Apparently some of the moderators tonight prefer blue. (matrix reference)
I take the stand that "it's not our job to police the world". While we're off screwing up Iraq, social problems here at home are only getting worse. Bad things happen in the world. The only place we have the power to fix them is here at home. Interventions in foreign countries only tend to make things worse - women's status in Iraq pre- and post-invasion, for example.
Do some reading about the history of the Balkans, moron.
Seeing as how the victors write the history books, I'm not too sure what to believe. I do know that we had an exchange student from Macedonia for a semester, and he had no love lost for Billy Clinton. I wasn't around much at the time, so I don't know specifically what his perspective was. Found an old email address, perhaps I should write.
The U.S.-led destruction of Yugoslavia fits nicely into the conspiratorial overview of the covert power games btwn west and east...
So Milosovich was valiant anti-imperialist? Right.
One theory is that Milosovich was winning his war-crimes trial at the Hague, and was going to call Bill Clinton as a hostile witness in his defense. Mighty convenient that he died of a 'heart attack'. But what do I know, I'm just the jester on the sidelines.
And the Islamists are striking a blow against imperialism? By stoning women to death? Or chanting Islam is a religion of peace!! and shooting a 75 year old nun?
The controlled media picks up on the worst-of-the-worst in the islamic world, to make sure 'we' look down on 'them' as primitive. There are plenty of examples of nasty people in our own midst - who are we to look down on bad-apple islamists shooting a nun, when two American Highschoolers slaughtered 10 buddhist monks in a petty war game/robbery?
... as far as the current system goes. Rigged elections are nothing new in America - why would the electioneers give up their control over the outcome voluntarily?
No, for "we the people" to get fair, honest elections, the entire crooked Feral government has to collapse first. The clean up crew can then round up George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the rest of the globalist NeoCons, and turn them into NeoConvicts, for their warcrimes and other crimes against humanity. Bill Clinton for carpet bombing Serbia, the current crew for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq & elsewhere.
Fortunately, the world's only superpower isn't much of a superpower anymore. Not only is the economy on its last legs before a much-needed correction, but our leaders have abdicated the moral high ground. Our government is now little more than a jackbooted thug, a Goliath picking on people in all corners of the world. But there are a couple groups with slingshots to keep the balance, so all's well.
Crooked elections are the least of our worries, at this point - been there, done that, look what we got. I'm looking forward to Bush & Co. getting their due.
The question we should be asking, is why is US growth so low, and how can we fix it.
Your post has the answer to your question:
Contrary to popular belief, a substantial amount of engineering for Dell is done in the US, not in Taiwan. Employees have constructed an effective wall to foreign design centers and have actually left the company any time mgmt has tried to tear it down (thanks to HP for showing employees what to be afraid of).
Dell is an exception, rather than the rule. Jobs have been fleeing the United States for years... First it was manufacturing, then engineering/technology too. Foodservice and low-level Health Care positions don't pay nearly as well as manufacturing, IT, or engineering used to. Wages in the jobs that are still in North America are being squeezed by competition from low-wage China and elsewhere.
There's no chance of fixing the economy now - the time for action was in 1992/1993, when Traitor Bush the Elder first negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement and Traitor Clinton pushed the NAFTA implementation bills through the congress. Or in 1995 when the World Trade Organization was first organized. Or in the 80's, when Reagan (really, Puppet Master Bush the Elder) was printing money to pay for his military buildup. Or in the late 60's/early 70's, when the Feral Government was printing money to pay for the Vietnam war. Or even more recently, when Traitor Bush the Junior negotiated the Central American Free Trade Agreement (and others).
There's also the hordes of illegal immigrants (encouraged by the corptocracy) depressing working class wages... But vdare was yesterday's story...
The best we can do now is elect a congress who will impeach/convict the Bush/Cheney junta. Tell your friends - Fire the [republican] incumbents, the Bush depression has already begun.
Economic restructuring is a good thing, because many of us are miserable in the current political/economic climate. Look at the people you see out in WalMart's isles: fat & sick, and looking for satisfaction in meaningless trinkets. Going to get a little rough, but it will certainly be worth the struggle in the end.
I've some earthboxes and seeds, so I won't be entirely dependant on produce shipments from far away, picked by mexican slave labor.
These earthbox pictures are from 3 weeks ago (start with the last picture). The plants are coming along nicely, and I'll be harvesting my first lettuce & tomatos soon (I'm in the desert southwest, so the plant-killing summer heat has just recently abated).
Why is everyone so sureal. Any look at the numbers is just terrible, do people understand that the dollar can't make it as a global reserve currency for more than a few more years and likely can't make it as a currency at all within the next decade?
I add to a list of quotes every so often, and I noticed this one a couple days back:
Greg: Another chapter in your book is, "Death by Denial." People seem to be in total denial as far as what's making them sick and overweight. Is that what you touch on in this chapter?
Carolyn: Yes. I even refer to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work on the five stages of death and dying that people go through. When it comes to the death of our society, the death of our culture, we are in complete denial of what's going on. You see, we don't think governments or business could be that sinister -- that they would rather make money than be concerned about human health. Instead of accepting this fact, people have put their head in the sand. They've got to wake up to the reality that the government and corporations are corrupt and simply don't care about our health. What Marshall McLuhan said is that only puny secrets need protection. **Big secrets are protected by public incredulity, and that's where we are now.**
While the context is about health, the statement about "public incredulity" is equally applicable to the coming banking collapse. Most people seem to think that "the United States are too big to fail"... Aren't they going to be in for a surprise.
Newsflash: infinite budget deficits are unsustainable. The rest of the world has been financing the twin deficits (Feral Government budget deficit and the trade/current account deficit) for decades. Sooner or later China will pull the rug out from under the U.S. economy, perhaps when they figure they've taken all the industrial capacity they can get and we're no longer useful to them.
