In Place Of Strife

JD responds to the previous post on Labour's abandonment of principle:

Wrong question. You should be asking simply "Why vote?"

Changing from Tweedledum to Tweedledee is not going to solve anything. For the past 30 years (at least) all political viewpoints have merged into a perpetuation of and the 'management' of a culture which is moribund.

Something which is explained here with great clarity by Alan Watts-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDu3JdQ8Ow

I have been reading again "A Guide for the Perplexed" by Fritz Schumacher and towards the end of the book he writes- "the modern experiment to live without religion has failed"

...here is the passage from the book

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yy_qPNMDIFYC&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153&dq=the+modern+experiment+to+live+without+religion+has+failed&source=bl&ots=xP5iLtU3Wy&sig=ualsz-G4JTa8yx_DJshTeWWoLZ8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAWoVChMI7dXQkOfpxgIVQhEsCh0EsAL7#v=onepage&q=the%20modern%20experiment%20to%20live%20without%20religion%20has%20failed&f=false

Here is a sample of Schumacher's thinking-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDtF9-owes4

...this is not part of the comment but is just a few random thoughts which may or may not lead to something or other :)

I wasn't going to comment because the answer to your question would lead into a very long and complicated discussion about the nature of our 'democratic society' and the reasons for how and why we arrive at this situation.

I could point you in the direction of the 'Perennial Philosophy' as Schumacher points in his book to several authors on that subject but I am not entirely convinced by the arguments put forward by the likes of Schuon or Lings; they have a clear understanding of history but offer no direction for the future. I am inclined to go along with John Michell's view that the coming collapse is inevitable after which the whole cycle will start all over again.

I am not gloomy, by the way. Far from it, life is wonderful!

Rather than quoting John Michell to understand why I think life is wonderful, I would suggest buying this book instead-

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-Radical-Traditionalist-John-Michell/dp/0971204446

Reform of the voting system? Again, Jimmy Goldsmith had an answer to that suggesting that MPs should be chosen at random from the Electoral Roll in the same way that juries are chosen. It cannot be any worse than the present set up and might even be better. In my experience the average voter is considerably more intelligent than the average MP (Cameron recently demonstrated that fact on the Letterman Show) and more so than the average Whitehall Mandarin and nowhere near as devious.

Addendum (22 July):

Three recent stories which illustrate the statement by Alan Watts that our modern society is dedicated, albeit inadvertently, to its own destruction.

http://www.thesundaily.my/news/1496885

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/07/21/uk-airlines-drones-lufthansa-idUKKCN0PV1EE20150721

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3169724/Hackers-control-Jeep-Cherokee-crash-ditch-gaining-access-entertainment-amid-concerns-cars-vulnerable.html

One should also take note of this; 'Naqoyqatsi' is the third of a trilogy of films by Godfrey Reggio (with music by Philip Glass)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl1RcfvEsiA

Naqoyqatsi is a Hopi word which translates as "life as war" In the film's closing credits, Naqoyqatsi is also translated as "civilized violence" and "a life of killing each other."

It cannot be denied that in its near 240 year history the USA has been more or less permanently at war with somebody or other (even with itself at one point).

A few years ago the Arabs and specifically the Iranians called the USA 'the great satan' Were they right?

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Ourobouros and the melt-up

(Source)

We appear to be entering a very dangerous phase. The system is using deceit to cover the fact that it is creating its own investment. Like flying by pulling on your bootstraps, it can't work, so it won't.

Frances Coppola has been discussing Juncker's plan, and a commenter explains how a dodgy trader's scheme will get the money in and straight out again - with doubtless nice fees and bonuses for the illusionist.

This is "melt-up" territory. If you get it exactly right, you will make a fortune, and if you don't, you'll lose your shirt. I've never claimed or wanted to be that sort of adventurous trader, and goodness knows what happens to the ordinary person during and at the end of this Wild Ride.


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SocGen warns of debt's potential to collapse the world economy

SocGen - Worst Case Debt Scenario

Black holes and the collapse of democracy

Last night I watched a Horizon programme about black holes. Experts don't understand them, and every galaxy has a giant one in the middle, weighing typically 0.1% of the mass of its host. Nothing can escape it as it continually collapses, and at its heart is a singularity where all the normal rules break down. Anything can happen at the centre; nothing is impossible.

And then I saw the ten o'clock news. The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, with the unhappy face of a Neville Chamberlain, had caved in and signed the Lisbon Treaty, the enabling legislation that takes Europe over the event horizon and towards "ever-closer union". Klaus wrote to his country's constitutional court:

“Twenty years after the restoration of our democracy and sovereignty, we are once again dealing with the question whether we should — this time voluntarily — give up the position of a sovereign state and hand over decision-making on our own matters to European institutions outside of the democratic control of our citizens.”

