Here's a handy chart that explains exactly why Japan had "deflation" for nearly 30 years, and why the US will not experience deflation anytime soon...

Original Article: US Not Going Down Japan's Road (Safe Haven)

I suggest you read that article for more in-depth analysis. Here's my quick summary:

Look how slowly Japan's M2 grew from 1992 until 2004. The average rate of growth is just 2%.

How can you have inflation without monetary expansion? You can't. Japan clearly proves it.

So when you hear a deflationista argue that Japan pumped money relentlessly into the economy, that is simply not true. If they had done that, there would have been inflation. But they didn't.

Now look at the US. Different story entirely. The US money supply expanded at a rate of nearly 10% in 2008.

Bottom line, watch the money supply. If it grows, inflation will soon follow. It's a law of nature. Like gravity. You can't argue against it and make it go away.

Update: It turns out in 2009 the US money supply (M2) only expanded by about 2%. Could this be the start of a long term trend, or just a temporary anomaly?

This is a follow-up article to this majestic piece of writing: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America (The Atlantic)

After reading the above article, a few ideas popped into my head which may not be known to the writer, given that the writer (and his/her sources) are probably members of an older generation. However, since I am a member of the so-called "generation Y" or the "echo boom" generation, I may be able to shed some light on what I am thinking (and maybe what other members of my generation are thinking) with respect to this issue.

First, it's evident at this point that the idea of upward mobility - the idea that you could work your way up the corporate ladder - is no longer an idea that can be embraced. It is far too risky. It used to be that if you worked hard enough, you would eventually end up in a highly-prestigious position, earning lots of money, and having a fair amount of authority (all of which are highly potent aphrodisiacs to undisciplined individuals).

OK, I said a mouthful so let's backtrack a little. What is an "undisciplined individual"? Put simply, all humans have instincts and most humans make decisions solely based on feeling (emotion), rather than rational thought. In basic sociology, a human has several aphrodisiacs which elevate his/her sense of self-worth. These are (to name a few): power, wealth, and social status. Most individuals act as robots seeking these three aphrodisiacs for their entire lives. Unless you are aware of this fact of nature and discipline yourself to be content with seeking happiness in other forms, you are considered an "undisciplined individual," who is purely seeking to maximize one's social status, power, and/or wealth. The vast majority of Americans are what I consider "undisciplined individuals."

Now, believe it or not, there are many people in the world who define themselves largely by the position they hold, or by the organization in which they are members. This is one way you can define yourself, but what happens when you lose your position, or the organization you are in collapses and you're left without a position? It is my belief that if you define yourself in such a way, you will suffer enormous emotional scars resulting from your "break-up" with your organization. In fact, it is almost identical to the break-up of a marriage. In a sense, many people are "married" to their jobs.

So what is the antidote to this madness? And why do I consider it "madness"? Well, it's madness because first of all, you are probably not a founder of the organization in which you are a member. Quite probably you have a very low-ranking position within that organization and even more probably you will never reach the level of power / control that the founding member has. That's number one. Number two, it's madness because in this economic environment, anybody can be fired from any position for any reason (or no reason at all!). While this has always been the case to some extent, it is only now that it is happening on a mass scale, reaching levels where the risk of being fired from a position to which you are married actually exceeds the benefit of "becoming married" to that position.

So what is the antidote to the madness? You have to think clearly and look at the facts. The facts are that these worker-organization relationships are becoming increasingly more transient. This idea was put forth by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book "Future Shock," in which he describes a condition where relationships (of any kind) become increasingly more transient in the not-too-distant future. This has come to pass in the form of increased divorce rate as well as increased job insecurity. I think there is no question at this point that Toffler was right and that this trend will continue for a long time.

So given all that, it is far more rewarding to think of yourself in terms OTHER THAN your relationships with other organizations. When I look at myself, I value myself based on my ability to solve problems creatively, or by my ability to think logically. These are attributes that are fundamental to survival, but which have been almost eternally ignored at the societal level. I believe these attributes are far more fundamental than anything else. You need to define yourself based on your fundamental attributes that make you a resilient individual in the face of any natural or environmental situation. Always avoid the trap of thinking that your identity is defined by what others think of you. This is a fundamental shift in mentality that needs to occur on a massive scale. This shift is what separates a "disciplined individual" from an "undisciplined individual." We, as humans, need to become far more self-disciplined and far more aware of the destructive aphrodisiacs I mentioned earlier.

As an aside, two things I try to avoid constantly are:
1. Believing (or becoming attached to) others' opinions of me.
2. Following popular beliefs or behaviors unquestioningly.

Coming back to the idea that upward mobility is dead, imagine you start out your career as a Walmart cashier. Then, 20 years later you're back at Walmart as a cashier. If you grew attached to the idea that you would advance over time, you would be devastated to find yourself 20 years later in exactly the same position. However, if you defined yourself by other characteristics which may not be as socially respectable (yet) as the idea of career advancement, you would be relatively unaffected by your career path, however erratic it may be. It is an idea from many oriental religions which must be embraced: "avoid attachment to things which are invariably transient."

Sadly, many are refusing to accept the new reality and construct a belief system which is more consistent with it. Instead, it appears that many are resorting to having children as a way to escape their insecurities and gain social approval. It's understandable that we are social beings. And it requires an enormous shift in thought patterns in order to avoid the common traps that cause us to do undesirable things purely for social approval. Yet, in order to evolve as a species, we must engage in precisely this sort of detachment from the base aphrodisiacs that have driven society for generations. So if you find yourself unemployed, become a Buddhist monk. It's a step in the right direction.

To close off, I will give one last example which illustrates what can happen when jobs disappear but the parasitic aphrodisiacs of power and social approval remain. In Philadelphia, white neighborhoods are now becoming increasingly black. White males, who have held blue-collar and even white-collar jobs have now been unemployed for years. Some are now resorting to precisely the same kind of behavior that blacks have been struggling with for decades: fathers abandoning their children, drug dealing, violent crime, and domestic violence. This is all because, fundamentally, blacks are no different from whites. It is only the economic circumstances which produce a difference. Now that the differences in economic circumstances between blacks and whites are beginning to narrow, we are seeing a convergence in terms of behavior patterns. Unfortunately, this convergence is happening in the wrong direction: instead of blacks becoming more affluent, whites are becoming poor.

All too often, persistent widespread poverty results in a loss of dignity among members of a society. This is certainly understandable, but there are many societies which, by our definitions of wealth, are extremely poor. Yet, these societies are very cohesive and peaceful. We do not have to go through a break-up of society as a whole as a result of increased overall poverty. In fact, the society of the 1930s was very cohesive and generally in good spirits. People helped each other. We should work toward a healthier society, by valuing those things which are fundamental to survival: knowledge, and creative problem solving, rather than those things which are the primal aphrodisiacs of undisciplined individuals.

I would like to take this opportunity to encourage users of old PCs (pre-2005) to take extra precautionary steps before installing Windows 7.

Otherwise, you could end up baking your hardware. Yes, baking, in the oven.

How I ended up baking my laptop:

I installed Windows 7 on an older Toshiba laptop (from 2004) with a GeForce Go 5200 graphics card. First, it was not recognized - Windows 7 actually decided to use the Standard VGA Adapter driver for the card, which forced me down to 1024x768 resolution and extremely slow rendering. Well, I decided to look for a driver. Toshiba didn't have one on their site, NVIDIA no longer supports the 5xxx series, so I ended up finding a shaky third-party (modded) driver and modded it a bit myself to get it to actually recognize my card.

So after all that, I installed the custom modded driver and it seemed to work great at first: I even had Aero Glass! But little did I know there was a major problem lurking in the shadows... A few days after installing the new driver, I start up the laptop and it starts displaying columns of random flashing characters (at the BIOS screen). Immediately I concluded that this was a video card problem - it had happened to me before, with a GeForce 4 Ti4200 card.

Great, so now I had a dead video card. I looked around the web for people who had experienced the same problem, and found one who took his laptop to a repair shop and the technicians there diagnosed it as a "BGA failure." So I looked for BGA-related problems and found what seemed to be a re-occurring theme on various forums: "bake at 375*F for 5-10 mins". Surprisingly, those who tried it said it actually worked!

But how does it work? The BGA (Ball Grid Array) is what a video chip is most often connected to. This thing is just an array of tiny balls of solder that can melt at very low temperatures (even 120*C). When the video chip gets insanely hot (like over 100*C), it can warp the BGA so much that the chip disconnects from the balls and you end up with the problem I had (random characters at the BIOS screen). The solution, apparently, is to heat up the entire PCB (in this case the motherboard) evenly at a high temperature, so that the solder melts and reattaches itself to the chip. The prescription, in my case, was to bake at 375*F for 7 minutes.

Of course, I had to remove anything that might melt or explode - like batteries. I made sure to remove even the CMOS battery and remove all attachable parts (RAM, hard drive, etc.). I only baked the actual motherboard. But at the end, it worked! The video is fixed now, thanks to BGA baking!

The problem was caused by Aero Glass overheating my card. I'm 99.9% sure of it. And I'm also 99.9% sure that's why NVIDIA doesn't have any official Vista / 7 drivers for it. So immediately when I booted up my laptop after baking, I booted straight into Safe Mode, removed the graphics driver, and rebooted into Windows 7. Then, I reinstalled the graphics driver and made sure I was on the Windows 7 Basic theme, without Aero Glass. I also disabled the DWM service, so that there is no freak occurrence where Aero Glass gets re-enabled.

Precautionary steps that would've saved my behind:

Like I was saying, with Windows 7 on older hardware it's very important to take a few extra precautionary steps:

1. Run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. Ensure that your essential hardware (the stuff you can't boot up without) is supported.
2. Take an inventory of your hardware. For me, the easiest way to do this was to just run Dacris Benchmarks (version 8.0) and create an HTML report under the System Information tab. This makes it much easier to find drivers online when everything in Device Manager is listed as "Unknown." But, if you have perfect memory, you don't need to do this.
   
3. Make sure you download any necessary network adapter drivers before you install Windows 7. Otherwise, you won't have Internet access. Usually the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor will tell you if you need to do this, but do it even if it doesn't tell you - just in case - unless you have another PC connected to the Internet and a USB key.
4. For hardware that is shown as not compatible in Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, try to find official Windows Vista drivers for it. If no official Windows Vista drivers exist, and the device is essential, you may want to reconsider upgrading to Windows 7.
5. For software that is shown as not compatible in Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, try to find a newer version online that supports Windows Vista. If no such version exists, and the software is essential, you can still upgrade to Windows 7 but the software will probably need to be run in XP Mode. While XP mode is great, there are some things it can't do - like Direct3D. So if the software in question is a game, you may want to keep Windows XP. In that case, I would recommend dual-booting Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Now, in fairness, I couldn't have run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor on that Toshiba laptop I mentioned, because it had no working OS at the time (the reason I installed Windows 7 was because XP died). I should've really just reinstalled XP and then run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

A side note - hardware manufacturers (especially NVIDIA) have failed us:

While I was thinking about baking my graphics card, I had a thought: was it really the fact that Vista had such a different driver model that caused hardware manufacturers to produce unreliable drivers? Did hardware manufacturers really not have enough time to adapt to Vista? I remember Microsoft in 2005 mentioned that any PC made in 2005 or later would be able to run Windows Vista. So hardware manufacturers in fact had 2 years to produce Vista drivers. The Vista development cycle lasted 5 years. Plenty of time for IHVs to get involved, learn the Vista driver model, and develop drivers in consultation with Microsoft.

So who really failed here? Microsoft? Was NVIDIA's discontinuation of support for the GeForce 5xxx line a Microsoft decision? Who is to blame for NVIDIA's inability to produce drivers? I would say it's NVIDIA that's to blame here. I've had so many NVIDIA cards fail on me: I witnessed a friend's NVIDIA card go up in flames, literally, then my own NVIDIA card did the same thing! Then, I had an older NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti card that died with the classic BGA failure, then I had this latest failure: another NVIDIA card. That's four NVIDIA cards, three of which were mine. So out of all the NVIDIA cards I've ever had (about 5), only two remain. Now, I've had my share of ATI cards (roughly 5) and not a single one has ever failed. Not one.

