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Things That Make You Go Hmmm – Fiat Monkees and Golden Beatles

Things That Make You Go Hmmm – Fiat Monkees and Golden Beatles

By Grant Williams

 

By Grant Williams  | October 29, 2013

Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.

On September 8-10, 1965, this ad appeared in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, as two aspiring filmmakers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, inspired by what was to become one of the best and most influential musical films of all time, set about trying to cast the leads in a television show about four crazy kids living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that the protagonists in the aforementioned film had made so appealing to the masses.

That film was A Hard Day’s Night, its stars The Beatles, and the four young men (chosen from 437 applicants) who would be groomed to supplant them in Americans’ hearts and minds were Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Mike Nesmith. Together, these four part-time musicians and wannabe actors would become The Monkees; and Rafelson & Schneider’s plan was to make them bigger than even The Beatles could dream of being. Armed as they were with the power of television entering its golden age, they had the odds stacked in their favour — or so it seemed.

In 1965, the Beatles were the preeminent band in the world and at the very peak of their power. The time seemed right for a knock-off band that would enable its architects to live the high life and create untold riches out of thin air. After all, The Beatles were genuinely talented songwriters and musicians, and those were in limited supply, even in the 1960s. It was far easier to produce a band that didn’t have to rely on something tangible, such as talent, in order to be accepted by the public — as long as you could sell it to people by capitalizing on The Beatles’ success.

That band was to be The Monkees.

The premise was, in the words of Dolenz, to produce “a TV show about an imaginary band … that wanted to be The Beatles, [but] that was never successful”….

The Beatles were music’s gold standard; the Monkees would be a convenient fiat alternative….

How did the fiat alternative to John, Paul, George, and Ringo fare? Well, the answer is perhaps somewhat surprising.

Initially, The Pre-Fab Four, Mike, Davy, Peter, and Mickey (it just doesn’t have the same ring[o] to it, I’m afraid), were assiduously kept away from the musical instruments they were supposed to play when recording the songs that would, according to Rafelson & Schneider’s strategy, sell by the millions and make everybody rich — despite the fact that they were all reasonably accomplished musicians and, in the case of Nesmith and, latterly, Dolenz, capable of composing successful pop songs.

Jones was chosen to sing lead vocals (something that rankled with the rest of the band, who felt that Dolenz’s more distinctive voice was far more likely to set the band apart); Dolenz was picked as the drummer (even though Jones was far more accomplished in that role, but his diminutive stature meant he disappeared behind the high-hat cymbals); Nesmith took lead guitar (even though Dolenz was an accomplished guitarist but had never played drums before); and that left Tork, who picked up the bass (even though Nesmith was skilled in the playing of that instrument) and keyboards.

In short, an alternative to the most successful band of the day was created by parties interested in having a simpler, more lucrative alternative under their control. It was created and configured not with its long-term viability in mind but rather with appearances as the main driver, in the expectation that, even though the level of talent underpinning the band was hardly of the calibre of Lennon & McCartney, it would be enough — at least for a while.

And guess what? It was.

In August 1966, the Monkees’ debut single, “Last Train to Clarksville”, was released and Monkeemania was born. The group’s network TV show debuted a month later, in September 1966 (in the days when there were only a handful of channels to watch). It was designed to appeal to the teen audience enthralled with the lovable Brits, and so the band’s popularity was assured…. As long as the masses accepted The Monkees, the talent underpinning their success was of altogether secondary importance.

The following year, 1967, something rather extraordinary happened.

That year, The Beatles released a collection of songs in an album entitled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — which would go on to be voted the number-one album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine (a position it retains to this day). Meanwhile, another popular rock combo of the day, The Rolling Stones, released two albums, Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request; Jimi Hendrix introduced the public to Are You Experienced?; and The Doors unveiled their eponymous debut album, featuring “Break on Through”, “The End”, and “Light My Fire”.

Well, guess what?

The number-one, top-selling album of 1967 was (drum roll, please):

Yes folks, More of The Monkees, featuring “When Love Comes Knockin’ (At Your Door)”, written by Carole Bayer Sager and Neil Sedaka; “Sometime in the Morning”, penned by Gerry Goffin and Carole King; “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”, by Boyce and Hart; and the instant classic “I’m A Believer” … hot off the pen of Neil Diamond….

But ultimately, over time, something which is real will always be recognized by the masses as superior to something created for superficial purposes — particularly during times of crisis.

For those keeping score at home, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are second only to Bob Dylan’s 11 albums in the top 500, with 10 each, and the Beatles have 4 albums in the top 10 (including, of course, the number-one album of all-time in Sgt. Pepper).

The Monkees don’t appear in the top 500.

Why do I bring this up? Well, of course, this is one of those weeks when I’m going to be talking about gold again — yes, finally! — and my thoughts were triggered by an article I read in, of all places, the Hindu Business Line.

India’s love affair with gold is well-understood in this part of the world and completely misunderstood in the West — a phenomenon I have always found fascinating — but recently it has become abundantly clear that this disconnect is widening almost daily as the Western fixation with The Gold Price and the Eastern obsession with The Price of Gold take ever more divergent paths.

After the recent frenzied activity at the Reserve Bank of India (which, if it had taken place in the USA, would absolutely have been labeled “The War on Gold” by CNN) as they tried every means possible to stop Indian citizens from buying gold (something I documented in “Never The Twain“, TTMYGH August 27 2013), I set about thinking why it is that attitudes in the opposing hemispheres are so different regarding the yellow metal….

To continue reading this article from Things That Make You Go Hmmm… – a free weekly newsletter by Grant Williams, a highly respected financial expert and current portfolio and strategy advisor at Vulpes Investment Management in Singapore – please click here.

Why Obamacare Will Not Conquer American Culture

Why Obamacare Will Not Conquer American Culture

obamacare

It’s become quite obvious that, politically, Obamacare has conquered America. (It now has the power of law.) However, it will eventually fail. In fact, it’s failing already because of something that transcends politics – our ingrained culture.

I had a conversation yesterday with a very astute European friend. While discussing the differences between Europeans and Americans, he said:

On the scale of a whole society, Americans change slower, Europeans change faster. But individually, Americans change faster, and Europeans slower.

And he is quite right about this. Europeans change in groups, but Americans very seldom do. And even when they do, those changes seldom last.

He went on:

This gives Americans an advantage: they can try many more solutions before choosing. But if a society-wide change is imposed on them, it may never find mass adoption; the majority will resist it, and wait it out.

Obamacare is one of these society-wide European-style solutions, shoved down the throats of American culture. Confused by politics (which is, more or less, the purpose of politics), most Americans haven’t known what to think about it, so they are waiting to see what happens.

At the moment, what they see is very bad and while they may hope it works itself out, we know it won’t for one simple reason: Americans expect to choose, and to change their choice whenever they want.

Americans expect to choose a product this year, but to change to a different one next year, when something better comes along. This is deeper than the noise and clamor of politics – it is ingrained in our culture.

Obamacare transgresses the American cultural norms, and will therefore fail – sooner or later, in one way or another.

Why Obamacare Is Much Like A Viking Invasion

In the early Middle Ages, the Vikings wrought havoc on the British Isles. They plundered wherever they wished, extorted astonishing amounts of silver from the kings of England, and never suffered a serious defeat. They conquered, clearly and definitely.

