Well, apologies for being away.  Blame it on tech problems that remain unresolved. No phone or computer. That leaves cell phones. Which I avoid.  And friends. Whom I also avoid.

But time away from blogging is always good, because it reminds me how pleasant life away from  “instant access” can be.

The first benefit is the amount of time that seems to be freed up when you aren’t tied to the net.  Computers were supposed to make things faster and easier so we’d spend less time on communicating. instead, they made communication more time-consuming…. by raising the bar.  Staying in touch used to be a letter or post card every month. Now you’re a hermit if you haven’t called in a week. We want to reach out and touch someone, it seems, no matter where they are – driving, eating, sleeping, in the loo…

That seems to be the characteristic of a lot of technology. Or, perhaps it’s a characteristic of human beings. We’re prone to turn a good thing into a bad thing, no matter what.

The net, taken intravenously the way bloggers tend to, is calculated to overwhelm you with buzz, with noise.  You’re inundated daily with events that are either completely irrelevant to your life or of vital relevance…. but completely beyond your ability to affect in any way.

It’s like watching a train hurtling at a baby while you’re locked behind a glass window.

You’re inundated by second-by-second bad news getting badder, class-warfare out of Occupy Wall Street, legislation authorizing indefinite detentions without trial for practically everyone, incipient legislation to shut down the Internet, cheer-leading for all kinds of schemes to remake the system into something even more liable to being gamed, dreamed up mostly by people whom I wouldn’t trust to microwave a pop-tart.

The result for most of us is that we freeze. We give up.  Or we exhaust our nerves and vital energy.

I spent the last few days thinking about that and the fix for it. At least, a temporary fix. It’s quite a simple one and it boils down to this – narrow your focus.

Take your eyes off the big picture.

The big picture is the incessant drive by the elites of the Anglo-Zionist establishment to centralize, manage, and police the entire globe. I say, take your eyes off that picture and fix it on something you can do something about. Not permanently. But just for now. Intermittently. As a discipline.

The small picture I focused on was my desk. Yes, the long-suffering brown kitchen table where I usually work.

I forgot about the empire, Occupy Wall Street, Soros, hackers, the Line of Control, Neocons etc. etc. I took aim at my old receipts, my warranties, old letters, junk  mail, JC Penny deals, gala opening invitations, bank statements, unidentified metal objects, dust bunnies of venerable age , computer thingies that don’t fit anything, cables lurking in a Loch Nessian tangle in the bottom drawer of the cabinet.

And I won. Almost. A few sorties left. A skirmish or two. Then I will be on top of it all.

And I did something else. I began a new nutrition regime.  Specifically, cod-liver oil. It’s better emulsified, but I got a bottle of 100 good quality capsules for about eight bucks and I thought I’d start with that. I’m taking B-Complex and C along with it, because those always help with assimilation.  I cut back on the coffee (slipping for a few days recently), because you never want to drink coffee or tea while taking vitamins, as they don’t get absorbed.

Coincidentally, (or was it synchronistic?), Bill Sardi has a piece on this at Lew Rockwell today on what happens if you don’t get enough B1 – you get beri beri. He claims, plausibly, that because so many people drink tea or coffee today, this is fairly widespread. I believe him.  Here are some of the symptoms he says you should look out for:

• Difficulty walking
• Loss of feeling (sensation) in hands and feet
• Loss of muscle function or paralysis of the lower legs
• Mental confusion/speech difficulties
• Pain
• Uncontrolled side-to-side eye movements (nystagmus)
• Tingling
• Vomiting
• Increased heart rate
• Swelling of lower legs
• Neck veins that stick out
• Droopy eyelids
• Fatigue
• Irritability, moodiness, depression
• Loss of appetite
• Heartburn
• Abdominal pain
• Leg cramps
• Mental confusion
• Underactive thyroid
• Anxiety
• Oversensitivity to pain or noise
• Pain upon pressure to calves (classic early sign)
• Slow heart rate or fast heart rate
• Multiple sclerosis
• Diabetes
• Sleep disturbances
• Memory loss

That’s quite a list, and the good thing is, unlike the bad news, you can do something about it. Quite easily and quite fast.

And my third tip is simple too.  Yoga breathing.

You probably know how already. 5 seconds breathe in through the left nostril, 10 seconds hold with nostrils pinched shut, 5 seconds out through the right nostril. Do that whenever you have a minute, when you’re waiting for someone to pick up, at a traffic stop, or while the hot water is boiling.

That’s it. Clean your work space; take fish oil regularly (with Vitamin B); take deep breaths.

Try that for a week. And then get back to worrying about the globalists. You’ll do it much better.

