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Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: A Ponzi scheme is a financial scam that involves paying abnormally high returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. The entire financial system is equivalent to a gigantic Ponzi scheme; which include many interlinked subsiduary Ponzi schemes, such as the sub-prime crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, the derivatives crisis, etc.
James Bond has one that allows him to kill, drivers of cars are supposed to always have one on them, and gun owners are constantly complaining about how difficult it is to get or renew one.
While it may indeed often be an inconvenience to obtain them, licences play a very useful role in regulating the ownership and use of dangerous and potentially lethal tools such as vehicles and firearms.
Few would deny that it’s a good idea people should obtain licences before being allowed to pilot a few tons of metal down the highway at 120km/h, or that it should be ascertained whether someone has a criminal record or is mentally unstable before they are allowed to own and carry a lethal weapon.
It seems there is pretty much a consensus that when it comes to things that have the possibility to injure, kill or in any other way negatively impact the lives of people or society in general, regulation is desirable.
Considering this, there is one sort of licence that is conspicuous by its absence: a licence to breed.
Or procreate, to use the more acceptable term, for people seem to get quite upset when the rather mundane event of a human giving birth to a child is referred to in any way other than with the respect and awe usually reserved for describing some religious experience.
It is, after all, a miracle, isn’t it? A miracle that happens 150 times each minute.
But to be fair, the baby born this very second somewhere in the world is indeed unique – just like everyone else.
It is only common sense that this is a field of human activity that should be tightly regulated, yet the unemployed, uneducated idiot who is incapable of looking after a child considers it an inalienable right to bequeath on the world more of his genetic legacy.
And make no mistake, stupid people love to breed – people with low IQs have more children than those with high IQs.
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THE recent rumours about potential xenophobic violence after the World Cup are a puzzling throwback to a third force that bedevilled the 1980s at the height of opposition to apartheid. The evil has reared its head and smacks, as before, of central levers at work. It also raises questions about the role of security agencies and their part in preventing crime and safeguarding law and order.
Fears of xenophobic attacks are totally unnecessary. The National Intelligence Agency (NIA), police and army must handle delinquency and serious threats to state security — whether they are suspicions, rumours or reality. Any large-scale violence, including xenophobic violence, is their business and they should pre-emptively and promptly deal with any menace.
The head of the police service has already congratulated his troops for victory during the Fifa tournament — much crime was anticipated before the tournament, based on the influx of foreigners and internal experiences.
If the police succeeded at this task, surely they can repeat the feat by pre- empting xenophobic crimes. Stories of potential xenophobic threats follow previous attacks in 2008. While the fires from those attacks were still hot, the state hastily gave explanations and solutions.
The African National Congress (ANC) made xenophobia a “moral” issue, eschewing interpretations that it was based on material causes, such as jobs and housing, which ignite poor and stressed communities anywhere. No mention was made of the ethnic factor, as happens in conflicts, for example, in Nigeria, in the Balkans, and in SA’s history — among native blacks, white burgers and foreigners.
I have been working on a twelve step program to introduce the laws of thermodynamics to economists, here are the first few steps:
# 1. The candidate economist must go to a library. There he or she will notice spheres sitting on wooden stands. These represent the planet we live on: Earth. Spheres like Earth are by definition finite -- they only hold just so much stuff. Economists are required to memorize this key point and say it over and over, "The Earth only holds just so much stuff because it's a sphere. The Earth only holds just so much stuff because it's a sphere. The Earth only holds just so much stuff because it's a sphere. ..." Economists are required to say it over and over until he or she can remember it without peeking at notes.
Next, the economist is ready for his or her very first BIG scientific experiment! The economist is advised to stay calm, and be sure to get a good night's sleep before attempting the experiment.
# 2. Put a piece of cake on a plate.
# 3. Eat the cake.
# 4. See if you still have the cake.
Economists aren't used to empirical science and will have to do the experiment (#2 through #4) a few times before the implications finally sink in.
In her book, “Titanic”, author Stephanie Barcszewski described the exchange between Captain John Smith and the ship’s designer Thomas Andrew just over ten minutes after the collision with the lethal iceberg.
“Smith asked Andrews how long the Titanic had left and Andrews did some quick calculations: An hour and a half, possibly two. Not much longer.” That quick calculation was not far off. The ship sank two hours and forty minutes after it hit the iceberg, or roughly two hours and twenty minutes after Andrews made that grim pronouncement.