But a funny thing happened to the Vikings over time – they became Englishmen.

The Vikings started as a wild band of pagan destroyers and thieves, and ended up, in a fairly short span, as Christian British farmers.

Why did they make this change? Because the English way of life – English culture – was far more attractive than a life of frozen oceans, killing, and drunkenness.

The Vikings conquered militarily, but they were defeated culturally.

The same thing is happening to Obamacare in America: It conquered politically, but it will fail culturally.

Culture trumps conquest, whether it be the conquest of arms or the conquest of politics.

Obamacare will fail because Americans expect to choose, and to change their choice when they want.

When Americans want a different doctor or hospital, they expect to get it. If they don’t, they’ll break the rules: either they’ll bribe people to get what they want, pay for political favors to get what they want, go to the black market to get what they want, or start taking over hospital administration offices. (I fear that there may be a few shootings too.)

American culture expects choices; it is built for individual changes, not collective changes. This is in the DNA of the culture, and no matter which political gang controls the levers of rulership, the culture will not simply follow.

Whether in one way or many, sooner or later, Obamacare will fail. American culture is not dead yet.

Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]

FOURTH TURNING GETS MORE INTERESTING BY THE MINUTE

Chinese launching their new nuclear submarine force this week. The Russians conducting surprise missile defense exercises. Israel attacking Syria today. This Fourth Turning gets more interesting by the minute. Stock market euphoria at the top of a bubble. An economy in recession. A desperate president whose approval ratings are at all time lows and whose domestic agenda is in absolute shambles could do something really stupid. The entire world resembles a room full of TNT inhabited by a bunch of monkeys lighting matches. It isn’t long before the whole thing goes KABOOM!!!!  

The Russian Aerospace Defence Forces carried out live firing exercises at the Kapustin Yar testing ground in Russia’s southern Astrakhan region on Wednesday. The training involved carrying out exercises using the s-300 Favourite, S-400 Triumph and Pantsir-S missile defense systems.

 

First Glimpse Of China’s Nuclear Submarine Fleet

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/30/2013 22:20 -0400

Following Japan’s scrambling of fighter jets for the 3rd day in a row, China has revealed that its first fleet of nuclear submarines has started sea patrols, in the latest sign of its military’s growing confidence which has raised concerns in the region. As The FT reports, Xinhua, China’s official news agency, released photographs of what appeared to be Xia-class vessels – China’s first generation of nuclear-armed submarines, which are several decades old – saying they were being “declassified” for the first time, adding with supremely colorful language that, the subs would “gallop to the depths of the ocean, serving as mysterious forces igniting the sound of thunder in the deep sea”, and be an “assassin’s mace that would make adversaries tremble”.

 

 

Via The FT,

…

 

While the submarines displayed on Sunday were the older generation of nuclear vessels that are part of China’s northern fleet – and not the more advanced Jin-class based at the southern Chinese island of Hainan – the display in the domestic media nonetheless reflects the Chinese military’s growing confidence.

 

“It is still the first time that the Xia class has been discussed in such detail in China’s state-run media,” said Taylor Fravel, an expert on Chinese security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. “As China’s military modernisation continues to advance, the PLA has become more willing to discuss its capabilities.”

 

…

 

In recent years, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has become increasingly active in the Pacific, particularly in staking Chinese claims to disputed maritime territory in the South China Sea.

 

Chinese ships and aircraft have also become more aggressive in challenging Japanese control of the Senkaku Islands – which China calls the Diaoyu – in the East China Sea. Japan has administered the uninhabited group for decades, but China and Taiwan both claim sovereignty.

 

Syrian Army Base Rocked Again By Overnight Explosions, Israel Implicated

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Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/31/2013 08:03 -0400

The last time major explosions were reported near Damascus, it was in May when Israel and its air force did everything in their power to provoke the Assad regime to escalate military operations both domestically and abroad. It almost succeeded when three months later Obama nearly led a falseflag-driven “liberation” force facilitating Saudi and Qatari energy interests in the region and their pipeline ambitions below Syria. Since then Israel had been largely dormant, seething in its (and Saudi) disappointment that it was unable to play Obama like a fiddle.

The unstable detente changed again overnight, when as Haaretz reports “a large explosion was heard at a Syrian army missile base in Latakia.  Eye witnesses told the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human rights that the explosion took place near Snobar Jableh, south of the city. It was not yet clear whether anyone was wounded in the strike.” And not surprisingly, it is once again Israel’ that was implicated in the latest regional provocation because as Haaretz adds, the “strike follows Lebanese media reports that Israeli aircraft circled above southern Lebanon.”

“The official Lebanese news agency reported that Israeli aircrafts were sighted on multiple occasions Wednesday in the south of the country. According to the report, which was based on a press statement by the Lebanese army, the airplanes entered Lebanese airspace at around 1:40 P.M. and circled over various places before leaving over the Mediterranean Sea near Tripoli and Naqoura at 5 P.M.”

From Haaretz:

A Facebook page run by Syrian rebels claimed that the strike occurred at around 7 P.M. According to the page, a missile was fired from the sea and struck the Syrian base but did not result in any casualties. Israeli sources declined to comment on the reports.

 

Last week, Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jarida reported that Israeli fighter planes had bombed a shipment of missiles in the border area between Lebanon and Syria. The report, which according to the paper was based on sources in Jerusalem, has no confirmation from any other source.

 

The source told the newspaper that the missiles that were destroyed were of an advanced model and were designated for Hezbollah, as part of the strengthening of the organization’s missile system. It is not clear whether the attack was carried out on Lebanese territory or on Syrian territory.

 

Israel refused to comment officially on the publication in the Kuwaiti newspaper, whose reliability is questionable.

While hardly surprising if Israel is confirmed as the offending party, a far bigger question is what are next steps: because unlike before, Putin has now very officially made Syria his protectorate, even as the US protective influence over both Syria and the region in general was waned substantially in the past few months. But perhaps more surprising is the desperation with which Israel is once again trying to destabilize the region. One thing that is clear: while such provocative actions may have yielded results as recently as half a year ago, Israel will need to put far more energy into comparable actions in the future, whether they target Syria or Iran, as the public opinion’s threshold for unwarranted Israel offensive action has dropped substantially since the bundled US foreign policy escapade in Syria which was an unmitigated disaster for the US-Saudi-Qatar-Israel axis.

The Economy Can Never Fully Recover as Long as This Remains…

The Economy Can Never Fully Recover as Long as This Remains…

government regulations and business

When I was a young man, the older men I admired were the independent businessmen. Being a corporate suit issuing orders to underlings never appealed to me, but being a successful man who controlled his own life and business… that did.

Perhaps as a result, most of my friends are independent business people of one sort or another. Not long ago, I had a notable conversation with one of them, during which he said:

You know, Paul, business used to be fun. I’d take my children around and show them what we were doing, and explain the differences we’d make.

I waited just a beat as he winced and then continued:

Now, I don’t want to drag my kids into my business. Every time I move, there are regulations, permissions, forms to file. It takes up most of my time, for nothing. Business isn’t fun anymore. If I could find something else, I’d get out.

And this is a man who has been in his business since childhood, who loves to tell stories about it, and who used to enjoy his work immensely. If this guy is looking for the exit, the problem is dire.