Sorry NVIDIA, but I'm afraid I must buy ATI cards from now on. Sure, NVIDIA's drivers are more polished, and sometimes NVIDIA wins in terms of performance, but the cards rarely last very long. I would urge anyone who is thinking of purchasing an NVIDIA card to think twice and consider the ATI alternative, and think of which card you'd most likely have to bake. Now, of course, if you like baking, NVIDIA is your friend. :)

KEY TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS OF THE 2000s THAT MOST OF US USE EVERY DAY:
- LCD monitors and TVs
- Solid State Drives (SSDs)
- Cloud computing
- Wireless networking (WiFi/802.11g)
- Multi-core processors
- USB flash drives
- Streaming audio / video
- Torrents
- Online game consoles
- Touch screens
- Bluetooth

KEY TECHNOLOGIES THAT DIED IN THE 2000s:
- Floppy disks
- CRT displays
- Modems
- DOS games
- VHS tapes

PREDICTED TRENDS FOR 2010s:
- Software development re-focuses on hardware limitations & performance optimization (yes, hardware is still very limited!)
- Streaming 3D - enormous worlds with terabytes of content loaded from the web in real-time on your mobile phone or gaming console
- Pen-like computers & 3D glasses - this is the next logical combination of input/output devices overtaking the old PC & monitor
- Popular novels become 3D-ified - entertainment now puts YOU in an immersive 3D world of fantasy - be on Mars battling aliens
- Enhanced vision - while you wear 3D glasses, your PC will see the real world for you in many ways: real, infrared, X-ray, and so on
- The OpenWorld3D project: a perfect online replica of the entire Earth as a 3D world (with buildings, streets, cars, weather, etc.)
- Collaborative 3D modeling online - 3D model wikis are born: allowing the online community to build 3D models collaboratively, online
- 3D will be THE buzzword of the decade, like "online" was for the last decade; expect highly immersive & realistic 3D worlds
- Flexible paperlike screens allow creation of rollable (and maybe even foldable) tablet PCs and phones - OLED will make this happen
- The data web: a computer-friendly version of the entire world wide web, allowing greater sharing of data between sites
- The Internet goes 3D: toward the end of the decade, expect more and more websites to be full-blown 3D worlds

Quick! How many times did I mention 3D?

It was about 4 years ago when I started saving money for the first time. I opened an ING Direct savings account. Didn't know what I was going to do with it all, but I knew one thing: nobody was saving their money. There had to be a reason. Not only that, but saving was frowned upon. It still is. "Live your life, man!" is what everybody would say. But no. I was saving every penny.

At times, I found it somewhat absurd. Why should I keep saving? What's the point? Why not live for today? Life is short, after all. But I kept saving. I decided to treat it like an experiment. I wanted to find out where it would take me. What advantages would I gain (if any) from saving as much as I can?

Mind you, 4 years ago I was 19 years old and was just becoming acquainted with the vastly complex world of finance. I didn't even know where exactly to put my savings. CDs? GICs? RRSPs? What does it all mean?

So 3 years ago I started researching finance, in depth. I started reading online materials on stocks, bonds, GICs, money markets, and everything else. Basically, I wanted to become aware of all the options I had.

A few months passed, it was July of 2007, and I was observing the stock market. I observed one thing: stocks had been rising since 2002. So, it had been 5 years of continuous rise. If I put my money in stocks now, I reasoned, I would probably lose a whole bunch of it when the stock market crashes (at the time I figured it was a matter of months before the next crash).

So I decided to hold off on buying stocks and keep exploring. Maybe there was something I could put my money into that wasn't just a plain vanilla savings account. I turned my eyes toward inflation. At that point, my only recollection of inflation was the disastrous hyperinflation that my parents experienced in Romania during the 1990s. I remembered clearly that there was a time when every week the price of bread would double. I wondered if something like that could happen again, in North America.

After doing a bit of research on the CPI and noticing that inflation had been going on, though at a slower pace, in the western world as well, I realized there was really no difference between Canada and Romania in terms of currency. Fundamentally, the currency system was exactly the same. So, technically, even though my savings account was CDIC ensured, the purchasing power of that money was not.

I decided to look for ways of protecting against inflation. Initially, my idea was to actually start an inflation insurance firm. Yes, I was determined to sell inflation insurance!

But there already was inflation insurance - and in October, 2007, I finally found out what it was. Gold. My research quickly took me on the path of precious metals, which had been inflation-proof for thousands of years. A good enough track record, I figured.

Great, so I decided to move some of my savings into gold. Of course, I realized it must not be too much, because gold is extremely volatile. Not only that, but gold had been going up for 6 years - longer than the stock market. Surely it was due for a correction. I started small, and moved slowly, making sure that my bullion position never exceeded the "safe" limit that I had set for myself.

But how did we end up talking about gold? The topic was savings. In general. And why it's important to have savings.

Well, first I must make it clear that gold is the only true form of savings. Paper depreciates, and is vulnerable to political turmoil. Stocks are risky - companies go under all the time. Real estate also depreciates and is vulnerable to political turmoil. If you want something that can withstand many generations and has a track record of preserving value through time (which is what savings is), that something is gold, and silver. Precious metals.

Now we can talk about why savings is power. What does it mean to have savings? It means you have the power to readily take on adversity, for a prolonged period of time, in the hope of achieving a greater income. For the individual, it means you can go without a job longer, so you have the latitude to negotiate higher pay in full view of the risk of remaining unemployed, because that doesn't bother you, because you have savings. It means you can explore new business ideas and have no fear of failure, because you know you have savings.

But this applies not only to individuals. Savings is power for countries as well. You see, the country that is able to take on the greatest adversity for the longest period of time will come out on top. Wars are won by those countries that have accumulated the greatest savings. In World War II, the US had the most gold of any country in the world. The US won the war and continued to dominate the world for decades thereafter. Remember: gold is savings, and savings is gold.

Now, 4 years after I started saving, I think I can finally appreciate the power of savings. I see now that debt is servitude, and savings is power. For you see, those who are in debt are subservient to those who have the savings. This has always been the case for all of time. Which side are you on?

My 10 predictions for 2010:

1. Inflation will surprise everybody. Watch prices carefully. Everything will be up 10-15% by summer. Your lunch will no longer be $7, but $10, and soon $12. Your bus ticket will no longer be $3, but $4 and soon $5. All in 2010.
2. Revolution will surprise the powers that be. The US is ripe for a revolution. Especially when it becomes perfectly clear that Obama has done nothing but lie, and that the propaganda machine around Obama is more powerful and more terrifying than what Bush could've ever dreamed of.
3. The big important theme for 2010: Cost cutting. The words "budget" and "low cost" will be what keep most businesses alive. It'll be about stretching every dollar, stretching every penny, despite the growing unacknowledged inflation.
4. China will be a big story in 2010, specifically recognition that China is now the world's dominant economic superpower and that US treasuries will soon be liquidated en masse. Furthermore, China will be a story because all of the inflation we'll be seeing will be originating directly from China!
5. Not to be outdone, mobile phones will go big in 2010 (or rather, small). There will be a surprise in the mobile market that neither Google nor Apple will appear to have prepared for - and that will come from Microsoft. Google, Apple, you have been warned! Yes, we're talking about Windows 7 phones.
6. Steorn, and a few others, will surprise the oil companies. Yes, free energy will arrive in 2010, if you know where to look. Steorn will be doing a demo early in the year, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. The human race has reason to celebrate, and reason to rise up!
7. Electric cars will reach power parity with gas-powered cars. Range will be hundreds of miles on a single tank. Batteries will charge in seconds! You have been warned...
8. Government will expand to take over every aspect of our lives. Yes, this is a sad one, but as private sector jobs disappear due to income tax bracket creep caused by inflation, government will expand to take over nearly every aspect of industry. We could see 90% of jobs becoming government-run or government-backed in some way.
9. Masses will be waking up, in a surprising way. TV will have a decreasing influence in everyday life, and you will become surprised to know that your next-door neighbor knows as much about the New World Order as you do, plus a lot of other things about free energy, UFOs, and other "black-listed" knowledge.
10. Wage inflation, yes wage inflation, will begin. Your salary will probably be up 50% by the end of the year, but inflation in everything else will have been closer to 100%.
    

Overall themes for 2010: surprise, reform, and revolution! Change will come, but not because of Obama.

Is time linear?
Does every interval of time contain the same amount of information?
What does time contain anyway?

Time is a container for change. Time contains the delta between one state of the cosmos and another. Each finite interval of time contains within it the amount of change that has occurred from the beginning of that interval to the end of that interval.

In a sense, change is novelty and novelty is change. Novelty is merely a synonym for change. So when we think about novelty theory, to refer back to the work of Terence McKenna, we're really analyzing the content of time.

We know that the content of space is matter, and energy. But what is the content of time? It's a perplexing question for those who cannot see the logical conclusion that time in fact contains information. For it is information that informs change. Information is nothing other than change, and change is information. Novelty is therefore information. We're running around in circles describing the same phenomenon with different words, each word trying to out-grandiose the others.

But the fact is simple and yet stunning: Time contains information, much like how space contains matter.

Now, we know another interesting fact from basic observation of the world around us, and that is that information is cumulative. You never lose information. This has been elaborated by Terence McKenna as well. Essentially, the fabric of time itself is cumulative. At every stage in the evolution of the universe, we have gone from a state of low complexity to a state of higher complexity. We've never "devolved" into a state of lower complexity. Complexity has always increased.

Well, what is complexity? First, it helps to understand how we obtain complexity. At the start of our universe, if we accept the big bang theory, the highest level of complexity in the universe was characterized by a primordial soup of electrons and elementary particles. From that evolved the first atom, clearly a structure with an order far more advanced than what had existed prior to its emergence out of the primordial ontos.

Now, this first atom, the hydrogen atom, contained a whole lot more information than its parts, or even the sum of its parts. Because the hydrogen atom has a logical structure far more elaborate than the logical structure which represents an electron. Indeed, it is this logical structure that we must talk about when we're talking about complexity and information. The hydrogen atom is an entity which requires far more information to describe than the electron or the proton alone. So basically, the primordial soup required a very small amount of meta-data (meta-information, or logical structure) to describe, compared to what followed (i.e. the hydrogen atom). This is where we get the notion of increasing complexity. Complexity is the measure of the quantity of information required to produce the simplest possible explanation of a particular physical phenomenon.

As the universe evolved further, we got more and more complex structures. We got other atoms, molecules, organic compounds, and then biological life, and finally social life; intelligent life. Each of these complexities builds on the previous level of complexity. Molecules build on atoms. Social life (cultural or intelligent life) builds on acultural, biological life. Microbial life builds on essential organic compounds. In essence, each new level of complexity contains within it all existing levels of complexity.

Thus, complexity is conserved. We can in fact emphatically state that complexity is never destroyed. It is strictly conserved.

So what does this all imply for the nature of time? Well, time contains within it descriptions of changes within entities of varying complexity. At the beginning of the universe, each second of time contained a only a very minute description of changes, because only a minute description was needed for the level of complexity at which the universe had arrived at that time. Basically, God only needed a handful of bits of information to describe a change in the state of the universe when the universe was still in its primordial soup state.

As the universe complexified, necessarily the amount of information contained within each second of time needed to increase, in order to completely describe the more complex universe that was emerging. Basically, each level of complexity required more information about the changes within that level of complexity.

Thus, as the universe cooled and complexified, time became more and more burdened with information, so that each moment of passing time contained within it more information than the previous moment.

This process continued to this day. With every passing moment, time "expands" to contain more information than any previous moment that has ever existed. This is a profound concept to grasp, with profound consequences for our perception of time. It means that our linear time assumption, the assumption that time is isotropic and linear - that each moment is the same as every other moment, and that each interval of time is qualitatively and quantitatively the same as every other interval - is absolutely patently false and misleading.

We have to ditch the idea that time is somehow plain, linear, and uninteresting. Time is extremely interesting, and ought to be studied by science like nothing else, because we don't have a sufficiently clear understanding of the nature of time.

But the interesting implications of this "expanding time" theory are many. This theory actually validates intuitively-derived beliefs in many cultures that time is accelerating, or that time is heading towards an ultimate end. In fact, even modern science has managed to create a theory mainly involving human culture and cultural progress which indicates that there may be a point in the not too distant future where all of our knowledge, having been preserved thanks to the law of conservation of complexity, leads to a point of infinite temporal acceleration - a point of asymptotic discovery and asymptotic change, putting an end to time itself. Indeed, this very idea has been prophesied by others, including the ancient Mayans with their apocalyptic 2012 prophecy, or the Christians, or even modern-day prophets like Terence McKenna, although I'm sure he would despise being called a "prophet."

We must challenge all of our dearly-held assumptions about time or else we will not proceed to make true scientific discoveries. Today, we carry notions about time that are akin to believing that the Earth is flat or that it sits atop the backs of four turtles. For example, we believe that causal connections can only exist from the past to the future. We have established one predetermined direction for causality. Yet, we can clearly observe retrocausal effects all around us that seem to defy the laws of physics and all too often get classed as mere coincidences or worse, paranormal phenomena. In fact, such occurrences should be observed experimentally and we should try to develop a theory for explaining such retrocausal phenomena as the appearance of 9-11 as a motif in various artifacts well in advance of the actual event which occurred on 9-11-2001. Other retrocausal phenomena include such cases as the flight of animals to safety prior to a devastating tsunami or earthquake. Anything that is often classed as premonition or prophecy ought to be investigated as a potential candidate for retrocausality - events from the future having causal links to events in the past. It's crazy to think that the future could have a causal influence on the past, as it means that the past is now just as malleable or perhaps more malleable than the future!

Anyway, I hope I've been able to shed some light on the strange nature of time and why what we humans often think is obvious is really not so.

