Danny's Weblog

2008 Nov 08 [ Sat ]

The Obama vote and electoral system design

The British media seem to be gushingly welcoming to Obama. But more significantly, all media sources seem to think that there was a major difference between Obama and McCain.

Personally, I think they were Kang and Kodos. Link to Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" VII, segment "Citizen Kang": en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_VII]

Yesterday I was thinking about why the two-party system is so entrenched, and how it might ideally be changed, and I came up with the following idea. I don't suppose it's novel, but I couldn't find a specific discussion of it on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system]

Instead of having a multitude of small constituencies arranged by geography, each offering a choice of a handful of candidates only to local voters, every candidate could be voted for nationally by any voter in the country. At the end of the election, there would be no winners and losers: every candidate who received any votes at all would be entitled to a vote in the national assembly, in proportion to the number who elected him (similar to voting in trade union congresses).

This system probably seems strange. But it's not very unlike the system in Israel, where all candidates are national. Although in Israel, voting is by party.

Now I'm not such a mug as to believe that the current PTB would ever institute such a system, because it would not be in the interests of the PTB. But I think the results for the voters would be interesting. It would mean that candidates whose appeal was bland, designed to appeal slightly to many voters, would each wind up with a small share of the bland vote. But niche candidates, who appealed very strongly to a small fraction of the voters, would wind up with a strong position. In other words the individual voter would not have to feel forced to choose between Kang and Kodos, and would wind up with some representation in the assembly, even if his candidate did not form part of a majority bloc. And politicians would not feel under so much pressure to conform to the views of the lowest common denominator of the voters.

I think it has a few other advantages, in that it does not require runoff votes, and is fairly simple to describe. The only big disadvantage that I can see is that the number of candidates would probably be far too big to fit on the voting form. You would probably need to write down a code number for your preferred candidate, like "161507", and then the tally would be somewhat more burdensome and less transparent. But I think it would still be much more practical than voting systems which require voters to rank candidates in order, or many other proposed systems.

Oh well. I wonder if I should invest in a "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!" T-shirt. www.cafepress.com [http://www.cafepress.com/Voted4Kodos.67328372]

2008 Oct 23 [ Thu ]

Where Argentina goes, Britain and the USA will follow

Last month, I mentioned that I have assumed for forty years that by the time the baby boomers reach retirement age their savings will be stolen:

I think the government will not dare to let pensioners starve, and will continue to provide some sort of pension scheme, but it will have no compunction about seizing assets to pay for this.

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit01.html]

Here's an article in Money Week – not exactly Socialist Weekly – describing the latest situation in Argentina:

In fact, things have now got so bad that the state has decided to take over $29bn of the country's privately managed pension funds to get its hands on some cash.

But it goes on to make the same point as I did:

So if the excuse arrives to 'help out' the odd pension fund or two, what are the odds of Gordon Brown importing the Argentine model and finding a way to hoover up some of the available cash? It may not seem likely right now, but then a year ago, nor did the nationalisation of half our banking system.

www.moneyweek.com [http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/the-credit-crunch-claims-its-biggest-victim-argentina-13892.aspx]

2008 Oct 09 [ Thu ]

What did Paulson know?

I recently speculated Paulson must have had some kind of insider information to make a ten-billion-dollar short bet: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit07.html]

I don't think we'll ever know what it was. But perhaps the following is a part of the puzzle:

President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.

See story in Business Week (2006 May 23): www.businessweek.com [http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may2006/nf20060523_2210.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily]

From original story: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/october2008/091008Negroponte.htm]

Inappropriate TV ads

One of the few things which make me think that the financial institutions had no idea of the crash is that the TV ads are still showing the same commercials they were before the crash.

I think TV advertisers have the option of pulling ads on an emergency basis, so apparently the financial institutions do want these ads to be shown. And of course they are ludicrously inappropriate for the current situation, in which the investor is mainly thinking about the stability of the institution.

I'm not talking about the current Abbey/Santander ad particularly here; that's just a terrible ad which would have been blatantly contemptuous of the customer even in the balmiest of economic conditions.

Or the current UBS ad, which blithers portentously about how important "U" and "US" are. I wonder if it was "conceptualized" by a European ad agency, full of people who did not know what "BS" means in English.

I mean the whole market segment. Apparently the institutions need to maintain advertising to grab people who are switching, even though the ads they have are incredibly ill-suited in the current climate. The Bradford and Bingley ad, for instance (does B&B even exist any more?).

Bonus payments for financial executives and the banking crisis

Fir many years it has been routine for companies to pay bonuses to executives for various achievements, such as high profits or rises in the company's share price.

When the tax rules were changed so that dividends became less attractive to investors, and the basic "compensation" for executives became shares in their own company, these bonuses translated into a large incentive to maximize the company's share price.

This looks like a good deal for shareholders, right? And indeed the only objections that were published in the mass media were to the scale of the bonuses.

But there are several major problems with the bonus system.

1. Bonuses are paid for gains, but there is no punishment for losses. So there is a large incentive to gamble.

2. Bonuses are paid for *short-term* variations, but do not include any correction for the *long-term* results of policies. So the executive has no incentive to make an investment which would be a drag on the share price for years until it paid off.

3. There are some bets which are like "betting on favorites", in horse racing terms. They usually pay off, so the executive has a large incentive to play them. Occasionally, however, they result in a huge loss.

I think it's easy to see that the result would *inevitably* be a huge incentive to make risky bets.

On the other hand, in most companies the efect of such bets is fairly easy to gauge. If you are running a manufacturing plant, and you stop investing in new machinery, this is more or less noticeable, and investors who favor fundamental analysis (my own bias) will drag down the share price.

But in the finance industry, there are no reality checks. You couldn't go and *visit* a bank's holding facility for toxic investments, and actually *see* a dank pit of sewage with a few tattered certificates floating on the top.

And the banks were inventing new, more complex, more leveraged securities all the time. You need at least a business cycle or two to develop a rule of thumb, but they were inventing new financial instruments much faster than that.

So that's why the problem first showed up in the financial industry.

Unfortunately the financial industry's problems come from those toxic investments. And they are toxic in the *real* economy. Governments around the world are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to buy banks whose value depends on their ability to make a profit, which depends on the ability of *real* businesses to make a profit.

And those businesses were drowning under crazy short-term gimcrack schemes *before* their customers start to pay the bill for the bank bailout.

Oh well. The US Army has had plenty of experience in suppressing urban protest, and anybody in the army who would have refused to use torture against helpless prisoners has by now been identified and eliminated.

So I suspect the new boss is going to be same as the old boss.

2008 Oct 08 [ Wed ]

Why we are told "timing the market" is bad

When Paulson presented the plan to borrow even more money to prop up the banks, I was naively surprised that the Senate didn't ask obvious questions like:

How do you know this plan will make things better, not worse?

Who will benefit and lose from this plan?

