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costard

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Posts posted by costard

    President Hosni Mubarak steps down?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    I just meant' date=' it would be a bit naive to expect a flawless, smooth process immediately. Trial and error is required. At least, if you don't forcefully remove every public official that has ever been corrupted, and sit all the voting population through an extensive seminar on how stuff is done properly. ;)[/quote']

    You have that right - and given the level of competence generally available to the human race.... I think the big, the really big problem being faced by these countries (Egypt, Tunisia, now Bahrain) is that the rule of law has met the point where the populace is finding itself unable to feed itself. "You can take my car, my house, my job, but when you take food from the mouths of my children, you cannot expect me not to fight." How is it that these people can suddenly no longer afford to feed themselves? Well, for a start, most of them try to make ends meet on less than $2 a day.

    The movement of money from the US Treasury, through the Federal Reserve to the market has resulted in the flight of that money away from the place where it's wanted, (apparently US Treasury bonds at some dismal price, perhaps kept there for 50 or a hundred years) towards other asset classes. Equities are bouncing along the top at the moment: the price to earnings ratios (particularly due to the sudden loss of market participation that occurred with the '08 crash) have hit the point where more money can be made, for less risk, in gold, silver, copper - commodities.

    Thanks in large part to the largess of the Fed and its nincompoop masters, the amount of money in the market (the number of fiat US dollars) is now such that these commodities have hit their limit and the money has now moved to being put into soft commodities: food and fibre. The markets for these are vast - something like 60% of the global economy. When these commodities are subject to the same price manipulations as, say, silver or oil, you get the basic injustice of theft and fraud transmitting itself from the upper echelons of the society to the lower - everyone knows it is happening, noone can deny that there is a miscarriage of justice (if they're capable of making true statements, of course). The rule of law has been demonstrated to be a sham, there is no longer an obligation on the part of the populace to agree to abide by the dictates of the state. In fact, for them to do so is in effect to invite their own deaths.

    The banks and trading houses of Wall Street own no moral sense (though they claim to be individuals under the US constitution as far as voting law is concerned) - they own lots and lots of paper (paid for with taxpayer money, mind you). This paper requires them to meet promises made, i.e. we have "trust me" coming from the mouths of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BOA, the US legislature..., and doesn't necessarily mean anything when the relationship to reality is plumbed by enquiring minds (do a google search for silver and contango). It really isn't looking good, in my opinion.

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    President Hosni Mubarak steps down?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Michael has it right there. Read Churchill's "History of the English Speaking Peoples" for a good, concise account of the processes running before and in conjunction with the adoption of democracy in the west. Mostly it's about gradual change and a long term view.

    As far as stability goes, I'd say that now would be a good time to be hoping for anything but instability. The meaning of "revolution" is "makes a full circle" - I suspect it found it's usage as a discription for the overthrow of a government to have been coined by someone with a fairly dark sense of humour.

    Being good at doing something you've never done? Every child manages this process, I don't see that it needs to be impossible to do with human institutions of government. A predictable future makes it a lot easier to plan long term and lets the investment in the change needed return value to the commitment of capital: it would seem that our current leadership is incapable of implementing the changes necessary, or having a clue about which changes are necessary, or even of seeing that there will be a large set of difficult problems to solve in the future. No, I diminish their true value with the last: it must seem like there is no place where there are no problems to solve, present or future. It's just that the hopelessness they feel and the incompetence they display is imperfectly emulated by their constituency.

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    The Peng Challenge Thread (By Popular Demand)

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Aussie Santa Claus.

    Breaks into your house, raids the fridge, steals all your stuff and uses your guest towels for toilet paper.

    Christmas isn't really very well received down there, I hear.

    I use kangaroos to pull the sleigh - the pouches sure handy for stashing the loot. Not that I'd get anything worth keeping from Boo's. Although the bio-tech outfits here would pay a premium for the new and wondrous diseases I could isolate there. Hmm.... Santa's going to be wearing a biohazard suit this year Boo. Leave beer and a chop instead of milk and cookies and you won't wake up with your hand in a bucket of tepid... well, tepid, anyway.

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    President Hosni Mubarak steps down?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    So, no light at the end of the $hitstorm tunnel? Anybody?

    Egypt enjoys the position of sitting on one of the major strategic sea routes in the world - it can't just be let go to do it's own thing. Stability is the requirement - something they had with Mubarak until the recent hikes in food prices.

    Aff, I was being kind and imagining that Egypt had a functional opposition party. It doesn't, that's the result of having a dictatorship in place for the last thirty years. What we saw was Mubarak being sacrificed to placate the mob and buy time. Sure he was corrupt, but he held the Middle East in relative stability with the support of the US (and Israel) - something that isn't easy to do.

    On the plus side: CMSF:The Suez will provide some stunning backdrops to the action.

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    President Hosni Mubarak steps down?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Yeah, control went to the army. yay. I mean, would you be happy with this outcome if you cared about democracy or transparent processes of gummint? An opposition that has sat it out for the last thirty years is unlikey to be able to form any sort of functioning cabal, reinstalling the present gummint is unpalatable to the "I confuse emotions with thoughts" mob informed by the world press: the military has the game stitched up. What a **** up.

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    The Peng Challenge Thread (By Popular Demand)

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    ..some words on the nature of love...

    In other news, IL2 Cliff of Dover is already ordered. mayhaps a chance of shooting you all down again will happen in March? I remember being the only pilot of the Cess Patrol that could actually land.

    Rune

    Landing's eeeasy! Ctrl-E and watch the plane plough through your aerodrome: same result without dying and you get to watch the show. Pfft - landings are for sheep fakers.

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    Do you want to know...?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    A must read if you're at all concerned with the direction of the US (and world) economy. It's about 30 pages, but the writing is good and the author doesn't miss a step.

    By the way, zerohedge is great fun to read ('specially the comments) but isn't suited to the paranoid or willfully ignorant. You've been warned.

    Diesel, it'd appear I was way optimisic in giving us two years.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/article/atlantic-capital-management-cooke-hoover-bernanke

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    Challenge : reading

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    I guess if your courses in self esteem don't include study on the worth of achieving academic competency you aren't doing anyone any favours. That said, your dominant culture reveres the ability to make money - sportspeople, gamblers and dissemblers are all at the top of that tree. Intellectuals, phht.

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