Re: Oliver Richman song

On Nov 15, 1:17 am, Anthony Coleman <Buntina...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 14 Nov, 17:13, Renli <usagi.mei...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You make my idle
time at work so much more entertaining. I'd be in danger of getting
bored if it were not for the complete BS you post so reliably to
usenet.

Oh really? If you think it's BS, look a little deeper.

Unless of course martial arts is just a form of entertainment to you.

This is a Martial Arts newsgroup?!?!? I was looking for the Karate Kid
Fan Club!

Typical (adj):

1. For a martial artist (assumption) you show a shocking lack of
understanding of the important events which go on around you; this is
evident because you choose to waste your time in idle pursuits
insulting people you do not know on usenet. I might add that
considered from your standpoint there is a 50% chance that you've made
a mistake and now look like an idiot to people in the know.

Your disconnect from reality - and I do not mean the reality of ME or
who I am (although you obviously haven't seen that yet), I am just
talking in general - is now obvious to anyone who can comprehend run
on sentances. Here's a clue for anyone who made it this far: the
question is, CAN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT REALITY REALLY IS, because if you
can't, you become confused and unable to participate any longer.

http://www.24hgold.com/viewarticle.aspx?langue=en&articleid=196593_Peak_Money_James_Howard_Kunstler

Peak Money
By : James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/

The multi-dimensional meltdown underway in the finance sector
illustrates perfectly how the complex systems we depend on start to
wobble and fail as soon as peak oil establishes itself as a fact in
the public imagination. Mainly what it shows is that we don't have to
run out of oil -- or even come close to that -- before the trouble
starts. Just going over the peak and heading down the slippery slope
of depletion is enough. Peak oil, it turns out, is also peak money.
Or should we say, peak "money?"

First of all, what is finance exactly? I'd bet that a lot of
people these days don't know, including many working in the financial
"industry," as it has taken to calling itself. Finance, until very
recently, was the means by which investment was raised for useful
economic activities and productive ventures -- in other words, the
deployment of capital, which is to say accumulated wealth.
Historically, this accumulated wealth was pretty meager. There wasn't
a whole lot to deploy and the deployment was controlled by a tiny
handful of people statistically greater only than the number of
Martians in the general population. They operated as families or
clans, and everybody knew who they were: the Medici, the Rothschilds.
Even the Roman Empire was a kind of financial Flintstones operation
compared to what we see on CNBC these days. Not having the printing
press, the Romans had to inflate their currency the old-fashioned way,
by adding base metals to their gold coins.



Finance in the 200-odd-year-long industrial era evolved step-by-
step with the steady incremental rise of available cheap energy. More
to the point, the instruments associated with finance evolved in
complexity with that rise in energy. It was only about two-hundred
years ago, in fact, that circulating banknotes or paper currencies
evolved out of much cruder certificates that were little more than
IOUs. Once printed paper banknotes became established, and
institutions created to regulate them, the invention of more abstract
certificates became possible and we began to get things like stocks
and bonds, traded publicly in bourses or exchanges, which represented
amounts of money invested or loaned, but were not themselves "money."

Much of this innovation occurred during the rise of the coal-
powered economy of the 19th century. It accelerated with the oil-and-
gas economy of the 20th century, up into the present time. So, for
about 150 years -- or roughly since the end of the American Civil War
-- we've had a certain kind of regularized finance that enjoyed
continual refinement. Even in the face of cyclical traumas, like the
Great Depression, currencies, stocks, and bonds retained their
legitimacy if not always their face value.



Russia was a bizarre exception. Crawling out of the mud of
medievalism relatively late in the game, Russia pretended to abjure
capital while still faced with the need to deploy it in industry.
They solved this paradox conditionally by disqualifying the Russian
public from participation in any part of the industrial economy except
the hard work, and pretended to pay them in promises for "a brighter
future," which never arrived as long as the Soviets remained in
charge. (The Russian people repaid the system by only pretending to
work.)



In any case, finance for the purpose of deploying capital has
prevailed as reality among people who use the implements of the dinner
table, but something weird has happened to it in recent years. It has
entered a stage of grotesque, hypertrophic metastasis that now
threatens the life of the industrial organism it evolved to serve.
Its current state can be understood in direct relation to the run-up
to peak oil (peak fossil fuel energy, really, since coal and gas
figure into it, too). The oil age, we will soon discover, was an
anomaly. Many of the things that seemed "normal" under its regime will
turn out to have been rather special. And as the beginning of the end
of the oil age becomes manifest, these special things are starting to
self-destruct pretty spectacularly.



For one thing, finance in the past twenty years has evolved from
being an organ serving a larger organism to taking over the organism,
becoming a kind of blind, raging dominating parasite on its former
host. Or to put it less hyperbolically, it has become an end in
itself. That is what they mean when they say that the financial sector
has been "driving" the economy. A feature of this ghastly process has
been the evolution of financial instruments into ever more abstract
entities removed from reality-based productive activities. Stocks and
bonds were understood to represent direct investment in enterprise.
Sometimes the enterprise was a failure, and sometimes the people
running it were swindlers, but no one doubted that common stock
represented the hope for profit in a particular venture like making
steel or selling laxative chemicals. The new "creatively-innovated"
financial "derivatives" of recent years are now so divorced from any
real activities or product that often the people trafficking in them
don't understand what they're supposed to represent. I'd bet that
more than half the people in the New York Stock exchange any given day
could not explain the meaning of a credit default swap if a Taliban
were holding their oldest child over a window ledge across Wall
Street.



The innovation of mutant financial "products" is a symptom of
the "crack-up boom" that characterizes society's response to peak
oil. The main implication of peak oil for an industrial economy is
that the 200-odd-year-long expectation for continued regular growth in
combined energy-activity-and-productivity at roughly 3 to 7 percent a
year under "normal" conditions -- that expectation is now toast.
Under the new regime of peak oil and its aftermath, regular energy
depletion, society can expect no further industrial growth but only
contraction, and all the certificates, instruments, and operations
associated with the expectation for further industrial growth lose
their legitimacy. Seen in this light, one can then understand the
temporary value of these mutant financial derivatives. They allowed
participants to conceal the fact that these "investments" were not
directed at productive enterprise. They also provided a cohort of
sharpies with "vehicles" for converting the leftovers of the
industrial economy into assets for themselves -- a form of looting,
really. Hence, the employees of Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and
Merrill Lynch gave themselves $50-million Christmas bonuses for
trafficking in these inscrutable non-productive financial gimmicks,
and were able to acquire fifty-room Easthampton houses, Gulfstream
jets, and impressionist paintings.



Of course, the aftermath might not be so pretty for these guys,
since the next thing they may acquire could be long prison sentences.
If they flee prosecution in their Gulfstream jets, they will not be
able to take their Hamptons estates aboard with them. Those who remain
may live to see mobs with flaming torches outside their windows, as in
the "Frankenstein" movies of their suburban childhoods. But this has
yet to play out.



For the moment it appears that we have entered the climax of the
crack-up. The slick and inscrutable derivative vehicles infesting the
ledgers of the investment banks, are now being systematically revealed
as frauds of one kind or another, and, self-evidently lacking in
worth. The process now underway is gruesome. The sheer dollar losses
involved are almost as incomprehensible as the phony operations and
instruments that they are derived from -- twelve billion here, nine
billion there. As the late Senator Everett Dirkson once quipped,
"sooner or later you're talking about real money...." Or are we? Is
it money or "money." And if it's "money," what will become of it?
And of us? How will it allow us to live?


By : James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/

.

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