The alleged gang rape of a 15-year-old girl on the campus of Richmond High School in Northern California while 10 or more witnesses, most of them students, looked on has sparked familiar questions: “Why are our kids so messed up?” “Why didn’t these students try to stop the crime?” “What’s happening in our schools?”
All it took for things to lurch out of control, investigators, students and community leaders say, was opportunity – and that came when the girl left the school dance Saturday night, walked by a group of bad boys boozing hard in the unlit courtyard, and accepted their invitation to hang out.
Fueled by street-macho bravado and inspired by sexual initiations required to get into some local gangs, they began the attack, investigators say.
Separation of girls and boys is the number one priority of secondary education, without this initial condition whatever system is implemented is doomed to failure. Secondary education was always separate, not only in space but also in style and subject. Only recently has the mixing of adolescent males and females been accepted as ‘normal’, while for centuries these two have been kept apart-for very good reasons.
The exceptional moment of well brought-up girls and boys, living in small New-England twons, where everyone were middleclass and people left their doors unlocked has well & truly passed away (even if we assume it really did exist). To build a universal system on exceptional cicumstances is a great folly only surpassed by the thought that such an abnormal system should be exported by force to the whole world.
Now that life in the US resembles an impoverished police-state, this system has turned into an endless nightmare. The East has learned over centuries of civilisation—that went through good and bad times, through times of safety and times of fear, times of personal self-control and times of animal barbarism—that girls are not to be left alone in the company of men.
Activists of human rights groups particularly Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, feminist organizations as well as public figures and government officials in the West joined the crusade in condemning the Taliban for the restrictions. Some called the restrictions “gender apartheid”, others labelled the Taliban ” oppressors” and “segregationists.” Madam Madeiline Albright even called them “despicable.” Still others viewed the measures as the imposition of Pashtun tribal codes on the liberated city females. Of course, all condemned the measures as a violation of women’s basic rights. More serious, governments even though some of whom had signaled signs of good will toward the Taliban until then withheld recognition of them as government mainly because of the restrictions. They were only called “a rouge state”, and treated as such. Nevertheless the Taliban went on with the restrictions as if not a single voice of protest had been raised.
The critics, to my knowledge, did not address the question why the Taliban did not heed the protests, and why did they impose restrictions in the first place? They just condemned and demonized apparently for political reasons. The short answer is that the Taliban cared for the Islamic Shari’a as they know it, for the lives and security of women, and the suppression of the crimes associated with rape, abduction and fatherless unborn.
Before the Taliban entered Kabul women were, among other criminal acts, raped during the entire Islamic Tanzimat period on a scale unheard of in Afghanistan. Women who disappeared after sexual assault in Kabul during this period numbered 30, 000 according to Sharee’a, the official weekly of the Emirate. Even handicapped and mentally deranged women of an institute in Kabul were raped. The list of rapes of individual women by individual armed men and groups is too long to note. Only a few instances are noted here.
The use of gold and silver coin has no inherent weakness. It is the concept of legal tender that is flawed and unjust. By fixing the rate of exchange between gold and silver, and declaring what constituted legal tender, the powers that be seriously intervened within what was supposed to be a free market. Any chance to function as a free market was gravely impaired. The system was doomed to fail from the start, as the seed of its own destruction lay within – waiting to blossom. Alexander Hamilton was the architect of its design; and he did not knowingly make mistakes. He was very capable and as accomplished as they come.
It is one thing to fix or set the standard of a monetary system. This the Coinage Act of 1792 did when it set the standard as a weight of silver: 371.25 grains of pure silver. This is sound monetary policy.
To fix the exchange rate between gold and silver at 15 to 1 is an entirely different matter. This would have been better left undone. Let the free market decide upon the exchange rate between gold and silver, not a statute or legal tender law, which is nothing more than forced obedience – the King’s prerogative. This was all Hamilton’s doing.
The gold standard with a floating gold-silver ratio is the true standard. Fixing the ratio of silver to gold turns it into a derivative of gold. This feature of the British gold standard was a flaw that caused its ultimate demise and replacement by pure fiat currencies. A floating ratio means that the money supply can expand and shrink with the economy automatically without the need of an external regulator. A central bank will always be behind the curve and either shrink or expand the money supply more than needed, creating structural problems in the system; these will ultimately bring the system down.
I have been planning to write an extensive post on this subject (I even prepared a graphical item!) but time constraints prevented me from doing so. I will try to post some press-clippings until I have enough time to do the research and write the long-awaited post about the real gold standard.
