Cool zombie flick, bro!

'...there have been no substantial retrenchments of the US government, and the situation is getting worse, on a hyperbolic curve. Trends in motion tend to stay in motion until a genuine crisis changes them, and this trend has been gaining momentum for over a century. The fact is that when a government collapses, especially when the government is providing all the things the US government does today, people want somebody to fix it; they want their goodies back. It's well known that over 50% of the US population are net recipients of state largess. And the degree of state support and involvement in the US is far, far greater than it was in France, Russia or Germany. After a period of chaos, it's always the people who are most political, who have the most rabid statist ideas who get the public's attention and rise to the top. It seems highly likely that the US will get a savior, someone full of bravado, who assures the booboisie that he can straighten things out – if he is given sufficient power. Perhaps it will be an arrogant windbag like Gingrich, perhaps some general. The government won't wither away; it will reassert itself. I don't see any way around it, actually. We are already moving into a police state...' -- There's no stopping what can't be stopped, no killing what can't be killed.

'The idea is that a technocracy of the elite can present candidates who are the most "competent" at administration. The corollary to this, of course, is that one must accept EVERY FACET of the CURRENT system to accept that one is voting purely for competence. In other words, if people do not like the current corporatist/authoritarian/totalitarian/militarized state that is being constructed around them, they're simply plumb out of luck. That's because the candidates on this "best of all worlds" won't be running on how to CHANGE what's going on – only on how to administer it BETTER. The idea, of course, is to ensure that any discussion of the FAILURES of government ends up providing an anodyne – that is a solution that INCLUDES MORE government. In other words, government is a terrible problem and the only solution is to increase it and make it better and more responsive – and larger and larger. The absurd end result of such a point of view is an all-encompassing government stretching around the world with ever-vaster resources. The additional resources will be needed to police government itself. In other words, as the corruption grows, so the resources of government must grow.' -- Pied pipers are piping.

'It took 150 years to blow up the banking sector – a brief history of a slow detonation.' -- Pointing finger is pointing at "government"

'On your territory, only you are permitted to produce money. But that is not sufficient. Because as long as money is a regular good that must be expensively produced, there is nothing in it for you except expenses. More importantly, then, you must use your monopoly position in order to lower the production cost and the quality of money as close as possible to zero. Instead of costly quality money such as gold or silver, you must see to it that worthless pieces of paper that can be produced at practically zero cost will become money. Because you can create paper money out of thin air, you can also create credit out of thin air. In fact, because you can create credit out of nothing (without any savings on your part), you can offer loans at cheaper rates than anyone else, even at an interest rate as low as zero (or even at a negative rate). With this ability, not only is your former dependency on banks and the banking industry eliminated; you can, moreover, make banks dependent on you, and you can forge a permanent alliance and complicity between banks and state. You don't even have to become involved in the business of investing the credit yourself. That task, and the risk involved in it, you can safely leave to commercial banks. What you, your central bank, need to do is only this: You create credit out of thin air and then loan this money, at below-market interest rates, to commercial banks. Instead of you paying interest to banks, banks now pay interest to you. And the banks in turn loan out your newly created easy credit to their business friends at somewhat higher but still submarket interest rates (to earn from the interest differential). In addition, to make the banks especially keen on working with you, you may permit the banks to create a certain amount of their own new credit (of checkbook money) in addition and on top of the credit that you have created (fractional-reserve banking).'

'Printing money from nothing is not just corrosive, it has significantly changed the face of modern society, and even the history of the world. It is difficult to imagine our lives without so much monetary stimulation. Probably there would be far fewer wars. And healthier food. And far less drug abuse. Far fewer people in jail and much less poverty. Far fewer dictators and much less torture. Fewer taxes and significantly less inflation. Regulatory authorities and their dictates would not be in vogue. Lawyers would not be in such significant demand. There would be fewer horrible depressions. And the fear-based promotions that the elites rely upon to push Western middle classes toward fuller global governance would not likely be available. Most importantly, the world would not be controlled, at least partially, by a tiny cabal of sociopathic central banking families.'