It’s pretty obvious why

I have limited faith in government statistics, but there are a few informative ones on this subject:

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) recently reported that the annual cost of complying with government regulations is more than one trillion dollars per year and has been since 2005.

It goes on to report that big businesses (500+ employees), pay about $7,550 per employee to comply with the regulations. Small businesses, on the other hand (up to 20 employees) pay about $10,600 for every person they employ. And this is just one reason why small, independent businesses are being swallowed up by giant corporations.

Also bear in mind that this is just the cost of compliance with federal regulations. States also impose regulations on businesses. So do most of the county and city governments, especially large city governments.

New rules are produced constantly, and the cost of compliance rises constantly. In the US (and many other places), the cost of doing business has long since become prohibitive.

The Work-Arounds

Clever folks always find ways to get around this insanity, of course. But those ways are extra work and probably help relatively few people.

#1: They get rid of their employees

They find niches in their fields that allow them to escape the endless paperwork, penalties, and senselessly wasted time that comes with being an employer. (If you’ve ever had employees, you know what I mean.)

And what of the workers? Well, some get hired by the few related-industry employers that remain, while others have to take a mind-numbing mid-level corporate job just to pay the bills or get insurance. The rest are living on food stamps, disability, or a dozen other welfare programs.

#2: They go offshore

If your business is not resident where the regulators are, they usually can’t say anything about it.

Not many business people have moved abroad, but lots of them have set up offshore companies and are conducting business on the Internet. These people get their lives back… if they can find a way to make it work.

That is the dirty little secret of offshore companies, by the way: It’s not about escaping taxes; it’s about escaping all that ridiculous, insulting, pointless paperwork. No more spending days crunching numbers at tax time, no filing new reports every time you do something. You just take care of your customers and deliver good product. (Which ought to be enough.)

#3: They pay politicians for protection

Why would anyone donate thousands of dollars to a politician unless they expected to get something in return?

Big businesses pay politicians so that they can make a phone call to get problems that arise fixed. Small businesses can’t afford that, and most small business owners have moral problems with bribery.

Legit Is Dead

Unfortunately, the old “American way” of working hard, conducting honest business, and succeeding is gone, dead, and buried. It may still happen from time to time, but infrequently and off the beaten path.

Not long ago, I found this sign posted on a streetlight in Chicago:

business and government regulations
The sign is right – the old “legit” way of doing business is dead. If you want to get ahead these days, you either try to play a game that is rigged against you, you pay politicians to bend the rules for you, or you avoid the situation entirely.

It seems that the best and brightest – the would-be drivers of the economy – are choosing the last option.

What does that say about where things are going?

Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]

SNAP REDUCTION ON NOVEMBER 1 IS NOT A CUT

This is what passes for journalism on ultra-liberal websites like Salon and Huffington Post. These are the stories that reveal the true nature of liberals, Keynesians, and low-life politicians. Let me take you back to early 2009. Obama and his minions proclaimed that the world was going to end. The country had to get behind his shovel ready $800 billion ONE TIME STIMULUS PLAN. We were told by the Keynesian economists, Obama, and the Democrats in Congress that this TEMPORARY injection into the economy would pull us out of recesssion and all would be well.

This is how liberals grow government to epic proportions. They threw $250 billion at states to pay union teachers, rather than have the states make the tough choices to balance their budgets. When this money ran out two years later, the liberals SCREAMED about these spending CUTS. How could we do this to the children. They were not fucking cuts. They sold this porkulus plan as one time stimulus. It ran out. It wasn’t a cut. Can liberals get that through their thick skulls?

When an economy goes into recession, more people sign up for food stamps. It has always happened that way. When the economy recovers, the number of people on food stamps drops. It always happened this way. Not this time. Obama took a huge chunk of that ONE TIME STIMULUS money and pumped up the SNAP program. His minions then went about recruiting people to join the program. The recession has been over for four years and the number of people on SNAP has continued to rise by 7 million. 

Well guess what? The stimulus money runs out in two days. The $5 billion reduction in the SNAP program is NOT a fucking cut. The liberal douchebags want it both ways. First the money is one-time stimulus. Now it is a dreadful CUT that will lead to riots. Complete and utter bullshit. People in West Philly will have to cut back on KFC and Taco Bell. Maybe they can hold off buying that new iPhone or pair of Jordans. No one will be going hungry because the STIMULUS money ran out. Have you seen the people on SNAP. One look and you realize they ain’t starving.

IT ISN’T A SPENDING CUT!!!! 

Monday, Oct 28, 2013 12:45 PM EDT

“Riots always begin typically the same way”: Food stamp shutdown looms Friday 

The head of the largest food bank says the $5 billion annual cut will take a week of meals off millions’ plates

 

CULTURE OF IGNORANCE – PART ONE

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
– Thomas Edison

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

 

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” – Hendrik Willem van Loon

The levels of ignorance are multi-dimensional and diverse, crossing all educational, income, and professional ranks. The stench of ignorance has settled like Chinese toxic smog over our country, as various constituents have chosen comforting ignorance over disconcerting knowledge. The highly educated members, who constitute the ruling class in this country, purposefully ignore facts and truth because the retention and enhancement of their wealth and power are dependent upon them not understanding what they clearly have the knowledge to understand. The underclass wallow in their ignorance as their life choices, absence of concern for marriage or parenting, lack of interest in educating themselves, and hiding behind the cross of victimhood and blaming others for their own failings. Everyone is born ignorant and the path to awareness and knowledge is found in reading books. Rich and poor alike are free to read and educate themselves. The government, union teachers, and a village are not necessary to attain knowledge. It requires hard work and clinging to your willful ignorance to remain stupid.

The youth of the country consume themselves in techno-narcissistic triviality, barely looking up from their iGadgets long enough to make eye contact with other human beings. The toxic combination of government delivered public education, dumbed down socially engineered curriculum, taught by uninspired intellectually average union controlled teachers, to distracted, unmotivated, latchkey kids, has produced a generation of young people ignorant about history, basic mathematical concepts, and the ability or interest to read and write. They have been taught to feel rather than think critically. They have been programmed to believe rather than question and explore. Slogans and memes have replaced knowledge and understanding. They have been lured into inescapable student loan debt serfdom by the very same government that is handing them a $200 trillion entitlement bill and an economy built upon low paying service jobs that don’t require a college education, because the most highly educated members of society realized that outsourcing the higher paying production jobs to slave labor factories in Asia was great for the bottom line, their stock options and bonus pools.

Instead of being outraged and lashing out against this injustice, the medicated, daycare reared youth passively lose themselves in the inconsequentiality and shallowness of social media, reality TV, and the internet, while living in their parents’ basement. They have chosen the ignorance inflicted upon their brains by thousands of hours spent twittering, texting, facebooking, seeking out adorable cat videos on the internet, viewing racist rap singer imbeciles rent out sports stadiums to propose to vacuous big breasted sluts on reality cable TV shows, and sitting zombie-like for days with a controller in hand blowing up cities, killing whores, and murdering policemen using their new PS4 on their 65 inch HDTV, rather than gaining a true understanding of the world by reading Steinbeck, Huxley, and Orwell. Technology has reduced our ability to think and increased our ignorance.

