Originally posted March 12, 2012: Great cities have always consumed population. In times past, infectious diseases spread by rats and polluted water, respiratory diseases due to air pollution, and the absence of space to grow food to avert starvation during times of unemployment, all reduced the life expectancy and fertility of urban populations relative to that of country dwellers.
Today, cities are healthier places to live, but they still impose a severe restraint on human reproductive success due to the high cost of urban living, particularly the costs of housing and transportation.
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it "I refute it thus."
James Boswell:The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)
The world is composed of matter: wind, water, and hard things like rocks that can be kicked by philosophers, whereas our awareness of the world seems to be of an altogether different character. Consciouslness, except our own, cannot be seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled or otherwise directly shared, but can only be intimated by words, the meanings of which we learn ostensively, by reference to things that can be observed by both speaker and hearer.
The challenge of explaining consciousness has naturally attracted the attention of philosophers who seem almost as puzzled by the problem as anyone else. A solution that some philosophers have adopted is to assume that consciousness is inherent in all matter, not just brains, a theory called panpsychism.
9/11 has provided many people with an interesting intellectual puzzle, the solution to which, in outline at least, is fairly obvious, but which will never be publicly acknowledged short of a coup d'état in Washington, DC.
The reason the truth cannot otherwise be acknowledged is obvious: many people were involved in 9/11, which means that public recognition of the truth would necessitate mass trials and executions of members of both Democratic and Republican Party leadership, plus many prominent persons within the security apparatus. Almost certainly, corporate entities, their directors, and members of their technical staffs would also be implicated, together with security services and corporate entities of several other countries.
There is more evidence to prove
that saltness [of the sea] is due to the admixture of some substance, besides
that which we have adduced. Make a vessel of wax and put it in the sea,
fastening its mouth in such a way as to prevent any water getting in. Then the
water that percolates through the wax sides of the vessel is sweet, the earthy
stuff, the admixture of which makes the water salt, being separated off as it
were by a filter.
Aristotle: Meteorology, Book II
First Posted October 15, 2012: It has been suggested that
this is an example of Aristotle giving experimental proof of desalination by
osmosis. In fact, it is an example of why science in ancient Greece never took
off. Moreover, if the procedure Aristotle described had worked, it would have been an
example not of osmosis but of reverse osmosis, whereby water from a salty
solution is forced through a semipermeable membrane that prevents the passage of
salts. But as described, the procedure would not have worked because the walls
of a vessel of wax will not serve as a semipermeable membrane. Moreover, unless
the vessel was immersed at depth, something Aristotle does not mention, there
would have been no pressure gradient to drive the process.
When, during the First World War, a British Expeditionary Force crossed the English Channel to fight alongside the French army in the defense of France, the German Kaiser dismissed it as a "contemptible little army".
In an article at Psych Central by Margarita Tartakovsky entitled What You Need to Know About Psychosis in Parkinson’s Disease, we are told that “Psychosis in Parkinson’s disease is very common.” And then, quoting Dr. James Beck, Director of research programs at the Parkinson's Disease Foundation:
In fact, psychosis may affect 1 in 5 Parkinson’s patients... And as many as 2 out of 3 patients may experience minor symptoms, “such as non-bothersome illusions. (An example is “seeing something in the corner of your eye that may not be there, [such as] a bug in the sink for an instant.”)
Patients primarily experience visual hallucinations ... A smaller number of patients – 10 to 20 percent – experience auditory hallucinations, he said.
We all know what Jesus thought about major social issues of his own days on Earth, matters such as the stoning of adulteresses, the payment of taxes to Rome, how to respond when smitten on the cheek, and so forth. But there are many moral questions that we have to decide today on which Jesus's position is not immediately obvious.
Fortunately, Jesus, as everyone who has read the gospel accounts of his life knows, taught his followers to regard God as a personal god to whom they could speak as they would speak to a loving father. It was in this spirit, therefore, that we invited Jesus to join us on this blog for an exclusive interview via Skype*, a request that Jesus, now a member of the Holy Trinity, and thus the voice of God, very graciously agreed to.
Without further ado, then, here is our conversation.
US stock markets are off by more than one and a half percent today (actually tw and a half percent by the close), which coincides with realization that Hillary lost the Commander-in-Chief tele-thingy whatever it was. I didn't watch, but I see one poll indicating that Trump was judged the winner by a margin among viewers of two to one.
That follows a series of polls of voting intention showing Trump either even with Clinton or marginally ahead. Considering the anti-Trump media bias and the incentive the media therefore have to skew the poll results, the implication is that Trump is now well out in front. And that's ignoring the shy Trump supporter phenomenon, which manifests as Trump supporters telling pollsters that they support one of the no-hope third-party candidates, although in the event they intend to put their X next to Trump's name.