'Every time Merkel meets with Sarkozy in one of their "no, no, yes, yes" liaisons, European stock markets rise. There is some vague language about another round of bailouts. Investors rush in to buy, buy, buy. The fund managers are not rewarded to produce long-term capital gains. So, they cannot resist buying whenever Merkel and Sarkozy emerge from their tryst to tell the world that they are willing to let Germany bail out the Greek bond market one more time. This is great political theater. The funds' memos to major banks regarding the funds' refusal to roll over their short-term loans can go out at any time. No one wants to be the first fund to trigger a banking panic. But no one wants to be left holding the bag. This is why predictions regarding the day of reckoning are highly speculative. The major decisions will not be made by banks. They will be made by fund managers with large deposits at banks. The bankers are just sitting there, hoping for the best.'

'The people are catching on. Thus we arrive at the strangest of moments when the world is figuring out that the forecasts of fire, flood and plague were faked, just as they realize the reassurances about the money were faked too. Disaster is coming, but not because of carbon. We’ve been worried about the wrong tipping point. Is it a coincidence? A random convergence of delusions? Not so. It takes one falsity to feed the other. We need a special kind of wealth to worry about bad weather 100 years from now. No one was watching the dollars hard enough... Corruption reigned across the high end of town. Politicians lied, scientists lost data, bankers mispriced risk and sold it to suckers but were bailed out, and public servants served government instead of the public. Science journals forgot what science was, professors broke laws of reason, and virtually everyone in the old media let them get away with it. Indeed the old-media was busy hacking phones for entertainment.'

'You CANNOT, as a society, witness a couple of guys pull a trillion out of their back pockets without feeling, well ... snookered. And after feeling snookered, something else begins to percolate. "Hey," you say, "wait a minute. I sit here with my debts and my job and my house in foreclosure and this guy – THIS GUY – throws around trillions? Wait a minute. WHEN DO I GET MINE!" And so it begins. You have seen the essential immorality of the system. You have felt it deep in the gut... Human beings, among other things, live within various ethical environments. When these are shown to be false, there is trouble brewing. We've written this over and over, that the old financial order, based on central banking, is basically finished. But THIS is WHY. The moral order that supported this sort of society is kaput. It's been found out. On the way is increased chaos, increased immorality and eventually A NEW MORAL ORDER.'

'The colossal miscalculation made by Washington and Wall Street is that they could control the moral hazard genie once they removed it from the bottle. They assumed that the people would be too stupid to see what was going on. And that even if the people did figure things out, they would willingly wear the thick, choking chains of debt being welded to their necks... Instead, thanks to the Internet and the democracy of information and insight it affords, the people were instantly wise to what was happening, and it stirred them. ...the moral hazard virus is now loose and swiftly propagating throughout society. The American psychological landscape has been parched by the searing winds of financial desperation, surging inequality and dying hopes. And the tinder of the desiccated American Dream, once the great calling and aspiration of a nation, is now piled so high that a spark igniting it would unleash raging flames reaching up to and scorching an astonished Sun.'

'Tribal culture is resistant to Westernization. Somalis, Pashtuns, Bedouins and Punjabis (if one includes Pakistan) are tribes with millennial cultures. Uprooting persistent cultural trends is a long-term project. First violence is applied to fracture the culture and then massive amounts of foreign aid to rebuild it. What looks like generosity is actually self-interest. The powers-that-be use aid like gesso, whiting over what once was to paint an entirely new picture. Look back in time and we think there is plenty of evidence the ongoing and expanding wars may be part of a long-term project. World War I we could speculate was designed in part to overwhelm German culture. World War II shattered Japanese culture. The Korean and Vietnamese wars did the same in Asia. Only the Middle East and Africa are left. Is it a coincidence then? Engaging with Iran and the former Persian Empire would likely bring a kind of regional World War III to fruition.'

"The State is a parasite that almost always ends up eating its host."

'This is the issue: "How can the US cease its warring when so many people in that beleaguered country depend on conflict for their employment?" The US unemployment or under-employment rate (the real one) is somewhere between 25 and 30 percent. To reduce or eliminate garrisons in both Iraq and Afghanistan would inject hundreds of thousands of additional individuals into an economy that is struggling to provide employment to available workers. (Not to mention the private-sector "defense" jobs that would be made redundant.) And assuming that the additional workers find jobs; wouldn't they be at substantially lower salaries than their existing military compensations?" Were the US to suffer such an influx of unemployed as a result of adopting a sensible foreign policy rather than acting as the policemen for global morality, it is likely that trade unions and other leftist organizations would demand the existing wages of the military workers be maintained at current levels.'

