World domination in Watford

What newspaper do participants in the Bilderberg conference favour?

Bankrupt

The world is bankrupt: not just our world but the world that we inhabit. Man, as an expansive species, was always going to bring the roof down on his own head unless there was some element of absolute restriction in his culture. He knew it in his myths of the tree of knowledge and of Pandora's box. The only thing left in our box now is geo-technology.

Our society, the most expansive culture of the most expansive species, has replaced taboo with the risk asessment and the precautionary principle. We have internalised and digested our sense of restriction, substituting calculation for prohibition.

Bach created the B minor mass and never heard it performed. For us performance is everything. We create without prayer and our highest spiritual faculty, to some, is the sense of wonder. Truly we consume; profligately or reverently, we consume.

The gods of chaos

In summary, the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go: down the road that logically follows from the abolition of urban reform. As in the past, this is a 'street without joy', and, indeed, the unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City - one of the world's largest slums - taunt American occupiers with the promise that their main boulevard is 'Vietnam Street'. But the war planners don't blench. With coldblooded lucidity, they now assert that the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century. Pentagon doctrine is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor. This is the true 'clash of civilizations'.

MOUT [Military Operations on Urban Terrain] doctrine - according to Stephen Graham, who has written extensively on the geography of urban warfare, is thus the highest stage of Orientalism, the culmination of a long history of defining the West by opposition to a hallucinatory Eastern Other. According to Stephen Graham, this dichotomizing ideology - now raised to 'moral absolutism' by the Bush administration - 'works by separating the 'civilized world' - the 'homeland' cities which must be 'defended' - from the 'dark forces', the 'axis of evil' and the 'terrorist nests' of Islamic cities, which are alleged to sustain the 'evildoers' which threaten the health, prosperity and democracy of the whole of the 'free world'.'

This delusionary dialectic of securitized versus demonic urban places, in turn, dictates a sinister and unceasing duet: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent  explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.

Concluding paragraphs of the 'Epilogue' of Mike Davis's Planet of Slums (2006): 'The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows ... a heartbreaking book.' Financial Times

Drone on

The public talks of 'drones' but the military prefer to call them 'unmanned aerial vehicles'. We should realise that military procurers and supplers in the developed world have in mind a much wider range of drones and that the comprehensively automated and unmanned battlefield is in their sights.

It may require a little, involuntary, help from the insect world:

In 2006 the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) asked America's scientists to submit "innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs" .

We are clearly doomed.

Darpa's call essentially launched a grand science fair, one designed to encourage innovation and tap into the competitive spirit of scientists around the country. The pamphlet outlined one specific application for the robo-bugs –outfitted with chemical sensors, they could be used to detect traces of explosives in remote buildings or caves – and it's easy to imagine other possible tasks for such cyborgs. Insect drones kitted out with video cameras could reveal whether a building is occupied and whether those inside are civilians or enemy combatants, while those with microphones could record sensitive conversations, becoming bugs that literally bugged you.


Maharbiz bristles at the most sinister suggestions, at the media coverage that suggests his beetles are the product of, as he puts it, "some evil government conspiracy". His beetles haven't been sent out into the field yet – they still need some refinement before they're ready for deployment – but if and when they are, Maharbiz says he expects his bugs to be used abroad, in routine military operations, but not to track US citizens. (Of course, some people may find that "equally reprehensible", he acknowledges.)

It is not only insects that are being recruited in the march of progress.

They began by opening up a rat's skull and implanting steel wires in its brain. The wires ran from the brain out through a large hole in the skull, and into a backpack harnessed to the rodent. ("Backpack" seems to be a favourite euphemism among the cyborg-animal crowd.) This rat pack, as it were, contained a suite of electronics, including a microprocessor and a receiver capable of picking up distant signals. Chapin or one of his colleagues could sit 500m away from the rat and use a laptop to transmit a message to the receiver, which relayed the signal to the microprocessor, which sent an electric charge down the wires and into the rat's brain.

During training, the SUNY scientists used an unconventional system of reinforcement. When the rat turned in the correct direction, the researchers used a third wire to send an electrical pulse into what's known as the medial forebrain bundle (MFB), a region of the brain involved in processing pleasure. Studies in humans and other animals have shown that direct activation of the MFB just plain feels good.

Elsewhere researchers are comandeering rat brains in a different way:

Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information in a major step towards what the researchers call the world's first "organic computer".