I'm using this opprotunity to load my credit card with useful things. Bought ten earthboxes a few weeks back, and dirt/fertilizer/plants/etc. When the system finally goes, I'll have some tasty vegetables, to go with a couple sacks of dry beans/rice/wheat.
pictures of my earthboxen (start with the last picture)... These were from 3 weeks ago, going to put some more recent pics up soon.
What did that poor penny ever do to you?
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But that's only the beginning of why pennies ought to be eliminated.
Rather than focusing on waging war against the poor humble penny, why not focus your attention on the federal policies that have made it nearly worthless? I'm talking about perpetual deficits and the federal reserve printing 'dollars' like there's no tomorrow.
If we had a rational monetary system in the U.S., there couldn't have been a housing bubble, nor a tech bubble... Take a look at this graph of the (m3) money supply - there is an inflection point is right around 1/1995, when the federal reserve started 'printing' money. The tech bubble followed soon thereafter. After that bubble popped, all that money started flowing into housing. Now a lot of people are getting screwed because they can't afford their two investment houses and the condo in the mountains, and can't sell because they're now upside down. Sure, it's their own fault for overextending themselves, but it's mainly the bank's fault for lending them the money to make it possible.
My comment was not directly about the MMR vaccine. It was about vaccines in general, and the connection of Thimerosal (vaccine preservative) to autism. One cause of autism is likely the preservative in the package, not the MMR-component of the vaccine itself.
As for disease control/elimination: vaccines take credit where none is due. If you look at a graph of the number of cases in an epidemic, the vaccine shows up just as the disease was burning itself out.
As for polio, there is a good case for it being caused by excessive sugar consumption/malnutrition. Healthy bodies don't come down with severe cases of teh polio. Or teh mumps. They recover rapidly from smallpox. I had 10 poxes once, so mom (registered nurse) figured I'd had my case of chicken pox. Some kids get covered w/ chicken poxes - what's the difference?
Speaking of which - my mother recently had a case of Shingles (chicken pox virus re-activates and causes trouble). She's 53, and shingles is usually an old-person disease. There are a couple things that weaken the immune systems allowing for shingles, one being stress. Much better to keep and train a healthy immune system, than rely on potions from far away.
Vaccines frequently fail:
My two-year-old daughter had mumps in February - diagnosis was confirmed in hospital although no explanation given as to why the MMR vaccine had failed. My seven-year-old, who had MMR at 14 months and the pre-school booster is suffering now. Justine, Buckinghamshire
People seem to be under the misapprehension that it individuals who have not been vaccinated against mumps who are being affected. This is simply not true. All my children had all their vaccination as and when they should have. My 17 year old son is just recovering from mumps. Is this vaccination really that successful? Linda, York
I was born in 1986, and I have had the MMR and a booster, yet I still had mumps last November, along with many other students at my university who had also had the MMR, so it seems even those who have been vaccinated are at risk. Lindsey, Cambridge
For more people to be truly healthy, we need an ideological shift. Right now people believe that health is external - something you have until you lose it, and the only way to get it back is with a pill or a surgery. Vaccines and antibiotics are like shields against viruses & bacteria which can come and take anyone's health away.
It's really more accurate to say that health comes from within. Attitudes & beliefs affect health, as does diet & structure. When all the different factors are aligned for the production of health & wellbeing, the individual Doesn't worry about becoming sick, because their bodily systems are perfectly capable of staying in balance.
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
I don't know the historical scale of vaccination, but I do know that 50 years ago we didn't inject infants and children on a regular schedule with doses of Thimerosal, a type of mercury. Perhaps it was the late 70's/early 80's when mass-vaccination really started to take off.
There are a lot of reports by parents who directly observed changes in their kids following the injection of one vaccine or another. I, for one, think that this a much stronger correlation than "tv causes autism".
Follow the money, and we'll know why autism is so prevalent. Pharmaceuticals are facing billions of dollars in lawsuits - is it any wonder they find some shills to laugh and ridicule what will likely, someday soon, be considered obvious?
Another quote:
Greg: Another chapter in your book is, "Death by Denial." People seem to be in total denial as far as what's making them sick and overweight. Is that what you touch on in this chapter?
Carolyn: Yes. I even refer to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work on the five stages of death and dying that people go through. When it comes to the death of our society, the death of our culture, we are in complete denial of what's going on. You see, we don't think governments or business could be that sinister -- that they would rather make money than be concerned about human health. Instead of accepting this fact, people have put their head in the sand. They've got to wake up to the reality that the government and corporations are corrupt and simply don't care about our health. What Marshall McLuhan said is that only puny secrets need protection. **Big secrets are protected by public incredulity, and that's where we are now.**
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
It's worth noting that lung cancer rates only exploded post-WWII. People had been smoking for thousands of years, but lung cancer was a relative unknown.
The change was that some years before manure, which had been used for fertilizer on the tobacco plants, was requisitioned for the war effort (gunpowder, explosives or whatever). Tobacco companies had to switch to Rock Phosphate to fertilize their plants. They liked it because their tobacco plants grew quicker & bigger, with less labor invested in gathering animal dung.
You don't hear much about the downfall: rock phosphate has low levels of natural radioactivity. Tobacco plants concentrate radioactive ions in their leaves... A dose or two of rock phosphate isn't much for concern, but when applied to the same fields year after year, the radiation levels in the plants have become significant.
With that said, I Don't smoke, never have, and Don't encourage it. If I did smoke, I would buy organic tobacco (American Spirit, for example) and roll my own, or perhaps "stuff my own", into a pre-rolled paper w/ a filter, like my college roommate did. It's cheaper, much much healthier to boot, and you know exactly what you're inhaling (that's a reference to cigarette companies putting all sorts of weird chemicals in their products).
Search for 'radioactive tobacco' for more information.
I don't know if it'd do anything for you, but whenever I incur a deep cut, I apply some DMSO as soon as I can. DMSO is known to speed wound healing, and prevent scar formation.
I once stood up from a chair into the corner of an open cabinet door. I could feel the blood pooling on my forehead, so I went to a nearby mirror. "That's going to leave a nice scar." I put some DMSO on a cotton pad (organic, because cotton crops get a lot of pesticides...) and applied it to my forehead. It burned a bit, but this was expected.
