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Info. Transparency?: Confessions: Investment Banker

2009-05-21T20:20:00.004-02:30

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Information Transparency?: Confessions of a Former Investment Banker

Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears that the financial engineers responsible for the world's swiss cheese financial system -- from it's Central Banks fractional banking and fiat currencies, to Enron and Worldcomm like fictional helium based accounting systems, on various stock exchanges; -- do not appear, to live below the sea-level of their financial systems.

It appears to me that for at least a few decades, with a gold boomtown greed like urgency, the 'bankers' in the 'stock exchange card game business', and the 'bankers' in the 'fractional banking and fiat currencies card game business'; consider the forms, regulations and usages, of their 'card game businesses', as entirely irrelevant.

If stock exchange regulations do not allow for companies traded on the relevant stock exchange to enter fictional helium based assets and liabilities, how is it that there appear to be no consequences for their accounting bluffing game? If a poker player goes all in on a bluff, and loses, he is out of the tournament, immediately. Yet companies invested in stock exchanges appear to enter ever greater and ever higher helium-like fictional accounting bluffs, and yet – even though this is strictly against regulations – the bankers interest in enforcing the regulations appear half-hearted, to the naïve, and intentionally criminal, to the astute.
-- Letter to Johannesburg Stock Exchange Board of Directors, July 29, 2008

Its the Economy Stewpyd...

Continuing the theme of justifications for Financial Secession, as a sub-directory of Political Secession of the Cape of Good Hope, from Azania; and finding points of Leverage that enable negotiating from a position of strength on the plausible issue of Cape Secession.

It is my view, that a significant leverage point would be that the Cape Secession movement ally itself to those who support totally transparent free markets -- best publicly respresented on the current geo-political stage, by Dr. Ron Paul and the Austrian School of Economics Libertarians.

There are those who pretend to be 'communists' and use 'communist theory' and 'propaganda' and secrecy and their secret police, to promise the masses whatever they want; and who are nothing but sheep in wolves clothing; their real religious ideology they serve being Pure Power. They are 'communists in name only'.

Then there are those who pretend to be 'capitalists' and use 'capitalist theory' and propaganda and secrecy and their secret police, to promise infinite economic growth and 'happiness' and 'prosperity'; who are often nothing but sheep in wolves clothing; thier real religious ideology they serve being Pure Power. They are 'capitalists in name only.'

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The End of Wall Street

by Michael Lewis Steve Sailor

Nov 11 2008

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar's Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue.

I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989 — Liar's Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they'd be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn't expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, "How quaint."

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It's never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup's C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

From that moment, Whitney became E.F. Hutton: When she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they'd fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You're wrong. You're still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.

Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it's true that she was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what was going to happen to these Wall Street firms. The C.E.O.'s themselves didn't know.

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She just expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer's campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they'd have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own.

At some point, I could no longer contain myself: I called Whitney. This was back in March, when Wall Street's fate still hung in the balance. I thought, If she's right, then this really could be the end of Wall Street as we've known it. I was curious to see if she made sense but also to know where this young woman who was crashing the stock market with her every utterance had come from.

It turned out that she made a great deal of sense and that she'd arrived on Wall Street in 1993, from the Brown University history department. "I got to New York, and I didn't even know research existed," she says. She'd wound up at Oppenheimer and had the most incredible piece of luck: to be trained by a man who helped her establish not merely a career but a worldview. His name, she says, was Steve Eisman.

Eisman had moved on, but they kept in touch. "After I made the Citi call," she says, "one of the best things that happened was when Steve called and told me how proud he was of me."

Having never heard of Eisman, I didn't think anything of this. But a few months later, I called Whitney again and asked her, as I was asking others, whom she knew who had anticipated the cataclysm and set themselves up to make a fortune from it. There's a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.

Steve Eisman entered finance about the time I exited it. He'd grown up in New York City and gone to a Jewish day school, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. In 1991, he was a 30-year-old corporate lawyer. "I hated it," he says. "I hated being a lawyer. My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer. They managed to finagle me a job. It's not pretty, but that's what happened."

He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate who didn't actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer's investment bankers stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: "I'm a junior analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him that as a lawyer I'd worked on a deal for the Money Store." He was promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial. "What I didn't tell him was that my job had been to proofread the documents and that I hadn't understood a word of the fucking things."

Ames Financial belonged to a category of firms known as nonbank financial institutions. The category didn't include J.P. Morgan, but it did encompass many little-known companies that one way or another were involved in the early-1990s boom in subprime mortgage lending—the lower class of American finance.

The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility was Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. "I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit," Eisman says. "I didn't know that you weren't supposed to put a sell rating on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should." He was pressured generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn't Steve Eisman's style. Upbeat and Eisman didn't occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. "He's sort of a prick in a way, but he's smart and honest and fearless."

"A lot of people don't get Steve," Whitney says. "But the people who get him love him." Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn't worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. "The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst," says Eisman, "was after Lomas said they were hedged." He recited the line from memory: " 'The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote." A few months after he'd delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

Eisman wasn't, in short, an analyst with a sunny disposition who expected the best of his fellow financial man and the companies he created. "You have to understand," Eisman says in his defense, "I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold."

Harboring suspicions about people's morals and telling investors that companies don't deserve their capital wasn't, in the 1990s or at any other time, the fast track to success on Wall Street. Eisman quit Oppenheimer in 2001 to work as an analyst at a hedge fund, but what he really wanted to do was run money. FrontPoint Partners, another hedge fund, hired him in 2004 to invest in financial stocks. Eisman's brief was to evaluate Wall Street banks, homebuilders, mortgage originators, and any company (General Electric or General Motors, for instance) with a big financial-services division—anyone who touched American finance. An insurance company backed him with $50 million, a paltry sum. "Basically, we tried to raise money and didn't really do it," Eisman says.

Instead of money, he attracted people whose worldviews were as shaded as his own—Vincent Daniel, for instance, who became a partner and an analyst in charge of the mortgage sector. Now 36, Daniel grew up a lower-middle-class kid in Queens. One of his first jobs, as a junior accountant at Arthur Andersen, was to audit Salomon Brothers' books. "It was shocking," he says. "No one could explain to me what they were doing." He left accounting in the middle of the internet boom to become a research analyst, looking at companies that made subprime loans. "I was the only guy I knew covering companies that were all going to go bust," he says. "I saw how the sausage was made in the economy, and it was really freaky."

Danny Moses, who became Eisman's head trader, was another who shared his perspective. Raised in Georgia, Moses, the son of a finance professor, was a bit less fatalistic than Daniel or Eisman, but he nevertheless shared a general sense that bad things can and do happen. When a Wall Street firm helped him get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, he said to the salesman, "I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to screw me?"

Heh heh heh, c'mon. We'd never do that, the trader started to say, but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don't just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I'll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade.

Both Daniel and Moses enjoyed, immensely, working with Steve Eisman. He put a fine point on the absurdity they saw everywhere around them. "Steve's fun to take to any Wall Street meeting," Daniel says. "Because he'll say 'Explain that to me' 30 different times. Or 'Could you explain that more, in English?' Because once you do that, there's a few things you learn. For a start, you figure out if they even know what they're talking about. And a lot of times, they don't!"

At the end of 2004, Eisman, Moses, and Daniel shared a sense that unhealthy things were going on in the U.S. housing market: Lots of firms were lending money to people who shouldn't have been borrowing it. They thought Alan Greenspan's decision after the internet bust to lower interest rates to 1 percent was a travesty that would lead to some terrible day of reckoning. Neither of these insights was entirely original. Ivy Zelman, at the time the housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse, had seen the bubble forming very early on. There's a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," Zelman says. "But the problem wasn't just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren't real buyers. They were speculators." Zelman alienated clients with her pessimism, but she couldn't pretend everything was good. "It wasn't that hard in hindsight to see it," she says. "It was very hard to know when it would stop." Zelman spoke occasionally with Eisman and always left these conversations feeling better about her views and worse about the world. "You needed the occasional assurance that you weren't nuts," she says. She wasn't nuts. The world was.

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn't understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he'd spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. "What most people don't realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world," he says. "The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market." He shorted companies that originated subprime loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these trades proved to be, they weren't entirely satisfying. These companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.

Enter Greg Lippman, a mortgage-bond trader at Deutsche Bank. He arrived at FrontPoint bearing a 66-page presentation that described a better way for the fund to put its view of both Wall Street and the U.S. housing market into action. The smart trade, Lippman argued, was to sell short not New Century's stock but its bonds that were backed by the subprime loans it had made. Eisman hadn't known this was even possible—because until recently, it hadn't been. But Lippman, along with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way to short the subprime bond market with precision.

Here's where financial technology became suddenly, urgently relevant. The typical mortgage bond was still structured in much the same way it had been when I worked at Salomon Brothers. The loans went into a trust that was designed to pay off its investors not all at once but according to their rankings. The investors in the top tranche, rated AAA, received the first payment from the trust and, because their investment was the least risky, received the lowest interest rate on their money. The investors who held the trusts' BBB tranche got the last payments—and bore the brunt of the first defaults. Because they were taking the most risk, they received the highest return. Eisman wanted to bet that some subprime borrowers would default, causing the trust to suffer losses. The way to express this view was to short the BBB tranche. The trouble was that the BBB tranche was only a tiny slice of the deal.

But the scarcity of truly crappy subprime-mortgage bonds no longer mattered. The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the N.F.L. Eisman was perplexed in particular about why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell short. "What Lippman did, to his credit, was he came around several times to me and said, 'Short this market,' " Eisman says. "In my entire life, I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, 'Short my market.' "

And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he'd just done so he could do it better. He'd call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They'd be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. "The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM," says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he'd hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. "She was this lovely woman from Jamaica," he says. "One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, 'How did that happen?' " It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. "By the time they were done," Eisman says, "they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn't make any of the payments."

In retrospect, pretty much all of the riskiest subprime-backed bonds were worth betting against; they would all one day be worth zero. But at the time Eisman began to do it, in the fall of 2006, that wasn't clear. He and his team set out to find the smelliest pile of loans they could so that they could make side bets against them with Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank. What they were doing, oddly enough, was the analysis of subprime lending that should have been done before the loans were made: Which poor Americans were likely to jump which way with their finances? How much did home prices need to fall for these loans to blow up? (It turned out they didn't have to fall; they merely needed to stay flat.) The default rate in Georgia was five times higher than that in Florida even though the two states had the same unemployment rate. Why? Indiana had a 25 percent default rate; California's was only 5 percent. Why?

Moses actually flew down to Miami and wandered around neighborhoods built with subprime loans to see how bad things were. "He'd call me and say, 'Oh my God, this is a calamity here,' " recalls Eisman. All that was required for the BBB bonds to go to zero was for the default rate on the underlying loans to reach 14 percent. Eisman thought that, in certain sections of the country, it would go far, far higher.

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn't figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. "I didn't understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold," he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. "We always asked the same question," says Eisman. "Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I'd always get the same reaction. It was a smirk." He called Standard & Poor's and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn't say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. "They were just assuming home prices would keep going up," Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody's but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody's were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. "But we're sitting there," Daniel recalls, "and he says to us, like he actually means it, 'I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.' And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, 'What did you just say?' as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him."

"With all due respect, sir," Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, "you're delusional."

This wasn't Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody's, the aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And the company's C.E.O. was being told he was either a fool or a crook by one Vincent Daniel, from Queens.

A full nine months earlier, Daniel and Moses had flown to Orlando for an industry conference. It had a grand title—the American Securitization Forum—but it was essentially a trade show for the subprime-mortgage business: the people who originated subprime mortgages, the Wall Street firms that packaged and sold subprime mortgages, the fund managers who invested in nothing but subprime-mortgage-backed bonds, the agencies that rated subprime-mortgage bonds, the lawyers who did whatever the lawyers did. Daniel and Moses thought they were paying a courtesy call on a cottage industry, but the cottage had become a castle. "There were like 6,000 people there," Daniel says. "There were so many people being fed by this industry. The entire fixed-income department of each brokerage firm is built on this. Everyone there was the long side of the trade. The wrong side of the trade. And then there was us. That's when the picture really started to become clearer, and we started to get more cynical, if that was possible. We went back home and said to Steve, 'You gotta see this.' "

Eisman, Daniel, and Moses then flew out to Las Vegas for an even bigger subprime conference. By now, Eisman knew everything he needed to know about the quality of the loans being made. He still didn't fully understand how the apparatus worked, but he knew that Wall Street had built a doomsday machine. He was at once opportunistic and outraged.

Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part of his speech about Option One's subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. "It wasn't a Q&A," says Moses. "The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve's hand and says, 'Yes?'"

"Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?" Eisman asked.

A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech.

Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no, Moses thought. "The one thing Steve always says," Daniel explains, "is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always lie to you." Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these subprime lenders but didn't see the need for him to express it here in this manner. For Eisman wasn't raising his hand to ask a question. He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said.

"Yes?" the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. "Is that another question?"

"No," said Eisman. "It's a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent." The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman's cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. "Excuse me," he said, standing up. "But I need to take this call." And with that, he walked out.

Eisman's willingness to be abrasive in order to get to the heart of the matter was obvious to all; what was harder to see was his credulity: He actually wanted to believe in the system. As quick as he was to cry bullshit when he saw it, he was still shocked by bad behavior. That night in Vegas, he was seated at dinner beside a really nice guy who invested in mortgage C.D.O.'s—collateralized debt obligations. By then, Eisman thought he knew what he needed to know about C.D.O.'s. He didn't, it turned out.

Later, when I sit down with Eisman, the very first thing he wants to explain is the importance of the mezzanine C.D.O. What you notice first about Eisman is his lips. He holds them pursed, waiting to speak. The second thing you notice is his short, light hair, cropped in a manner that suggests he cut it himself while thinking about something else. "You have to understand this," he says. "This was the engine of doom." Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a "particularly egregious" C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. "I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years," Eisman says.

His dinner companion in Las Vegas ran a fund of about $15 billion and managed C.D.O.'s backed by the BBB tranche of a mortgage bond, or as Eisman puts it, "the equivalent of three levels of dog shit lower than the original bonds."

FrontPoint had spent a lot of time digging around in the dog shit and knew that the default rates were already sufficient to wipe out this guy's entire portfolio. "God, you must be having a hard time," Eisman told his dinner companion.

"No," the guy said, "I've sold everything out."

After taking a fee, he passed them on to other investors. His job was to be the C.D.O. "expert," but he actually didn't spend any time at all thinking about what was in the C.D.O.'s. "He managed the C.D.O.'s," says Eisman, "but managed what? I was just appalled. People would pay up to have someone manage their C.D.O.'s—as if this moron was helping you. I thought, You prick, you don't give a fuck about the investors in this thing."

Whatever rising anger Eisman felt was offset by the man's genial disposition. Not only did he not mind that Eisman took a dim view of his C.D.O.'s; he saw it as a basis for friendship. "Then he said something that blew my mind," Eisman tells me. "He says, 'I love guys like you who short my market. Without you, I don't have anything to buy.' "

That's when Eisman finally got it. Here he'd been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren't enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren't satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"

This particular dinner was hosted by Deutsche Bank, whose head trader, Greg Lippman, was the fellow who had introduced Eisman to the subprime bond market. Eisman went and found Lippman, pointed back to his own dinner companion, and said, "I want to short him." Lippman thought he was joking; he wasn't. "Greg, I want to short his paper," Eisman repeated. "Sight unseen."

Eisman started out running a $60 million equity fund but was now short around $600 million of various subprime-related securities. In the spring of 2007, the market strengthened. But, says Eisman, "credit quality always gets better in March and April. And the reason it always gets better in March and April is that people get their tax refunds. You would think people in the securitization world would know this. We just thought that was moronic."

He was already short the stocks of mortgage originators and the homebuilders. Now he took short positions in the rating agencies—"they were making 10 times more rating C.D.O.'s than they were rating G.M. bonds, and it was all going to end"—and, finally, the biggest Wall Street firms because of their exposure to C.D.O.'s. He wasn't allowed to short Morgan Stanley because it owned a stake in his fund. But he shorted UBS, Lehman Brothers, and a few others. Not long after that, FrontPoint had a visit from Sanford C. Bernstein's Brad Hintz, a prominent analyst who covered Wall Street firms. Hintz wanted to know what Eisman was up to. "We just shorted Merrill Lynch," Eisman told him.

"Why?" asked Hintz.

"We have a simple thesis," Eisman explained. "There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there." When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman's logic—the logic of Wall Street's pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain.

There was only one thing that bothered Eisman, and it continued to trouble him as late as May 2007. "The thing we couldn't figure out is: It's so obvious. Why hasn't everyone else figured out that the machine is done?" Eisman had long subscribed to Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a newsletter famous in Wall Street circles and obscure outside them. Jim Grant, its editor, had been prophesying doom ever since the great debt cycle began, in the mid-1980s. In late 2006, he decided to investigate these things called C.D.O.'s. Or rather, he had asked his young assistant, Dan Gertner, a chemical engineer with an M.B.A., to see if he could understand them. Gertner went off with the documents that purported to explain C.D.O.'s to potential investors and for several days sweated and groaned and heaved and suffered. "Then he came back," says Grant, "and said, 'I can't figure this thing out.' And I said, 'I think we have our story.' "

Eisman read Grant's piece as independent confirmation of what he knew in his bones about the C.D.O.'s he had shorted. "When I read it, I thought, Oh my God. This is like owning a gold mine. When I read that, I was the only guy in the equity world who almost had an orgasm."

On July 19, 2007, the same day that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the U.S. Senate that he anticipated as much as $100 billion in losses in the subprime-mortgage market, FrontPoint did something unusual: It hosted its own conference call. It had had calls with its tiny population of investors, but this time FrontPoint opened it up. Steve Eisman had become a poorly kept secret. Five hundred people called in to hear what he had to say, and another 500 logged on afterward to listen to a recording of it. He explained the strange alchemy of the C.D.O. and said that he expected losses of up to $300 billion from this sliver of the market alone. To evaluate the situation, he urged his audience to "just throw your model in the garbage can. The models are all backward-looking.

The models don't have any idea of what this world has become…. For the first time in their lives, people in the asset-backed-securitization world are actually having to think." He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt. "The rating agencies are scared to death," he said. "They're scared to death about doing nothing because they'll look like fools if they do nothing."

On September 18, 2008, Danny Moses came to work as usual at 6:30 a.m. Earlier that week, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. The day before, the Dow had fallen 449 points to its lowest level in four years. Overnight, European governments announced a ban on short-selling, but that served as faint warning for what happened next.

