Phi Beta Iota: The Hill is letting us down when it fails to provide context. This “debate” over tax cuts is either criminal insanity or insanely criminal. As long as the federal government is BORROWING one trillion dollars a year “in our name,” any discussion that does not begin with “stop borrowing” is unconstitutional, illegitimate, and grounds for the impeachment of every member now serving in the Senate and the House, including Ron Paul if he does not bring this basic fact forward in public.
Gold rising further except for profit taking bursts. China is buying all the gold it can get, and unloading all the paper dollars it can dump.. Other countries, including Russia are buying gold. I can see the Yuan or RMB playing a larger role as a global currency, but most people are too ignorant of China to accept the Yuan quickly or easily. The Swiss have a huge mass of gold well stashed, so I can see the Swiss franc playing a larger role. It's hard to make a forecast for the Euro, although it will almost certainly survive the US dollar. It's also possible that the Swiss might make a deal with the EU that would result in the Euro being backed by Swiss gold. Now that the head of the IMF has been burned at the stake, his very good brain is of no further use. The EU is scrambled eggs right now. Sarko can't survive without a miracle. India's potential will take a very long time to organize and get rolling; I went to school there and it's a seething cesspit. It's time for the US to get out of foreign wars, but unlikely that it will because of the weapons market. Obama seems impotent. The Pentagon and its corporate backers and partners seems to be deciding policy. I'm not happy about Petraeus at the agency. I think the USG and the US are totally hosed. Desperate for a new demon. Good time for Lee Kuan-yew to retire. Wise of him. The immediate future does not look good. War and more war. Civil war. Revolution. Take your pick. The cupboard is bare. It's all been looted. What a mess America has made since 1945. Moments of glory, decades of folly and stupidity…. Israel and the Palestinians are a parody of the world as a whole.
I think the last real ingots of gold in Manhattan were in the basement of the Twin Towers. The Fed and the Treasury don't dare be transparent or audited, because whatever real (solid) gold they ever had was moved to Malta and other offshore or mountain stashes long ago, replaced with Play-Dough. Christ, even the Bureau of Engraving and Printing stops now and then to change engraving plates and produce “Presidential dollars” to be used as bribes by the White House (ever since Truman); we have that from a guy who is now retired after running the shop since 1945. The satellite imagery boys, where I have sources, dream of being about to electronically penetrate the earth to a depth of 100 feet or more from satellites but when I last checked 3 or 4 years ago they were still dreaming. They fiddle with HAARP trying to achieve earth-penetration, and only end up causing huge earthquakes and tsunamis; measurements already show the poles have begun to shift partly due to melting ice masses, but also due to fiddling with HAARP. The Fukushima quake and tsunami have been attributed to fiddling with HAARP, possibly the Sumatra disaster as well. Not all scientists are smart and prescient. We're damn lucky they haven't already blown us to smithereens, while scratching their backsides. Never forget that the Fed has always existed as a fraud by intent and design. President Wilson commented years after enabling the Fed in 1913: “I have destroyed my country.”
Doc Searls has posted a slideshow explaining how Amazon’s user experience is broken, in the context of a discussion about vendor relationship management (VRM), which is about evolving a world where customers have at least symmetry in the power relationship of customer and vendor. The slides are old (January 2010) and things might have changed, but I don’t think they’ve changed as much as they should’ve, because I still experience similar frustrations when I visit Amazon.
Phi Beta Iota: Amazon is a great company with an extraordinary cloud offering and enormous potential they have chosen to leave unattended. They rejected a 2007 proposition (Amazon as the Hub of the World Brain) that would have seen them create a markeplace for informed relationships and knowledge by the call or page, and they have rejected all suggestions for enabling buyers, readers, and reviewers to “co-create” the Amazon experience. It's a pity mostly because the world need multiple forms of M4IS2 hybrids, and this is something Amazon could have provided as a service of common concern, with both the cloud for melded shared information and the authors and their readers as the human intelligence component.
EXTRACT: Strip away the mathematical language of economists, and conventional theories of economic growth are rather crude. Economies produce “stuff,” and if you want more stuff to come out of the process, put more stuff in (like human capital, say). Yet economies do not produce stuff so much as billions of distinct types of goods — perhaps 10 billion, according to Eric Beinhocker of the McKinsey Global Institute — ranging from size 34 dark stonewash bootcut jeans to beauty therapies involving avocado. The difference between China's economy and that of the United States is not simply that China's is smaller; it has a different structure entirely.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very promising line of inquiry. It does not include the vital but poorly understood interactions among political-legal (integrity), socio-economic (fairness), ideo-cultural (education), and techno-demographic (balance), and natural-geographic (true cost, sustainability). As with most intellectual work these days, it is a thin slice across one dimension of very complex sphere–the world is NOT flat.
President Obama used his weekly address to announce steps to promote greater domestic oil production and reduce the burden of high gas prices. Republicans say it's not enough.
Whatever else we might say about Big Oil in the United States, we have to give the industry credit for one thing: it has mastered the art of scamming us with a perfectly straight face.
Pompeo and Labrador were joined by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Mike Needham of Heritage Action Fund. The two organizations joined a coalition of conservative groups in March, including Americans for Prosoperity, in a letter calling for an end to energy subsidies.
Click on Image to EnlargePhi Beta Iota: US politicians have substituted ideology for intelligence (decision-support) and borrowing for thinking. There is nothing intelligent in US energy policy, because there is no policy–just a long string of subsidies and hand-outs and tax exemptions. The oil drilling decisions are an example of doing the wrong thing righter, instead of the right thing (Russell Ackoff). The “policy” decisions are also hypocritical because nothing being decided today will have substantive effect in less than ten years. Here's what an intelligent government would use to think about energy futures…and everything else, all together.
The latest annual report to Congress (pdf) on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program details the soaring costs and deferred production schedule associated with the program. The report, which has not been publicly released, outlines total program costs from last year as well as per-aircraft costs and planned annual spending rates.
It's “a useful primer on the Pentagon's most expensive weapons program,” said one close observer of defense procurement.
Phi Beta Iota: Congress has abdicated its Article 1 responsibilities across the board, but particularly with respect to war and the cost of war. Coincident with the insanity of the US Intelligence Community claiming it can restrict the use of unclassified information in legal proceedings (See Drake Leak Case), what we have is a government that is “out of control” and incurring costs “in our name” that are unaffordable and often immoral as well as illegal. Transparency of true costs is a major foundation for sane democratic policies.
[The Freeman (March 2011). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Steven Ng, is available for download.]
The surge of federal economic interventions that occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency — the much-ballyhooed Great Society, whose centerpiece was the War on Poverty — differed from the four preceding surges, each of which had been sparked by war or economic depression. No national emergency prevailed when Johnson took office following John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. The nation was not engaged in a major shooting war, and the economy was on the mend after the mild recession of 1960-61. For the most part, the Great Society represented simply the culmination of economic, political, and intellectual developments stretching back as far as the 19th century.