“During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” – Bernard M. Baruch

The youth have one thing going for them. They are still young and can awaken from their self-imposed stupor of ignorance. There are over 80 million millenials between the ages of 8 and 30 years old who need to start questioning the paradigm they are inheriting and critically examining the mendacious actions of their elders. The future of the country is in their hands, so I hope they put down those iGadgets and open their eyes before it is too late. We need many more patriots like Edward Snowden and far fewer twerking sluts like Miley Cyrus if we are to overcome the smog of apathy and ignorance blanketing our once sentient nation.

The ignorance of youth can be chalked up to inexperience, lack of wisdom, and immaturity. There is no excuse for the epic level of ignorance displayed by older generations over the last thirty years. Boomers and Generation X have charted the course of this ship of state for decades. Ship of fools is a more fitting description, as they have stimulated the entitlement mentality that has overwhelmed the fiscal resources of the country. Our welfare/warfare empire, built upon a Himalayan mountain of debt, enabled by a central bank owned by Wall Street, and perpetuated by swarms of corrupt bought off spineless politicians, is the ultimate testament to the seemingly limitless level of ignorance engulfing our civilization. The entitlement mindset permeates our culture from the richest to the poorest. Mega-corporations use their undue influence (bribes disguised as campaign contributions) to elect pliable candidates to office, hire lobbyists to write the laws and tax regulations governing their industries, and collude with the bankers and other titans of industry to harvest maximum profits from the increasingly barren fields of a formerly thriving land of milk and honey. By unleashing a torrent of unbridled greed, ransacking the countryside, and burning down the villages, the ruling class has planted the seeds of their own destruction.

When the underclass observes Wall Street bankers committing the crime of the century with no consequences for their actions, they learn a lesson. When billionaire banker/politicians like Jon Corzine can steal $1.2 billion directly from the accounts of farmers and ranchers and continue to live a life of luxury in one of his six mansions, they get the message. Wall Street bankers are allowed to commit fraud, reaping profits of $25 billion, and when they are caught red handed pay a $5 billion fine while admitting no guilt. No connected bankers have gone to jail for crashing the worldwide financial system, but teenage marijuana dealers are incarcerated for ten years in our corporate prison system. The message has been received loud and clear by the unwashed masses. Committing fraud and gaming the system is OK. Only suckers play by the rules anymore. A culture of lawlessness, greed, fraud, deceit, swindles and scams was fashioned by those in power. Reckless disregard for honesty, truthfulness, fair dealing, and treating others as you would like to be treated, has permeated the beliefs and behavior of our society.

The ever increasing number of people in the SNAP program along with abuses committed by retailers and recipients, the skyrocketing number of people faking their way into the SSDI program, billions of taxpayer dollars lost to Medicare fraud, billions more lost paying out earned income tax credit refunds based on non-existent children, public schools falsifying test scores, students cheating on SAT tests, credit card fraud on a grand scale, failure to report income and falsifying tax returns, and a myriad of other dodges and scams are just a reflection of a moral and cultural collapse. The dog eat dog mentality glorified by the media, with such despicable men as Dimon, Greenspan, Corzine, Clinton, Trump, Rubin, Bernanke and Bloomberg honored as pillars of society, has displaced honesty, compassion, humanity, shared sacrifice, and caring about our descendants. Self-interest, self-indulgence, and a narcissistic focus on what is in it for me today has led to an implosion of trust and an attitude of “who cares” about our fellow man, morality, right or wrong, and the fate of future generations. We ignored the warnings of our last President who displayed courageousness and truthfulness when speaking to the American people.

“As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Me Generation has devolved into the Me Culture. While the masses have been mesmerized by their iGadgets, zombified by the boob tube, programmed to consume by the Madison Avenue propaganda machines, enslaved in chains of debt by the Wall Street plantation owners, and convinced by their fascist government keepers that phantom terrorists are hiding behind every bush, they surrendered their freedoms, liberties and sense of self-responsibility. There will always be evil men seeking to control and manipulate the ignorant and oblivious. A citizenry armed with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and moral integrity would not passively submit to the will of a corporate fascist oligarchy. Well educated, well informed citizens, capable of critical thinking are dangerous to rich men of evil intent. Obedient, universally ignorant, distracted, fearful, morally depraved slaves are what the owners of this country want. As the light of knowledge flickers and dies, we sink into the darkness of ignorance.

 

“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” – Samuel Adams

Cult of Ignorance

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” – Isaac Asimov

  

“While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.” – Henry Hazlitt

America’s cult of ignorance, combined with the selfish interests of various constituencies, the character weakness of the people elected to office, a lack of understanding or interest in basic mathematical concepts, and inability to comprehend the long term and unintended consequences of every piece of legislation, have brought the country to the brink of fiscal disaster. But still, the vast majority of Americans, including the supposed intellectuals and economic “experts”, are basking in their ignorance, as the stock market reaches a new high, the local GM dealer just gave them a 7 year $40,000 auto loan at 0% on that brand new Cadillac Escalade, Bank of America still hasn’t foreclosed on their McMansion two years after making their last mortgage payment, and they just received three pre-approved credit card notices from Capital One, American Express and Citicorp. As long as Bennie has our back printing $1 trillion new greenbacks per year, nothing can possibly go wrong. Our best and brightest economic minds are always right:

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” – Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929

“Many of the new financial products that have been created, with financial derivatives being the most notable, contribute economic value by unbundling risks and shifting them in a highly calibrated manner. Although these instruments cannot reduce the risk inherent in real assets, they can redistribute it in a way that induces more investment in real assets and, hence, engenders higher productivity and standards of living.” – Alan Greenspan – March 6, 2000

“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.” – Ben Bernanke – July 2005

The profound level of ignorance displayed by economists, politicians, business leaders, media personalities, and the average American, regarding the mathematically unsustainable path of our fiscal ship is perplexing to me on so many levels. If the Federal government was a family, the budget ceiling debate would be put into the following terms. Our household earns $28,000 per year, but we spend $38,000 per year and add $10,000 to our credit card balance, which stands at the limit of $170,000. In addition, we owe our neighbors $2 million we don’t have because we promised to pay if they voted for us as Treasurer of our homeowners association. We celebrate our good fortune of getting approved for another credit card with a $30,000 limit by increasing our spending to $39,000 per year. Intellectuals scorn such simplistic analogies by glibly pointing out that the family has a crazy uncle with a printing press in the basement and can pay-off the debt with his freshly printed dollars. And this is where the deliberate and calculated ignorance by the highly educated Ivy Leaguers regarding long term and unintended consequences is revealed. They ignore, manipulate, cover-up and obscure the facts because their wealth, power and influence depend upon them doing so. But ignorance doesn’t change the facts.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

Nothing exposes the ignorance of various factions within our society better than a debate about budgets, spending, and unfunded liabilities. This is where every party, group, special interest, and voting bloc ignore any and all facts that are contrary to their selfish interest. They only see what they want to see. The fallacies, errors, omissions and mistruths of their positions are inconsequential to people who only care about their short-term self-seeking interests. When I question the out of control spending on entitlements and our impossible to honor level of unfunded liabilities, those of a liberal persuasion lash out with accusations of hating the poor, starving children and throwing granny under the bus. Anyone suggesting we should slow our spending is branded a terrorist by the overwhelmingly liberal legacy media.