Let us assume that the US will implement healthcare reform that provides adequate care to those without insurance and those who are underinsured, what would be the consequences of such a move?
For the sake of argument I will assume that any reform is actually affordable. Increased healthcare will result in the following:
1. Longer lifespan: This will put pressure on both Medicare and Social Security from the state point of view, while putting more pressure on family members who have to care for the elderly from an individual point of view.
2. Increased disability: This has been the case with the military, improved battle care resulted in increased rate of injured soldiers putting pressure on the veterans infrastructure that could not support them. Is society (economically) ready to support the increased number of disabled people?
3. Lower child coast: Children might be the future, but they coast money even before they are born. If healthcare coast declines, then this will most likely spur childbirth, which is good in principle, in practice it will put pressure on the education system from the kindergarten level all the way up to higher education, it will also means millions of people entering the labour force 15 years down the road, will there be jobs for them?
4. Increased unemployment: Some claim that a 100,000 die in the US each year because of lack of insurance, this means that providing insurance will mean there are 100,000 who either want a job or dependent.
5. Doctor where are thou? The West has been suffering medical professionals shortage for decades, their first solution is to suck publicly educated professionals from poor countries, then from the former Warsaw block countries. Now the whole world is in the grip of the shortage.
“State officials have acknowledged the problem. “Health-care coverage without access is meaningless,” Gov. Deval Patrick said in March.”
Nothing ruined the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia than adopting financial and social systems totally unsuitable for their needs and unsupportable by their economies. Providing health subsidies had the same effect as any public subsidy would have, namely a bubble. When the economy started to crumble in the seventies the result was a collapse that caused the death of millions (through war, hunger and disease).
Credo
I believe that the current level of human productivity can easily support 15 to 20 billion people around the world. This can happen, I believe, without the harmful practises of industrial agricultural and with a higher level of sufficiency. I also believe that development of land in Africa, Siberia, Central Asia and South America can open the possibility for a total world population of 25 billions.
Will the future bring deflation or inflation? Some have reasoned that since there was deflation during the thirties and as we are going into a similar situation then we should expect deflation. The events since last year has certainly confirmed their predictions.
The fact is life is never that easy and such simplistic—typically English empirical—analysis based on analogy is almost always wrong, especially in historical analysis.
The problem arises from their view of the so-called ‘Great Depression’, they think that it ended by the 1940’s; in fact it did not end then. In reality the ‘Great Depression’ has not ended yet!
All attempts to solve the economic problems of the 1930’s failed until the war started and the depression did it patriotic duty and quietly went away. However once the war ended, just like the devil, it came back and demanded its due. The realisation that war elevates economic depression gave rise to the state of permanent war that has lasted since 1947. Of course, just like the devil, permanent war had its price:
The price of permanent war
Above (see Defining Inflation) is graph of the value of a US dollar from 1947. The dollar has lost 90% of its value in 60 years, equal to a yearly rate of -3.76% . Now we are entering a similar depression-like situation with defunct fiat currencies, ongoing wars, social dissolution, et cetera.
Some think that the government will not be able to inflate the economy because the banks are holding all the ‘printed’ cash and sucking all the liquidity into their black-hole balance sheets. The method of historical analogy is also used here by comparing the situation of the US with that of Japan during the last twenty years.
My first problem with this comparison is that they are comparing an independent country, nay an empire, with a colony that has been ruled by collaborators under a constitution written by the US military! To say that Japan did “everything” to get out of deflation and failed, is to forget that Japan was not allowed to do everything and only did what it was allowed by its masters.
If a government really wants to inflate then it can pull inflation from the moon. No better proof than Zimbabwe achieving hyperinflation in a couple of years. It seems that the world’s second economy, Japan, has less political independence than an African land-locked country.
The following was quoted in the Wikipedia article Brave New World:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”
Life is so diverse, so complex, that no one vision can capture it completely. Today we live in a world where:
Books are banned and there is no reason to ban a book.
Books are not banned by a political censor but by a publishing industry that function as the gatekeeper to what may or may not be published. The Internet is full of text that would never be published by the industry and yet hardly anyone wants to read. So the political power has no reason to actively ban books (except a few that are written by insiders) because they know that most books will not be read.
Before the reformation books, including the Bible, were in Latin and there was no reason to ban them, attempts to translate the Bible were met with prosecution and massacre.
We are deprived of information and we get too much of it.