For investors, the message is clear. It's time to pay attention to Trump's economic plan, which is that: Interest rates have to go up.
In this June's United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendum, Brits voted by an absolute majority to leave the European Union. Following the vote, Prime Minister Cameron, who campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU, resigned the premiership, attributing defeat of the remain campaign to public anger over the EU-mandated immigrant flood that has made the English a minority in their own capital city of London and in many other urban centers including the cities of Leicester, Luton and Slough, and soon England's second city, Birmingham.
The new face of Britain. In Luton, a jobless couple with eight
children demands public housing with at least six double bedrooms.
They evidently plan on having a couple more kids. It's what's known as indigenous population replacement immigration, aka the genocide of the English. Meantime the folks slated for extinction are evidently paying to clothe, feed and educate those who are about to replace them. (Source).
Quite bizarrely, the Conservative Party opted to replace Cameron as Prime Minister with former Home Secretary, Teresa May, who not only campaigned with David Cameron against Britain's departure from the EU (aka Brexit), but is on record as favoring Shariah courts in Britain, one of the issues of greatest contention among those opposed to the wholesale replacement of the English people and their culture, including the English common law, by people and cultures from elsewhere.
Since assuming the Premiership, Ms. May has done little to dispel the impression that she is totally unqualified to handle the Brexit decision. "Brexit" she declared "means Brexit," whereas in reality Brexit means exit, a fact that Ms. May seems anxious to obscure.
Consumption spending in the US, that is expenditures by people, not governments or corporations, equals 71% of the US GDP.
So what's holding back the US economy, which has been essentially flat for years and where real wages have fallen, while the proportion of the working age population that is not working has continually risen to reach a total, today, of 94 million?
The answer: Americans are tapped out. They've spent what they earn and much more beside on credit. But now the banks won't lend them more because they know that the public is at the limit of its capacity to service debt.
My bet is that George Soros is a front for the CIA or other such agency, doing things in his own name that his paymasters would be embarrassed to be caught doing for themselves.
The widely held assumption that George Soros is spending billions of his own money pushing the New World Order or any other political program seems totally out of character, and therefore improbably in the extreme.
World Net Daily, September 2, 2016: In accepting the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto to fly to Mexico City, the Donald was taking a major risk.
Yet it was a bold and decisive move, and it paid off in what was the best day of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Standing beside Nieto, graciously complimenting him and speaking warmly of Mexico and its people, Trump looked like a president. And the Mexican president treated him like one, even as Trump restated the basic elements of his immigration policy, including the border wall.
The gnashing of teeth up at the New York Times testifies to Trump’s triumph:
Mr. Trump has spent his entire campaign painting Mexico as a nation of rapists, drug smugglers, and trade hustlers. … But instead of chastising Mr. Trump, Mr. Pena Nieto treated him like a visiting head of state … with side-by-side lecterns and words of deferential mush.
As I wrote in August, Trump “must convince the nation … he is an acceptable, indeed, a preferable alternative” to Hillary Clinton, whom the nation does not want.
As any English person in Londonistan knows, speaking the truth about the population and immigration policies of Britain's treasonous governing elite, the Blair's, the Cameron's, the May's and their media enablers and defenders is, yes you got it, RAAAACIIIIST.
Thing is, as we pointed out the other day, not being RAAAACIIIST means being complicit in the genocide of your own people. So what are you? A politically correct twit complacently driven by the powers that be to support the destruction of your own people and culture — the Western civilization that created the modern world, or a RAAAACIIIIIST?
Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2016: This is the week that the steady drip, drip, drip of details about Hillary Clinton’s server turned into a waterfall. This is the week that we finally learned why Mrs. Clinton used a private communications setup, and what it hid. This is the week, in short, that we found out that the infamous server was designed to hide that Mrs. Clinton for three years served as the U.S. Secretary of the Clinton Foundation.
In March this column argued that while Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information was important, it missed the bigger point. The Democratic nominee obviously didn’t set up her server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets—that was incidental. She set up the server to keep secret the details of the Clintons’ private life—a life built around an elaborate and sweeping money-raising and self-promoting entity known as the Clinton Foundation.
Had Secretary Clinton kept the foundation at arm’s length while in office—as obvious ethical standards would have dictated—there would never have been any need for a private server, or even private email. The vast majority of her electronic communications would have related to her job at the State Department, with maybe that occasional yoga schedule. And those Freedom of Information Act officers would have had little difficulty—when later going through a state.gov email—screening out the clearly “personal” before making her records public. This is how it works for everybody else.
A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Rudyard Kipling (Beyond the Pale, in Plain Tales From the Hills)
Racism is defined as the belief that a particular race is superior to another. Thus, a person who believes that it is better that Germany, say, is populated mainly by Germans, rather than by, say, Syrians or Chinese is a racist since they are saying that a German is better than a Syrian or a Chinese, at least in Germany.