What I didn't expect was the virtual cauterization of the somewhat deep divot in my forehead. The 'hole' leaked lymphatic fluid for the next day or two, but the bleeding stopped right after the application of DMSO.
Don't know anything about how specifically DMSO stops my bleeding, (not a featured use on the literature page), but I've used on several different cuts, and it always slows the bleeding substantially.
I suggest getting the gel for occasional use. Call or visit your local natural food store, or the local horse supply store (tell them it's for your dog, as DMSO is only approved for a certain bladder condition in humans).
I too got scammed on the shake light... Bought one at the gun show, showed my grandfather. He wanted some too (gifts), so I got a couple more. When I got home, I pulled them all out of their boxes to make sure they worked... And one had a busted switch. Took it apart, and found batteries in my shakelight. Sure was disappointed.
Anyways, went to another gun show, and saw a booth with all sorts of LED light stuff. The guy had a strip of white LEDs for undercounter lighting, and LED conversion kits for Maglite flashlights (made in the USA). I picked up a light strip, and was looking all over for the 'made in china' label, and couldn't find it! Later the owner's son came up and told me that they built most their products locally. The guy used to work for Intel, got tired of the corporate life, and started designing LED setups instead.
I went over to his house, and saw his little workshop... He was employing a highschooler to assemble the setups he'd designed.
Anyways - he also sold some 'made in china' LED products. Told him about my disappointment with the shakelight, and he sells a 'generator' light that has a small electric motor and capacitors. I got one and took it apart to look for batteries.
Next time you're emergency flashlight shopping, look for a crank and you'll probably be okay.:)
In many cultures, childhood ends at puberty. Thereafter comes adulthood. Call it probationary adulthood if you like, but the person was expected to act like an adult.
Today in the United States, we treat people as children until they're 18/21. In some states they're allowed to stop going to the government school at age 16, other states lock 'em up in the name of "educating" them. Is it any wonder that, as John Gatto points out, many people never really grow up?
Sure, monitor your pre-pubescent kids' instant messaging. But if you want your kids to ever grow up, you'll have to act like you expect them to.
Didn't the lower cost of building all the components there help to decrease the prices of computing, encouraging demand. And wasn't the continuosly lowered cost of infrastructure/equipment an integral part of the computing/technological/information/internet revolution. Which incredibly benefited the US economically. Which provided jobs and increased jobs and increased pay scale during the late 90's and early 2000's.
pehaps, but I think the influence of cheap imported goods (including/especially computer equipment) is analogous to using liquid oxygen to start your barbeque. To get your grill going, you could either put a couple pounds of charcoal on, start it the regular way and wait, or put 60 pounds of charcoal on, add a burning match, dump liquid oxygen on it, and *poof*, instantly ready for grilling.
But if you do things the slow way you'll have 50 extra pounds of charcoal, for the next five times you want to barbeque.
No, federal mismanagement of the economy is equivalent to dumping liquid oxygen on the coals. Not a very sustainable thing to do. See my other posts in this story.
You benefited from it, now its someone else turns.
Most of "us" have not benefited from globablization. The goal has always been to concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite, and to make everyone else poorer. Globalization has been especially harsh to native peoples. Not everyone desires a western lifestyle, you know.
A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level.
I think a good old-fashioned econmic collapse is in our future. Mandeville wrote his book in 2003, and says the 2006 collapse is right on track (housing market, for example). This will be a good thing, as it will re-level the economic playing field. Not exactly fun, of course, but very necessary.
Read something a while back: countries that don't produce goods don't need engineers to design them. Hence the movement of R&D offshore, of which you speak.
I think the best first step is to get rid of the federal reserve banking system. Fiat currencies (paper money) are the direct cause of massive trade imbalances between the United States and the rest of the world.
Consider that the only reason Chinese goods are still cheap is because they've pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar at a fixed ratio. In a free market currency system, as the trade imbalance with China grew, the dollar would have become worth progressively less. Chinese goods would have become progressively more expensive, and WalMart et al would've thought harder about whether it was prudent to shift production overseas.
But the free market is dead, and has been for a long long time. Imperialists spent the entire 20th century hijacking the American 'ship of state', and now non-aligned foreign leaders like Hugo Chavez are our only hope.:)
I don't agree. IMHO, the government was used to rig the economic playing field. See 1970's, redux. Summary: federal reserve has been inflating the money supply since 1995. First came the dot com bubble, then the dot com crash. Recession! Then there came a "terrorist" attack, and Alan Greenspan and his merry band of fools cut interest rates to next-to-nothing. Because production had already been moving offshore (fleeing teh inflation), this new injection of money flowed into... housing. If teh government hadn't already screwed the economy up, stimulus would've fincanced new production lines & the like. Now the media is finally picking up on the fact that there is a problem with housing bubbles, but they're a little late to realize such, and they still don't realize that the inflation in prices was directly caused by
I agree but it isn't just about cost. 30+ years ago "Made in the USA" meant quality. Does anyone see it that way today? Often people are willing to pay more for things produced overseas because of higher quality.
It's not that they have higher quality in Japan/China/Germany/etc, but that they've been getting all the investment for new equipment. New equipment and production processes result in higher quality.
As an interesting aside, note those three countries' position on the CIA's ranked order of Current account balance. Then read the list until you find the United States. Is it any wonder that companies try to move as much as possible offshore? (Link courtesy of the latest What We Now Know).
good points... These charities are disinclined to actually "cure" the problem for which they raise money, as they'd be causing their own irrelevancy.
Also, from the information I've read, both breast cancer and aids are non-issues.
A large part of the breast cancer cases in the west stem from a single fasion accessory: the brassiere. Bras (especially the kind with underwires) restrict the flow of lymphatic fluid in the breast. See A Pinch of Cancer: Can Wearing a Bra Kill You?. Also worth noting is the theory that bracing the breasts (with a bra) causes them to sag moreso than they would without the artificial support, the theory being that the tendons wither away when the bra removes the need for them to hold the breast up. Or something like that.