The truth is concealed and drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
We are deprived of exact and timely information and we are drowned in incidental and non-essential information. Without information—no matter how smart we are—we can never know the truth.
We are a captive culture and a trivial one.
Those who are not trivial, who do not spend their lives following the latest celebrity “scandal” are captive in enclosed academia or high-powered career. They enter their cage willingly, even competing to get a place, because it is the only escape they know from the triviality.
People are controlled by pain and pleasure.
We are ruined by our fears and desires.
People are so different, so diverse—this is a natural consequence to the fact that each person is physically different: some are tall others are short. Some are healthy; others are sickly, et cetera—that while some give up to their pleasures, others have more self-control and vision and have to be intimidated by the threat of pain. Nevertheless a generation grows up that is willing to endure the pain and that is when physical elimination becomes necessary, the Russian Empire achieved that by exile to Siberia, the Military rulers of South America by ‘disappearing’ tens of thousands, other countries do it by constructing the world’s largest prison system.
In High Treason in Zimbabwe I suggested the introduction of a gold coin, which I called the Zimbi, to solve the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe:
The zimbi would have turned the monetary system of Zimbabwe from the weakest on Earth to the only one based on gold, thus ensuring that Zimbabwe becomes the world’s only country with a trustworthy currency. Capital would pour into Zimbabwe from all over the world and its economy would boom.
Now Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr Gideon Gono has suggested a plan to reintroduce the Zimbabwean dollar as a gold backed hard currency:
THE GOLD STANDARD
1.23 The gold standard is a monetary system in which money in circulation is freely and fully convertible into a fixed amount of gold. Under such an arrangement, the value of local currency is fully backed by gold. The system allows holders of local currency to redeem paper money for gold at a specified rate.
1.24 The total amount of money in the country would be fixed in relation to the amount of monetary gold. The Central Bank is only able to expand money supply if there is a corresponding increase in gold reserves.
1.25 The gold standard, which is characterised by stable exchange rates removes business uncertainties and facilitates trade and commerce.
THE CURRENCY BOARD
1.26 Under a Currency Board arrangement, Monetary Authorities only issue domestic currency, backed by foreign exchange reserves. The Central Bank issues notes and coins that are convertible into the anchor currency at a fixed rate of exchange.
1.27 Under a Currency Board, however, the country loses monetary autonomy to the anchor country.
OPERATIONAL MODALITIES OF ISSUING THE GOLD/DIAMOND BACKED LOCAL CURRENCY
1.28 Under the gold/diamond backed monetary system, Government will need to provide adequate mineral resources to back each unit of the local currency issued.
1.29 It will be critical to capacitate local gold and diamond producers in order to produce adequate mineral resources.
1.30 Government will establish an Independent Committee of Stakeholders to ascertain and certify the quantity of gold or diamonds produced to back the issuance of the local currency. This Committee would, thus produce certificates of authenticity, indicating the true levels of gold, diamonds, platinum, against which now money would be printed.
1.31 The operational modalities of the gold/diamond backed local currency issuance are as follows:
Step 1:
1.32 Diamond/Gold producers deliver to the designated delivery point
Step 2:
1.33 An all inclusive Independent Panel of stakeholders certifies the quantity of gold/diamonds produced and delivered.
Step 3:
1.34 Upon delivery of gold/diamonds the Independent Panel of experts issues gold/diamond certificates to RBZ, authorizing it to issue local currency equivalent in value to the amount of gold/diamond delivered.
Step 4:
1.35 RBZ instructs Fidelity Printers to print local currency equivalent to the value of the gold/diamond certificates and reports back to the Panel for verification and transparency,.
Step 5:
1.36 Fidelity Printers prints local currency amount equivalent to the value of gold/diamond delivered.
Step 6:
1.37 RBZ issues local currency to the Public through the Banking channels.
RESULT
1.38 The result would be smooth functionality in the country’s payments system, without the risk of over supply of money.
Although this plan will not solve all problems and will have problems of its own, it is a thousand times better than the treasonable act of dollarisation. Reaction:
“Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor, Dr Gideon Gono who has identified inflation as the country’s number one enemy and fought to give the national currency a semblance of value, has generated intense debate after he recently called for the reintroduction of local unit.
In a presentation he made in Parliament this week, Dr Gono proposed that the new currency be backed by gold or diamond production in the country, so that it has actual value, as one could have a measure of gold in exchange for money.
The reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar, he said, was therefore ‘not a blind return to the money printing press.’”
