Dumb:

Project Lifeline is a Bush administration initiative to give distressed mortgagees an additional month before their homes are foreclosed upon. This reprieve goes not only to subprime borrowers but to all distressed borrowers. The subtext to this move is that not only are subprime borrowers in distress. One month’s grace is dumb because the amount of debt that we’re dealing with coupled with the loss of equity from falling housing prices is not something that is going to resolve itself that quickly. This is akin to giving a starving man a rice cake. We all know that rice cakes are good only as coasters, so too is Project Lifeline.

Dumber:

Interest rate cuts are an even dumber idea. Last month the Fed cut rates by a staggering 1.25%. There is strong rumour that more cuts are coming. This is a dumber idea for a few reasons. First interest rate cuts are the cause of debenture spending. The reason we’re in the mess we’re in is because people are/were spending money they didn’t have. Next, lowered interest rates cause economic bubbles such as the housing bubble which is just in the process of bursting. Finally, interest rate cuts increase government debt. The way that the Fed lowers interest is by buying treasury bills with printed money. This devalues the currency and increases government debt. Thus, interest rate cuts are the cause of the current economic quagmire, and certainly aren’t the cure.

Dumbest

The US Stimulus Package is the dumbest possible idea. Under the package, people could see $600 to $1200 in tax rebates. First off, the amount itself is a pittance. Next, where is the money coming from? The money is being borrowed from China to be repaid with interest. Where is the money going? The money, it is hoped, will be spent into the economy to buy ’stuff’. Where does all the stuff come from? The stuff comes from… China. The real underlying problem is that the US economy has shifted from a production based economy to a consumer based economy. Until you address that problem, any attempts to throw money at the problem will simply throw money in other people’s pockets. I’ll give the government some credit though, the US Stimulus Package does manage to stimulate an economy; perhaps the government will fund moving its citizens to Beijing where the positive effects can be felt.

AID · Beijing · bubble · bush · Bush administration · China · Coming · Economy · fed · federal reserve · Federal Reserve System · george bush · http · interest rate · life · mortgage · OJ · prime · project lifeline · Red · stimulus package · subprime · the fed · United States · US Federal Reserve · USD

Marx once said that “religion is the opiate of the masses”.  If one is to believe this graph:

it would seem to suggest that the poorer you are, the more inclined you are to be religious.  Perhaps it’s not so odd that most religious television programs are constantly begging for money.  However, they may do better by making their pleas for money to the aetheists instead of ‘preaching to the [poor] choir’ as it were.

Most interesting are the outliers on this graph.  The US is more religious than its overall wealth would suggest, so perhaps George Bush does indeed hear the voice of God.  Also note Kuwait which is highly religious and relatively prosperous compared to countries with similar levels of religiousity.

More information can be found here:

http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258

AID · bush · choir · George · george bush · God · http · king · Kuwait · levis · marx · opiate · php · RAM · Red · Religion · United States · wealth

At age 35, having recently been laid off, I found myself at a career exploration workshop run by the Jewish Vocational Services. [ed. note: The Jewish Vocational Service now serves people of all races and ethnicities. It is as identifiably Jewish as the star of Dennis; that is to say, not.] Coming from a lucrative yet unfulfilling career in Computer Sciences, I was looking to marry my other talents with my career or perhaps start a new career altogether. Other classmates were either seeking career guidance or training. Whatever our immediate goals, we were all in the same boat, fighting against the tide of layoffs and restructurings unleashed in this latest economic maelstrom. My shipmates flew the flags of many diverse nations, had charted the courses of many differing careers and hailed from all ages and walks of life. Just the same we found common steerage on our upstream battle for employment or fulfillment or perhaps the confluence of both.

Our first day consisted of pen and pencil cognitive tests adding numbers, mentally folding boxes, and figuring out which way a submarine will go when its control surfaces were adjusted. Rudely, I knew exactly where I’d like that submarine to go upon first inspection, but there was no entry on the form for my proposed destination. Despite the continued assurances of the counselors that these tests were only a part of the overall equation, they were a shot across the bow for many of us since these tests are becoming ever more popular in interviews. I personally lost several points on one test after falling into a daydream where I asked: “If I took a five pound weight and used a 10 meter lever, would it be enough to crush the infernal 5 minute timer which callously and repeatedly told us we were out of time?”

Were we out of time? Were we too old, too obligated to family, short on funds, or too far removed from Canadian culture to find the employment and fulfillment we sought? Despite healthy doses of gallows humour about the testing process and the general state of the economy there was a palpable weight on people’s shoulders. While we all smiled and shrugged off the indignity of the return to school days, we all feared that the next spatial visual acuity box we might fold might very well be a coffin in which we would be forced to bury our dreams.

Fortunately the rest of the program returned our egos to an even keel. Patricia, a course facilitator guided us through assessments of personality where the only wrong answer was to have no personality to speak of; fortunately this was a fate suffered by no one. She is a veteran of many lands, many careers and I imagine many recessions who seems to pay them no mind. Her right and proper British manner seems to remind us of Mary Poppins who would advise us all to take “a spoon full of [optimistic] sugar to make the [recession] go down.”

Then there was Derek, the course facilitator with a coy and sly smile which hinted at his razor sharp interviewing style sure to eviscerate any unsuspecting and inauthentic candidate. While we would rue having him on the opposite side of the interview table, luckily for us, he was on our side and was willing to share his insights. He built our confidence and ability to market ourselves and revealed some insider interviewing secrets such as having his secretary work on his behalf as a covert agent. Candidates be forewarned: be nice and polite to the secretaries – while you cannot remain silent, everything you say can and will still be used against you.

Career change is never easy, under any financial climate. I note that some attendees proudly claim that they can do anything while others are more reserved about their dreams and ambitions. Our facilitators would quickly point out that the differences in expressions were due to the different personality types we had studied that week. Both types of expression however are a defense against the underlying fear that our high flung ideas will run aground on McDonald’s Island where we’ll be forever enslaved serving cheeseburgers to other people who somehow managed to make it. There was tremendous talk among attendees of the economic climate and other external factors which the course could not possibly change. The course however, spent precious little time on the economic situation and instead looked to what it could adjust, our attitude and direction. Ultimately we all cast off and sought our own safe harbours but we did so with the benefit of a true and straight compass. For the beacon lighthouse JVS offered me in navigating a foggy and tumultuous job market, I am truly grateful.

AID · aig · ale · cent · Coming · Computer Sciences · Economy · equation · flu · Health · Jewish Vocational Service · Jewish Vocational Services · king · life · lighthouse JVS · Mary Poppins · McDonald’s Island · RAM · Red · secretary · secrets · the Star · unsuspecting and inauthentic candidate

PDF Version: AncientInjustice.pdf

Growing up, my Jewish education consisted of an after school program (‘cheider’ to the Yiddish inclined) while I attended public school by day.  On my walk to Hebrew School I would often try to marry the two bodies of knowledge from the two respective school systems.  A happy romance occurred around 1987 between the religious and secular bodies of knowledge.  As many may recall 1987 was the year of the big crash on the stock market.[1]  Debt and the economy were on the lips of many in those days.

In the secular world there was tremendous talk of personal and national debt, interest rates, unemployment and the like.  All the while, the Torah I was reading in Hebrew school was definitely running on about the sabbatical forgiveness of debt and the precept that “there should be no poor among you”. (Deut 15:1-4)  Now my mental image of the ancient Israelites was that of a pastoral, agrarian people.  With hindsight I can say that this image was only slightly misguided.  Despite the rumored grandeur of the Davidic kingdom, archaeologists hold that their society was more rural than urban.

But this left me with a theological problem:  I saw debt as a product of banks which were on city streets.  I failed to conjure an image of rolling agricultural fields dotted with banks and/or ATMs at the Temple gates. (Parenthetically, it turns out that if the Gospels have any historical veracity, there may have been just such an ancient equivalent of an ATM at the Temple gates.  More to follow shortly.)  Failing to imagine ancient banks, I was puzzled about what the ancient Israelites knew of debt and how then did this prescient warning against the accumulation of debt make it into the Torah?  I questioned my Hebrew school teacher along these lines and I was given the answer that ‘the Torah contained the writ word of God and all His wisdom.  It was written for all times and addressed all the problems that we would encounter until the end of days.’

Platitudes such as this are to young inquisitive men, such as I was, like drinking sea water when thirsty:  quenching only at first and then leaving you more thirsty than ever.  If my teacher’s answer was to hold water (pun intended) then there were conspicuous absences from the ‘writ word of God’.  Where were the foundations for democracy?  Where were the specific prohibitions against slavery (beyond the sabbatical release of Hebrew slaves)?  Where was the discussion about protecting the environment beyond the scant ordinances for burying excrement beyond the outskirts of camp (Deut 23:14)?  From those grandiose absences there were more mundane absences like: Where were the prohibitions against smoking and where were the prohibitions against high cholesterol foods?  My attempts to marry the religious and secular belief systems were thwarted by the absence of these secular guidelines which I had determined to be legitimate and necessary.  After a brief flirtation the attempted marriage failed in divorce with the judgment pronounced by my rationality decreeing that the Torah was not indeed the writ word of God.