Well aware that their findings were "explosive," the Singers sent their survey results to the heads of America's most prestigious cancer organizations and institutes. None responded. Like the cancer business, the bra business is huge. Multiply how many worldwide women buy several $25 bras every year and you end up with a multiple of the $6 billion-a-year US bra business.
Syd Singer says that establishment censorship of the bra-breast cancer connection is killing women. Pointing to the biggest commonality among breast cancer patients, he's emphatic that it's bra-squeezed lymphatics.
Going bra-less for all occasions, Soma began dressing to de-emphasize her breasts. She also began regular breast massage and bicycle riding, vitamin and herbal supplementation, and drinking only purified water.
Two months later, her lump disappeared.
At the first frightening sign of a lump, an angry Syd Singer says, "women should take their bras off before they take their breasts off." Why wait, when you can liberate your lymphatics now.
IF YOU MUST WEAR A BRA:
Push-up and sports bras are out. Choose loose-fitting cotton bras. Make sure you can slip two fingers under the shoulder-straps and side-panels. The higher the side-panels, the more severe the restriction of major lymph nodes. Don't wear this disastrous device to sleep. Take it off at home. Massage your breasts every time you remove your bra. Sing your lymphatics into health -- or at least breathe deeply.
Some cases of breast cancer are unrelated to the undergarment, of course, but this is a big point that gets overlooked.
As for AIDS, the first cases in the U.S. were amongst homosexual drug users. Not exactly the country's healthiest population. To be diagnosed with AIDS in the U.S., someone has to test positive for HIV and have several other diseases too. The alternate theory is that HIV is really just a marker for some other problem, and not the cause of the problem itself - similar to a fever being indicative of having the flu. See this LA Times story on a HIV+ homosexual drug addict who passed on the usual drug therapy (AZT killed more patients than HIV ever did), and is doing just fine 17 years later.
Malnutrition abounds in Africa... They don't do HIV tests in Africa ($), so the deaths from hunger/malnutrition/tuberculosis/etc get re-labeled as "AIDS". Seems to me to be a political thing. Africa would receive a 1000x more benefit from clean water and nutrition campaigns than AIDS drugs.
Remove hard drive first, nuke it yourself. Only way to be sure.
How would I go about obtaining a nuke? Should I start collecting smoke detectors?
I've got a bunch of old hard drives that need the data wiped. Wouldn't it just be simpler to hold it up to a rare-earth magnet? Would I have to take the cover off?
Excellent analysis. I've just one little point that I'd like to reply to:
You americans are spending your capital, and taken to it's extreme it means that you will no longer own your economy.
'We [poor] americans' are simply playing along in an economy that's rigged to benefit bankers and globalists, mostly because we don't know any better, and partially because it's hard to break out of the trap when 'everyone else' doesn't realize that there's a problem.
The banker/populace tension really goes back to the revolutionary war, according to Misdirection Conspiracy (link in this post. When word that the british had surrendered spread to New York City, people went skipping through the streets, chanting how the colony had kicked the mother country out... But the banking class, who enjoyed a certain degree of privledge under british rule, muttered under their breath: "but we like the british...", and starting plotting America's return to the British Empire. War of 1812, Rhodes Scholarships (Bill Clinton), Bilderberg, etc.
One objective has always been to establish a national bank. I'm a little sketchy on ups and downs of the national bank, but the Federal Reserve bank is the current incarnation thereof. It's supposedly "public", but the congress only gets to appoint the board as figureheads, and the bankers choose acceptable candidates anyways, so the "congressional oversight" is meaningless.
This is a long-term process, so don't get all disappointed when the economy doesn't assplode next year.
It's taken a very long time to get to where we are today (most of a century), and I'm sure the end of the present economic order is very near - certainly within 6 months. Then again, we might see a 1929-style "black thursday" in October, what with the way housing & everything else is breaking down. The media (owned by the banking class) try to hide the signals that recession is imminent, but independent analysis online is getting the word out to people that seek. See Mish's blog, the Daily Reckoning, etc.
I do know that the housing rush is due in part (or maybe entirely due to) the across-the-board drop in prices for consumer items. Thanks to cheap Chinese manufacturing ($35 microwave anyone?), Americans have a lot more room in their budgets to buy a house.
The recent inflation of housing prices was clearly precipitated by the federal reserve slashing interest rates to 1% starting in 2001. This was previously covered in the 'canary' post linked to in my original in this thread. Your reasoning here leaves me... baffled. Americans [used to] buy a microwave once a decade (my grandfather's 'nuker is 25 years old), so the difference between a $500 microwave and a $35 microwave (that they might replace every 2 years because it's a piece of 'caca') is irrelevant in terms of a repeating monthly $1000 mortgage payment ($150k loan, 30 years, 7% interest).
In the 'canary' post I also linked to a report from the frontline of the industry that indicates the bubble is already collapsing. Mish has some good analysis on his blog; you might want to read some of his other posts.
I always thought that exporting our manufacturing jobs was the method of "smarting up" the population. Seriously: why are any Americans still sitting at an assembly line, acting like robots?
Gatto's work clearly indicates that Americans only sat/sit at assembly lines because the 'corptocracy' (corporate interests + government) set up government schools to 'dumb us down' so that we'd tolerate meaningless work. You can't 'smart up' the population without disassembling the government school institution first.
Seems that the Chinese people don't need much in the way of mindful services provided by Americans. I think this is indicative of a problem. Do you?
No, they just can't afford our services. Yet.
Hello? They own our economy (via the trade deficit), and they 'can't afford our services'? I'm just wondering what americans do that the chinese can't learn to do for themselves.
Production is an essential aspect of any economy. The current status quo won't last much longer - either find a useful economic model, or be confused by the inevitable economic realignment.
I suppose you don't believe in the "housing bubble" either.
and because we're exporting all the mindless jobs (read: assembly lines, manufacturing) to the countries whose technology levels have risen high enough to accept them.