I could probably talk further here but instead I think I need to actually summarize what I described:

1. Time is a container for... change in information, also known as novelty. Necessarily, then, time has at least two dimensions.
2. Complexity is conserved. Each new level of complexity builds on lower levels. Complexity is never destroyed or reduced.
   
3. Time is non-linear and quite probably anisotropic.
4. Time is expanding, with each one-second interval containing more information than any previous one-second interval. This is subjectively perceived as an acceleration.
   
5. There may be an endpoint for time, consisting of an asymptotic acceleration of the rate of progress toward infinite complexity.
6. Causality probably works both ways, even if it seems odd to us. Retrocausality seems to explain perfectly the phenomenon of prescience in some organisms.

Bend your mind, but be careful not to break it!

So, it seems Moore's Law is at it again. And those who are not aware of it (by now) will be left in the dust. Read this article and you'll know what I mean.

First, I must warn you that you may be offended by reading this article. If you are an ardent fan of Google or Apple and/or a hater of Microsoft, you may not like what I'm about to tell you. That's fine. Just be prepared, if you do plan to read on.

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 on a 5-year-old laptop with 512 MB RAM and only 7 GB of free disk space. It installed (surprise!) and ran flawlessly! It even ran smoother than the XP installation I had on it before. Probably because with all the service packs, XP has actually become more bloated than Windows 7.

Now, I want you to note the specs: 512 MB RAM, 7 GB of disk space. Impressive. A high-end PC from 10 years ago would've had these specs. So literally, Windows 7 supports a decade of computers!

But what's more fascinating is the mobile arena. Currently, Apple is still dominant and yet still afraid to lose its iron grip on the iPhone. On the surface, Apple appears to be very friendly to developers, but behind the scenes they are the control freaks they've always been - I'm looking at you, Steve!

Anyway, there are quite a few frustrating things about the iPhone. First, you can only sell your app through Apple's app store and it has to be approved by Apple. Second, there is no Flash on the iPhone, and no web browser other than Safari. This ought to raise eyebrows and even get Apple into legal trouble like Microsoft got into trouble with IE and Windows, for supposedly abusing their monopoly. But it seems only Microsoft is the unlucky one.

Next we have Google's Android OS, which is a commendable OS. It has everything. It is, for mobile devices, like Windows is for PCs. It is open to developers and developers can share & sell their applications without Google's approval. The only "problem" with Android is that there are too many variants of it. I wouldn't really call this a problem. It's a natural drawback of having to support a wide variety of devices. I mean, look at Windows: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and do you hear Windows developers complaining about it? No. They've adapted to it. They expect it. Only Apple fanboys complain about "too many variants" of Android because they don't understand it.

Next, we have Windows Mobile. Or do we? Windows Mobile is laughably dated and limited. Microsoft seems to have lost it completely on the mobile front. But have they? Or are we all missing something that's actually staring us in the face? Are we missing the elephant in the room?

Yes.

Let me introduce you all to the elephant in the room. It's Windows 7. Yup. And it's moving to smart phones. Remember, I installed Windows 7 on a PC with 512 MB RAM and 7 GB of disk space. Why do you think Microsoft decided to actually support old devices this time, and not raise hardware requirements like before? Why do you think Microsoft developed multi-touch capabilities in Windows 7? Is it for all those giant useless tablets out there? Is it for all the giant useless netbooks out there? No! It's for MOBILE PHONES!

Suddenly it all makes sense. But wait, I hear you say, how can Windows 7 ever fit on a phone? Simple: There are smart phones today that have 512 MB of memory. There are smart phones today that are extensible (via microSD card) to as much as 32 GB of storage. Last but not least, is Intel's Atom processor. It's an x86 processor (just like the desktop ones) with speeds of nearly 2 GHz! But the best thing about Atom is, it's extremely low-power and low-heat.

So the situation is now ripe for Windows 7 to start transitioning onto smaller and smaller mobile devices. There are MIDs / UMPCs currently available with screens of 4.8" which is about as small as a PSP. They fit in your pocket. And they run Windows 7. The leap from here to mobile phones is tiny. There is no leap. It's a baby step.

In conclusion, if you thought Microsoft lost the mobile space, you are totally mistaken, and you'll be in for a shock next year. All the Android and Apple fans out there won't know what hit them. Better get on for the ride.

As for what I'm doing to prepare, I'm back developing client-side Windows applications. I use WPF and .NET. They are extremely easy and fun to work with. Microsoft has always had the best support for developers, which is what helped them gain (and maintain) a monopoly for so long. Windows has more software than any other OS, and will continue to do so for many years thanks to Windows 7.

So gold just shot up above $1090 today - a new all-time high, oil is up above $80 a barrel again, and I'm getting emails in my inbox about contract opportunities with rates of $60+ an hour. So what does all of this have to do with Bob Prechter?

Who is Bob Prechter anyway? For those who don't know, Robert Prechter is a semi-popular financial analyst who occasionally pops out of his wooden shed to warn us all about the impending danger of deflation. Much like Mike "Mish" Shedlock of globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com, he was right in the fall of 2008, when the price of everything collapsed spectacularly. However, most prices have pretty much recovered since then and some (like gold) are actually making new highs!

Robert Prechter has an interesting theory, however: that short-term market movements are entirely random - influenced by a recurring cycle known as the "Elliott Wave," which is based on the Fibonacci ratio of 1.618. In short, markets are irrational, but predictably so - they can be predicted by applying this Elliott Wave theory.

I agree with Robert Prechter on the "markets are irrational" bit. I even think he might be on to something with the Elliott Wave theory. But as far as deflation goes, I am strongly against it. I do not believe deflation can happen in a system of fiat currency (where money is created out of thin air).

One example that deflationistas often like to bring up is the case of Japan in the 1990s, and how allegedly Japan experienced deflation from 1990 to now. That is just totally wrong. Japan experienced roughly -0.5% inflation for 3 years. That's it. That's all the "deflation" it ever experienced. Japan is not a valid example of deflation.

One other example some deflationistas hearken back to as a last resort is the Great Depression. However, during the Great Depression the US was still on a gold standard, so that example is totally invalid in today's fiat world.

So given the track record of these "deflation" predictions, why does Robert Prechter think that "this time is different"? And where is he now, when his predictions appear to be falling apart by the day?

It was 2002. I had just finished developing Dacris Benchmarks 4.9 using pure Win32 API. I was proud of myself. It was the first 100% Windows API application I had developed. No more Borland OWL crutches. It was a clean start. The application went on to become a phenomenal success. But something was not quite right in the land of Windows development. A major new player was just entering the arena. Its name was ".NET", previously known as NGWS, and it promised to change everything.

From the beginning it was clear that this .NET thing was not going to be popular right away. It was a gigantic change at a time when the world was still trying to recover from the collapse of the dot-com bubble. It was, furthermore, a behemoth in the days when broadband Internet was still a rare commodity. Weighing in at a hefty 23 MB, the .NET redistributable was just too much of a penalty to pay for the convenience of developing "managed" applications with a truly object-oriented language.

From the developer's perspective, .NET was amazing from day one. Sure it still had some kinks which ultimately led me to develop NetXP, but as a development paradigm it completely overshadowed the archaic Windows API. It was a dream come true - garbage collection, Windows Forms, remoting, and a whole bunch of other goodies.

.NET immediately took off on the web. Within one year, nearly every major company was developing ASP.NET web apps with .NET 1.1. The release of Windows Server 2003 only served to accelerate that trend even further. .NET web development soon reached a frenzy as the advantages of ASP.NET over other technologies (PHP, JSP) became evident.

However, something was wrong on the desktop. Three years after .NET came out, virtually no .NET desktop applications were being developed. The reason? Most ISVs, especially the small ones, saw the gigantic size of the .NET framework and the support headache associated with its deployment as a major roadblock to adoption. Even though .NET was great for developers, it was not so great for end users.

The fact that Windows XP SP2 and SP3 did not include the .NET Framework only made the situation worse. For most ISVs, it was clear that if they wanted to develop Windows apps, they would have to continue using Windows API, until something better came along.

Well, something better finally did come along in 2007. It was called .NET 3.0 (or WinFX), and it was embedded in Windows Vista. Suddenly, the deployment obstacle to .NET adoption was removed. Now, there was really no reason for ISVs not to adopt .NET. Or was there?

The reason was one word: "Vista." This word soon came to be reviled among the Windows community. Nobody wanted to touch Vista with a ten-foot pole. The truth is, Vista was plagued with problems for at least a year after its RTM. Finally, in 2008, the initial Vista problems started getting resolved and users started adopting Vista at a more rapid pace.

Today, there is a two-word reason why .NET adoption on the desktop finally makes sense: "Windows 7." Windows 7, which includes .NET 3.5 by default, is leaner and meaner than its predecessor. Every PC that can run Vista can run Windows 7 and do so with better performance. In a few months, the combined market share of Windows 7 and Windows Vista will exceed 35%. It's practically there right now.

From an ISV's perspective, however, it is not only market share that counts. It is also the value per customer within that segment of the market. For example, a Mac user typically has 4 times more value than a Windows user because Mac users tend to buy applications more readily than Windows users. Now when it comes to Windows XP versus Windows Vista/7, the Windows XP user at this point is basically stuck in the stone age. The odds of a Windows XP user purchasing a new application are much lower than the odds of a Windows Vista/7 user purchasing a new application. The Windows XP user generally runs old applications on old hardware, and is very conservative when it comes to making new purchases. The result is that the value of a Windows XP user is (sorry XP users) generally lower than the value of a Windows Vista/7 user from the point of view of an ISV.

Anyway, to make a long story short, despite a market share of "only" 35%, Windows Vista/7 users are now actually a more important market for ISVs than Windows XP users. This is only now starting to happen, after about 8 years of XP dominance.

What does this mean for ISVs and the software industry as a whole? It means that .NET will finally be adopted on the desktop. .NET makes development much easier, there is no question about that. However, for a long time there was a question about whether Microsoft would embrace or at least continue to support .NET. That question has finally been answered. .NET is here to stay and the future for Windows applications is .NET. Windows API has finally come to the end of its life. It's an exciting time to be a Windows developer.

I want to draw your attention away from the talking heads on CNN/FOX/CNBC (who are all shouting "recovery") and toward a recent video by TheModernMystic:



Apparently, M3 - a measure of US money supply - has been declining now for over a year.
Credit as well as money has been declining at an annual rate of at least 5%!
In other words, we are in deflation (in the US) since March of 2008.

Banks are being paid to hold money in reserve and NOT lend. Why is the Fed doing this?
Could it be that China now has enough power over US monetary policy to prevent inflation (and thus devaluation of their dollar assets)?

Additionally, consumer attitudes toward credit & spending have changed dramatically. This has been pointed out by Mish on his blog many times.
High & rising unemployment has forced people to save (US savings rate now 7%) and has driven salaries lower (people taking 30%-50% pay cuts).

The big question is whether deflation can/will continue.
I believe that it can, and it will. It all has to do with what is in the interest of those who control the money supply.

Let's look at it this way. If you're a bank, and you've given out $5 billion in loans,
you would ideally want to be paid back in full (with interest) on those loans. What happens if there is a sudden 50% inflation?
You get 50% less than what you gave out in loans. That is, you are not paid in full, because the dollar has lost 50% of its value.
So, given this reality, you would ideally want the dollar to maintain its purchasing power or even gain in purchasing power.
In other words, the ideal condition for banks (and other lenders) is deflation!

Now, let's look at China. China has at least $1 trillion in US bonds. They've lent out $1 trillion to the US. They would ideally
want to be paid back in strong dollars so that they can purchase US assets on the cheap. They want to maximize the bang for their buck!
China wants deflation. How much control does China have over US monetary policy? I would argue that, since they are the biggest exporter to the US
and the biggest supplier of cheap labour to US companies, they have at least a tangible influence over what Ben Bernanke decides to do at the Fed.

Clearly, US banks and China want deflation. The US government, however, wants inflation because they have no way of paying their gigantic debt burden.
How much say does the US government have in monetary policy? None. That is just a fact. The Federal Reserve is a private institution, independent of the
US government. The US government has no control over monetary policy. No matter how much inflation they want, they aren't in charge of the printing press.

Now a clearer picture starts to emerge. The picture is a little shocking for those who have been led to believe that the US dollar is headed for hyperinflation.
The picture shows what is likely to happen for the next 5-10 years, and it ain't pretty. The US dollar is likely to maintain its purchasing power or even gain
purchasing power. What is likely to unfold is another depression, similar in magnitude and character to the Great Depression. Prices of all non-essential items
will fall or remain stagnant. Wages will fall or remain stagnant. The stock market & real estate market will collapse.

So what can you do to come out ahead? First, if you have a job and can save some money, save it in gold. Have enough dollars to get by on for a few weeks but
beyond that all savings should be in gold. Why gold? Gold maintains its purchasing power. The likelihood that the dollar will gain significantly in purchasing
power is very low, simply because it's a fiat currency - its supply can be increased arbitrarily. Even if the dollar does not inflate over the coming years, you
will not have lost anything by owning gold, because gold never loses its value. Additionally, gold has no counterparty risk. It's not a loan or a promise to pay.