And so the millennarian (it had been planned to be complete by 2000) madness sweeps another into the host. At the centre, now irrecoverably detached from the rest of the universe, the club gathers, surrounded by advisers and servants of every kind, all determined to live as high and as absurd as Marie Antoinette tending her washed sheep, as we career chaotically towards economic breakdown and the loss of law, freedom and security. The transfer of wealth and power without consent - without our consent - is crime and tyranny.

Centripetal forces create centrifugal forces. The overweening power-seeking of the mediaeval Papacy hastened the move towards a Europe of sovereign states and religious fraction. Now, the forced bureaucratic union at the top of our group of societies will lead to greater disunion lower down, of which the BNP's Nick Griffin is merely a small, scruffy symptom.

In the middle ages, the walled towns developed internally; there sprang up strong-walled houses for the wealthy elite, to protect themselves not only from each other, but from the desperate, hungry, half-naked mob outside.

In the dream is denial, and in denial is defeat.

Fears of a stockmarket correction

My trader's intuition is flashing warnings that the stock market might drop off a waterfall starting this week. - Charles Hugh Smith

But Marc Faber (htp: Jesse) thinks not - as the dollar weakens, the market adjusts upward. And he is convinced of the "Bernanke put", i.e. money will be thrown into the system to maintain the illusion that all is well. Longer-term, Faber (in that smiling way of his) gives it around 10 years before the dollar simply collapses as public finances run completely out of control.

The dolorous stroke

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal


Hitchens (1):

A great grey Tower of Babel reaches up into the sky over Europe, lopsided, full of cracks and likely to collapse in the fullness of time...

For Britain, Europe’s oldest continuously independent sovereign state, [...] it is the end of 1,000 years of history, as predicted by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell as long ago as 1962...

In the EU, Ireland – no longer a Tiger – takes its place alongside Slovenia and Lithuania as a quirky, minor possession on the damp and unvisited fringes of the Continent, with almost no voting power.

Shorn – as it is now – of its ability to get in the way, it may find that the flow of subsidies will become much thinner in years to come...

The ascent of the EU happened to coincide with several decades of unheard-of prosperity and growth. But the EU did not cause that prosperity...

It was based on American Marshall Aid and helped along by American and British willingness to spend heavily on defending Europe against the USSR, while most of the EU nations kept their military budgets small.

The EU also cannot guarantee that Europe’s prosperity will go on forever. With so many member nations, many of them devastated by decades of Marxist misrule, its capacity to hand out subsidies is running out.

The credit crisis has not finished yet, Western Europe is fast running out of its own energy supplies and the shift of economic power to the Far East is speeding up, not stopping.

The European nations have not worked out how to deal with the enormous Muslim minorities which they have encouraged to settle on their territory and which increasingly demand the right to live according to their traditions.

Nor can they stop the slide of the manufacturing industry towards the regions where labour is cheapest.

Germany, still in a sort of post-traumatic shock over the cost of absorbing the Communist East, may not forever be willing to share a currency – and so a joint bank account – with the poorer and less well-run nations of the Eurozone.

Hitchens (2):

... At the coming Election, refuse to vote for any of them, and do so in such numbers that they can no longer claim they have any mandate to rule, so that their zombie parties collapse in a heap of dust and worms, and we can start again.

The alternative is the accelerating death of our civilisation.

Hannan:

People often wonder why national leaders are so ready to hand their powers to Brussels. Each successive EU treaty has weakened national parliaments, yet each has been enthusiastically ratified by those same parliaments, often in overt defiance of public opinion.

What makes the politicians do it? [...] Perhaps – let’s be blunt – they are defying their electorates in the hope of getting lucrative positions in the EU when their terms expire.

I realise that this is a big claim. But, in ten years as an MEP, I’ve seen it happen time and again.

I’ve watched people arrive in Brussels as moderate Euro-sceptics, but change their views as their lips become clamped around the teat of the expenses. I’ve watched ‘No’ campaigners turn into Euro-enthusiasts after being given sinecures.

Now Tony Blair is plainly not in that category. He was a Euro-enthusiast to start with, albeit in a rather vague, pro-Italian-holidays kind of way. And he’s hardly poor...

No, the charge against him is not that he abandoned his beliefs, but that he abandoned Britain’s interests...

Could the issue of the [EU] budget have been linked in Blair’s mind, even subliminally, with that of the presidency?

... if Blair really did seek to buy the presidency with British taxpayers’ money, he was almost literally selling his country – and there is a very unpleasant word for people who do that.

For those who believe in history with a human face, perhaps this is a punishment, for believing we could create some small and imperfect version of an Earthly Paradise, where even the poorest man would have a voice in his government, and have hope to better his position in society; where the bully would be held back by fear of punishment, and the powerful restrained by the apprehension of condign retribution.