The Chinese and the Syrians, of course, think Chinese or Syrians, as the case may be, are better in China or Syria. In fact, that's how the great majority of people in any country think. Only bigots like Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel apply the perjorative term "racist" to people who believe in the preservation of their own kind, their own legal and religious traditions, and their own culture.
Birmingham New St. School: These are lovely children, but nearly all are immigrants or the children of immigrants, the indigenous population of England having been slated by a treasonous elite for minority status, along with English culture and eventually perhaps even the English common law. Today, in Birmingham, England's second city, English elementary school children are not even the largest minority ethnic group. Click to enlarge (Image source)
The racism of those who seek to preserve their own cultural and racial identities is in stark opposition to the globalist project to make the European peoples minorities in their own homes through a combination of policies that suppress the reproduction of the indigenous people while bringing about mass replacement immigration. In Britain, this project has already achieved its objective in London, Luton, Leicester, as in many other urban areas in Britain, the European mainland, and the United States too.
Here's a map showing the proportion of Vancouver residents who are financially qualified to purchase a median priced home. The areas shaded in pale yellow, i.e., most of the map on the West side of town, indicate where less than 20% of households are so qualified.
It reminds me of 1986 when we planned on moving from the West Coast to Toronto. House prices in Toronto were on a crazy roll. Inventory was almost non-existent, and most of the houses that were for sale looked as though they were occupied by the kind of people who couldn’t possibly afford to buy a house for the kind of money their house was priced at.
But think about this. In 1972, we contemplated buying a house in the 4700 block of Vancouver's W 2nd Avenue, which was priced at $189 K. In the 46 years since then, that house has appreciated (according to the BC Assessment Authority) over 62 times to almost $12 million. That’s equivalent to a 500,000% increase per century. Does that sound like hyper-inflation?
Yet if real mortgage rates go negative, who’s to say prices cannot still sky-rocket!
Still, I don’t think things can go on as they have. In the short-run perhaps, but in the long-run, the trend for a huge and increasing proportion of income to be devoted to the payment of rent, either to landlords, or as interest on mortgages to banks, cannot continue. More capital has to go into productive sectors of the economy that generate real wealth, as opposed to capital gains on real estate which are in reality generational wealth transfers.
Of course I’m not complaining. Since the early 70's, our house (not in Vancouver) has appreciated about four times faster than wages, so when it is sold it should reap a windfall for someone — my estate I suppose — of around a million dollars (that's if I die soon, much more, on current trends, if I die later), the gain to be at the expense of the poor folks who will have to pay the mortgage on that amount.
Does that sound reasonable and fair? Will Canadians for ever put up with a Ponzi economy that punishes young adults most, i.e., young folks entering the RE market? It's great, I suppose, if you want to perpetuate the failure of Canadians, a tiny population occupying half a continent, to fully reproduce themselves (but that's another matter).
Question is, how did we get to the present state of the economy and how could that state be changed?
Steve Keen, and others outside the bubble of Nobel-Prize-winning bullshit economics, have well revealed the pathologies of the FIRE economy that has dominated the West since the drive for globalization went into high gear in 1994. That was the year Bill Clinton signed the GATT agreement, a treaty that exposed US labor to unrestricted competition from workers of the Third World earning less than 5% of US wages.
As American and other Western workers affected by the new wave of globalization became increasingly uncompetitive in the internationally tradable sectors of the economy, they made up for the short-fall in income by taking on ever increasing amounts of debt, the debt bubble continually stimulated by declining interest rates (now absurdly entering negative territory), and money creation, mainly by private institutions.
The question is, what to do to reverse this trend and stimulate wealth creating investment?
The answer, obviously, is to redirect capital from consumption and speculative investments in a Ponzi economy into productive activities. Trouble is, Western governments are all owned by the banks and other financial corporations that reap the profits of the debt-based economy and see less opportunity for profit from investment in productive endeavors than in driving asset bubbles.
So what to do? A lynching or two might help. At least the total public humiliation of scoundrel politicians such as Blair and Brown and Cameron, the Bush’s and the Clinton’s who do the bidding of the corporate elite (for pay) would be a start, so the ongoing public humiliation of Hillary, a life-long liar and swindler, is an encouraging start. A war crimes trial for Bush and Blair would be another step in the right direction. Publicly debagging some Central Bankers, past and present, would be a good idea too.
Amazing, really, that a candidate for the US Presidency in 2016 would claim to have been duped by Dubya's 2003 lies in justification of the criminal war of imperialistic aggression against Iraq.