Lobaczewski: '...pathocracy progressively intrudes everywhere and dulls everything... the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually starts to dominate... Once a group has inhaled a sufficient dose of pathological material to give birth to the conviction that these not-quite-normal people are unique geniuses, it starts subjecting its more normal members to pressure... For many people, such pressure of collective opinion takes on attributes of a moral criterion... Individuals with a more normal sense of psychological reality leave after entering into conflict with the newly modified group; simultaneously, individuals with various psychological anomalies join the group and easily find a way of life there.'

'Like Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke also believes – and this is why his voice cracks and his lips quiver when he speaks "confidently" of the Fed’s policies – that hedging against what would be pretty much instantaneous chaos here in America (if all support was withdrawn from the system, no matter how problematic such support is over the long term) through the infusion of trillions of fiat dollars into the economy is the only possible path to follow. (As for the growing austerity-driven crisis in Europe, we’ll just have to wait and see. I mean if war breaks out, it won’t be fought in our streets, right Mr. Chairman?) -- I am a nominal man living in a real world. In the real world, austerity and poverty hasten the arrival of civil strife. In the real world, real hunger and real suffering leads inevitably to the rise of radical and violent political and social movements. War will come. War is the health of the state, but only if the war is fought somewhere else, correct? ' -- Collapse.

'Dominant Social Theme: Please don't look at the man behind the curtain. -- The entire mechanism has been reborn as a public enterprise beholden to the elite. Teacher, lawyer, educator, accountant, doctor or military person – all are entangled in a quasi-public system beholden to government at almost every level (and many are aware of their unwitting complicity, even if they can't verbalize it). For those who seek to survive outside of the system, there are various intelligence agencies and other adversarial governmental institutions manufactured to make life difficult. -- The "silver lining" to all of this, if there is one, is that the truth-telling of the Internet has thoroughly upset the artificial construct – the all-encompassing monetary and professional matrix – that the elite created through money power in the 21st century. As we have written before, there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.'

'There's too much uncertainty about the economy and what companies and ideas are viable. Too many bad ideas and sectors have been propped up. Too many zombie companies are still being supported by governments and forgiving central bank policy. So easing won't provide growth. But what another round of quantitative easing WILL do is continue the formation of various kinds of speculative bubbles. Businesses may not borrow; entrepreneurs may not flourish, but money will find its way into some forms of speculation, be it oil, gold, food, etc. Thus Trader Dan is correct. Quantitative easing will cause price inflation but do little or nothing to stimulate animal spirits and create jobs. Eventually, the Federal Reserve will need to confront the largest problem of all: its growing lack of credibility and a system based on fraudulent pretences that is being exposed to a larger and larger audience every day.'

'The power elite's fear-based promotions and solutions grow stranger in our view. Wherever one looks there is weirdness. Homeland Security is installing full-body scanners that take and store naked pictures – but denies that they do. The Obama administration passes a health care bill that mandates people pay for insurance whether they want it or not, even though such a law is likely unconstitutional. The US Federal Reserve prints trillions of paper dollars to try to stave off the collapse of the Western economy (which it has caused) and then pretends it is business as usual. And most recently, we find there is plausible evidence that the president of the United States himself, Barack Obama, is actually a CIA undercover agent. We could go on and on. Global warming is nonsense; the idea that people are polluting the earth by breathing is nothing short of insane. The war on non-existent terror continues in America and around the world...'

'The pathologies of late empires...' -- "There's a reason that you have to invent the government to make all this stuff work – you have to invent the government to make all this stuff work because people wouldn't buy it without the government! You have to invent God if you're a priest to tell people what to do because nobody's going to obey you, you're just some guy. You have to invent governments to justify theft because so very few people want to steal directly. The important question to ask is, what's going to happen when this ponzi scheme called government stops 'working'?" [Are people going to be able to admit that] what has failed is coercion, is government, is using violence to achieve your ends? The price we pay for fantasy is destruction. And we will continue to pay that price until we understand the mechanics of what governments do, which is rape and pillage the average person for the profit of the elite."

