But is Paris Hilton a NATURAL gold? We deserve to know.

23 years of FTSE growth, RPI-adjusted

At last, education for life (instead of lifelong education)

In the Sunday Express today, Alain de Botton explains why he's opened a School of Life shop-cum-philosopher's-studio-cum-therapy-room in Marchmont Street, London:

"Before I went to university, I imagined it as an extraordinary place where you'd get a chance to escape from commercial pressures and examine the great questions of life in beautiful surroundings with fascinating people, and so become a better, wiser, more interesting person."

So did I, and mostly what I learned was how naïf I'd been.

Good luck with the new venture.

IN- or DE: Denninger reasserts his position

Karl Denninger repeats - in his rather forthright and sexualised way - the simple argument that deflation suits the bankers who run the Fed:

... In a deflationary environment the banker gets as much of your money as he can, and then he also gets the house! [...] The banker makes money in terms of real value in a deflationary environment. You, on the other hand, being debt, get rammed."

In short, cui bono?

And in the Marc Faber interview cited in the previous post, Dr Doom maintains that the drop in the price of oil shows that we're already in recession; the drying-up - the sucking back out - of excess liquidity is what will make the dollar more valuable.

I once read a short story by Brian Aldiss, in which invisible vampire aliens ravage a farmer's livestock - all one can see is the double puncture. The skin is pierced, the innards liquefy and are drained. Sturdily, the farmer accepts that he has a new class of customer.

Is this not like banking and government? Without mortgages and inheritance tax, how otherwise would almost everybody in each generation be forced to buy their living quarters anew?

The view from Agamotto's Eye

Doctor Strange and the all-seeing Eye of Agamotto

Mish relays an interview with Marc Faber, who is a bull on the US dollar (not US stocks) and Japan.

"Europe will have to cut interest rates as well, and their economies are most likely much weaker than perceived...

... We are in a seven year bull market for commodities, so commodities can easily drop 50%. Some have already done that like nickel, lead, and zinc. Others will follow. But after that, I think that the bull market in commodities will reassert itself. But my view was that for the second half of 2008 commodities would go down."

Can we undo the damage of easy credit?

... the [political] system which has for sixty years precipitated the greatest debt cycle in history may be inadequate to address the greatest deflationary cycle in history if it chooses to prescribe the same snake oil which sickened the economy in the first place rather than the balanced (fiscal) diet and (strict economy) excercise we all know would be better for us.

The road back from economic folly will be long, hard, narrow and possibly untrodden, warns London Banker in a masterly essay on the need to re-establish a savings culture.

(htp: Jesse's Cafe Americain)

Paris Hilton: an observation

Speaking of Paris Hilton, there's something odd about her: smooth, featureless, un-angular; as if she were, I don't know, inflated and unstable. One feels it would only take a little prick to make her explode.

Posh tarts and Pop Tarts

How much social disruption is caused by posh people's boredom?

The Grumbler today whines about schoolgirls aping whores to get attention - a survival strategy in today's feckless-male world, I'd have thought - and a Dr Ringrose of London's Institute of Education (they never ask actual schoolteachers, do they) opines that teaching about the history of feminism is "needed to overcome the negative influences of celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera".

Paris Hilton is a world-famous millionaire socialite am-porn star and now part-time political commentatrix. Britney Spears is a world-famous millionaire entertainer, and her disastrous private life is a moneymaker for her and a raft of reporters and photographers; besides, her misdeeds and misfortunes are no worse than those of the underclass whose offspring I teach, nor much different from the self-indulgence of many rich and aristocratic women in the first half of the twentieth century. Christina Aguilera ditto - and currently a Google search for her yields nearly 29 million pages.

Emmeline Pankhurst was a rich businessman's daughter, married a barrister, joined the Independent Labour Party, toured North America lecturing on VD and joined the Conservative Party when she returned. Her daughter Adela went to Australia, joined the Communists and then the Fascists. Another daughter, Sylvia, got knocked-up out of wedlock and she and her mother fell out and never met again. The third, Christabel, enthusiastically promoted the First World War and internment of enemy aliens, visited Russia after the Revolution to urge its continuation in the conflict with Germany, became a Christian evangelist in the USA, returned to Britain, was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1936, and fled the country when war broke out again.

Yep, I can just see all that on the syllabus.

The need for civil rights

Professor James Duane explains in shocking detail why, in the USA, everybody should remember to exercise their right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent. (htp: Obnoxio The Clown, referring to Philip Thomas' post)

"The following is the common Miranda warning used by most law enforcement agencies in the United States today:

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense."

How about here in Britain?

"You have the right to remain silent. But it may harm your defence if you fail to mention anything that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

"Free legal advice is worth what you pay for it." Having said that, here is a site purporting to give advice to activists being questioned by police in the UK.

How many laws are on the Statute Books in the United Kingdom? Is there anybody in the country of legal age who could not be accused of having broken one of them? Do we not have too much law?

UK worse than USA?

If it's the USA (aka The Great Santa) that's in dire trouble, how come the pound sterling has dropped 5 cents against the dollar, since July 17?

Bill Gates: charity begins at home

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is set up to give away $38 billion (plus another $30 billion pledged by Warren Buffett).

While I'm in the mood for mad ideas, how about sparing some fraction of that (oh, a billion?) to go back to Bill's crazy source code and finally straighten out all the problems with Microsoft's core products, then send out a one-use-only disk to all previous purchasers, to reload everybody's programs with reliable updated versions?

Or should I stick with dreaming up more realistic schemes, like the deposit-free banking idea?

Fractional reserve banking - why bother?