When I accuse Wall Street bankers of criminal fraud and ongoing manipulation of the financial markets, the CNBC loving apologists for these felons bellow about the market always being right. When I rail about the military industrial complex and our un-Constitutional invasions of other countries, the neo-cons come out in force blathering about the war on terror and imminent threats. When I point out the horrific results of our government run educational system and how mediocre union teachers are bankrupting our states and municipalities with their gold plated health and pension plans, I’m met with howls of outrage about the poor children. The common thread is that facts are ignored because each of their agendas requires ignorance on the part of their team’s fans.

The following chart of truth portrays an unsustainable path. Ignoring the facts will not change them. This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. It’s an American problem.

 

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.” – Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt may have written these words six decades ago, but they aptly describe Paul Krugman and the legions of Keynesian apostles whose bastardized interpretation of Keynes’ theory has led us to this fiscal cliff. How anyone can truly believe that borrowing to consume foreign produced goods versus saving and making job creating capital investments is a rational and sustainable economic policy is the height of ignorance. One look at this chart exposes the political party system as a sham. When it comes to the fiscal train wreck, set in motion thirty years ago, the ignorant media pundits peddle a narrative about politicians failing to compromise as the culprit in this derailment. Nothing could be further from the truth. Compromise is what has gotten us to this point. The Republicans compromised and allowed the Democrats to create a welfare state. The Democrats compromised and allowed the Republicans to create a warfare state. The Federal Reserve compromised their mandate of stable prices and preventing financial calamities by inflating away 95% of the dollar’s purchasing power in 100 years, while creating bubbles every five or so years, like clockwork. There are a myriad of facts related to the chart above that cannot be ignored:

  • It took 192 years for the country to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. It has taken us 30 years to accumulate the next $16 trillion of debt. We now add $1 trillion of debt per year.
  • If the Federal government was required to use GAAP accounting, the annual deficit would amount to $6.7 trillion per year.
  • The fiscal gap of unfunded future liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government pensions is $200 trillion.
  • Using realistic growth assumptions adds another $6 trillion of state and local government unfunded pension benefits to the equation.
  • The Federal government has increased their annual spending from $1.8 trillion during Bill Clinton’s last year in office to $3.8 trillion today, a 110% increase. The population has increased by 12% over that same time frame, and real GDP has advanced by 25% since 2000.
  • Defense spending has increased from $358 billion in 2000 to $831 billion today, despite the fact that no country on earth can challenge us militarily.
  • The average Baby Boomer will receive $300,000 more than they contributed to Social Security and Medicare over their lifetime. Over 10,000 Boomers per day will turn 65 for the next 17 years.
  • The Social Security lockbox is filled with IOUs. The funds collected from paychecks over the last 80 years were spent by Congress on wars of choice, bridges to nowhere, and thousands of other vote buying ventures.
  • A normalization of interest rates to long-term averages would double or triple the interest on the national debt and increase our annual deficits by at least 30%.
  • Obamacare and the unintended consequences of Obamacare will add tens of trillions to our national debt. The initial budget projections for Medicare and Medicaid showed only a modest financial impact on the financial situation of the country. How did that work out?
  • Entitlement spending in 2003 was $1.3 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2008 was $1.7 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2013 was $2.2 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2018 will be $2.8 trillion, as these programs are on automatic pilot.

When you consider the facts in a rational manner, without vitriolic denials, bitter accusations, acrimonious blame, and rejection of the entire premise, you come to the conclusion that we’ve passed the point of no return. Decades of bad choices, bad leadership, bad men in important positions, bad education, bad governance, and bad citizenship have led to bad times. But very few people, across all socio-economic classes, have any interest in understanding the facts or making the tough choices required to save future generations from a life of squalor. We willfully choose to ignore the facts.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” – Aldous Huxley

Our degraded and ignorant society is incapable of comprehending their dire circumstances or acting for the common good of the country. We are a nation on the take. Greed really is good. Everyone needs to play the game. From the top floor corporate CEO suite to the decaying urban wastelands, we have chosen comforting ignorance to uncomfortable knowledge. Our warped form of democracy enriches the few at the top, while dispensing enough subsistence payments to the lower classes to keep them from revolting, while enslaving the middle class in debt and convincing them it’s really wealth. Mencken understood the pathetic impulses of the American populace decades before we reached our point of no return.

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” – H.L. Mencken

The only way a democracy can survive is if the population is knowledgeable, vigilant, skeptical, educated, individually responsible, self-reliant, moral, capable of critical thinking and willing to accept the consequences of their actions. A nation of takers, fakers and blamers will not last long. We’ve degenerated into a nation of knowledge hating book burners. Our culture of ignorance will lead to the destruction of our culture and the ignorant masses will wonder what happened.

 

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.” – Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

In Part Two of this examination about our culture of ignorance I’ll explore the roles of technology, family breakdown, government, and propaganda in creating the ignorance that is consuming our system like a mutant parasite. If you are seeking a happy ending, I suggest looking elsewhere.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” — David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” — A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

“Who the h*** wants to hear actors talk?” — H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

“I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.” — Gary Cooper, on his decision to not take the leading role in “Gone With The Wind.”

“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” — Response to Debbi Fields’ idea of starting Mrs. Fields’ Cookies.

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” — Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” — Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M “Post-It” Notepads.

“So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.'” — Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer.

“Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” — 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard’s revolutionary rocket work.

“You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can’t be done. It’s just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training.” — Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the “unsolvable” problem by inventing Nautilus.

“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” — Drillers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist in his project to drill for oil in 1859.

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” — Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” — Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” — Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction”. — Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon”. — Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.” — Orville Wright.

RAT UTOPIA

The Behavioral Sink

Will  Wiles

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php

How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.

Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.

 

Calhoun’s concern was the problem of abundance: overpopulation. As the name Universe 25 suggests, it was not the first time Calhoun had built a world for rodents. He had been building utopian environments for rats and mice since the 1940s, with thoroughly consistent results. Heaven always turned into hell. They were a warning, made in a postwar society already rife with alarm over the soaring population of the United States and the world. Pioneering ecologists such as William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn were cautioning that the growing population was putting pressure on food and other natural resources as early as 1948, and both published bestsellers on the subject. The issue made the cover of Time magazine in January 1960. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, an alarmist work suggesting that the overcrowded world was about to be swept by famine and resource wars. After Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1970, his book became a phenomenal success. By 1972, the issue reached its mainstream peak with the report of the Rockefeller Commission on US Population, which recommended that population growth be slowed or even reversed.

 

Mouse utopia/dystopia, as designed by John B. Calhoun (middle and bottom). All images from Animal Populations: Nature’s Checks and Balances, 1983.

But Calhoun’s work was different. Vogt, Ehrlich, and the others were neo-Malthusians, arguing that population growth would cause our demise by exhausting our natural resources, leading to starvation and conflict. But there was no scarcity of food and water in Calhoun’s universe. The only thing that was in short supply was space. This was, after all, “heaven”—a title Calhoun deliberately used with pitch-black irony. The point was that crowding itself could destroy a society before famine even got a chance. In Calhoun’s heaven, hell was other mice.

So what exactly happened in Universe 25? Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.

 

Mouse utopia/dystopia, as designed by John B. Calhoun. All images from Animal Populations: Nature’s Checks and Balances, 1983.