Literalists may be tempted by the previous sentence to toss this work out of hand directly into the fire.  Indeed this may provide needed warmth to those suffering the effects of debt.  Just the same, with a bit of patience on both sides of the theist/atheist debate, I believe there is commonality to be found in the good intentions of the Torah.  While we may debate its authorship I will not debate that it was written with the best of intentions.  Further, I hold that it was written to describe an ideal rather than the actual practice of the day.  There is a common modern Israeli expression: “The synagogue I don’t go to is Orthodox.”  Similarly, I believe that the Torah describes an ideal set out for the people to follow which was likely, based on archaeological evidence, considerably different than religion actually practiced by the ancient Israelites.  Specifically, archaeology reveals the rampant practice of polytheism and idolatry up to the Babylonian exile.[2]  Biblical archaeology contends that the Torah was a compendium of tales written by a reformist movement railing against the practices of the day.  Setting aside the issue of biblical authorship, I will continue the discussion in the context of the good intentions of the author presently.

The now dubious authorship of the Torah made my original question even more pronounced.  If the Torah was not written by God, then who wrote it and how were the ancient Israelites aware of debt and its effects?  My research would lead me to the field of biblical archaeology.  I studied the works of William Dever and Israel Finklestein amongst others with the following results.  The ancient Israelites never conquered Canaan as told in the Torah canon.  They were instead Canaanites themselves who survived and replaced a decaying social order with a more egalitarian one.  For those interested in how I arrived at this conclusion there is a wonderful précis of biblical archaeology available on Public Broadcastings’ NOVA series: “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”[3]  There you’ll find a terrific summary of all the archaeological and scientific findings to date.  I only wish this series had existed at the outset of my research for it would have saved me much trudging through many inaccessibly written academic works on the topic.  Researching biblical archaeology was much like archaeology itself: sifting through piles of academic detritus to yield occasional relics and then putting the pieces together.

So, accepting for the moment that the Israelite race emerged from the nadir of the Canaanite civilization, Zephaniah 1:11 becomes ever more clear:
“The dwellers of Machtesh [, a quarter of Jerusalem,] howl;/ For all the tradesmen [nation of Canaan] have perished, All who weigh silver are wiped out.”
Two things are critical in this passage.  First the time of Zephaniah, well past that of the Canaanite era, and second the reference to the weighing of silver.  Zephaniah was not admonishing the Canaanites but rather the Jewish merchants of Jerusalem who were acting like Canaanites.[4]  As to the reference to the weighing of silver, silver was then as it is now, a monetary metal.  All throughout history, every society has been plagued by the manipulation of their currency leading to their ultimate downfall.  Economists call the process seigniorage gain.

Seigniorage gain is the process by which the minter (usually the government) gains on the difference between the face value of the coin and the actual value of the metal used to make it.  I often think it is the job of economists to construct palatable names for what in the end turns out to be sheer larceny.  Those unfamiliar with the term may be more familiar with the contemporary synonyms such as ‘inflation’.  Whatever you choose to call it, ‘a lemon by any other name would taste as sour’ and inflation, currency manipulation, or seigniorage gain is quintessentially a tax on the middle class leading to widespread debt, poverty and wealth inequality.  It is a fundamental violation of the biblical injunction to have “fair weights and measures” (Deut 25:13-16).

It is my supposition that it was an economic collapse brought about by currency manipulation which spelled the end of the Canaanite civilization.  I will support this supposition by reviewing the log roll of history vis a vis currency manipulation and the subsequent unfolding of the relevant civilization.  Biblical archaeology tells us that the proto-Israelites literally fled for the hills in the face of the collapse of the Canaanites.[5]  There they regrouped and sought to set themselves apart from the evils of their past.  After the dust had settled they returned with a renewed spirit and purpose to set out a more equitable system.  To that end they developed laws against the accumulation of debt and the slavery that results.  Those laws were later canonized in the Pentateuch around the end of the Babylonian exile (4th to 6th centuries BCE).[6]

Some 600 years later we know that these laws were largely being ignored and that corruption again loomed large.  We have the historical testimony of the gospels of Luke and John which recount Jesus’ banishing of the money changers from the temple gates.  Around the time of the year 0 CE Roman currency was the common currency in the holy land.  These coins typically bore the images of pagan gods and were unacceptable for use in temple worship.  At the temple gates, benches of money changers would exchange these coins, at predatory exchange rates, to Levite coins for use in temple services.  These same money changers would charge the Levites unreasonable rates to change these coins back into Roman coins such that the Levite priests could make purchases in the markets.  Jesus found the entire process abominable and forcibly drove them from the temple.[7]  Whether you believe the historical veracity of the gospels is beside the point here.  What is known is that currency manipulation was clearly on the mind of the authors of the gospels and the gospels were known to be written around this time (admittedly within 400 years).  As a pertinent aside, the word ‘Bank’ comes from the Latin for ‘bench’ precisely referring to this historical antecedent.[8]  I believe it is social disarray caused by the financial ruin of Israel which led to its overthrow by the Romans.  There is textual evidence for this in the bible itself:  Jeremiah 7:11 reads “Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”  Amos 5:7 reads “Ah you who trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the ground, and make the humble walk a twisted course.”

It is an irony of history, if not a recurring leitmotif, that the very same financial snare which destroyed Israel also destroyed its captors.  In Hebrew school we all learned of the famous (infamous) “Judea Capta” coin.[9]  This coin depicts the pride of the Romans in defeating ancient Israel.  It is in the silver or precious metal content of roman coinage with which we can track the decline of the Roman Empire.  The backbone coin of the Roman economy was the Denarius which started out with a silver weight of approximately 4.5 grams.  Have you ever noticed the ridges on the edge of a quarter?  These same ridges were present on the Denarius and there intention is to make any shaving of the coin obvious.  This made it harder for individuals to debase the currency but the government was free to mint coins with less and less silver content.  By the year 274 CE under Aurelian’s reign the coins had almost no silver content at all.[10]  The causes of the fall of Rome are admittedly complex, including the outsourcing of their military defense to barbarian mercenaries.  Just the same, the economic decline of Rome is certainly one of the principle causes and is yet another exemplar of the debasement of currency leading to the debasement of the underlying civilization.

The collapse of the Roman Empire led the world into the dark ages.  The Christian religion took hold championing the cause of the poor all through these long dark ages.  Eventually a fair monetary system was developed called the tally stick system.[11]  Very strict Christian based laws against usury (interest) prevented any monetary abuse.  However, in the 1500’s Henry VIII, obviously unaware of the peril, deregulated the economy and allowed for certain forms of usury.[12]  The economic maelstrom unleashed destroyed the English economy.  In the wake of the upheaval and in the aftermath of the English revolution of 1642, the Bank of London was established.  Oddly enough, the initial shares were bought with no other currency than talley sticks.  The bank of England replaced this monetary system with their own manipulated (or ‘fiat’) currency.  Currency manipulation was now institutionalized in the form of this ‘Central Bank’ put in place to ‘protect and regulate’ the money supply.

Just around this time, gold was being used as a currency.  Carrying ones gold on their person could be cumbersome and moreover, dangerous.  A robbery could erase ones savings.  The goldsmiths of the day agreed to hold gold for consumers at a nominal fee and issued them a certificate which they could then use to redeem their deposits.  These little slips of paper were much easier to work with and in a very short time, the slips of paper would be used in transactions instead of gold.  The goldsmiths made an astute observation.  Not all of their clients came to collect their gold at one instant.  As such they could lend out some of the deposited gold at interest making money on money they did not really have.  While this seems relatively harmless provided customers do not all come for their gold at once, it is in fact at the core of everything wrong in the world today.  The fraud is subtle yet essential to understand.  By using gold that say a farmer had deposited to make loans, you are using the hard labour of the farmer to make money with very little labour.  In a nutshell, this practice siphons up the value of labour and puts it in the hands of the advantaged few who are in a position to leverage it.  This is the practice of fractional reserve banking with is with us to this very day.[13]  When a middle class family takes out a loan to get an SUV, the bank does not lend you their money.  They lend you the savings of an auto worker who drives a compact sedan.  The banker turns interest on money s/he never owned and drives a luxury sports car on the profits.  Such is the food chain of fractional reserve banking.  Bankers love the practice for obvious reasons.  Politicians love it because they can finance their projects without reaching for tax dollars.  Projects can now be financed with thusly conjured money with only a nodding concern for inflation and the ever growing national debt. The average person neither loves it nor hates it because they do not understand it.  Hopefully, that is, until now.

