Wednesday, July 29, 2009

[virgin feels blue] front wheel falls off plane


A wheel fell off the front of a Virgin Blue aircraft and rolled down the tarmac at Melbourne Airport at the weekend, moments before the plane was due to take off. Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association national secretary Stephen Purvinas said a corroded front axle led to one of the Boeing 737's two front wheels becoming loose about 8am on Saturday. "A wheel came off the nose of the aircraft. We believe it was noticed by another aircraft in the vicinity who radioed through and told the Virgin driver to get his aircraft back to the base to get it checked properly," Mr Purvinas told Radio 3AW.

Isn't that lovely for passengers? In the vid, a spokesman played it down, in a deadpan voice, as if it were just one of those things. As in, "Just one of those things when you're thinking of coming in to land."

One of those things. [This post is part of #silly week.]
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[coffee anyone] flabberific


The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) conducted a survey of iced coffees sold by some popular chains in Britain including Starbucks, Caffe Nero and Costa Coffee to gauge the calories as studies increasingly link obesity with cancer.

The worst offender - a venti dark berry mocha frappuccino from Starbucks - had 561 calories. Other iced coffee contained more than 450 calories and the majority had in excess of 200.

Health experts advise that the average woman should consume about 2000 calories a day and a man about 2500 calories to maintain a healthy weight. Dieters aim for 1000 to 1500 calories a day.

"The fact that there is an iced coffee on the market with over a quarter of a woman's daily calories allowance is alarming," Dr Rachel Thompson, science programme manager at London-based WCRF, said in a widely-reported statement.

"This is the amount of calories you might expect to have in an evening meal, not in a drink."

[This post is part of #Silly Week.]
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[defoe arrested again] second time for talented striker

Back in 1692, Spurs' striker, Daniel Defoe, was arrested for payments of £700 (and his civets seized), though his total debts may have been £17,000.

Now, it appears he's in trouble again:

July 31, 1703: Daniel Defoe was arrested today and pilloried for writing a pamphlet entitled The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church at Tottenham, arguing for the extermination of Man U players and supporters.

Stoke Newington neighbour Sir Thomas Abney said Defoe wasn't going to be able to worm his way out of this one by penning his poem "Hymn to the Pillory".

However, the poem caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects and to drink to his health.

Defoe said later:

Tweren't me, guvna. I'm so angry, yannoe, I might just go to sea and find a $%#*&# island to live on the rest of m'life, yannoe.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

[pseudonyms] adopted by co-authors


1. The Scribblerian club comprised Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Robert Harley, and Thomas Parnell mainly and they purported to write the biography of whom?

2. An official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project was coined in 1968. Until its use was formally discontinued in 2000, it was the sole pseudonym used by members of the Directors Guild of America. What was it?

3. Frederic Dannay and James Yaffe used a collective pseudonym for their crime writing. In a successful series of novels that covered 42 years, this pseudonym served as both the author's name and that of the detective-hero. What was that name?

4. American mother-daughter writing team Patricia and Traci Lambrecht teamed up to write award winning novels, particularly Monkeewrench. Under which name do they write?

5. What was the pseudonym adopted by a German Research Project for a massive compiling of materials opposed to Einstein's special theory of relativity?

Answers Martin Scriblerus [yes, I know it was a giveaway]; Alan Smithee: Ellery Queen; P.J. Tracy; G. O. Mueller

[when dolphins play] humans are mesmerized



Don't know about you but I find that amazing.

[This post is part of #Silly Week.]

[government backed notes] starting now

Much shorter post this time. The long one is here.


Vox Day would like to know when the experts say the turnaround is going to be:

I am in need of a quick summary of every major economist, CNBC talking head or organization's position on the current prospects for recovery for the second half of 2009 and beyond.

Vox, there ARE NO EXPERTS. They are under the mesmerizing spell of the fictional theory of the natural business cycle. There IS a business cycle but we have to get it into our heads that it is INDUCED. We remain in the clutches of the very people who should not be controlling our money supply - the private central banks.