At the time, I didn't believe a word of what we now know for absolute certainty to have been a stream of lies for war from Bush and Blair and their media accomplices, the New York Times (remember the scare about Saddam's aluminum tubes), WaPo, Fox News and the British Broadcorping Castration (remember Saddam's drones of death that would spread plague across the Western world), etc., etc. Neither did my old school bud, the late Postman Patel, aka Edward Teague, believe the obvious rubbish and lies propagated by the political class and the media to justify an war of aggression against Iraq.
In a precient essay he wrote about the, then, forthcoming Iraq war for my old Web site, the Canadian Spectator, Edward accurately predicted the disaster that the Iraq war would become:
What is uncertain is the aftermath. This is the variable never publicly factored into the thinking(?) of the Tony Sopranos of Dubya's gang; their deeds plant the seeds of future, furious, frightening resistance. As many as half a million Iraqi soldiers may be intentionally killed and perhaps 100,000 civilians written off to collateral damage. Think of the grief of millions after this slaughter, the conversion of that grief into rage, combine that with the internecine struggles based on historical ethnic fault lines (that the Ba'ath Party has repressed), and we begin to appreciate the explosive complexity of post-invasion Iraq.
In fact, this was not genius. It was just rational thinking that no doubt also underlay the war planning at the Pentagon and the White House. But acknowledging the truth about America's imperialistic wars of aggression can never be admitted. American foreign policy requires a bodyguard of lies and liars, which means that American politics now depends on the maintenance of an ever growing body of lies through the election of career liars such as the Bush's and the Clinton's aided by the ever mendacious corporate media oligopoly.
Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time ...Isaac Newton
Things always change, as do we ourselves, in our perceptions, our beliefs, our social life, our mortal frame, the latter ultimately to be with clay compounded, or as a plume of smoke and a heap of ashes dispersed.
It reminds me of 1986 when we planned on moving from the West Coast to Toronto. House prices in Toronto were on a crazy roll. Inventory was almost non-existent, and most of the houses that were for sale looked as though they were occupied by the kind of people who couldn’t possibly afford to buy a house for the kind of money their house was priced at.
But think about this. In 1972, we contemplated buying a house in the 4700 block of Vancouver's W 2nd Avenue, which was priced at $189 K. In the 46 years since then, that house has appreciated (according to the BC Assessment Authority) over 62 times to almost $12 million. That’s equivalent to a 500,000% increase per century. Does that sound like hyper-inflation?
Yet if real mortgage rates go negative, who’s to say prices cannot still sky-rocket!
Still, I don’t think things can go on as they have. In the short-run perhaps, but in the long-run, the trend for a huge and increasing proportion of income to be devoted to the payment of rent, either to landlords, or as interest on mortgages to banks, cannot continue. More capital has to go into productive sectors of the economy that generate real wealth, as opposed to capital gains on real estate which are in reality generational wealth transfers.
Of course I’m not complaining. Since the early 70's, our house (not in Vancouver) has appreciated about four times faster than wages, so when it is sold it should reap a windfall for someone — my estate I suppose — of around a million dollars (that's if I die soon, much more, on current trends, if I die later), the gain to be at the expense of the poor folks who will have to pay the mortgage on that amount.
Does that sound reasonable and fair? Will Canadians for ever put up with a Ponzi economy that punishes young adults most, i.e., young folks entering the RE market? It's great, I suppose, if you want to perpetuate the failure of Canadians, a tiny population occupying half a continent, to fully reproduce themselves (but that's another matter).
Question is, how did we get to the present state of the economy and how could that state be changed?
Steve Keen, and others outside the bubble of Nobel-Prize-winning bullshit economics, have well revealed the pathologies of the FIRE economy that has dominated the West since the drive for globalization went into high gear in 1994. That was the year Bill Clinton signed the GATT agreement, a treaty that exposed US labor to unrestricted competition from workers of the Third World earning less than 5% of US wages.
As American and other Western workers affected by the new wave of globalization became increasingly uncompetitive in the internationally tradable sectors of the economy, they made up for the short-fall in income by taking on ever increasing amounts of debt, the debt bubble continually stimulated by declining interest rates (now absurdly entering negative territory), and money creation, mainly by private institutions.
The question is, what to do to reverse this trend and stimulate wealth creating investment?
The answer, obviously, is to redirect capital from consumption and speculative investments in a Ponzi economy into productive activities. Trouble is, Western governments are all owned by the banks and other financial corporations that reap the profits of the debt-based economy and see less opportunity for profit from investment in productive endeavors than in driving asset bubbles.
So what to do? A lynching or two might help. At least the total public humiliation of scoundrel politicians such as Blair and Brown and Cameron, the Bush’s and the Clinton’s who do the bidding of the corporate elite (for pay) would be a start, so the ongoing public humiliation of Hillary, a life-long liar and swindler, is an encouraging start. A war crimes trial for Bush and Blair would be another step in the right direction. Publicly debagging some Central Bankers, past and present, would be a good idea too.