On day 560, a little more than eighteen months into the experiment, the population peaked at 2,200 mice and its growth ceased. A few mice survived past weaning until day six hundred, after which there were few pregnancies and no surviving young. As the population had ceased to regenerate itself, its path to extinction was clear. There would be no recovery, not even after numbers had dwindled back to those of the heady early days of the Universe. The mice had lost the capacity to rebuild their numbers—many of the mice that could still conceive, such as the “beautiful ones” and their secluded singleton female counterparts, had lost the social ability to do so. In a way, the creatures had ceased to be mice long before their death—a “first death,” as Calhoun put it, ruining their spirit and their society as thoroughly as the later “second death” of the physical body.

Calhoun had built his career on this basic experiment and its consistent results ever since erecting his first “rat city” on a quarter-acre of land adjacent to his home in Towson, Maryland, in 1947. The population of that first pen had peaked at 200 and stabilized at 150, when Calhoun had estimated that it could rise to as many as 5,000—something was evidently amiss. In 1954, Calhoun was employed by the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Maryland, where he would remain for three decades. He built a ten-by-fourteen-foot “universe” for a small population of rats, divided by electrified barriers into four rooms connected by narrow ramps. Food and water were plentiful, but space was tight, capable of supporting a maximum of forty-eight rats. The population reached eighty before succumbing to the same catastrophes that would afflict Universe 25: explosive violence, hypersexual activity followed by asexuality, and self-destruction.

In 1962, Calhoun published a paper called “Population Density and Social Pathology” in Scientific American, laying out his conclusion: overpopulation meant social collapse followed by extinction. The more he repeated the experiment, the more the outcome came to seem inevitable, fixed with the rigor of a scientific equation. By the time he wrote about the decline and fall of Universe 25 in 1972, he even laid out its fate in equation form:

Mortality, bodily death = the second death Drastic reduction of mortality = death of the second death = death squared = (death)2 (Death)2 leads to dissolution of social organization = death of the establishment Death of the establishment leads to spiritual death = loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival = the first death Therefore: (Death)2 = the first death

This formula might apply to rats and mice—but could the same happen to humankind? For Calhoun, there was little question about it. No matter how sophisticated we considered ourselves to be, once the number of individuals capable of filling roles greatly exceeded the number of roles,

only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. … Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked.

 

Cover of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, 1968. Brunner’s title comes from the notion that the world’s population in 1968 could fit (if everyone were standing tightly together) on the Isle of Man, while the projected population in 2010 would fit on the larger island of Zanzibar. Courtesy Grant Thiessen/BookIT.

If its growth continued unchecked, human society would succumb to nihilism and collapse, meaning the death of the species. Calhoun’s death-squared formula was for social pessimists what the laws of thermodynamics are for physicists. It was a sandwich board with “The End Is Nigh” written on one side, and “QED” on the other. Indeed, the plight of Calhoun’s rats and mice is one we easily identify with—we put ourselves in the place of the mice, mentally inhabit the mouse universe, and cannot help but see ways in which it is like our own crowding world.

This is precisely what Calhoun intended, in the design of his experiments and the language he used to describe them. Universe 25 resembles the utopian, modernist urban fantasies of architects such as Ludwig Hilberseimer. Calhoun referred to the dwelling places within his Universes as “tower blocks” and “walk-up apartments.” As well as the preening “beautiful ones,” he refers to “juvenile delinquents” and “dropouts.” This handy use of anthropomorphism is unusual in a scientist—we are being invited to draw parallels with human society.

And that lesson found a ready audience. “Population Density and Social Pathology” was, for an academic paper, a smash hit, being cited up to 150 times a year. Particularly effective was Calhoun’s name for the point past which the slide into breakdown becomes irretrievable: the “behavioral sink.” “The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental,” Calhoun noted drily. The “sink,” a para-pathology of shared hopelessness, drew in pathological behavior and exacerbated its effects. Once the event horizon of the behavioral sink was passed, the end was certain. Pathological behavior would escalate beyond any possibility of control. The writer Tom Wolfe alighted on the phrase and deployed it in his lament for the declining New York City, “O Rotten Gotham! Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,” anthologized in The Pump House Gang in 1968. “It got to be easy to look at New Yorkers as animals,” Wolfe wrote, “especially looking down from some place like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour Friday afternoon. The floor was filled with the poor white humans, running around, dodging, blinking their eyes, making a sound like a pen full of starlings or rats or something.” The behavioral sink meshed neatly with Wolfe’s pessimism about the modern city, and his grim view of modernist housing projects as breeding grounds for degeneration and atavism.

Wolfe wasn’t alone. The warnings inherent in Calhoun’s research fell on fertile ground in the 1960s, with social policy grappling helplessly with the problems of the inner cities: violence, rape, drugs, family breakdown. A rich literature of overpopulation emerged from the stew, and when we look at Calhoun’s rodent universes today, we can see in them aspects of that literature. In the 1973 film Soylent Green, based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, the population of a grotesquely crowded New York is mired in passivity and dependent on food handouts which, it emerges, are derived from human corpses. In Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner’s 1972 novel of a hyperactive, overpopulated world, society is plagued by “muckers,” individuals who suddenly and for no obvious reason run amok, killing and wounding others. When we hear of the death throes of Universe 25—the cannibalism, withdrawal, and random violence—these are the works that come to mind. The ultraviolence-dispensing, gang-raping, purposeless “droogs” of Antony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, which appeared in the same year as Calhoun’s Scientific American paper, are the very image of some of the uglier products of mouse utopia.

 

Poster for Soylent Green, 1973. The film depicts a futuristic society in which overpopulation is so catastrophic and food in such short supply that the populace survives on rations of the titular food product, which turns out to be made from processed human flesh.

Calhoun’s research remains a touchstone for a particular kind of pessimistic worldview. And, in the way that writers like Wolfe and the historian Lewis Mumford deployed reference to it, it can be seen as bleakly reactionary, a warning against cosmopolitanism or welfare dependence, which might sap the spirit and put us on the skids to the behavioral sink. As such, it found fans among conservative Christians; Calhoun even met the pope in 1974. But in fact the full span of Calhoun’s research had a more positive slant. The misery of the rodent universes was not uniform—it had contours, and some did better than others. Calhoun consistently found that those animals better able to handle high numbers of social interactions fared comparatively well. “High social velocity” mice were the winners in hell. As for the losers, Calhoun found they sometimes became more creative, exhibiting an un-mouse-like drive to innovate. They were forced to, in order to survive.

Later in his career, Calhoun worked to build universes that maximized this kind of creativity and minimized the ill effects of overcrowding. He disagreed with Ehrlich and Vogt that restrictions on reproduction were the only possible response to overpopulation. Man, he argued, was a positive animal, and creativity and design could solve our problems. He advocated overcoming the limitations of the planet, and as part of a multidisciplinary group called the Space Cadets promoted the colonization of space. It was a source of lasting dismay to Calhoun that his research primarily served as encouragement to pessimists and reactionaries, rather than stimulating the kind of hopeful approach to mankind’s problems that he preferred. More cheerfully, however, the one work of fiction that stems directly from Calhoun’s work, rather than the stew of gloom that it was stirred into, is optimistic, and expands imaginatively on his attempts to spur creative thought in rodents. This is Robert C. O’Brien’s book for children, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, about a colony of super-intelligent and self-reliant rats that have escaped from the National Institute of Mental Health.