Secondly, get out of stocks and real estate. Real estate prices are going to continue to collapse. The Dow will go to 2000. Real estate will probably go back to
1980s price levels - $100,000 for a house. The time to buy these assets for the long haul will be in 3-5 years when the lows have been hit. However, these assets
will not perform well for the next 10+ years, so you have plenty of time to wait before getting back into "the market."

Third, bonds are going to be problematic. In a deflationary depression, first comes the stock collapse, then the bond collapse. The bond market collapse will be
far more painful than the stock market collapse. US treasury bonds are in a bubble. Bonds are the last thing to peak after a speculative mania. 0% yields are not
sustainable for more than 2 or 3 years. I've said it before and I'll say it again: owning US treasuries now is like owning dot-com stocks in 1999.

Finally, consider owning some silver. It's more risky than gold but has the potential for higher returns over the long term. Silver outperformed gold from 1932
to 1979 by a significant margin. If gold is your rainy-day fund, silver is your 401k. Regardless of whether there is inflation or not, silver will gain in value
relative to every other asset. That's what's important.

Again, let me emphasize that the inflation/deflation debate has no bearing on whether precious metals will continue to gain in value over the coming decades.
That question is answered by looking at supply & demand over the long term. The same goes for stocks, bonds, and real estate. What matters is the relative
performance of one asset compared to another.

The future of the dollar only concerns those who hold dollars and those who owe dollars. It concerns China and US banks. They wish for deflation.
The Federal Reserve, being in bed with US banks like Goldman Sachs, will probably grant them that wish. The US government will probably continue to borrow and hope for inflation. They will probably just default, like Russia in 1997.

Article:
Infowars.com - Twenty Minutes with the President

Some 9/11 smoking guns:

1. NORAD standing down
2. Operation Northwoods
3. Memo on "Bin Laden determined to attack inside US"
4. Saudis flown out while nobody else could fly
   
5. PNAC
6. Blacking out of "Saudi Arabia" in 9/11 [C]omission Report
7. Omission of Building 7 in 9/11 [C]omission Report
8. WTC buildings falling down at free-fall speed
9. Larry Silverstein insurance policy & "pull it" comment
10. Record level of put options on airlines prior to 9/11
11. Giuliani knowing WTC was going to collapse
12. BBC knowing that Building 7 was going to collapse before it actually did
13. Bin Laden was a CIA asset, known as Tim Osman

Time to wake up!

Article: Up to $3,800 fine for failure to get health insurance

"WASHINGTON (AP) - A top senator is calling for fines of up to $3,800 on families who fail to get medical insurance after a health care overhaul goes into effect."
...
"The plan from Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana would make health insurance mandatory, just like auto coverage."


I'm not going to comment too much other than to say that this just another example of fascism in the US. Public-private partnerships. Government subsidizing private industry. And guess who gets stuck with the bill? The dumbed-down American people, that's who.

The American people lost their country in 1913, when the government took over the financial industry via the Federal Reserve and declared a monopoly on money creation. The US at that point became a fascist state. Ever since 1913, America has been nothing but a banana republic, ruled by brute force rather than law.

I will leave you with this alleged quote from Woodrow Wilson:

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." -Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence

I'm going to get a little more personal in this post and tell you all about my latest insights into life. Seems like while everyone is starting school again, I'm here looking for work trying to forge a new path into an uncertain (and increasingly bleak) future.

I graduated from Waterloo Software Engineering in June with no job, and no idea what to do with my life. That much hasn't changed -- yet. But what has changed is my level of knowledge of the so-called "real world."

A major economic depression started in 2008, along with a gigantic paradigm shift in people's attitudes towards spending. Regardless of why or how that shift happened, it's now certain that it happened and it won't be reversed. It's here to stay. How did this affect me personally? Well, the place I was working at before I graduated basically went into a hiring freeze in November, 2008 and so I lost the full-time job I may have been offered otherwise. I ended up graduating without a job.

Following an enlightening trip to Romania, where I witnessed some rather spectacular things which I might describe in more detail in a future post, I came back with a somewhat revised outlook on life. Specifically, I realized that in order to make it in the "real world" I had to be far more easy-going and roll with the punches as it were.

I'm gaining even more insights every day. It's as if years of uncertainty are finally meshing into a coherent mass of wisdom. It's hard to describe, but it's as if the hormonal fog through which I was trying to navigate during my teenage years is finally lifting. So I will now share with you some of the pearls of wisdom that have formed inside my brain recently.

1. Reality is Negotiable
There's a lot more flexibility in everything than you might at first believe there is. An example of this is with respect to lifestyle. It's amazing to me how people in Romania can live on as little as 500 euros per month and afford all the modern aspects of American life, including cell phones, cars, travel, and of course lots of alcohol & partying. There's flexibility wherever you choose to look for it. Never be afraid to negotiate. You have nothing to lose.

2. Eliminate Expectations
When I started university in 2004, I had some pretty lofty ideals of what my life would be like after graduation. I envisioned a steady income of $60,000 or more per year, I saw myself driving a European car, living in a stylish condo downtown, and being able to travel to interesting places. Of course, I still have those visions. I still want that lifestyle, but I've come to terms with the fact that I probably won't have it for many more years to come, if ever. The party is over. What I've found is that if life does not match your expectations, you'll be unhappy. Happiness is often found when you eliminate expectations as they relate to status, wealth, and other materialistic desires. The frugal lifestyle doesn't have to be a depressing lifestyle. It's just different. It's still life.

3. Take Advantage of Black Swans
Building on wisdom from the "Black Swan," there can be both positive black swans and negative black swans. Try to minimize your exposure to negative black swans but maximize your exposure to positive black swans. They say that luck favors the well-prepared. Take risks whenever you have little to lose and much to gain. Go all-in on a good hand, to use a poker analogy. It's extremely important, and I can't stress this enough. It is extremely important to recognize the situations where you have nothing to lose and something to gain. A lot of businesses fail because they focus too much time on reducing minute losses instead of actively looking for large gains.

4. Disarm Weaknesses
The most uncomfortable (i.e. scary) things are the things from which you'll learn the most. As a well-known philosopher once said, "do something that scares you everyday." Recognize what scares you the most, and approach it, confront it, and disarm it. Not only that, but why not go on and master it? Why let fears be your master, when you can master your fears? Talk about the things you'd rather not talk about. The only way to grow is by recognizing your insecurities and disarming them. By "disarming," I mean dealing with them in any way you feel is most efficient. Don't try to become a master in something you have no interest in. But just recognize what it is that makes you uncomfortable and find a way to disarm it. If you're afraid of dogs, recognize that fact (stop denying it), and disarm it by exposing yourself to that which you fear.

5. Stop Seeking External Validation
The world is a brutal place. Nobody is going to appreciate you, hold your hand, or treat you in a special way just because you think you're special. A lot of people have incredibly fragile egos which are based purely around what other people think of them. Some will go as far as to create false impressions, manage their public appearance, and hide any weaknesses that they might have. This is suicide. If you do this, you might as well kill yourself because the same objective is achieved - your personal life, your life as an individual, ends at that point. Recognize situations where you are seeking validation and disarm those situations. Your self-esteem should not be dependent on what others think of you. Try to humiliate yourself at least once a day.

6. Loss of Control is an Illusion
Control freaks will often run into situations in which they feel that they have no control, and typically they will feel very uncomfortable -- even terrified. The loss of control may feel complete, but it's not. Typically, in an unfamiliar situation you feel the most sense of "loss of control." Again, you have more control than you think. So just chill. If you think more deeply you'll realize just how much control you actually have.

7. Always Test Assumptions
I have to give credit to the author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" for this golden piece of advice. Left-brained people always love to read books and follow prescriptions (instructions) for everything. I hate this approach, because I have to know WHY a certain step has to be taken, and what the alternatives are. I guess that's why I'm an engineer. But really, following assumptions (blindly) is akin to following a religion. Also, just because an assumption is socially prevalent doesn't mean it's right. It's often easy to overlook this reality and say that, well, the masses are always right. The masses are seldom right. And even if they were, what does it matter to you? You should be looking at assumptions as if they were hypotheses, and try to test them by experimentation.

8. Only You Can Establish Boundaries
People seldom establish their own boundaries. Sad but true. There are many boundary-pushers out there. These are the bullies of middle school, the bosses that belittle their employees, the abusive girlfriends or boyfriends, the students who tease the inexperienced supply teacher, the children who bankrupt their parents. If you do not assert your boundaries, people will assume that there are no boundaries there. I've had experience with this all my life and I always hate it when my personal boundaries are violated, and I make it clear that it's not cool. You have to be willing to say "no," in a reasonable way and be prepared to make enemies. That's life.

9. Ignore the Inconsequential
There's far too much information (and entertainment) in the world today. A lot of it is totally inconsequential relative to your own life. A lot of it is a complete waste of time. You can spend a lot of time worrying about minutiae. I've been there. I know what it's like. A lot of people with OCD probably know what I'm talking about. Spending countless hours doing something totally meaningless because you don't want to get started on that massive Anthropology assignment. You just sit there surfing the net aimlessly. You don't even go out, you don't do anything productive. Procrastinators actually have a form of OCD. Worrying about a major undertaking is pretty normal, but just don't let it consume too much of your time.

Why 9 points? I like 9. It's a very complete number. It's the highest single-digit number. How many 9s are there from 1 to 100? Google it, I won't give you the answer. I won't hold your hand. Nobody will. It's time to grow up and do things on your own. Just like you have in the past.

The next 10 years of my life will certainly be more fun than the last 10 years of my life. Maybe it's time to say goodbye to this lost decade for good. It's time to embrace the real world, free of school, free of the left-brain prison where you must accept assumptions and regurgitate them on command. It's time to enter an enlightened state of mind.

"Cut My Pay" Nonsense

Inquiring minds may want to read the following article:
Cut my pay... please! - CNN Money

Apparently workers in the US are taking 30-50% cuts in salary in order to get jobs. This is grim, folks. Really grim.

"Rebecca Eason, who used to make a comfortable $33,000-a-year living in Tennessee."

Hmm... $33,000 was a comfortable living? I wonder how that's possible. If you just take rent, add food and electricity, and sprinkle a dash of transportation costs on top of all that, you can easily get up to $1800 a month in living expenses! Now suppose you want your "comfortable" lifestyle to include some savings for retirement ($400 a month), plus a few nights out ($100 a month), a small vacation ($300 a month) and a very limited clothing budget ($200 a month) and you get to $2800 a month necessary for a comfortable lifestyle. $33,600 in annual cost. Assuming a very modest tax rate of 15%, you would need almost $40,000 for a comfortable lifestyle.

But now Rebecca isn't even making $33,000. Apparently she's making $18,000/yr in a temporary position! You can't even survive on that kind of salary. Or if you do, it's in a very compromised lifestyle. The economic situation in the US must be extremely dire for people to resort to such madness!

Downsizing of the American Lifestyle

It's now become quite clear that the American dream is finished. The US is rapidly devolving into a third-world country. That has been the plan all along, at least since the 1970s when manufacturing jobs started moving to China. Slowly, the US became a hollowed out consumer-driven "service" economy (in reality, the vast majority of wealth was concentrated in the financial sector, which was just a money-laundering front for the arms & drug trade).

But no matter how it happened, it's clear that the American lifestyle has been downsized. In the 1960s, the average salary for 2 years was enough to afford a house. Now, it takes at least 6 years worth of the average salary to buy a house. The real wage has declined to a third of what it was in the 1960s! No wonder it takes 3 salaries nowadays to support a household!

The average CEO makes up to 500 times what the average worker makes. The difference was 10 times smaller in 1980! Times have changed. The rich have gotten richer while the poor have gotten poorer.

Power Corrupts: US as the Lone Superpower

The only reason why US society was so equitable, just, and civilized 30+ years ago, post World War II, was because of the cold war. The cold war was the main reason why the US maintained such an elevated standard of living for its citizens. Social decline could not happen in the US, as it would immediately show the "weakness" of the capitalist system and, as a result, give credence to the socialist system. As long as these two rival systems fought for supremacy, the US had to maintain an image of prosperity and fairness.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 for economic reasons, and since then the US has been the lone superpower in the world. As the old saying goes, power corrupts. No longer charged with maintaining an image of prosperity, the US gradually declined into a society of poverty and inequality, which is the typical outcome of a capitalist system. Capital concentrates increasingly into the hands of the few, the well-connected, the corrupt few who have absolutely no morals and total self-interest. Power begets power. Money begets more money. Influence begets more influence.

To give credence to this theory all you have to do is look at the evidence: the decline in US standard of living from 1969 (the peak of US-Soviet rivalry as exemplified by the moon landing) to today. Nothing could be clearer than the steady downward trend in real wages and upward trend in income inequality that started in the 1970s.

