricty production stats, you can see that windfarms are contributing something like a mighty 0.1% of the UK's current electricty needs...
Which means that if the UK government sticks something like £300,000-500,000 a year on the average household's energy bill and gives that money to the aristocracy to build lots of lovely new windmills on 'their' land the British will have done their bit to keep global climate exactly the same as it was 20 years ago, for ever
Ooops, that's just for the electricity and doesn't include natural gas, heating oil and petrol consumption. Better make that £1,000,000+ per year per household.
And, obviously, the UK wouldn't have to build quite so many wind farms if we constructed a national grid of rechargeable batteries the size of Battersea Power Station to store up energy when its really windy so we can use it when it's not really windy
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It's easy enough to believe that AGW Climate Change prophets like George Monbiot are essentially decent, well-meaning types who haven't quite thought things through. I'd be a lot more convinced if they weren't rich, hypocritical fuckers who are wealthy enough not to suffer from, and will actually profit from, the consequences of the corrupt 'solutions' they are advocating
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So much going on in the conspirasphere, so little time to vent fully, but just enough time to place a few bets on some on-going stories...
Wikileaks
Such is Julian Assange's new found fame, even my pensioner Mum who never reads newspapers and only watches Italian gameshows on TV asked me the other day if I thought Assange was kosher on the level a straight shooter or not
The fact that she was even asking me the question pretty much answers it
Aangirfan has put together a much more detailed list of reasons to have little faith in Wikileaks
He could have saved himself a lot of time by trying to come up with a list of reasons to actually have faith in Assange
The countless debates about whether Assange is what he claims to be or not remind me of the past antics of the Shayler Being. Fans of Shayler's work will recall that he bought credibility in certain Truther circles by revealing the startling news that, shock fucking horror, MI6 planned to murder Gaddafi at one point in the 1990s. In return for this completely underwhelming revelation he was given a free pass to trample all over UK Conspiraloondom for the better part of a decade. I was still debating with people who wanted to give Shayler the benefit of the doubt even when he started claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus AND King Arthur. Mercifully, the low cut blouse and lipstick was the final straw for all but the most open-minded and tolerant of folk. However, Shayler's ex girlfriend/ handler, who bought into Truther status at the same low low price, is still out there hard at work, playing a much longer game and with a slightly better hairdresser
To be honest, I'm a little nonplussed that so many on-line folk are willing to give Assange so much benefit of the doubt, given the nature of the official narrative friendly bullshit he's pumping out, the stuff he isn't pumping out, and the fact that he's getting so much coverage from the mainstream media.
In comparison, it's worth remembering how hard the mainstream press worked at trying to ignore, then downplay, the Climategate story last year. A leak which genuinely did piss in The Establishment's chips, a lot
When in doubt, it's always worth remembering the Golden Rule of State Broadcasting Portraiture. If someone is covered by the BBC and they're not lit, or otherwise presented, like Baltar from Battlestar Galactica they ain't threatening anyone of any importance
Eric Cantona's bank run
Fair play to Eric for calling for the collapse of the banking cartel...
...but a planned bank run ain't going to do it
Even if a mass protest did take place, managed to overcome daily cash withdrawal limits and actually killed a bank or two, how exactly would that beat the system?
The Fed in the US and other central banks around the world were actually created in the wake of staged bank crises
More dead banks and more chaos equals more consolidation and more centralised control
Sorry
Cantona strikes me as a decent man but one who doesn't fully understand how money works
Unlike a certain indecent man who does...
Max Keiser
Max, and his new best buddy and fellow precious metal salesmen Alex Jones, have been trying to whip up a viral campaign with the claimed objective of destroying JP Morgan by buying up physical silver. The story goes that JP Morgan has been selling lots of paper silver, so if Max's followers buy lots of physical silver they'll reduce physical supply, drive up the price and JP Morgan won't be able to honour its paper contracts
Curiously, in spite of all his ranting on the subject in recent years, Max seems to have forgotten what happens every time the finances of large banks go tits up, and who ends up covering all the losses. Buying a few poxy coins isn't even going to scratch a power structure that's been crafted over centuries and any immediate losses inflicted on that structure will be recouped, with interest
Max also seems to forget who controls most of the production and stockpiles of precious metals around the world. The last time I looked, I don't recall identfying many silver mines or bullion depositories that were owned and operated by anarcho-syndicalist cooperatives
Max also seems to have forgotten that there isn't actually that much physical gold or silver to go round and that if ordinary people did actually drive the price of gold or silver up to astronomical highs by buying a couple of coins each they wouldn't benefit themselves by very much but would benefit anyone who's already sitting on a few thousand coins to start with enormously
There again, maybe Max hasn't forgotten any of this
On reflection, I think he probably hasn't. I think it's more likely that he's trying to succeed where others have failed; through the power of the internet, lots and lots of bullshit and total and utter contempt for anyone who'll listen to him...
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Max and Minimax