Who caused the problem?

Who will execute the plan?

After a while, though, it occurred to me: who *should* you select at such a moment? It would be nice, wouldn't it, to select someone who was not among the saps who let this happen, and better still, not one of the people who planned it.

So who are the magical people we would be looking for? They would need to have warned about actions the country took which we can now see led to problems. Hmm. Suppose you expected such problems, and the "country" (ie the media lapdogs like the NY Times) ignored you. What would you do?

Well, what Paulson did was he took out a bunch of short bets, for instance on the British bank Northern Rock that failed a year ago, and made ten billion USD for his company, and 3 billion USD for himself. (The news came out at the same time his company recently announced that despite new regulations on short selling it planned on continuing.)

I don't remember anyone saying that Paulson *warned* about the dangers of reducing stability in the financial system. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt. The interesting point is, how did he *time* his short bets so well?

The problem with financial markets is that a lot of the value of a financial instrument depends on the mood – good or bad – of the investors. No matter what the "fundamentals" of a business might be, its financial instruments are at the whim of market psychology. This is particularly true in the short term, which is where short selling is largely conducted. It is one of the big reasons why we are repeatedly told that "timing the market" is bad: you cannot reasonably expect to "buy low and sell high".

I don't think that market insiders know anything about economics that is not known to academics.

What I'm guessing is that Paulson knew that something specific would be done to destroy market confidence – and when. This would be too big to be done by any private investors: this would need to be done by the Feds, or better still the Feds and several other governments (like Airstrip One). So something specific was agreed prior to Northern Rock, which could be expected to trigger a collapse of confidence. Hmmm. I wonder what that was? Not a rhetorical question.

2008 Sep 29 [ Mon ]

Amateur video shows Death Star over San Francisco

This is an amazing short, consisting of handheld shots taken around the San Francisco area, with routine tourist views in the foreground and the Star Wars Death Star, or an Imperial battle cruiser, or At-Ats, in the background.

Here are a couple of links to it:

gizmodo.com [http://gizmodo.com/5037927/galactic-empire-begins-invasion-of-san-francisco]

starwarsblog.starwars.com [http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2008/08/15/i-left-my-star-destroyer-in-san-francisco/]

There was only one clip which lacked authenticity for me – a small pasenger craft swoops to a landing, folding its wings. Somehow, it seems separate from its environment; a little too glittery and shadowless. Everything else works well.

I don't know what kind of software he used to make the Star Wars shots maintain alignment so well with the foreground. I suppose his basic idea was that if the distant items are *very* distant – perhaps miles away – local camera motion does not require any alteration in the appearance of the distant item, so *only* alignment was necessary to maintain credibility. I think also he chose the blend modes well so that slight matte errors on edges did not cause visible flickering.

It's occurred to me before – eg about the most recent Star Wars movies – that if the camera pauses, and stops the story, and gazes at length on some special effect, the viewer is jettisoned from the story, and thinks to himself "ho-hum, big special effects scene, blah". Whereas if most of the shot is *not* a special effect, we think about the *story*. This short seems to exploit that idea to the full: the clumsy camera work, often clearly aimed at capturing San Francisco rather than the Imperial hardware, puts you squarely in the alternate-history narrative of an ordinary person.

Overall, it reminds me of how easily video can now be faked. Actually, it looks more credible than the shots we have seen from 9/11.

2008 Sep 28 [ Sun ]

The Great Debate about the 700 billion USD bailout

There is a debate in Congress about Paulson's proposed 700-billion USD bailout of the financial industry. But it's just theater – for instance the moment when Paulson got down on one knee to plead for acceptance.

Meanwhile, what the TV news doesn't say is that last week the banks borrowed 940 billion USD *already*. The TV pundits also don't dwell on the fact that the proposed bill would actually allow Paulson to create an *unlimited* amount of taxpayer-funded debt – the much-quoted 700-billion figure is only the amount to be "outstanding at any one time": www.prisonplanet.com [http://www.prisonplanet.com/bank-borrowing-from-fed-already-exceeded-bailout-total-in-last-week.html]

But don't worry. The Great Debate – ie, "Do you want families to lose their house and savings?" – continues

2008 Sep 19 [ Fri ]

Amongst their weaponry... are such elements as... I'll come in again

In a previous posting, I said that the three weapons of governments are to increase taxes, borrow and start wars: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit01.html]

I realized later that I had forgotten a major one that most books quote: to debase the currency.

In Roman times this had a literal meaning: the government withdrew gold and silver coins and reduced the value of their precious-metal content either by reforging them with a higher fraction of base metal or by simply shaving the edges. Over the centuries this process continued until today we are used to paper currency which has no precious-metal content at all.

Not to be defeated however, governments realized that they could inflate the currency to serve the same purpose. The benefits, as far as the government and its cronies are concerned, that the true value of debts (eg to pension savers) are reduced, and the effective tax rates rise without requiring changes in legislation. So in my defence I can say that debasing the currency is now equivalent to raising taxes and borrowing money.

This reminds me of a speculation I had about the motives of the Feds in creating this crisis: they intend to destroy the value of the dollar so that dollar-denominated foreign debts (such as T-bills) vanish. Presumably they don't care about the horrendous consequences to the economy, because if they and their buddies are correctly positioned when the crash happens they can buy US companies and real estate for (effectively) pennies on the dollar. And once the US population has been subjected to mass bankruptcy, unemployment and starvation they will be glad to accept third-world wages and working conditions, so new US businesses will be competitive with the Red Chinese.

But that explanation is probably too simple.

Another example of how financial stability was destroyed

In the last couple of postings in this thread I've made the point that over the last few years financial institutions "began to operate well *below* long-term stability".

Here's another example: the "Financial Services Modernization Act" passed by the US Congress in 1999. A Slashdot poster quotes Senator Durgan's eloquent speech opposing the bill:

I believe fervently that 2 years, 5 years, 10 years from now, we will look back at this moment and say: We modernized the financial services industry because the industry did it itself and we needed to move ahead and draw a ring around it and provide some guidance, some rules and regulations. I also think we will, in 10 years time, look back and say: We should not have done that because we forgot the lessons of the past; those lessons represent timeless truths that were as true in the year 2000 or 2010 as they were in the year 1930 or 1935.

ask.slashdot.org [http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=968941&cid=25065385]

Incidentally, my position is basically anti-regulation. However, the current system is full of regulations which were assiduously sought by the industry. For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which most people think of as a watchdog over the industry, primarily acts to shield it from individual lawsuits.

More generally, the legal concept of the limited-liability company led very rapidly to the situation of the 19th century where huge organizations were able to form impregnable monopolies by bribing legislatures, which is still the case today.

A more recent example is the CAN-SPAM act, which legalized spam by making it impossible for individuals to file suit against spammers.

But most people would probably think eliminating the limited-liability concept would be a little harsh, and would be more open to increasing regulation, so here we are.