At the market opening in the U.S., everything—every financial asset—went into free fall. "All hell was breaking loose in a way I had never seen in my career," Moses says. FrontPoint was net short the market, so this total collapse should have given Moses pleasure. He might have been forgiven if he stood up and cheered. After all, he'd been betting for two years that this sort of thing could happen, and now it was, more dramatically than he had ever imagined. Instead, he felt this terrifying shudder run through him. He had maybe 100 trades on, and he worked hard to keep a handle on them all. "I spent my morning trying to control all this energy and all this information," he says, "and I lost control. I looked at the screens. I was staring into the abyss. The end. I felt this shooting pain in my head. I don't get headaches. At first, I thought I was having an aneurysm."

Moses stood up, wobbled, then turned to Daniel and said, "I gotta leave. Get out of here. Now." Daniel thought about calling an ambulance but instead took Moses out for a walk.

Outside it was gorgeous, the blue sky reaching down through the tall buildings and warming the soul. Eisman was at a Goldman Sachs conference for hedge fund managers, raising capital. Moses and Daniel got him on the phone, and he left the conference and met them on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. "We just sat there," Moses says. "Watching the people pass."

This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. "The investment-banking industry is fucked," Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. "These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It's like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: 'Holy shit, I'm wrong!' " Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct.

Not so for hedge fund managers who had seen it coming. "As we sat there, we were weirdly calm," Moses says. "We felt insulated from the whole market reality. It was an out-of-body experience. We just sat and watched the people pass and talked about what might happen next. How many of these people were going to lose their jobs. Who was going to rent these buildings after all the Wall Street firms collapsed." Eisman was appalled. "Look," he said. "I'm short. I don't want the country to go into a depression. I just want it to fucking deleverage." He had tried a thousand times in a thousand ways to explain how screwed up the business was, and no one wanted to hear it. "That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice," he says. "They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience."

Truth to tell, there wasn't a whole lot of hand-wringing inside FrontPoint either. The only one among them who wrestled a bit with his conscience was Daniel. "Vinny, being from Queens, needs to see the dark side of everything," Eisman says. To which Daniel replies, "The way we thought about it was, 'By shorting this market we're creating the liquidity to keep the market going.' "

"It was like feeding the monster," Eisman says of the market for subprime bonds. "We fed the monster until it blew up."

About the time they were sitting on the steps of the midtown cathedral, I sat in a booth in a restaurant on the East Side, waiting for John Gutfreund to arrive for lunch, and wondered, among other things, why any restaurant would seat side by side two men without the slightest interest in touching each other.

There was an umbilical cord running from the belly of the exploded beast back to the financial 1980s. A friend of mine created the first mortgage derivative in 1986, a year after we left the Salomon Brothers trading program. ("The problem isn't the tools," he likes to say. "It's who is using the tools. Derivatives are like guns.")

When I published my book, the 1980s were supposed to be ending. I received a lot of undeserved credit for my timing. The social disruption caused by the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry and the rise of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts had given way to a brief period of recriminations. Just as most students at Ohio State read Liar's Poker as a manual, most TV and radio interviewers regarded me as a whistleblower. (The big exception was Geraldo Rivera. He put me on a show called "People Who Succeed Too Early in Life" along with some child actors who'd gone on to become drug addicts.) Anti-Wall Street feeling ran high—high enough for Rudy Giuliani to float a political career on it—but the result felt more like a witch hunt than an honest reappraisal of the financial order. The public lynchings of Gutfreund and junk-bond king Michael Milken were excuses not to deal with the disturbing forces underpinning their rise. Ditto the cleaning up of Wall Street's trading culture. The surface rippled, but down below, in the depths, the bonus pool remained undisturbed. Wall Street firms would soon be frowning upon profanity, firing traders for so much as glancing at a stripper, and forcing male employees to treat women almost as equals. Lehman Brothers circa 2008 more closely resembled a normal corporation with solid American values than did any Wall Street firm circa 1985.

The changes were camouflage. They helped distract outsiders from the truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture.

I'd not seen Gutfreund since I quit Wall Street. I'd met him, nervously, a couple of times on the trading floor. A few months before I left, my bosses asked me to explain to Gutfreund what at the time seemed like exotic trades in derivatives I'd done with a European hedge fund. I tried. He claimed not to be smart enough to understand any of it, and I assumed that was how a Wall Street C.E.O. showed he was the boss, by rising above the details. There was no reason for him to remember any of these encounters, and he didn't: When my book came out and became a public-relations nuisance to him, he told reporters we'd never met.

Over the years, I'd heard bits and pieces about Gutfreund. I knew that after he'd been forced to resign from Salomon Brothers he'd fallen on harder times. I heard later that a few years ago he'd sat on a panel about Wall Street at Columbia Business School. When his turn came to speak, he advised students to find something more meaningful to do with their lives. As he began to describe his career, he broke down and wept.

When I emailed him to invite him to lunch, he could not have been more polite or more gracious. That attitude persisted as he was escorted to the table, made chitchat with the owner, and ordered his food. He'd lost a half-step and was more deliberate in his movements, but otherwise he was completely recognizable. The same veneer of denatured courtliness masked the same animal need to see the world as it was, rather than as it should be.

We spent 20 minutes or so determining that our presence at the same lunch table was not going to cause the earth to explode. We discovered we had a mutual acquaintance in New Orleans. We agreed that the Wall Street C.E.O. had no real ability to keep track of the frantic innovation occurring inside his firm. ("I didn't understand all the product lines, and they don't either," he said.) We agreed, further, that the chief of the Wall Street investment bank had little control over his subordinates. ("They're buttering you up and then doing whatever the fuck they want to do.") He thought the cause of the financial crisis was "simple. Greed on both sides—greed of investors and the greed of the bankers." I thought it was more complicated. Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation. The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed.

But I didn't argue with him. For just as you revert to being about nine years old when you visit your parents, you revert to total subordination when you are in the presence of your former C.E.O. John Gutfreund was still the King of Wall Street, and I was still a geek. He spoke in declarative statements; I spoke in questions.

But as he spoke, my eyes kept drifting to his hands. His alarmingly thick and meaty hands. They weren't the hands of a soft Wall Street banker but of a boxer. I looked up. The boxer was smiling—though it was less a smile than a placeholder expression. And he was saying, very deliberately, "Your…fucking…book."

I smiled back, though it wasn't quite a smile.

"Your fucking book destroyed my career, and it made yours," he said.

I didn't think of it that way and said so, sort of.

"Why did you ask me to lunch?" he asked, though pleasantly. He was genuinely curious.

You can't really tell someone that you asked him to lunch to let him know that you don't think of him as evil. Nor can you tell him that you asked him to lunch because you thought that you could trace the biggest financial crisis in the history of the world back to a decision he had made. John Gutfreund did violence to the Wall Street social order—and got himself dubbed the King of Wall Street—when he turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street's first public corporation. He ignored the outrage of Salomon's retired partners. ("I was disgusted by his materialism," William Salomon, the son of the firm's founder, who had made Gutfreund C.E.O. only after he'd promised never to sell the firm, had told me.) He lifted a giant middle finger at the moral disapproval of his fellow Wall Street C.E.O.'s. And he seized the day. He and the other partners not only made a quick killing; they transferred the ultimate financial risk from themselves to their shareholders. It didn't, in the end, make a great deal of sense for the shareholders. (A share of Salomon Brothers purchased when I arrived on the trading floor, in 1986, at a then market price of $42, would be worth 2.26 shares of Citigroup today—market value: $27.) But it made fantastic sense for the investment bankers.

From that moment, though, the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith.

No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.'s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.'s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit.

No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between the ability to get in and out of Princeton and a talent for taking financial risk?

Now I asked Gutfreund about his biggest decision. "Yes," he said. "They—the heads of the other Wall Street firms—all said what an awful thing it was to go public and how could you do such a thing. But when the temptation arose, they all gave in to it." He agreed that the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. "When things go wrong, it's their problem," he said—and obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government. "It's laissez-faire until you get in deep shit," he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of the game.

It was now all someone else's fault.

He watched me curiously as I scribbled down his words. "What's this for?" he asked.

I told him I thought it might be worth revisiting the world I'd described in Liar's Poker, now that it was finally dying. Maybe bring out a 20th-anniversary edition.

"That's nauseating," he said.

Hard as it was for him to enjoy my company, it was harder for me not to enjoy his. He was still tough, as straight and blunt as a butcher. He'd helped create a monster, but he still had in him a lot of the old Wall Street, where people said things like "A man's word is his bond."(sic) On that Wall Street, people didn't walk out of their firms and cause trouble for their former bosses by writing books about them. "No," he said, "I think we can agree about this: Your fucking book destroyed my career, and it made yours." With that, the former king of a former Wall Street lifted the plate that held his appetizer and asked sweetly, "Would you like a deviled egg?"

Until that moment, I hadn't paid much attention to what he'd been eating. Now I saw he'd ordered the best thing in the house, this gorgeous frothy confection of an earlier age. Who ever dreamed up the deviled egg? Who knew that a simple egg could be made so complicated and yet so appealing? I reached over and took one. Something for nothing. It never loses its charm.

Source: Steve Sailors Blog

0 Opinion(s):

Info. Transparency?: Confessions: Derivatives Trader

2009-05-21T20:18:00.003-02:30

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Information Transparency?: Confessions of a Former Derivatives Trader

PUMP AND DUMP

It's a simple scheme really. The mafia knows it quite well. By whatever means necessary, drive a stock's price higher and higher. Make it look like a mover, even if it's a dog. Cook the books and get suckers to buy in, helping to drive the price even higher. When you think the balloon will pop, call all your buddies and sell your shares. That effectively steals all the money that the suckers put in. When the stock crashes, the suckers who weren't part of the scheme will take the loss, whether they be individual investors or the New York City police and fire pension fund.

If I mention the "bookkeeping problem" that's threatening Wall Street right now and asked you how many companies were being investigated for or had announced "overstated earnings," how many would you say? Six? Eight? Try 17. Did you think that WorldCom was a big one, having illegally claimed $3.8 billion in earnings to boost its share price? On July 5, according to Newsday, the energy giant Reliant Resources "restated" its 1999-2001 earnings by chopping off $7.8 billion in revenue. Just today it was disclosed on CNN that the pharmaceutical giant Merck has overstated its revenues by $14 billion.

At the core of all these accounting problems is a non-transparent form of corporate bookkeeping called "pro forma." As opposed to the more transparent and rigid practice called GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices), pro forma bookkeeping allows for all kinds of manipulations like hiding debt as income, double booking revenues and sneaking drug money onto the bottom line. What has yet to be fully explored by any of the major media is which other major corporations use pro forma bookkeeping. The reason is that all of the major media companies use it too. Also on the pro forma system are GE (NBC), AOL/Time Warner (CNN), Microsoft (MS-NBC), Viacom (CBS), Disney (ABC), IBM, Intel, Cisco Systems, Sun Micro, Tribune (the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times), the Washington Post (Newsweek) and the New York Times.
-- Michael Ruppert, The Gathering Storm, From the Wilderness, July 7, 2002

Its the Economy Stewpyd!....

This shall be followed by Confessions of a Former Investment Banker and Secrets of Global Debt Slavery Central Banking. They are one, of many, perspective's on the quality, or lack thereof, of Reasonable, Total or any Transparency whatsoever, in World Markets and Banking Institutions.

It is partially in response to Vanilla's perspective, at Financial Secession from the Tape Worm Debt Slavery Economy: Local Currencies, that:

[Andrea] Your views on how markets work are plain wrong.....

Markets work BECAUSE they are 100% transparent. Markets are so efficient that nobody (including the professionals) benefit from superior information. There is no superior information. Inside information is illegal, but even then the market reacts so fast that it is unlikley that more than a handful of people may benefit. Moreover, nobody should be investing in one company, that is stupid but by investing in many companies there is no risk of cooked books.

If these Markets are not operating in Total Transparency, then in my view, those who participate therein, are blindly, participating in their own Financial Debt Slavery.

They are the Main Street Milk Cows, for the Stock (like a good slaughterhouse?) Exchange Mafia Honcho's Manipulating the System with Cooked Bookkeeping, etc.

The question I imagine will simply be; how much of what these Confessions, -- and others like them -- blow the whistle on, occurs infrequently, reasonably frequently, or is viral, within the 'Stock Exchange' and current Financial System?

Perhaps the current Financial Systems Engineers ain't been making sure the Engine is oiled with Transparency, instead of Herd Like Mentality, and now the System's Immune System is ravaged with AIDS; or is it Ebola?

********

F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street,

Frank Partnoy (Book Excerpt) Derivatives Strategy

From 1993 to 1995, I sold derivatives on Wall Street [at First Boston and Morgan Stanley.]

My group [at Morgan Stanley] was the biggest moneymaker at the firm by far. Morgan Stanley is the oldest and most prestigious of the top investment banks, and the derivatives group was the engine that drove Morgan Stanley. The $1 billion we made was enough to pay the salaries of most of the firm's ten thousand worldwide employees, with plenty left for us. The managers in my group received millions and millions in bonuses; even our lowest level employees had six-figure incomes. And many of us, including me, were still in our twenties. Other banks—including First Boston, where I worked before I joined Morgan Stanley, could not match Morgan Stanley's aggressive new sales tactics.

The derivatives group received its marching orders from the firm's leader, John Mack. Following Mack's lead, my ingenious bosses became feral multimillionaires: half geek, half wolf. When they weren't performing complex computer calculations, they were screaming about how they were going to "rip someone's face off" or "blow someone up." Outside of work they honed their killer instincts at private skeet-shooting clubs, on safaris and dove hunts in Africa and South America, and at the most important and appropriately named competitive event at Morgan Stanley: the Fixed Income Annual Sporting Clays Outing, F.I.A.S.C.O. for short. This annual skeet-shoot tournament set the mood for the firm's barbarous approach to its clients' increasing derivatives losses. After April 1994, when these losses began to increase, John Mack's instructions were clear: "there's blood in the water. Lets go kill someone." We were prepared to kill someone, and we did. The battlefields of the derivatives world are littered with our victims.

At the time, I wasn't exactly a derivatives guru. I had attended law school, not business school, and the knowledge I had acquired, mostly from reading academic treatises, was useless on a fast-paced trading floor. Nor had my training courses at First Boston helped much. The year before I arrived, DPG [the derivatives products group] had arranged hundreds of derivatives transactions and had raised more than $25 billion of funding for clients. The group's new products included derivatives with names I'd never even heard of.

These were heady days at Morgan Stanley. No one seemed to care about how risky many of the hundreds of derivatives deals were. No one seemed to care about whether clients actually understood what they were buying, even when the trades had hidden risks. The group simply continued to pile trade on top of trade. Year by year, client by client, trade by trade, the venerable House of Morgan was building a precarious house of cards.

PERLS

Early on I learned about one derivatives trade that I think exemplifies the group's business. This particular trade, and it's acronym, were among the group's most infamous early inventions, although it still is popular among certain investors. The trade is called PERLS. PERLS are a kind of bond called a structured note, which is simply a custom-designed bond. Structured notes are among the derivatives that have caused the most problems for buyers.

Morgan Stanley's derivatives salesmen made millions selling PERLS to investors throughout the world. These investors had little in common except that each of them would pay Morgan Stanley enormous fees, and many would lose a fortune on PERLS.

I discovered there are two basic categories of PERLS buyers; I call them "cheaters" and "widows and orphans." If you are an eager derivatives salesman, either one will do just fine. Most PERLS buyers—the cheaters—were quite savvy. With PERLS, investors who were not permitted to bet on foreign currencies could place such bets anyway.

Morgan Stanley, in contrast, had nothing to lose. The firm would profit regardless of what happened to the various rates because it would hedge its foreign exchange risks in separate transactions with other banks. At the same time the firm would charge the investors millions of dollars in fees. In 1991 Morgan Stanley charged more than 4 percent for its multiple-investor PERLS. For $100 million of PERLS that would be $4 million of fees.

But there were other types of PERLS buyers who lacked the training and experience to understand them at all. They looked at a term sheet for PERLS, and all they saw was a bond. The complex formulas eluded them; their eyes glazed over. The fact that the bonds' principal payments were linked to changes in foreign currency rates was simply incomprehensible. These are the buyers I call widows and orphans. These are the buyers salesmen love. I don't mean to suggest that all derivatives salesmen sold PERLS to widows and orphans. But certainly some did. And many more salesmen tried to sell bonds similar to PERLS. The combination of simplistic appearance and complex fundamentals made PERLS a potentially lethal mix.

[One] salesman [who] had earned a giant commission on [a] PERLS trade asked me if I knew what it was called when a salesman did what he had done to one of his clients. I said I didn't know. He told me it was called "ripping his face off."

"Ripping his face off?" I asked, wondering if I had heard him correctly.

"Yes," he replied. He then explained, in graphic, warlike detail how you grabbed the client under the neck, pinched a fold of skin, and yanked hard, tearing as much flesh as you could. I never will forget how this salesman looked me in the eye and, with a serious sense of pride, almost a tear, summed up this particular PERLS trade.

"Frank," he said "I ripped his face off."

I began to crave the sensation of ripping someone's face off. At First Boston I had never actually ripped a client's face off, and I certainly had not blown up anyone. Now, as I watched Morgan Stanley's derivatives salesmen in action, I began to like the idea.

Morgan Stanley carefully cultivated this urge to blast a client to smithereens. It was no surprise that I had caught the fever so soon. Everyone had caught it, especially the more experienced managing directors. My bosses were avid skeet shooters, constantly practicing at their private skeet shooting clubs, gathering for weekend hunting trips, and even traveling together on safaris and dove hunts throughout Africa and South America. When they screamed, "Pull!" they imagined a client flying through the air.

This kind of aggressive fervor was new to me. I had never belonged to a militia before. Even in its training program, First Boston had not been nearly as warlike. The salesmen at First Boston might have played practical jokes on their clients, but they certainly hadn't discussed firing shotguns at them or blowing them up or ripping their faces off. In contrast, Morgan Stanley was a savage cult. I marveled at how quickly the firm had seized on such a fierce creed.

The Pre4 Deal

In 1992, the Republic of Argentina issued the ugliest bond in history. The enormous $5.5 billion bond issue was popularly known as BOCONs.

The new bonds were issued in various series, one of which, called BOCON Pre4s, was by far the ugliest. It was almost impossible for the owners of BOCON Pre4s to determine what the bonds should be worth, and consequently investors hated them.

The Pre4s were not my first choice when my bosses instructed me to look for a derivatives trade in Argentina. They were too unwieldy. Nevertheless, with the end of the year approaching, we were looking for a home run to ensure that we could claim responsibility for plenty of profits at bonus time. We still were looking for the derivatives group's "trade of the year."