If you check the numbers, I'm sure you'll notice that the negative trade balance with the country we've exported many of our "mindless jobs" to is now at a record level. Seems that the Chinese people don't need much in the way of mindful services provided by Americans. I think this is indicative of a problem. Do you?
And if you think the american economy is crappy... well you don't live here and you have no idea. I can't complain...
If you get out of your little tunnel and open your eyes, you'll find that the economy is not so great. Real wages have been going down since the 70's (following the start of the outsourcing trend), and many of our fellow americans have been financing the difference. In the last couple of years, this means Adjustable Rate Mortgages to afford payments on a house, 0% auto loans, growing credit card debts, growing trade deficits, growing federal budget deficits.
America has a problem with debt.
gas is cheap again and I take home more than it costs me to live...
I believe that the two oil guys in the whitehouse talked with their buddies in the industry to get a little help on election day.
could you explain what's stopping you from starting your own worker-owned cooperative *right now*?
I guess there's nothing stopping the formation of cooperatives, so much as that the system is set up to favor the formation of corporations. This includes corporate privledges (for example: no shareholder liablity for corporate fuckups - government picks up the tab if the corporation leaves a big mess after it dissolves), and a school system designed to create worker-drones (see Gatto link in original post).
Also, raising capital typically means borrowing it from a bank/venture capitalists. So, unless one's "large group of friends" includes multiple multi-millionaires, raising capital certainly involves creating corporate shareholders to start any significant business venture. At the very least, the bank parasitically benefits because of its legal privledge to create the money it loaned (via fractional reserve banking), redistributing the loan interest to its shareholders...
I know a guy who created a couple shell corporations (LLCs) to borrow money for a restaurant building, the rational being that if the venture was to fail (get sued/etc), he wouldn't be left holding the entire bag. Typical thinking in the corporate age...
You'd be interested in the Shadow Stats guy (link in that post).
Just assembled a comment in another thread in this story; you might find something interesting there too.
This economic correction will be hard to ride out - think "greater depression". A real 'new economy' is coming our way, but the old one's leaving kicking and screaming...
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently some of the moderators tonight prefer blue. (matrix reference)
I take the stand that "it's not our job to police the world". While we're off screwing up Iraq, social problems here at home are only getting worse. Bad things happen in the world. The only place we have the power to fix them is here at home. Interventions in foreign countries only tend to make things worse - women's status in Iraq pre- and post-invasion, for example.
Do some reading about the history of the Balkans, moron.
Seeing as how the victors write the history books, I'm not too sure what to believe. I do know that we had an exchange student from Macedonia for a semester, and he had no love lost for Billy Clinton. I wasn't around much at the time, so I don't know specifically what his perspective was. Found an old email address, perhaps I should write.
The U.S.-led destruction of Yugoslavia fits nicely into the conspiratorial overview of the covert power games btwn west and east...
So Milosovich was valiant anti-imperialist?
Right.
One theory is that Milosovich was winning his war-crimes trial at the Hague, and was going to call Bill Clinton as a hostile witness in his defense. Mighty convenient that he died of a 'heart attack'. But what do I know, I'm just the jester on the sidelines.
And the Islamists are striking a blow against imperialism? By stoning women to death? Or chanting Islam is a religion of peace!! and shooting a 75 year old nun?
The controlled media picks up on the worst-of-the-worst in the islamic world, to make sure 'we' look down on 'them' as primitive. There are plenty of examples of nasty people in our own midst - who are we to look down on bad-apple islamists shooting a nun, when two American Highschoolers slaughtered 10 buddhist monks in a petty war game/robbery?
NAFTA is the least of Clinton's transgressions: Who Said Clinton Didn't Kill Anybody?
... as far as the current system goes. Rigged elections are nothing new in America - why would the electioneers give up their control over the outcome voluntarily?
No, for "we the people" to get fair, honest elections, the entire crooked Feral government has to collapse first. The clean up crew can then round up George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the rest of the globalist NeoCons, and turn them into NeoConvicts, for their warcrimes and other crimes against humanity. Bill Clinton for carpet bombing Serbia, the current crew for the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq & elsewhere.
Fortunately, the world's only superpower isn't much of a superpower anymore. Not only is the economy on its last legs before a much-needed correction, but our leaders have abdicated the moral high ground. Our government is now little more than a jackbooted thug, a Goliath picking on people in all corners of the world. But there are a couple groups with slingshots to keep the balance, so all's well.
Crooked elections are the least of our worries, at this point - been there, done that, look what we got. I'm looking forward to Bush & Co. getting their due.
The question we should be asking, is why is US growth so low, and how can we fix it.
Your post has the answer to your question:
Contrary to popular belief, a substantial amount of engineering for Dell is done in the US, not in Taiwan. Employees have constructed an effective wall to foreign design centers and have actually left the company any time mgmt has tried to tear it down (thanks to HP for showing employees what to be afraid of).
Dell is an exception, rather than the rule. Jobs have been fleeing the United States for years... First it was manufacturing, then engineering/technology too. Foodservice and low-level Health Care positions don't pay nearly as well as manufacturing, IT, or engineering used to. Wages in the jobs that are still in North America are being squeezed by competition from low-wage China and elsewhere.
There's no chance of fixing the economy now - the time for action was in 1992/1993, when Traitor Bush the Elder first negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement and Traitor Clinton pushed the NAFTA implementation bills through the congress. Or in 1995 when the World Trade Organization was first organized. Or in the 80's, when Reagan (really, Puppet Master Bush the Elder) was printing money to pay for his military buildup. Or in the late 60's/early 70's, when the Feral Government was printing money to pay for the Vietnam war. Or even more recently, when Traitor Bush the Junior negotiated the Central American Free Trade Agreement (and others).
There's also the hordes of illegal immigrants (encouraged by the corptocracy) depressing working class wages... But vdare was yesterday's story...