“But our people could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was—that it all rested on foreign trade and financial credit; that the course of trade once turned away from us, even for a time, it might never return; and that our credit once shaken might never be restored.”
Almost all resources have been put towards developing better computational implementations and bigger computational capacity; while very little has been devoted to developing theories that need less computation.
Now we read in a recent article:
“The models run on these computers can generate visualizations of everything from supernovas to protein structures.But even with the speed supercomputers provide, the complex models are quickly overwhelming current computing capabilities.”
The real problem is that supercomputers are being overwhelmed by the models, while scientific theory has hardly moved forward for the last two generations. Now that is a scientific crisis.
In the past science advanced by bounds and leaps from one generation to another, sometimes the scientific output of one country declines while that of another increase. Now the whole modern world, with its modern science, is declining without an alternative to take over. There is a real qualitative difference between the so-called scientists of today and real scientists who advanced science in the past.
Newton, who died in 1727, built on the foundation of his predecessors. His three abstract laws became the foundation for scores of empirical laws already discovered by great scientists like Johannes Kepler (died 1630), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) and Christiaan Huygens (d. 1695), to name just a few.
Those men had built their empirical laws on a solid foundation consisting of observations collected by their predecessors, great names like Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543) and Tycho Brahe (d. 1601).
They in turn built on the science developed by the Islamic East and in particular the invention of Algebra, the basis for all subsequent mathematical advances (see the Wikipedia articles: Astronomy in medieval Islam & List of Muslim astronomers).
Newton himself acknowledged this when he wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”. Unfortunately the view of modern science is blocked by huge super-computers.
They have spent huge amounts of money on building larger and larger accelerators, the failure of each one to advance the science becomes the reason for building an even bigger one; this process of enlargement has resulted in an accelerator as big as a city, the biggest pyramid is always built shortly before the end.
And now the recent article:
“The world’s largest scientific machine has cost $10 billion, has worked only nine days and has yet to smash an atom. The unique equipment in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel with cathedral-sized detectors deep beneath the Swiss-French border has been assembled by specialists in many countries, with 8,970 physicists eagerly awaiting the startup.
But despite the expense, thousands of physicists around the world, many of whom hope to conduct experiments here, insist that it will work and that it is crucial to mankind’s understanding of the universe.
…
The collider emerged as the world’s largest after the U.S. canceled the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas in 1993. Congress pulled the plug after costs soared, and questions were raised about the value of the science it could produce.
…
They hope the higher energy will enable them to see particles so far undetected, such as the elusive Higgs boson, which in theory gives mass to other particles — and objects and creatures — in the universe.”
Not as shown in hack director Roland Emmerich’s forthcoming film 2012:
But in a much more serious and historically consistent way. The Mexica people predicted their own demise in the beginning of the sixteenth century, this came true not through brimstone and floods but through an alien invasion that rocked society and brought everything crumbling down.
The world of the Mexica
Today the world is united under one power, just as the world of the Mexica was united under one power residing in Tenochtitlan, that rules without consent of most who live under its power. Any country that tries to resist this rule will either end up like Iraq or in most cases like Zimbabwe.
Any disturbance to the power structure will unleash pent up pressure, just as the arrival of aliens to the world of the Mexica unleashed rebellion:
“Cortés, with up to 500 Spaniards, did not fight alone but with as many as 150,000 or 200,000 allies from Tlaxcala, and eventually other Aztec tributary states. It was not difficult for Cortes to find allies to fight with him, the Aztecs were not generally liked by the neighbouring city-states.”
So what could disturb the structure of power in the world? Neither aliens nor religion will do it. Environmental collapse or natural causes have some probability on the long term, but we should not concentrate on either. Let us see if we can learn from history and ask why did the world of the Soviet Union collapse? The answer is economic collapse.
“It is apparent that the quantities of money are increasing in an accelerating fashion. In 1990, the total amount of currency in circulation passed US$1 trillion. Twelve years later, the total amount exceeded US$2 trillion. This doubled again less than six years later in early 2008.”
Doubling in half the time is a characteristic of exponential growth. The next step is a doubling in three years, which means by 2012 the total amount of currency in circulation will pass $8 trillion.
Trillions more is being ‘printed’ by central banks. That money, for now, is being horded by the bank but sooner or later the dam will burst and the money will engulf the whole economy, then there will be no escape from hyperinflation.
In Beware the Boom! I wrote the following about China’s gold reserves:
China’s official numbers are constant, but gold produced in China is not exported, hence the gold is being accumulated outside the official reserve.