2008 Sep 18 [ Thu ]

Another followup on the credit crunch

In my posting yesterday I made the point that financial institutions "began to operate well *below* long-term stability". I didn't post any links to confirm that, believing that anyone who takes the time to read any of my postings (all three of you) probably does not find that statement hard to swallow. www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit02.html]

Still, I was happy to find today a good link to an illustration of what I said: bigpicture.typepad.com [http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/09/regulatory-exem.html]

Apparently, the big 5 US brokers somehow persuaded the SEC in 2004 to write a special exemption, just for them, to allow them to make riskier trades than other smaller brokers were allowed to. To take a charitable view, even the biggest brokers were under so much pressure to take risks that they decided to operate well below the limits which had been designed in 1975 to ensure stability (and which had protected all brokers from competitors who might take a higher-risk strategy).

Now imagine what the *smaller* brokers felt about all this.

2008 Sep 17 [ Wed ]

Some more thoughts on the credit crunch

My posting on this topic yesterday: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit01.html]

I happened to see a webpage which suggests I am not the only nutter who expects the government to loot private pensions. Apparently Alicia Munnel, a Clinton administration appointee as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy argued that private pensions should face a capital levy to make up for the fact that their accumulation was tax free: www.prisonplanet.com [http://www.prisonplanet.com/us-economy-rudderless-and-reeling-from-direct-hits.html]

Her argument is almost rational; it's almost the same as something I argued in that posting. But it ignores the issue of who argued what when these pension schemes were first proposed, and who really benefited, and who paid the price.

Another point, about the Long-Term Capital Management fiasco: when I thought about the things I said in the previous posting about the *message* people took from that disaster, I realized I wasn't as clear as I would like. What I should have said is as follows.

The message people *should* have taken is that, for one reason or another, even institutions which are arguably stable in the long term are prone to calamitous collapse, so regulators need to force them to operate with a much greater safety margin than merely breaking even.

Of course, the message which financial institutions took from LTCM was that nothing was really dangerous and if anything did happen the Feds would bail them out. Worse: they concluded that if any institution decided to operate safely, its competitors would run it out of the market. So they began to operate well *below* long-term stability.

So here we are.

2008 Sep 16 [ Tue ]

The credit crunch has been coming for sixty years

I'm pretty old, so I'm old enough to remember not only things that happened, but also what we were told about them at the time.

For instance, pensions. When the universal pension scheme was introduced in England at the end of WW2, most people welcomed it, but it was fairly obvious that it was being financed in a strange way. That is, current wage-earners were paying for current retirees, and no more than that (actually even less, but that's another issue). In the long run, this only works if the numbers of each group remain stable, or if the wage-earners exceed the retirees. But in this period we had the baby boom. Clearly, unless the population was going to explode, the baby-boom generation would be followed by some sort of reversion to normal fertility rates. And that would break the system. However, the government did not worry because for many years there would be more wage-earners than retirees.

By the time I was old enough to read analyses in the early sixties, the effect was obvious. Simple arithmetic showed that the burden on wage-earners would become stupendous by around 2015. At that time, I was less cynical than I am now, but plenty of people said many cynical things about what the results would be. I formed the opinion that one of the ways that the government would react would be by heavily taxing pension income, and means-testing the recipients of state pensions. I have followed that judgement all my life, and have no pension arrangements whatever.

Why did everyone else not see what I did? Actually, many did: I have often seen it referred to that most baby-boomers believe the pension system will collapse before they can get back what they paid in. But almost everyone took the opposite route: they tried to build up personal savings so that they could survive without a state pension. I think the government will not dare to let pensioners starve, and will continue to provide some sort of pension scheme, but it will have no compunction about seizing assets to pay for this. So I can profit now, while others will be robbed of their life savings to pay for me later. I don't think my behavior in this is any worse than the government's, and much less hypocritical.

But a much bigger reason is what we were being told at the time. We were being told to expect a future in which electric power would be too cheap to measure. We were being told to expect robots capable of carrying out any task, combined (somehow) with full employment. Where is my flying car?

At the same time, we were warned of the risk of nuclear annihilation. Why bother worrying about changing society, or planning, when all of our problems would be swept away, one way or another?

In the fifties and sixties many people relied on company pension schemes. But the swinging sixties left young people no longer expecting to spend their lives with a single employer, and pension schemes ruthlessly punished job-switchers. Also, a string of cases where companies looted their pension schemes were publicized. The best-known case (from the eighties and nineties) is of Robert Maxwell and the Daily Mirror: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell]

Such cases continue to happen, such as (my observation) the way older employees were encouraged to give up long-term jobs at Sears in exchange for apparently more promising jobs at sister companies, only to find that the sister companies were left to wither and the small print of their contracts meant their pension rights disappeared.

So how could people form a nest-egg for their retirement? One way was to buy a house, but there are obvious problems with that. After retirement most people are not eager to go through the turmoil of moving to a smaller, more easily-maintained house, but how else are they to get cash out of the house? Also, as people live longer and require many more years of assisted living, the house would have to be truly palatial, resulting in enormous local tax payments.

And people became aware that there was a speculative boom/bust cycle now in housing. The government kept the house prices high, way above the natural level, by providing tax relief on the mortgage interest, but this resulted in occasional deep falls in prices. (One of the major conclusions from the era of the Wall Street Crash was that it should be specifically forbidden to lend money for the purposes of investment, but that's exactly what the government encourages in the housing market.)

So HMG and the Feds started to offer various schemes to allow people to build portable pensions. Now they never really explained how they were supposed to work. Why exactly should other taxpayers, who maybe have no spare cash for their own pensions, pay higher taxes to subsidize someone to make investments for his own pension? The only undeniable result of these schemes was hugely increased business for the pension companies, plus a new source of investment for various companies on the Stock Exchange.

Still, people were happy. Their money poured into various accounts with a lot of small print, and the investments seemed to prosper (partly because money was pouring into the investments, but oh well).

But what is the *long-term* picture for such investments? Recent history is full of cases where fund managers have made serious blunders in administering a fund, eg Long Term Capital Management (a name which became highly ironic, but which actually did not even reflect their stated modus operandi): en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management]

A particularly interesting element in LTCM's case was that after its collapse, its holdings were liquidated making a small *profit*. In other words, even operations which were sound in some sense were vulnerable to speculation. Unfortunately, society took the wrong message from this. It seems to have decided that financial institutions deserved to be bailed out when things go wrong. Society would have been much safer if it had decided to execute LTCM's directors and major investors.