We heard from a client that Goldman, Sachs had recently completed a large derivatives deal in Argentina. One of the DPG salesman quickly obtained a copy of the Goldman prospectus for the deal. It appeared that Goldman had taken some of the BOCONs, simplified them using derivatives, and sold the resulting mix to U.S. investors. They had made the purchase of BOCONs hassle free, and U.S. investors had purchased more than $100 million worth. By our calculations, Goldman had made several million dollars.

We began copying the Goldman deal shamelessly. The idea was simple enough, and Goldman's deal had some structural problems, which we began to correct. Investors loved the deal, and we had no trouble selling it.

The Pre4 Trust fit the pattern of RAVs [repackaged asset vehicles] we had been selling throughout the past year. First we found bonds that were subject to some type of costly investment barrier or restriction in a country outside the U.S. Then we found a way for the investors outside the country to buy the bonds and bypass the barrier. That formula had generated deals with sizable fees. Our trades also typically had one lead buyer, known as the lead order. The Pre4 Trust was no exception, and the lead order came from an insurance company in the heartland. Other Pre4 Trust buyers were more sophisticated.

However, even the most sophisticated investors obviously did not understand the mechanics of the trade. It was incredibly difficult to calculate the value of exchanging the ugly payments for simple payments. We had built an elaborate computer model to make these calculations, but I don't believe any of the buyers were able to create anything similar. If they had, they likely would not have agreed to pay Morgan Stanley several million dollars more than we thought the trust was worth. The excess payments were our fees.

A few investors had expressed concern about whether we would buy the trade back at a fair price. Many buyers didn't want to have to hold a trade for more than a few years and were worried that because the bonds were so unusual, they might not be able to find anyone other than Morgan Stanley to buy them. In such a predicament they feared Morgan Stanley would rip their faces off. They were right to be afraid. Morgan Stanley would commit to repurchase the bonds, but it wouldn't commit to do so at a fair price.

Despite these protests, the bonds proved easy to sell. A dozen or so investors were satisfied with the terms of the trade and agreed to buy. All told, we sold $123 million of Pre4 Trust units. The profits from the Pre4 Trust—approximately $4 million—exceeded those of any Morgan Stanley derivatives trade in 1994. The Pre4 Trust was our trade of the year, a clear home run, and my first "elephant." The derivatives group was euphoric.

My bosses were avid skeet shooters, constantly practicing at their private skeet shooting clubs. When they screamed, "Pull!" they imagined a client flying through the air.

It looked as if I would have to close the Pre4 Trust alone. As I worked with the lawyers in Argentina and the U.S. to close the trade, several other DPG salesman tried to tell me that a $4 million fee was no big deal. One said he had made $8 million on one leveraged swap. Other salesmen said they had charged 5 or even 10 percent fees for derivatives trades. Even [the head of the derivatives group] burst my bubble, telling me a 4 percent fee was "OK, but it's not that great. We've taken more than that out, ten, twenty or more points." I couldn't believe DPG had received a 20 percent fee on any trade, regardless of how stupid the buyer was.

There were two potential disasters on the Pre4 Trust deal. The first one involved the question of whether we should call the Pre4 Trust a "derivative." Although the term was becoming more popular at the time, in reality, this was a minor point. Everyone knew the Pre4 Trust was a derivative. Nevertheless, I thought a clear statement that the trust units were derivatives would bolster the firm's case somewhat in any future litigation.

When [my immediate boss] returned from Mexico, I handed her a freshly printed prospectus and told her we were right on schedule. Boxes of prospectuses were on their way to the various investors, and I had a large box of them ready to distribute to the salesmen tomorrow. A few minutes later, I heard a blood curdling scream. When [she] saw the word "derivative" in the prospectus, she exploded. She began screaming at me, calling me every name she could think of.

"Godammit, this says derivatives! These aren't derivatives! Why does this say derivatives? Who told you these were derivatives?" She refused to let any of her deals be called a derivative, now that the term had such a negative connotation, and ordered me to halt distribution of any prospectuses with that filthy word in them. I conceived Federal Express to remove the prospectuses from their planes, just in time.

By Friday, September 30, [1994,] the details were done. The deal would close the following Monday, as planned. I stayed late Friday night, after everyone had left for the weekend, just to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. I was alone on the deserted trading floor. Without the bedlam of angry traders and frantic salesmen, the place was spookily quiet. The phone rang. I was about to experience the second potential disaster on the Pre4 Trust deal.

It was the small insurance company from the Midwest, the lead buyer for the Pre4 Trust.

"We've decided not to go ahead with the Pre4 Trust deal."

Pause. "Pardon me?"

"We've decided that the deal isn't right for us. I hope this doesn't cause any inconvenience for you?"

I tried not to panic. If they backed out now it would be a catastrophe. I looked everywhere on the trading floor. No one. It was now 7:30 p.m. I tried calling various managing directors at home, but no one answered. I tried calling the in-house Morgan Stanley lawyers, but they were gone, too. After leaving more than a dozen messages, I reached the partner from Cravath. Lawyers at Cravath were always at work.

I will not reveal the substance of our conversation other than to say that he used the phrases "What the fuck?" and "Shove it up their ass" more than a Cravath partner typically would. After I had briefed him, we called the insurance company.

For almost an hour [the client's attorney] raised numerous objections, each of which we batted down, until finally there was only one issue remaining. They wanted an amendment to the trust deed for the deal. They said if Morgan Stanley could agree to this amendment that night, they would stay in the deal. If not, they were out.

Just minutes before I was about to commit Morgan Stanley to these new obligations on my own, [my boss] called me from home. I quickly explained the situation, and she agreed to the amendment. The deal was saved. I was a nervous wreck, sweating and delirious. There was no one there to congratulate me. My bosses better give me some credit for this, I thought.

The next day, when Peter Karches, the head of the trading floor, walked over to DPG and asked, "Who did this Pre4 trade?" [The head of the derivatives group] took credit. I was angry and wished I had been able to claim full credit for my efforts. However, I understood the firm's hierarchy. At least if anything went wrong with the deal, everyone would blame him, not me.

[He] seemed happier now. He and I previously had argued, in a congenial way, about whether financial markets were efficient, with me taking the more commonly espoused view that they were. Now he told me "If I ever hear you talk about efficient markets again, I will make you go stand in the corner." I laughed. He had a point. How could you make $4 million virtually risk free in so little time in an efficient market?

DPG suffered some anxiety in early December [1994], when one buyer of the Argentina Pre4 Trust said it wanted to buy some more. Two months earlier we had told the same buyer that the price was around $95. Since then the price of the bonds had declined. While we were trying to calculate the new value of the bonds, one derivatives trader stopped by for an update. The trader was nervous about whether we were offering to buy the bonds at a fair price. He was still concerned that if we lowered the price too much, the investors might realize how much money Morgan Stanley had made on the trade.

The Argentine Pre4 Trust was among the victims [of the December 1994 peso crash]. It lost $50 million in a few weeks. Investors were furious, and called constantly for explanations and up-to-the-minute prices. Traders no longer had to worry about whether a fair price was $90 or $95. Suddenly, $60 seemed pretty good. One trader said we should prepare to be sued.

The Pre4 Trust wasn't even close to the worst-performing derivative. One of the buyers of the Pre4 Trust, a fund manager from Morgan Stanley's own asset management group, said the Pre4 Trust was only his second worst performing investment. Another bank had sold him a Mexican peso structured note that had dropped from $100 to $27 in one day. I heard about several other derivatives that had dropped from $100 to zero. By comparison, the Pre4 Trust didn't look so bad.

As the Latin American markets continued to crash, the Pre4 Trust was among the worst-hit victims. The DPG trader who was giving out Pre4 Trust prices was about to snap. When one client called for a price, he said, "Use fifty, sixty, I don't give a shit, We're all fucked any way." By mid-January, DPG was offering to buy the Pre4 Trust at $42, and offering to sell at $50. An eight point bid-offer spread was unheard of. Could it get any worse? One of the salesmen said he was a big buyer of the Pre4 Trust at zero.

Sayonara

By April 1995 I had become, in my judgment, the most cynical person on Earth. I now believed everything was a fraud, and I had a well-founded basis for my beliefs. Derivatives were a fraud, investment banking was a fraud, the Mexican and Japanese financial systems were frauds. It was depressing.

Everyone I knew who had been an investment banker for a few years, including me, was an asshole. The fact that we were the richest assholes in the world didn't change the fact that we were assholes. I had known this deep down since I first began working on Wall Street. Now, for some reason, it bothered me.

I don't mean to get on a moral high horse here. There is nothing impressive, from an ethical perspective, about my quitting a high-paying investment banking job. If anything it was idiotic. What I mean to convey is the reason why I decided to quit so quickly. For most people in the financial services industry, their job is morally ambiguous. That's the only way to survive. I had believed mine was, too. Moral ambiguity is just fine, especially while your salary is increasing. However, when I began to think, unambiguously, that what I was doing with my life was fundamentally wrong, I simply couldn't do it anymore. I had no choice but to stop.

What lessons did I draw from my experience selling derivatives? I believe derivatives are the most recent example of a basic theme in the history of finance: Wall Street bilks Main Street. Since the introduction of money thousands of years ago, financial intermediaries with more information have been taking advantage of lenders and borrowers with less.

If you still want to buy derivatives, you may as well buy them from Morgan Stanley. You can give them a call or just stop by the firm's new building at 1585 Broadway, just off Times Square. Don't tell them I sent you.

Source: Derivatives Strategy :: From the Wilderness

0 Opinion(s):

Currency Strength and Stability: Instrinsic Value Currency

2009-05-21T20:16:00.002-02:30

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Currency Strength and Stability: Intrinsic Value Currency

"Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours - when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you know that your society is doomed....

"Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.

"Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced.

"Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.

"Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims.

"Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: "Account overdrawn.""
-- Francisco d'Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

Inspired by Viking to add value to the discussion -- Strength and Stability of Currencies -- at Financial Secession from the Tape Worm Debt Slave Economy: Local Currencies; regarding Fiat Currencies, vs Intrinsic Value Currencies based on a -- for example -- Gold Standard.

The same applies to a Local Currency that pegs its value to Local Intrinsic Commodities. See Mr. Darby's original article, A New Kind of Money.

********

In Government We Trust?

By Ron Paul

03/12/09 Many who agree with me on a lot of other issues, do not understand my enthusiasm for gold and sound money or why I spend so much time studying and talking about monetary policy. It's true that I talk about money differently than most, but the fact is sound money offers many benefits. For example - peace.

Can sound money really bring about peace? Actually, it plays a big part in peaceful international relationships. Money based on commodities, rather than paper, is not subject to government manipulation, and is a key component to free and honest trade. History shows that if countries engage in trade with each other, their governments tend to find ways to get along for the same reason you do not kill your customers at your place of business, even if they occasionally annoy you. If someone outright cheats you, however, you may engage in "war" by taking them to court, for example, and the relationship will sour. Governments and central banks with unfettered power to manipulate currency also have the ability to cheat their creditors. One way they do this is to simply create enough currency to pay off debts. This devalues the currency and "cheats" the recipient out of what they are owed. It would not be fair if you watered down your product the way our government waters down its currency, so it is not hard to understand, in these simplified terms, why loose monetary policy contributes so much to ill will and war around the world.

Sound money, on the other hand, simply is what it is. Removing governmental power to manipulate money, removes the temptation for government to spend, print and cheat. Sound money ensures that our government's spending priorities would be brought into sharp focus and reduced to only what we can afford.

Sound money also limits the ability to wage wars of aggression. Imagine how much more careful Washington would have to be about starting a war if they did not have this financial sleight of hand at their disposal! Fiat currency allows government do expensive things they should not be doing while paying the bills with cheap money. The Federal Reserve has lately been auctioning off large amounts of treasury bills as a way to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our crushing entitlement burden. The resulting devaluation of the dollar is quickly eroding our image as a good trading partner in the world. As a consequence, there is therefore more talk of economic isolation and war.

This vicious cycle of spending, fighting and inflating is not what Americans want. It is what the government wants, and it has had to deceive the citizens into allowing and supporting it. Sound money curbs the government's ability to engage in these shenanigans and reduces the wars we fight to only truly defensive ones, for which Americans are more than willing to stand and fight. So in these ways, sound money is very conducive to peace.

Another benefit of sound money is financial security.

Can sound money give you financial security? There is something very comforting in knowing that what you earn today will retain its purchasing power in the years to come. Indeed, the same silver dime that bought a loaf of bread in the 1960's can still buy a loaf of bread with its precious metal content - which is worth about $1.00 today. An ounce of gold has always been about evenly exchangeable for a finely tailored men's suit, which these days is roughly $800. And in these days of fluctuating gas prices, when priced in gold, oil has been stable. Meanwhile, since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the fiat dollar has lost 94 percent of its purchasing power. The erosion of purchasing power rapidly accelerated when it was completely uncoupled from gold in 1971. This sort of fluctuation in the medium of exchange creates a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace and necessitates that you either take extraordinary defensive maneuvers, or face financial ruin. Trusting in government for financial security in retirement is not a safe option. Indeed, a recent study by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project shows that bankruptcies among those 75 and older has more than quadrupled since 1991. This represents wealth and savings that have been eroded by inflation, and trust in entitlement promises that were more fantasy than reality. Even with the pittance that social security pays to seniors, it is bankrupt and bringing the economy to its knees. It is no wonder that many in the younger generations want no part of it, and they should not be forced into a failed system.

On the other hand, holding physical gold can defend against aggressive government monetary policies that threaten to inflate away the value of your life savings. During the hyperinflation in post WWI Germany, what used to be a comfortable nest egg was suddenly the value of a postage stamp. If one held just a portion of their savings in precious metals, the crisis was greatly softened. Gold will never be worth nothing, even if the exact price fluctuates. There is a famous photograph, however, of a German woman during this time period burning piles of tightly bound banknotes to keep warm.

Imagine if the money you earned had honest, stable value, or even appreciated like an investment! No such special measures, like converting dollars to gold, would be required to ensure that your savings would sustain you in your golden years. That is the way it could be and is supposed to be. However, the government's thirst for power will not be easily, or cheaply, quenched. Fiat currency is one tool governments have to extract wealth quietly from the working class. It is time for the people to wake up to this ruse and look to the Constitution to restore sound currency.

Sound money keeps government spending in check, keeps trade fair and honest, which reduces the temptations, and many underlying causes, for governments to wage wars. It also gives you the peace of mind of knowing that your savings will be able to sustain you in your retirement.

So if sound money is such a good thing, what is stopping people from simply trading with each other in gold and silver? Why are you still being paid in fiat dollars, and why can't you pay for gas in gold? The answer is that the government has enacted policies that provide considerable stumbling blocks to such transactions.

One of the main stumbling blocks is Federal legal tender laws, which state that government-controlled fiat currency MUST be accepted for many kinds of monetary transactions. In light of this, Gresham's Law takes effect. Gresham's Law states that bad money drives out good money. Meaning, if someone is forced to accept your bad money, it is to your advantage to pass it off, like a hot potato, in exchange for something of value. Any good money you have, you will hoard. Eventually, real money is driven out of circulation and under people's mattresses, so to speak. In the absence of legal tender laws, people are free to accept the medium of exchange of their choice, and are likely to insist on payment in something of real value.

Related to legal tender laws, contracts in gold are not enforced. Meaning if two parties agree to exchange goods or services for gold, and end up in a dispute, the courts will simply settle the dispute in Federal Reserve notes. While gold clauses have been legally enforceable since the late 1970's the fact remains that disputes over gold clauses might well be resolved in court with a dollar figure calculated in terms of Federal Reserve Notes. In the recently decided case of 216 Jamaica Ave v. S&R Playhouse, which reversed a district court decision, the court upheld the enforceability of a gold clause, but sent the case back to the district court to decide what obligations the gold clause imposed on the defendant. It is not inconceivable that this will result in a decision that the value of the "gold coin" referred to could be valued by the court in terms of Federal Reserve Notes, not in terms of ounces of gold. Furthermore, given the federal government's actions against Robert Kahre (the Nevada businessman who paid his employees at the legal tender face value of gold bullion coins) it is obvious that the government is still waging a war on gold. Whether either of these cases establishes a precedent remains to be seen. Additionally, because 31 USC 5103 establishes Federal Reserve Notes as legal tender, it would likely take a court challenge to determine whether a gold clause or legal tender law takes precedence.

Governments should do very little, in my estimation, but it should enforce contracts and property rights through the courts. But in this instance it shirks this basic duty, when it comes to gold, as one way to keep control of our economy and the medium of exchange. One is also expected to pay sales tax on the purchase of gold. This is as ludicrous as if you paid sales tax at the bank when you converted dollars into quarters! The IRS also expects you to pay capital gains tax on gold, which is so backwards, since gains on gold really represent decline in the value of the dollar!

Legal tender laws should be repealed at the Federal level. Congress has the Constitutional duty to protect the integrity of our money. However, since it has passed this duty off, and the Federal Reserve has only debased our currency, Congress should no longer force Americans to do business in dollars if they would prefer to transact in gold, or silver, or cigarettes or seashells, for that matter. Free people should be free to associate and do business in ways that benefit them. Instead they are forced to use the unstable dollar to their own detriment, and the benefit the government.

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas and perhaps the only voice in Washington still advocating "limited" government in the Jeffersonian tradition. He has delivered several stunning addresses before Congress, including: "Sorry, Mr. Franklin, We Are All Democrats Now" and "We've Been Neo-Conned." Ron Paul is also the author of The Revolution: A Manifesto, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, and Pillars of Prosperity.

Source: Daily Reckoning

15 Opinion(s):

Viking said...: This is a great piece of economics and I like it, it brings out the libertarian in me. I think he makes a stronger argument for the independence of the central bank, like in the UK, rather than a return to the gold standard though.; 20 May 2009 8:22 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Viking: RE: I think he makes a stronger argument for the independence of the central bank, like in the UK, rather than a return to the gold standard though.

