From Chomsky's article I extracted the name Thomas Ferguson, which led to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_competition

More on the owners of america:

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20100124.htm

Chris Hedges & George Carlin ( listen to George talk about 'The owners of America' then Chris Hedges. Chris Hedges also has some interesting things to say about Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists etc )
Michael Scheuer ( I haven't heard him say anything I disagree with yet ) Ex CIA talks about Arab Spring. Why the hell are we in Lybia, are we STOOPID???

So, I hear this song on the radio, that sounds like some nutso making up his own Book of Revelations, and it sounds familiar - it's something about a 'Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall' or something. The voice, it reminds me of, oh yeah, it's that guy who sings 'Rocky Mountain High', ok, so I look up 'Bob Denver' on the net, and up pops: GILLIGAN!

There has been some debate about whether this was going to be a stagflationary recession or whether the US was going to follow the Japanese script.

The US just lost it's AAA credit rating. The result? Today google news shows stocks falling and Treasury Yeilds DROPPING.

The facts don't lie: We're Japan.

What's going on? Here's my basic economic worldview, and my take on things in a nutshell:

Spending money shifts PRESENT resources. You can't eat future porkbellies now. You can only eat pigs in existence at the present time. It doesn't matter how much money you borrow, the money can only obtain presently existing goods. You can spend money for a promise of bricks in the future, but you can not build a brick building in the here and now out of paper promises to deliver bricks in the future.

Money is government debt. The government will accept currency in payment of taxes. You need not deliver chickens, or lumber, or bushels of wheat when you pay your taxes, the government accepts cash. When you pay cash to the government, then you cancel a debt the government owes you.

The government then is free to shred these obligations, or reissue them by spending the notes again.

When the government spends money, it shifts present resources from private ends to public ends.

When the economy is booming, then there is already plenty of demand for resources like materials and labor, but in bust times, the prices of these things fall.

When the government shifts resources to public ends, the public ends are generally worthwhile when they grow the taxable base of the economy in a sustainable ( haha ) way, more than the private ends they would otherwise have been put to.

( Here I have to say that from my point of view almost nothing could be more worthwhile than for Uncle Sam to write me a nice check for 1 BILLION Dollars. Moo ha haa. Worthwhile is a relative concept of course. You would of course disagree. With a Billion dollars, I could buy some island and be coconut-king of it and the US could go to hell if they insisted. But without a billion dollars, I do care about what happens in the US since I live there. )

Big government spending during boom times creates inflation because there is already high demand, at the time the government is shifting resources away from private ends by spending. The competition for goods raises prices.

Big government spending during bust times utilizes idle goods when demand is slack keeping prices from falling in a deflationary spiral.

But how the government comes by the notes it spends becomes important.

Printing money has the effect of a tax on money holders. Conventional taxation gives the government finer control over how resources are shifted. Obtaining notes to spend by issuing public debt gives investors the choice to lend their money to the government rather than to a private enterprise.

When there are safe and attractive private investments, then the yields rise, but in bust times, and for the shortest term debt, yields are close to zero because there is insufficent competition for money. Nobody wants to spend.

But why should the government perpetually roll over short term debt at near zero percent when it could just issue a 0% fixed interest note such as the Federal Reserve Note?

If the government runs a deficit during bust times, then it will be spending more notes than it takes in with taxation. During boom times it would collect more revenue than it spent, possibly helping to cool things down.

Deflation can not take hold if the government commits to always spending sufficient notes to prevent it. Of course people may decide that because the economy is in the dumps, they will wait for the government dole of newly printed notes rather than embark on new enterprise. It's interesting how a crisis due to Fractional Reserve Banking could lead to a pathological concentration of government power.

But this is not likely anytime soon in the US.

LONG before the US was forced to fund any excessive and unproductive welfare dole scheme to spend sufficiently to effectively prevent deflation, there would LOTS of changes.