The Future: Economic Crisis, Followed by Revolution

The US will follow the path of the Soviet Union in its final decline from its throne of global superpower. The first signs are already occurring. The economic crisis that the US is now seeing is far different from previous recessions. There is a deep, fundamental problem with the US economy that was caused by 30 years of easy credit, corruption, and out-of-control unproductive spending.

This economic crisis will only deepen, and it will deepen as a result of present policies being put in place to "stimulate" the economy. The current policies only serve to increase government spending, expand military operations, and continue the unsustainable American empire. The collapse of Empire America is what is necessary for the US to begin recovery.

There will come a point when Americans will become so sick of the injustice which is currently occurring that they will rise up in a new American revolution. This time, it will be a revolt against every single unconstitutional policy that has served to destroy the foundation upon which America was built. America was once a land of opportunity, and there was great prosperity because the government adhered to the US constitution and was not in bed with giant multinational corporations or hostile faraway nations.

A Look Back

Go back to 1932 and imagine that you saved a year's salary ($600) worth of silver, a total of 2400 oz. Now suppose you did not touch your stash of 2400 oz until 1979, when you decided to sell it all for $30 an ounce. How much money would you have earned?

Answer: $72,000

You could have bought a decent house with that money in 1979. $72,000 was 9 yearly salaries in 1979. Good investment, I'd say.

Now suppose you did the same thing, but with gold. So, you would've bought $600 worth of gold in 1932 (29 oz) and then sold it in 1979 for $800 an ounce. How much would you have pocketed?

Answer: $23,200

OK. Still a decent investment. I mean, that was 3 average salaries back then, but certainly not as good as silver.

Now imagine you did the same thing, but with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which you would've bought at the rock-bottom price of $40 a share. That's 15 shares. How much would you have gotten for your investment in 1979?

Answer: $13,500

That's still a bit above the average salary. Certainly not as stellar as gold or silver though. And you had to get the market timing exactly right to snap up 15 shares at precisely the all-time low in 1932.

My point should be evident by now. Over a period of 47 years (almost an entire adult life) in the last century, starting in 1932, the best-performing asset class as an investment was silver. The worst-performing was the Dow!

A Multi-Decade Trend is Ending

The last 29 years have been exceptionally good for stock market investors, and exceptionally awful for precious metals investors. This trend will change, just as it has in the past.

Already, the metals have been outperforming the Dow for the past 8 years. However, they are still very cheap by historical standards. Silver is just $0.28 in 1930s dollars, which is close to the actual low of $0.25/oz in 1932.

Even after going up 3-fold in the last 7 years, silver is still undervalued!

The Future Looks Bright for Silver

In 1979, silver hit a high of $50/oz which it has yet to surpass. That high, adjusted for inflation, is $153. However, if I use M3 money supply growth and adjust it for net silver supply growth, I get about $250. Considering that I see gold hitting $5000 and the gold:silver ratio has been as low as 12:1 in the recent past, I don't see why silver can't even go above $400 when the real speculative mania sets in.

Assuming the odds of hitting $8 are about the same as the odds of hitting $500, the midpoint falls around $60/oz. That means, to properly balance out the downside risk & upside potential, the price of silver should be $60/oz right now. That's over 4 times higher than today's actual price.

Warren Buffett, eat your heart out! Silver will likely have incredible returns for the next 40+ years, just as it did from 1932 to 1979. Forget about buying gold. Why not get the best returns? Why not buy silver?

Let the debate begin!

Here's my 3-part YouTube video series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

It was 2001 when I first started developing with Win32 API. Back then, Win32 API was the only way to develop a Windows application. Sure, you could use a variety of different wrappers, including MFC and Borland's OWL. However, the Win32 API was always at the core of the application. This resulted in applications having a very consistent look & feel. Every application looked like it belonged in Windows.

In 2002, a new phenomenon started, called the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework was supposed to be Microsoft's decision to improve developer's lives by replacing C++ with managed code (written in any language). At least that's what I hoped back in 2002. However, from the very beginning it became clear that Microsoft's intent was not to replace Win32 API with .NET but in fact to carry two separate development frameworks, and ultimately to confuse and alienate Windows users and Windows developers.

Let's look at what "mistakes" MS made with .NET that have been causing ongoing pain for Windows developers.

1. Not including .NET in Windows.

Microsoft has an ongoing policy of keeping .NET & Windows separate. For some bizarre reason, Microsoft will not distribute the latest version of .NET with the latest version of Windows. Windows XP SP1 could have included .NET 1.1. It didn't. Windows XP SP2 could have included .NET 2.0. It didn't. .NET should've been a required update from the very beginning. It should've been an inextricable component of Windows, just like IE. Though it's unclear which version of .NET will ship with Windows 7, what is clear is that when a later version is released, Microsoft will make damn sure that users won't even know about it.

2. Not making the Win32 API obsolete.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft could've made all new APIs available only to .NET developers. Why do that? To discourage Win32 API development. To make it clear to developers that .NET is the future. Starting with Vista, Microsoft should've moved all of its innovation into .NET. Instead, they added new features to Win32 API! Features that they didn't add to .NET! In other words, they showed that Win32 API is still the only way to develop Windows applications.

3. Not setting an example.

Microsoft could have migrated all of its apps to .NET. Office 2007 should've been entirely written in .NET. Visual Studio .NET (first version) should've been written in .NET! Microsoft should've set an example, that .NET is the future. Instead, they keep writing apps in MFC or Win32 API. Clearly, MFC and Win32 API is still the future. I challenge you to find any major Microsoft application written in .NET.

4. Reinventing the wheel.

Rather than using native Win32 API controls in .NET WinForms applications, Microsoft instead decided to reinvent the wheel, coding an entire UI toolkit from scratch using managed code. What for? Sun already did that! It's called Java!

The inconsistencies in look & feel in .NET are hideous, but even worse are the inconsistencies in behaviour. .NET 1.1 was notorious for its non-standard controls. It's the reason I developed NetXP. It's the reason why I had to write a gigantic .NET wrapper around Win32 API. .NET itself should've been that wrapper. Here's an exercise: Try popping up a balloon tooltip (a feature of Win32 API in Windows XP) in .NET 1.1.

This is the biggest issue with .NET, and Microsoft still hasn't fixed it. Take the XAML menu for example. It's totally different from the standard WinAPI menu. Even the ClearType looks different in a XAML app! This decision by MS not to enforce OS UI conventions will lead to a wide range of UI variation on Windows, and will ultimately lead developers (and users) away from Windows, and toward Mac or even Linux.

Conclusion - My Message to Microsoft

It's painful to develop apps in Windows API (or MFC) in 2009. You (Microsoft) could've changed that. You had the opportunity, with .NET, to create a new way of programming Windows. You blew it. Until you fix the 4 issues above, I will be programming in Java. Java is everything .NET is and more. Java is cross-platform, free software, and has a wider user base. Why should I limit myself to Windows when the choice I have is between Windows API (a 25-year-old technology) and .NET (a clone of Java that runs only on Windows)?

To those out there who remember Visual Basic, .NET is another Visual Basic. VB was great for RAD (Rapid Application Development). So is .NET. But the problem with VB was that it was non-standard. It didn't wrap the Win32 API well enough. The same is true for .NET. Now, if .NET was going to be cross-platform, I'd understand. But it was never intended to be cross-platform. Microsoft totally blew it with .NET. Developing a Windows application in .NET is as ridiculous as developing a Windows application in Visual Basic.

In this article I will attempt to explain why this is not 1929, and why it will get worse.
Economically, America is on a path toward certain death, if it's not already dead.
The only thing that can revive America is a revolution and a new declaration of independence.

Anyway, let's explore the reasons why it's worse than 1929:

1. The US is a military superpower
   How is this bad? The US is totally dependent on continuing its military dominance over the rest of the world. It forces countries to accept T-bills at gunpoint. Any slight weakness or decline in this military dominance spells disaster. It would lead to hyperinflation and shortages of just about everything. The US imports more oil than any other country. The US economy is heavily reliant on imports, mainly of oil and drugs. These imports usually come from hostile regimes like Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.
   
2. The US produces nothing
   There was a time when the US was a leading producer in the world. It produced automobiles, commodities, and other tangible products. However, partly because of rising taxes, these days hardly anything is produced in the US. Why do that when it's so much cheaper to produce it in China and import it? Of course, when the US was a producer, people had jobs. With jobs, people were able to save, invest, spend, and thus contribute to the growth of the US economy. Nowadays, the only jobs left are government jobs, and the US produces only fiat currency, which is worth nothing.
3. The US Federal Government is gigantic and wants more
   Income taxes are rising. They are already higher than in many of the developed nations (including Canada!). Property taxes are high and rising. The reasons why house prices are falling are two-fold: first, there are no more jobs and therefore rent income has diminished. But also, property taxes are still as high as they were in 2006 if not higher, and certainly rising. So what you have now is houses with negative earnings, selling for $1 on eBay!
4. The US dollar is worthless
   In 1971, Nixon removed any ties between the US dollar and gold. In 1929, the US dollar was still backed by gold. Today, it's backed by nothing. In the absence of a stable currency, all economic activity in the US is distorted, unpredictable, and volatile. Speculation runs wild, and everyone makes miscalculations and misallocations of capital while the Federal Reserve quietly manipulates the markets. The result: through repeated cycles of inflation & deflation, the private Federal Reserve takes ownership of all property and the people are left homeless.
5. Auto workers no longer make $5 a day
   Just to give you an idea of what it was like in 1920s America, Henry Ford established the $5 per day "efficiency" wage. In today's money, this would be equivalent to about $500 per day (or $120,000 per year). This was way above the average, but Ford believed that it would motivate employees and lead to increased productivity. This is the polar opposite of what most employers are doing these days (i.e. slashing wages in every possible way).
6. Farming has disappeared from America
   Back in the 1930s, many people moved back to the countryside where they could live off the land. Nowadays, most people are crammed into cities where everything is 100% dependent on reliable supplies of goods from overseas. If those supplies are interrupted for any period of time, chaos will break out. Just imagine what it would be like in a major city without electricity for 2 weeks.

We need to stop comparing the present situation to the 1930s. Things today are very different, and much more perilous. We are treading through unprecedented historical territory. As I see it, Americans need to reverse the 6 things I listed above. Otherwise, the US is headed for disaster. I believe that, at this point, the US government has become so totalitarian and so unconcerned with the will of the people that only a revolution (i.e. a total overthrow of the government & return to the constitution) would affect any change.

To put things more clearly, the states need to remove their support for the federal government by seceding from the union, citing the 10th amendment.

Stumbled upon this:



In the words of Jordan Maxwell, someone better wake up & do their homework!

The proud reassertion of nationalism shown in Moldova this week marks the end for the New World Order.

You cannot suppress nations and divide them up with arbitrary borders. You cannot erase national history.

The elections were not the object of protest in Moldova. The protest was in fact a call for reunion of two Romanian countries: Romania and Moldova. It was a reassertion of nationalism.

Much like North & South Korea, Romania & Moldova used to be one & the same, until they were divided (quite arbitrarily) under the USSR.

This is why "one world government" will never work. You cannot kill nations, and you cannot kill individualism. You might as well try to extinguish the sun.

An excellent synopsis of what's to come, as predicted by Gerald Celente, and with which I agree 100%.

Here's a scary story. This is how hyperinflation (defined here as >20% per year or the doubling of prices in 4 years, as measured by the gold price) has crept up on Canadians over the past 2 years.

It was the summer of 2007. Gold was below $700 US. The Canadian dollar was reaching parity with the US dollar. Thus gold was around $700 Canadian.

Gold shot up through the fall of 2007 until November, when it reached $800 Canadian. The Canadian dollar was stronger than the US dollar!

Through March of 2008, gold was on the rise. Price in March? $1000 Canadian. The Canadian dollar was still close to parity.

Through the summer of 2008, not much change. Still $1000. Then came the great devaluation. The crash of August, 2008.

Gold fell precipitously. But the Canadian dollar was now far below the US dollar. So, in Canadian dollars, gold was still around $900. (At the worst of the Great Collapse in Everything that was the fall of 2008)

Then, gold quickly shot up through $1000. By January 2009, it was $1100.

Today, it's just over $1200.

So the Canadian dollar inflated 71% in 18 months! That's 43% inflation per year!

Still waiting for a correction to buy gold?

What's more is that central banks still haven't raised interest rates!! They're all expecting deflation! What a bunch of fools! Now is the time to take advantage of the greatest contrarian trade in the history of the world. Short currencies and buy gold.

To put a final nail in the coffin of the "fiat currency deflation" argument:

Japan's so-called deflation - the only example of a fiat deflation - lasted 3 years and had a maximum annual decline in the CPI of just 1%.

If we define inflation as the rise in CPI, within a margin of error of 1%, then Japan had absolutely NO deflation.

Of course, there have been short-term periods of deflation in just about every fiat currency. For instance, the year 1970 in the US was a major deflationary year. However, I'm talking here about periods longer than 2 years (length of your average recession). I'm talking about 4 years or more of deflation. There's never been such a case. Not even in Japan.