Remarkably, the communication between the rats was two-way. If the receiving rat failed at the task, the first rat was not rewarded with a drink, and appeared to change its behaviour to make the task easier for its partner.

"This tells us that we could create a workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations."  

We need not fear that the ethical implications are left unexamined:

Anders Sandberg, who studies the ethics of neurotechnologies at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, said the work was "very important" in helping to understand how brains encode information.

But the implications of the technology and its potential future uses are far broader, said Sandberg. "The main reason we are running the planet is that we are amazingly good at communicating and coordinating. Without that, although we are very smart animals, we would not dominate the planet."

"I don't think there's any risk of supersmart rats from this," he added. "There's a big difference between sharing sensory information and being able to plan. I'm not worried about an imminent invasion of 'rat multiborgs'."

So that's alright: no risk to the 'Future of Humanity' or that we might cease to be 'running the planet'. Indeed, soon we could all be doing it:

Though scientists will continue to build their cyborg animals, Maharbiz says he fully expects that "kids will be able to hack these things, like they wrote code in the Commodore 64 days". We are heading towards a world in which anyone with a little time, money and imagination can commandeer an animal's brain.

Buzz

On the way out

The decline of wild bees and other pollinators may be an even more alarming threat to crop yields than the loss of honeybees, a worldwide study suggests, revealing the irreplaceable contribution of wild insects to global food production.

A second new study published in Science on Thursday showed more than half the wild bee species were lost in the 20th century in the US.

Meanwhile scientists are working on robotic bees, which as well as 'autonomously pollinating a field of crops' will have added advantages such as 'military surveillance' and 'traffic monitoring'.   Who needs bees?

On the way in

Furniture apocalypse

Final luxury

It seems cutting edge furniture design is not going to survive the end of the world, to judge from this picture of the interior of a 'luxury' survival bunker now selling like hot cakes from California to New York, as people brush down their dubious interpretations of the Mayan calendar.

Hot cakes are not going to do too well either, as the bunker is reported to have a mini fridge and microwave but 'little other space for food preparation' and only a small dining area. Presumably there won't be much time (or need?) for eating once the world ends. But the lucky survivors will still be able to watch their favourite tv programmes.

It's just sour grapes on my part.

Never-never, or Never, never, never

Never Never Land or the Never-Never is said to have originated in the Australian Outback, unspecific parts of which were so named because they were a place which, depending on your outlook, you would never want to go to, or never want to leave. Apparently the phrase is still in such use in parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory.

It was J M Barrie who introduced the phrase into popular English usage. In Peter Pan Never Land was where the babies went who fell out their prams and were not rescued, and where they joined the lost boys (presumably little girls did not fall out of their prams in Edwardian times). So it was a place to which 'normal' people could never go, and from which it's inhabitants could normally never escape, and where they could never progress through mortality like the rest of us. (The Edwardian fear of mortality and its varying expression in the grandiloquent and the fey is a theme for other reflections.)

Yet 'never never' gained its strongest and most characteristic place in the popular English imagination when 'the never never' became the common term for hire-purchase, an early form of credit that enabled one to acquire goods and pay for them in regular stages. Of course it was not 'never' that one actually finished paying for them, but, so strong was then the residual popular sense that actually enjoying or using something before one had paid for it was the road to ruin, that it acquired a strongly morally disapproving overtone.

How far have we travelled from there, and to what place has it brought us, when credit is now so universal and interwoven into all our economies, personal, national and international? The acerbic commentator might say that even the prudent amongst us usually have little idea of exactly when the funds for their purchases actually leave their possession, and the feckless neither know nor care whether they ever were or ever will be in it - but in that they have been shown, quite literally, to be no different from those who have charge of our largest and most venerable banks, whose pretence to the ownership of funds is so large and so false that no-one dare challenge it.

'Never, never, never!' was the famously obdurate declaration of Ian Paisley senior that Ulster would never accept the Republic of Ireland's having a role in the constitutional affairs of Northern Ireland, something that was shortly to come about and which many would have regarded as historically inevitable. Indeed, so historically inevitable was it that the lion and the lamb were shortly to lie down together when he and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness were elected First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively to the Northern Irish Assembly, created by the Belfast Agreement, on 8 May 2007. They apparently got on so well that they became known as 'the chuckle brothers'. Of course Sinn Féin and Martin McGuinness did not actually represent the interests of the Irish Republic, but in earlier days Paisley would not have made such nice distinctions.