The best we can do now is elect a congress who will impeach/convict the Bush/Cheney junta. Tell your friends - Fire the [republican] incumbents, the Bush depression has already begun.
Economic restructuring is a good thing, because many of us are miserable in the current political/economic climate. Look at the people you see out in WalMart's isles: fat & sick, and looking for satisfaction in meaningless trinkets. Going to get a little rough, but it will certainly be worth the struggle in the end.
I've some earthboxes and seeds, so I won't be entirely dependant on produce shipments from far away, picked by mexican slave labor.
These earthbox pictures are from 3 weeks ago (start with the last picture). The plants are coming along nicely, and I'll be harvesting my first lettuce & tomatos soon (I'm in the desert southwest, so the plant-killing summer heat has just recently abated).
I add to a list of quotes every so often, and I noticed this one a couple days back:
While the context is about health, the statement about "public incredulity" is equally applicable to the coming banking collapse. Most people seem to think that "the United States are too big to fail"... Aren't they going to be in for a surprise.
Newsflash: infinite budget deficits are unsustainable. The rest of the world has been financing the twin deficits (Feral Government budget deficit and the trade/current account deficit) for decades. Sooner or later China will pull the rug out from under the U.S. economy, perhaps when they figure they've taken all the industrial capacity they can get and we're no longer useful to them.
I'm using this opprotunity to load my credit card with useful things. Bought ten earthboxes a few weeks back, and dirt/fertilizer/plants/etc. When the system finally goes, I'll have some tasty vegetables, to go with a couple sacks of dry beans/rice/wheat.
pictures of my earthboxen (start with the last picture)... These were from 3 weeks ago, going to put some more recent pics up soon.
But that's only the beginning of why pennies ought to be eliminated.
Oh, how I long for the day that a penny could buy something meaningful...
Rather than focusing on waging war against the poor humble penny, why not focus your attention on the federal policies that have made it nearly worthless? I'm talking about perpetual deficits and the federal reserve printing 'dollars' like there's no tomorrow.
If we had a rational monetary system in the U.S., there couldn't have been a housing bubble, nor a tech bubble... Take a look at this graph of the (m3) money supply - there is an inflection point is right around 1/1995, when the federal reserve started 'printing' money. The tech bubble followed soon thereafter. After that bubble popped, all that money started flowing into housing. Now a lot of people are getting screwed because they can't afford their two investment houses and the condo in the mountains, and can't sell because they're now upside down. Sure, it's their own fault for overextending themselves, but it's mainly the bank's fault for lending them the money to make it possible.
As for disease control/elimination: vaccines take credit where none is due. If you look at a graph of the number of cases in an epidemic, the vaccine shows up just as the disease was burning itself out.
As for polio, there is a good case for it being caused by excessive sugar consumption/malnutrition. Healthy bodies don't come down with severe cases of teh polio. Or teh mumps. They recover rapidly from smallpox. I had 10 poxes once, so mom (registered nurse) figured I'd had my case of chicken pox. Some kids get covered w/ chicken poxes - what's the difference?
Speaking of which - my mother recently had a case of Shingles (chicken pox virus re-activates and causes trouble). She's 53, and shingles is usually an old-person disease. There are a couple things that weaken the immune systems allowing for shingles, one being stress. Much better to keep and train a healthy immune system, than rely on potions from far away.
Vaccines frequently fail:
For more people to be truly healthy, we need an ideological shift. Right now people believe that health is external - something you have until you lose it, and the only way to get it back is with a pill or a surgery. Vaccines and antibiotics are like shields against viruses & bacteria which can come and take anyone's health away.
It's really more accurate to say that health comes from within. Attitudes & beliefs affect health, as does diet & structure. When all the different factors are aligned for the production of health & wellbeing, the individual Doesn't worry about becoming sick, because their bodily systems are perfectly capable of staying in balance.
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
I don't know the historical scale of vaccination, but I do know that 50 years ago we didn't inject infants and children on a regular schedule with doses of Thimerosal, a type of mercury. Perhaps it was the late 70's/early 80's when mass-vaccination really started to take off.
There are a lot of reports by parents who directly observed changes in their kids following the injection of one vaccine or another. I, for one, think that this a much stronger correlation than "tv causes autism".
Follow the money, and we'll know why autism is so prevalent. Pharmaceuticals are facing billions of dollars in lawsuits - is it any wonder they find some shills to laugh and ridicule what will likely, someday soon, be considered obvious?
Another quote:
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
It's worth noting that lung cancer rates only exploded post-WWII. People had been smoking for thousands of years, but lung cancer was a relative unknown.
The change was that some years before manure, which had been used for fertilizer on the tobacco plants, was requisitioned for the war effort (gunpowder, explosives or whatever). Tobacco companies had to switch to Rock Phosphate to fertilize their plants. They liked it because their tobacco plants grew quicker & bigger, with less labor invested in gathering animal dung.
You don't hear much about the downfall: rock phosphate has low levels of natural radioactivity. Tobacco plants concentrate radioactive ions in their leaves... A dose or two of rock phosphate isn't much for concern, but when applied to the same fields year after year, the radiation levels in the plants have become significant.
With that said, I Don't smoke, never have, and Don't encourage it. If I did smoke, I would buy organic tobacco (American Spirit, for example) and roll my own, or perhaps "stuff my own", into a pre-rolled paper w/ a filter, like my college roommate did. It's cheaper, much much healthier to boot, and you know exactly what you're inhaling (that's a reference to cigarette companies putting all sorts of weird chemicals in their products).
Search for 'radioactive tobacco' for more information.
I don't know if it'd do anything for you, but whenever I incur a deep cut, I apply some DMSO as soon as I can. DMSO is known to speed wound healing, and prevent scar formation.
I once stood up from a chair into the corner of an open cabinet door. I could feel the blood pooling on my forehead, so I went to a nearby mirror. "That's going to leave a nice scar." I put some DMSO on a cotton pad (organic, because cotton crops get a lot of pesticides...) and applied it to my forehead. It burned a bit, but this was expected.