This is not my theory, this is the practical observation from most of the U.S. presidents through to Milton Friedman. The people of America seemed to understand the situation in Jackson's day, understand it very well:

Biddle wrote to a federal judge in February 1834: “This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank.” By the fall of that year, Biddle was so reviled for his nationwide curtailment of credit that he was hunted by mobs in Philadelphia, forcing him to bar the doors of his house and post armed guards.

Why, oh why can't we wake up? I wrote a comment at Vox's:

Vox, you write as though this recovery is going to make itself. It is, as it has always been, dependent on when the Fed and the other central banks decide we've been squeezed enough to have made their current round of profits and new monopolies - just look at Goldman Sachs! As Milton Friedman put it:

The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe [monetary] contractions of 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38. No other 20-year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions.

... and again:

I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally, of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.

... and:

The severity of each of the major contractions is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes – excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system.

The two culprits in all the so-called "cycles" have been and are fractional reserve banking and the Fed's [and other CBs'] power to contract and expand money and to control credit.

The solution

1. Pay off the debt with Treasury backed notes [the old greenbacks in American parlance but the principle is the same in Britain] whilst at the same time raising reserve percentages of the small banks to halt inflation, [in line with population growth];

2. Abolish fractional reserve banking and move, within two years, to full reserve banking, with the issuance of money and control of credit in government hands;

3. Repeal the two acts of 1913 and 1864, [it's more difficult over here], with the Fed property and that of the Bank of England and other central banks now acting as repositories for the Treasury;


4. Withdraw from the IMF, BIS and World Bank.

Do this, despite all the Nicholas Biddles and foreign pressure, the attempted wars, the induced depression due to the further contraction of money [and so on], the spread of doom and gloom.

The first two years will be the worst but all we need fear is fear itself.

This is the ONLY sustainable solution. As long as those vipers sit over the power to create money out of thin air [ten times the value of the created money], then the laughably called "cycle" will continue. A physician first treats the root cause, not the symptoms.

If every person wrote his or her Congressman or local member and educated him/her, the thing would be possible. Lincoln was isolated but we need not be.

Objections

The economists will say it's not possible in what has become the most complex money system in history, The central banks will immeidately shout "inflationary".

It does not have to be so.

If the statutory requirement to match the flow of notes, earmarked to pay off bond and other debt, to gradually increased small bank reserve requirements takes place, the spectre of inflation would be held at bay.

The only danger is the havoc which the Biddle type central banks will wreak, trying to hoodwink you into thinking the scheme doesn't work.

I myself will either be roundly ignored or told I'm no economist. Do you need to be an economist to realize that debt-free notes, backed by a government as legal tender, are a solution? Blind Freddy can see that.

Finally, it would work because sufficient people WANT it to work. Ways can always be found round the flood of problems which accompany any adjustment, provided people wish to solve those problems, understand the real causes and are agreed to work together to overcome them.

Again


As long as we try to erect defences whilst we're down in this nest of vipers, the vipers still control the space we live in. They have immersed and held us in a debt economy where the issuance of interest bearing bonds and their buying of them as a simple bookkeeping entry is then multiplied many times over due to fractional reserve banking.

There are already proposals by Brown and the world financial authorities for a radical reconstruction of the financial system.

THIS IS ENTIRELY UNNECESSARY.

Simply follow the four steps listed above and the problem of the flow of money is solved within two years. Other social problems will take two generations. If you need an example of how to do it, look at the island of Guernsey.

An island is no different to the world in that the same principles of money issuance apply. KISS. Lincoln showed that it was possible but he was isolated and under attack, with the distraction of the Civil War. Many presidents have spoken of the matter.

You, the blogosphere, the readers of the MSM, the people out there, the economists locked into a way of thinking you've been induced to by your economic education and decades of practice in thinking along those lines, reinforced by organs such as the FT and the Economist - you only need go back into the realm of actual history, not into any new economic theory.

This is a very old principle we're talking about here.

All of us, all of you, can simply demand of our local member, of our Congressman, that the Treasury in each of our countries:

Begin to issue government backed, debt-free notes.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is where we start. That's our starting point.

The original video is here.