In this article, perhaps. Agreed. If you read allot or a bit about Ron Paul, bigger context.; 20 May 2009 8:24 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: I hear you and on the surface it seems to make sense, but it requires a more in depth analysis. Inflation is caused by numerous factors, but let's assume that the printing of money by a Central Bank is the primary cause. If a Central Bank was printing money excessively we could expect to see an inflation rate in excess of the appreciation of the Gold price. In other words, let's assume that $1 = 1 Ounce of Gold in 1972 (the year my data begins). The rate of appreciation for Gold over that period was 7.50%. The US inflation rate over the same period was 4.66%. Hardly proof of a Central Bank that is out of control. The same scenario applies to the SAR, but the reverse applies to the Zimbabwe Dollar. What is more, a fixed valuation relative to Gold requires periodic adjustments in the absence of freely floating currencies and hampers foreign trade.; 20 May 2009 8:28 AM
Robby said...: Not sure what info is your source however since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913 the purchasing power of the dollar has declined some 90% ...in 1972 the official price of gold was $42.00 using the FEDS own inflation calculator (see below) that is equal to $219.44 in today's dollars....bear in mind that the basket of commodities that the government uses to gauge inflation changes ever decade in other words the current price of gold should be somewhere south of $2400.00

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/; 20 May 2009 9:31 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: @Robby. Gold closed at $65.20 on 31 Dec 1972 and $880.30 on 31 Dec 2008. Use Time Value of Money calculation and derive your geometric rate of return bright spark. Who is calculating the inflation adjusted gold price? Only you. What I was doing was demonstrating that the geometric inflation rate was below the geometric gold price for the period 1972 - 2008.; 20 May 2009 1:40 PM
Anonymous said...: If one truly understand what is written there, the correct response would be to hang the responsible bankers.; 20 May 2009 5:01 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Anon: Agreed, what's your favourite colour pitchfork? ;-); 20 May 2009 8:15 PM
Robby said...: Sorry got my wires crossed the reason I used the $42.00 figure was it was not until 1974 that Americans could legally own gold The limitation on gold ownership in the U.S. was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill legalizing private ownership of gold coins, bars and certificates by an act of Congress which went into effect December 31, 1974.FYI the US Treasury still values Americas gold supply at $42.00 per ounce; 20 May 2009 8:28 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: This post has been removed by the author.; 20 May 2009 9:44 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: [Who Cares? ;-)]: GOLD, INFLATION and WEIMAR GERMANY:

A few intersting stats:

German Mark prices of Silver and Gold from January 1919 to November 1923:

Jan. 1919 Silver 12 Gold 170
May. 1919 Silver 17 Gold 267
Sept. 1919 Silver 31 Gold 499

Jan. 1920 Silver 84 Gold 1,340
May 1920 Silver 60 Gold 966

Sept. 1921 Silver 80 Gold 2,175

Jan. 1922 Silver 249 Gold 3,976
May. 1922 Silver 375 Gold 6,012
Sept. 1922 Silver 1899 Gold 30,381

Jan. 1923 Silver 23,277 Gold 372,447
May. 1923 Silver 44,397 Gold 710,355
June 5, 1923 Silver 80,953 Gold 1,295,256
July 3, 1923 Silver 207,239 Gold 3,315,831
Aug. 7, 1923 Silver 4,273,874 Gold 68,382,000
Sept. 4, 1923 Silver 16,839,937 Gold 269,429,000
Oct. 2, 1923 Silver 414,484,000 Gold 6,631,749,000
Oct. 9, 1923 Silver 1,554,309,000 Gold 24,868,950,000
Oct. 16, 1923 Silver 5,319,567,000 Gold 84,969,072,000
Oct. 23, 1923 Silver 7,253,460,000 Gold 1,160,552,662,000
Oct. 30, 1923 Silver 8,419,200,000 Gold 1,347,070,000,000
Nov. 5, 1923 Silver 54,375,000,000 Gold 8,700,000,000,000
Nov. 13, 1923 Silver 108,750,000,000 Gold 17,400,000,000,000
Nov. 30, 1923 Silver 543,750,000,000 Gold 87,000,000,000,000

These numbers are from an article at Le Metropole Cafe.; 20 May 2009 9:45 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: [Ooops Formatting Correction]:
Robby: These may interest you, if you ain't seen em.

SHANGHAI (Dow Jones)--China's gold reserves may serve as backing for the yuan as Beijing promotes its use overseas, said Zheng Lianghao, managing director of the World Gold Council's Far East division, the Shanghai Securities News reported Monday.

Zheng, who was speaking at a forum over the weekend, said increasing gold holdings would provide China with a useful hedge as the dollar faced the possibility of depreciation, according to the report.
China's Gold Reserves May Back the Yuan.

Instead, Congress has abdicated this responsibility to a cabal of elite, quasi-governmental banks who, instead of stabilizing the economy, have destabilized it. It took less than two decades for the Federal Reserve to bring on the Great Depression of the 1930's. It has also inflated away the value of our currency by over 96 percent since its inception.
Ron Paul: Audit the Fed, Then End It!.; 20 May 2009 9:50 PM
Anonymous said...: "It took less than two decades for the Federal Reserve to bring on the Great Depression of the 1930's. It has also inflated away the value of our currency by over 96 percent since its inception.
Ron Paul: Audit the Fed, Then End It!."

I don't understand Ron. He's a bright guy. Does he honestly believe that those who own the Fed. will stand by and let us common folk have it audited and closed down... after it took them this long to centralise the wealth?
Does he honestly think they'll say: "yeah sure Ron, we'll still have the Bank of England so why not, let the people have the Fed.???
Does he not know what WW2 was all about?
Here's a clue Ron.: "the greatest crime of Nazi Germany, was to try to manage its own wealth"(Winston Churchill)!; 20 May 2009 11:10 PM
Viking said...: why are people arguing for the gold standard?? why exchange one piece of value-laden currency for another?
Gold has no value to me. I can't eat, wear it, drive it, or live in it. It has exchange value. If you owe me R5,000 and instead give me a lump of gold to that value, I'll be pissed off! I'll have to go sell it, then put the cash in my account, which AB5A will charge me for. Do you know how much petrol my car eats????????; 21 May 2009 12:00 AM
Robby said...: Viking...you can't eat money either..the concept of a gold standard is to limit the ability of government to print/inflate the money supply.That being said America could never return to a pure gold standard because there is not enough gold in the world to achieve that hence the term "Precious metal".

The reason people buy gold is not for investment rather it's a insurance policy against fiat currency and more important in today's world it is the only asset that eliminates what is known as "counterparty" risk; 21 May 2009 1:35 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Anon: I imagine Ron Paul does what he does, in full knowledge that he is a David in a Goliath battle.. and does not refrain from doing what he considers the honurable thing to do, cause doing the honourable thing means confronting Goliath's lies and deception, and he does so, cause that is the type of man he is. It is after all such men who defined the progressive history of 'humanity', by confronting hteir Goliath, from Martin Luther, to Galileo, the Wright brothers, etc.. etc...; 21 May 2009 2:12 AM

AIDS in Dekaffirnated Africa Is a Vatican Joke!

2009-05-21T19:36:00.002-02:30

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

AIDS in Dekaffirnated Africa Is a Vatican Joke!

'The high AIDS-rate in African countries is not due to a lack of safe sex practices but to the fact that "the blacks like to copulate ('schnackseln') a lot"'.
-- Princess Gloria von Thurn & Taxis

While Botswana Plans to Circumcise 460,000 Men to Combat AIDS; after a six-month trial, Johnson Aziga, a 52-year-old native of Uganda and resident of Ontario, has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of two of his sex partners from AIDS-related cancer.

Prosecutors argued that despite being counseled to disclose his HIV status and use condoms during sex, Aziga willfully endangered the lives of the 11 women with whom he had unprotected sex. Seven of his 11 sex partners have become infected with HIV, and two of them have died.

Toronto police have arrested and charged a 28-year-old man with attempted murder and aggravated sexual assault for having unprotected sex with another man without disclosing that he was HIV positive. And an Iowa man, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for failing to disclose that he was HIV positive before having sex with another man in June, 2008.

And the Pope and Congolese Bishops advocate that 'condom's breed selfishness'; because using a condom is "not only an ethical disorder but above all the proof of the trivialization of sexuality in our society."

*****

Pope claims condoms could make African Aids crisis worse

The Pope today reignited the controversy over the Catholic church's stance on condom use as he made his first trip to Africa.

The pontiff said condoms were not the answer to the continent's fight against HIV and Aids and could make the problem worse.

The timing of his remarks outraged health agencies trying to halt the spread of HIV and Aids in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 22 million people are infected.

The pontiff, speaking to journalists on his flight, said the condition was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

Rebecca Hodes, of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, said that if the Pope was serious about preventing new HIV infections he would focus on promoting wider access to condoms and spreading information about how best to use them.

Hodes, the director of policy, communication and research for the campaign group, added: "Instead, his opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans."

It is not the first time the Pope has made public remarks on the HIV/Aids outbreak ravaging the continent.

Shortly after becoming pontiff in 2005, he told senior Catholic clergy from Africa that, while the disease was a "cruel epidemic", it could not be cured through using condoms.

Addressing bishops from South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia and Lesotho who had travelled to the Vatican for papal audience, he said: "The traditional teaching of the church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids."

He also warned them that African life was under threat from a number of factors, including condoms.

"It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking and a contraception mentality," he added.

More than two-thirds – 67% – of the global total of 32.9 million people with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Three-quarters of all Aids deaths in 2007 happened there.

Africa is the fastest-growing region for the Roman Catholic church, which competes with Islam and evangelical churches.

The Pope also said today that he intended to make an appeal for "international solidarity" for Africa in the face of the global economic downturn.

He said that, while the church did not propose specific economic solutions, it could give "spiritual and moral" suggestions.

Describing the current crisis as the consequence of "a deficit of ethics in economic structures", he added: "It is here that the church can make a contribution."

*****

Congolese Bishops Say Condoms Breed Selfishness

Affirm Benedict XVI's Support in Fight Against AIDS

KINSHASA, Congo, MAY 5, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The Congolese bishops are noting the hope Benedict XVI brought on his visit to Africa, and are supporting his stance on condom use as an ineffective means to fight AIDS.

A statement from the Congolese bishops' conference affirmed, "In all truth, the pope's message which we received with joy has confirmed us in our fight against HIV/AIDS," Catholic Information Service for Africa reported today.

The statement, signed by the conference president, Bishop Nicolas Djomo Lola of Tshumbe, added, "We say no to condoms!"

The prelates noted that condom use is "not only an ethical disorder but above all the proof of the trivialization of sexuality in our society."

They affirmed, "Instead of preventing the spread of the disease, and without even guaranteeing complete security, [the condom] heightens human selfishness, worsens the problem, and encourages people to let themselves be driven by their sexual instincts and divests sexuality of its religious and symbolic functions."

The statement expressed regret about the controversy stemming from "some mass media sources who have voluntarily created confusion," by taking the Pope's words on AIDS "out of context," although he merely underlined "the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church."

It added, "Only freedom that does not give in before the fleeting passion of desire, the blindness of one's own selfishness, and the tyranny of the convenience of the moment, can contribute to making man more noble and more responsible in his acts, in the prospect of a better future."

The conference affirmed that the Holy Father's visit confirmed their "faith in Jesus Christ, the Light of the World," and brought hope for the future back to Africa.

The statement concluded, "This is how we understand the Pope's insistence on respect for life, the preservation of our African identity which is seriously threatened by a vigorous and aggressive globalization, the fight against corruption and the unjust exploitation of man by other men, and an appeal to African governments regarding their responsibilities in regards to their people and other nations."

*****

Botswana to Circumcise 460,000 Men to Combat AIDS

The government of Botswana has implemented a program to circumcise 80% of the male population, approximately 460,000 men, over the next five years in order to limit the spread of AIDS, reports Agence-France Presse.

Botswana, with a population of about 2 million inhabitants, has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world: a staggering 24% of the adult population. Life expectancy in Botswana is only 34 years, which is slowly rising due to the introduction of antiretroviral medication.

Until the 1970s, bush circumsion was widely practiced as a ritual of passage to manhood in Botswana, but the practice was largely stopped out of public health concerns. Recent studies have found that adult circumcision can significantly reduce the likelihood of contracting HIV.

Sources: Guardian (Excerpts) :: Zenit :: Agence France Press

6 Opinion(s):

Vanilla Ice said...: That's another reason why RELIGION IS BULLSHIT.; 13 May 2009 11:01 AM
Dachshund said...: @VI: Never mind religion, having sex with multiple partners is gross on an ethical and physical level to most whites and Asians, but it's like shaking a banana from a tree for Africans.

The Pope is preaching to the already converted on not using condoms. Let them get on with it.; 13 May 2009 8:32 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: I imagine the Pope's actions are -- perhaps consciously -- to, among others, exponentially increase the following possibility.....

"If radical environmentalists or eugenicists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would be something like AIDS. I see AIDS not as a problem, but a necessary solution."

A few months ago, a Southern Cape black ANC member made the following statement to a house meeting on the issue of AIDS:

'AIDS is a blessing in disguise, cause now we do not have to build all the houses we promised; cuase allot of them are dead.'; 13 May 2009 9:09 PM
Dachshund said...: Andrea: regarding the Pope. That somebody harbours intentions quite contrary to his public statements is easy to say but hard to prove. Proof requires that it be at least far more probable than any other possible explanation. I don't think that is the case here.; 13 May 2009 9:43 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Dachshund,

I would certainly agree within the perspective of the limited views regarding the Pope, provided in this post.

My views re: the Pope's possible intentions, are far more deeper than those herewith presented, hence, within the context of this post, i used the qualifier of 'imagine'.

No doubt, anyones perspective on the the Pope's intentions would be dependant on how deep their enquiry into the Vatican history, not to mention its attachment to Pagan theologies, and sacred rituals, or its relations to the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), et al...

Its one of those MATRIX RED PILL questions! ;-); 13 May 2009 10:59 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Dachshund: For example, & there is far more 'evidence' of this nature:

1. Location of Vatican-Nazi Death Camps in Poland Have Hidden Meaning, and for an image of the Baphomet (Pagan Symbol, among others) Concentration Camps, and a new perspective to Abrahamic and other Sacrificial 'liberation theology' Rituals: Pope Pius' Final Solution, implemented by Fr. H. Himmler, S.J. (Society of Jesus)2. Get yourself a copy of VATICAN ASSASSINS, by Eric Jon Phelps (there is usually a pdf copy available online). I don't necessarily share Mr. Phelps religious interpretations, particularly where they are based on scripture, but he's got a ton of information on Jesuit history! (www.vaticanassassins.org); 13 May 2009 11:13 PM

Mothers Limbic Love Connection: Reptilian vs. Limbic Brain Love & Intimacy

2009-05-21T19:25:00.002-02:30

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Mothers Limbic Love Connection: Reptilian vs. Limbic Brain Love & Intimacy

This Mothers Day post was motivated by Dachshund's comment to Why People Work Hard (below intro)

It is a brief snippets exploration into the possible neurological (psychological and emotional) foundations of love, from the perspective of individuals whose 'love' thinking and behaviour, occurs at the level of the reptilian brain, limbic brain, or neocortex.

All mammals have reptilian, limbic and neocortex brains; Reptiles only have reptilian brains. In any mammal, any 'fight, flight, love, et al' behaviour may be rooted in any related, or a combination thereof brain. Additionally the practice of certain behaviours, in this case, love, touch and intimacy, from infancy all through life stimulates the growth and activity and intimacy in the limbic brain. The absence of loving touch, and intimacy from childhood, results in stunted limbic brains. A mammal/human with a stunted limbic brain, accordingly responds to 'love' by means of their reptilian brain knowledge thereof.

Reptilian brains experience a reptilian truth: "no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists in the reptilian brain."

*****

[Dachshund]

Your pic:

please note that while 82% of white American males enjoy fellatio, it has appeal [intended] for just 55% of African Americans.

Now consider how little ... ahem ... appeal it has for blacks in Africa for whom "dry" unprotected vaginal intercourse is traditional.

*****

Thoughts on Love...

'I profess to understand nothing but matters of love.'
-- Socrates in Plato's Symposium.

He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees… The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love…. Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.
-- Paracelsus

"What is love, and why are some people unable to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do?

'Steeped as they are in limbic physiology, healthy people have trouble forcing their minds into the unfamiliar outline of this reptilian truth: no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists outside the limbic domain."
-- A General Theory of Love

Plato's Theory of Love: Rationality as Passion

Perhaps if we were honest with ourselves, we may confront the reality that much of our life, our actions, our desires, our motivations, are all focused in some conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect way on acquiring some form of love, whether intimate, or in the form of recognition, or attention, or respect or admiration.

Love is so important to us, and yet how often does it, or our concept of what it should be, and how we should feel about it, disappoint us?

We expect a lot from our sexual passions, our partners, and often end up disappointed when romance disappears. Irrespective, we keep getting married, hoping that somehow, the next time will be different.

In the Platonic dialogue, Symposium, Aristophanes explained via a comic and eccentric myth that love is our search for our alter ego, the part of us that we feel we need to make us whole. The ancient gods inflicted a curse on us, and divided us in two as a punishment for our arrogance, and love is our remedy therefore; love is our constant search for completion, for wholeness.

Socrates responds to Aristophanes theory that our desire for love, for the other half of us to make us whole, unless that other half is good. In other words, our motive force in love is our yearning for goodness, not just completion. When we love someone, we desire possessing the goodness which is in them. Accordingly, 'Love is desire for the perpetual possession of the good.'

Plato's diagnosis is that we are ignorant of what we want, and accordingly we err in our searching therefore. Our ignorance and confusion are the sources of our suffering, and can be amended either through recognition of the reality of our ignorance of our desires, and our understanding of the human condition.

In short, Plato tells us, everything begins where we used to think that everything ended.

Back to the Future: What is Love?

Perhaps to understand love, "we must start with feelings"? And to understand feelings, which are a cognitive interpretation of an internal state of being and sensations, we need to study the brain and its neurological and hormonal workings from infancy to adult maturity?

A General Theory of Love, does exactly that.

Its brief conclusions: Although love does not submit to commands, natural love can flourish as long as the conditions for it do not die. It gives us a look at the natural science of our feelings, and why communication, touch, and time spent with another individual plays a far more important role in healthy relationships than do all the drugs, fake friends and Freudian therapy can possibly hope to achieve.

We are provided with a poetic scientific explanation on the development of love upon our limbic brains, and how such limbic love resonance, shapes our personalities.

The studies and conclusions are interesting for anyone who wants to raise a child in love, or wants to understand why many people are capable of limbic resonance loving touch and intimacy; and others limbic brains are stunted, and cannot love; to reptilian behaviour that can kill without remorse, to taking pleasure in torture and murder.

Neurological Theory of Love: Reptilian vs. Limbic Brain Love & Intimacy

Brief excerpts from A General Theory of Love (T. Lewis, MD; F. Amini, MD; R.Lannon, MD):

"The limbic brain has more opiate receptors than any other brain area."

"Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others."

"... a child gets his first taste of his feelings secondhand. Only through limbic resonance with another can he begin to apprehend his inner world…. Before any glimmerings of event memory appear, he stores an impression of what love feels like."

Our unconscious recognition of this feeling often determines whom we select later in life for intimate relationships, be they healing or destructive. This is the mechanism for being 'in love,' an important and wonderfully pleasing state; one that is quite different from loving someone. "As such, adult love depends critically on knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre .... A child's early experience teaches this skill [of reliably understanding another person] in direct proportion to his parents' ability to know him."