And now we read:
“China, owner of the world’s biggest forex reserves, said Friday its gold reserves had risen to 1,054 tonnes by the end of 2008.
China is now the fifth biggest holder of gold reserves in the world, with only six countries having a holding of more than 1,000 tonnes, Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told Xinhua in an interview. The new figure represents an increase of 454 tonnes from 600 tonnes in 2003, the last time China announced an adjustment of its gold holdings.
The country adjusted its holding of gold reserves twice this century. It raised its holding from 394 tonnes to 500 tonnes in 2001, and to 600 tonnes in 2003, Hu said.”
Over the last six years China’s gold reserve has been increasing at a yearly rate of about 10% while all published statistics showed it as a constant. Since 2000 the reserve has increased two-and-a-half times. Even with the latest increase the reserve is still pitiful, equalling about a three-hundredth of an ounce per person. The following table compares that to other countries:
In ancient times people had to perform labour to extract from nature the substances they needed to survive, thus direct labour resulted in direct satisfaction.
Later barter developed where people would perform labour and extract from nature more than they needed, afterwards they would exchange their surplus with a different substance extracted by someone else. Thus in this situation past labour was exchanged for past labour.
Later indirect barter through a monetary commodity developed. Now the two people bartering did not have to meet and exchange their goods in one operation, instead surplus goods are exchanged for a monetary commodity, which in turn is exchanged for needed goods. The monetary commodity, like all commodities, represented past labour and it was also the most liquid thus guaranteeing that the second exchange operation will be completed.
Later (much later) gold and silver emerged as the final monetary commodities. The direction of development went towards mined products from the moment they became abundant to fulfil the role of money. The first mined commodity to play that role was salt, which did not need refining.
A British Guinea
A piece of minted gold contain the following labour: labour to discover the gold, labour to mine the gold ore, labour to refine the gold, labour to mint the gold, labour to secure the gold through this process. When one gives up his surplus product for a piece of gold he is exchanging past labour with past labour in monetary form. The new form has many advantages: it does wear out or perish, it is much denser making it easer to store and transport and most importantly it is liquid.
“Gold is the indispensable regulator of debt in society. … Well, we have just tried [bureaucratic regulation of the level of debt] and found that whenever irredeemable promises are to be liquidated by issuing more irredeemable promises, debt proliferates beyond any limit.
…
People wake up and realize that they are surrendering real goods and real services in exchange for irredeemable promises.”
Now we live in an age where all the developments of the last ten thousand years are being thrown away and replaced by new un-tested gimmicks. We throw away monetary commodities and replace them with fiat currency, but do we really know what we are getting ourselves into?
As I tried to show in The Printing Press is a Harsh Mistress one unit of fiat currency is equivalent to one unit of public debt on the central bank balance sheet. If one accepts a fiat currency then he will not be accepting past labour but instead the promise that future labour will generate enough public income (through tax, excise, et cetera) to service the public debt. Thus selling goods for fiat currency becomes an exchange of past labour for future labour.
Imagine a farmer exchanging his surplus wheat for the hunter’s surplus winter catch. The farmer fulfils his obligation at harvest but has to wait six months for his share. What would happen if the winter’s catch were too low? This is why meat is smoked or cured and exchanged at harvest time. The farmer gets last year’s catch instead of next year’s catch.
The problem with future labour is not only unforeseen circumstances but more importantly is that before generating a surplus enough has to be generated to pay the workers, but since they too are paid with fiat currency this will only increase the amount of future promises. This cycle means that the quantity of money has to increase exponentially at a rate outpacing the economy. As more money is created its exchange value drops, the dollar has lost about 97.7% of its value (gold from $20.67/oz. to $900/oz.) since becoming a fiat currency.
A US Gold Dollar
There is no need to add the phrase “In God We Trust” to coins with intrinsic value because if you have them then your prayers have already been answered by the Almighty.
“If they cannot be bothered to reproduce, why should any European soldier sacrifice himself for future generations that never will be born?”
-Why Europe chooses extinction by Spengler (hat tip to Fabius)
The following map is taken from Wikipedia and edited by me to emphasise the difference. The map shows the birth rate per country (births/1000 person), I changed the nine colours to three.
The red countries are all dying out, the blue represent the inflection point and the green are the only countries with potential to grow.
It seems that modern western social order is not capable of chewing gum and walking at the same time. Reproduction is a necessary condition in the biological definition of ‘life’; societies that cannot reproduce themselves are dead.
Click to view