Karl Denninger comments on the unfolding crisis of non-subprime mortgages, where he thinks losses will be even worse.

A question: why bother with any kind of reserve?

Once you've determined that banks can lend a high multiple of deposits, you may as well make deposits entirely irrelevant. In fact, it would save quite a bit on operating costs if you could have banks that specifically didn't take deposits from anybody - no cash in or out, so no tellers, no branches. Let the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England give a handful of providers a total lending limit, and then stand back and watch them pump away.

Insolvency? Loan-to-value not good enough? Raise the limits again, pump harder. Get a punter to overpay for one house and you increase the value of all the others in the street, so making their mortgages safer. And if the bank doesn't have to pay interest to depositors, it can charge as little as it likes for its loans.

I can't see the flaw here, any more than I can see the difference between a banker and a swindler.

I don't know why I didn't think of it before.

House prices underpinned by shortages, boosted by inflation?

The Centre for Economics and Business Research reckons house prices will steady next year and shoot up for three years after that, thanks to housing shortages and building project cancellations - reports The Grumbler.

"Real estate could become a very good investment and inflation hedge once the government starts seriously printing money," commented Jim from San Marcos (who still has a realtor's licence) after his July 27th post.

I hate computers

Currently I use Windows, like most people, and my experience of this is certainly like the picture on the left. No wonder there are so many Bill Gates jokes, e.g. "The president of Lotus walks into an elevator with a gun in his hand. In the elevator are: Saddam Hussein, Timothy McVeigh, and Bill Gates, but there are only two bullets in the gun! Who does he shoot? A: Gates, twice, to be sure."

I also have an ASUS laptop that has a nervous breakdown when I ask it to connect to the Internet and my printer at the same time. In fact, it's now objecting to my mouse as well. I half-suspect the power management system is compromised by some ASUS virus that informs Peking of my every keystroke; put that down to paranoia if you like, but we'll see what the history books say one day.

But is the Mac really as simple and reliable as the middle picture suggests? And is Linux really so powerful and jazzy? Before I throw this computer from some carefully-selected high place, I'd appreciate guidance on its replacement.

By the way, here's Daniel Bozet's original cartoon; I thought the one above looked unbalanced.

And here's some techno comment on BoingBoing, that obviously I don't quite understand.

If telephones were like this, I'd be using liveried runners.

Check memes with Snopes.com

My American brother and his wife put me on to Snopes.com, a service that sources and corrects rumours that spread through the Internet. One example is a very sharp, funny diatribe on the Middle East, allegedly by Dennis Miller, but actually adapted from this 2002 article by Larry Miller.

What have I learned?

• Meme alterations tend to add spite - compare the original with its viral successor
• I should include Snopes and Larry Miller in my blogroll

In the piece concerned, I particularly liked the imagined reversal of position between Jews and Arabs. I'm always grateful for a mental flip that lends me a new perspective.

USA $800 billion subsidy to Asian investors

Read Karl Denninger on how the Fed has been forced to prop up shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to please foreign equity holders such as China.

Further comment from Mish.

The taxpayer pays all - and presumably we're looking to do something similar here, to keep the banking show on the road.

This may be the time when those predictions about the Dow hitting 9,000 and gold breaking through $1,200 start to come true.

Gold

Gold now below $900, heading perhaps for the $875 forecast by "Jesse" a couple of weeks ago. Will the second part of the prediction be proved correct, also?

Logical consistency

Also in today's Guardian's G2 section is an article titled "I became a Zen Buddhist nun," at the end of which is the invitation: "Do you have a story to tell about your life? Email it (no attachments, please)..."

Reading the Guardian

It's been years since I tried to read the Guardian. My favourite memory of it is Posy Simmonds' "Silent Three" cartoon strip, which I admire for the artist's control of her line, more than for its social comment.

This morning, on the paper run while the kettle was boiling, I caught sight of its trailer on the front page: "How the wealthy lost touch with the rest of us/Polly Toynbee" (actually, it's also by David Walker, though it doesn't say so there).

I thought, I'll grit my teeth and have a go. There must be some reason why teachers like me read this stuff. Here (in the G2 section) it is.

Fisk it yourself. Note the sly references to (ugh!) the Daily Mail and (ahhh!) how hard teachers work. Then note what isn't said, for example about Toynbee's own high income and wealth, foreign property etc.

And look at the unexamined implicit assumptions in statements like "...others deserve a share of that, too." Unless you are religious (and I include in that category anyone who talks about Man with a capital M), why should anyone care about anybody who's not a blood relation (and the ever-logical Mao didn't even do that)?

So I guess my gripe is that here we have a coldly commercial product pretending to morality; which perhaps I should admire for the artist's control of her line, more than for its social comment.

David Cameron: a flaw?

There was a moment - a minor incident - and I can't track it down. It was either Matthew Parris or Quentin Letts, watching Tony Blair perform in Parliament some years ago. The PM reacted scornfully to something he appeared to have heard from the Opposition benches, yet when the journalist asked his colleagues in the Press Gallery, nobody had heard that something. It seemed that Blair was simply indulging in brazen invention. A tiny incident, but revealing a character trait that has cost the country dearly.

In this week's Spectator, Charles Moore publishes an SMS text from a businesswoman friend, giving her immediate impressions of meeting David Cameron, and although she is clearly struck by the man's looks and personality, one little sentence jumped out at me: "Doesn't really listen." I think I know what she means, because it gels with how I read his body language every time I see him on the news: he is tightly focused on maintaining his grip on the Protean figure of Success, and will not be distracted. That has its dangers.