I do not wish to suggest Paisley has been without his merits and abilities or that he did not mellow with age; he was created a life peer in Gordon Brown's dissolution honours list in June 2010 (someone else whom we may expect to mellow with age, unlike Tony Blair - 'age shall not weary him'); in February this year Paisley was admitted to hospital with a serious heart condition from which he was later reported to be recovering.

Paisley no doubt intended a bastardised echo of Winston Churchill's celebrated 'We shall never surrender.' How masterly, or how natural, is Churchill's falling cadence with the word 'never', making it not something to be asserted but quietly acknowledged; how contrasting with Paisley's stridency; and how wide a gulf does it reveal between the culture of Churchill and that of Paisley. 

So for us now, in our present polical-economic woes, is it never-never land, or never, never, never? Perhaps both.

We are indeed in never-never land in every sense. Our debts can never be repaid. Our economy is in a state of perpetual immaturity. Our past elysium, that brief post world-war-two interlude when there seemed to be a miraculous combination of steady material improvement and a recognition by those in power that there was a debt to be repaid to the ordinary citizens of the nation who had saved Europe from catastrophe, is well and truly lost.

There is no way forward except through reform, not the kind of 'reform' that Tony Blair and David Cameron like to talk about - masking their partisan political preferences in the language of historical inevitability and public benefaction in a false echo of the great Victorian Reform Acts - but something in the full, literal meaning of the word.

Yet for those who effectively control political, economic and financial power it is 'We say never, never, never!' and they say it with less grace, if less street-volume, than Ian Paisley. Never is there to be the necessary rebalancing of the financial obligations in the economy; never are financial pretences to be acknowledged; and never is the tide of the increasing accummulation of wealth amongst an extremely small minority of the population to be reversed or even halted. Yet theirs is the 'never' of Paisley as they increasingly lay waste the economy on which they depend both for the aquisition of their wealth and for some form in which it can be expressed and have value. And ours is the 'never' of J M Barrie, a land of the lost.

'Nothing shall come of Nothing. Think again.'

China: a 'cultural revolution'?

Lifted out of poverty in Guangdong

It's the banks, stupid

"There is a path out of this challenge. These decisions are in the hands of Europe's leaders; they understand the urgent need to act. There are specific steps they can take right now to prevent the situation from getting worse. One of those steps is taking clear action as soon as possible to inject capital into weak banks."

President Barack Obama, 8 June 2012


"Monetization of government debts is perfectly safe in a liquidity trap. It would solve the need for austerity and allow governments to repair their economies. Unfortunately the global elite want depressions as unemployment lowers wage demands, increases the time debtors owe money to creditors and increases interest rates and their yields.

"It works thus-

"There are two parts to QE. The first part is where the Bank of England uses its privileges as a central bank to magic some money from thin air, buy a truck load of outstanding government debt from banks and credit their reserves with the money it has created.

"This is the part that should be and is designed to be inflationary. Money is created and the banks should in theory be able to leverage the reserve crediting up and stimulate demand in the wider economy with it.

"In the last couple of years the Bank of England has created £325 billion this way. So what has been the effect on the money supply?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/9242042/Record-collapse-in-UK-money-supply-blamed-on-banks.html

" 'Figures released by the Bank of England on Wednesday showed that the UK's broad money supply, M4, shrank by 5pc in the past year to a new record low.'

"QE obviously isn't working in the way it is intended. The credits given to banks are not finding their way into the real economy. QE is simply not stimulating growth in the money supply in the way it is intended to.

"So what has gone wrong? In short - bankers greed. Banks demand a 15% return on equity to enable them to support their "business model" of spending over half their turnover on pay packets that average £350,000 . This level of return is so high and greedy that banks have no interest at all in lending for mortgages or to small businesses - the returns are too small.

"As credit creation in banks is the only way the UK economy can widen its money supply and credit creation in banks is responsible for 97% of the money supply growth. If banks won't lend then the money supply doesn't grow and our economy shrinks. The money supply must widen by at least 5% pa for any growth (money supply growth averaged 10% pa in the decade before the 2007 crash). That isn't happening so we are in recession.

"The other source of growth is government spending but since Osborne is taking many multiples of £150 billion out from public sector spending this virtually guarantees we enter a depression.

"Is there a silver lining though? Yes - the Bank of England has successfully bought up a third of the government debt that Cameron and Osborne are withering on about without sparking an inflationary spike in the money supply.

"Given that everybody was expecting QE to feed through into growth in the UK money supply there was always planned to be a second part to it.