Repaying the national debt with newly created money would force those who now earn a small but positive interest rate to accept 0% to hold cash. Some would not find this acceptable. US creditors would do one of four things:

1 - Continue to be US Creditors by holding onto their cash and earn 0%.

2 - Invest the money in the US private sector.

3 - Buy US made goods.

4 - Invest the money in foreign private enterprise or foreign government debt.

1 - The US should commit to enough spending to make earning 0% unattractive.

2,3 - Investing in the private sector or buying US made goods will boost the economy. Great!

4 - Investing abroad will weaken the US dollar. This will make exporting easier, and will have the effect of lowering US consumers' buying power with respect to imports. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN - BADLY. In fact countries that hold large quantities of US Debt, do so to devalue their own currencies in the moral equivalent of a trade war. This is both a tarriff on imports from the US and a subsidy of exports to the US. The value of the tarriff accues to the government in question in the form of treasuries, while wages in that country are depressed. The skimmed value is ultimately paid for by the workers in the country ( China and Japan are examples ) in the form of wages paid in devalued currency.

China must artificially control foreign investment to maintain a devalued currency. Japan's relatively low yeilds have repelled foreign investment in Japan thusfar.

Though natural resources ( especially fossil fuels ) are destined to become more scarce in the near future, I believe there is easily sufficient room stimulate the economy by replacing interest bearing debt with newly created money to address very near term issues.

Imagine the effect on the US economy of suspending taxation temporarily but continuing to spend as before? If foreign powers insisted on continuing to devalue their currencies by holding excessive US cash, this is the magnitude of expense they might theoretically incur.

It would obviously not actually be necessary to follow through on such a drastic threat as foreign powers are pretty much rational actors.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-07-18/galactic-scale-energy

http://www.mnforsustain.org/immg_case_for_reducing_immigration_to_100000_mann_d_npg.htm

Capital is the main source of productivity in the US, NOT people.

I've been reading slashdot less frequently than I did of old. Mostly because of all the javascript 'improvements'.

When I do read slashdot it's for the stories, and the community. Ideally slashdot would be much like a usenet newsgroup except for some editorial control over the stories posted. In fact, I wish the slashdot community would move to some other place like a usenet group with that sort of interface.

Now I hate the improvements when using firefox, but I mostly use w3m or lynx to view slashdot, which has insulated me from some of the worst of it I'm sure, but sometimes it makes a feature unusable for me.

For instance, I thought I'd use a couple of my 15 moderator points ( why does slashdot give 15 points instead of 5? my guess is others like me have almost completely stopped moderating because the improvements have made moderating such a hassle, so they think that by giving more points, more moderation will be done. It's a hassle. You want people saying: Oh that's so good I'll moderate that comment instead of posting one of my own. And you want moderators to look at the low ranked comments and mod them up which is a hassle because they are hidden requiring multiple clicks to read. It's difficult to scan a bunch of low ranked comments deep down in threads because of the hiding. I don't bother.

Except today I did bother, but found it very difficult because I could no longer use w3m to moderate as there is no Moderate button. It seems that the dropdown box uses Javascript to submit the change when you make the selection and there is no Moderate button to allow one to do this manually.

Having a way to operate the site without javascript ought to be a fundamental requirement of any site for general consumption.

But I like it all cooked up together into some succinctly rich and flavorful tomato sauce as above.

I am the Onceler and I speak for the Thneeds. Seriously, I'm not green at all in my politics. But that's not what ecological economics is about. See this: about Frederic Soddy

It works well. I typed Issac Hayes in, and found a whole slew of stuff that I liked but didn't know what it was called, or hadn't thought of in a long enough time that it didn't come to mind.

When it first came out I couldn't imagine it finding anything that wouldn't come to my own mind if I typed in some stuff, but for pop culture, it seems to be quite useful.