So again, one only needs to adjust the definition of inflation slightly to mean "net inflation over a period of 4 or more years" to state confidently that all fiat currencies have always inflated.

And what exactly is inflation? The way I define inflation is "a rise in consumer prices without a corresponding change in supply & demand."

Deflation would be the opposite: "a fall in consumer prices without a corresponding change in supply & demand."

The latter part is critical, because prices rise & fall all the time due to supply & demand imbalances. However, when you have the same supply and the same demand and prices are rising, it can only be because there are more dollars with which to denominate the price.

So knowing all this, what would you rather prepare for? Inflation, or deflation? If you say deflation then you're probably also preparing for the second coming of Jesus Christ and you probably already have a bunker set up in preparation for the 2012 arrival of Planet X.

I've been reading Mike Shedlock's financial blog for a while now, mainly to have a contrarian view to the inflationary perspective that the US dollar will collapse.

He posts great news and analysis and always very timely. His deflation thesis always seemed rather bizarre to me. I mean, here you have the US dollar - a fiat currency - and yet his thesis is that because of debt destruction, we're going to see deflation in the US and a rise of the US dollar. Also strange because no fiat currency has ever deflated for more than a few months. Look it up. Prove me wrong.

Anyway, for a long time I gave him the benefit of the doubt, mainly because his arguments all seemed so compelling. But here's what he posted in an article yesterday:

"Hyperinflation?

No, this madness is nowhere close to causing hyperinflation. You do not get hyperinflation with this much consumer and corporate debt when unemployment is soaring globally, overcapacity is rampant, and wages are falling. Please see Fiat World Mathematical Model for more details."

Well, he's finally lost it. There is NO way I'm going to agree with that argument. That sounds more like something Jim Cramer might say on CNBC. Here's why...

In the history of the world, there have been MANY recorded incidents of hyperinflation occurring precisely at moments when there was "overcapacity" in the economy, huge indebtedness, soaring unemployment, and falling wages.

Look at Zimbabwe. How many people have jobs there? How many people can actually spend money on anything but the most basic necessities of life? Yet there's hyperinflation.

Mish, you have totally lost your credibility with this one argument. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe a moment of total absent-minded foolishness. But if your entire thesis of deflation relies on this argument, then you are just plain wrong.

The bottom line is, the value of a currency has little to do with economic fundamentals. If the US dollar went down 50% tomorrow (i.e. prices doubled), you'd say consumers went on an insane over-the-top shopping spree. Maybe Obama finally gave the PEOPLE a stimulus package. But you'd be wrong. The dollar could depreciate 50% without ANY FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE in the economy! This is very important to understand.

For example, you might have salaries $27,000 one day and $32,000 the next. Gas would also go from $2.70 a gallon one day to $3.70 the next. If you were Mish, you would argue, "consumers just got a raise and so they're spending more!" Or, "there's a glut of savings!" In reality, what happened is consumers got a PAY CUT! REAL wages went down. Savings didn't change. The dollar just depreciated nearly 40%. That's what happened.

This depreciation of the dollar thing is very hard to understand intuitively, because it's a complex mass-psychology phenomenon, and because it has never happened in the United States. But it will happen. It's not a matter "if" but "when". All fiat currencies in the history of the world have eventually become worthless. The question is, are you prepared for this eventuality? What good is the FDIC if you have $100,000 in the bank and the minimum wage is $50,000 an hour?

I consider the possibility of hyperinflation in a fiat regime to be far more likely (by a factor of 100) than the possibility of a sustained multi-year deflation. I'm much more in agreement now with Peter Schiff than Mike Shedlock.

Here's a neat little story for you. The Bank of Canada claims that over the past 14 years (from 1995 to 2009), there has been only 28% inflation in consumer prices (Core CPI). That averages out to 1.78% per year. But that's not the most shocking thing about this story. The shocking thing is, they're more or less right!

My own calculation of inflation (using various commodities, housing prices, and wages) indicates that we had just 49% inflation since 1995. That's 2.87% per year. For 14 years.

How can this happen in a fiat currency regime? I mean, aren't all fiat currencies supposed to inflate at faster & faster rates until they become worthless? Isn't growth in the money supply supposed to translate into higher prices?

By that logic, if we look at the Canadian M3 money supply, we should see little growth there as well. But guess what? M3 money supply grew from about $470 billion in 1995 to $1.3 trillion today. That is a 177% growth! That should have translated into 7.55% inflation per year!

We are operating today as if the M3 were just $699 billion. Where did the other $600 billion go?

Why am I saying all this? Because, arguably, inflation is better than deflation for the average person, in a debt-based monetary system, because it reduces the burden of debt over time. We should all be rooting for inflation, especially wage inflation. Everyone should get out there and strike!

But I would go further and say that it is not inflation, but an uncontrollable money supply, that leads to rapidly-changing property ownership and shifting societal structure. It means that few people ever gain the wealth & power to control society. It makes societies more prudent (saving for a rainy day) and leads to a more equitable distribution of wealth, since no one person can amass a huge amount of wealth. It also leads to a fairer distribution of wealth, because only those who are competent will end up retaining their property for any period of time. Therefore, it should be in everyone's interest (except those who wish to control society) to relinquish all human control over the money supply and turn it over to mother nature.

Abolish the Fed.

Greenspan admits that the Federal Reserve is a PRIVATE entity.

Here's how I see things right now...

If you look at the last 10 years, what do you see? I see a period of little to no change. Just briefly go back mentally to 1999. You had powerful computers, 3D graphics, Internet, Google, hip hop, house music, Seinfeld, and all sorts of things that are (remarkably) still popular today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hasn't moved in 10 years. Hardly anything has changed.

If you look at history, such long periods of stagnation are usually followed by periods of MUCH MORE RAPID change. I believe we are entering one of those periods now. In 10 years, we'll look back to 2009 as if it were ancient history. Seinfeld will no longer be relevant. "The Simpsons" will be regarded as we regard "I Love Lucy" these days. There will be such a profound change in society that a whole new culture will emerge, which will regard the "old culture" of the 1990s and 2000s as irrelevant to the new present-day reality.

There is the real possibility that THERE WILL BE NO Dow in 10 years, and no US dollar, because the US government will have defaulted on its debt, and the US will have split up into separate sovereign states by 2020. We are at the beginning of an unprecedented period in world history. I expect that we'll see major political upheavals and a major restructuring of the current world order similar to what took place during World War II. Currencies will fall. There will be exchange controls. Countries will cease to exist. Borders will be redrawn. Only gold & silver will protect wealth.

In terms of lifestyle, people will go back to farming and a heavily rural, heavily local way of living. Transportation will be very difficult. Most people will simply ride bikes. Petroleum or gasoline will be a very unusual item to see in the 2020s. This is because the global interconnected system of distribution that currently still (barely) exists will be completely dysfunctional. It's not that there won't be enough oil. It's that it will be very hard to convince countries like Venezuela or Iran to sell it to us or distribute it to us, with global currencies in hyperinflation and price-fixing mechanisms like the COMEX in default.

Traffic will be scaled back to 1920s levels. People who can afford to drive will be regarded as extremely well-off financially. Companies will be forced to adapt to this new lifestyle. People will simply not go to work if it costs them more to get to work than what they're getting paid.

As far as food is concerned, you will only be buying items that are "in season." That means locally-grown produce. For us Canadians, that means no more oranges in February I'm afraid. Although such items will still be available. They'll just be very expensive. Oranges, and other exotic food items, will be given as gifts for Christmas.

There will be a general negative attitude toward debt, banks, and conspicuous consumption. Those who flaunt their wealth will be ridiculed because it will be assumed that they are actually in debt to finance their extravagance. People will work diligently at building up savings. The neighbour across the street might look & behave as if they are poor when in fact they have amassed quite a bit of wealth in the form of savings. But all of this will be known & obvious to everyone.

The era of the full-time permanent job with benefits is over. People will enter labour contracts of a very different form from what they are today. The contracts will be very short-term, very uncertain in their duration, and very uncertain in compensation. They will also often times be quite informal. In other words, nobody will have a guaranteed income. It will be quite common to see one person doing 3 or 4 jobs simultaneously, and those jobs may not all be in the same field. In other words, it will be possible for people to truly do what they love, expanding in multiple dimensions of their personalities, *provided* that they are OK with the fact that they have no guaranteed income.

Incomes will drop dramatically. A worker in China will make roughly the same amount as a worker in Canada. That is, a typical salary for a Canadian worker might be $7000 to $8000 a year (in today's money). Of course, lots of other prices will also drop, so rent would cost only $300 a month or so... and even less if sharing an apartment. To own a modest apartment will cost somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000 in today's money, and I'm more inclined toward the low side.

University will become cheaper if not free. Attendance at colleges and universities will drop off a cliff in the coming years. The reason? Price. And pretty soon professors will realise that if they want to keep their jobs, they better (a) ask the government for assistance by socializing post-secondary education or (b) lower tuitions and accept pay cuts as a result. I'm more inclined at this point toward (a) as the solution that will be sought, simply because no professor would ever ask for a pay cut.

The most secure jobs will be government jobs. There will still be teachers, doctors, police officers, and other government workers. These will be paid the highest and have the highest job security. I would put public school teacher as the top job for the next 20 years. High pay, high security, low stress, and 3 months of summer vacation.

During the tougher periods, there will be shortages of many essential goods. Some people will be prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain certain things. Be prepared to witness more bribery and underground commerce. There will be MANY shadowy deals done under the table. Some may be 100% legit, others may be scams. It will be a dangerous world.

Barter will be an accepted method of exchange. Barter may be in terms of labour (e.g. I will mow your lawn for 2 weeks if you give me 3 cans of coffee), or "I will pay you $50 a month if you let me rent your garage to sell widgets.

How do I know all of this will happen as I described? Well, I've seen it before. I've lived through it. My parents lived through it. This was Romania, from 1978 to today & still ongoing. It is a perfect example of a once-great society destroyed by greed and corruption. It was a *little bit* better than what I think is coming, because you had a lot of government safety nets in place, like guaranteed employment and guaranteed housing, and you had a lot of surplus wealth of previous generations that had been kept and passed down to the younger generations. Plus, you had farms all over the place. Farmers were a major part of society and encouraged and heavily subsidized by the government. People could go to farms to obtain produce that they would not normally find in the city, and many had relatives who worked on farms.

Here in North America the principal difference is that everyone is broke. All the wealth was sucked out by the central bankers. Second difference is there is little or no farming. Food could become nearly impossible to obtain for many people. There's also no safety net in place. Unemployment could easily reach 40% or higher - there's nothing to prevent that from happening. Homelessness could become a major problem. There could also be a revolution, or multiple revolutions where various groups of people take over the government by force. Also, with such bleak economic prospects, crime is sure to rise. The government will be nearly broke, so it will have a very hard time keeping crime in check. See, this is what I mean by "it will get worse."

For some reason, I'm in a really revolutionary ("revolted") mood today.

Anyway...

I have a theory:

The 1950s and 60s - an era regarded as an era of "prosperity" by most historians - was actually the EXACT OPPOSITE.

Starting with World War II, and going on until today, the real wealth of Americans has been slowly sucked away, to the point where most Americans today not only have NO wealth but they actually have NEGATIVE wealth, where they are on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt which they took out to buy a giant mansion, multiple imported cars, and of course a whole lot of Chinese junk.

The era of conspicuous consumption, starting in the 40s and going on until recently, was actually the slow process of bankrupting America and plunging it into the darkness of the third world.

It was engineered by design, using Nazi-style propaganda...actually even the Nazis would marvel at the American propaganda of the 1950s where the middle class was always portrayed as owning a really large house, multiple top-notch cars, and lots of useless (but expensive) decorative trinkets.

It all started after World War II. Using the savings that Americans had built up over the Great Depression (and in the century prior to that), the international bankers created an incredibly convincing propaganda image of the middle-class American living the suburban lifestyle with a giant house, etc. All Americans of more modest means, who didn't have giant homes but who had savings and maybe even a modest house, were lured into this consumerist materialist lifestyle of "more stuff is better". The result was that Americans gradually slipped from savings into debt, while moving from frugality into conspicuous consumption in trying to keep up with the Joneses (because that's what they saw on TV).

International corporations were fooled too. They were given money and told to expand, just keep expanding. As long as they expanded exponentially every year, everything would be great. So they started out expanding nationally first. Then, once they saturated that market and profit margins started to slip, they expanded internationally, looking for cheap labour and resources. They secured cheaper & cheaper labour for a long time. They harvested rainforests and cleared the Earth of all its precious natural resources, all the while getting deeper & deeper into debt. But finally, the game is up. The bankers have come to collect on their debt. Once-giant international companies are falling into bankruptcy. They have no more rainforests left to exploit. They have no more Malaysian children left to exploit. It's over. Just like the American consumer who was lured into mountains of debt, so were once-respectable American corporations lured into more and more debt. With each generation, as they devised new ways of paying off that debt, they became more despised all over the world and their day of reckoning drew closer.

