[kyphosis] spinal curvature with age

The aspect of ageing which plays on the mind a bit is not the increasing creakiness or the paunch or the ailments which one reads about but the actual "shape of the spine", I suppose.

I'm referring to spinal curvature or kyphosis and it seems to me that that's the thing we should be on guard against in our late 40s, perhaps getting into an exercise regimen with that as one of the factors. Mother's wisdom seems to have been right after all: "Stand up straight, pull your stomach in and have you got clean underpants?"

As a daily undies changer, I objected to that last bit.

There was a mechanic I used to take my car to in Russia and he was beginning to have spinal problems. Now, it occurred to me that he only needed stick one leg backwards, straight in line with the upper body, as he leant over the engine and it would take a lot of pressure off the lumbar region. Ditto with bending down - bend your knees instead and keep the back straight and so on.

But that's the lumbar area. For the upper back and shoulders, I should think a good anaerobic regimen, not too punishing, might be the trick, strengthening all muscles in the area, doing side exercises, "shruggees" and all the rest of it - any gym can give you a chart.

Apart from that, being conscious of posture seems to be the way to go, especially at the computer seat. Laptops can be bad and it seems to me that if you can get your ergonomics working so that your back is straight and leaning slightly forward, not back, with your feet in an appropriate position, it might help.

[continuous story] contribute one paragraph

Read our super story, composed by us and ready for a publisher.

Below is the start of the story and you were asked to contribute one paragraph or two, of normal length, in order to keep the story running.

The Princess's Personal Problem

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince named Prancelot, with quite a reputation as a lady's man, multi-faceted sportsman, top lover and all round good guy. That was his reputation - the reality was a little different, as his offsider and valet was wont to tell them down at the Fox and Hounds.

Actually, there was a bit more to Prancelot's valet than met the eye and many was the time money would change hands late at night at the tradesman's entrance and the little sachet would be handed over.

Princess Floozy knew nothing of all this, of course. We'll come to her character by and by.

Anyway, there they were on the SS Cinatit, with assorted family and hangers-on, for the world cruise he'd promised her on the occasion of their honeymoon, Princess Floozy being quite far down the track in the family way, not that any one "noticed officially, of course.

Dot dot dot ........

UPDATE 19:43 - just realized I can't comment in comments as it would spoil the story but thanks so far.

[de ville] venus of avenue d

I see you walking down the street she's lookin' good enough
She's my inspiration dressed in red, she's been in all my friends heads
Now, on the rainy afternoon ask you, babe, wanna ride my car
I knew it couldn't be too soon, I knew that love go far

Now in the backroom the boys, they're talking about us-eh yeah
Now in the backroom the boys they're talking about us-eh yeah
She's the queen of my block, what's it take to make you stop
She's the queen of my block, what's it take to make you s-s-s-top

There she goes, there she goes, in her high heeled shoes
And her silk stockings and her dress that's so ... tight
Oo yeah, she's alright, she's alright, she's alright

Now, on a rainy afternoon ask her want to ride my car
I knew it couldn't be too soon, I knew her love would go far

Now in the backroom the boys, they're talking about us- eh yeah.
Yeah in the backroom the boys, they're talking about us- eh yeah.
She's the queen of my block, what's it take to make you stop
She's the queen of my block, what's it take to make you ...

She's the queen of my block,
Yeah she's the queen of my block,
Yeah she's the queen of my block,
Yeah she's the queen of my block,
Yeah she's the queen of my block,
Yeah she's the queen of my block,
Yeah she's the queen of my block


Not my type but Willie de Ville's, I imagine.

[macro-economic delusions] part two – usury corners the market

Part 1 was here.

Xlbrl reports that Garet Garrett described our current state in The Revolution Was:

This is a method, and Roosevelt is the model. But the methods were not made by Roosevelt either. It is made in an unbroken line, intellectual and often by blood, from the early nineteen hundreds to now. Garrett, Hayek, and others provide details.

Roosevelt made things vastly worse for many years, and yet improved his standing and made four terms.