For anyone who still thinks that Hank Paulson was the only one gaming the system to the hilt, here’s a glimpse of the murky world of welfare assistance:

“A Seattle woman who is receiving welfare assistance from Washington state also happens to live in a waterfront house on Lake Washington worth more than a million dollars.

Federal agents raided the home this weekend but have not released the woman or her husband’s name because they have not officially been charged with a crime.

However, federal documents obtained by KING 5 News show the couple currently receives more than $1,200 a month in public housing vouchers, plus state and government disability checks and food stamps. They have been receiving the benefits since 2003.

The 2,500 square-foot home, which includes gardens and a boat dock, is valued at $1.2 million. And even though the couple has been receiving the benefits for nearly 10 years, records show that they accurately listed the address of their current home when applying for the state and federal benefits.

A federal official told KING 5 that the couple likely took advantage of a loophole, which allows low-income individuals to receive financial assistance to help them pay their rent and move away from housing projects. However, the law does not require officials to verify what type of home the benefits recipient is living in.

“As if the million dollar home weren’t enough, the supposedly low-income couple also gave money to various charities and traveled around the world to locales in Turkey, Tel Aviv and resort towns in Mexico, according to court records.”

Comment

D’ you think this sort of thing is unusual? I doubt it. And yet, people still go on with their mantras about government assistance going only to the needy, or to starving children.

Children do starve in America. I’ve taught a few who were malnourished, but the problem had nothing to do with money (except in rural areas).

It had to do with completely irresponsible families, violent neighborhoods, drugs, junk food, intrusive school psychologists who diagnose and treat boredom as a disease, and aggressive marketers who target low-income families.

From Andrew Rosenthal, the New York Times blog (apparently the NYT doesn’t think this deserves the front page):

“The Senate is debating the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a series of provisions that mandate military interrogation and detention for any suspected member of Al Qaeda, and authorize indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without trial. (The law is written so broadly that parts of it could also cover U.S. citizens.)

The provisions were co-sponsored by Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, both of whom should know better. Their excuse was that some Republicans had proposed worse rules. But the smart response to that situation would have been to block faulty legislation outright, not to make a really bad deal.

A deal, by the way, that Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said was hashed out behind closed doors without consultation with his committee, or the Intelligence Committee, or the Defense Department, the F.B.I. or the intelligence community.”

Thinking Aloud, a minarchist blog, defends Ron Paul against Gary Weiss’s vicious rant at Salon:

“The Libertarians vision is not one of people starving in the streets so that rich people can be richer.  It’s a vision of a non-coercive society. In Libertarian thought, cutting social services can be done morally because the Libertarians believe Americans are big enough as people to voluntarily provide for those who are hard-up. This does not constitute a denial of our obligations to each other, but rather a denial of the morality of using coercion to fulfill them. I do not necessarily agree that this would happen, but it is fundamentally different than a Randian ‘what’s-mine-is-mine.’  Paul Ryan might be a Randian, but Ron Paul is not. Furthermore, Weiss’s implication that Ron Paul is a shill for oligarchic interests is simply dishonest.  Part of the libertarian critique is that the modern state engages in significant cronyism, patronage, and rent-seeking for the connected-thus creating the oligarchy.  Weiss ignores this entirely in his quest to paint Paul as a stooge, and ignores the wider point that the income of the most economically powerful is most certainly augmented by those sorts activities through campaign finance, regulatory capture, patronage, and other mechanisms.

Mr. Weiss’s tone and style is not well-placed in the service of attacking fellow enemies of American corporatism.  Mr. Paul, though wrong in my opinion, is an honest and principled politician who in many fields is helping to fight the good fight. He is connected to his followers because he offers something different, something principled. He is not a ‘manipulator’ or “faux-populist con job” that Weiss portrays him as.  If Mr. Weiss wishes to spill ink in such a virulent fashion, perhaps he should restrain himself to the actual shills, manipulators, and faux populist con-jobs that inhabit the Republican Party, rather than the honest man in the lot.

Any reader of this blog would realize that I am no member of the Paul-cult, reflexively attacking any critic. Unlike much of the Left, who find their sympathies with the closet-collectivism of American social conservatives, my ‘were I a wingnut’ sympathies lie with the Libertarians. I find the motivations behind libertarians to be nobler and less intrusive than other ideologies. That being said, I also think that life-mistakes should not be punished with utter destitution, that the Federal Reserve performs a useful function in providing for an elastic currency, that Austrian economics is merely the most highly developed form of the arm-chair school, that market power exists and is frequently abused, that there are public goods best served by the public authority, and that there are market externalities that are frequently left un-addressed and that this encumbers society significantly. This is what separates me from the libertarians. They’re good people. Good– but wrong–people.”