A human being has dual hearts—the first, a pulsating fist of muscle in the chest; the second, a precious cabal of communicating neurons that create feeling, longing and love. …The meticulously crafted core of a neural network…learns from experience and transforms itself. …Love alters the structure of our brains.

All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours.

…Ongoing exposure to one person's limbic (patterns) does not merely activate neural patterns in another—it also strengthens them. Long standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel emotional parts of the people we love…Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

A General Theory of Love explores the realms of cognitive science, including implicity and explicit memory, learning, problem solving, etc.. all within the central context of the limbic brain system.

They explain that infants are born with their limbic systems "open" and unregulated, and they need the mothers absolute closeness to slowly, over time, get regulated.

This is a two-way thing.

Mothers also require limbic connections with their babies, in order for themselves to be limbically regulated.

All homo-sapiens require a limbic connection with another to be successfully regulated.

Put differently: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are.

Three Level Brain Triune: Limbic Resonance & The Deprivation of Limbic Connections

The model of a three-level brain is used throughout the book. This triune brain consists of the brainstem, or reptilian brain, which senses and controls internal functions such as heartbeat and avoidance of threat; the mammalian, or limbic, brain that represents the evolutionary advent of emotion in mammals, the ability to sense and respond to external phenomena; and the cortex, or neocortical brain, which consciously responds to that of which we are cognitively aware. We usually ascribe the most important aspects of our being to the neocortical brain.

The authors use descriptions of clinical disorders and evidence from interesting and ingenious experiments to support this triune model of the brain. For example, reptiles are neither emotionally responsive nor playful. By contrast, we mammals can sense the internal state of another mammal and adjust our own physiology to match.

This phenomenon of limbic resonance is illustrated by the calming influence a secure mother has on her baby by gazing into her baby's eyes or by cradling her baby so that it can listen to her heart beating. Although we all have made these observations, their meaning has escaped us, but their subtlety has not.

The lasting importance of the emotional content of our early experiences is clearly illustrated by the devastating results of Harry Harlow's experiments with maternal deprivation of otherwise well-fed and well-cared-for infant monkeys and by Rene Spitz's observations of similar fates for children raised in foundling homes.

Our Cryptic Limbic Brain

The brain's ancient emotional architecture is not a bothersome animal encumbrance. Instead, it is nothing less than the key to our lives. We live immersed in unseen forces and silent messages that shape our destinies. As individuals and as a culture, our chance for happiness depends on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves-invisibly, improbably, inexorably-around love.

From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. The body's physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities. Limbic Love makes us who we are, and who we can become.

"New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain areas as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy."

"Assuming the world is the way it looks is the neurally prompted so-called naive realism to which most of us unwittingly subscribe. Reality is thus more personal than daily life suggests. Nobody inhabits the same emotional realm."

"Many people live in a world so singular that what they see when they open their eyes in the morning may be unfathomable to the rest of humanity."

'Steeped as they are in limbic physiology, healthy people have trouble forcing their minds into the unfamiliar outline of this reptilian truth: no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists outside the limbic domain."

The Social Contract of Reptilian Sex: The Praying Mantis

The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder, by Robert Ardrey:

The evolutionary dillema of the preying mantis rests on the eagerness of the female to eat anything, including the male. The female is endowed with poorer eyesight than the male, and she can only see him when he moves. He approaches her compelled, but a turn of her in his direction freezes him. That sex for a male preying mantis is a dangerous game requires no comment.

With a final leap the male may secure himself on her back unnoticed, there to proceed with copulation, a fair chance existing that he will fail. If at the last instance she glimpses his movement, she may seize him with her deceptively named forelegs, and begin to eat him. She begins always by chewing off his head.

Having lost his head, he literally loses all fear of her. Headless, abandoned freely to the sexual compulsion, he wrenches free from her grasp, mounts her back where she cannot see him, and copulates. Then slowly he will weaken, lose his grip, die. When he slides to the ground, she will discover him again and finish eating him.

Limbic Brain Delusions about Reptilian Brain Realities

Those who take limbic love for granted, as a natural emotional, and psychological physiological reality for all two-legged mammals; forget and cannot fathom reptilian brain thinking.

Those with stunted limbic brains; whose 'love' reality is not limbic, but reptilian; experience a reptilian brain truth:

"no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists."

Sources: No Beliefs Review :: The Social Contract :: Practical Philosophy

6 Opinion(s):

FishEagle said...: "The absence of loving touch, and intimacy from childhood, results in stunted limbic brains. A mammal/human with a stunted limbic brain, accordingly responds to 'love' by means of their reptilian brain knowledge thereof. Reptilian brains experience a reptilian truth: "no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists in the reptilian brain.""

I'd like to propose a correction to that statement, "The absence of loving touch, and intimacy from childhood, MAY OR WILL MOST LIKELY result in stunted limbic brains." Otherwise, according to that statement I'm a reptile incapable of restraining myself on harming people. I happen to know that it is not the case.; 11 May 2009 2:19 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle,

If I had written the book, I'd be happy to consider your input, to changing the conclusions reached therein. I didn't; I was simply sharing the conclusions of the authors.

I imagine what you are saying is: Your childhood was one in which you experienced a total absence of loving touch and intimacy. Or was it only partial deprivation?

Imagine you are saying the former? Is that what you are saying?

If so, I imagine ---- on the working assumption that the authors conclusions are 'correct', based upon their research; ---- it is possible that your judgement of your childhoods absence of loving touch, may not quite measure up to what the individuals whom were studied by these doctors, experienced, in terms of absence of loving touch, and intimacy.

Without going into your story in much greater depth, I imagine it would be difficult to impartially measure the difference between your 'limbic deprivation' childhood experience; and those in the research studies.

There are so many possible factors that could be considered, it is really difficult to go into the issue impartially, without really enquiring into the issue with all the facts public.

So, I wouldnt be too harsh on yourself; nor would I come close to putting you in the 'reptilian brain' category.; 11 May 2009 10:45 AM
Dachshund said...: That was a bit oblique, Andrea. I didn't quite get how this relates to different cultures or races' preference for fellatio or sexual intercourse. I would guess fellatio is less likely to get a woman pregnant in the absence of sexual intercourse, and is more likely to prolong sexual intercourse if this follows fellatio.

I have never actually asked an African woman what her sex life is like. I don't know whether the African custom of "dry" sexual intercourse is intended to harm the woman.

Coming back to limbic and reptilian brains: babies initially have their limbic brains imprinted on contact with their mother or other female. But the presence of a consistent father is very important. If the mother does not feel financially or emotionally secure, she cannot convey feelings of security to her child.

Most families are dysfunctional to some extent, because we live in a world of constant stress. Children are mostly resilient - if we were not resilient, we would not survive. Children are good intuitors of their parents' moods to the point of exploitation and manipulation.

Let me give you an example. I went to a large supermarket a while ago, and there was a toddler screaming his head off. He wasn't hurt, he was just bored and craving attention. It started on getting on quite a few peoples' nerves, so I asked the parents if they wouldn't mind getting Junior to quieten down a bit. "What?", they screamed in unison, "Are you telling my kid to shut up?" "Well, yes it's annoying to other customers."

This really set the parents off to shouting and screaming. In the meantime, Junior had gone dead quiet, watching all this palaver. As soon it stopped and his parents had trundled their supermarket around the corner, the blubbering started again. "Bweeeh ...."

That kid will probably grow up loathing his parents, because they have no self control themselves.

People get hooked into caring too much about their experiences with their parents. Parents are only human beings after all. We should worry less about our experiences with our parents and whether we have limbic or reptilian brains.

Life is too short and yet so many start their lives late or not at all because of blaming their parents for everything that goes wrong. You will suffer to some extent in your life, and you will be happy as well, depending on how receptive you are and how much you are prepared to put into life.

People also have varying needs for love and intimacy. It doesn't mean that because someone is a bit remote that they don't care about others.

A reptilian brain? You get sociopaths of course, but "reptilian" sounds very David Icke. I don't follow this "authority".; 11 May 2009 5:57 PM
FishEagle said...: Andrea, please see my response under the post "State controlled consciousness: Fathers love for justice"; 11 May 2009 6:30 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Dachshund

Did you mean the post was oblique, or my comment to FishEagle was oblique?

If the post: The 'reptilian brain' issues in the post I find fascinating, and share as a working hypothesis; not an absolute fact.

Admittedly, my experience may have provided me with observation opportunities that few white South Africans have experienced. I spent 14 months in a South African prison, approximately 7 of those in a seriously overpopulated dormitory cell.

I would -- perhaps inacurately -- label the predominant majority of indivdiuals in that cells social interactions to be of the 'reptilian' kind (and that is how i judged each one of them, unless they made efforts to prove to me, that they weren't just brutal predatorial thugs without any conscience). The few other whites who landed in those prison cells, chose the option of >> do-gooder, I am a 'non racist', I like black people, can I be your friend... type of interaction <<. Their 'black friends' robbed them, and beat them; and then they would come complaining to me about the 'kaffirs'. And my response would be; when you walked in here; i warned you, and you called me a racist. The difference between me and you, is that what I have to say to them; I say to their faces, not behind their backs; and I provide them with evidence of why I think of them as I do; and they are welcome to change their behaviour, and I will change my opinion.

Anyway, perhaps I could have shared my perception of examples of reptilian brain behaviour more clearly; and of course analogies that I find useful in my decision making; others may not.

HL Mencken's phrase of 'I believe in liberty, but not enough to force it on anyone' is a maxim for my sharing of ideas. What to me may be a 'liberating conceptual idea' or 'analogy' may not be for someone else; so instead of thrusting how it is for me such; I share it only, and if someone else finds it useful, great; and if not, thats okay too.; 11 May 2009 7:21 PM
Dachshund said...: @Andrea: no, nothing to do with Fish Eagle, oblique with regard to my comment about racial sexual preferences.

An overpopulated South African prison cell is an even more sadomasochistic place to socialise than a speed dating venue.

Reptiles, ugh ... now you've made me think of Jacob Zuma's trouser snake.

Sod this, I'm going shopping.; 11 May 2009 10:21 PM

One Man and His Dog Charged with 'Incitement to Racial Hatred'!

2009-05-21T19:21:00.002-02:30

Saturday, May 09, 2009

One Man and His Dog Charged with 'Incitement to Racial Hatred'!

Please Don't be Too Honest, we Are the Politically Correct Crystal Ego Thought Crime Police!...

One Man and His Dog, television presenter Robin Page was arrested by police after he stated in a Protest speech that farmers should enjoy the same rights as Blacks, Muslims and Gays.

Outraged Police traveled over 200 miles to question Page, before detaining him, and then charging him with incitement to racial hatred.

****

A former presenter of One Man and His Dog has been arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred in a pro-hunting speech.

Robin Page, 61, a farmer and countryside campaigner, was questioned over remarks he made at a fair in Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire.

Mr Page was invited to the event by its organisers, the Frampton Court Estate, to urge people to attend the Liberty and Livelihood March in London.

But several people complained to police about his speech, in which he allegedly said supporters of the traditional country way of life should be given the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays.

On Monday Gloucestershire Police asked Mr Page to attend an interview at a police station in Cambridge, near his farm in Barton.

The Daily Telegraph columnist was subsequently arrested on suspicion of committing public order offences by breaching section 18 of the Public Order Act, which refers to the stirring up of racial hatred.

Mr Page denies having made racist comments at the event on 6 September.

Establishment blamed

He said: "I believe country people should have the same rights and protection under the law as any other minority group in a multi-cultural society.

"It is beyond my comprehension that I am not allowed to say that in a public place, where I was invited on to private land."

He said his arrest was an example of the way country people had been "victimised" by the establishment.

A spokesman for Gloucestershire Police confirmed a man from Barton, Cambridgeshire, was arrested on suspicion of committing public order offences.

Mr Page was released on bail and is to report back to Stroud Police Station on 6 January.

Source: BBC

1 Opinion(s):

Loggi said...: The mind boggles.; 10 May 2009 12:20 AM

State Controlled Consciousness: Fathers Love for Justice

2009-05-21T19:00:00.003-02:30

Saturday, May 09, 2009

State Controlled Consciousness: Fathers Love for Justice

"The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
-- H.L. Mencken, The American Mercury

"Perhaps school's greatest danger is that it may convince you life is nothing more than an institutionalized rat race"
-- Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School & Get a Real Life and Education

State Indoctrication and the Destruction of the Family

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 27 years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes any more that scientists are made in science classes, or politicians in civics classes, or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides, and even as administrators. But the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care, and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - by which I mean it has no conscience.
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Exhausted School

Scenario A: Jeffrey will not be still in class, he disrupts other students.

1957 - Jeffrey sent to the Principal's office and given a good paddling by the Principal. He then returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.

2009 - Jeffrey is given huge doses of Ritalin. He becomes a zombie. He is then tested for ADD. The school gets extra money from the state because Jeffrey has a disability.

Scenario B: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.

1957 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college and becomes a successful businessman.

2009 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. The state psychologist is told by Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has an affair with the psychologist.

Scenario C: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.

1957 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.

2009 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

Brief Dot Connectors on the Road to the Destruction of the Family:

"Communism and Socialism all know that they can not survive with strong families. Strong families make strong communities, and strong communities keep government power in check. Break down the families, and the door is wide open to centralizing power in government. Once families break down through divorce, welfare, cohabitation, etc. Government gets more and more involved in everyday life. More and more centralized government control."
--- Red Squirrel's 'Nut Cracking' Nationalism': Why I am a Nationalist....

The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by the legendary sociologist Edward Roth in his manifesto of 1906, Social Control:

"Plans are underway to replace family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media and education .... people are only little plastic lumps of dough".

Lump of Dough Children are accordingly in need of an education system that is deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring their inner lives, to deny them appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."

The Socialist "Father of American Education," John Dewey, stated his beliefs about how schools should be instrumental in developing a socialist society in America, in My Pedagogic Creed (1897) and The School and Society (1899). He suggested a system of 'progressive education' that should use psychology to deemphasize academics:

"Our schools … are performing an infinite significant religious work. They are promoting the social unity out of which in the end genuine religious unity must grow."

Obstacles to the Central Socialist Planned Society:

The biggest obstacle to a planned society are parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids; most often they love their kids. Parents motivations are self-reinforcing, unlike those of 'educators' who are motivated predominantly by their pay-check. Accordingly parents need to be manipulated, for a few unhappy parents could disrupt the efficiency of the Dumbing Down Educational Experiment being conducted on their guineapig 'lump of dough' children.

The second biggest obstacle to a planned society are religious 'cults', all of which have their own ideas as to 'Gods' plan for all human beings, including and particularly children.

The third significant obstacle being local values and strong family ethnic cultures; which provide children with socially useful socio-cultural navigation maps for growing up.

Accordingly a Planned Centralized Social Society needs to seriously suppress, if not attempt to entirely extinguish: individuality, cultural identity, a individual relationships with God, and close-knit family's.

Few people are aware that the concept of Forced Schooling, was a recent invention, subsequent to the industrial revolution. Even fewer are conscious of how forced schooling has served the dual function of: l) The creation of a mindless proletariat stripped of its traditions of liberty, independence, fidelity to God, loyalty to family and land; and 2) The creation of a professional proletariat, suitably dumbed down and obedience specialized to serve functionally in a highly centralized corporate/bureaucratic economy.

The Path of Least Resistance: Debt Slave Consumers

"A man in debt is so far a slave."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver."
-- Ambrose Bierce

"Debt is the slavery of the free."
-- Publilius Syrus

"Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people."
-- Wendell Phillips

"Live within your means, never be in debt, and by husbanding your money you can always lay it out well. But when you get in debt you become a slave. Therefore I say to you never involve yourself in debt, and become no man's surety. If your friend is in distress, aid him if you have the means to spare. If he fails to be able to return it, it is only so much lost."
-- President Andrew Jackson

"You can explain the model in a few simple sentences: Encourage people to spend. When they run out of money, encourage them to borrow. When they tire of borrowing and spending, lend them more at lower rates."

"As a way for people to build wealth, this economic model of the Bubble Period was as ineffective as a bad banker. It was a 'have your cake and eat it too' school of financial success with an obvious flaw."

"In the Bubble Epoque people tried to get something for nothing… Imagine, they thought they could get rich by borrowing money and spending it. Have you ever heard of something so ridiculous? Ha ha! Now, they think they can get rich by spending money that doesn't even exist."
-- Bill Bonner, Daily Reckoning

The old mature ethics and values of 'no free lunch' and 'the path less travelled', honour and integrity, a man's word is his honour, etc... were replaced with new Highway to Hedonism and a Consumer Paradise Superficiality: Easy divorce laws removed the need for commitment to work at relationships; easy credit removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers removed the need to ask questions.

Unschooling: Road to a Meaningful Life Adventure

"Where did we ever get the grotesque idea that the State has a right to educate our kids? Where did we ever get the notion there is only one right way to grow up instead of hundreds? How did we lose our way and come to believe that human value and human quality can be reduced to numbers derived from paper/pencil tests?"
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Exhausted School

Now for the good news. Once you capiche the lump of dough conspiracy of modern schooling, avoiding its tricks and traps are easy:

State propaganda trains children to be employees and consumers; teach yours to be leaders and adventurers.

Socialist indoctrination trains children to obey reflexively; teach yours to think critically and independently.

State zombies have a low threshold for boredom and being alone, addicted to external 'entertainment stimulus'; help your own to develop an inner life of adventure and wonder, into history, literature, philosophy, so that they'll never be bored.

Challenge your kids with nature and solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, and appreciate conducting their own inner dialogues.

Sociliazed Sheeple prefer shallow and superficial friendships and relationships, quickly acquired and quickly abandoned; do your children deserve more?

Your children can have a more meaningful life, and so can you.

Disobedient Adventurers for Love: Fathers for Justice:

"…when historians look back on British Society at the start of the third millennium they will accord a small but important chapter to the men in tights."
-- The Times Newspaper, January 2006

"…fiercely intelligent, charmingly foul-mouthed and a fantastic turn of phrase…few could equal O'Connor when it comes to taking a conversational thread,yanking, unravelling and generally running with it."
-- Will Self, Author, GQ Magazine, June 2006

"No comment."
-- PR Office, Scotland Yard

"Fathers 4 Justice? The worst campaign group I have ever heard of."
-- Downing Street Press Spokesman

The civil rights group Fathers 4 Justice (F4J) was founded in December 2002 by Matt O'Connor after he experienced first hand the injustices of the secret family courts as he struggled to see his two boys Daniel and Alexander after a traumatic divorce. Started as a vehicle for social change, F4J quickly became the high-wire act of protest groups, whether powder-bombing the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, scaling the balcony at Buckingham Palace in a Batman Costume, invading the Pulpit at York Minster during a General Synod Service or taking the National Lottery Draw live off air on BBC1 in front of ten million viewers.