My wife says she feels aggression everywhere, people arguing with bus drivers that they shouldn't have to pay. I say the hungry sheep look up and are not fed; we are lost and leaderless ; those at the bottom of society live in fear of the future, despair, impotent rage, having nothing but meagre dole given them with grandstanding condemnation and impossible promises of opportunity.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help, said the Psalmist.

Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins

It always ends in a building project, whether the new EU Parliament or Ceauşescu's Casa Poporului...














But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more

It's not for us to take up arms. Worldly powers will rise and fall. Our defence, and the future, is the family. That is the nearest we can have to the Earthly Paradise.

Where to turn, for financial security?

Richard Bookstaber (whom we've met before, here) looks at asset allocation and makes a point he's made before: in a crisis, everyone wants out, and the relative merits of different assets are ignored in the dash for cash. Provided cash (at bank) hasn't itself become risky - and after last year, that's not a given. Even outside the bank, there's inflation, devaluation and also, potentially, the fate of the Confederate dollar.

Leo Kolivakis comments, "I happen to believe that diversification is still important, but loses its power as huge inflows are going into all sorts of public and alternative asset classes."

That's the problem: we no longer know where to turn. As Kunstler comments, "the most perplexing part is that there hardly seems any safe place to preserve one's savings."

How about the smart, nimble operators? Investment guru Marc Faber spends his time looking at liquidity flows, trying to predict the next sudden tide and get in beforehand - not a game for the type of clients I have usually advised. And even he appears to be readying himself for the worst, "a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today."

Recently, I seem to have been reading more commentators tending to the view that we are heading for that Mises "crack-up boom" - outlined here nine years ago, for example. And worse:

"And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!"

The great pleasure gardens of China's Emperor took some 40 years to build, in the first half of the eighteenth century. Vast, complex and exquisite, they were testimony to the wealth and power of the Middle Kingdom, only to be methodically destroyed in an act of punitive vandalism by the French and English in 1860. Premier Zhou Enlai decreed that the ruins should remain unaltered, a monumental lesson for the Chinese about the Western powers.

Of all the curses on humankind, long and vengeful memory may be the worst.

People get ready

We're going to be splatted by a headlights-on-full-beam, diesel-pluming, horn-honking road-train of debt. Fred Goodwin, CEO at Nomura (i.e. not the RBS wrecker who scuttled to his hideout in France - the private gated resort may be the one between Cannes and Mougins) has used the colourful phrase "clear and present danger" of the British economy. Unfortunately, shouting "Look out!" usually doesn't prevent disaster.

Karl Denninger, still indignant and vengeful but now also beginning to sounding the Cassandra note of inevitable defeat ("We are one cycle away from a collapse - if we're lucky"), graphs debt against GDP for the USA and it's clear that there must be a break in the smooth lines at some point.

And however bad it is for America - a country which periodically falls over, picks itself up, dusts itself down, and starts all over again - it'll be far worse for Britain, a country where the management has never quite lost that 1066 sense of being quite unconnected with the indigenous peasantry subjected to their cruel alien rule. This is why our overlords find it so easy to flee the country to take their place in the new pan-European aristocracy currently under construction, an unlovely amalgam of big-business swindlers, venal politicians and their marketing men. They're allying with old money smart enough to know which side its bread is buttered; history is made in the bedroom and the backroom (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”).

There is a long history of England's rulers employing foreign mercenaries (especially Germans) to put down uprisings of the overwrought population, both here in the sixteenth century, and in the American colonies in the eighteenth. In the modern world, where the predominant avatar of Power is money (Bertrand Russell's 1938 book is illuminating on the three-headed helldog), we are being driven off our business smallholdings and made day-labourers for giant enterprises owned abroad or by equally huge collective investments in which the individual shareholders' voices are lost "like tears in rain".

And when the Empire falls, as it must, as all do, the great forgetting will descend. Perhaps we can take comfort in the thought that after the bloody cataclysm, the Dark Ages, so named because untroubled by the scribes and accountants of expansive rulers, were, quietly and anonymously, as sunlit as ours.

Another collapsist

Last month, Marc Faber used the word "collapse"; now, Max Keiser says the same: the dollar will halve, gold will leap 50 - 100%, import prices will soar. In this interview, Keiser is a bit less gonzo and correspondingly more credible.

The question is, how bad is it for other countries (e.g. the UK) and what will trading partners do to stop their export markets being hit? If all major countries try to devalue their currency, then maybe only certain commodities will be worth holding on to while the winds blow.

And Keiser says the wealthy have been shifting their capital out of America since 9/11. He's been choosing defensive stocks, ones that will survive high unemployment, consumer boycott and anti-American sentiment. One big and possibly vulnerable name he mentions is Coca-Cola (remember Qibla Cola?) - a staple of Warren Buffett's portfolio.