"The second part of QE is the insane bit. Sitting in the wholly publicly owned Asset Purchase Facility is £325 billion of outstanding government debt. The same debt Cameron says it is critical we eradicate. His plan for it is that in a few years time, the Asset Purchase Facility should sell it back out to the banks we bought it off and then rip up the money the banks give us for it.

"Given the original reserve crediting didn't cause the money supply to widen this is just treasonous and insane. The resale obviously can't be inflationary - the money creation bit from part one happens over 5 years before the reissue of gilts. Reissue will obviously be deflationary as banks will allocate liquidity to buy the gilts instead of using the money for something else. But it cannot be inflationary as there is no money creation at that point. The second part of QE should be abandoned. A sensible government would announce that the money supply is shrinking, that the £325 billion in the Asset Purchase Facility can be safely monetized and that public sector cuts are cancelled and a £175 billion stimulus package can safely be afforded.

"How likely is this? Given how corrupt, incompetent and misleading is the current government to mis explain how the economy works in order to justify selling off the public sector to their friends and funders? The Tories and their backers want high unemployment and household debts to rise as this lowers wage demands and increases corporate profits. They are deliberately engineering a slump in order that the banks who provide 50% of their funding and the donors who can afford the £250,000 dinners with Cameron can slightly increase their profits.

"Business is sitting on £700 billion of retained profits, banks are rich enough to pay an average of £350,000 to their staff. So what does Cameron do? He abolishes the bankers bonus tax, drops the 50p highest tax rate, lowers corporation tax and exempt overseas subsidiaries of multinationals from paying tax. The rest of us get a 5% hike in VAT, trebling of university tuition fees, youth unemployment raised to 20% and once again (as with Thatcher) unemployment."

Payguy2 The Guardian CIF 6 June 2012

She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

Things change, stuff happens

Some things have changed in our new millenium:

Barclays Bank liabilities

Yet at least innocence, like suffering, is spread widely:

"More generally, the current extended period of rock-bottom interest rates has impacted heavily on those holding most of their savings in deposit or short-term savings accounts, who have seen negative real returns. Savers have every right to feel aggrieved at losing out; after all, they did nothing to cause the financial crisis. But neither did most of those in work, who have also seen a substantial squeeze in their real incomes. And unemployment, particularly among the young, has risen as output has fallen. This is all a reflection of the hit to output from the financial crisis. Output is still some 4% below its previous peak and more than 10% below where it would have been if the economy had simply continued growing at its pre-crisis historical trend. There have been few winners over the past few years." 
Charlie Bean, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England

although not universally:

Meanwhile, it is refreshing to have this insight into the quality of mind and expression that characterises one of the leading private global 'intelligence' companies on whose insights our governments and international corporations rely.

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2012/02/propaganda-wars-our-version-risk-weighted-lies-1/

http://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2012/02/charlie-bean-strikes-again-impact-of.html

http://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2012/02/wikileaks-and-stratfor-email-release.html

Greece confronts its nemesis

We are all Greece's inheritors

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/13/greece-bankrupt-ablaze-cradle-democracy

Sauve qui peut - or captains and bankers first



Bail out: the global economy sinks

 http://londonbanker.blogspot.com/2012/01/survivor-bias-and-tbtf-tyranny.html

And, changing the headline to something altogether more sombre, 'The protection of the law' perhaps:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/subordination-101-walkthru-sovereign-bond-markets-post-greek-default-world#comments

There is much convolution before one gets to this rather wipe-out possibility:

Before we proceed we would like to also point out one very curious Catch 22, in that if indeed Greece succeeds with its own exchange offer with the world not imploding, the natural next step would be for the other PIIGS to proceed with just such an exercise in order to cut their own debt load by up to 70%. Because while Greece may have the advantage, the question now become who will be second. Paradoxically, the more success this global strategy has, the deeper it sows the seeds of Europe's destruction, as more and more bondholders will actively shy away from all weak bonds first in the PIIGS, then in Europe, then in the world. Until at the end, there is no end-market demand, and the only buyer remains the central bank.

We can be heroes, just for...

I am indebted to the blog Viable Opposition for these quotations from the recently released US Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) minutes from their meeting on 31 January 2006 shortly before things went a little wrong in the US and world economy. The blog post itself has much more substantial comment on which to reflect.