In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extension of the administrative hand....When you have passed one miracle you have to pass another one to
take care of it, so it was with the New Deal.

The revolutionary historian.... will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the (traditional) form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same words. This was the American people’s first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.

So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them.

To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan’s first view of China–so rich, so unaware. Why should anyone fear government?

Its cruel and cynical suspicion of any motive but its own was a reflection of something it knew about itself. Its voice was the voice of righteousness; its methods therefore were more dishonest than the simple ways of corruption.

We have an unreal and bewildering situation whereby economixts do not seem to be able to – or through their self interest are unwilling to – see that there is very much collusion in the markets. For every denial by a Kaletsky, there is a quote as from this pdf on silver:




It’s ludicrous to suggest there is no collusion to fix prices, corner markets and gain insider information – history is littered with such things. If you persist with this ridiculous stance then I ask one question, by way of example – why the American Anti-Trust legislation, e.g. the Sherman, in Teddy Roosevelt’s time?

Sonus asks when collusion becomes conspiracy and it’s a good question.

GATA has this:

I have recently been reporting on how delivery notices at the COMEX cannot be reconciled with movements of metals from and into the warehouse. Clearly these are not going to match on a daily basis, just as orders into a factory will not match shipments out on any given day, as there is a time lag. But when averaged over a month, the "flow" of metal inventory should be comparable to the delivery notices issued.

This is just basic accounting. But I have observed that reconciliation is almost impossible with the COMEX data. The only explanation I could think of is that settlement of contracts must be bypassing the warehouse. But how could this be possible, as I thought all contracts had to be delivered via a COMEX registered warehouse?

… and:

A futures market is supposed to provide price discovery for a commodity. In the gold market this notion has been hijacked because settlement can be made with a derivative instrument, such as an unbacked or partially backed ETF share. If that derivative instrument is not backed by gold on a 1:1 basis the scheme allows an artificial apparent increase in the supply of gold and so distorting price discovery toward lower prices.

Such a scam would be in grave danger of becoming exposed if anyone knew the true inventory condition of the vaults of the ETFs. That problem is easily solved by having HSBC be the custodian of GLD and JPMorgan be the custodian of SLV.

Who allowed this situation to develop in the first place and who has a controlling interest in that body? The same question, over and over.

The Bloomberg wording of its report on Greenlight Capital reveals its own suspicions – the green shoots of understanding, perhaps and yet welcome form such a mainstream organ:

The firm’s Greenlight Capital LP fund gained 16.3 percent in the second quarter, bringing its return this year to 21.5 percent boosted by investments in Ford Motor Co. debt, according to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News. The fund lost 23 percent last year.

One of my Anons wrote:

We can devalue. I believe that to be broon's target. Slow or sudden is the question. 99% of QE is still going on gilts because the madman will not stop borrowing for his Fabian Marxist utopia. He is barking mad!

Sonus quotes Gibbon:

When the rule of law collapses, and the self interest of the state dominates, capital cannot long survive. It flees. […] People began to flee from Rome during the reign of Commodus, and this trend was given a Latin name, - Suburbian.

The rights, privileges, and immunities disappeared, and the thrust of Roman Law became only the self interest of the state. Gibbon wrote that the Roman government prosecutors became “the most worthless of mankind who are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorder which they allow in themselves”. […].

Rome collapsed because the rule of law became corrupted. Rome became “corrupted by the multiplicity of laws”, that the judges, “being pro-government, (as today) merely interpreted the laws, according to the dictates of private interest” [...]”

Capital flees.

There is a distinct difference between the collusion, the conspiracy if you insist, which ensures that the people in the government appoint and are appointed by the usurers, thus continuing the unholy alliance which causes the misery of poverty and war which is so profitable – there is a difference between that and the rule of free enterprise whereby your wife can set up a coffee shop up the road, is encouraged by society to give it a go and is welcomed by the council, without crippling concession fees.

One is the Statism of the global socialists masquerading as capitalists and the other is the small “c” capitalism of the truly free market.


