[fireside chat] in the afternoon

When you see a headline: "The brutal nature of political life is best left to the young," the first reaction is: "Yeah, right."

When the person who wrote that is the former Treasurer of a western nation, one sits up and takes notice. Peter Costello says:

The most important adjustment is the loss of privacy. Those who come to elected office late in life will find the media intrusion a form of torture, particularly if they are used to respect in their former occupations. Nothing prepares you for the first occasion when your photograph is plastered across the front page of the newspaper distributed to neighbours, children, friends, relatives and the whole country with accompanying stories about how incompetent or morally deficient you have proven to be. It hurt me for the first 20 or 30 times. After that you start to get used to it.

That explains a lot about the thick hides of politicians but now I'm going to leave the theme and make this personal instead.

Political bloggers are, in a way, politicians, without the cynicism and corruption [see expenses scandal]. What sets them apart is the feeling that they can get away with it without coming under concerted campaigns of vilification.

Peter Costello is under no illusions about political life - it is rough and whispering campaigns are all part of it. The stakes are high and the potential rewards great. The opposite is true too, as John Howard found when he not only lost the election but also lost his seat, the 2nd PM to do so.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have nothing directly to gain by lambasting the CBs, Them, the gay mafia, the feminazis et al and as long as they're fairly insignificant as bloggers, have little to lose. However, if they have numbers to the blog, then they're not only going to get hit but according to their potential for damage, they're going to have campaigns waged agaisnt them - classic Macchiavelli.

Some bloggers dish it out and cry foul when they have this done to them. It's no picnic on a combative blogger's site.

When this is done by the very people attacked, then it is par for the course and in a way, one doesn't mind. I mean, it's all part of the game to have dirty tricks done on you by the very people you're accusing of ... er ... dirty tricks.

What really does get under the guard though is when supposed supporters, miffed by who knows what, decide to adopt the same tactics and such people really can do damage, especially if they've learnt the game.

The oldest game works this way:

Mention to a friend of your target, "I've heard John Smith pulls the wings off flies." The friend says, "How should I know? He might, he might not. I wouldn't think so."

The "he might' is the part taken and then it's emailed to a third party that, "John Smith told his own best friend that he pulls the wings off flies." There's always a tenuous connection with the truth maintained.

The third party, judging that the mischief maker knows John Smith fairly well, maybe has a point and it's never investigated, never puts it to John Smith to comment.

That's how lies get a foothold.

It's dirty politics but what makes it doubly bad is that there is nothing to gain for John Smith in the first place, except to help make people aware of things. Loss of what has been gained and character assassination though are very much on the cards because such things are never done honestly.

They're always done behind the scenes.

That's why, if you have something to say about someone, you post on it, let people have their say and then that's an end of it. That's the way it should work, anyway.

[greenspan] cynical bastard in the know

I've just commented over at Capitalists at Work and I must be a pain in the neck for the poor chaps there and indeed with poor old Sackers too.

The view I push is that the CBs are the central problem, that if you get rid of their control and command under the guise of reacting to market forces, replacing them with a downsized series of micro-economies, then the macro-boom-and crash-economy will be a thing of the past.

1. Eliminate the CBs by governmental decree and vest the power in the Treasury instead;
2. Withdraw from the IMF, BIS and other predators;
3. Replace debt bills with debt-free Treasury notes;
4. Slowly up the reserve requirements of the individual banks, to be kept within the Treasury - slowly, to control inflationary fallout from this.

Naturally, this view is passed over by the experts and it's felt that Higham should go and take his pills when he comes out with this stuff. He's patted on the head as the amateur he is, though showing a healthy interest and yet this, by Greenspan, is a most interesting statement today:

"The crisis will happen again but it will be different," he told BBC Two's The Love of Money series. He added that he had predicted the crash would come as a reaction to a long period of prosperity.

But while it may take time and be a difficult process, the global economy would eventually "get through it", Mr Greenspan added.

"They [financial crises] are all different, but they have one fundamental source," he said. "That is the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that it will continue."

Now he is a cynical bastard because he knows exactly what the gameplan is for coming out of this one, with the profits of GS, JPM and others already made, with their coffers topped up and the bailouts fading into the vague folk memory until one day, as he says, it will happen all over again because the predators who control the debt-based macro-economy and who keep us in near-penury need a re-injection of obscene profits.

Thus the whole ugly cycle continues. And to what does Greenspan ascribe the blame? Human beings wishing prosperity to continue.