 

Sources: Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams, “Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent  Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,” The Journal of Social History, vol. 42, no. 3 (2009). Available as a working paper at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/.
John B. Calhoun, “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 66 (January 1973), pp. 80–88. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264.
John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific American, vol. 206, no. 2 (February 1962), pp. 139–150. Available at http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1963-02809-001.

 

Will Wiles is a London-based author and journalist. He is deputy editor of Icon, a monthly architecture and design magazine. His debut novel, Care of Wooden Floors, will be published by HarperPress in February 2012.

THE NEW NORMAL?

Our government and financial “leaders” tell us that things are back to normal and we are well on our way to economic recovery. They report rising GDP, declining unemployment, and record corporate profits. The legacy media propaganda machines, controlled by corporations dependent upon the government and Wall Street to funnel them advertising dollars in return for reporting falsehoods and mistruths, have been informing the masses that all is well. Just go back to staring at your iGadgets and tweeting your every thought to your followers, because the best and brightest in D.C. and Wall Street have it all figured out. The new normal is here to stay.

I guess my interpretation of normal deviates slightly from our glorious leaders’ definition. During the long-term bond bull market, from 1982 until 2007 the 10 Year Treasury steadily declined from 16% to 5%. This was normal because inflation declined at the same rate. Inflation declined from 13% to 3% over this same time frame according to the BLS. In reality, measuring inflation as it was measured in the 80’s and early 90’s would have yielded an inflation rate closer to 6% in 2007. During the decade prior to 2007, which consisted of supposedly strong economic growth, the 10 Year Treasury ranged between 4% and 7%. Even during the 2001 recession, it never dropped below 3.5%.

In a normal world an investor in a 10 Year Treasury bond would require a yield 2% to 3% above the rate of inflation. If the yield was below the rate of inflation they would be guaranteed to lose money. Only a fool, Federal Reserve chairman, or a CNBC bubble headed bimbo would buy a bond yielding less than the inflation rate. The BLS reported inflation rate has been between 2.1% and 3.2% over the last two years. Over this time frame, the 10 Year Treasury  yielded 2% or below until the threat of tapering reared its ugly head this past summer. Would this happen in a normal free market? If things are back to normal, why aren’t supposedly free markets acting normal? The Chinese and Japanese reacted normally. They stopped buying Treasuries with a real negative yield.

The only fool willing to buy negative yielding Treasuries is none other than Ben Bernanke. He thinks they are the investment of a lifetime. He is so sure they are a can’t miss investment, he buys $2.5 billion of them per day, which just so happens to be the government deficit per day. Ben now has $3.8 trillion of bonds on his books, versus $900 billion in 2008. His balance sheet is leveraged 60 to 1, versus the 30 to 1 of Lehman and Bear Stearns prior to their implosions. When even the hint of reducing bond purchases from $85 billion per month to $75 billion per month caused 10 Year rates to jump from 1.5% to 3% in a matter of weeks, you realize how “normal” our economy and financial system is functioning.

If our financial system was functioning normally and free market capitalism was allowed to operate according to true supply and demand, the 10 Year Treasury would be yielding 4% to 5% and 30 year mortgage rates would be 6% to 7%. Think about that for a minute. This scenario was normal from 2002 through 2007. That is what normal looks like. Now open your eyes and observe what your owners are telling you is normal. The slight increase in mortgage rates from 3.5% to 4.5% has brought the Wall Street buy and rent housing recovery scheme to it knees. Imagine if mortgage rates were allowed to rise to their true market rate. Housing would collapse in a heap.

Allowing Treasury rates to adjust to a true market rate, based on true inflation, would double or triple the annual interest expense on the $17 trillion national debt and blow a gigantic hole in Obama’s already disastrous $1 trillion annual deficits. Does this sound like “normal” to a rational thinking human being with the ability to understand simple math? Luckily, there are very few rational thinking Americans left and even fewer with the ability to understand simple math. We have been programmed to believe rather than think. As long as the stock market continue to rise, then everything is normal.

Do you think Ben Bernanke and his cohorts at the Federal Reserve worry about the average person who doesn’t own stocks, has to fill up their gas tank, feed their kids, make the mortgage, auto, and credit card payments, and figure out Obamacare, while working two part time jobs? Quantitative Easing (MONEY PRINTING) has one purpose and one purpose only – to further enrich the owners of the Federal Reserve – Wall Street banks. The .1% own most of the stocks in this country and their greed and avarice can never be satisfied.

This artificial prosperity plan for Wall Street has the added benefit of allowing the captured politicians in Washington D.C. to continue their $1 trillion per year deficit spending with no consequences for their squandering of future generations’ wealth. Bernanke and Yellen will never taper, because they can’t. The Fed balance sheet will continue to grow by at least $1 trillion per year until they crash the financial system again. Except this time, there will be no money printing solution. We are all trapped like rats in this monetary experiment being conducted by evil mad scientists. No one will get out alive. Welcome to the new normal. Now eat your cheese.

Is Bitcoin More Dangerous than “Cartel Money”?

Is Bitcoin More Dangerous than “Cartel Money”?

bitcoin cartel money

I’m going to use a couple of passages from the Bible (the original set of moral standards for our Western civilization), followed by an examination of both Bitcoin and cartel money, to see how they hold up in comparison.

As for my use of the term “cartel money,” it’s the best short description I know for the dollars, euros, yen (and so on) that we use in our daily commerce. They are produced by secretive and monopolistic groups of private banks. That rather precisely matches the definition of cartel.

Principle #1: For wherein you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.

I think by now we have all heard the big accusation against Bitcoin – that it is used for “money laundering” – made especially by the money cartels (the European Central Bank first).

First off, that doesn’t make sense to me. A currency is supposed to be neutral – that is its purpose. So, accusing a currency of money laundering is like jailing a knife for murder. But, that’s not precisely the point we’re addressing here.

Rather, the question is: do the cartels do the same thing that they condemn?

You bet they do!

Read this story on HSBC. Then read this one on Wachovia. These banks laundered hundreds of billions of dollars – knowingly – for violent drug lords. And it gets worse: No one from either bank went to jail. Neither bank was shut down. Neither bank suffered more than a minor fine.

So, how much of a concern can money laundering really be to the cartels and their politician partners? Clearly none, or very close to none.

And, since the cartels accuse Bitcoin of being used for bad things, let’s be clear about the situation: Every mafioso on the planet uses cartel money. So do all the drug smugglers, terrorists, and pornographers.

Does Bitcoin accuse the money cartels? Nope. Bitcoin has no official operators to speak for it at all.

It is true that many Bitcoin users accuse the cartels of being manipulators, but, at least for now, there is no Bitcoin cartel that is even capable of manipulating the currency.

So, round one goes to Bitcoin: The cartels very clearly condemn themselves, and Bitcoin clearly does not.

Principle #2: Everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light.

When Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto posted his Bitcoin paper in 2008, he laid everything open for all to see. Then he wrote the Bitcoin program and left it “open source,” so anyone could see the programming.

The process of creating cartel money, on the other hand, is mostly hidden, purposely confused, and isn’t even taught to most Econ majors. And if you think that’s just my opinion, here’s one from the esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith:

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

The argument is made, of course, that the process of creating dollars, etc. is very complicated, and that people don’t understand it because of that.

