Kafka

You hear it now all across Europe. “We are out of the woods, the crisis has ended, the worst is over” but I take scarce solace from these comments. The numbers have been falsified, the figures have been altered, and that which should have been counted as been ignored as a matter of political expediency. Bills uncounted do not mean that they do not have to be paid and obligations ignored do not erase them. The problems of Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal have been wallpapered over and the “new look” has been sung to the Press and the citizens alike but the wet plaster remains behind the façade and the upcoming peeling will commence in our New Year. More money equates to lower yields in the short run and assurances of health prevail in the world for the moment but the raw data tells another story as capital diminishes and debts build and uncounted liabilities surface once more.   2012 was a year of a vast and complicated charade. 2013 is likely to be a year when the resplendent masks are removed.

Three visualizations describe the breakdown of PSMs--previously successful models: S-Curves, Supernovas and Rising Wedges. A successful model traps those within it; escape becomes impossible.  We see the immense power of previously successful models. Straying from the previously successful trajectory looks needlessly risky, even as the trajectory has rolled over and is heading for unpleasant impact. Anyone who questions the previously successful model (PSM) is suppressed, fired or sent to Siberia as a "threat" to the enterprise's success. Anyone who realizes the Titanic will inevitably sink and abandons ship leaves behind all their sunk capital: they leave with the figurative clothes on their back.

Individually, it seems, most Fed officials accept the chief recommendation of monetary theorists, such as Michael Woodford of Columbia University, about how to conduct policy when the nominal federal funds rate is stuck at its zero lower bound. The problem they face rather explicitly, as Morgan Stanley's Vince Reinhart points out, is how to translate the advice from economic textbooks to the application of policy by the diverse group of people on the FOMC. Reinhart goes on to ask, rhetorically, if a conditional policy rule works so well in theory, why has it not been put into practice? Congress instructs the Fed to foster maximum employment and price stability but gives no guidance on weighing deviations from those goals in the short run. If the FOMC cannot agree on the weights, then they cannot agree on a rule. As a result, the Fed is living out a collective action problem, in that officials individually support a rule but collectively cannot agree to a single rule. This leaves Fed officials are now in the improvisation phase of their monetary policy experiment. That does not seem to us like a 'good' thing for the most powerful entity in the world.

“Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”  Nice, Mr. Draghi, but at what cost? And who will ultimately bear this cost? It is already far beyond the measure of mere money; democracy, truth and sovereignty have all been destroyed to prop up the central bankers' Status Quo. We can presume Mr. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are in on the propaganda campaign, and so we need to examine the words and promises of these two central bankers, as well as what they have not said. Is talking about printing money as good as actually printing money? It would seem so. Is promising to "do whatever it takes" as good as actually doing whatever it takes? Once again, it seems so; global markets leaped at the "news" that the financial Status Quo was going to be "saved" yet again.

What if it is beyond saving?

As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of electronic media hypnosis/addiction as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense addictive/conditioning powers of 24/7 social and "news" media. What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook page? What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+ hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die? We would declare that drug to be far too powerful and dangerous to be widely available, yet the Web is now ubiquitous. Servitude comes in many gradations and forms. Relying on the Federal Reserve to constantly prop up our pension and mutual funds lest reality cause them to collapse is a form of servitude; we end up worshipping the Fed's every word and act as mendicants worship their financial saviors. That the Fed is unelected and impervious to democracy or the will of the people is forgotten; all that matters is that we love our servitude to it.

This is where Orwell enters the convergence, for the State masks its stripmining and power grab with deliciously Orwellian misdirections such as "the People's Party," "democratic socialism," and so on. Orwell understood the State's ontological imperative is expansion, to the point where it controls every level of community, markets and society. Once the State escapes the control of the citizenry, it is free to exploit them in a parasitic predation that is the mirror-image of Monopoly capital. For what is the State but a monopoly of force, coercion, data manipulation and the regulation of private monopolies?  What is the EU bureaucracy in Brussels but the perfection of a stateless State? As Kafka divined, centralized bureaucracy has the capacity for both Orwellian obfuscation (anyone read those 1,300-page Congressional bills other than those gaming the system for their private benefit?) and systemic avarice and injustice. The convergence boils down to this: it would be impossible to loot this much wealth if the State didn't exist to enforce the "rules" of parasitic predation. In China, the Elite's looting proceeds along somewhat different rules from the looting of Europe and the U.S., but the end result is the same in all financialized, centrally managed economies: an expansive kleptocracy best understood as the convergence of Marx, Orwell and Kafka.

After it was the west backing down from further unnecessary escalation with Iran two weeks ago, when Israel and the US delayed indefinitely joint naval operations in the Arabian Gulf, it is now Iran's turn to blink. Following reports that Iran would pass a law halting crude exports to European countries, in advance of the full-blown embargo expected to take place some time by June, or as soon as European countries have found alternative supplies, we now learn that "Iran's parliament on Sunday postponed the debate over the bill." This is happening just as nuclear inspectors are arriving in the country "to probe allegations of a secret atomic weapons program." Yet does this mean that Iran has just exposed a major weakness that the West will immediately pounce on? It is still unclear - Reuters reports that "Iran's oil minister said on Sunday the Islamic state would soon stop exporting crude to "some" countries, the state news agency IRNA reported." Naturally the vague, open-endedness of this statement makes it quite clear that it was Iran's turn to de-escalate this time around. Or does this simply mean that Iran has been unable to conclude alternative oil trade arrangements with China, Russia and India just yet?

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but his opinion was all he was permitted.--Franz Kafka

The fog of lies seeping from the corrosive tar pits of Washington D.C. is getting thicker by the day, our social environment has become a vortex of confusing mismatched messages and conflicting data, and getting a straight answer from any mainstream outlet has become a fools errand. For those of us who are awake and aware, it seems as though our senses are under attack every minute of everyday. We are overwhelmed with illusions, delusions, mirages, and unsupported opinions masquerading as cold hard fact. Sometimes, we need media that inspires us and teaches us, rather than attacking us with amoralist rhetoric and rewriting our history in real time. Sometimes, we need to know we are not alone in our daily fight against disinformation. We need to know that there are, and always have been, others out there who see the truths that we see. Sometimes, we just need a break from the propaganda machine. In the hopes of providing for you as many moments of rest as possible, I have listed below some of the films and other media which have, at the very least, messages that support the vestiges of liberty and free thought. Some people may disagree with certain choices, and certainly, not all of the films below are examples of “artistic auteurism”, but at least they don’t spew up the bile of globalism and collectivism all over your living room when you watch them, which is always a nice change of pace. Onward with the show…

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said he doesn’t mind breaking promises to pensioners to close a $10.5 billion budget deficit -- even if they sue...

"Americans today are constantly watching their speedometers and trying to conform to every little rule yet there are so many rules that it's impossible for even the most honest and hard-working Americans not to be breaking some type of law on a daily basis. We are slaves in a criminal monetary system, where the Federal Reserve steals from the middle class through inflation and transfers this wealth to their banker friends on Wall Street. We are forced to accept pieces of paper of money while the US constitution defined only gold and silver as legal tender...We are now seeing countless signs on a daily basis that the US is headed for a complete societal collapse as we know it, forever."

“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”
Franz Kafka–The Trial

(I just finished watching the Earls family forcefully reclaim their home in SIMI Valley. Like many of you, I am feeling slightly uneasy about this story.)