The Bank of England was aware of the practice of the goldsmiths but instead of outlawing it, embraced it.  As such they succeeded in protecting and regulating the money supply insofar as her citizens of wealth were concerned but all to the detriment of the English parliament and the general public.  The bank so bankrupted England that England was forced to place a heavy tax burden on its colonies.  The American colonies revolted to the cry against ‘taxation without representation’ in the war of independence of 1762.  By the end of this revolution, with the effects of the Bank of England in mind the Americans set out to “form a more perfect union”.  Into their new constitution section 10 forbids “…emit[ing] Bills of Credit; mak[ing] any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts…”.[14]  It was pursuant to this section that the United States was on the Gold Standard for most of its existence up until 1933.  The Gold Standard ensured that every bill was backed by gold.  Bills printed prior to 1933 were marked “redeemable in gold”.  After 1933 they were marked as only “legal tender”.  The founding fathers knew of the threat of a manipulated currency but that memory and warning was, as we now see, historically fleeting.

The Americans had the first and second Banks of America which again started to manipulate the currency.  Andrew Jackson famously put a temporary stop to the banking cartels saying: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.”[16]  For a short while he succeeded.  From 1836 to 1913 the United States was free of a central bank and the currency manipulation they bring with them.

During this hiatus in central banking while financial crises persisted, inflation was flat.  That is to say that one dollar was worth one dollar for this interim period.[17]  This allowed for the accumulations of savings which is the true practice of capitalism.  Indeed by the early 1900’s bankers were concerned with the prevalence of self-financing of business development.  So concerned were the bankers that they sought to reassert themselves and in 1913, taking advantage of a recent (some say engineered) financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was born and central banking was reborn in America.[18]  Again too, the promise of the Federal Reserve was to regulate the money supply and again, so it did, to the advantage of the wealthy few.  As it has always been throughout history, currency manipulation manufactures debt and poverty.  Since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by 95%.  Inflation has increased by 1929% (that’s 19 hundred and twenty nine percent!).[19]  The effect of this is that wealth inequality is now staggering.  As of 2001, in the U.S., the top 20% held 84% of all the wealth.[20]  For those who have trouble dealing with math, what this means is that if you are in the class of the remaining 80% (most of us are) then in a more fairly distributed economy – which would necessarily feature a fair currency – you would have approximately 5 times your current assets.

As common as monetary manipulation is throughout history, so too are the attempted fixes when the system gets out of whack.  A fiat currency (recall a ‘fiat’ currency is an ‘on faith’ currency) is a sort of monetary Golem: this time made of minted coins instead of clay.  Generally it functions impeccably as designed, siphoning wealth upwards but occasionally and often dramatically, it causes large financial upset.  When this Golem takes a swat at its banker creators the solution is to placate it with, yes, ever more printed or minted money.  This maneuver results in one of two results: 1) a temporary stabilization of the monster or 2) a hyperinflationary death when the monster collapses under its own weight.  Note that in either outcome, the best that can be accomplished is a temporary shoring up of the system.  Inevitably, the Golem collapses back into the imaginary ore it came from, only after raping the value of the land and passing it into the hands of the elite few.  Revisiting the economic death of Rome, Nero and other Emperors debased the currency via inflation fiddling and minting as it were while Rome burned.

However, one need not look as far afield to find a terrific example of the hyperinflationary death of an empire.  Just recently, the Weimar republic died just such a death.[21]  In the 1920’s Germany forced under the WWI reparations act to make payments to the victor nations.  The victor nations, most notably France and England who were in their own financial distress due to – you may have guessed by now – their own currency manipulation, pressured the Germans to make good on their obligations.  The German coffers were largely empty and as a result they decided to print money to meet their obligations.  The German citizens were wary of the stability of their currency and began to hoard cash fearing a crisis.  Simultaneously the German creditors began to fear default on their loans and closed the taps of credit.  The German economy stalled and went into a brief bout of deflation.  The Germans did what every other economy has tried all throughout history to solve the problem:  they threw more money into the market to try and jumpstart it.  The German citizens feared for their nest eggs which caused them to attempt to convert any cash they had on hand to real assets.  This unleashed a torrent of cash on the market which immediately lead to hyperinflation.[22]  Hyperinflation is runaway inflation fueled by panic and distrust of the underlying currency.  A corollary to the loss of trust in currency is an inevitable loss of trust in the government that promotes it.  It was thus that the Weimar republic fell leaving a political vacuum in its wake which would soon be filled by the Nazis.  Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that: “It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”[23]  History will record that this is equally applicable to the cessation of belief in government.

Historians and economists alike may be quick to point out that there would appear to be a historic precedent for economic spending or stimulus as an escape to recession.  They undoubtedly would point to the Roosevelt era and the “New Deal”.  So hope filled were the citizens of the day that the New Deal was rhapsodized into the Great Depression era musical: ‘Annie’.  Daddy Warbucks swooned “I know the depression is depressing… But we’ll get a new deal for Christmas this year.”[24]  The character Daddy Warbucks was modeled after Paul Warburg.[25]  It was common knowledge at the time that this was so.  Warburg was one of the chief architects of the Federal Reserve which is the United States arm of the Bank of England.  The bitter irony here is that it was the Federal Reserve System which caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.  They were anything but the cure.  The famed economist Milton Friedman spent a lifetime promoting this interpretation of events.  On the occasion of his 90th birthday Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Fed said: “I would like to say to Milton… Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”[26]  While I believe that Roosevelt was well intentioned, he was fatally naïve.  His New Deal served only to confiscate all public monetary gold and transfer yet more power to the Federal Reserve to manipulate currency.  The hidden tragedy of the musical Annie is that while she shares a stage with the theatric Roosevelt and Warbucks (Warburg) singing their accolades as her saviour, she is actually praising the instrument of her orphan plight.  (Annie was orphaned due to the financial insolvency of her parents.)

While unwittingly kissing the hand that starves you may be tragic when it occurs on stage, it is far more tragic when it occurs in the real world.  It is still a mainstream notion that Roosevelt’s New Deal was what rescued the Americans from the Great Depression.[27]  Even though all through history, government salvation through spending has led to financial ruin at every attempt some still espouse the idea that it is possible to spend our way out of the damage wrought by currency manipulation.  Currency manipulation is good for bankers and bankers fund business schools which produce bankers.  It is no wonder then that currency manipulation which goes hand in hand with government spending ‘has’ to be a good thing.  If you want to be at the top of this pyramid scheme you have to support the bricks that build it.  In this light, when the financial meltdown of 2008 hit, how did the pyramid builders propose to deal with the ‘Gre08er Depression’?  You guessed it, with more government spending.

Journalists are already pointing out the similarities in circumstances between Barack Obama and Roosevelt.[28]  I believe the comparisons are justified and that Obama is, like Roosevelt, well intentioned but critically misguided.  Mind you, not only is Obama misguided but most people are ill aware of monetary policy and its implications.  Obama promises trillion dollar deficits running for the next many years.[29]  It is his hope that this massive spending will shock the economy back to life.  The only shock it can reasonably hope to achieve though is shocking the Frankenstein of currency manipulation to life to turn on its creator.  The only reason Roosevelt’s New Deal appeared to work was that by the end of WWII, the US had developed tremendous manufacturing capabilities and the US was a burgeoning economy; the US emerged from the Great Depression despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, not because of it.  The situation in this Gre08er Depression is different.  There is no new manufacturing potential, indeed it is declining.  The US is not a burgeoning nation but is instead a declining one.  Thus the only shock government spending is capable of producing on the US economy is an electrocution.

Growing up I had trouble relating to the ancient Israelites I was reading about.  I could relate only to their enslavement in Egypt which I read as an allegory for my forced attendance at school.  Beyond that, they were a people very far from me both spatially and temporally.  My time was dominated by discussions and anxious anticipation of new technologies and new scientific discoveries.  While I could ‘upconvert’ an ordinance to help a neighbour right a fallen cattle to a more modern equivalent of assisting ones neighbour with a crashed computer in general the setting for torah morality written in terms of cattle, oxen and sheep failed to connect with me.  I was always amazed then as to how these seemingly simple people understood concepts such as debt.  Most debt in modern times comes from securing shelter.  In ancient Israel this could be accomplished by erecting four poles and securing canvas.  So where did these biblical injunctions come from, what wrong were they trying to right?

In trying to answer that question I would have to journey through studies of biblical archaeology and general history.  After so doing, I have found a new connection with the ancient Israelites.  They were trying to solve a very old and fundamental problem:  how to govern a large group of people equitably while preventing corruption.  Currency is one of the fundamental cornerstones of any civilization.  It is fundamental to most of our interactions and if it is corrupt, so too will inevitably be anything built on top of it.  Disappointment then comes in reading the scroll of history with each entry echoing the previous:  “Empire rises with high ideals.  The high ideals erode under complacency.  Corruption then leads to inequality and fiscal malaise.  Empire manipulates the currency to buy time.  Empire runs out of time.”

The tenet of monotheism according to the bible started with Abraham.  What the Torah describes as a moment of epiphany is revealed by biblical archaeologists to in fact be a long arduous process which took several hundreds of years.  Key here is that a stated ideal can become a practiced ideal with exertion of effort over time.  It is thus to the commandment that we “should have no poor among [us]” that we must redirect our time and efforts.  I have recently come to a conclusion that the reformed Canaanite predecessors of the world’s ‘big 3’ monotheistic religions likely came to long ago; poverty is not the result of a lack of wealth but instead a lack of justice.