Again – look at history, this time the history of usury in the United States and the one common element throughout the whole sorry affair is the dishonesty of those who have colluded to wrest and maintain power from the people, something they briefly had a sniff of in the days of Andrew Jackson.

What we’re up against is the incredulity of the population, the inability of people to think ill of the nice banker down the road or those friendly investment advisors.

The incredulity of the population

Anonymous commented on one of my reasonably well researched posts on the matter:

The lack of comments on this post is significant, compared to comments on other posts. The problems seem difficult to convey. "The incredulity of the masses is their best defence". "Animal Farm" again, in real life this time!

It's not just the lack of understanding but the wilful refusal to try to. This is the thing which frustrates those who bring the horse to water and then watch it steadfastly refuse to drink. It's the frustration of watching, from the next hill, a wolf approach a flock of sheep, blithely unaware of the danger until it is upon them.

As my mate said the other day, on another issue and i hope he reads his own quote here - how come I can see these things and others can't?

I answered him that perhaps their brain is not wired that way.

The plethora of explanations not based on fact or historicity



Millions of bloggers, thousands in the MSM, everyone and his dog, is formulating theories on who's to blame and what to do, as was shown in part one.

Read your history - please read your history and you'll see, as Krugman does, that "most macroeconomics of the past 30 years was spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst”.

It is harmful because the wolves are thereby hidden, pick us off, retire to the forest, appear again, pick us off and so on.

Part 3 is here.

[silent saturday] it's a bust

[macro-economic delusions] part one – follow the history

Part 2 is here.

Robert Lucas, one of the greatest macroeconomists of his generation, and his followers are “making ancient and basic analytical errors all over the place”. Harvard’s Robert Barro, another towering figure in the discipline, is “making truly boneheaded arguments”. The past 30 years of macroeconomics training at American and British universities were a “costly waste of time”.

To the uninitiated, economics has always been a dismal science. But all these attacks come from within the guild: from Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley; Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times; and Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics (LSE), respectively. The macroeconomic crisis of the past two years is also provoking a crisis of confidence in macroeconomics. In the last of his Lionel Robbins lectures at the LSE on June 10th, Mr Krugman feared that most macroeconomics of the past 30 years was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst”.

Nor can economists now agree on the best way to resolve the crisis. They mostly overestimated the power of routine monetary policy (ie, central-bank purchases of government bills) to restore prosperity. Some now dismiss the power of fiscal policy (ie, government sales of its securities) to do the same. Others advocate it with passionate intensity.

The central and abiding error these people make is that they argue from a discipline called macro-economic theory, whilst ignoring a simple discipline called:

History.

They refuse to look at the history of booms and busts, who profits from them and who induces them because it does not fit within the narrow focus of modern economics, as taught at the LSE.

By what process of logic would a group like Goldman Sachs not attempt to ensure a cornered market? What sort of business acumen would it show if they not only did not play the system but wouldn’t even create it when they have the clout, the historical precedence and the opportunity to do so?

How long is it going to take economists, even thinking economists such as those at Capitalists at Work, one of the best of its kind, to wake up that the only way to stop these wolves is as follows:

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. In the U.S., repeal the two acts of 1913 and 1864, [it's more difficult over here], with the central banks now acting as repositories for the Treasury;

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

Of course, that by itself would cause tremendous inflation, since our currency is presently multiplied by the fractional reserve banking system.

So, as the Treasury buys up its bonds on the open market, with government notes, the reserve requirements of your local bank will be proportionally raised so the amount of money in circulation remains constant. As those holding bonds in notes, they will deposit this money thus making available the currency then needed by the banks to increase their reserves.

Once all the bonds are replaced with notes, banks will be at 100% reserve banking, instead of the fractional reserve system currently in use.

From this point on, the former CB buildings will only be needed as a central clearing house for cheques and as vaults for notes. Former Acts can now be repealed. Monetary power can be transferred back to the Treasury Department. There’d be no further creation or contraction of money by banks.