We're now at the endgame. It is checkmate for the international bankers. The world owes trillions to them, but they won't be able to collect, because the people will revolt and the international bankers will be exposed for the gigantic fraud they created, and for the rigged monetary system that led to unfathomable destruction of the Earth and of the human spirit.

Like they did in the 1960s, we must unite in love & peace. We must maintain solidarity, because the bankers will not go without a fight. We must model heroes like Gandhi and MLK in the struggle for justice. We must not give in to their plan of global despair and poverty. We must fight for a future of prosperity and peace.

They have won. It's over. Welcome to International Socialism.


Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Dont cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
Well live together or well die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armor
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above

In looking at historical data for the Dow, gold, and treasuries, I was able to find some interesting correlations which could be used to predict what will happen over the next 30-50 years.

First of all, gold is inversely correlated with US treasuries. Next, the Dow is positively correlated with US treasuries. Here's what that means:

A secular bull market in treasuries => A secular bear market in gold => A secular bull market in Dow
A secular bear market in treasuries => A secular bull market in gold => A secular bear market in Dow

We can illustrate this by looking at the past 80 years...

1932-1960	Secular bull market in treasuries	Gold up 100% ($21 to $42)	Dow up 1300%	Interest rates went from 20-30% (depression-era) to 2% (1950s)
1961-1981	Secular bear market in treasuries	Gold up 1900% (from $42)	Dow up 25%	Interest rates went from 2% (1950s) to 20% (1980)
1982-2008	Secular bull market in treasuries	Gold up 100% (from 1980s average)	Dow up 1400%	Interest rates went from 20% (1980) to 0% (2009)
2009-2030	Secular bear market in treasuries	Gold up ????%	Dow up ??%	Interest rates will go from 0% (2009) to ??% (2030)

This means we can say what the financial world will look like in 2030:

Dow: 12,000 to 15,000
Gold: $15,000 to $19,000 (don't laugh! this is scary!!)
Interest rates: 15 - 20%


To get some sense of how much money that is, we have to take into account inflation. From 1961 to 1981, wages went up about 120%. This means inflation was *at least* 120%. The price of oil went up 400%. This means inflation was *at most* 400%. The geometric mean of that is 230%. This translates to a yearly inflation rate of 6.2%. I'm not using the CPI because it's heavily massaged.

So let's assume that the same rate of inflation (6.2%) takes hold over the next 20 years. This means that, in today's dollars, gold would be between $4500 and $5700. Plausible, given that the 1980 peak is $2200 in today's dollars. Now, how much would the Dow of 2030 be in today's dollars? 3600 to 4500. Many analysts (including Peter Schiff) contend that the Dow will go down to 3000 in the next few years. So it's VERY plausible.

Let's do some more math and see what other things might cost in 2030 (using the 6.2% rate of inflation):

Average Salary: $91,000 / year
Average House: $650,000
Oil (if there's any left): $130 / barrel
Gasoline (if we still use it): $7.15 / gallon
Rent: $3000 / month
Car (new): $90,000
Bread: $6.29
Can of Coke: $3.30
Fancy Dinner: $400
Movie: $30
Pair of Shoes: $200
Decent Suit: $1200
Really Nice Suit: $2900
Flight to Amsterdam: $3500

Ladies & gentlemen, I see before me a crisis that will lead to the thirdworldization of America.

Okay, so "thirdworldization" isn't really a word. But it could become one.

One thing is clear: the United States of America is rapidly heading toward third-world country status.

"But... this has never happened before" you say! Actually, it has. The Roman empire collapsed in a similar way. The government became more and more draconian while trying to fight inflation (caused by all the excesses of past politicians), which led to disenfranchisement, factionalization, and a 50-year period of relative anarchy known as the "Crisis of the Third Century".

But history aside - I'm going to show you how America is set to enter the third world.

I'll begin by defining the term "third world" in terms of the way it's used in the modern vernacular. Initially, "third world" was used in reference to specific countries during the cold war. But today, it's used more broadly to describe countries where the standard of living is very low and the level of political organization borders on anarchy.

So what are the characteristics of a "third world" country? One only needs to look at Mexico for an example. Here are 7 characteristics of a third world country:

1. Militias and/or warlords control much of the country's means of production.
2. All public officials are corrupt, even at low levels (e.g. police officers).
3. Most business owners/officers are tied to militias and/or corrupt government officials, and are themselves corrupt.
4. Trade relations with foreign countries are very limited or non-existent.
5. The country has little in the way of credit rating, and as a result has high inflation (possibly even hyperinflation).
6. Unemployment is high, wages are very low, and the standard of living is similar to the Great Depression.
7. The country is incapable of producing enough to sustain its own people (i.e. GDP is very low).

Romania from about 1985 to 1995 met all 7 of these criteria. Though I was only a child then, I still remember it quite well. After 1995, #4-7 improved considerably, but #1-3 still continue unchanged.

Back to the US - how many of the criteria are met right now? Let's see...

#1 - No. A secretive elite controls America's means of production. Better than a militia...I guess.
#2 - Yes & no. At the high level, it's called lobbying. It's not happening yet at the low level.
#3 - Yes. This is absolutely the case with 99% of US corporations. They lobby the government, and the government does what they want.
#4 - No.
#5 - No.
#6 - No.
#7 - Yes. If you take social security for instance, that is unsustainable. Also, all of America's manufacturing has been exported, and agriculture is being done by a handful of multinational corporations.

So America meets 2.5 out of 7 criteria right now. But where is America heading? What will it look like in 2012? Let's look at current events, because as Gerald Celente says, current events form future trends...

#1 - Squatters are busy taking over abandoned properties these days. If you think you can defend your property with a gun, think again. Squatter "tribes" are large - maybe as many as 100. Bigger than gangs. Think your guns can help you now?

There is increasing factionalization (development of tribal factions) in America. Some are united by ethnicity, others are united by political beliefs. These factions are growing in size and power. The vacuum of power left by the bankrupt US government will be filled in by these factions. There is one thing in common among all these factions: disenfranchisement by the US government.

#2 - When police officers have virtually no food on the table because their government paycheque has either disappeared or shrunk because of inflation, they will gladly accept bribes. A little disenfranchisement will also help. Many will feel disenfranchised when their government paycheque has become a cruel joke. If that doesn't do it, increased taxes will. Not to mention the fact that the government will be perceived as powerless and incompetent after its collapse. Most police officers will become sympathizers of the "people" (the disgruntled masses) as long as they receive some decent bribes.

#5 - When China realizes it's been royally screwed, after the default of the US on all of its dollar-denominated debt, they will no longer lend to the US so willingly. Or perhaps all it takes for China to dump its dollars is for the US to be downgraded from AAA credit rating. The day that happens, the US dollar will begin to resemble the Zimbabwe dollar pretty quickly.

The US is not AAA no matter how you put it. Even if you believe they have 8,500 tons of gold at Fort Knox, that's only worth about $250 billion. The total amount of US dollar-denominated credit outstanding is about $36 trillion. So the gold at Fort Knox doesn't even cover 1% of that. Gold would have to go to $13,000/oz just to back 10% of the US dollars sloshing around out there. And that's if you believe the whole Fort Knox business.

#4 - See #5. Basically, with no more credit, the US will be forced to withdraw from all of its global outposts purely for financial reasons. Since they are heavily reliant on imports, a loss of credit rating would immediately result in shortages of the most basic goods out there, including gasoline and food.

#6 - Unemployment in the US will go above 10% and likely even above 15%. After inflation, a salary of $30,000 a year will look similar to what a Chinese worker makes today. Without basic goods such as gasoline (see #4), the average American will be plunged into - literally - a "dark age".

So now you see that it is possible for the US to fall into third world country status. Out of all the criteria, I have to admit that #2 (street corruption) seems the LEAST likely to happen. I just don't see your typical God-fearing American bribing a police officer. But I could be wrong. Actually - let's hope I'm 100% wrong and none of these doom & gloom predictions ever happen.

So I've met a couple of people (who shall remain nameless) over the past few weeks who insist that C++ is better than Java. I am truly impressed by the stubbornness of these people. So here goes. I'm going to argue once & for all why ...
OH NO! I'm not falling into that trap.

I'm just going to pose questions that any developer should ask before choosing either C++ or Java. NOTE: I'm not advocating just Java here. Mono has comparable features, or .NET if you don't care about cross-platform.

Before I start I'd like to mention that I was once a die-hard C++er. I started programming in C++ back when I was 11, but 5 years after that I found .NET and never looked back. So I technically have 5 years of experience with nothing but C++, and I have used it off & on and will continue using it whenever I absolutely need to.

1. Ant vs "make"

What's better? Ant or "make"? Would you rather write a Makefile (no extension) in a proprietary hard-to-read language, with a text editor like "vim", or would you rather write an XML file (build.xml) which could easily be generated by a tool (perhaps with a GUI)?

Secondly, which one has more capabilities? Ant or "make"?

2. Pointers

Do you really need pointers? Do you really need to convert integers (memory addresses) to objects? Are you willing to put up with the hassle of manually collecting garbage (using "delete" statements)? How are you going to test that you don't have memory leaks?

What if the architecture you're working on uses 48-bit memory addresses and you want to port your program to an architecture that uses 64-bit memory addresses? Have you thought about how you're going to do that? Because you know, in Java you don't need to think about any of this.

3. CPU Architecture and OS

What CPU are you programming for? What OS? Do you need little-endian or big-endian integers? Are you going to use Unicode? Which kind? UTF-8 or UTF-16? With Java, you don't need to think about it.

Suppose you are coding for multiple OSes/CPUs. Do you like having lots of preprocessor statements in your code? There is no need for preprocessor statements in Java. If you do want to check what OS or CPU you are running on, you can do so at runtime.

How are you going to know what libraries to link to on each OS? And how will you know that you have the right version? For the right architecture/OS? In Java, you have only one shared library: the JDK. In C++, you have a variable number of shared libraries.

4. JUnit

One question: Unit testing: how will you do it in C++? Or will you just rely on integration testing all the way through?

5. Graphical User Interface

Suppose you want a GUI for your application. What toolkit will you use? Gtk, Qt, Win32, MFC, .NET? Console is starting to look more attractive already, isn't it? Will you use a different toolkit for each OS? At least in Java, SWT handles all that dirty work and you can get a native GUI on just about every OS.

6. Web Applications

What are you going to do for web applications? Make/use a CGI application? Use Perl/Python/PHP? Does the ugliness of those scripting languages bother you at all? Or the fact that you'll have to learn yet another language? With Java, you can build a totally custom web server in about 300 lines of code. You also have JSP.

7. Dynamic Linking

Suppose you want to enable your application to have plugins, so that other developers can contribute parts of your application without seeing the core application's source code. How exactly are you going to do this? In Windows, you can use DLLs. What about in Linux? How are you going to distinguish between the two?

What if somebody submits a plugin built for Linux and your application is built for Windows? Maybe you want to load that plugin anyway, because it technically shouldn't have any OS calls. How will you do it? The plugin is an .so file and your application is an EXE. Feel like figuring that out?

8. Exceptions vs. Core Dumps

Think about this carefully: Would you rather receive a core dump (segmentation fault) if something goes really seriously wrong, or would you rather it be an exception?

Conclusion

This is it for now... I may add to this article if I come up with anything else.

It's official: The Council on Foreign Relations now calls the US dollar a "historical anomaly," a "piece of paper of no intrinsic merit."

Check it out - straight from the horse's mouth.

I've taken the liberty of coming up with a list of very specific things that I would do if I were US President...

• End all combat operations, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere
• Bring those troops home and station them at the border (80% at the US-Mexico border, 20% at the US-Canada border)
• Place a permanent cap on military spending during times of peace (or undeclared war)
• Implement a GST (Goods & Services Tax), a national sales tax of 5% on all discretionary consumption goods
• Eliminate income taxes for incomes of $30,000 or less per year
• Institute a flat 20% income tax on all income exceeding $30,000
• Institute a 25% tax on gasoline and diesel fuel, to encourage the development of alternative technologies
• Give the US Treasury legal authority to produce silver coins and certificates
• Create a public education campaign on the benefits of using silver as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes as money
• Create a 3-year program for phasing out the legal tender status of Federal Reserve Notes and the Federal Reserve itself
• Give the federal government the authority to finance itself directly by issuing US Treasury bonds (denominated in silver dollars) rather than by borrowing from the Federal Reserve
• After the use of Federal Reserve Notes is phased out, finance the entire national debt using 30-year US Treasury bonds denominated in silver dollars
  
• Create a system of transfer payments between the states, where rich states give a small percentage of their tax revenue to poor states
• Create a 3-year program to move medicare, social security, and prescription drug coverage to the state level
• Eliminate the DEA and all anti-drug legislation, legalizing all drugs from cocaine to marijuana
• Eliminate the national minimum drinking age
• Get rid of the FDA and FCC
• Revamp the government statistics program so that official statistics are realistic again
• Create a federal (public) TV + radio station, with a clear mandate to provide balanced journalism, that competes with the private networks (like the CBC in Canada)
  
• Start a 10-year plan to develop an interstate rail system similar to the interstate highway system
• Deliver a state of the union speech with the sole purpose of telling the truth to the American people
• The speech would discuss false-flag attacks, the US constitution, the Federal Reserve, secret societies (CFR, Bilderberg, etc.), and who owns the private media
• The speech would conclude with, "My fellow Americans, we have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Of course, by the time I get to the silver stuff, I'd probably be assassinated, or some odd scandal would come up that would force me to resign, or I'd be impeached. Power always does what it wants folks. The owners of America would never allow any US President to do what I just stated.