What I didn't expect was the virtual cauterization of the somewhat deep divot in my forehead. The 'hole' leaked lymphatic fluid for the next day or two, but the bleeding stopped right after the application of DMSO.
Don't know anything about how specifically DMSO stops my bleeding, (not a featured use on the literature page), but I've used on several different cuts, and it always slows the bleeding substantially.
I suggest getting the gel for occasional use. Call or visit your local natural food store, or the local horse supply store (tell them it's for your dog, as DMSO is only approved for a certain bladder condition in humans).
I too got scammed on the shake light... Bought one at the gun show, showed my grandfather. He wanted some too (gifts), so I got a couple more. When I got home, I pulled them all out of their boxes to make sure they worked... And one had a busted switch. Took it apart, and found batteries in my shakelight. Sure was disappointed.
:)
Anyways, went to another gun show, and saw a booth with all sorts of LED light stuff. The guy had a strip of white LEDs for undercounter lighting, and LED conversion kits for Maglite flashlights (made in the USA). I picked up a light strip, and was looking all over for the 'made in china' label, and couldn't find it! Later the owner's son came up and told me that they built most their products locally. The guy used to work for Intel, got tired of the corporate life, and started designing LED setups instead.
I went over to his house, and saw his little workshop... He was employing a highschooler to assemble the setups he'd designed.
Anyways - he also sold some 'made in china' LED products. Told him about my disappointment with the shakelight, and he sells a 'generator' light that has a small electric motor and capacitors. I got one and took it apart to look for batteries.
Next time you're emergency flashlight shopping, look for a crank and you'll probably be okay.
In many cultures, childhood ends at puberty. Thereafter comes adulthood. Call it probationary adulthood if you like, but the person was expected to act like an adult.
Today in the United States, we treat people as children until they're 18/21. In some states they're allowed to stop going to the government school at age 16, other states lock 'em up in the name of "educating" them. Is it any wonder that, as John Gatto points out, many people never really grow up?
Sure, monitor your pre-pubescent kids' instant messaging. But if you want your kids to ever grow up, you'll have to act like you expect them to.
Didn't the lower cost of building all the components there help to decrease the prices of computing, encouraging demand. And wasn't the continuosly lowered cost of infrastructure/equipment an integral part of the computing/technological/information/internet revolution. Which incredibly benefited the US economically. Which provided jobs and increased jobs and increased pay scale during the late 90's and early 2000's.
pehaps, but I think the influence of cheap imported goods (including/especially computer equipment) is analogous to using liquid oxygen to start your barbeque. To get your grill going, you could either put a couple pounds of charcoal on, start it the regular way and wait, or put 60 pounds of charcoal on, add a burning match, dump liquid oxygen on it, and *poof*, instantly ready for grilling.
But if you do things the slow way you'll have 50 extra pounds of charcoal, for the next five times you want to barbeque.
No, federal mismanagement of the economy is equivalent to dumping liquid oxygen on the coals. Not a very sustainable thing to do. See my other posts in this story.
You benefited from it, now its someone else turns.
Most of "us" have not benefited from globablization. The goal has always been to concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite, and to make everyone else poorer. Globalization has been especially harsh to native peoples. Not everyone desires a western lifestyle, you know.
good points, good points. :)
A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level.
I think a good old-fashioned econmic collapse is in our future. Mandeville wrote his book in 2003, and says the 2006 collapse is right on track (housing market, for example). This will be a good thing, as it will re-level the economic playing field. Not exactly fun, of course, but very necessary.
Read something a while back: countries that don't produce goods don't need engineers to design them. Hence the movement of R&D offshore, of which you speak.
Good points, parent.
:)
I think the best first step is to get rid of the federal reserve banking system. Fiat currencies (paper money) are the direct cause of massive trade imbalances between the United States and the rest of the world.
See my other post in this thread, and the posts I link to too.
Consider that the only reason Chinese goods are still cheap is because they've pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar at a fixed ratio. In a free market currency system, as the trade imbalance with China grew, the dollar would have become worth progressively less. Chinese goods would have become progressively more expensive, and WalMart et al would've thought harder about whether it was prudent to shift production overseas.
But the free market is dead, and has been for a long long time. Imperialists spent the entire 20th century hijacking the American 'ship of state', and now non-aligned foreign leaders like Hugo Chavez are our only hope.
the government's central bank.
Had a recent post on the banker/populace tension, might want to check it out...
We only have ourselves to blame for that.
... housing. If teh government hadn't already screwed the economy up, stimulus would've fincanced new production lines & the like. Now the media is finally picking up on the fact that there is a problem with housing bubbles, but they're a little late to realize such, and they still don't realize that the inflation in prices was directly caused by
I don't agree. IMHO, the government was used to rig the economic playing field. See 1970's, redux. Summary: federal reserve has been inflating the money supply since 1995. First came the dot com bubble, then the dot com crash. Recession! Then there came a "terrorist" attack, and Alan Greenspan and his merry band of fools cut interest rates to next-to-nothing. Because production had already been moving offshore (fleeing teh inflation), this new injection of money flowed into
I agree but it isn't just about cost. 30+ years ago "Made in the USA" meant quality. Does anyone see it that way today? Often people are willing to pay more for things produced overseas because of higher quality.
It's not that they have higher quality in Japan/China/Germany/etc, but that they've been getting all the investment for new equipment. New equipment and production processes result in higher quality.
As an interesting aside, note those three countries' position on the CIA's ranked order of Current account balance. Then read the list until you find the United States. Is it any wonder that companies try to move as much as possible offshore? (Link courtesy of the latest What We Now Know).
Also, from the information I've read, both breast cancer and aids are non-issues.
A large part of the breast cancer cases in the west stem from a single fasion accessory: the brassiere. Bras (especially the kind with underwires) restrict the flow of lymphatic fluid in the breast. See A Pinch of Cancer: Can Wearing a Bra Kill You?. Also worth noting is the theory that bracing the breasts (with a bra) causes them to sag moreso than they would without the artificial support, the theory being that the tendons wither away when the bra removes the need for them to hold the breast up. Or something like that.