Nelson Hultberg via the Daily Bell:

“The “Two Pillars Strategy” is the foundation of the Conservative American Party.

Pillar #1 is to enact Milton Friedman’s 4% auto-expansion plan for the Fed. This will mandate by law that the Fed can only increase the money supply by 4% every year. Monetary expansion will be taken away from the FOMC’s arbitrary discretion and be computerized, which will keep money supply growth equivalent to the growth of goods and services, which will reduce price inflation to zero. This will end the Fed’s irresponsibility and allow time for the people to be educated as to the necessity for a gold standard and ending the Fed, which might require several decades. Such an auto-expansion plan is not perfect and not a permanent solution, but it will stop the destruction of our currency. It is a vital interim policy until gold money can be re-established. Even Ron Paul himself knows that the Fed is not going to be eliminated right away. Only naïve utopians who don’t live in the real world want to end the Fed today. Good grief! The country would totally collapse. We need a plan to phase out the Fed. This pillar is the first step toward that process. Combine it with Edwin Vieira’s plan to enact gold and silver coin alternatives at the state level, and you have a viable means to rectify 100 years of Marxist / Keynesian monetary insanity.

Pillar #2 is to enact an equal-rate income tax of 10% for everyone (i.e., a genuine flat tax). If we are to uphold “equal rights” in America, then we must have “equal rates” in our tax system. And all citizens must be assessed the tax. No exemptions. Period. Only in this way can we have a responsible electorate. When all people have to pay proportionally for their government services, they will begin to vote for less government every year at the polls. “

I spotted this in the Sacramento Bee:

“Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK), today announced that its CEO and Chairman Dr. Patrick M. Byrne, was named the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2011 Retail and Consumer Products Award winner. He was honored at the Entrepreneur of the Year Awards gala, the culminating event of the Ernst & Young Strategic Growth Forum® held in Palm Springs, California on November 12, 2011.

Ernst & Young recognized Byrne for his ability to spot opportunity in the online retail industry, giving rise to the first online site used for inventory liquidations, and for enhancing the online shopping experience. Ernst & Young noted that Byrne was able to weather the storm of the internet bubble and to lead Overstock.com and its sister philanthropic-retail sites, Worldstock.com Fair Trade and The Main Street Revolution, to the top of the industry.”

The award is very prestigious and suggests that premature funeral orations from Byrne’s critics are greatly exaggerated. Those critics, confined to a few mainstream financial writers and their blogger side-kicks, felt vindicated by the decision of a Canadian supreme court to shut down Byrne’s controversial white-collar crime site,  which named corrupt financial players and their media flacks, left and right.

Byrne’s suit against Goldman Sachs, one of many confrontations he has had with the power elites, has a long history, dating back to when Byrne decided not to go the corrupt IPO route, so lucrative for the big banks. Instead, he chose to pioneer the Dutch auction, an alternative that the big banks have long resented, since it denies them their lucrative cut.

It is time someone recognized that capitalists who claim that society can do what the government botches should put their money where their mouth is.  They cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim that voluntary and private actions can outdo the government, and then, when people actually unite to take action, they go silent, because they don’t want to offend their business networks.  Their silence is complicity in fraud. And fraud is coercion. Anyone who coerces another person through fraud is subverting their free will, as I’ve previously blogged.

It is completely anti-market.

Survival Blog, via Lew Rockwell:

“First of all, realize that ALL correspondence done on the “free” email providers is kept in a database indefinitely. Deleting it does not physically remove it. And in addition to that, consumers need to realize that if you choose to use a smart phone to browse the Internet, send/receive emails, send/receive text messages, etcetera, you are also giving out location data and even more precise personal data. ………

The second, and most effective, way to help protect your privacy is to resist the urge to let your browser keep track of all your login information, and make certain all tracking cookies and other data are removed every time you close your browser………

Recently published information revealed that Google is processing large amounts of law enforcement warrants for personal data. Many of the warrants include information about people completely unrelated to any crime – People who have merely corresponded with an individual who is under some sort of surveillance.”

Faux-Capitalist:

“Three prominent hard money advocates have endorsed the temporary issuance of fiat money, with two of them particularly endorsing interest-free fiat money.

On September 18, 2011, Nelson Hultberg of the Conservative American Party outlined one of the party’s primary planks, to “enact Milton Friedman’s 4% auto-expansion plan for the Fed.“

On August 17, 2011, monetary reform activist Kirk Mackenzie outlined his transition period of issuing interest-free fiat money, in moving toward a free market monetary system.

On October 2, 2008, Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian presidential candidate said with regard to issuing interest-free fiat money like Lincoln did: “That’d be a step in the right direction.“

Gary North, prominent writer for LewRockwell.com, has curiously stayed quiet by not smoking out these individuals as alleged false-flag infiltrators according to the same standards he used for taking exception with Ellen Brown advocating (interest-free) fiat money. Could it be that Ellen Brown was an easy target, not having any connections into the social circles he travels in, unlike these three other individuals?”