"MR. POOLE: ... Mr. Chairman, many around the table have commented about their experience serving here. I will, of course, echo those. I would like to put a little different angle on it. Of the people who have had a major impact in my life, you are certainly one. I mark on the fingers of one hand the people who have had extraordinary influence on me. You have influenced me mostly in my professional life but also in many aspects of leadership that go beyond economics and policy in a narrower sense. So I thank you for that. I am also looking forward to continuing to learn from you. I understand that you have some books, at least in your head. And given my interest in making sure we have clear communication, I have a suggestion for a title for your first book. And it is in line with some books by your predecessors. So I suggest “The Joy of Central Banking.” [Laughter] And I suggest that your second book be “More Joy of Central Banking.” [Laughter]

"CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. How to Be a Joyous Central Banker, Even Though We Don’t Have Hearts.” [Laughter] Can we end the speculation on the title? [Laughter] Thanks very much, Bill. President Stern."
...

"VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. Mr. Chairman, in the interest of crispness, I’ve removed a substantial tribute from my remarks. [Laughter]

"CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. I am most appreciative. [Laughter]

"VICE CHAIRMAN GEITHNER. I’d like the record to show that I think you’re pretty terrific, too. [Laughter] And thinking in terms of probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you’re even better than we think is higher than the alternative. [Laughter]"

The Mower against Gardens

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the gardens square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupified them while it fed.
The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind.
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.
The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,
And learned to interline its cheek:
Its onion root they then so high did hold,
That one was for a meadow sold.
Another world was searched, through oceans new,
To find the Marvel of Peru.
And yet these rarities might be allowed
To man, that sovereign thing and proud,
Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,
Forbidden mixtures there to see.
No plant now knew the stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the wild the tame:
That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit
Might put the palate in dispute.
His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,
Lest any tyrant him outdo.
And in the cherry he does nature vex,
To procreate without a sex.
’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,
While the sweet fields do lie forgot:
Where willing nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence:
And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howsoe’er the figures do excel,
The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Andrew Marvell
Latin Secretary for the Council of State of the Protectorate
Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull

See also Cannons: a tale of wealth, property, art and patronage

The elect

Well, it's an election, stupid, I say to myself, but nevertheless it did catch my attention when Mitt Romney was reported as attacking Obama's foreign policy:

"Abroad, he's weakening America. He seems to be more generous to our enemies than he is to our friends. That is the natural tendency of someone who is unsure of their own strength, or of America's rightful place as the leader of the world."

I suppose, a century and a half ago, a British person might well have made the same unhesitating and unreflecting claim to a "rightful place as the leader of the world", but we are, all of us, usually a little more circumspect now. I just wonder wherefrom Mr Romney thinks that right derives, and whether he does not reflect that he has just given a hostage to fortune, or to history. Can he truly be confident that the right will not soon be migrating to another national brow?

A Ponzi landscape

In this time of economic collapse, a tottering banking system, vanishing consumer prosperity, one looks around the physical landscape and thinks, not how it might grow and develop, what new might be added, but which parts are most devoid of energy and truth, devoid of any wealth of spirit, that they might collapse from our physical consciousness, now that something even more meretricious is less likely to be created or manufactured to give them some relative substance and permanence. The sense of relief is palpable as one imagines the earth swallowing them up: a relief from sensory and mental din.

Italy

From eighteenth-century barrels to Global

James Man (1755–1823) was the founder of Man Group, the United Kingdom's largest alternative investment management business and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Born in Whitechapel and apprenticed to a William Humphrey as a barrel maker, James Man decided to establish his own business as a sugar-broker in 1783. In 1784 he secured a contract to supply the Royal Navy with rum. This business grew into Man Group, one of the largest investment management businesses in the world. He retired in 1819 and moved to Dartmouth, Devon where he died in 1823.


'MF Global a US-based futures broker that can trace its roots back to 18th-century London, yesterday [30 October] became the first major US casualty of the eurozone debt crisis by filing for bankruptcy protection, putting 3,000 jobs at risk after a rescue takeover failed to materialise.

'As Barclays did with Lehman in 2008, potential bidders may emerge to cherry-pick the best operations out of bankruptcy from a business that can trace its roots back to 1783 when sugar broker James Man – who provides the M in the firm's name – set up in the City of London. He also provided the name for Man Group, the hedge fund listed in London which spun off what was then Man Financial - later MF Global - in 2007 and sold out entirely in 2009. Man Group stressed yesterday that it no connection to the firm or any exposure.'

Dominoes

Dominoes, thine hour hast come. Vietnam was a terrible disappointment, but wait long enough ...