I don’t think that’s true, but even so, let’s compare it to Bitcoin: Making bitcoins is also complex, but Bitcoin enthusiasts have been working night and day to explain their new currency and how it works. I’ve seen them cornering people at birthday parties, trying to make them understand.

Round two goes to Bitcoin also. Bitcoin wants to be seen and known, and the cartels surely do not.

It all comes down to the reason “why.”

Satoshi Nakamoto began the original Bitcoin document by saying that he wanted to, “allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” He goes on to say that he was creating,

an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

In other words, Satoshi wanted to remove the necessity of one man ruling another in the area of money. Furthermore, he did it, then went away.

As for the motives of the cartel, we can’t really tell. The visible heads of the Federal Reserve are certainly not the owners of the Federal Reserve, and the US government refuses to reveal the names of the owners.

Perhaps the closest real examination of their motives comes from a renowned professor who worked for them for a few years. Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown – and a major influence on none other than Bill Clinton, wrote this in his book Tragedy & Hope:

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world.

So, was Quigley right? I have no solid proof that he is, but he would be an awfully hard witness to impeach. One substantiation that comes to mind is a recent comment by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. In the midst of a political fight, he complained, “The banks own the Senate.”

That’s not really proof either, but it is interesting.

You can make up your own mind on the banks, but Satoshi’s motives are fairly well beyond question.

I think it is clear that from a moral standpoint, Bitcoin is far, far better than cartel money. (As are silver and gold.)

So, the next time you hear someone calling Bitcoin dangerous and evil, don’t let them get away with it!

Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]

DC Wins, America Loses

Authored by Ron Paul via The Free Foundation,

Washington, DC, Wall Street, and central bankers around the world rejoiced this week as Congress came to an agreement to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling. The latest spending-and-debt deal was negotiated by Congressional leaders behind closed doors, and was rushed through Congress before most members had time to read it. Now that the bill is passed, we can see that it is a victory for the political class and special interests, but a defeat for the American people.

The debt ceiling deal increases spending above the levels set by the “sequester.” The sequester cuts were minuscule, and in many cases used the old DC trick of calling reductions in planned spending increases a cut. But even minuscule and phony cuts are unacceptable to the bipartisan welfare-warfare spending collation. The bill also does nothing to protect the American people from the Obamacare disaster.

As is common in bills drafted in secret and rushed into law, this bill contains special deals for certain powerful politicians. The bill even has a provision authorizing continued military aid to opponents of the Ugandan “Lord’s Resistance Army,” which was the subject of the widely-viewed “Kony 2012” YouTube videos. Most of these unrelated provisions did not come to public attention until after the bill was passed and signed into law.

Members of Congress and the public were told the debt ceiling increase was necessary to prevent a government default and an economic crisis. This manufactured fear supposedly justified voting on legislation without allowing members time to even read it, much less to remove the special deals or even debate the wisdom of intervening in overseas military conflicts because of a YouTube video.

Congress should have ignored the hysterics. A failure to increase government’s borrowing authority would not lead to a default any more that an individual’s failure to get a credit card limit increase in would mean they would have to declare bankruptcy. Instead, the failure of either an individual or a government to obtain new borrowing authority would force the individual or the government to live within their means, and may even force them to finally reduce their spending. Most people would say it is irresponsible to give a spendthrift, debit-ridden individual a credit increase. Why then is it responsible to give an irresponsible spendthrift government an increase in borrowing authority?

Congress surrendered more power to the president in this bill. Instead of setting a new debt ceiling, it simply “suspended” the debt ceiling until February. This gives the administration a blank check to run up as much debt as it pleases from now until February 7th. Congress can “disapprove” the debt ceiling suspension, but only if it passes a resolution of disapproval by a two-thirds majority. How long before Congress totally abdicates its constitutional authority over spending by allowing the Treasury permanent and unlimited authority to borrow money without seeking Congressional approval?

Instead of seriously addressing the spending crisis, most in Congress would rather engage in last-minute brinksmanship and backroom deals instead of taking the necessary action to reign in spending. Congress will only take serious steps to reduce spending when either a critical mass of Americans pressures it to cut spending, or when investors and foreign countries stop buying US government debt. Hopefully, those of us who understand sound economics can convince enough of our fellow citizens to pressure Congress to make serious spending cuts before Congress’s reckless actions cause a total economic collapse.

OBAMACARE IS JOKE – EVEN TO ULTRA-LIBERALS

The Road to Hell is Paved… With Fear

The Road to Hell is Paved… With Fear

fear

One of the cool things about the Bible is that it contains some very interesting passages that no one seems to read.

Understand, please, that I’m neither promoting a literal interpretation of the Bible nor giving you a sermon. I’m just pointing out a fascinating fact that most everyone seems to have missed, religious folks included.

In this case, I’m referring to a passage that comes at the very end of the book, where a list is given, itemizing the kinds of people who will be condemned to “the second death.”

Who would you expect to stand at the top of the list? Murders? Idolators? Maybe adulterers?

Nope, none of those. The first people heading off to destruction are “the fearful.”

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

Not what you expected?

You can look it up if you like. That’s from Revelation 21:8 (King James Version). And I even checked the original Greek: fearful is the right translation.

Fear as a Tool of Damnation

I’m not going to get into theological engineering here, but yes, this would mean that the promoters of fear are sending people to hell.

And, considering that we live in a fear-based culture, that’s an interesting thought indeed.

Now, if you want to be truly bold, think about this: Who is it that currently promotes fear?

We know the answer, of course. The people who live on fear are the majesties of the age: politicians being chief among them but followed by the entire ‘law enforcement‘ complex, military and intelligence organizations, television news-readers, religious bosses, newspaper operators, and, increasingly, anyone who wants something and has access to the public stage.

If the Bible is correct, people who profit from fear are profiting from the destruction (nay, the damnation!) of their fellow men and women.

Religion Isn’t Necessary, of Course

The conclusion that fear is the enemy of mankind doesn’t require religion, of course. We can reach the same conclusion just by recognizing that fear (and especially the chemicals associated with fear) damage our health.

Literally, people who make you fear are making you sick. (We covered this in issue #38 of Free-Man’s Perspective)

Beyond that, it is clear that fear is the number one tool of manipulators. If you want to get large numbers of men and women to do your will, scare them. Every tyrant in history has known this and used this technique.

What To Do About It

First of all, start paying attention to your feelings and notice when things make you afraid. Stop your thinking and pay attention to the whole fear process. If you do, you can deal with most of these attacks quickly, rather than leaving an indistinct fear to roll around the back of your mind all day.

Second, start analyzing the words that convey fear to you. Are they really true? Is the response the fear merchants deliver to you really the only course of action? The hard part of doing this is that the words come too fast; by the time you’re ready to analyze one statement, another one is halfway complete. Analyzing them in writing is far easier, or getting a live speaker to slow down and go one phrase at a time.

Third, start discounting the people who consistently throw fear at you. If that’s all they have, they’re not worth paying attention to. Turn off the TV; excuse yourself from the conversation; walk away. You don’t have to take it.

Finally, start pointing out these things to other people. They may be defensive at first, but isn’t that worth facing, to clear the minds of your friends and family? Why should they suffer under the lash of fear all their lives?

Paul Rosenberg

[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]