But now we had a situation where millions of individuals with no experience were expected to administer their own pension plan. Not only is it quite possible to pick stocks which go bad – for instance, by misunderstanding the correlation between various holdings so that what appears to be a balanced portfolio is actually highly vulnerable – not only are stock markets subject to long troughs, so that an entire generation of retirees are forced to sell off most of their holdings in the first few years – not only are government-controlled inflation indexes well known to ignore medical and nursing expenses vital to retirees – but simply having too many transactions kills the small investor. Transaction costs are minimal for investment funds themselves, because they know the system and have a strong negotiating position. But individuals see a fee of 2% of the buy and an 0.5% per-annum fee and think that's not much. Well, 0.5% per annum profit is about what the *best* strategies get, long-term, beyond inflation, for the small investor. And a single 2% fee can blow several years of compound interest. And a lot of investors get suckered into even *higher* fees, as well as exposing themselves to intensive marketing to churn their accounts. "Intelligent" pensions are about as good a deal as "long-term capital management".

So people start thinking about housing as an investment again: not just buying your own house, but investing in various more complicated ways. Governments like this because they really have only three strategies: increase taxes, borrow and start wars. (Kind of like the joke about the guy who starts a new job and his predecessor hands him three envelopes.) The beauty of inflating house prices, from the government's point of view, is that it can hand out money to people and the people who will have to *borrow* that money are people in the *future*.

What do I mean by that? In order to hand out more money, the government gives money to banks. But the banks then have to *lend* it to people. This works best if people are *forced* to borrow it. But if the government forces up house prices, by offering tax breaks and reducing the supply by zoning etc, people who *already* have houses are insulated. Those people can easily get loans based on this artificially inflated value, and spend the money on real-granite countertops and Harley-Davidsons and investments in government securities, and the people who will really pay the price for all of this are those people's children, who will be forced to buy houses because rental prices are pushed up by the house prices, so it will still make financial sense to choose to buy instead of rent.

All of this was clear to me 30 years ago, when I sold a house I'd owned for a year, and observed that I made more money than I'd earned that entire year in my job (even after transaction costs).

Well, maybe a lot of people had the same thoughts. But they didn't react by putting any pressure on the governing class. They just figured the situation wouldn't change anytime soon.

Cut to 2003. The US government, for reasons best known to itself, wanted to have a war in Iraq. It didn't want to finance it by raising taxes, because then the people might finally start putting two and two together, and it was lying about the real cost of the war. But it really needed a *lot* of money, so it borrowed the money. It flooded the international market with US securities.

But the supply of credit is not infinite (despite the Chinese government's apparent attempt to demonstrate it). All over the world, sources of credit started to dry up. Housing finance rates, which had been very low for a long time, started to creep up. Young people began to despair of ever entering the housing market and began to resign themselves to sharing housing and living with their parents and siblings. The supply of willing buyers dried up and houses became unsaleable. And people who had been encouraged to buy a house on the assumption that its price would rise enough to pay off a balloon mortgage found that someone else had made a big bet that *they* were going to lose.

Well, you know I'm talking about the credit crunch, which has left most financial institutions which invested – in whatever overcomplicated way – in the housing market completely exposed to fully-leveraged losses. But it's not some big surprise, and the banks who made bets that it would never happen are not the real architects of this disaster. The people who are most guilty, and are least likely to be punished, are generations of politicians of all parties who conspired to convince everyone that "Social Security is the third rail" and anyone who dared to propose the reforms that would be necessary would be destroyed.

And the Bush regime, but you probably guessed I'd say that.

And all of this is happening even *before* the baby boomers start to retire. Now *that* is going to be the real third rail. And we're all going to have to pee on it.

2008 Mar 16 [ Sun ]

Mysterious deaths of British police officers

I had started to notice one report after another of dead or missing police officers. I was surprised to see no speculation about possible reasons for this string of deaths. I noticed in the London Times (2008-03-14 p9) the following summary:

Mr Munro's death follows the apparent suicides of Police Sergeant Richard Fuller, 55, in Calne, Wiltshire, and Michael Todd, 50, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester.

plus this interesting statement:

Dewi Pritchard-Jones, the North Wales Coroner, took the unusual step of calling medical evidence at the opening of the inquest [on Chief Constable Michael Todd] in Llangefni, Anglesey, in order to dispel "suspicions and fears" about the "ridiculous" stories circulating in recent days.

If I was circulating any "ridiculous" stories, I think I would start with the interesting way Todd's cellphone signal led searchers to a location miles away from where he was found. Did his killers not realize that cellphone companies can monitor user's locations? Or did they deliberately lead rescuers away from where he was eventually found, rendered unconscious and left in freezing 80 mph winds without a jacket? Perhaps it was just essential to provide a pretext of suicide as fast as possible, so they used his cellphone to send text messages ostensibly from Todd, although the cellphone conveniently doesn't leave any evidence of who actually punched the messages in... while the person who sent the messages was miles away from Todd's dying body.

But what could lead HMG to kill *several* police officers at once? Perhaps it's like Waco, where most of the LEOs found dead had served as Clinton's personal bodyguards. What element of their past links them together?

Hmmm... also, that kind of thing would have been planned and set up in advance. Why were the killers in such a desperate, slipshod hurry?

From a Times Online article:

A Whitehall source said that Mr Todd's death had nothing to do with his work but was related to his personal life.

Well, he would, wouldn't he? The government also seems to be pushing the line that the real reason for Todd's murder is that he had led an investigation into the CIA rendition flights via British territory, but this seems implausible to me: HMG has been caught red-handed on much worse and the running-dog media just keeps shovelling the government's spin. And it doesn't explain the other two deaths.

The meaning of Orwell's 1984

I vaguely remember reading an analysis of 1984 which suggested that Orwell thought that his world in 1948 actually *was* the world of 1984; he only set the novel in the future, with a few irrelevant sf touches like the telescreens and the names of countries, in order to get it published.

Unfortunately I couldn't find that idea in a casual web search. Indeed, one of the first webpages I found was so collossally badly written that I wondered how it could possibly have acquired pagerank: studentweb.tulane.edu [http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~jgray1/]

This is much better, though tendentious: findarticles.com [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_49_17/ai_81790763]

As usual the Wikipedia entry is valuable: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four] although it does not address my point.

My previous article re Orwell and Big Brother: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/bigbrother01.html]

I have been thinking about this issue because for several years I have been reconsidering my entire worldview and tearing away successive layers of belief about historical events. Having come to believe that the British and US governments created the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for their own purposes, I found it easy to see what HMG gained from the war in Ulster, and so forth.

In particular, 1984 shows scenes of grinding poverty which are more similar to the grim conditions of Britain in 1948 than the Ipods and holidays in Ibiza which we see around us. But what was Orwell actually saying? The Wikipedia article shows that in the world of the novel, the government ("inner party") deliberately kept the people in poverty:

The point of continuous warfare is to be rid of the surplus of industrial production to prevent the rise of the standard of living and make possible the economic repression of people.