But behind the headlines and dramatic protests is a new creed for family law enshrined in our documents "Family Justice On Trial Opening The Door On Closed Courts" and "Blueprint For Family Law In The 21st Century." These pioneering, ideas-led documents set out radical and visionary frameworks for a fair, just, open and equitable system of family law. Both documents are essential reading and available on this web site for the first time.

F4J campaigns not just in the name of the father, but in the name of all parents, grandparents and children seeking equality in family law. The achievements of F4J to date are best described by the Times Newspaper who in January 2006 wrote:

"F4J caught the spirit of the times: they reflected the zeitgeist, and they changed it...for all the flaws within F4J, the issue of fatherhood has a currency that would have been unimaginable three years ago...when historians look back on British Society at the start of the third millennium, they will accord a small but important chapter to the men in tights."

In just a few years Fathers 4 Justice has not only effected "climate change", but it has also succeeded in discrediting the secret courts and undermining public confidence in them. The result has been to force the government to advance proposals to open up the secret family courts to greater scrutiny and propose tougher enforcement of contact orders.

Ridicule, satire and subversion are integral elements of the Fathers 4 Justice campaign. Naturally politicians, judges and the family law industry are targets for protests that are one part Monty Python, one part Pantomime and one part high-wire Circus act.

Over the last four years, F4J has produced an ideas bank of creative work for campaigns, protest and demonstrations. Some ideas have yet to be realised and many never made it to their intended destination. Others though, like the infamous "In The Name Of The Father" banner graced a crane at Tower Bridge, the roof at York Minster and St Paul's Cathedral.

Fathers for Justice

John Taylor Gatto: State Controlled Consciousness

Sources: Fathers 4 Justice :: Red Squirrel's 'Nut Cracking' Nationalism :: Fathers for Life: Communist Manifesto :: InfoWars: High School: 1957 v 2009 :: JT Gatto: The Exhausted School (PDF)

36 Opinion(s):

Vanilla Ice said...: @Andrea. I am only half way through your article but I had an epiphany. That explains the difference between my education and that which I experience in Canada. My new countrymen are well educated, to say the least. They are book learned and disciplined, but fuck me they cannot critically think, rarely do they search for truth and they daren't stray from the indoctrinated norm. I opine that white South Africans are educated under a system that they know to be corrupt and therefore develop an ability to question everything. Your thoughts?; 09 May 2009 3:33 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Vanilla. My thoughts. When I read your comment, my first thought was to Journalism as a Weapon of War, by John Pilger:

During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. "I have to tell you," said their spokesman, 'that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?"

What is the secret? It's a question now urgently asked of those whose job is to keep the record straight: who in this country have extraordinary constitutional freedom. I refer to journalists, of course, a small group who hold privileged sway over the way we think, even the way we use language.

I have been a journalist for more than 40 years. Although I am based in London, I have worked all over the world, including the United States, and I have reported America's wars. My experience is that what the Russian journalists were referring to is censorship by omission, the product of a parallel world of unspoken truth and public myths and lies: in other words, censorship by journalism, which today has
become war by journalism.

For me, this is the most virulent and powerful form of censorship, fuelling an indoctrination that runs deep in western societies, deeper than many journalists themselves understand or will admit to.

Then he goes on providing examples of journalists withholding the truth about atrocities of torture and mass murder in Vietnam, Iraq etc... And he ends with:

It is said the internet is an alternative; and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of the great muckrakers: those like the Irish journalist Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until it is officially denied." But the internet is still a kind of samidzat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on; just as most of humanity does not own a cell phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of
words". That time is now."; 09 May 2009 8:27 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Dr. Chimp!! ;-) (I love that pic!)

I thought more about your epiphany. So much there, we could dedicate an entire blog to the issue. But anyway..

Simplistically, is it possible to 'think critically', or 'search for teh truth', before you confront the reality, that (a) simply regurgitating 'thoughts' fed into your brain, is not 'critical thinking'; and (b) what you spent your life 'thinking' (read: obediently believing what you were told to believe) to be 'the truth' is not 'the truth', but lies and deceptions to manipulate you.

I think confronting these realities within ourselves, is based on many, many factors, emotional, cultural, academic, social, familial, etc. Each of us, has to -- before we can ever really do any critical thinking, or search for the truth -- confront the aforementioned realities. Some, perhaps many, if not most, may go through our entire lives, never confronting those realities, again for many reasons.

Its a fascinating subject of discussion, with various dimensions, from:

1. The socio-cultural peer pressure, financial et al, factors that inhibit 'awakening to reality';

2. The inner emotional, psychological ego coward, et al, factors....

3. Basically, the stuff of philosophy, theology and much else! ;-)

I remember my own resistance to confronting reality; to wanting to believe 'the truth' was what i had been told, and so naively had believed, without any enquiry on myown part to be 'the truth'. I remember feeling insulted to think that anyone could think that I don't 'think critically'. How rude!! How insulting! What a mean person they were! All the rationalisations, to avoid confronting issues, that rocked my little status quo ego-boat. Anyway I eventually did manage to say 'enough is goddamn enough'...

And then i think about all the known unknowns and unknown unknowns.. and try to remember to not be too attached that those i think are 'known knowns', really are so.. cause just maybe i may someday need to re-examine them again!

Ain't a critically thinking life a journey of adventure? ;-); 10 May 2009 2:12 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: I had a debate recently. An otherwise educated Canadian was remonstrating about the lack of freedoms in China. I asked what the difference was between China and North America. He was visibly shocked. I then explained that North America are deliberately kept ignorant, and only fed the news that is necessary. I went on to explain how difficult it is to get impartial news. I have to specifically subscribe to BBC, I cannot get Al Jazeera or Sky news, I cannot get European or Russian news, but if I want US news, they are a dime a dozen. I then have to subject myself to some loud and crass female (usually) and swallow utter US garbage. I haven't experimented with Fox yet. It is quite unbelievable how difficult it is to remain connected to the rest of the world.; 10 May 2009 2:13 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: @Andrea. No doubt it is a topic for a blog posting. I haven't ever really considered what defines a critical thinker. I love your term "awakening to reality". I especially like the thesis that it may take different people different lengths of time to confront reality, if they ever do. It would be interesting to explore why this is so. Are you kidding? I have enjoyed my journeys very much since I awakened to my reality. For me it is the essence of life.; 10 May 2009 2:30 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Vanilla: Wow, you know things are really bad, when you can't get the mainstream bit of alternatives from Russia Today, AlJazeera and the BBC, et al! That's really cutting down even mainstream alterantives! Wow!

Poor Canadian, he has been told for so long, how 'free' he is and what a 'free' society he lives in; that he has swallowed it as an absolute truth.

As for a definition of 'critical thinking'. Hmmmm that would be interesting.... I'd have to do some critical thinking on that! ;-)...; 10 May 2009 3:04 AM
FishEagle said...: Some people can think and others can't. Don't think about it too much or you will drive yourself crazy.

Critical thinking is partly the ability to take care of one's interests. The logical thought process is usually easy but the emotional part requires the ability to bridge the conflicting emotional needs between and within the social spheres of each individual. Many people just have the ability to look at the issues closest to them on an emotional level (personal issues, family and friends) and they are unable to expand the periphery of their vision to include broader issues in society. It's not as easy as you might expect. But you guys are doing it!

The definition is provided in Wiki and starts like this: "Critical thinking is purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do[1] in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments……."; 10 May 2009 5:17 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: @Fish Eagle. Indeed, and it ties in with our earlier chats on truth. If the pursuit of truth consists of your epistemology, which it does, then logically your critical thinking will be impaired if your sense of observation is flawed, ceteris parabis. So as Andrea mentioned, if the concept of truth has not been challenged in the minds of many, and the mainstream dogma is accepted as factual, there will be a flawed observation process, leading to flawed conclusions. Kind of like North Korea, it is well known that they are a high IQ nation, yet they idolise their leader. I appreciate much of that is a survival mechanism, but the large majority truly believe in their cause. The same could be said of cults. As I ramble along here I get a sense of having discussed this before in a different guise, anyway I am sure you get the gist.; 10 May 2009 8:02 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Fish Eagle,

Interesting. I agree, and as an exploratory exercise: what is 'thinking'?

Besides its biological definition, it's basically an abstract concept, and accordingly has various interpretations.

Your definition of critical thinking is also interesting. Critical thinking being another abstract concept, I won't even begin to attempt to say your defintion is incorrect. I am quite happy to explore it, as a working assumption.

So if: Critical thinking is partly the ability to take care of one's interests.....

Would you not agree, that long before you got to the 'taking care' of your interests; it would behoove yourself to accurately define your interests, based upon what REALLY, AND I MEAN REALLY LIKE A BULLET TO TEH BRAIN INTERESTS you.... after much serious thought, even better after some serious experimentation and exploration... to determine for yourself EXACTLY WHAT YOUR INTERETS ARE AND THEIR PRIORITY.... ;-)

I say so... cause it is my opinion, that it is very plausible.. what most people 'think' are thier 'interests' are nothing less than what they have been brainwashed to 'believe/think' are their interests, by family/church/Fortune500 et al...

So, if the ultimate goal (their interets) are not their gut wrenching own... what does that say about their ability for critical thinking?

If, for example, Johnny is highly capable of taking care of himself, based upon the interests he has been brainwashed to accept as 'good' or 'successful' or whatever?

A shallow observation of his behaviour may draw the conclusion, he is capable of 'critical thinking'; but is he really, if he has never even bothered to ask himself whether all he does, towards the goal, he 'believes/thinks/is brainwashed' to believe is his; is REALLY REALLY WHAT GIVES HIM MEANING AND PURPOSE?

If you interested in any of aforementioned... happy to hear your thoughts.. prior to delving further into the wiki definition...; 10 May 2009 9:39 AM
Anonymous said...: How about scepticism equals critical thinking?; 10 May 2009 11:20 AM
Dachshund said...: You're terribly interesting. I'm so glad you're contributing.; 10 May 2009 11:45 AM
FishEagle said...: Hi Andrea, I believe people ALWAYS know what is best for them. Difficulties arise with the implementation of one's goals when there are conflicting interests within a person's emotional spheres. I believe part of critical thinking is that ability of consistent conflict bridging and alignment of goals. These actions of bridging and alignment are universal but people's interests will depend on individual needs.

Let me give you an example of the bridging of conflict and alignment of interests that I am familiar with.

I believe it is in my interest to have children one day.

Assuming you know my history, I was afraid of finding love with another person because I was not at peace with myself (on the personal level). I remembered the causes of my unhappiness that I was raped as a child. I began questioning my own motives so that I was eventually secure in the knowledge that I truly had my own interests at heart.

I was afraid of having children because my parents did not provide me with an example of a healthy family (the family level). I began to question their motives and by putting the pieces together of the circumstances that gave rise to my rape I was able to forgive my parents and find peace in my family.

I did not remember my rape, which made me feel ashamed and stupid. I doubted whether I would be responsible as a parent or colleague (immediate society level). But then I questioned my own intelligence and when I studied a course in the natural sciences it gave me the confidence that I needed about my own logic. Similarly, I now have confidence in my emotional intelligence after spending time on this site (so thanks guys!)

Then when I started working I saw first hand the environmental damage that people do. It made me afraid of having children because I felt it was morally wrong to put any further strain on our natural resources (the greater society level). However, when I began questioning the direction that the human race was taking (NOT THE ACTUAL IMPACT THAT WE ARE HAVING ON THE ENVIRONMENT – THAT'S OBVIOUS) I read about race population dynamics and realized it wouldn't make a difference whether I had kids or not.

Whites have become responsible towards the environment but we have found ourselves in the situation of being out "bred" by the less educated and less responsible races. When everybody decides to act responsibly and only have a small number of children I won't worry about the greater good of society. In the meantime, I don't have the authority to tell other races that they must not have too many kids and they will continue to do it. Therefor I could argue that the more kids I have, the better!

I believe we are heading for a meritocracy, which will curb population numbers responsibly and it is something that I can be proud of. So I have made peace with my race too.

When people get brainwashed by family, church or whatever, they are not true to themselves anymore. Some people just need time before they come around and connect the dots. Others never come around because they simply don't have the ability. Can we judge them because of it? No! But clearly these people are out of touch with the goals of the people around them and therefore they are unable to align themselves in a way that they will benefit from the association.

You asked the question "What does it say about their ability for critical thinking?" It means that under the circumstances they can't do it.

I don't know about where you guys are but today is the most idyllic day we're having here. Warm sun, no wind, calm sea….; 10 May 2009 6:56 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Anon (11:20 AM): if it works for you; thats all that matters, to me. I imagine a superficial 'skeptic' may critic whatever 'theory' being promulgated; and a systemic skeptic may go deeper; 'out of the box' so to speak.

Dachshund (11:45 AM):
Well, in the same way that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; I imagine so too, are other interpretations of behaviour, such as 'interesting', or 'nutcase' or whatever. So, I appreciate your choice of 'interesting'; and found it gave me quite a bit of food for thought. Thanks. Feel free to let me know when you find my contributions 'interestingly' offensive, or disagreeable too.; 11 May 2009 3:01 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle,

Perhaps this is nothing, and perhaps you want to ignore it (no problem); I just thought I'd give you the feedback; but my feedback is based on very little observation; only you would be able to examine the issue further for yourself.

I noticed when I read your sentence: I believe it is in my interest to have children one day.

I had to go back and read it again a few times. It sounded so alienated. Almost like you (the person typing, and thinking as you type) were talking about someone totally outside of you, separate. Almost slightly little dictatorial, as in decisions made about what the interests are, and should be.

If you don't pay close attention to language and how people speak, and what they say; what I am saying to you may sound like the biggest load of hogwash gobbledygook BS to you.

Before you do, imagine for a minute, you are a psychologist, and you have two men sitting in your group therapy class: This is how they express thier problems:

1: 'Doctor, I have a problem; I have insomnia. Although i have a beautiful wife and nice children. I have a happy marriage, and I have many worries.'

2: 'Doctor, I am troubled; I cannot sleep. Although I am married to a beautiful wife, with a lovely family. I am also troubled.

Do you see the subtle psychological differences in terms of how these two men perceive their 'problems'?

How we express our problems is often, an indication of how we perceive them; and how we perceive them, frequently determines how we confront them, or allow them to consume us.

If you are remotely curious to explore the issue further (only you can benefit from expressing yourself in a way that is more intimate to your desires, and wants and needs)

For example: If you say the following sentences; how do they sit with you intellectually, psychologically, emotionally and physically (any tension in your being, for example: tense shoulders, grinding teeth, relaxed or whatever??):

1. I very much want to, and need to, conceive and give birth to children one day.

2. I am excited and passionately intensely seeking the man I wish to make the father of my children.

Compare those to:

I believe it is in my interest to have children one day.; 11 May 2009 3:30 AM
FishEagle said...: Hi Andrea,the issue of having children is an emotional issue. If I am having a conversation with my sister, for example, I may express myself in the way that you are suggesting. At the time that I wrote the comment my thoughts certainly were not motherly. That does not mean that I don't have those motherly feelings.

In the context of this discussion I have taken myself and my emotions out of the conversation. I don't really see the point of expressing my emotions when we are having a discussion about critical thinking.

I was hoping that my example would prove my point regarding critical thinking efficiently. Just because I am a very emotional person does not mean that I'm not efficient. I believe it is important to be able to determine the appropriate tone for a conversation. It is important to determine who is going to get the message and the intention of the message. My intention is not to engage the readers of this blog with my emotional motherly needs. I'd rather prefer to engage the readers on the complexity of being able link emotional needs, critical thought and so forth.

I flirt when I want to flirt. I enjoy the weather when I want to enjoy it. That is what I've enjoyed about this site so much.; 11 May 2009 4:54 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: @FishEagle and others.

I don't accept the notion that we instinctively know what is good for us since the outcomes are so varied and many choices people make are just stupid. As Andrea mentions, the departure point would have to be defining what it is that is good for us. In order to rationally define what is good for us we need to determine an appropriate time frame. Is it good for me now, or will it benefit me in the long run. The long run is usually what counts and in order to be successful at that takes understanding and mastering delayed gratification. These are not instinctive concepts. A common denominator for successful critical thinkers is undoubtedly intellect, but the field becomes murky when you consider that the lack of critical thinking can affect entire groups, or nations. So there is obviously an interplay between intellect and indoctrination.; 11 May 2009 5:47 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle,

As I said, I could be wrong. Just how I heard it. Having spent much of my life in the area of raising children (not my own), I no doubt got my wacky ways about how prospective mommies must communicate! And its good when they don't obey and communicate as they wish! ;-)

I get your intention and point.; 11 May 2009 10:05 AM
FishEagle said...: VI and Andrea, I agree the departure point is defining that which is good for us, i.e. making the logical deductions from the given facts. Of course the conclusion will depend entirely on the given facts, which will include the person's environment.

Andrea posed the question, "If critical thinking is partly the ability to take care of one's interests….it would behoove yourself to accurately define your interests based upon what REALLY, AND I MEAN REALLY LIKE A BULLET TO THE BRAIN INTERESTS you…after much serious thought, even better after some serious experimentation and exploration…to determine for yourself EXACTLY WHAT YOUR INTERESTS ARE AND THEIR PRIORITY…"

The term "know" was used in the context of her question and meant in terms of logical deductions and not instinctive decisions. My point is that with any given facts people are always capable of making the correct deductions when they need to make decisions that benefits them, although it may be to different degrees.

The problem comes in when the balance between the 3 parts of the brain is disturbed, which may be due to stunted emotional development, trauma and so forth. That is when the implementation of logical deductions becomes problematic or 'incorrect' and people become confused, are unable to bridge the gaps of conflict and align their emotional spheres. That is when critical thinking becomes particularly useful to restore the balance, as I have hopefully illustrated in the example in my previous comment. Please note that I am not attempting or I have not tried to attempt to define critical thinking. I'll leave that to the experts.; 11 May 2009 6:33 PM
FishEagle said...: Andrea, I just read your last comments. Lady, I will not take such patronizing crap. Unbelievable! NOBODY here is a child, get it? Nobody here needs to speak as if they are speaking to children!

And regarding your comment under the other post (Mother's Limbic Love Connection), "I wouldn't be too harsh on yourself," wake up please! The f*cking audacity of some of the assumptions you make! I'm not harsh on myself. I'm just making it clear that you must not be harsh on the likes of myself. Whether you wrote the book or not, you quoted it! Take some f*cking responsibility!