By doing it this way, our national debt can be paid off in a single year or so and the CBs, WBs, IMFs and fractional reserve banking can be abolished or will collapse by losing its support base, without national bankruptcy, inflation or deflation or any significant change in the way the average person goes about his business.

To the average person, the primary difference would be that taxes would begin to go DOWN.

Paradigm shift

Without this fundamental shift, the problems will continue to repeat because it is in the interests of those at the helm for them to repeat. It was shown just as CBs pull the plug to induce crisis, so do they allow greenshoots to reappear.

You can build better corrals, you can write a billion words but until you eliminate the wolf, you ain’t gonna be safe – none of yer.

And it’s not as if this was unknown. Note the date of this quote – March 4, 2003:

In the International Monetary Fund's annual assessment of the British economy, it said there was an "appreciable risk" that housing could scupper hopes of an economic recovery. "In particular, domestic demand is being sustained by high and increasing levels of household debt, fuelled by house-price inflation and low interest rates, which increases vulnerability to potential adverse shocks," it said.

Instead of making the paradigm shift necessary to free us of the cycle of misery, economists prefer to trade theories:

If the EMH held, then markets would price financial assets broadly correctly. Deviations from equilibrium values could not last for long. If the price of a share, say, was too low, well-informed investors would buy it and make a killing. If it looked too dear, they could sell or short it and make money that way. It also followed that bubbles could not form—or, at any rate, could not last: some wise investor would spot them and pop them. And trying to beat the market was a fool’s errand for almost everyone. If the information was out there, it was already in the price.

On such ideas, and on the complex mathematics that described them, was founded the Wall Street profession of financial engineering.

One economist leading the effort to define that new paradigm is Andrew Lo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sees merit in both the rational and behavioural views. He has tried to reconcile them in the “adaptive markets hypothesis”, which supposes that humans are neither fully rational nor psychologically unhinged.

Instead, they work by making best guesses and by trial and error. If one investment strategy fails, they try another. If it works, they stick with it. Mr Lo borrows heavily from evolutionary science [oxymoron if ever there was one]. He does not see markets as efficient in Mr Fama’s sense, but thinks they are fiercely competitive. Because the “ecology” changes over time, people make mistakes when adapting. Old strategies become obsolete and new ones are called for.

You can see that they're going to miss the bus yet again. Thrashing around blindly, trying to reconcile orthodox macroeconomics with new synthetic theorems will not alter the simple political fact that monopolies control the CBs and not by accident.

Look at American history because there are some wonderfully transparent examples there. If a mob can stomr Biddle’s house in 1838 for inducing the crisis, why can’t today’s public be equally perspicacious?

There are elements of truth in this:

The truth may be simpler and more depressing: that no economic theory can perform the feats its users have come to expect of it. Economics is unlikely ever to be very good at predicting the future. Too much of what happens in an economy depends on what people expect to happen. Even state-of-the-art forecasts are therefore better guides to the present mood than the future though they may also be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Au contraire – economic theory, such as that followed by the wolves is centuries old and has served them well – their own theory of induced cycles. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy kept in-house and worked towards to ensure the ongoing hegemony of the old money.

Economists are going to sidestep this post and say, “What would he know? Where’s his LSE qualification? Sheesh – he doesn’t even speak the lingo.” They're going to look at the "unworkable and idealistic oversimplification" in the four points above and smile indulgently. Therein lie the origins of our demise - the inability of our economists to think more laterally about true causes of why we're at the mercy of the usurers.

Everyone and his dog has his own theory - make tax goods based, make it income based, introduce CBI - none of it can have any lasting effect if we continue to play down the very real role of the global money, the old money and its source.

Unless economists really do want the general acceptance among the population of the globalists' "it's capitalism which caused this" cry, unless they want the financial markets even further regulated but by the wrong people, then they need to get on board with radically fundamental economics ... in other words, simple common sense.

Just as Deep Throat urged, “Follow the money,” so I and many others urge, “Follow the history.”

We can't make the change? History does not agree with that objection.

Part 2 is here.