This is one of the most disgusting distortions he could possibly have perpetrated on us. Based on an element of truth - that humans do have that desire for the good times to keep rolling - he conveniently eliminates from his reasoning, the role of the predatory CBs in playing on that and instead of managing the economy, as they're charged to do, they exacerbate the situation, e.g. with sub-primes and the hedge-fund scandals, pretending not to be able to predict trends in a volatile economy when most of the time it is induced and they even write about it in FOMC reports!

The unquenchable capability of human beings ... The unquenchable capability of the CBs to stand by, doing nothing to prevent amateurs like us prosperitizing ourselves to extinction while they smile on and allow it to happen, allow us to get ourselves in hock to our eyeballs because we can't afford our lifestyle because the prices have been artificially inflated and Papa CB waits until the appropriate moment and turns off the tap.

You do see what this is all about, don't you? By blaming us [partly true], he says it will happen again but the only way out of it is the global economy.

No, no, no, no - exactly the opposite, you manipulating bastard!! Your ilk should be strung up and the four steps above followed. Until then, the wolves are in charge of the sheep pen and are putting out that they are worthy gentlemen with the best interests of the sheep at heart.

And people, especially those within the financial sector, fall for it. And it's not as if we don't have chapter and verse on this - read Sonus in the sidebar for a start.

Why do people refuse to do their research and see things for what they are?

UPDATE Wednesday 14:15

Have you seen it yet? Bank of England considering negative interest rates. Think it through and consider the implications. Now if you needed immediate proof of the pudding - there it is. Did the local bank manager decide this? No. Did the local council? No. Who did consider it?

Yes, that's right - the effing CB. Do you see what I'm getting at in this post? It's time to take the CBs out of the equation.

[monkeysphere] the space within which we care

Lord T has an article on the MonkeySphere i.e. the area within which we consider people to be our concern, our community, if you like. His Lordship says:

Your family members, close friends, close relatives, close neighbours, other friends, distant relatives, other neighbours, locals you don’t really know and down the chain till we meet foreigners in another country. Depending on our current situations depends on where we draw the line on help.

That's right - it's issues based. If it's a matter of giving charity to the starving, our Monkeysphere will be larger but if, as Lord T says, it's a question of the food chain breaking down and everybody scrambling to survive, then the MS becomes necessarily much smaller.

Many people know the Twilight Zone episode where there is a nuclear threat and one man has a bunker big enough for his immediate family. His so-called friends now become deadly enemies.

Anyway, pop over and read the whole thing.

[graffiti] when it is a national art form

From Alexandra Hertell, of Iceland Review:

Icelanders are not only creative but also superstitious and many, especially in the countryside, believe in gnomes, trolls, and hidden people.

The art splashed around town is playful and reminiscent of their particular cultural psyche. Spontaneous street creations are usually left intact by the government.

During Culture Night, which celebrates just that, young artists embellish various walls as a reminder that street art is a modern form of expression to be acknowledged alongside the Skaldic poetry of the Vikings.

[toilet talk] in the middle of the night

Imagine the door frame more solid than this, floor to ceiling.

Russian cafes fall roughly into two categories - the old and the new. The old have natural airconditioning, as I call it and are not noted for either the service or the food quality. The new use the latest materials but things can be built in an interesting manner.

They like to use this plastic covered metal which we have for window frames, only they use it for anything, including bathroom doors. Another thing they often do is not think of consequences because a Russian simply can't plan. He's friendly, brave and handsome but he can't plan.

Therefore, when our anti-hero lost his girlfriend and went to the cafe to drown his sorrows, a number of things happened. One was that, near closing time, he went to the loo and what with one thing and another, he fell asleep. Now, the door to the loo closed in a snug fit with the metal lip of the frame [draughts in a Russian winter can be unpleasant] and though there was an extractor fan inside, it did not connect with the outside world but into another room at the back and through a tiny opening.

About this time, the waitress went off-duty and the manager and the floor manager came in, cupboards, doors and anything lockable was locked, including the loo, the lights were switched off and the building vacated until the next morning. As this cafe was in town, there were no houses and thus no one about in the wee hours.

When he came to, our anti-hero realized the situation, hollered and tried to kick down the door, except that it opened inwards and now, as he wrenched at it, the handle came off. There was water in the bowl, water in the taps at the wash basin but the air was becoming musty because of course, all the power had been turned off and he was in pitch black.

When his eyes adjusted, he saw that he was not in complete pitch black, as the tiny connecting hole of the fan admitted some air flow but not enough and it was becoming clear that his air supply was ever so slowly diminishing.

Now he had some decisions to make. If he shouted, he used the air. If he tried to break down the door, that had consequences too.

What should his steps have been?

[late evening listening] sade

Judging by the last Sade piece, she's not all that popular or her style of singing is not so this evening's piece is clearly just something I like and that's that. Sometimes one has to do these things.