Gees I'm disappointed!; 11 May 2009 6:33 PM
Vanilla Ice said...: Oookaaaay. FishEagle I didn't interpret Andrea's comments the way you have. I had a few things to say but I think I will leave it there.; 11 May 2009 7:15 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle (6:33 PM): I am not sure what specific words I wrote, that you chose to interpret as 'patronizing crap'. Perhaps if you clarify for me what words exactly I said, I can understand how it is you are angry. I was simply being playful. My attempt to indicate that I am a playful person, even when I share information on a serious issue, are the included cartoons.

Irrespective I hear that you think that something I said was patronizing. I don't know what I said that you so interpreted; nor do I know exactly how you define patronizing. Until you do, I won't know.

Perhaps this may help: My view on life is that in many aspects we are all big children; who have forgotten how to play. The world is cursed with the Curse of Greyface (see Dischordianism).

My apologies you chose to interpret what I said as if I was speaking to a child. I was speaking as one big child, to another big child, in playfulness. If that offends you, my apologies.

As for being harsh on anyone;.... and the 'fucking audacity of some of the assumptions i make'.... that was hilarious! Were you being serious, or are you joking?

If serious, me does think the lady does proteth a little.. and thats okay.. I am prone to protething allot too!

RE: "Whether you wrote the book or not, you quoted it! Take some f*cking responsibility!"

Please clarify what you are trying to say: I should not have quoted the book? That would have been responsible?; 11 May 2009 7:40 PM
FishEagle said...: "and the "fucking audacity of some of the assumptions I make"…that was hilarious!" Now that is a comment I can sincerely appreciate.

Some of the examples of your patronization, which were specifically addressed to me:

"I won't even begin to attempt to say your definition is incorrect." Gee thanks.

"If you don't pay close attention to language and how people speak….what I am saying to you may sound like the biggest load of hogwash gobbledygook BS to you…" Really dear, and who died and made you the expert?

"I no doubt got my wacky ways about how prospective mommies must communicate! AND IS GOOD WHEN THEY DON'T OBEY AND COMMUNICATE AS THEY WISH!" Wtf??? I'll make sure that as a prospective mommy I will not obey as you suggest.

"I was simply being playful." Yip, big child you are.

"Perhaps this may help.." And why do I need help?

"if serious, me does think the lady does PROTETH a little..and that okay.. I am prone to PROTETHING ALLOT too!" If you had any underthtanding of pthychology you would have an underthtanding of the lengths to which a rape thurvivor has to go to, to actually become an adult in every sense of the word. Of course I am fucking protesting!!

"So I wouldn't be too harsh on yourself…" posted under (Mother's Limbic Love Connection) Well, you know what I said about that already!

Gees, I can't believe you actually made me read some of your comments again!

Regarding your quote under the post Mother's Limbic Love Connection, it is fine that you quoted the book. I can't judge you in your ignorance. But then you go on to justify the comments after I asked you to be just a little more open minded and you actually go and say that I don't have enough knowledge about myself to make an objective decision whether I have a reptilian brain!!!!! You haven't asked any people in my social spheres!!! Go fuck yourself!

You have the freedom to behave like a big child. Who can stop you? I just won't be taking the journey with you. And do you really think a big child is capable of critical thinking?? Ironic, hey, that you profess to be such an expert. You don't know what you are talking about.; 11 May 2009 8:54 PM
Viking said...: Hi Andrea

I'm not sure I agree that
"what you spent your life 'thinking' (read: obediently believing what you were told to believe) to be 'the truth' is not 'the truth', but lies and deceptions to manipulate you"
It all sounds very Dan Brown to me. There will always be debate on what it means to be a critical thinker, and a couple of good books to start with would be anything by economist Tim Harford, or "fooled by randomness" by Nassim Taleb. The latter is badly written but worth reading.

But back to the comment - our ability to think critically may be impaired (as Vanilla Ice says) by expernal factors, but some people seem to have an inherent ability to question. I was a critical thinker from a young age, and never followed the crowd. When I was 5 I switched to being a left-hander because everyone else wrote with their right hand, and I've been a contrary s-o-b ever since!

One of the hardest battles is against society's expectations. Get the good job, get the Merc, get the girl. It is the stuff of African-American rap music videos. But it is hard to escape from without becoming either a monk or a beach bum. In that respect FishEagle is right when she says "Critical thinking is partly the ability to take care of one's interests", when you work out what your immediate interests are versus what your "real" interests are. Everything is a trade off.

On another note, I think you (Andrea) make too much out of the statement "I believe it is in my interest to have children one day."
There would seem to be very little food for pschological analysis there! seems like a rational statement to me, and is deliberately phrased so as to be rational and not emotionally charged.
Is it really in a person's interest to have children? they are an emotional and financial drain, and the potential benefit they bring to the world is a gamble at best!
From an emotional and personal point of view it is a crucial issue, and the definition of one's interest CERTAINLY includes one's emotional and spiritual health.

just my two cents..; 12 May 2009 12:42 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: viking: Thanks for the 2 cents; would you like any change? ;-); 12 May 2009 3:34 AM
Viking said...: Always in favour of change, Andrea :); 12 May 2009 5:27 PM
FishEagle said...: Viking, I liked your story about switching from right to left hand. If you're a contrary SOB then I guess that makes two of us.

"But it is hard to escape from without becoming either a monk or a beach bum." Such a true observation.; 12 May 2009 6:52 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle,

In addition to be a contrarian SOB, I think you are a hell of a gutsy lady, in many more ways than one.; 12 May 2009 7:00 PM
FishEagle said...: Thanks Andrea, truce?; 12 May 2009 7:05 PM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle,

A Truce!

Humour Response: You gotta be kidding me! This war my friend! A catfight for the PC boysclub! ;-)

Serious Response: No, just kidding. I imagine we may yet disagree plenty, and so be it. We will sometimes stumble, and hopefully learn from each other. I appreicate your passion, and your gutsyness.; 12 May 2009 8:40 PM
Doberman said...: Awww man..a truce..? ;)There's noting sexier than two feisty intelligent women having a fight, am I right boys?!!; 12 May 2009 8:47 PM
Joe King said...: Dobes, I agree. I have been following this thing from the sideline and have been enjoying every response. Notice no comments from most (even anon) , but we cannot allow a truce- this is to much fun. Gentelman place your bets please. ;-); 12 May 2009 11:24 PM
FishEagle said...: JK, even though it is all actually quite sad you made me crack up with laughter. Thanks

Andrea, these guys are also going to have a go at one another one of these days then it will be our turn to place the bets!; 13 May 2009 12:43 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: FishEagle: If we were playing poker, we'd both have gone all in; and be splitting the pot! ;-) Well said.; 13 May 2009 1:45 AM
Viking said...: "There's noting sexier than two feisty intelligent women having a fight, am I right boys?!!"

hahahaha never a truer word.
still cracking up over this one!; 13 May 2009 3:13 AM
FishEagle said...: Viking,tussen jou en Doberman soek julle 'n vet klap!; 13 May 2009 4:45 AM
Viking said...: @FishEagle

I love it when you talk foreign to me!; 13 May 2009 4:53 PM

'Free' Congo Farm Land Seduction for White 'Neocolonial Land Grabbers'

2009-05-21T18:20:00.003-02:30

Friday, May 08, 2009

'Free' Congo Farm Land Seduction for White 'Neocolonial Land Grabbers'

About 50 million acres (over 20 million hectares) vanish each year to urbanisation, population growth, and economic and industrial development.

To get an idea of how fast population is going up and arable land is going down, take a look at the Internet clock that keeps track of this at: tranquileye.com/clock.

In October 2008, the global food security-focused NGO called GRAIN issued a report, The 2008 landgrab for food and financial security, citing over 100 examples of what they referred to as "neocolonial land grabs".

In the absence of any population reduction or containment measures, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates the amount of additional land required to meet projected food demand in 2050 would be about 3 billion hectares – and nearly all of this will be in developing countries. Africa, with only 14% or 184 million hectares of its arable land under cultivation, is a prime target for such land grabs.

In light of aforementioned realities, the Congo approached white Afrikaner farmers (oh the irony!), offering them 'free farming land', in exchange for food security for the Congo's remaining citizens. Considering the honourable ethical morality of the Africoon; how long do you think it may be, before any of those farmers are called 'neocolonial land grabbers'?

***

More than half the population of Congo-Brazzaville has been wiped out by HIV/Aids and more than 99% of its food is currently imported. It has formally asked Agri SA to help it establish a primary agricultural sector. Dr Theo de Jager, deputy president of Agri SA, recently went there to negotiate the terms of a contract. He spoke to Glenneis Erasmus about the opportunities and challenges in that country.

What does the memorandum of understanding between Agri SA and the Congo entail?

Congo-Brazzaville offers free irrigation land to South African farmers exclusively for 99 years. Six government farms of 135 000ha in the Niarri Valley and another 10 million hectares have also been made available.

Farmers will also get a five-year tax holiday and be exempt from import taxes on equipment and agricultural inputs. This means you'd be able to import a John Deere tractor for cheaper than you can buy one in South Africa, as you won't have to pay tax or import duties on it. Profits can also be taken out of the country at any time to any place. The Congolese government, in return, wants the country to be food-secure within the next five years.

What is the state of food security in the Congo?

Congo-Brazzaville imports 99,9% of its food. It's mostly past its sell-by date or unsuitable for the French market so it's "imported" or dumped at exorbitant prices. Poor-quality imported tomatoes sell for around R100/kg, while beef sells for around R185/kg. The quality of the beef is so bad that no South African would consider eating it.

There are around 10 000 cattle, 36 000 sheep and 30 000 goats in the country. The cattle aren't farmed in the conventional sense of the word, as the locals are afraid of them. When our delegation approached the cattle for inspection, the agriculture minister told his bodyguards to shoot them if they attacked us.

No chicken, egg and dairy products are produced either. Most of the cassava and bananas grow wild.

The locals can't afford the imported food and they live off cassava produced locally. Since they don't eat maize, there are no issues like in South Africa about using maize as feedstock for biofuel production. We could produce two harvests in the Congo, as the country has two summers a year.

What markets are there if most of the Congolese are poor?

The average income of Congolese workers on the mines and in government employment has grown significantly. Over 35% of these people's income is spent on food due to the high cost of imports. With local production, the country would have better, more affordable produce. A huge expat community, working in the mining industry, would welcome better food.

The rest of Africa also has great opportunities – Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is just across from Brazzaville on the southern side of the Congo River, has more than 8,5 million people. That's twice the entire Congo-Brazzaville population and the export opportunities are huge. Europe and our other traditional export countries would still be an option with exports primarily via the Pointe-Noir harbour.

Many African countries are notorious for bribing tourists and foreign visitors. How will the Congo prevent this from happening to South Africans?

Farmers will get a letter from the Congolese government saying that they are guests of the president. There will also be an emergency number they can call if they feel they're being treated unfairly. In addition, farmers will get special number plates so that they can be identified easily.

The Congo-Brazzaville has been disrupted by civil war and political instability in the past. How will South African farmers be protected?

There's a bilateral agreement between South Africa and the Congo which stipulates compensation for expropriation. In such a case, the renter has to be compensated for investment in infrastructure and loss of income and must receive another piece of land with equal production and income potential as the one that was lost.

The agreement also protects South African investments and stipulates compensation in the case of losses due to war, armed conflict, riots and so forth.

What if the government is taken over by a new party which doesn't honour this agreement?

The chances of this aren't very good as the ruling party represents the majority. It has also formed a coalition with the main opposition party. A new government would have to honour the agreements signed by the previous government. South Africa would also be able to contest reneging on the agreement at the international court of The Hague if necessary.

What about protection against dumping and cheap imports?

We were actually surprised by the strong stance the Congo took in this regard. The country understands the importance of protection if it wants to establish a sustainable industry. It has asked Agri SA and future farmers to become involved in developing a strategy to protect the agricultural industry in terms of phytosanitary requirements and import tariffs.

Describe the infrastructure.

It's very poor, but the government has approached our government to help fix the railway line between Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire where most of the people live. The Congo River can also be used for transportation. Most of the roads in the northern parts of the country are non-existent so it's better to fly between certain towns.

The World Bank and UN's Food and Agriculture Organization have pledged to help with the establishment of new infrastructure and the development of new markets. The Chinese are constructing a huge hydraulic power generation plant, and MTN is investing in telecommunication infrastructure.

Do you see this as a way for white farmers to escape the difficult political and economic challenges in South Africa?

There are some farmers who'd leave South Africa to establish themselves in the Congo and in other African countries due to land restitution, rising production costs, low protection and other political factors. But I see the Congo and other African countries as an opportunity for farmers to expand and diversify. Producing in other countries will not only help to spread risk, but increase markets. For example, banana farmers in Mpumalanga, who also have orchards in Mozambique, are currently generating higher profits there due to low labour and input costs.

Contact Theo de Jager on 082 332 2110.

Source: Farmers Weekly

GRAIN: The 2008 landgrab for food and financial security (PDF:207KB)

3 Opinion(s):

Vanilla Ice said...: There is already talk that the locals are pissed off. Which ties in with what I said about the secession of the Cape. We will always be seen as the colonialists.; 08 May 2009 5:16 AM
Vanilla Ice said...: Which reminds me of a joke... (Don't remember it too well, perhaps one of you can help)

A Zimbabwean pleads.

"We are suffering, we are hungry, we have no water, no house, nothing ..."

Suddenly one day he hears a rumbling, water appears from the tap, the neighbours come running, ...

He shouts "Quick get me my AK47, the whites are coming."

Something like that.; 08 May 2009 5:22 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Vanilla,

That's funny... and cause it is so true. Perhaps you are right, that it will be the same in the Cape. If so... i f***king give up! :-)

Please tell ET, to land me a UFO on my front lawn, cause I'd like to hitch a ride to my own planet! This looneybin sucks!; 08 May 2009 5:49 AM

7 Steps to Sustainability, by Paul Ehlrich (the Population Bomb)

2009-05-21T17:29:00.004-02:30

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

7 Steps to Sustainability, by Paul Ehlrich (The Population Bomb)

Paul Ehlrich was the 60's Dr. Doom author of the Malthusian The Population Bomb, wherein he warned that population growth would collide with peak food; and consequent mass starvation would result. The continuing higher agricultural yields produced as a result of the Green Revolution; and a slight decline in fertility in the Third World, are reasons given for the delayed Malthusian DieOff result originally predicted.

Since 2001, Shell geologist Dr. Hubbert King's original '70's Peak Oil theory has become more mainstream, with the establishment of, among others, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO). Peak Oil theorists allege that the effects of Peak Oil will be (and are being) experienced in, among others: agriculture (fertilizers and pesticides are derivatives of oil & gas), and the current financial crisis (cheap energy being the foundation of the fiat currency debt based fractional reserve banking system's 'economic growth' paradigm). Peak Oil 'Doomers', for the most agree with Mr. Ehlrich's population perspectives, viz a viz, the collision of population growth with finite and depleting resources.

For those interested in hearing more from Mr. Ehlrich, further below is also a video of a seminar he gave to the Long Now Foundation, about the evolution of human culture, and its effects on the environment, The Dominant Animal and the State of the World

Like Maggie Thatcher, the advocacy for less or zero population growth, and sometimes simply the discussion thereof, is controversial; and few are left unmoved either way.

A central problem of the human predicament discussed in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment is that we're small-group animals trying to live in ever more gigantic groups - and not doing very well at it. If catastrophe can be avoided, we're stuck with gigantic groups for a century or more, and very large groups "forever." It therefore behooves humanity to start asking itself how to maintain the small group coherence and interests that make people comfortable while greatly damping down intergroup competition and substantially enhancing the intergroup cooperation desperately needed to solve the human predicament.

Can human cultural evolution be directed away from its current trajectory toward disaster and diverted toward creating a prosperous and equitable long-term future for society? The answer is, "yes, it could" if the small-group animal "family" attitudes can be properly channeled. The basic requirements would be quite simple - a set of overlapping and intertwined ethical-environmental steps toward sustainability such as suggested below and over the next few weeks here at the "Eco-Compass" blog. Whether such steps will be taken is, of course, an entirely different question. But here's the first of the steps we should take:

One: Put births on a par with deaths.

Human beings have always fought against early death from accident, hunger and sickness, and in the past century or so have employed improved sanitation and the use of pesticides and antibiotics to good effect in raising life-expectancy. But given the horrendous potential consequences of the explosion of human numbers following reduction of the death rate, we must pay equivalent attention to reducing the birthrate as well. As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living - including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multigenerational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations retaining a happy, sustainable life style.

To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies. The goal must be to halt population increase as soon as humanely possible, and then start reducing human numbers until births and deaths balance at population size that can be maintained without irreparable damage to our life-support systems.

Two: Put conserving on a par with consuming.

At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one's share of the pie.

One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth's aesthetic assets. A high priority should be rethinking how we use the resources available to us - as individuals and societies - manage manufactured and natural capital (our ecological assets) carefully, and distribute their benefits more equitably. Success there, if it were combined with a decline in numbers, should eventually permit most people to live satisfactory lives. Of course, success would require abandoning the insane idea that growth in consumption is automatically good and can continue forever, No physical quantity can do that, including the total bulk of the human population (which at recent exponential growth rates would equal the total mass of the universe in less than 10,000 years).

Three: Transform the consumption of education.

Education is what economists call a "non-rival good" - something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others-and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament - the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations. Education reform is also crucial. In the future, both the need for sustainability and the multi-dimensional environmental, social, political, and economic requirements to achieve it must be central elements of education around the world. Unless a much larger fraction of the human population becomes aware of the predicament we all face and its possible solutions, sustainability is unlikely to be reached.

There exists today what I like to call a "culture gap." When I lived with the Inuit (Eskimos) more than a half century ago every Inuit individual possessed the vast majority of the non-genetic information (culture) available to the Inuit community. Women knew how seal hunting was done; men knew the use of a woman's knife. Perhaps a shaman had a few secret chants, but in general everyone was "fully educated." In our global society that has changed completely. Even the most educated people do not possess even one millionth of the non-genetic information housed in human brains, libraries, computer disks, arts, and artifacts. Given the parts, I could not begin to assemble the computer on which I am writing this. How many readers of this blog could explain quantum physics or ecosystem science, or recite the poems of Shakespeare? There is a huge gap between what society knows collectively, and what people know individually. We obviously cannot close the culture gap across the board, but we could narrow it selectively. In short, we must strive to narrow the culture gap in the most crucial areas related to reaching sustainability..

Four: Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.