——————————-

[1]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
[2]   William G. Dever: “Did God Have a Wife?”
[3]   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html
[4]   http://books.google.ca/books?id=sIWn6lYS-MQC&pg=PA171
[5]   Smith, Mark “The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel” (pp 6-7)
[6]   McDonald & Sanders, editors of The Canon Debate, 2002, The Notion and Definition of Canon by Eugene Ulrich, pg 4
[7]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_money_changers
[8]   http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bank
[9]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaea_Capta_coinage
[10]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Michael_Rostovtzeff.2C_Ludwig_von_Mises.2C_and_Bruce_Bartlett [11]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talley_stick
[12]  http://books.google.ca/books?id=pnszAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA8
[13]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#History
[14]  http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec10.html
[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
[16]  http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/andrew+jackson
[17]  http://www.economics-charts.com/cpi/cpi-1800-2005.ht ml
[18]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
[19]  http://postworthy.com/Worthy/ex/US_Dollar_Purchasing_Power_Decline/205.aspx[20]  http://mwiner.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wealthdistribution.gif
[21]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_German_inflation
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
[23]  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/malcolm_muggeridge.html[24]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2vGeaqM33g
[25]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg#Legacy
[26]  http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm[27]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
[28]  http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html
[29]  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-06-obama-economy_N.htm

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Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

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There has been a lot of controversy regarding the proposed integration of ‘Intelligent Design’ into current biology curriculum. Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that all life on Earth was created and designed by an intelligent designer. Subsumed by this hypothesis, although not clearly stated, is that most proponents of Intelligent Design believe the intelligent designer to be the most intelligent designer, namely God. It is proposed that in the name of impartiality, Intelligent Design be taught along side Darwinian Evolution in biology classes.

We have two choices in trying to argue against this hypothesis. First we can show that the hypothesis is false by counter claims of design flaws. Next we can show that the hypothesis is an inherently un-testable hypothesis which thus belongs in the realms of philosophy or theology, but not in science. I will argue that while the first approach of finding design flaws is enlightening, it misses the issue. The issue is that for something to be taught in a science classroom it must somehow relate to a testable hypothesis: testable by experiment.

The temptation for someone who is versed in biology when approached with Intelligent Design is to quickly point out all of the design flaws that they know of. There are many examples to pick from but the most commonly offered are design flaws in (human) joints, most notably the elbow and the knee. One of my personal favourites is the prevalence of people with eye glasses which suggests there is a possible design flaw in the maintenance of a spherical shape of the eye. Biologists quickly offer up their favourite design flaw hoping to see a recantation of Intelligent Design. To their dismay, they get answers like: “We do not know the design of the intelligent designer. Perhaps non-spherical eyes are beneficial in some other unknown way, or the knee was some sort of design trade off against some other more beneficial feature. However, the sum of all the trade offs is the ultimate perfect design, designed by the most intelligent designer, God.” The frustrated scientist then returns to his beaker and the Intelligent Design guru returns to his pulpit or to the White House which are increasingly indistinguishable.

The reason that the hypothetical scientist and the theologian talk at cross purposes is that they both have failed to realize the bar of entry to science: a testable hypothesis. In life there are testable hypotheses and un-testable hypotheses. Some un-testable hypotheses are:
1) In absence of an observer, human or otherwise (i.e. a tape recorder): If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a noise? Yes or no?
2) Suppose all of history started 5 minutes ago with all of our collective memories implanted at that moment.
3) All good in the world is a work of a benevolent God, and all problems people experience are the result of God working in mysterious (good) ways.
More topically:
4) The wonder and beauty of the living world is the result of an intelligent design and all counter examples such as fossils, design flaws, evolutionary proofs, are just the result of our inability to grasp the grand design.

The common thread that runs across all four statements is the fallacy of an unprovable statement. It is this same thread that many stitch together to form a rip stop nylon fabric of belief. Statements 1 through 3 would likely be widely accepted as topics for a class on philosophy or theology. Statement 4 is no different. It is an inherently unprovable statement which has no place in science.

Many have said that science is a religion unto itself. I have often said that the only reason our language has two words for science and religion is that we sorely misunderstand both. They are both searches for the truth. Science is an ideology based on the Scientific Method and the instrument of that method is the experiment. Science allows for discussions of all things provable, even if they are not yet proved. Take for example the Superstring revolution in physics. It is currently unproven; however, scientists are building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland which should have sufficient power to create ’supersymmetric’ particles which would confirm the theory. What experiment does Intelligent Design proposes to validate its hypothesis? How does one experimentally prove something was designed? Even if such an experiment could be constructed, how then does that disprove that the designed item was not self designed and thus (perhaps), not intelligently designed?

Confused? The notion of a self designing design is especially hard to understand on a planet where we (most) see a clear distinction between human made and natural objects. [However, it is a distinction I do not see because humans as part of nature.] Just the same, the notion of a self designing design is crucial to evolution, and while complex, its power is compelling. If you are confused and interested pick up a good book on the subject or take a course. However, if you are presented with Intelligent Design, ask for a proposed or executed experiment published in a reputable scientific journal. Darwin had to go through the same efforts of the before his works were accepted. There is an established process in place and it has been put in place by an intelligent design (irony intended). The designer is certainly not God and its intelligence is often arguable, just the same it has served us well so far.

In summation, scientists are, by definition, very inquisitive people who would love to have conversations about many different theories and possibilities. The price of admission to such a conversation is to bring with an experimentally testable hypothesis. All other discussions belong in a different classroom.

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I typically shy away from watching American Idol. I find watching peoples hopes dashed by ‘judges’ akin to watching humans flayed by gladiators to the amusement of the dullard populace. Parenthetically, I wonder how the objectively questionable voices of legends: Louis Armstrong, Neil Young, Bob Dylan or Robert Plant would survive the scrutiny of the bastions of talent assessment found in judges: Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, and Paula Abdul. Paula Abdul. My automatic grammar checker is telling me that the sentence “Paula Abdul.” on its own is a sentence fragment; I couldn’t disagree with it more in this context. In fact, I find it to be a full paragraph.While I find the show irksome, mustering the power to ‘turn the other cheek’ is about as hard as turning to another channel and as such, I haven’t, until recently, paid it much mind. However, when this show chose to wax moral, I perked up my ears because when a Fox Network program discusses morals, this is bound to be something I want to tune into. (Words fail to express the sarcasm of the previous sentence.) The Fox Network is the same network which brought you the tasteful tidbit “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?” and is the official station of George W. Bush and his war to eradicate weapons of mass destruction. (In a strange twist of fate, the largest [and only] weapon of mass destruction after the year 2000 in Iraq turned out to be George W. Bush himself.) This is the network that sought to sanction contestant Antonella Barba on American Idol after it was revealed she had some scandalous photographs found on the internet. Barba was voted off the show, but it was her voice that was cited as the final cause. Nonetheless, American Idol has previously removed a contestant “Frenchie” after pictures surfaced of her on an adult pay site.

A Google search of either girl will reveal an onslaught of the related pictures as well as 50 pop up adds suggesting you need a larger penis, methods for fixing the problem and several contests you’ve won which should provide funds for any such programs. After closing the fog of pop ups, the pictures that emerged were at best Maxim or FHM worthy. To those not versed in the realm, Maxim and FHM are to Playboy and Penthouse as light-filtered-cigarettes are to cigars. My initial reaction to the pictures was flaccid causing me to momentarily rethink closing all the previous pop ups. After that moment I realized that I was unimpressed because it was clear to me that these pictures had absolutely nothing to do with the talent of the contestants. For the record, Frenchie has moved on to a promising career on Broadway. Instead, these pictures had everything to do with our confused morals.

Some will immediately protest: “the show is called American IDOL” — emphasis on ‘idol’ — and hence part of the criteria must be if such people are worthy of being idols. As soon as we open this can of worms, it’s necessary for American Idol to somehow consider the morals of the contestants. Morals and ethics are complicated and I’m certain that the Fox Network lacks the acumen to address the issue. In fact, I find it very hard to determine if it was revealed that Barba mutilated puppies would it have received more or less press and attention? I hear the conservative drone say: “the children, the poor children, whatever will we do if they see those pictures?!” To such parents, I point out that what would happen to children if children watch the evening news? I will attend that point momentarily.

Only in such a state of moral asymmetry could we even begin to ask these sorts of questions. Let’s look at the issue. Pornography: bad, good, neither, both? Dr Phil’s ‘Occam’s Razor’ style argument on the topic goes like this: If you wouldn’t want your daughter involved in porn, then why would you watch someone elses’ daughter? Dr Phil, President Bush and the Fox Network are experts at providing short answers to complicated questions that sound reasonable and under scrutiny turn out to be faulty. At the risk of being guilty of the same thing I accuse Dr. Phil, the short answer to Dr. Phil is: I don’t want my daughter to be a sanitation maintenance engineer (the politically correct term for garbage man/woman) but that doesn’t stop me from taking my trash to the curb. However, let’s take a deeper look at the issue, and to do so, we’ll restrict the general porn issue to examining going topless at a beach. If anyone reading the rest of this article derives that I carte blanche advocate pornography, I invite them to reread the previous sentence.