'These people lock the system in place while at the same time destabilizing it by imposing financial burden on the productive. Apparatchiks are also in place in "finance" much of which would be in bankruptcy reorganization were it not for government payouts. Most of these workers are clueless hulks of America's communist Fascist policy. We have a huge burden being placed on the few real sectors of the economy with local law enforcement, capital investment, and education, being gutted by the weight of a system stealing our freedom with a police state. We need to encourage our bright people to be constructive parts of society not toe sucking lackeys of those who have entrenched themselves in an insane psychopathic system of mealy mouthed boot lickers. Beria had it right that law and financial based capitalism would defeat itself in a psychotic-insane-prison-death-knell. We now have a leaderless nation with a growing secret police. The media has dominion over our minds and bodies.'

'For the individuals who took work that was rooted in over consumption by the government, they had no way of knowing that their position could not be sustained over the long term. It really is not their fault that they lose their jobs, but the fault of a government that created an unsupportable structure. Likewise, the businesses that will go bust structured themselves to support the over-consumption, and it is not the fault of the proprietors that they have gone bust. They were incentivised by the government to direct their resources to unsustainable government consumption. The problem of austerity is that, whatever happens, the shift from government consumption of resource means that those employed in activities to support that consumption are going to be hurt, whether now or later. ...to place blame on the 'cutters' is to place the blame on the wrong people. It was those that distorted the economy onto an unsustainable path that shoulder the responsibility.'

'It is central banking that gives rise to the booms that lead to tremendous industrial euphorias. As these abate, revenues diminish and calls for increased taxes arise. As local economies fail, people grow angry and demand that the government act through increased regulation to punish wrongdoers and recalibrate marketplaces. It is central banking that ultimately hollows out economies by causing small businesses to fail and generating consolidation that favors grossly inefficient, corrupt and powerful multinationals that are controlled of course by the Western power elite rather than by local or regional entrepreneurs. Mercantilist central banking, in our humble opinion, lies at the heart of every problem that Western democracies face. The huge pools of money available to central bankers and their highly placed colleagues in private industry ensure that the worst elements of governance receive the most funding and are the most highly cultivated.'

'The long term effects of the First World War - the fall of the Free West, and the darkening skies of tyranny...' -- The Killbot Class

"It's compounding interest that's causing the problems." -- P < P + I -- (But it's not 'money', it's debt! Each note is a ticket to stand in line and get your shit took.)

'Denial is a psychotropic, mind-altering drug that by comparison makes crack cocaine look like health food, and addiction to it shuts down the brain. Addiction breeds immorality. Addicts will stop at nothing to get their drug of choice. -- The colossal miscalculation made by Washington and Wall Street is that they could control the moral hazard genie once they removed it from the bottle. They believed they could use the genie to enrich themselves with trillions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer money, and then replace it in the bottle before its magic spell of immorality metastasized throughout society at large. They assumed that the people would be too stupid to see what was going on. There is accumulating evidence that the Washington/Wall Street moral hazard experiment has gone disastrously wrong, and just like any other accidental discharge of a deadly virus, the moral hazard virus is now loose and swiftly propagating throughout society.'

Watts on the inbred psychopathic 'elite': "They won't keep you around as a pet. Everyone is used in turn: the communists were used in turn, the right-wingers as well – but they don't realise it. They are all used to serve and bring about the same agenda which is simply the elites' survival. Where we can talk about psychopaths as being alien from us because they have no empathy for others; they're very cunning; they're like cameras that watch and study you and emulate you, and are very good con men, but they feel nothing for you – well, in a Darwinist philosophy, they are the natural successors to take over and rule the world. They believe that they are the most advanced predators on the planet and they're not ashamed of being predators, they think that's the natural order, and that's what they discuss at the top thinktanks." -- Jones on the stockholm syndrome: "They've trained the slaves to giggle and laugh and be delusional where if they laugh something off that makes it not exist."

'What we are now seeing in the UK is the brewing of a perfect storm. As governments issue record levels of debt, the competition for who is funded is intensifying. Again, it is an argument that I made long ago, and it is now an argument that is gaining a broader airing. Whilst other economies may look very bad, the credit will flow to the countries that look least bad and the UK is not well placed in such a competition. The result is that yields on gilts are climbing, meaning that funding the government is already becoming more expensive. Just as in Greece, it appears that the electorate in the UK are taking their creditors for granted, and have not accepted (yet) that it is possible for the credit taps to switched off. At some point, the UK electorate needs to wake up and accept reality, but the prospects for this are dim. ...the government is building a client state - where any serious cuts to government expenditure threatens the livelihoods of ever more individuals.'