I have been feeling more and more keenly that living standards for most people have hardly risen over my lifetime. It's true we have mobile phones and widescreen tvs, but many more important things – job security, public transport, access to medical care – have become much less satisfactory. And yet technological advances have taken place. Productivity has been steadily rising for fifty years; why are we still working 40-hour weeks? More people own their own homes now, but their homes' rise in value is at the expense of their own children. Do people realize that? That they are taking those holidays in Ibiza by refinancing a debt which is being imposed on their children?

So I believe Orwell's analysis was valid for 1948, and 1984, and 2008.

2007 Oct 14 [ Sun ]

Another data point on the killing curve

Some years ago I wrote an article about the fact that goverments have become more and more skilled at convincing us to kill each other: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/killing01.html]

It recently occurred to me that there is a data point which is outside the curve I had in mind in that article. And that is: can governments make a man kill himself?

In WW2 governments which demanded such a sacrifice were viewed as totalitarian and despicable. When Allied governments "needed" a "suicide mission", they requested volunteers, and even then the men would not be expected to actually kill themselves.

But now governments have developed and tested the technology to create suicide bombers. Remember, suicide bombers are just as new in Moslem/Arab society as they are to their audience in the West. Everybody has grievances, and now the techniques have been perfected on the Moslems they can be tried out on anyone.

2006 Apr 08 [ Sat ]

Large corporations are a branch of the government?

This Slashdot poster makes the excellent point that because many large corporations like ATT are heavily regulated and given monopoly powers by the government, they are effectively a branch oif the government which is not subject to normal constitutional restrictions and monitoring: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182479&cid=15087190]

It makes me wonder whether governments are *aware* of this point. Certainly governments routinely set up organizations to carry out operations for them with plausible deniability. The most famous is probably the US Federal Reserve, although opinions vary as to whether the US Government set up the Federal Reserve or vice versa.

Likewise I have posted many articles about the chances that rebel and terrorist organizations are actually run by the governments they are supposedly attacking (eg the Brits are now known to have operated terrorist groups during the Malayan insurgency). But it had not occurred to me that this technique might be useful at all points along the spectrum.

2006 Mar 12 [ Sun ]

New theory on Robert Maxwell "suicide"

Many years ago, Robert Maxwell, widely-known ruthless media baron, went missing from his boat and his body was never recovered.

A recent news story says that a police memo has been uncovered which states that at the time of his disappearance he was under investigation for having murdered a German mayor: at the time of the Allied invasion of Germany Maxwell had been an officer in the British Army, and had allegedly been negotiating a peaceful surrender of the mayor's town when a German tank fired on his men, and had shot the mayor in retaliation.

The memo suggests that Maxwell must have been aware of this investigation and theorizes that it could have been a motive for suicide.

This suggests many things to me:

1. How much things have changed since Maxwell's disappearance. These days a British officer could order his dog to gnaw off an Iraqi mayor's testicles and the Sun would fawn over him.

2. Maxwell was a pretty tough character. To me it sounds utterly, insultingly ridiculous that he would have taken his own life over fear of such an investigation. If the police could present this as a motivation for suicide in his case, they could use any motive for anybody.

3. If you think the government might want to get rid of you, get very cautious when they put you under pressure: it may be the prelude to an assassination.

2005 Sep 18 [ Sun ]

Perhaps each political movement *must* have an esoteric core

In a long article on the successes of the neocon movement in implementing the war in Iraq: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/Pages/Sept05/170905Imperial.htm] there was an idea which I found particularly interesting.

The writer, Justin Raimondo, refers to Ayn Rand's Objectivist movement, and makes the point (not for the first time) that the way the inner circle of Objectivism operated – Rand herself, Nathaniel Branden etc – was *antithetical* to the principles which objectivists claimed to passionately uphold.

He quotes from Murray N. Rothbard in his survey of The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult:

Every religious cult has two sets of differing and distinctive creeds: the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The quite different creed is the unknown, hidden agenda, a creed which is only known to its full extent by the top leadership, the 'high priests' of the cult. The latter are the keepers of the Mysteries of the cult.

While he does not *prove* his point (how could he – so I guess it's not scientific), the litany of examples is very persuasive. Objectivists, Marxists, Scientologists, neocons – the list goes on. (He leaves out Nazism. Certainly Nazi leaders had some room for rootless cosmpolitanism in their own lives... but perhaps Hitler's hold on the party was so strong that he could eliminate cabalistic tendencies.)

It makes me think that the process of joining such a cult must involve some sort of screening process in which the new entrant is allocated either to the outer group or the cabal (since potential cabal members would inevitably decide to exit the movement if they were left to be indoctrinated in the nonsensical external tenets).

2005 Sep 10 [ Sat ]

George Bush *wants* to be the Antichrist

I suppose most people, like me, believe that G W Bush's born-again Christianity was a transparent ploy to evade responsibility for the "youthful" excesses which his family has largely managed to cover up.

But an interesting possibility just struck me. Suppose he *actually believes* that claptrap. In that case, *what role* does he think he's playing?

Remember, the born-agains think the End Days are *already evident*. And here he is, the most powerful person in the world. Perhaps every night, as he kneels by the bed, he asks God "Why have you chosen me for this, O Lord? Yet I shall follow your wishes as mine own."

And every day he *implements* the End Days.

I haven't found a good authoritative description of the End Days, but I thought this site was interesting: www.enddays.ws [http://www.enddays.ws/jleary01.html]

Christian Zionism (why Christian fundamentalists give unflinching support to Israel): whtt.org [http://whtt.org/whtt.shtml?rpr/MarchingtoZion.htm]

2005 Sep 03 [ Sat ]

The difference between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina

The difference between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina is that I'm almost sure that President Bush can't order the CIA to cause a hurricane.

2005 Aug 14 [ Sun ]

What do conspirators tell their children?

As anybody who reads my political postings will know (does anybody?) I have a paranoid view of world events. I see Al Qaeda as the latest in a long line of ridiculous conspiracy theories forced on the public by our governments for their own ends.

Whether you agree with me on that or not, I think it's interesting to consider a corollary that just occurred to me. If you're actually executing a real, Bush-style conspiracy, what do you want your children to be taught? Are we to assume that there are private classes at Princeton and Yale that only plutocrats' children are ever invited to, and when these gilded youths appear to be slacking from their regular classes they are in fact beavering away on the real causes of the Napoleonic Wars through the War on Terror?

What would one *want* as such a parent? Children – even, or especially, plutocrats' children – can be idealistic and untrustworthy. If your child blabbed he would have to be eliminated. Hmm. Better wait a few more years...

Still, how would you feel as a parent if your child actually believed in what you knew to be a pack of lies?

Of course, if you knew for a fact that the entire world had been fed *one particular* pack of lies, what would you believe in yourself? What *could* you believe in without feeling like a patsy? Perhaps the rich are amoral because they have even less faith in any form of morality than I do – with even better reason.

2005 Jul 25 [ Mon ]

The great advantage of suicide bombers

I have seen many press accounts which make the point that suicide bombing is a tactic which the security forces have as yet found no effective response to: since the attacker does not survive, they do not need getaway plans, hideouts, or any other form of support which can be tracked down.