Comment:

Update (Michael Rozeff critiquing Ellen Brown):

“According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this issue extensively, interest now composes 40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don’t see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and materials, before they have a product to sell.”

Brown’s bottom line proposal is that the government create money instead of the banking system. She wants the government to set up its own banks. She says that this would bypass “the interest tab”. We have seen that this doesn’t bypass the cost of capital at all, not when that capital comprises real resources and the government absorbs these resources. But Brown has another fallacy in mind which is that fiat currency will eliminate the capital cost. She wants the government banks to issue fiat currency which is non-interest bearing and in this way fund projects at what she thinks is a zero capital cost.

Picture a government printing press for currency. Citizens are required to accept the newly-printed paper in payments for goods. Obama’s lieutenants take the paper currency and spend it for their favorite projects. All this amounts to is a different kind of taxation scheme by which the government absorbs (seizes) resources that are in limited supply. The opportunity costs of these seized resources still do not vanish no matter whether the resources are seized directly, taxed through the IRS, or obtained by spending new pieces of green paper.

Brown is committing the same fallacy as the Communists who attempted in vain to get rid of interest. It is an impossibility. The interest measures the postponement of consumption and arises because of it. If there are to be any production processes, they require capital and non-consumption. There will have to be interest. If interest is forcibly suppressed, capital will flee and people will engage in greater consumption. Capital will be consumed and the economy will go downhill. Government printing presses amount to taxes on capital. They will have the same results.”

Lila: 

Frankly, I have had this conversation with Ms. Brown many times on this blog. Ellen Brown has the establishment’s ear and thus one must suppose that this is what is in the works.

However, my point is different. I am not suggesting that this is a proposal that would be viable long-term. I am just broaching the possibility that some compromise might work as a temporary fix at the local level. 

If it were left to me, I’d decentralize banking, require gold reserves, cut taxes across the board to one number, says 10-15%, lift all subsidies, send most of the funding of universities and related programs to the states or to private hands, free up licensing in healthcare, teaching, and law, and ease legal immigration. 

That would take care of the problem of monitoring tax-shelters and money-laundering. It will not happen. We are going to get printing one way or other. That being the case,  it seems moving to a decentralized banking system (much lower than the level of state banks) might be a start.  We are talking about temporary measures here.  And yes, it is communistic. But so is everything else going on.

Is Rozeff suggesting that whole-sale looting of the treasury by the state and its clients is capitalistic? So, when everything is completely corrupt and collectivist, a small amount of collectivism on behalf of local communities, through a decentralized system, is not bad.

Ellen Brown doesn’t understand economics, true. But she does get one thing many free market economists don’t seem to get.

We don’t have a free market. We are already communist/collectivist. Already. Thus redistributions within this system are only a matter of supporting one power bloc over another, fighting for the spoils of savings. The financiers have been looting so far. Now the populace wants a bit.  My thinking is, yes, it’s wrong, but it might shift the power-balance a bit temporarily.

In any case, there are people who think similarly, with more cogent arguments, like Bill Still or Nelson Hultberg, and it seems that at least some experimentation in thinking in that direction might be helpful.

ORIGINAL COMMENT

I should quickly state that I read and like the writing of both North and Brown and think there is room for a via media, if we pay attention to language. So my question, before everything else, is this: Is interest-free money  the same as interest-bearing credit (which is not money, although the piece doesn’t make the distinction)?

The simple anwer is no. See here for some interesting ideas for community banking and decentralized use of money, that might be a temporary fix for some communities.

Will it be inflationary in the same way. The likely answer is not quite. Will it be completely non-inflationary? Not likely. But it will depend on how it enters the market, what other adjustments are made, whether the economy grows, and whether we also cut spending so we can service previous debt.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

“New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the move to evict the protesters and tear down their tent city.

“Unfortunately, the park was becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others. There have been reports of businesses being threatened and complaints about noise and unsanitary conditions that have seriously impacted the quality of life for residents and businesses in this now-thriving neighborhood,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

The protesters had set up camp in Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17 to protest a financial system they say mostly benefits corporations and the wealthy. Their movement has inspired similar protests against economic inequality in other cities, and in some cases have led to violent clashes with police.

The mayor said protesters and the general public can return once the park is cleaned, but would have to abide by rules banning items like tents, tarps and sleeping bags.

“Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments,” Bloomberg said.

Protesters vowed that the eviction from the park that had become the epicenter of their movement would not deter them and several hundred congregated at another lower Manhattan square.”