As there was no PA system on board the ship, Captain Smith issued immediate instructions to his crew to have passengers board the lifeboats, beginning with 1st class passengers of course. The Titanic was, after all, a microcosm of Edwardian society and 70% of third class people never saw a lifeboat that night. But then again, 40% in 1st class did not survive either, and I suspect that is a much lower percentage than that will perish in the imminent sinking of RMS Affluent Society. Rich ticket-holders will evidently launch off the first lifeboats half empty because they don’t believe in the fallibility of the ship.
But the point is, Captain John Smith sought an honest assessment of his ship’s condition, accepted it, and took whatever action he could to mitigate the scale of the disaster.
The new PM Julia Gillard's views on population growth were not known till this morning (27 June) when she is reported as rejecting the notion of "Big Australia".
She promises a significant reduction in immigration, and has renamed the Minister for Population Tony Burke (whom Rudd appointed a few months ago in what was probably a piece of window dressing). In future he is to be called " the Minister for Sustainable Population".
Members of Sustainable Population Australia remain cautious, with comments on Australia's on-line population forum including "At last a Prime minister who can read opinion polls" and "She talks the talk. It won't be long until we see whether she can walk the walk..." and "Might be rhetoric, but good to see some change in the stance."
However it is already clear (see the Age article below) that Julia Gillard is aware of public resistance to population growth; and we will learn in time if she is genuinely sympathetic to the public mood.
In her ability to "read the polls" Julia seems ahead of some of the commentators, who continue to deny that Rudd's "big Australia" rhetoric was a reason the public turned against him so decisively. Robert Boni comments on population forum:I cannot believe that the mass media analysis on Kevin Rudd's popularity free fall in the last couple of months, have all skipped population as a reason, and blamed his problems on an array of other issues. It's like some sort of conspiracy. It is unbelievable that his attitude on population had nothing to do with his popularity problems.
 Our high population growth, so beloved of both major parties, is straining resources and has turned the great Australian dream into a nightmare of haves and have-nots, says William Bourke. |
Our high population growth, so beloved of both major parties, is straining resources and has turned the great Australian dream into a nightmare of haves and have-nots, says William Bourke.
Australia is an open and tolerant country with a rich history in migration. But it is an illusion that Australia can absorb many more millions.
Even a basic assessment shows that Australia's more recent high population growth causes or exacerbates many of our major economic, environmental and social problems. Yet successive federal governments push it higher and higher.
There is no consulting the electorate. No real democracy. Most of our population growth is driven by a high level of immigration. This is something that the federal government directly controls.
We know that Kevin Rudd favours "a big Australia", with a population of 36 million by 2050. It was only a few years ago that the official 2050 projection was 23, then 28 million. The current growth rate would actually take us to about 45 million. What happens after 2050 on this slippery slope?
There are a number of half truths and financial fantasies floating around the U.S. today, which may explain why some have decided to throw caution to the wind, adopting a cult-like blind faith in the “unsinkable” American economy. I suspect that the consequences for this error in judgment will become quite clear to most by the end of next year, but until then, let’s examine our current situation, what the government has to say about it, and the reality they wish to gloss over.
It’s nice to maintain a rosy outlook on the economic situation we face. It makes us feel safe. The fact is, though, that we are far from safe, and denying the problem will not make it go away. The MSM’s main drive, at least for now, is to promote a sense of well being. Some of them do it because they believe the markets are driven by psychology and that by creating a positive atmosphere, we can somehow make our troubles disappear through shear force of will. Of course, this is an absurd notion.
Others ignore the facts and spin ideas of recovery deliberately and with malicious intent, because they know comfortable people are not alert, and those that are not alert are easy to surprise, and surprised people are easy to control.
 Slums have existed in what is now the developed world since the Industrial Revolution. Currently, about 36% of Africa's population lives in urban areas but the continent is experiencing urbanisation rates twice as high as those seen during the West's industrial revolution. It is predicted that Africa will be an urban continent by 2030. The UK government's Commission for Africa concluding report warned: “These slums are filled with an increasingly youthful population, unemployed and disaffected. Africa's cities are becoming a powder keg of potential instability and discontent.” -- “Operation Production” of Global Slum Dwellers; perhaps future Criminals & Terrorists? |
 Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater security firm (recently renamed Xe), at the company’s Virginia offices. Photograph by Nigel Parry. |
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.