I've always been a fan of minimalism when it comes to GUI elements in a web browser. I've operated almost since the mid 90s with the smallest possible icons, and the fewest number of toolbars the browser's configuration would let me have. For years I have disabled the bookmarks toolbar, and kept only the back, forward, stop, and sometimes the home buttons. I was kinda irritated when they added a search window, but I must confess I use it, though nowadays the url bar does search so I use it much less than I did. I think it can go.. If I want to use a search engine, then I'll go directly to the url of the search engine.

However, Firefox extensions allow one to almost create their own ideal GUI. I've been experimenting lately and have found a setup that is better than what I had before.

I am very picky about which extensions I install. They absolutely may not slow down my browsing experience unless they are something that I turn on only when I am using it. I don't have anything that fits that bill.

All my extensions are enabled all the time, and none of them slows anything down. The only one that is a little iffy as to whether I will keep it is the Weave Sync bookmarks extension. It replaces GMarks which I had before, but which although it worked great, it was a pain to get it to log into my account sometimes. I have weave installed to see how I like it. I do like being able to create a custom-useful directory style structure which GMarks did not allow.

I have:

• Adblock Plus - this speeds things up
• Behind The *Asterisks* (EladKarako Mod) - I can mouse over password fields to see them unasterisked
• Fission - progress bar in the uri field ( when present )
• Hide GUI Bars - I can press CTRL-Shift-a and make the set of GUI elements appear/disappear - this is the most important one!
• Hostname in Titlebar - put the host name of the site in the current tab in the title bar
• Download Statusbar - Show status of downloads in status bar
• Live HTTP headers - in case I want to look at the HTTP headers
• NoScript - I've used this before and gotten rid of it because it broke too many things. I am going to see if it speeds up net access by limiting extraneous downloading once I build up a good whitelist. I like the feature that you can save it's info in a bookmark and sync it everywhere so that work in configuring is not wasted/duplicated. I'm giving this another go. It seems to have a bunch of new features. I got it to get around the paywall of newscientist.com ( I'm a cheap bastard ). I'd read sciencedaily instead before paying, but if it's that easy not to pay, I'll do that.
• Organize Status Bar - I can specify where the stuff that puts itself in the status bar goes.
• Rights To Close - Haven't had occasion to really test this one. NoScript takes care of it mostly, but although I haven't browsed porn lately, when I get the urge, and the time to do so, I will test this out. NoScript is a double edged sword WRT porn browsing since although it prevents all the trickiness/nastiness, letting them take control of your browser is how porn leads to other porn. With NoScript, sometimes you get the free porn without the ads, bypassing the paywalls, and sometimes you miss out on the free porn because it WAS the ads. I am going to browse porn with NoScript set to Scripts Enabled Globally ( I only browse porn on Linux so I don't worry about shenanigans ) and see if Rights To Close helps.
• Save File to - Right click on a file, and get a tree menu of folders in which to save it.
• Tree Style Tab - This one wants to put the tab bar on the side, and will group them by site etc. I have them put on the top, and it groups them with a small space. This is marginally useful I guess
• United States English Dictionary - Spell check stuff I post/type
• Weave Sync - This is going to become part of Firefox soon. Why wouldn't I want my bookmarks available everywhere I am? If I have any naughty ones, I will use my special porn browsing login ID box with the sexy background image etc. or store them in a file

I set up Firefox to have the smallest possible icons, the menu bar, the tab bar and the status bar. Then I set up Hide GUI Bars to hide all but the tab bar and the status bar which I find I need. I tried doing without the tab bar, making do with CTRL-Tab to switch between them, but I need something to remind me which ones I have open. Maybe if Firefox put up some kind of tab ring when you hold down CTRL-Tab like KDE does when you press Alt-Tab then I would be able to do without the tab bar. Hmm, I'll see if there's an extension to do that sometime... I have a new wide-screen laptop that is forcing me to be even stingier than ever with vertical screen space.

Ideally, I'd do completely without tabs, opening each page in it's own window and using the OS's ALT TAB ring to switch between pages, but I use multiple OSs. Whatever I do, I want it to work everywhere I am. I might experiment with doing that again,but sometimes I have lots of things open besides my browser, and it is kind of nice to have my Firefox windows separate.