(An unremembered comedian [likely Bill Maher or Robin Williams] once quipped that to, the overly simplified criminal justice mantra, “three strikes and you’re out” is the answer to gays in the military “four balls and you walk”?)

I’d like to ask Dr. Phil if he’d let his daughter go topless on a beach. I suspect strongly that he’d say no. Then I’d like to ask him if he’d let his daughter go topless on a beach in Brazil where the practice is commonplace (certainly more common place) and considered about as common as walking around in a bikini. I suspect he’d still say no, but the question would have got him thinking (and hopefully you as well). People will hem and haw over this point but that’s only because we’re dealing with the cusp of what’s currently considered ‘ok’. Then I’d ask him if he’d let his daughter wear one piece swim suit (not a bikini). I suspect he’d say yes. Then I’d finally ask him, if he lived in the 1800’s (when woman swam in the equivalent of a ‘Burka’) would he also let her wear a one piece swim suit? I’d like very much to hear his answer. Whether he says yes or no, he’d be forced to admit that his ‘morals’ have more to do with the time (society) he lives in than what is actually ‘right or wrong’. Star Wars got it right when George Bush gawks: “You’re either with us or against us” and Obe Wan Kenobi replies: “only the Sith believe in absolutes.” It’s my personal belief that the ‘Sith’ is a code for George Bush and the conservative lot (Sith = Simple Ignorant THeists).

Thus, questions of moral propriety are very hard questions to answer, and I sure as hell don’t want the Fox Network to even make the attempt. The question of where this moral confusion arose in the first place begs answering. I can only offer an answer in a form of an allegory of two presidents. First we have a story of an otherwise good president who had sex in the oval office; He was impeached. Next we have a story of a president who didn’t have sex in the oval office and sent a nation to war to get rid of weapons of mass destruction which didn’t exist. This president who sent thousands to their deaths for no reason at all was, was… was… Oh, nothing happened to him.

The take home message of all this confusion is that morals are hard. You’re going to have to turn off the TV and think about them if you want to have a chance of getting them right. In turn, the only take home message one can glean about the state of American morals from all this is that Americans are fine with boobs only so long as one doesn’t post pictures of them on the internet and instead elects them to office.

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This is one of my favourite Neapolitan love songs.   It is mournful during descriptions of the present and joyous and hopeful in recollections of the past.  I’ve been trying for some time to find a translation.  I’ve found a partial translation from the version performed by Mario Lanza (which was abridged).  I prefer the rendition of Claudio Villa presented here:

Here is the partial translation.  If anyone has a more complete translation, please provide a link in the comments.

Si ’sta voce te sceta ‘int’a nuttata,
If this voice wakes you in the night
Mentre t’astringe ‘o sposo tuio vicino,
While the man at your side is holding you
Statte scetata, si vuo sta scetata,
Stay awake if you want to stay awake
Ma fa vede ca duorme a suonno chino.
But pretend that you’re fast asleep.

Nun gghi vicino’e llastre pe’ ffa’ spia,
Don’t go to the window to see who’s there
Pecche nun puo sbaglia: ‘sta voce e’e mia…
Because you can’t mistake it – that voice is mine…
E’a stessa voce ‘e quanno tutt’e dduie
The same voice as when we both
Scurnuse, nce parlavamo c’o "vvuie".
Were strangers, both so formal.

Si ’sta voce, che chiagn’int’ `a nuttata
If this voice crying into the night
Te sceta’o sposo, nun ave paura,
Wakes your man, don’t be afraid
Vide ch’e senza nomme’a sserenata…
Because there are no names in my serenade…
Dille ca dorme e ca se rassicura…
Tell him to sleep, that everything’s all right.

Dille accussi: "Chi canta ‘inta ‘sta via
Tell him: "Whoever is singing down in the street
O sarra pazzo o more’e ggelusia
Is either crazy or dying of jealousy
Starra chiagneno quacce `nfamita
He’s probably crying over some betrayal,
Canta isso sulo. Ma che canta a ffa?"
He sings alone. But what’s he singing for?”

AID · Claudio Villa · http · Mario Lanza · MIT · RAM · Red

For years now, I’ve tried to understand how the Federal Reserve (the Fed) lowers interest rates and how it affects inflation. I mistakenly thought that the Federal Reserve was a wholesaler of money. I thought that it was a Federal institution which under the direction of the government could make money available to banks at a certain lending rate. Thus when the Fed lowered rates to say 3%, the banks could get money at that rate and pass the savings along to their customers by lending money at say 3.5%. I was partially mistaken in my interpretation as to how that affected interest rates. I thought that as a result of people being able to get money at a lower rate, people would spend more, and the more they spent, the more the market could tolerate higher prices for common goods. This is true, but isn’t the full story. So let’s get the full picture.

My first mistake occurred when I assumed the Federal Reserve was a federal institution of any sort. This is not at all true. It is a private bank enacted by an act of congress in 1913 to oversee the US monetary policy. I offer the following interesting nugget of information for those who are interested: It was passed on Dec 23 1913 when most of congress was on vacation, in absence of a proper quorum. If that tidbit piqued your interest, please see this post: http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/terrific-documentary-explaining-the-economy/

So how then does the Fed manage to control interest rates? First off, when you hear of the Fed lowering or raising the interest rate, it isn’t directly lowering or raising the interest rates, it is changing the target interest rate. At a high level, the Fed accomplishes this by controlling the supply of money. Money, just like any other commodity can respond to supply and demand. If there is a lot of money in the economy, interest rates will drop because banks will have an easier time of procuring money to loan. However, having more money in the economy encourages inflation because the value of the currency is lowered by increased supply.

If you want to understand how the Fed manages to expand or contract the supply of money, we need to first understand a few key concepts. The first is partial reserve banking. It was long ago that banks discovered that not every person needed their cash at any given time. It was thus that banks could loan money that technically they didn’t have on reserve. In the US, banks are required to maintain a 10% reserve which means they can loan out 10 times the amount they have on reserve. (This is often referred to as ‘banker’s reach’.)

Next you need to understand what a treasury bill is. A treasury bill is a promise issued to the buyer by the federal government to give you the maturation price of the bill on the maturation date. The bill is always sold at a discount rate, that is a rate, less than the maturation date. For example, a treasury bill may be sold at a discount rate of $950, a maturity rate of $1000 and a maturity date which is a year from now. This means you can buy the bill at $950 and make $50 dollars profit when it matures in a year.

So we now have enough knowledge to work a simple example of how the system works. Suppose that the interest rate is currently 8%. Suppose too that there are 100 people who have $10 each. These 100 people each put $2 in the bank. The bank thus has $200 in reserves and due to partial reserve banking, they can make ten times that amount, some $2,000 in loans. This means they can make a loan of $20 per person.

People typically want to buy things that are 4 times the amount they have on hand. In housing the standard financing model is you must have 1/4 the purchase price in capital. So people with $10 typically want to make a major life purchase which would be $40, but as we see, the bank can easily lend everyone $20, but $40 would be hard to come by at a reasonable interest rate. Thus, people stop purchasing, the economy stalls and the Fed decides to step in.

The Fed does some research and discovers that if the lending rate reduces to 5%, then most people will be able to make the payments and will take out loans and start spending again. So the Fed set the TARGET rate to 5%. To reach this level, the Fed offers to buy a treasury bill the bank has on hand with a maturity value of $500. The bank accepts and now the bank has $700 in reserves. Recall that the bank is allowed to loan out 10 times the amount it has on reserve. So the bank can make $7000 dollars in loans or $70 dollars per person. Since the amount to loan out is plentiful the bank lowers its lending rate to 5% to entice people to take out loans.

It’s important to keep track of the total amount of money in the economy while all this occurs. We started with 100 people having $10 each. Thus there was $1000 in the economy. When the Fed purchased the treasury bill, it printed money to do so. So now there is another $500 dollars in the economy for a total of $1500. You may be scratching your head over the previous sentence, but this is the second part of the misnomer “Federal Reserve”. The Federal reserve is not federal and it doesn’t have any reserves. It prints money to make purchases. I don’t want this post to become a rant against the Fed so I’ll cut it short here and explain the other side of the coin: how the Fed contracts the supply of money.

So now in our moot world, everyone can take out a $30 loan to get the $40 item they’ve been dreaming of. However, one of the principles of a free market is that prices will rise to the maximum that the market will bear. As a result, since most people can afford the $40 item, the market starts charging $42 or $44. Slowly the price creeps up because the value of money has been decreased by an increased supply. In short we are experiencing inflation.

