First published in the British humour magazine “Punch” on April 3, 1957, the following neatly encapsulates the tone of the cheeky madness that is our monetary and banking system. Of course, customers do in essence lend money to banks by depositing it there, but it is not true that banks do likewise. The money that banks lend out is created as an interest bearing debt out of thin air, which I suppose is the best place to create it out of.
More…
Now here is a man who knew what’s what. “The Free Press” may have been written some ninety odd years ago, but the observations and comments made by its visionary English author Hilaire Belloc provide a thorough guide as to the nature of so-called free speech within a so-called free nation. In fact, Belloc would have been most comfortable with the pioneering spirit of the internet and no doubt a blogger par excellence -
“I PROPOSE to discuss in what follows the evil of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble hands; its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and the probably increasing effect of these last.”
The interminable disinformation put about recently with regard to the global financial crisis (which, by the way, has barely begun and to which all the wrong causes are being knowingly attached) proves Belloc’s point. The manipulation of consciousness through the covert control of the news agenda has become reality defining for huge numbers of defenseless viewers and readers. Belloc’s tight essay goes some way to providing inoculation against this infection.
A free PDF version of this essay can be download from HERE.
More…
I’ve been wittering on about INTEREST for what now seems like several months. After discussing this issue with Scott and some other luminaries (see podcast in previous post), I had cause to write a comment or two which I now place below. May you find it … interesting.
More…
Scott Meredith is one half of the excellent Conscious Media Network team and someone I have known since the 1980’s. Because he now lives in another part of the world and sometimes gets sad and lonely there living in his beautiful house, with his beautiful wife and his beautiful car, and asking himself tiresome questions like “How did I get here?”, he will often call me up and ask me to talk excitedly for hours on end about anything at all.
A few days ago he did just that and the podcast below is the result.
Frankly its too long and I speak too fast, but it’s a start. And yes, I do know that brevity is the soul of wit. Future episodes, as and when they arise, will be shorter.
P.S. If anyone does manages to listen to the whole thing then leave a comment and we’ll place you in our prize draw, 1st prize $700 billion dollars. Honest.
Apparently there’s a bit of a stink on Wall Street these days. Someone’s misplaced $700 billion (and the rest) and is in need of borrowing a bit to tide them over ’til next week. Any takers?
The Senate is pretty keen. So too, according to the paid for puppet advocates in the media, will be the House of Representatives. Just so long as the US taxpayer meets the bill thereby maintaining the culture of “Private Profits, Public Debt” so much favoured by the thieves union that is big business, the Govt and last but not least, the privately owned Fed and its attendant stockholders.
More…
If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95.
With HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50
£1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5.
But if you bought £1000 worth of Stella Artois Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminum re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.
As Homer Simpson once remarked “The internet? Is that still around?”
Is the death of the free internet imminent? Kevin Parkinson suggests so in his article (following). As he makes clear, Canada is a good start point for this sort of nonsense as it has been a major testing lab for our would-be masters as they seek to restructure their world system along feudalistic lines.
Some of the large blog providers such as blogger, wordpress and typepad may take umbrage at this move. More than 1% of all websites (including this one) now run on wordpress, a not inconsiderable number of reasonably smart people who know how the net works and what is at stake. So, a few million bloggers pounding at the doors of the Canadian ISP’s in question may bring them up short. In fact, this could become one of those cause celebres that helps spur freedom lovers to unite and immolate a common enemy. A better title for the piece could therefore be “Death of Canadian ISP’s Imminent”. Now there’s a thought.
As Mr Parkinson points out, the inevitable appeals to “security” and “protection” will yet again be wheeled out as part of the psychological war of attrition to be waged on a pliable public mind. Yet another outing for the old Problem-Reaction-Solution mechanism. It’s because ever more people are becoming clued in to this scam that the charging model is being instigated, a control pipe with which to limit free speech and thereby continue the process of pacifying the individual.
Net neutrality is another aspect to this control culture. The CEO of Virgin Broadband in the UK, Neil Berkett, dismissed net neutrality with a very rude word which we wouldn’t print here. But you can read it here.
Mr Berkett admits that Virgin are already in negotiation with certain suppliers who will effectively pay Virgin to be on the fast lane, whilst “other” sites will be relegated to the internet bus lane. The beginnings of a two (or more) tier system and the seizing of the net by visionless corporations and the visionless people who pretend to lead them. Of course that’s not strictly true. They do have a vision, it just happens to be one that excludes the community spirit (unless it is the bogus community spirit of so-called social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook etc) that built the net in the first place and that is its greatest treasure.
More…
Dec 17
Michael Hoffman's cogent analysis of the Bernie Madoff affair. 
Dec
15 Bernie Madoff, ex
head of Nasdaq, pulls off ponzi scam. Not.