Some cases of breast cancer are unrelated to the undergarment, of course, but this is a big point that gets overlooked.
As for AIDS, the first cases in the U.S. were amongst homosexual drug users. Not exactly the country's healthiest population. To be diagnosed with AIDS in the U.S., someone has to test positive for HIV and have several other diseases too. The alternate theory is that HIV is really just a marker for some other problem, and not the cause of the problem itself - similar to a fever being indicative of having the flu. See this LA Times story on a HIV+ homosexual drug addict who passed on the usual drug therapy (AZT killed more patients than HIV ever did), and is doing just fine 17 years later.
Malnutrition abounds in Africa... They don't do HIV tests in Africa ($), so the deaths from hunger/malnutrition/tuberculosis/etc get re-labeled as "AIDS". Seems to me to be a political thing. Africa would receive a 1000x more benefit from clean water and nutrition campaigns than AIDS drugs.
Remove hard drive first, nuke it yourself. Only way to be sure.
:)
How would I go about obtaining a nuke? Should I start collecting smoke detectors?
I've got a bunch of old hard drives that need the data wiped. Wouldn't it just be simpler to hold it up to a rare-earth magnet? Would I have to take the cover off?
Just wondering...
Excellent analysis. I've just one little point that I'd like to reply to:
You americans are spending your capital, and taken to it's extreme it means that you will no longer own your economy.
'We [poor] americans' are simply playing along in an economy that's rigged to benefit bankers and globalists, mostly because we don't know any better, and partially because it's hard to break out of the trap when 'everyone else' doesn't realize that there's a problem.
The banker/populace tension really goes back to the revolutionary war, according to Misdirection Conspiracy (link in this post. When word that the british had surrendered spread to New York City, people went skipping through the streets, chanting how the colony had kicked the mother country out... But the banking class, who enjoyed a certain degree of privledge under british rule, muttered under their breath: "but we like the british...", and starting plotting America's return to the British Empire. War of 1812, Rhodes Scholarships (Bill Clinton), Bilderberg, etc.
One objective has always been to establish a national bank. I'm a little sketchy on ups and downs of the national bank, but the Federal Reserve bank is the current incarnation thereof. It's supposedly "public", but the congress only gets to appoint the board as figureheads, and the bankers choose acceptable candidates anyways, so the "congressional oversight" is meaningless.
This is a long-term process, so don't get all disappointed when the economy doesn't assplode next year.
It's taken a very long time to get to where we are today (most of a century), and I'm sure the end of the present economic order is very near - certainly within 6 months. Then again, we might see a 1929-style "black thursday" in October, what with the way housing & everything else is breaking down. The media (owned by the banking class) try to hide the signals that recession is imminent, but independent analysis online is getting the word out to people that seek. See Mish's blog, the Daily Reckoning, etc.
In the 'canary' post I also linked to a report from the frontline of the industry that indicates the bubble is already collapsing. Mish has some good analysis on his blog; you might want to read some of his other posts.
Gatto's work clearly indicates that Americans only sat/sit at assembly lines because the 'corptocracy' (corporate interests + government) set up government schools to 'dumb us down' so that we'd tolerate meaningless work. You can't 'smart up' the population without disassembling the government school institution first.
Hello? They own our economy (via the trade deficit), and they 'can't afford our services'? I'm just wondering what americans do that the chinese can't learn to do for themselves.
Production is an essential aspect of any economy. The current status quo won't last much longer - either find a useful economic model, or be confused by the inevitable economic realignment.
I suppose you don't believe in the "housing bubble" either.
and because we're exporting all the mindless jobs (read: assembly lines, manufacturing) to the countries whose technology levels have risen high enough to accept them.
"Mindless jobs" are an artifact of the "industrial devolution". No economy that depends on dumbing down the majority of the population is sustainable.
If you check the numbers, I'm sure you'll notice that the negative trade balance with the country we've exported many of our "mindless jobs" to is now at a record level. Seems that the Chinese people don't need much in the way of mindful services provided by Americans. I think this is indicative of a problem. Do you?
And if you think the american economy is crappy... well you don't live here and you have no idea. I can't complain...
If you get out of your little tunnel and open your eyes, you'll find that the economy is not so great. Real wages have been going down since the 70's (following the start of the outsourcing trend), and many of our fellow americans have been financing the difference. In the last couple of years, this means Adjustable Rate Mortgages to afford payments on a house, 0% auto loans, growing credit card debts, growing trade deficits, growing federal budget deficits.
America has a problem with debt.
gas is cheap again and I take home more than it costs me to live...
I believe that the two oil guys in the whitehouse talked with their buddies in the industry to get a little help on election day.
See Canary in the coal mine for more on the coming super-recession, and plan accordingly.
could you explain what's stopping you from starting your own worker-owned cooperative *right now*?
I guess there's nothing stopping the formation of cooperatives, so much as that the system is set up to favor the formation of corporations. This includes corporate privledges (for example: no shareholder liablity for corporate fuckups - government picks up the tab if the corporation leaves a big mess after it dissolves), and a school system designed to create worker-drones (see Gatto link in original post).
Also, raising capital typically means borrowing it from a bank/venture capitalists. So, unless one's "large group of friends" includes multiple multi-millionaires, raising capital certainly involves creating corporate shareholders to start any significant business venture. At the very least, the bank parasitically benefits because of its legal privledge to create the money it loaned (via fractional reserve banking), redistributing the loan interest to its shareholders...
I know a guy who created a couple shell corporations (LLCs) to borrow money for a restaurant building, the rational being that if the venture was to fail (get sued/etc), he wouldn't be left holding the entire bag. Typical thinking in the corporate age...
You'd be interested in the Shadow Stats guy (link in that post).
Just assembled a comment in another thread in this story; you might find something interesting there too.
This economic correction will be hard to ride out - think "greater depression". A real 'new economy' is coming our way, but the old one's leaving kicking and screaming...