So the Fed sees this situation and decides to curb inflation by raising the target interest rate. By raising the target interest rate, the Fed makes money harder to get, more scarce and thus the market can’t bear higher prices, slowing spending and curbing inflation. To accomplish this, the Fed sells treasury bills. By selling treasury bills, banks that purchase them are forced to spend their reserves to make the purchase, thus pulling cash out of the economy. Recall that banks can loan 10 times the amount they have on reserve. By lowering the amount of cash banks have on reserve, the Fed restricts the bank’s ability to make loans. Since the bank has less money to loan, it must charge more interest to compensate, and the interest rates rise. The key point here is that the difference between the discount rate and the maturity rate must be paid for at some future rate. When the bank comes to collect on this treasury bill, the Fed must pay the bank the promised maturity price. If you have an eye for catching trends then you may have already guessed that the money to pay the difference comes from, yup, you guessed it, printed money.

In conclusion, the Fed controls the supply of money. It accomplishes this by buying and selling treasury bills on the common market. It’s important to remember that when the Fed buys treasury bills it does so with printed money. Also when the Fed issues treasury notes and those notes are redeemed, the difference owed to the purchaser is paid with printed money. This is called a fiat currency, or a currency based on credit — in this case the credit of the United States. It doesn’t take a Harvard ecomonist to realize that every time the Fed runs through one of these cycles of inflation and contraction, that the amount of money in the economy is increased. It is only a question of time before the Fed destroys the currency it relies upon by making it too common. This process is called devaluation. If you want to see devaluation in action, see this graph of the US dollar vs. the Euro over the past 5 years:

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=EUR&amt=1&t=5y

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What was presented to consumers as a clean, green alternative to fossil fuels turns out to be a wretched red herring.  Ethanol is a kludge attempt to address the Global Warming crisis.  The idea of using Ethanol as a substitute for fossil fuels is so stupid that it’s necessary to break down the stupidity into a list:

1) Food Diversion : Ethanol is produced from several sources, most notably corn. 

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the bio fuel policy is halted.

Certain critics will point out that ethanol is produced by feed corn, not human corn.  Those critics would do best to consider that the amount of arable land on the planet is finite.  Thus the more feed corn we grow, the less food corn can be grown.

2) Ethanol isn’t economical.  That is, it costs MORE than crude oil.  For comparison:

Goldman Sachs says the cost of ethanol from corn is $81 a barrel (oil equivalent), with wheat at $145 and soybeans $232. It is built on subsidy.

3) Farm land isn’t green land.  The more we come to rely on ethanol, or bio fuels in general the more farmland we’ll need.  For example Brazil has the largest reserve of potentially arable land.  The problem is that land coexists with the rainforest.

The catch is obvious. “The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow bio fuels seems profoundly stupid,” said Professor John Beddington, Britain’s chief scientific adviser.

4) As a corollary to 1) Ethanol is a weak attempt to assuage the West’s abuse of the planet, at the cost of the world’s poor. 

The global food bill has risen 57pc in the last year. Soaring freight rates make it worse. The cost of food “on the table” has jumped by 74pc in poor countries that rely on imports, according to the FAO.

The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso,” said Mr Diouf. “There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food,” he said. 

Original source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/04/14/ccview114.xml

AID · ale · bio fuel · biofuel · Brazil · CHIEF · crude oil · egypt · ethanol · farmland · food · food bill · global warming · gold · html · http · oil · Paris · professor · quote · rainforest · Red

Growing up I often heard people remark that the “poor get poorer as the rich get richer.”  I was led to believe that this was an unfortunate side effect of a free market economy.  This flaw aside, the free market economy was said to be a much better approach than anything else that had come along.  I spent my time focused on ways of making laissez faire capitalism more compassionate.  We exist in a welfare state and I, living in Canada, live in a society which offers socialized medicine.  Both of these measures are great first steps in assuring the compassion of capitalism however, I was always frustrated knowing that the only true compassion of capitalism would come in allowing everyone to earn wealth.

As I continued to study the problem, imagine my shock and dismay when I learned that we do not live in a free market system.  We live in a central bank monetary system (ie, the Federal Reserve) which has an invisible, moreover, malevolent hand in conducting the nation’s monetary policy.  This may sound like a conspiracy theory however if it was, it’s an awfully dull one given that the chairman of the Federal Reserve openly admits this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x56MpWZh88s
http://broadband.thecomedynetwork.ca/comedy/?vid=19058

Through the Federal Reserve’s mucking with the money supply and the resulting inflation, those with savings saw their savings erode silently falling into the hands of the nations richest few.  In order to escape inflation, you must own debt free assets which index to inflation.  Only the richest few of us can accomplish this and thus evade the silent erosion of our savings into the hands of bankers and the financial elite.  Here are a few graphs showing the effects:

source : http://lanekenworthy.net/2008/03/09/the-best-inequality-graph/

source : http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Central banking (The Fed) is an age old scheme of mob rule over the money supply. 

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.”
– Mayer Amschel Rothschild

It has origins dating back to the temple days when Jesus drove out the money changers.  (The word ‘bank’ comes from the Latin ‘bench’ from which the temple money changers made their predatory exchanges.)  The only way to restore justice and equity is to restore the issuing power over money back to the people.  For more info, please see:

http://inflationtax.blogspot.com/

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In honour of Ben Stein’s Canadian release of “Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed”

http://www.expelledthemovie.com/playground.php

I have produced a nice javascript demo of one of the basic concepts of evolution: natural (cumulative) selection. 

Don’t get me wrong, I think Ben Stein is a very intelligent person.  Having said that I think when it came to taking attendance in biology class his teacher was saying: “Stein? Stein? Stein?”.  Natural selection is simple concept but is easy to confuse.  Does anyone know what natural selection is “anyone? anyone?”

(If you don’t catch my allusion, please watch : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbqDGQvobVA)

I got so annoyed with the repeated claim that evolution is a random process that I developed a javascript demonstration to show how evolution actually worked.  I’ll say it one more time for all those who aren’t quite sure:  “EVOLUTION IS NOT A RANDOM PROCESS.”  The only thing ‘random’ (even chaotic will suffice) in the process is the generation of variability (diversity).  Natural selection is the exact opposite of random. It is a deliberate selection of traits which confer a higher fitness of individuals within a population.

So without further ado, here is the javascript demonstration of evolution in action:
http://www.rankyouragent.com/evolution/weasel.htm

AID · ben stein · creationism · darwin · evolution · expelled · http · king · natural selection · php · random · teacher

In 2001 Alan Greenspan at the Fed (Federal Reserve) lowered the interest rate to try to rejuvenate the economy after the fallout of the .com bubble burst. History will record that Greenspan went from the sublime to the ridiculous when he cut the interest rate to 1%. This set off a spate of irresponsible borrowing and lending the effects of which are still being dealt with today.The banks took advantage of this by starting to offer mortgages to subprime borrowers. Subprime borrowers are borrowers with a poor credit rating (specifically a FICO (credit) score of < 620). Typically these are individuals who habitually are unable to make credit card payments, or those who have suffered a foreclosure or bankruptcy. In the past they wouldn’t be able to get a loan, but thanks to the low interest rate, some could now afford the payments. With great fanfare out went the ads: “Send us your poor, your homeless, your great creditless masses!” Lured by the prospect of home ownership and lulled by the chimera of ‘buy now, pay later’, loans were issued as fast as the printers could print them.

Banks noticed that the default rates were lower than they expected. This led them to think that there was an untapped market in subprime lending. They developed many products, of which 3 were common 1) Variable rate mortgage with a higher rate due to the risk, 2) An interest only loan where they would start paying off the capital after an initial period and 3) low fixed rate initially, resetting to market rate after a few years.

The people who took these loans did so for two principal reasons 1) they hoped their income/credit would improve during the initial period of the loans and 2) the housing market was so hot, they hoped to use the newly gained equity in their homes to refinance the loans with more agreeable terms. Regrettably, Alan Greenspan, noting the now uncontrolled inflation, agressively started to increase the interest rates in 2004 right back up to around 5% and beyond.

For people with loans of type 1) and 3) above, the loans were typically huge so these interest rate increases made the payments impossible to cover, leading to defaulting. Those with loans of type 2) were pushed over the edge when the capital component of their loan kicked in.

Now, were it not for the avarice of the bankers, this crisis would have ended there; that is, a large number of repossessions but no further economic upheavel. However, bankers are weasels and behind the scenes they were pulling more ridiculous stunts.

Behind the scenes, bankers were looking to mitigate the risk of this subprime debt and also to make more profit on profit by creating and selling subprime mortgage bonds. To accomplish this they pooled together all subprime debt. Next they broke the subprime debt into levels. Suppose there were 3 banks involved in a given mortgage. The banks that would get hit by a default first were put into the lower levels and the banks that would be hit last were put into higher levels. By doing so, each level bore a reduced amount of the total risk. Now, many financial institutions that cannot purchase subprime debt were able to get around this limitation by purchasing bonds in the higher levels (less risk) of these mortgage bonds. Now, subprime debt was distributed all around the world to various institutions in this masked mortgage debt trading instrument.