A novel synthetic chemical added to the plastic in a sports bottle may increase its durability or prolong its life. But if it leaches into the bottle's contents or into the environment and functions in tiny doses as a cancer-causing agent, is the risk worth the benefit? In general, benefit-cost analyses are not done frequently or carefully enough before the introduction of new technologies. Freons (chlorofluorocarbons) looked extremely beneficial until it was discovered they could destroy the ozone layer and with it all life on land. Risk cannot be avoided completely. But a cultural change toward more careful analyses and deployment only of technologies that carry very clear benefits will help humanity keep the odds in its favor. It is an example of where the small group alone just can't produce the necessary cultural evolution - information from the large-group institutions of governments and international science necessarily must be integrated into the process.

Five: Rapidly expand our empathy.

We're a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups. Although we no longer can associate exclusively with a clan "family" of, say, 125 relatives, most of us have a group of "pseudokin"—friends and close associates of about the same number. In both cases, we develop a sort of "we" versus "them" culture, with the "themness" increasing with physical and cultural distance.

People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time—not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future. Can affluent people in the West learn to care enough about a starving child in Darfur to take real action to save her? If society takes step five, the answer will be "yes," and we'll be on the kind of road that could lead to a level of global cooperation that might allow a billion, perhaps three billion small-group animals to live together sustainably in relative peace.

Six: Decide what kind of world we all want.

What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?

While the U.S. GDP has increased almost five times since 1958, satisfaction, as shown by polls, has not increased at all. The situation in other countries is similar. Must all nations then strive to emulate the American superconsuming life style? Or should all of humanity strive together to seek a more equitable global society, which could replace today's bipolar super-rich—desperately poor population in which the split widens as growth continues. We could initiate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) to begin a discussion of what economic, social, and political systems will best fulfill a small-group animal's desires as it struggles to live in gigantic groups. How, for example, do we take advantage of the enormous benefits that market mechanisms provide to societies while constraining their propensity to do gigantic damage when unregulated? Starting and maintaining a global cultural discussion is a step that would help determine the kinds of lifestyles people really want., Armed with that knowledge, we could try to establish as accurately as possible the conditions of population size, consumption patterns, economic arrangements, and technologies required to make such lifestyles sustainable.

Seven: Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability.

This is closely related to step six. In the 200,000 year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization's long-term survival.

All seven of the steps could be written of as an exercise in Pollyannaism. "Totally impractical," people will say, "not gonna happen." Well, I tend to agree. But there is nothing more impractical than letting our global civilization go down the drain, with billions of people dying. Pundits seem to think we have choices, but they are wrong. If we don't change our ways, they'll be changed for us.

Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He is the author of hundreds of scientific papers, and numerous books including The Population Bomb and Betrayal of Science and Reason (Island Press, 1997). His latest book is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, which he co-authored with his wife Anne.

The Dominant Animal and The State of the World according to Paul Ehlrich

Paul Ehrlich gives a seminar at the Long Now Foundation about the evolution of human culture and its effect on the environment. A perspective of the State of the World, from ecologists, biologists, etc.

Chapters: [chapter link goes directly to Fora.tv page & chapter]
Human Dominance of Earth Early Human Evolution Cultural Evolution Big Cultural Steps Human Effects on Environment Population Global Climate Change Toxification of Earth Epidemic Problems Resource Wars Changing Human Behaviour Drilling for Oil Questions

Sources: Eco-Compass & ForaTV [Related: ASPO South Africa]

3 Opinion(s):

Anonymous said...: This is the CRUX of it all!; 07 May 2009 12:14 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Anonymous,

So, I am assuming you are in agreement with Mr. Ehlrich?; 07 May 2009 2:46 AM
Leves said...: I surely am!; 07 May 2009 7:34 AM

The Dark Side of Optimism; or the Bright Side of Bias?

2009-05-21T17:14:00.005-02:30

Saturday, May 02, 2009

The Dark Side of Optimism; or the Bright Side of Bias?

Note: Reading the paragraph The 'Bright Side" of Bias, in The Dark Side of Optimism; I was reminded of Mike Smith's allegations that South Africans suffered from 'Buyers Remorse' (How Good are Good Intentions?) and "Paradigm Paralysis" (Shifting the Paradigm of Multiculturalism); like naïve utopian idealists, we purchased the 'Truth and Reconciliation' Multicultural Rainbow Illusion; and slowly we are waking up to the Snake Oil Salesmen's lies, and our own complicity in our blinkered refusal to confront reality. How complicit are we in allowing our thinking, to be misused, by remaining subservient to destructive beliefs? Why, and how, do we allow politicians, priests, professors and journalists, to tell us what to think?

The Dark Side of Optimism

Why Looking on the Bright Side keeps us from Thinking Critically

Has positive thinking gone too far in corporate America? That may sound like a bizarre question: Optimism is widely seen as a virtue of American culture and key to success in business. Cultural norms and beliefs about good business practice increasingly stress looking at the sunny side and de-emphasizing the problematic.

But such overly positive thinking is difficult to reconcile with the need to make realistic, objective assessments. Finding the right balance between healthy optimism and delusion is harder than one might imagine, for both individuals and institutions.

And despite years—decades—of sobering examples, we don't seem to be any closer to that balance. The recent recklessness of residential and commercial real-estate lending was in plain view, and a vocal minority wrote about it. But the financial and business communities dismissed all the warnings, insisting that any damage—should it ever arrive—would be contained to the subprime sector. The folly was obvious: Even if decision-makers had deemed the grim forecasts to be of low probability, the potential outcomes were so dire that they demanded contingency plans. On other fronts, experts are issuing warnings about the dollar's continuing slide, which could worsen international financial stability, and about oil prices, and the hiring slowdown, and any number of potential crises looming in the near future.

We acknowledge these problems and their seriousness—and then put them out of mind. Instead of treating worrisome developments as new information and looking dispassionately at the risks, we tend to avoid working through downside scenarios because they are upsetting. It's simply easier to put on blinkers and believe everything will work out than to confront the complexities of modern life.

"Negativity," an awkward coinage, has widely come to be used pejoratively. Magical thinking, too, has become increasingly popular as a way to gain the illusion of control in an uncertain world. Rhonda Byrne's motivational best-seller The Secret, for example, basically says that you get what you wish for. If you don't have the things you want, it means you don't have enough faith. In this construct, neither insufficient effort nor bad luck plays a role.

In the business world, we've moved from hardheaded to feel-good management. As Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway observed recently: "For people in any position of authority the ability to say no is the most important skill there is. . . . No, you can't have a pay rise. No, you can't be promoted. No, you can't travel club class. . . . An illogical love of Yes is the basis for all modern management thought. The ideal modern manager is meant to be enabling, empowering, encouraging and nurturing, which means that his default position must be Yes. By contrast, No is considered demotivating, uncreative and a thoroughly bad thing."

To illustrate, Tom Peters' Leadership offers an impossible, irreconcilable list of exhortations: Be a great salesman, great storyteller, great performer, networking fiend, talent fanatic, relationship maven, visionary, profit-obsessive, and (of course) an optimist. Push your organization; know when to wait; love mess, politics, and new technology; lead by winning people over; foster open communication; show respect; embrace the whole individual. Granted, Peters does give a couple of breaks—leaders get to be angry and make mistakes. But his list is all sizzle, no steak. Not only are his executives reluctant to say no—they don't develop any of the guts of what managing is really about: making decisions under uncertainty, creating routines, developing (not merely exhorting) direct reports, responding to crises, building in enough slack to deal with low-probability but high-consequence opportunities and risks.

The religion of management has instead shifted from hard skills to soft, interpersonal ones. While the human touch is important, making it the gold standard of good management practice is dangerous. It reinforces, rather than counters, the role of emotion in our decision processes.

The end result is a bias against critical thinking. It's hard enough, in the delicate social web of most organizations, to question the merits of any given proposal offered in good faith. But now decision-makers stagger under the weight of larger social trends and management fads that favor belief and force of personality over dispassionate analysis. Detached, rigorous thinking simply doesn't fit any of our cultural models. In his 1949 classic The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell showed that the hero's journey is a story found in every culture—just as management literature about leadership, whether knowingly or not, casts corporate corporate chieftains as prototypical heroes. But what archetypes do we have for the anodyne analyst? In mythology, Hermes and Loki were clever but also troublemakers and tricksters.

Science fiction, too, has long depicted alien beings as detached, logic-driven Cassandras whose warnings are invariably brushed off by upbeat, forward-thinking Earthlings (whose impetuosity, more often than not, saves the day). But that's just it—it's science fiction.

The "Bright Side" of Bias

In the real world, it's troubling enough that most of us overrate ourselves and, by extension, our enterprises (see "Are You—Yes, You—Deluding Yourself?" on page 34). But our social orientation makes us more suggestible than we realize in other ways. Out of his own frustration with how easily a smooth salesman could manipulate him, social psychologist Robert Cialdini studied how "influence professionals" exploit our reflexes. His findings, along with those of other psychologists, explain the ways in which optimism can trump logic:

Liking. Cialdini pointed out that we are more apt to comply with those we like—that is, people who are similar to us and people whom we find attractive. We are therefore more likely to shun someone who pours cold water on our pet ideas. Thus, people who want social influence will reinforce— or, at least, not dispute—optimistic assessments. To smooth their dealings with others, people resort to white lies—large and small—with startling frequency: A study by social psychologist Robert Feldman found that 60 percent of his subjects told lies, at an average frequency of two to three lies per ten-minute period. No surprise that our co-workers and colleagues reinforce and amplify our rose-colored views more often than they dispute our assessments.

Consistency and commitment. Most of us feel the need to be consistent, not only because society highly values such reliability but because doing so makes it much easier to function in life. As Cialdini suggested, it's simpler to adhere to successive actions and decisions and hope that everything will somehow work out well than to return to initial principles each time you must make a decision. But in an organization, this attachment to commitment can lead to inflexibility, particularly when an initiative or investment that looked good in the planning stages falters in the field. In game theory and economics, the practice of taking unsound actions to justify measures taken earlier is called "irrational escalation."

Confirmation bias. People tend to look for information that proves, rather than disproves, their theories. In 1960, British researcher Peter Watson gave subjects the number sequence 2-4-6 and asked them to identify a rule. The participants could then ask the experimenter if other threenumber series fit the rule: For instance, those who believed the numbers had to be even asked about numerous even sequences, whereas people who thought numerals had to increase by two offered several such orders. Some 80 percent of participants overthought the simple problem and got the wrong answer: The numbers simply had to be in ascending order. Watson's study is called a "cold" form of confirmation bias; it merely demonstrates the propensity of humans to look for supporting rather than falsifying data points.

"Hot" confirmation bias refers to cases in which the belief is emotionally charged. Not surprisingly, researchers have found individuals with a hot confirmation bias to be even less amenable to information.

Conjunction fallacy. This is one of many cognitive biases that result from our propensity to rely on stories to organize reality. Studies of juries have found that they typically base their decisions on whichever story seems most plausible to them, rather than weighing the evidence. Likewise, people will form their own stories when presented with facts.

Consider this example: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Rank the following statements from most probable to least probable:
1. Linda is a teacher in an elementary school.
2. Linda works in a bookstore and takes yoga classes.
3. Linda is active in the feminist movement.
4. Linda is a psychiatric social worker.
5. Linda is a member of the League of Women Voters.
6. Linda is a bank teller.
7. Linda is an insurance salesperson.
8. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

A majority of participants in many repetitions of this exercise rate No. 8 as more probable than No. 6, even though, obviously, it is more likely that Linda is a bank teller than both a bank teller and an active feminist. Adding more detail makes something seem more vivid and plausible, and we make the leap to seeing it as more likely.

How does this bias reinforce optimism? It means that we overestimate the likelihood of conjunctive probabilities—that is, the likelihood that A and B will occur together. For instance, estimating the success of a project or investment is a conjunctive probability. Certain elements must all go well for the project to succeed: Customers must place orders, production must meet demand, production then must reach certain efficiencies for the profit margins to be adequate, and so on.

The fact that we overestimate conjunctive probabilities means that we tend to overestimate the likelihood of project success.

Getting Real

We're always told to look on the bright side of things, to stay positive. After all, individuals and companies need a positive outlook to succeed, right? Isn't positive thinking essen-tial for progress? Not necessarily. No one is encouraging pessimism; rather, evidence from top-performing companies suggests that success lies in a realistic outlook. Organizations with a point of view based in realism have a keen eye for problems, and when they find them, they attack them with a doggedness that verges on the compulsive. Yet we fail to recognize this realism because it's at odds with the romanticized ideas we have about leadership. It's much more compelling for a CEO to see himself—and the public to see him—as a modern protagonist in a hero's journey than as an executive performing the mundane and often thankless task of making a large enterprise more effective.

In addition, corporations often hide their worries. During its rise to industry leadership, Goldman Sachs had a culture that could best be described as intolerant of error and obsessed with containing risks. Yet the firm's spokespeople and sales staff always presented a confident, professional demeanor. Similarly, the press wrote about the firm's aggressiveness, emphasis on recruiting top talent, and cohesiveness, not its sharp eye for trouble.

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, found that his top-performing companies confronted the brutal facts. To illustrate, he quotes Pitney Bowes CEO Fred Purdue: "When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,' even if what you see can scare the hell out of you."

Collins cites retail food chain Kroger as another exemplar of tough-minded realism. As consumers became more affluent, their grocery-store preferences shifted away from utilitarian outposts toward more attractive stores with a range of offerings, in particular higher-quality perishables such as bread, meat, and vegetables. The industry was aware of these changes, yet Kroger was alone among the incumbents to upend its business system: "By 1970," Collins writes, "the Kroger executive team had come to an inescapable conclusion: The old-model grocery store (which accounted for nearly 100 percent of Kroger's business) was going to become extinct." Collins goes on to quote then-CEO Lyle Everingham: "'Sure, there was some skepticism at first. But once we looked at the facts, there was really no question about what we had to do. So we just did it.'"

Toyota, another reality-driven top performer, has patiently gone from making cars that American consumers ignored to being the world's second-largest automaker. One of the keys to Toyota's success is its drive to seek rather than avoid impediments. As a New York Times Magazine article noted, "It is human nature to cover up a problem rather than call attention to it. At a Toyota plant, the identification of a problem became imperative and exciting. Because then it could be addressed." Put simply, shortcomings are seen as potential opportunities. If Toyota can come up with a solution, it puts the company ahead of competitors.

Likewise, Andy Grove created a culture at Intel that was deeply insecure, and rightly so. Leadership in the computer-chip business is tenuous, since manufacturers are only as good as their newest design and product life cycles are short. Recall that the United States appeared doomed to lose its technology leadership to Japan in the 1980s, and Taiwan has been steadily improving the sophistication of its chips over the last decade. Grove's famed paranoia included an obsessive focus on competitors and evolving customer needs. As he described it: "Think of the change in your environment, technological or otherwise, as a blip on your radar screen. You can't tell what that blip represents at first but you keep watching radar scan after radar scan, looking to see if the object is approaching, what its speed is and what shape it takes as it comes closer. Even if it lingers on your periphery, you still keep an eye on it because its course and speed may change."

Grove uses a military analogy completely different than those of most business leaders, who see themselves as generals out to subjugate enemy territory. He puts himself in the shoes of a lowly radar operator, underscoring the importance of relentless attention and accurate reporting by the rank and file.

Building Realism

For companies that believe that all news must be good, senior management must take deliberate, concerted measures to signal that it is less interested in boosting morale than in the cold, hard truth. New messages must be consistent, firm, and frequent. Cultural change does not happen overnight and requires considerable attention and constant reinforcement. The leadership group needs to be certain it is prepared to go this route, since pretending to be interested in candor but persisting with old habits of denial will simply increase cynicism. Some measures to consider:

Never shoot the messenger. Some managers may seem to be hopeless worrywarts, but remember Grove's warning: Better to be aware of a potential problem than not. Over time, you can calibrate whether some managers or units are indeed canaries in the mineshaft and, conversely, whether managers who dismiss possible dangers do so for valid reasons—or do so out of inertia.

Show interest in the downside and the upside. Grill executives on the risks inherent in their forecasts. Display interest in bad or problematic news, and express interest in having more early-warning systems for adverse developments.

If your company has deeply ingrained prohibitions against bringing up bad news—particularly if it is considered to be a sign of professional weakness—have brief one-on-one reviews individually with key business managers to discuss their operations and build a spirit of greater openness. Later, in a larger group setting, use the information gathered, starting with challenges common to several units so as not to put any one executive on the spot.

Shake up habits and procedures. It's hard to get people to think and act in a new way if they continue to go through the same old rituals. It may be worthwhile to look at your management-information systems and decision processes to see if they provide adequate mechanisms to obtain and air unbiased information.

Another way to rattle hidebound thinking is to engage in scenario planning. Most companies have a well-understood official version of the future, which is codified in their business plans, and the organization may also have one or two other major scenarios in mind. However, businesses tend to ignore low-probability but potentially devastating events, just as they ignore fundamental challenges even when they look increasingly likely. (Consider how Detroit resisted the production of smaller, lighter cars and, now, how many corporations aren't taking the implications of global warming seriously.) Don't let your company be caught off-guard.

Establish a house skeptic. It can help to have a designated critic. Sometimes that role falls naturally to a staff department, such as corporate development. The trick, then, is to ensure that its questions and concerns are treated seriously (i.e., to make sure representatives have some power) and that it focuses on substantive issues, rather than process or minor details. If you lack a logical internal party to play this role, use an outside adviser, such as a retired executive, a consultant, or a business-savvy lawyer. Generally, it is best to involve the person in major strategic decisions and acquisitions first, and at as early a stage as possible.

Regardless of what steps you take, your goal is not to squash optimism but, rather, to build a sense of realism into your company's culture. And keep in mind that what works for an individual isn't always successful on the level of a larger enterprise. While the elixir of optimism may help us get through the day, it is toxic to corporations when taken in excess.

Source: Conference Board Review (PDF)

3 Opinion(s):

Vanilla Ice said...: Phew, so it isn't so bad being labelled the pessimist. I have always been the prudent over-analytical type, who makes decisions based on probability. My role can easily be describned as being the house skeptic or the polemicist.

A great read for those that make the effort.

The gist, for me, is that it is careless to buy into the whole happy clappy approach to everything, without unearthing information and considering your options for yourself.

Welcome to the club Andrea.; 02 May 2009 9:09 AM
Doberman said...: Good post Andrea, welcome to the blog.; 02 May 2009 9:13 AM
Andrea Murrhteyn said...: Vanilla Ice and Doberman,

Thanks for the welcome.

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TO: (Andrea/Lara) Critic's Bright Side of Bias;

Anyone else, with any objections, ctiticisms or bias against me blogging here; please feel free to share that feedback; and get your voices heard.

Problems can only be resolved when they are exposed to light.

I shall consider any criticism you may have, within the context of your sincere concern for the ILuvSA blog reader community, as an inhouse reader skeptic.

Lara; 02 May 2009 11:49 PM