It has occurred to me however that the *real* advantage of suicide bomberslies in carrying out false flag operations. Previously, it was necessary to bump off the operatives yourself after a false-flag operation, and that raised suspicions (eg in Italy). Now they blow up along with the victims, and nobody asks any inconvenient questions.

Except around the London bombings. Some inconvenient questions are being asked finally. I think I saw a story that some of the bombers went on a *whitewater rafting trip to Wales* shortly before the attacks. Hmmm.

There are the reports that the fourth bomber, the one on the bus whose bomb exploded later than the tube bombs, was looking frightened and started frantically doing something in his rucksack shortly before the bomb went off. If he was determined to kill himself, would he look frightened? Or had he suddenly started wondering what exactly that nice man had put in their rucksacks?

And recently a suspected bomber was shot dead with five rounds while he cowered on the ground. He happened to be completely innocent and his suspicious behavior was running away from men in plain clothes waving firearms. I would certainly do the same in Phnom Penh, or the country he came from. Perhaps there is a standing order to shoot any suspected terrorist dead on sight. Wouldn't that be convenient for a false-flag operation?

After the Kennedy assassination hundreds of witnesses and investigators lost their lives in car crashes, hit-and-runs, suicides, falls from high buildings, etc. That was difficult to do, especially because even people who had *misleading* evidence had to be rubbed out, so that no conclusions could be drawn.

But there's a clean break with a phantom menace like Al Qaeda, and suicide bombers. All the evidence disappears and all we know is fed to us by "counterterrorism experts".

2005 Jul 22 [ Fri ]

Simple way to reduce the size of government

I was just daydreaming about what in heck I could do to actually improve things even if I had a Thaksin-like grip on the US. It occurred to me that one could pass a congressional amendment such that the *maximum* taxation in total would be say 10% of GNP in peacetime and say 25% in wartime.

Having patted myself on the back for a few seconds it then occurred to me that experience teaches us that the result of such an amendment, even if by some miracle it actually became effective, would be that the US would involve itself in endless wars.

Then I started thinking about the US's endless wars.

At the time, I supported the US involvement in Vietnam. I bought the domino theory and I hated socialist totalitarianism. Indeed, sometimes I still find myself arguing on the basis of my worldview at that time.

But now when I think about Vietnam I think about the endless succession of stupid, brutal "foreign entanglements" ever since the 19th century, and anyone can see the pattern.

Maybe my amendment would need to set the limits the other way: 25% in peacetime and 10% in wartime. Hmmm.

2005 May 29 [ Sun ]

Koran not flushed down toilet? OK then.

Many news stories are reporting that the US have announced that the Newsweek story about US interrogators flushing the Koran down a toilet were false.

But this is what the US forces'investigating officer said:

Hood announced that there is "no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Qur'an down the toilet."

So, logically, the following can be true:

1. There is evidence which he "does not find credible" (which does not mean that he does not believe it himself)

2. A US operative who was *not* a member of the Joint Task Force (eg one of those civilian contractors we've heard so much about) did it

3. They did it everywhere except Guantanamo Bay

4. They didn't *flush* it down the toilet – they forced it round the bend using the detainee's head

5. It wasn't the Qu'ran, it was the Q'ahuahoaharan (joke for linguists)

6. It wasn't down the toilet, it was into a vast pool of sewage in which the detainees had been chained

Later in the same para, it says:

Earlier, an FBI document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union had alleged such an incident in August 2002. On Thursday, the detainee who had made that allegation recanted his statement.

Hmm. Recanted? While sitting in his mom's house at a press conference with his lawyers?

Another interesting take on the Bush administration: www.justicefornone.com [http://www.justicefornone.com/handbills/leaving1.htm]

Another good reference to Bush as Lord Vader

This one makes the point that Bush, since 9/11, has succeeded in turning the USA into a *typical* fascist state. slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151013&cid=12665255]

My previous article: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/starwars02.html]

2005 May 28 [ Sat ]

New diversion on OKC bomb: FBI tortured suspect to death

I think that most of the new leads that appear on major propaganda episodes like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 are deliberate disinformation, created in order to cause further confusion.

My own guess on OKC varies but I wouldn't be surprised if the feds provided the explosive and the target. I think different groups in the feds knew different parts of what was really happening: I think some feds had planted informants in an operation which other feds had set up!

Many witnesses told the feds about "John Doe #2", but they were relentlessly ignored: www.worldnetdaily.com [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29606]

A new story says the Feds were actually holding some poor guy *believing him to be Richard Lee Guthrie*, a coconspirator. Anyhow, he died in their custody and there was (of course) a coverup: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/may2005/270505tortureandmurder.htm]

I'm guessing this story has been planted at this time to provide support for cover story #2: the FBI did indeed know about the planned OKC attack, but fouled up so badly that they had to cover up their involvement totally.

We will never be told the truth. Fox Mulder had a poster saying "the truth is out there"; regrettably it is entirely surrounded by a phalanx of lies.

2005 May 25 [ Wed ]

My wacky idea about Star Wars seems to be true

Way back in 2004 November: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/starwars01.html] I had the idea that Lucas was representing the current political situation in his movies. Now everyone sees it: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/may2005/240505sithlord.htm]

Actually, in interviews Lucas says that he formed his story based on the *Vietnam* war – for instance, the infamous "Gulf of Tonkin" incident in which President Johnson manufactured a reason to send the USA to war: www.fair.org [http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2261]

Hmmm. At the time I supported the USA in Vietnam. I don't know how much of my support was because of outright lies. Who knows how many lies have still not been brought to light?

The saddest thing is that it is *currently* perfectly obvious that Bush lied repeatedly about Iraq, but nobody but a bunch of old curmudgeons like me seems to pay attention. Hmm again. Maybe I thought, at the time of the Vietnam War, that only a bunch of old curmudgeons were complaining about Vietnam.

2005 May 10 [ Tue ]

Excellent Slashdot posting on capital punishment

I like it, I have to say, because he's making just the same points that I have: it.slashdot.org [http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148869&cid=12481646]

A representative quote, re checking DNA evidence *after* conviction:

A couple of years back, there was an interesting situation in Texas. After several such DNA exonerations, the state went through their frozen evidence from previous convictions, and destroyed them.

2005 May 07 [ Sat ]

Insightful article on the real significance of self-service systems

The following link may stop working; if necessary search for the author "Nicols Fox" and the string "Great Labor Transfer". www.iht.com [http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/05/05/opinion/edfox.php]

I'm going to include the following snippet to give you an idea of the article.