So when the debt hit the fan, the big institutions which normally make loans to one another on a regular basis to keep the economy rolling, suddenly mistrusted one another. No one knew who held what amount of subprime debt. As a result the overnight lending rate went sky high and the Fed had to step in to push cash into the economy to help stave off a liquidity crisis — a crisis where cash flow starts to freeze.

At the time of this writing (Dec 2007) we are beginning to see the end result of this crisis. The large financial houses are beginning to crumble under the weight of their own stupidity. Just yesterday financial giant Morgan Stanley reported its first quarter loss in its 73 year history. Even more alarming, in seeking to assuage their woes, not only are they turning to the US government for help, but have successfully enlisted the help of the Chinese Government.

What may not be obvious, but should have the reader seeing red is that as the result of the irresponsibility of US financial institutions, we’re witnessing a wide scale buy out of US assets and institutions. What’s more, who speaks for the countless duped masses who have lost homes, equity and security as the result of this mass irresponsibility? There can be only a partial answer in paraphrasing Herbert Hoover who said: “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” In this situation it is the financiers who tinker with the economy. But it is the working class that must work and suffer.

AID · alan greenspan · ale · bank · banker · bankruptcy · bubble · Chinese Government · Economy · fed · federal reserve · Federal Reserve System · finance · financial giant · Herbert Hoover · http · inflation · interest rate · king · liquidity crisis · MIT · Morgan Stanley · mortgage · prime · Red · subprime · subprime mortgage finance recession economy · the fed · United States · US Federal Reserve · US government · writing

In 1979 Jimmy Carter delivered a televised speech bemoaning the increasing US dependence on foreign oil.  In it he outlines his Energy Policy for the coming decades.

“[Foreign Oil is] a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation. The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation.”

– Jimmy Carter  (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html)

Today the US relies on 60% foreign oil (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/oildep.shtml) in strong defiance of president Carter’s prescient warning.

As far as the US dependence on foreign oil, nothing has changed since the Carter’s clarion call aside from the problem getting far worse.  However, president Carter didn’t live in a world threatened by Global Warming (at least it wasn’t commonly known).   President Carter also didn’t live in a world with two superpopulations, India and China weighing in at a billion people each who are poised to ramp up their consumption.

Clearly oil will no longer do as a source of energy.  Luckily science has provided an alternative: The Hydrogen – Aluminum Cycle.  To be clear, I’m not speaking of hydrogen power alone.  Hydrogen power alone is a red herring of alternative energies.  The catch is that hydrogen is hugely expensive to make and today largely comes from the demethylization of hydrocarbons; ie oil.  No, the Hydrogen – Aluminum cycle is something different entirely.

When we think of hydrogen, some horrible images from the past might emerge.

Here we see the Hindenburg which was filled with hydrogen bursting into flames.  Many see the risks of hydrogen in cars and decry ‘oh the humanity!’.  Well there are no such worries with the hydrogen – aluminum power cycle because the hydrogen is produced in micro amounts and only as needed.  Hydrogen need not be stored in a cryogenic canister with motorists barrelling down the highways with a bomb on board.  This in situ or just in time production solves the danger of using hydrogen in a car.

Next, we must solve the problem of where to find our hydrogen.  Clearly deriving it from oil simply won’t do.  The other current method for obtaining hydrogen is through a process called hydrolysis which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.  Regrettably, this process is too inefficient to be used on a wide scale.

Enter into the picture aluminum.  Aluminum has a high affinity for oxygen.  Whenever you hold a piece of aluminum it has a skin of oxidation.  This skin, once formed, prevents any further oxidation which is why you never have to worry about rust in components built of aluminum.  Aluminum likewise reacts with water;  A jealous lover of oxygen, it bonds strongly with it, ousting the hydrogen.  While a jealous lover aluminum may be, it is quickly satiated and forms a skin failing to react any further.

Jerry Woodall, a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Purdue, discovered in the 60’s that when aluminum, gallium and water were mixed, the aluminum oxidized fully, liberating massive amounts of hydrogen.  It would seem that the gallium acts as a mediator in the reaction and prevents the formation of the oxidation skin on aluminum.  The end results of this reaction are hydrogen gas, aluminum oxide (aka alumina) and gallium.  The gallium is not consumed, and thus can be recycled.  The alumina can be electrically converted back into aluminum and thus recycled.  Burning hydrogen produces only water.

The idea of using hydrogen to power a vehicle is certainly not a new one.  While Woodall was experimenting with gallium in the 60’s, GM was trying to prototype a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle: The Electrovan.  It is recognized as the first hydrogen fuel cell prototype.  The prototype was scrapped due to the high cost of the rare (precious) metals used in its fuel cells and the complexity of storing hydrogen.

The aluminum-gallium-hydrogen cycle may allow us to succeed where the Electrovan failed.  So now, let’s put the pieces together: How does this get you to work in the morning?  Your new, non-polluting car has two fuel tanks, one containing water, the other containing aluminum and gallium flakes.  As hydrogen is needed the water and the flakes are mixed.  The hydrogen is harvested and runs the engine.  Also the heat produces by the chemical reaction may be harvested for energy by a Stirling Engine which is a type of engine which can run off of temperature differentials.

When it comes time to fuel your vehicle, the new filling station attaches three hoses to your car.  One removes the slurry of used alumina to be recycled.  The other two replenish your supply of water and aluminum-gallium flakes.  When it comes time to pay for your aluminum flakes, will it be competitive with gasoline?

“Since standard industrial technology could be used to recycle our nearly pure alumina back to aluminum at 20 cents per pound, this technology would be competitive with gasoline,” Woodall said. “Using aluminum, it would cost $70 at wholesale prices to take a 350-mile trip with a mid-size car equipped with a standard internal combustion engine. That compares with $66 for gasoline at $3.30 per gallon. If we used a 50 percent efficient fuel cell, taking the same trip using aluminum would cost $28.”

–  (http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2007b/070827WoodallNanotech.html)

Next, some may wonder where the aluminum will come from.

Enough aluminum exists in the United States to produce 100 trillion kilowatt hours of energy. That’s enough energy to meet all the U.S. electric needs for 35 years.  If impure gallium can be made for less than $10 a pound and used in an onboard system, there are enough known gallium reserves to run 1 billion cars.”

–  (http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2007b/070827WoodallNanotech.html)

Recall that alumina (aluminum oxide, the waste product) can be recycled electrically back into aluminum.  So it’s not like oil where, once burnt, we can’t reclaim it.  We can electrically reclaim the waste alumina back into aluminum.

Ecologically this is a dream come true.  When thinking ecologically it’s important to think in terms of cycles.  Everythings output must be something’s input cycling back to the original source.  Here we have aluminum going to aluminum oxide (alumina) going back to aluminum.  The alumina to aluminum step can be powered by non polluting nuclear or renewable sources such as solar or wind etc.  The water turns to hydrogen which combines back with oxygen to produce water.  Gallium is never consumed and is recycled continuously.

So there you have it: president Carter’s dream some thirty years later, but not too late.  With the skyrocketing prices of oil the need for this change has never been more clear.  The only missing ingredient in this equation is the political motivation to fund and accelerate the conversion process.  This may prove to be the trickiest part of the equation to balance.

Further reading:

Please don’t take my word on this matter, feel free to do your own research:

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=aluminum+gallium&spell=1

http://youtube.com/results?search_query=aluminum+gallium&search_type=

There is also a similar approach using boron

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=boron+hydrogen+car&meta=

AID · ale · alternative energy · alternative fuel · aluminum · cent · chemical reaction · China · Coming · conversion · Economy · energy · energy crisis · engineering · equation · foreign oil · fuel cell · fuel cells · gallium · global warming · Google · html · http · hydrogen · hydrogen car · hydrogen gas · ie oil · India · industrial technology · inflation · Jerry Woodall · Jimmy Carter · king · levis · logic · mediator · oil · President · price oil · professor · professor of Computer Science · Purdue · quote · RAM · Red · solar · stirling engine · United States · USD · waste product · www.google.ca/search?hl=en& · www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=boron+hydrogen+car&

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“Brent T. White, a University of Arizona law school professor, says that it’s in the homeowners’ best financial interest to stiff their lenders and that it’s not immoral to do so.”

– http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/news/la-fi-harney29-2009nov29,0,3801270.story

This story, suggests that mortgage holders politely flip the bird to their debtors when they come to collect on underwater mortgages.  The argument provided is that when times were good, the banks were negligent and irresponsible in handing out loans.  As such, now that times are bad, it’s fine to simply walk away, and you should do so with a clear conscience.  I agree with the message but not with the reasoning.

The real reason is that you may think the bank has offered real money to the previous seller of your home; not so.  The bank instead paid the former seller of your house with money it conjured into existence from another mortgage.  The fractional reserve banking system allows the bank to ‘leverage’ 90% of its deposits, reserving only 10% for those who make periodic withdrawals.  So the money that the bank put up for the house is actually someone else’s deposits which theoretically could be called in on a moment’s notice?