I was reading the article about it on Wikipedia and came across several interesting things. But before I go into that, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Georgia Guidestones:

"The Georgia Guidestones are a huge granite artifact in Elbert County, Georgia, USA. It is sometimes referred to as the "American Stonehenge"^[1], a title which has been applied at times to a number of other structures."

So, as I mentioned earlier, I found a few interesting things in the article...

1. It was erected on March 22, 1980. March 22! ... 322! That's the number used by Skull & Bones. These people are obsessed with numerology!
2. It was written in several ancient languages including Sanskrit, Babylonian, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs! At this point, it became clear what the intent was. It was to make a monument that could be unearthed and understood by future archaeologists. Like the Rosetta Stone. It's an archaeological artifact meant for future civilizations.
   
3. The stones themselves weight about 42,000 lbs each and are astronomically aligned. Why the astronomical alignment? Well, because future civilizations will be able to tell the time when the monument was erected by using past star alignments, in the same way that the Great Pyramid was found to be about 10,000 years old based on its astronomical alignment.

Clearly, the purpose of the Georgia Guidestones is to send a message into the future - several millennia into the future in fact.

So what is the message? It is this...

MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000
  IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE
GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY —
  IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY
UNITE HUMANITY WITH A LIVING
  NEW LANGUAGE
RULE PASSION — FAITH — TRADITION
  AND ALL THINGS
    WITH TEMPERED REASON
PROTECT PEOPLE AND NATIONS
  WITH FAIR LAWS AND JUST COURTS
LET ALL NATIONS RULE INTERNALLY
  RESOLVING EXTERNAL DISPUTES
    IN A WORLD COURT
AVOID PETTY LAWS AND USELESS
  OFFICIALS
BALANCE PERSONAL RIGHTS WITH
  SOCIAL DUTIES.
PRIZE TRUTH — BEAUTY — LOVE —
  SEEKING HARMONY WITH THE
    INFINITE
BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH —
  LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE —
    LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE

The emperor has no clothes! The emperor has no clothes!

The collapse of Freddie & Fannie is the admission of the insolvency of two companies together holding about $5 trillion...
$5 TRILLION
in mortgages.

$5 trillion amounts to about 35% of US GDP, and about 50% of the US public debt!

We're talking about 35% of the entire US possibly being insolvent!

Here's a revealing video of what could happen now...

Need I say more?

I'm going to be as blunt as possible by putting several important historical truths in point form. These are all facts.

WARNING: You may be deeply disturbed by what I'm about to say. But I'll say it anyway.

1. Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is quoted as saying, "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."
2. The United States of America is a British private corporation. All US courts have a gold-fringed flag to indicate maritime admiralty (the law of the sea). Maritime admiralty is a system of international laws governing international commerce (done by merchants). ("mer"="sea" in French)
   
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on April 5, 1933, issued an executive order requiring all American citizens to turn over their gold bullion to the Federal Reserve, or be subjected to a $10,000 fine. He enforced this executive order even though it was not in his jurisdiction to do so (executive orders only apply to persons in the US federal government).
4. The attacks of Pearl Harbor were aided by the US government. Not only did US officials have prior knowledge of the attack, they let it happen, so that it could be used as a pretext to enter World War II.
   
5. The sinking of the Lusitania in WWI was a staged event. It was done in order to gain public support for the US entering World War I.
6. The dropping of not one but two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, authorized by Harry Truman in World War II, was an act of genocide by the United States of America. Japan had already surrendered.
   
7. The Vietnam War lasted 16 years, resulted in 58,000 American casualties, and over 1 million Vietnamese civilian deaths. It was a worse genocide than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and neared the magnitude of the Holocaust.
8. Henry Kissinger often referred to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy."
9. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, along with WTC 7, were demolished in a controlled fashion using thermite on September 11, 2001.
   
10. Rudolph Giuliani hired a private company after 9/11 to carry away all molten metal debris from ground zero to private, guarded trash dumps so that no investigation could be carried out into what actually caused the buildings to collapse.
    
11. Dick Cheney ordered NORAD to stand down on September 11, 2001, while the attacks were taking place.
12. When asked to testify before the 9/11 commission, George W. Bush insisted that he testify only together with Dick Cheney (not separately).
    
13. The air near ground zero was unsafe to breathe on 9/11 and as a consequence thousands NYC citizens are experiencing respiratory illnesses. However, the EPA has consistently denied any link between the air quality after 9/11 and these illnesses.
14. The Gulf of Tonkin incident during the Vietnam War was a staged event, just like the Lusitania, and just like Pearl Harbor. It was used to justify an escalation of the Vietnam War because the public's approval of the war was vanishing.
    
15. George W. Bush received a warning stating "Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States," a few months before 9/11.
16. In 1972, Chester M. Pierce, a Professor at Harvard University, stated: "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being. It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future."
17. David Rockefeller stated in 1991: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
18. Under the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU is officially a sovereign entity, with a privately-owned Central Bank, a European Court, a Parliament, and a President. The EU has its own flag, anthem, and currency.
19. The British Crown owns and directs almost all of the world's wealth. The current system of global commerce (a.k.a. globalization) is entirely set up and controlled by the British Crown.
20. Osama bin Laden remains at large. He is on dialysis and presumed dead, yet videos of him still surface occasionally.
    

To be continued...

Remember how, before its collapse, Enron was driving up energy prices in California through unregulated futures trading?

Remember how traders at Enron cheered every time a transformer burned out or every time there were forest fires?

Well, try applying this idea to oil. How do you control the oil market? If you make a country politically unstable to shut off its oil supply, what happens to the oil price?

This is exactly what Iraq was about. It was NOT about gaining access to "highly valuable" oil supplies. It was NOT about finding those weapons of mass destruction. It was NOT about Iraqi freedom!

It was about DESTROYING oil supply in order to drive up oil prices!

Just like Enron, the cartel controlling oil which included Bush, Cheney, Haliburton, and the Carlyle Group, decided it was time to boost profits for their little share of the oil industry by creating events which would lead to a rise in oil prices.

Think about it: Bush & Cheney live off-grid, independent of oil. In fact, they're some of the "greenest" individuals in America! There's a good reason for this, and it has nothing to do with peak oil. It has everything to do with the fact that they knew that they would cause an oil price spike of gigantic proportions and they simply didn't want to be paying those high prices. I mean, what good is a rising investment if you then have to pay more for the things you need?

Right now, for example, the price of oil is significantly higher than all other commodities. It's out of sync. The gold-to-oil ratio which has traditionally stayed around 15, is now below 7! Oil is at a ridiculously high price even when priced in gold! That cannot be explained by inflation alone.

Even more puzzling is the fact that oil supplies have remained flat or declining since about 2003. Now, you could say peak oil has arrived, but I think far more likely is that supply has been deliberately kept at that level. Why? First of all, peak oil theory does not predict a flat line longer than about a year. The current flat-lining for 5+ years is HIGHLY atypical of peak oil. Second, look at Venezuela's internal oil prices. They are ridiculously low! This indicates Venezuela is not exporting as much oil as it could be. Look at China, which is subsidizing the cost of oil without a problem. There seems to be plenty of oil to go around, but somehow it does not reach the global market. The PRIME reason for the flat oil supply in the past 5 years is NOT peak oil! It is political instability! Iraq's oil supply has dropped significantly since the invasion. And Venezuela (since the arrival of Chavez) has had its supply fall off as well. By "supply" I mean the amount of oil reaching the global market. We have a situation which is much more like the oil shocks of the 1970s than a global peak in oil production.

So now, naturally, Bush & Cheney are talking about invading Iran. McCain is even singing about it! There's a good reason for this. Iran has a fairly large oil reserve that is coming to market rather undisturbed right now. If they could go in there and f**k things up (to use Cheney's language), oil would go through the roof!

So there you have it folks, a perfectly logical explanation for why oil prices are so high, and why America's increasingly getting bogged down in unnecessary wars. Much of America's military involvement in the world right now is related to cornering the oil market.

In the long run, though, this strategy will backfire for the oil industry. Why? Because when enough people stop consuming oil, the price will crash and the price will end up LOWER than where it started because demand has been destroyed. The massive stockpiles of oil will then be revealed and rapidly released into the market, driving prices even lower. So, they may be able to game the system for now, but sooner or later the system will be gaming THEM.

Aside: Have you noticed Alan Greenspan going to the Saudis telling them to de-peg their currency from the dollar? Why would he want to do that? Do you think he has ANY concern for the Saudis' financial well-being? I think he just wanted the Saudis to get into trouble with the US so that the Saudi oil supply would be disrupted, driving up oil prices even more. There seems to be a lot of sabotage going on if you look for it, where agents of the US government (like Alan Greenspan) are going around trying to deliberately get the US into trouble with other countries.

I stumbled upon a file I wrote when I was only 12 years old when I coded a DOS game called Galawar (downloadable here!). I had an insane amount of computer knowledge back then:

This is me, sometime in 1999...
==============================================================================
-----     ***             What is protected mode?         ***     ------------
==============================================================================

     Protected mode isn't even close to a mode of security as you might think.
In fact, it is very different than that! Protected mode is a mode of your
CPU, where it can access(by using 24-bit memory addresses) a bigger amount of
memory than the usual 640 KB or less of conventional memory. Conventional
memory was the first memory to work with the 8086 and 8088 processors. Before
that, there was only 64 KB of memory or less to work with. Can you imagine?
Now, with the introduction of the 286 processor, we entered the world of
megabytes. The maximum amount of memory a 286 processor could have accessed
using protected mode was 16 MB. Protected mode was enabled and is enabled still
by the most common driver, HIMEM.SYS. It enables access to the High memory area
which can exceed the old 640 KB limit.

     Galawar uses the 386 processor which has some enhancements. It can access
memory using the virtual x86 mode, which is a mode that can simulate memory
through the hard disk using a page file(when there is not enough memory it
automatically swaps out some data to the hard disk. This is called A20 line
control and is enabled by HIMEM.SYS). Galawar uses the 32-bit enhancement
of the 386 processor to enable faster processing and, therefore, larger data
to go with the 16 MB of memory which can be accessed. 32-bit operating can't
be used on a 286 processor which wasn't a 32-bit processor. That's why, even
though Galawar uses protected mode compatible with the 286, Galawar needs a
386 processor to run.

     Protected mode is divided into two categories of memory, which can each
equal a maximum of 16 MB per block. The first and fastest kind is XMS memory,
which Galawar uses. Galawar could have used EMS memory, the second kind, but
it is a lot slower because it is divided into small handles. Each handle can't
be bigger than 16 KB. That's why, instead of using EMS memory, Galawar turned
back to the old conventional memory, which is somewhat faster than EMS memory
because it allows 64 KB handles. Also, Galawar simplified its requirements
because it would have wanted the EMM386 driver installed too, which can cause
real trouble in interaction with XMS memory. By the way, XMS memory can have
handle sizes up to 16 MB, in increments of 32 KB!

     Galawar hates Windows of any version because it uses too much processor
time(25% up to 50%) and because it uses too much memory. If you run Windows
in 386 Enhanced mode be careful because the memory might be in a page file and
Galawar could slow down a lot. Use DOS instead!(THIS DOESN'T REALLY MATTER
ON A PENTIUM OR PENTIUM II/III PROCESSOR).

     So, now I hope you know what protected mode is and why Galawar needs the
386 processor. You can impress your parents with this as well as your computer
teacher!

M2 money supply in 1930s = $40 billion
Gold price in 1930s = $35/oz
Silver price in 1930s = $1.30/oz

M2 money supply today = $7.7 trillion
Expected Gold price today = $6,700/oz (7.5 times today's actual price!)
Expected Silver price today = $250/oz (15 times today's actual price!)

Conclusion:
As the legendary Mogambu Guru (Richard Daughty) would say, We're freakin' doomed!

You should be able to buy a very decent house with 60 oz of gold or 1500 oz of silver.

Instead, with today's prices, it takes over 400 oz of gold (over 22,000 oz of silver!).

Those who hold gold & silver will be greatly rewarded in the years to come.

I came across an interesting video on YouTube, of an interview with Michael Cremo on Coast-to-Coast AM. He debates Darwin's theory of evolution and the origin of mankind. Interesting stuff...

Click here to see the next video in the series.