Cleverly, the restaurants made this choice not only easy but gratifying. Customers were given the sense of being good citizens or helping out the teenage minimum-wage workers who wiped off the tables. I was never fooled. I knew what was going on. We were doing the restaurant's work, and if we didn't we felt guilty. My children would shrink into their coats while people stared disapprovingly if I tried to abandon a cluttered table. In fact, it was a manifestation of the Great Labor Transfer. Companies that had already applied every possible efficiency to their businesses were looking for other ways to cut costs and saw an entirely new pool of workers who didn't have to be paid. Call them consumers.

My own little contribution to this idea is that it's part of the "de-skilling" drive in companies. I had assumed that the reason was to eliminate the power of the employee to negotiate with the employer by making sure that he has no portable skills (ie, nothing his employer or any other employer really needs), but I now see that de-skilling also allows the employer/mfr to transfer tasks to the customer/consumer.

2005 Apr 03 [ Sun ]

All new tires sold in USA for several years contain RFID transponder

So claims Slashdot poster below: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144771&cid=12123337]

You know where you have to give them your shoes at the airport, and they disappear with your shoes for a couple of minutes? What do they *do* with your shoes?

2005 Mar 29 [ Tue ]

How governments really work

This Slashdot poster thinks like me:

The general public is distracted... (Score:5, Insightful) by ites (600337) on Monday March 28, @09:52AM (#12065730) yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143985&cid=12065730]

One of the major instruments of the ruling political class is to divide and distract public opinion with intense moral-laden debate about subjects that in most other countries are treated as private matters.

Morality-driven debate is such a powerful tool because you can, by fine-tuning the argument, get a balanced 50-50 split on just about any subject.

And so, we get the endless debates about gay weddings, about living wills, about abortion, about the "theory" of evolution, about the role of religion in public structures, and so on.

Meanwhile debate about subjects that in any open democracy would make the front pages, would bring millions onto the streets, and would topple presidents... almost totally absent.

The general public does not debate the role of the state, the yawning chasms in the democratic process, the boom in military spending, gerrymandering, government-sponsored TV "news", political prisoners, torture, the corruption of every agency meant to protect the public, the environment, the economy into an agency designed to exploit and abuse...

Give the plebians bread, and circuses, and you can pretty much do what you like.

There are some good responses to him in the main article (about how the TSA lied about protecting the personal data it was collecting on individuals): yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/03/28/1344214.shtml]

Here's another posting in the thread. I guess it's not as important as US citizens being arrested and tortured in secret, but what happened to the poster is just a great example of what happens when our rights are taken away:

I've got things stolen by TSA, that's why I care. (Score:4, Interesting) by pikine (771084) on Monday March 28, @11:32AM (#12066508) yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143985&cid=12066508]

I have an obviously foreign name, and my luggage was searched two in a row for the last two times that I travelled. They put in a "notice of baggage inspection" slip in my bag. Now, the fact that they were searched wasn't a problem. The problem is that last August, they (1) delayed one luggage for a more thorough search, and (2) when I finally got my luggage, my $300 minidisc player/recorder was missing. The minidisc player was kept in a soft pouch; the pouch was stored inside a hand bag, which sit inside the luggage. They apparently opened the hand bag, pulled out the contents, found the minidisc player/recorder and found it convenient to transfer it to the inspector's own pocket.

Now, I tried to contact TSA and it wasn't helpful. The phone number they provided, (866) 289-9673, always responded with a busy tone. I e-mailed the airline, United Airlines, and they never got back to me. Maybe I was too cynical. I told them I don't think an innocuous little device like my minidisc player is a threat to airline safety.

But it is funny if you think about it. TSA steals my stuff and put a slip saying "we did it." Then the fact that there is no where to complain is like them saying to me, "nanner nanner nanner ..."

2005 Mar 15 [ Tue ]

Who actually benefits from terrorism? -- Scott Ritter answers

Most people will remember Scott Ritter as the man who was pilloried before the Iraq invasion for asserting that he had found no WMDs in Iraq.

Despite apparently working now for a fire department in New York state, his distaste for the Bush administration has deepened considerably, and in this interview his beliefs seem close to my own of a few years ago: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/march2005/140305terrortactics.htm]

Let's talk about the disintegration of the CIA as an organization capable of operating with any form of integrity.

Personally I think it's been doing what it's told... and it always has.

And here's a judge – one who has (hard to believe) often appeared on Fox News – with a very clear explanation of why the Patriot Act breaches the US Constitution: www.reason.com [http://www.reason.com/0503/fe.ng.the.shtml]

Naively, he says (about police): "they took an oath to uphold the Constitution". Hah. So did President Bush.

2005 Mar 14 [ Mon ]

Who actually benefits... part 2

Should one accept the conspiracy theory of history, or the cock-up theory?

A poster on Slashdot can see the trees but not the wood:

Re:this might not be popular here, but.... (Score:5, Interesting) by crush (19364) on Sunday March 13, @03:05PM (#11927447) yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142322&cid=11927447]

> We have the CIA and the NSA because we do have enemies abroad. Look at Iran.

And Iran is our enemy because we supported an anti-democratic fascistic dictator (the Shah) instead of allowing the people there to get on with their own lives and evolve towards democracy. At around the same time we supported other anti-democratic fascists in the Ba'ath party and look where that got us. The CIA supported that Ba'ath Party coup in Iraq.

Then later on the CIA fucked around supporting directly the Mujaheddin while they were busy dealing drugs, raping little boys and women and being allround asshats. Look where that got us.

The CIA are crap at preventing problems from external enemies: they seem to create all the external enemies. For a good read (after you've come down from your "external enemy" hysteria high, you could have a read of Chalmers Johnston's "Blowback" or Alexander Cockburn's "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press".

If you still believe that the CIA are more effective at preventing terror than creating it by their cack-handed and immoral interventions abroad then I'll eat your hat.

He sees the CIA consistently creating enemies of the American people over decades and thinks that it's some sort of mistake. I don't.

My previous posting on this subject: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/paranoia05.html]

2005 Mar 13 [ Sun ]

Who actually benefits from terrorism?

In the course of a recent interview: www.reason.com [http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml] Neal Stephenson, an sf writer, says this:

Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists.

Many, many people have pointed out that terrorism seems to bring no benefits to those groups who have espoused it: Northern Ireland's Catholics, the Basques, the Chechnyans, the Palestinians, etc etc. But for some reason they don't *draw any conclusions* from that – they don't decide that there might be something wrong with this picture.

As I've said before, there are two basic ways to analyze events, referred to in English as "the conspiracy theory" and "the cockup theory". The cockup theory requires you to believe that the US, for example, is run by complete idiots who make the same mistakes again and again.

The advantage of the conspiracy theory is that it allows you to make predictions which can be tested. You can say "What has the US actually done? What were the actual results? What can we deduce from that about what the US wants to do? What can we deduce from that about what will happen?"