Confused?  Good, you should be.  Suppose your neighbour lent you 5 DVD’s on condition that he might ask for then to be returned at any time.  You then turn around and rent out those 5 DVD’s for a dollar each for 1 week.  If your neighbour doesn’t ask for his DVD’s back during that week, you just made 5 bucks.  But suppose your neighbour comes back 2 days later to reclaim his DVD’s – what then?  Legally, in either case, the DVD’s weren’t yours to rent; the agreement between you and the people you rented the DVD’s to is null and void.  The only difference in the two scenarios was whether you got caught or not in the fraudulent activity.

Believe it or not, the banking system, worldwide, is currently this fraudulent.  The loans a bank issued are from the unwitting depositors funds’.  Only due to the Federal Reserve Act (and similar acts worldwide) is this fraud considered ‘legal’.  Even so, the bank never puts up its own assets for a loan.  As such a successful, yet rarely mentioned case, makes the argument that having failed to put up legal ‘consideration’ (hard assets) for a mortgage, the mortgage is null and void.

Here an article about this decision including links to the actual decision on file.
http://www.martincwiner.com/a-fast-way-out-of-the-mortgage-crisis/

AID · ale · Arizona · bank · banking · Brent T. White · Case · fed · federal reserve · Federal Reserve System · former seller · fractional reserve banking · fractional reserve banking system · http · king · law school professor · mortgage · professor · quote · Red · reserve banking · the fed · University of Arizona · US Federal Reserve

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For my grade 10 science project, my partner and I set out to hook a generator to an electric motor. The idea was that the motor would drive the generator which would drive the motor again in perpetuity. Now we weren’t so naive as to discount the idea of resistance. When you pass current over a wire, a certain amount of that power is lost to resistance (lost as heat). We were proposing using superconductors instead of the wires we used in our mock-up. We also proposed using magnetically suspended bearings and running our set up in a vacuum to eliminate all friction. Even if it was possible to eliminate all friction, there was still another problem for our design.

In grade 10, we had yet to be introduced to the laws of thermodynamics which strictly forbid such arrangements. A physics teacher came over to grade our project and after a quick glance he said: “background emf.” We stood there trying all permutations in our mind of what ‘emf’ could possibly stand for. He asked: “Background EMF? Have you taken grade 11 physics?” We dejectedly shook our heads to indicate that we hadn’t. He continued while leaving our booth “well you need it!”

Having recovered from our tragic defeat, and some 18 years later, I can explain the ‘travesty’ we had committed against physics. Background EMF stands for background Electromotive Force. What this means is that when you use a current (electrical power) to drive an electric motor, the electric motor as a result of its operation generates an opposing current to the one driving it. In a sense it is a sort of electromagnetic resistance. In short, what it says is that the system we built could never work, even if we used super conductors as wires and ran in a frictionless environment.

For the lay reader, a generator and an electric motor are virtually the same device. One generates electricity from motion and the other converts electricity into motion. In fact if you were to take an electric motor and hook up a volt meter to it and spin it, you’d discover that there voltage was generated just as if it were a generator. At the core of either device lies a loop (or loops) of wire and magnets. Recall that I said if you spin an electric motor, you generate a current. Well that’s exactly what background EMF is. As the motor spins, it also generates a current in the opposing direction to the current driving it.

Now along comes Thane Heins.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/300042
http://www.thestar.com/Article/300041
Through experimentation, he has come up with an arrangement which theoretically feeds background EMF back into the electric motor in a way which ADDS to the current driving the motor. In so doing he’s (theoretically) created a positive feedback loop which causes the motor, not only to maintain speed, but actually to accelerate.

This flies in the face of physics, specifically the laws of thermodynamics which say that you the amount of energy in the universe is constant and in a closed system, you can’t create energy. Heins’ system is what’s called a closed system, that is there is no external input of energy, hence it should not be able to create any more energy than was inputted: ie, the wheel should never gain speed, if anything it should always slow down.

Claims of perpetual motion on the Internet are about as common as claims of a new fad diet which will slim you with no effort. If you catch my drift, such claims are usually discarded as junk science. In this particular case though, it has appeared to have attracted the attention of several physicists, one of whom from MIT, who haven’t admitted that he’s achieved perpetual motion, but also haven’t been able to point out any obvious error in his experimental setup and claim.

Even if this fails to be perpetual motion, perhaps some of the concepts can be adapted to produce newer and more efficient electric motors. At the very least, the exploration of Heins’ design and concepts should help illuminate us all. To see video and for some further reading, please see:

http://www.g9toengineering.com/backemf/demonstration.htm

AID · Case · converts electricity · electricity · Electromotive Force · energy · engineering · Environment · free energy · head · http · ILS · Internet · magnetism · MIT · OJ · perepiteia · perpetual motion · physics teacher · Red · teacher · thane heins · thermodynamics · video

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill.  It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest.  Shape: rectangular.  Material: beige brick.  Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life.  Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training.  From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out.  But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.  What is Beauty?  The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room.  I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy.  Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem.  Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English.  To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in.  This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news.  A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits.  The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw.  Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.”  p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps.  Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me.  Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude.  Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades.  My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.  It represented ambition, longing, need.  It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about  ‘the divided brain’.  Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening.  Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur.  It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.”  I asked him to explain but keep it simple.  He told me that he’d try.  The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently.  It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided.  In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  This voice seemed to come from another being, really.  But who was this being?  Who were these secret speakers?  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration.  They experienced inspiration.  It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.  Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him.  I had to know.  I had to know everything he did, suddenly.  Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy.  And it probably was.  Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there.  I thought he should have to feel it in the air.  I thought it might force him to face his ugliness.  Then I said, “I heard this from a senior.  In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all.  They aren’t the only alternatives, that is.  There are other words between them.  And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices.  I chose another one.  ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading.  Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force.  Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.  We recognized one another instantly.  … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”  p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.  p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort.  To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long  live the king.  p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage.  He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does.  The play is titled: Planters and Waiters.  Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place.  That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything.  Without literature, humans would all be one.  Warfare was simply literature in arms.  The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”  p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem.  If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise.  Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature.  The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment.  Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.   I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of   mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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More on the impostor/fraud theme:

“Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Elliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” p.144

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Kirn had ongoing conversations with “V.” – an exchange student who “represented the best of the best of [his] entire country”.

“I felt in his company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.  And I felt flattered when he listened to me.  Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country — of an entire people, as I saw it — and I was holding his attention.” p.168

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The pains Kirn went to in order to write collegiate essays after he’d lost his fulfillment in so doing.

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. l began most of my sentences with ”the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. ”The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” p.178

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Kirn develops a regime for deprogramming him self from his college ‘undereducation’ and pulling himself out of a resulting depression.

“My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for she first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.”  I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones — my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.” p.183

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Reflections on having been awarded a post at Oxford.

“I’d soon be off to Oxford as a result.  “result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny.  But now I knew otherwise.  Imagination does.  And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Image that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone.  One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

Imagine having been imagined.  Imagine.” p.205

Kirn’s summation of the book:

“… I discovered the truth — of words like “truth” mean anything.  Ad even if they don’t perhaps.

Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

Some call this Grace.

I called it Marguerite.”  (Margerite Keasbey established the Keasbey Prize which Kirn received (enabling him to go on to Oxford)  after being denied a Rhode’s Scholarship). p 205

See: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/08/19971/

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Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Kirn’s Uncle Admiral — a childhood mentor — was Robert W. Knox RADM USC & GS (Ret.).  Here is a brief biography:

http://www.history.noaa.gov/cgsbios/biok4.html

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Kirn’s second, broader conclusion:  Reflecting on a friend Karl who was self-taught and well read and wanted to meet up with after Kirn graduated Princeton.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” p.210

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If you starve two patients, and only one develops an infection, one would still typically cite the bacteria and the starvation as (probable) causes of the infection.  Margaret Macmillan looks at this scenario strangely in that she infers that because only one patient developed a bacterial infection, the cause is solely the bacteria and not the starvation.

Margaret Macmillan is not writing about pathology hower, but the history of  international relationships at its greatest defining moment Paris 1919, the Treaty of Versailles. 

It has been commonly held that the harshness of the reparations exacted upon the Germans laid the grounds for Hitler’s rise and WWII.  Macmillan sites other historical examples of harsh reparations — such as those after the Franco-Prussian war – which didn’t lead to despotic reigns.  To my way of thinking her logic is like the smoking lobby gathering together 90 year old smokers to prove that smoking is harmless.

This flaw aside, Paris 1919 – the documentary (based on Macmillan’s book) should be required reading (viewing)  for anyone interested in history, war and peace, or international affairs.

It airs Wed Nov 11 @ 9PM on TVO followed by an interview of Margaret Macmillan by Allan Gregg

Paris 1919 on TVO:
http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?b?3003401257991231000

Margaret MacMillan interviewd by Allen Gregg:
http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?b?8587281257996911000

Paris 1919 Book:
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375760525

AID · Allan Gregg · Allen Gregg · bacterial infection · Hitler · http · king · logic · Margaret Macmillan · Paris · random · Red · Russia · starvation · the Star · web · writing · WWII