“I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.
Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)
I am contacting you in the hope that during your visits to Zimbabwe and South Africa you will confront head on with your black interlocutors (some of whom will be regime stooges) the racist and murderous behaviour of Mugabe’s regime and the tacit encouragement given by Zuma’s regime to black racist murderers in South Africa. There exists the very real danger – you work for the BBC after all – that you will refuse to tackle these questions since the organisation for which you work insists on presenting an anodyne, rainbow-coloured picture of South Africa to the rest of the world rather than the gruesome and savage reality that exists.
Some six years ago I met a farmer’s wife, Betty her name was, who had just been thrown out of Zimbabwe. Her crime consisted in the fact that her husband and she were successful, white farmers. Here is what happened. One day a gang of so-called “war veterans” (“war veterans” is the term used by Mugabe’s regime to describe the roving gangs who plunder white-owned farms and kill the owners) turned up at her farm. She was told that her husband and she would be thrown out of the country in one hour. Her husband died on the spot of a heart attack. Betty was only permitted to gather up enough personal effects sufficient to fill a small, hand-held suitcase. She was then taken to the airport and put on a plane. Betty and her husband had lived all their lives in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Not long after Betty related this harrowing account to me she died, broken-hearted and alone.
Debating on racial issues is largely a one-way debate in modern society. Just about all the academics, politicians and Main Stream Media (MSM) institutions are advocates of Cultural relativism and Racial Egalitarianism. They believe in a fallacy and modern day superstition that all races are equal just like people in the Dark ages believed the earth was flat.
With credit tight and consumers still pinching their pennies, many business owners find they can't go on.
The actual number of small businesses in trouble is probably higher, experts said, because many owners file for personal bankruptcy rather than seek protection for the business.
Dennis McGoldrick, a bankruptcy lawyer in Torrance, said his clients are all stuck in similar situations -- capital is hard to come by, customers are tough to attract and debt is piling up.
"In this economy, anything that isn't a necessity is a tough business to be in," March said. "And the majority of my clients have waited too long to file for bankruptcy and in the process made things worse on themselves financially as a result."
 Michael Ruppert, at home with his friend, Rags, by Clara Tomkins. |
Independent journalist Michael Ruppert predicted the global recession. Now he's foreseeing an imminent energy crisis
Michael Ruppert proudly claims that he predicted the global economic slump more than four years ago in his self-published "From the Wilderness," a monthly news publication and Web site. A narcotics investigator for the Los Angeles police department in the 1970s, Mr. Ruppert left the department and spent years trying to expose links between the CIA and drug smuggling; after 9/11, he wrote the 2004 bestseller "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," published by New Society Publishers and a favorite among conspiracy theorists.
 Explosion of debt: Japan's public debt could reach as much as 270pc of GDP in the next two years. A bullet train is pictured speeding past Mount Fuji in Fuji city, west of Tokyo Photo: Reuters |
Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.
In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.
Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.
"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.
Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – When work began in 2004 to build the world's tallest tower, Dubai's confidence also was sky high with a host of mega-projects on the drawing board or rising from the sands.
The financial crisis provoked a global front to stimulate economies through massive spending. But this was fuelled by a staggering amount of borrowing. Now governments are realizing that a new calamity looms - higher taxes and slashed social programs Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.Do you observe any of these symptoms in your "real world"? If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot. |
I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.
 Is gross mismanagement of the nation's energy policy an impeachable offense? |
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.
 Frequencies of the CCR5 allele |
EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF PERSONS WITH THE CCR5 DELTA-32 MUTATIONThe delta-32 mutation of the CCR5 receptor gene is present in up to 20% of the white population worldwide.8 Persons who have 2 copies of this mutant gene have been shown to be highly resistant to HIV infection; those with a single copy can be infected but experience an attenuated course of disease.9
-- The AIDS Reader
 Plaque commemorating Black Plague |
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KaffirLilyRiddle: F(x)population x F(x)consumption = END:CIV | Human Farming: Story of Your Enslavement (13:10) |
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US Army: Population vs. Resource Scarcity Study Plan | Human Farming Management: Fake Left v. Right (02:09) |
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2006: US Army Strategy for Environment | |
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Peak Non-Renewable Resources = END:CIV Scarcity Future |