When the Chechnyan leader Aslan Maskhadov was recently killed by Putin, what did that demonstrate? www.startribune.com [http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5287724.html]

Maskhadov was repeatedly named by Putin as the architect of the Beslan massacre, but it turns out that he consistently denied supporting it and similar attacks. (At the time of Beslan, I tried to find that statement on the web and could not, although there were thousands of articles which parroted the Putin line uncritically.) www.taipeitimes.com [http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/03/13/2003246067]

If you bump off an opponent who is willing to negotiate, what does that say about your *strategy*? And what does that suggest about *who really gave the order for Beslan*?

When Donald Rumsfeld sets up the Iraq operation with insufficient troops even to keep arms dumps secure, and then demands a legal opinion which will lead the US Army to torture prisoners, he is doing what sensible person would do to set up a forever war which leave the Middle East in turmoil for decades and eventually destroy the US. (Considering that "al-Qaeda" terrorism is supposed to be fomented by fundamentalist Islam, isn't it strange that the US actually goes after Iraq, and now Syria, which were/are opposed to fundamentalist Islam? And lets Saudi Arabia remain a close ally?)

The interesting thing is what his *end goal* is. Why would anyone want to destroy the USA?

The Depression at least had a point. The middle classes were encouraged to put all their money in stocks, and then the Federal Reserve only had to squeeze liquidity to burst the bubble. The rich had a decade to pick up property and factories at pennies on the dollar, and wages and benefits were ratcheted back. For some reason, Roosevelt was then determined to take the USA to war at any cost. Hmmm.

But the Depression benefited *somebody*. Who will benefit when UN troops occupy DC?

2004 Dec 29 [ Wed ]

"War is a racket" by Maj-Gen Smedley Butler

I saw this link somewhere on Slashdot: www.ratical.org [http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html]

The author died in 1940 – hence the "Rufus T. Firefly"-esque name. So he's writing about what happened in WW1, and arguing against US involvement in WW2. So people today may be put off by the antique examples he uses. I think most of his arguments apply very well to today however. Here's one passage that could certainly apply to "Begun the Clone Wars have" Iraq:

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factor ies and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were m ade over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the d ay. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were e ntirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think no thing at all of killing or of being killed.

Actually I've read studies which suggest that *comparatively few* "doughboys" were made into killing machines by the unsophisticated techniques of the day. Apparently most infantrymen refused to fire their rifle at an identifiable target. But after the war in the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam, more and more Americans are willing to kill people that the Feds want them to kill. Hmmm.

2004 Nov 18 [ Thu ]

Fedgov now sending scary email to "bad guys"

In the middle of a Slashdot discussion about a recently revealed US operation prior to the invasion of Iraq, in which email was sent to many Iraqi officers telling them resistance was futile, a poster pointed out that Fedgov can use the same technique against internal wreckers:

I received a similar message last month... (Score:4, Funny) by mogrify (828588) on Wednesday November 17, @07:06PM (#10848244) (gambone.homelinux.org [http://gambone.homelinux.org/)] politics.slashdot.org [http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130073&cid=10848244]

Attention leftist activists and intelligentsia! The solidification of our power is imminent. Although you could stay and fight, it would really be much better if you just left. Please accept these Novia Scotia brochures and a complimentary copy of Hockey for Dummies! Remember, if it's not Right, it's Wrong!

2004 Nov 17 [ Wed ]

The strange relationship between Star Wars movies and the War on Terror

As I have remarked before, Orwell's "1984" was referred to inaccurately so many times in the sixties and seventies that it became practically a marker of a wacky leftist argument, with no informational content whatever. A movie was released to more or less coincide with the year 1984, but it was earnest, turgid and unwatchable.

However, when "Brazil" came out, I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the plot of "1984" (the novel). I don't remember the critics referring to this at the time, but it seemed so obvious to me: the position of the hero, the 1940s styling, the torture sequence, the love affair.

"Brazil" seemed to me to be a clever and very pointed *update* of 1984, made to be accessible, and made to refer more or less explicitly to *current* concerns. In particular, it was the first thing which really made me question the London government's "war on terror" – the struggle against the IRA. Somehow, seeing the mysterious, pointless bombings in "Brazil" made me wonder about what was *actually* going on – "who whom", as Stalin said.

Like almost every other fan on the planet, I hated the last two Star Wars movies. Not only was the young Darth Vader offensively cute, not only was Jar Jar Binks a horrible miscalculation, but also the basic plot was deathly uncinematic. What on earth made Lucas choose to base the last two instalments of a thrilling adventure story for kids on a huge, slow-moving conspiracy basically aimed at overthrowing a peaceful and prosperous society?

The last time I saw one of these movies on cable it hit me: maybe Lucas decided to encode his view of the *current* political situation into his movies. I have written before about the way homosexual novels were routinely "translated" into heterosexual movies, merely for commercial reasons: at the time, this could be commented on by critics. Today, the Feds have successfully demonized all opponents to the "war on terror", and for Lucas to outright say that the Feds are trying to overthrow the US constitution would lead to nothing more than mocking references on Leno's monologue.

Just think about all those lines in the movies which were given unusual stress: at the moment of victory, Yoda scowls and says "Begun the Clone Wars have". Yoda has insight: we see Count Dookoo reporting to his mysterious overlord after what appeared to be a humiliating defeat, and he is *congratulated*. In other words, Yoda's insight is correct: the true aim of the plotters is to destabilize the government itself, and a central goal is to cause the assembly to give up its own powers and offer them to a single leader. The clone army is *per se* evil: because every clone is happy to follow orders, the clone army will be far easier for the eventual regime to control.

I think when Lucas thinks about the invasion of Iraq, he is like me: he thinks not "Bush is a complete idiot who has embroiled this country in a worse military disaster than Vietnam", but "hmmm. Why would anyone *decide* to do this?"

Of course, the "Phantom Menace" came out before the Iraq war. Still, I think Lucas could see the loss of civil liberties, and the reliance on militarism, and where they were heading. (Incidentally, isn't "Phantom Menace" a terrible name for a movie? And isn't it a great description of the War on Terror?)

In the 2004 election, a born-again prowar christian with a rich family beat a prowar jew with a rich family. In Iraq, the US Army becomes used to bombing and machinegunning and torturing inconvenient civilians in an endless war against a concept. "Begun the Clone Wars have."

Kerry's Jewish roots: www.jewishsf.com [http://www.jewishsf.com/bk030207/us02.shtml]

2004 Oct 11 [ Mon ]

What is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) *really* for?

Since 1980 we've seen various stories about the plans the British government made in case of nuclear war. They were surprisingly far-reaching, and the amount of physical preparation that was actually done – underground shelters, communication systems, storage facilities etc – was mind-boggling. And the whole programme was maintained in total secrecy.

FEMA is a similar program. Official statements have always downplayed it, but people have noticed that the legal setup for FEMA allows it to grab total control, with priority over all other agencies.

And what is its real purpose? Well, they seem to have a whole bunch of shiny new secret prison camps: www.thetruthseeker.co.uk