'What awaits the Afghans if the American and allied surge is successful? Presumably a Westernized way of life. In its advanced incarnation, it will include perhaps a British variant of "freedom" – cameras on every street corner (and in every field) to ensure there is no poppy cultivation except by select, government-enabled criminals. What else? Let us prognosticate. There will be eventually a high income tax; various sales taxes; an Afghan central bank that will inflate Afghanistan's currency to nearly nothing; a plethora of regulations that will "empower" Afghan women (who will then have to work several jobs along with their husbands to keep up with taxes and inflation); ... currency controls; gun confiscation; hate speech laws; endlessly degrading public schools; confiscation of private property; ever-enlarging police and military forces to "keep the peace"; manipulated democracy and vote rigging to sustain the intolerable status quo ... we could go on and on.'

'CrossTalks Peter Lavelle asks his guests where the Eurozone is going. Greece lied to get into Eurozone and Brussels knew this. As Greece goes, so does the Euro and the EU?' -- Debt disease. Risk of contagion. Oh noes.

'...the nation-state has been largely co-opted by increasingly powerful non-state entities -- from parasitical banks that sit astride core functions of the global system (they profit from the ability to distort core financial and economic functions to manufacture virtual "wealth") to transnational gangs that puncture borders with drugs and other smuggled goods -- and that corruption is spreading. Nothing can get done at the nation-state level anymore and what does get done (as the recent health and finance legislation in the US proves), is only being done to drive forward profitability in parasitical firms or sap our resources (making us more vulnerable to predation by local threats). Worse, nation-state bureaucracies are becoming more insulated and focused on self-preservation by the day from the institutional level down the individual government employee contractor.'

'The distinction between truth and a lie is a matter of predation: how will the author get what he or she needs? There is no interest in truth as an abstract idea, as a noble goal, as something integral to one's life or being. It is merely a rush, a kick of adrenaline, a way to get high and overcome a certain boredom. This chaos manifests in our world, too. All around us, words and actions do not match. Our leaders tell us one thing through their servants in the media, while the facts on the ground offer a widely contrasting counterpoint. The effects on society are the same as in a couple: the moral compass of people of conscience becomes disoriented. Individuals can no longer tell up from down, right from wrong, truth from falsehood. And after a certain time, they no longer care. They give up. They can no longer make sense of it all, so they turn it off.'

'In the ponerogenic process of the pathocratic phenomenon, characteropathic individuals adopt ideologies created by doctrinaire, often schizoidal people, recast them into an active propaganda form, and disseminate it with pathological egotism and paranoid intolerance for any philosophies which may differ from their own. They also inspire further transformation of this ideology into its pathological counterpart. Something which had a doctrinaire character and circulated in numerically limited groups is now activated at societal level... -- It also appears that this process tends to intensify with time; initial activities are undertaken by persons with milder characteropathic features, who are easily able to hide their aberrations from others. Paranoid individuals thereupon become principally active. Toward the end of the process, an individual with frontal characteropathy and the highest degree of pathological egotism can easily take over leadership.'

'One of the most important films ever made.' -- The ways to the One are as many as the lives of men.

'...those who minister to the mentally ill inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. ...the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. That is until recently. ...in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us ... we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. -- What is being missed is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering. “Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology. When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize [a disorder], then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick [a] pathology as a way to express that conflict.”'

'The double standard on debt defaults. The aggressive behavior of corporations and high net worth individuals relative to debt and contracts will be copied by the rest of society. Get over it, game theory dictates this. The result a legalism so intense (since basic norms of behavior can't be assumed, they must be spelled out with excruciating detail and enforced through lengthy and exhaustive monitoring) that the overhead expenses of running our economic system become unsustainable. Why? This behavioral roll-out converts the economic returns on societal complexity already in place (systems we built to solve past problems) from marginally positive returns (I'm being generous) into deeply negative drags on all economic and social activity.' -- The cancer that is killing /e/