Hostname in Titlebar somewhat compensates for not having the URL of the current site at the top of the screen.

Key combos do the rest.

• CTRL-Shift-a brings back all the menus Firefox would be configured to show if Hide Menu Bars were not installed it also makes them go away again if you hit it again.
• CTRL-l focuses on the URL bar ( making it appear if it is not already there ), and when you hit enter to go to the site, the URL bar disappears again on it's own returning to you the screen real estate. ( Hitting CTRL-Shift-a would also make the URL bar ( and the menu ) appear, it being the 'one thing you have to remember to get your menus back' key combo, but then you'd have to remember to hit it again to make the clutter disappear. ) CTRL-l is the right way to open a new URL.
• CTRL-k focuses on the Search Bar. If it is not there, then you are redirected to a search page which is probably configured to your favorite search engine ( mine's google so I haven't tried changing it ).
• Alt-leftarrow on your keyboard is the same as the back button on your browser ( that's not there ) I also have a physical back button mapped to that on my physical keyboard right next to the arrow keys . Why have I been using the GUI back button all these years? What a useless waste of screen space and mouse movement!
• Alt-rightarrow is forward - nuff said
• ESC is stop - I don't know about you, but I never knew that.
• CTRL-Tab/CTRL-Shift-Tab Cycle through tabs
• CTRL-T/CTRL-W open close tabs
• CTRL-N/CTRL-Shift-w do the same for windows

There are more key combos at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/keyboard+shortcuts but I would just hit CTRL-Shift-a and use the menus for more stuff ( aside from the / to find which I've used forever because I am used to vim )

The other thing I tried was an extension called KeySnail which makes Firefox behave like EMACS, or rather like w3m which is emacs' web browser. Instead of scripting in emacs-lisp you script in javascript. It bills itself as emacs' answer to vimperator.

I like what you can do! It's what I want to use! Except that I am a vi guy. I've tried to learn EMACS a million times, but instead of doing the right thing when learning Unix, which is to try vi, hate it, and fall in love with emacs while learning enough vi to get around when there's not emacs installed, I made myself fall in love with vi and found no compelling need for emacs. Or learn unix on a system with emacs and then learn vi when you have to where there is no emacs, but retain your love for emacs.

Except the scripting sucks in vi compared to emacs. You learn far more than a text editor when you learn emacs. And it gives you a reason to practice your lisp even if it is an ancient weird lisp.

Many of these things are things I want to use, such as KeySnail, and Mozart/Oz and others. However whenever I try to force myself to muddle through using emacs, when the shit hits the fan, and I have to get some editing done, I find myself switching back to vi. Then I continue that way until I've forgotten everything I ever knew about emacs, so that when I try to go back to learning emacs, I lose files because I can't remember how to get my buffer back, or I forget how to save a file or quit, so I just close the terminal window.

I need to learn emacs where the shit will never hit the fan. Sometimes the fan is encrusted with feces even when using Firefox, however this is seldom the case when I am using lynx. I've avoided w3m because I figured using an 'emacs application' would confuse the hell out of me when I don't even know how to use emacs. However I just tried it again, and it seems comparable to lynx. Maybe the path to emacs for me is switching from lynx to w3m.

One thing I REFUSE to do is learn the scripting crap for vim or anything very advanced. It won't ever work with every vi I have to use, and it will remove the incentive to learn emacs even further.

Going back over my posts, as I do sometimes, it's always obvious to me that my writing sucks. That's to be expected because I don't take the time to proofread even a little bit. It's because I'm usually posting when I should be doing somethin else, and doing it with lynx, editing entire paragraphs viewed through a 'window' which is really just a portion of one line.

This isn't going to change, so don't expect quality to improve. I just don't have the time or inclination to do better.

My habit has been to assume there is a solution to a problem and work to find it. This is distracting and exhausting. There is really no reason to believe there is a solution to a problem by default. Maybe most problems are insoluable.