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The Oil-Drenched Black Swan, Part 3: Multiple Risks, Multiple Unknowns
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
It is these unforeseeable and uncontrollable consequences that are poised to wreak havoc on the global financial system.
Here's the thing about risk: it bursts out of whatever is deemed "safe." It wasn't accidental that the Global Financial Meltdown originated in home mortgages; it was the perceived safety of the mortgage market that attracted all the speculative debt and leverage.
The authorities (those few who weren't bribed to look the other way) were caught off-guard by this explosion of risk in a presumably "safe" market, but this was entirely predictable: this is the nature of systemic risk.
Since 2009, central state/bank authorities have backstopped the private banking sector and the sovereign debt market with everything they've got. The Federal Reserve alone threw something on the order of $23 trillion in guarantees, loans and backstops at the private banking sector, and the other central banks have thrown trillions of yuan, yen and euros to shore up the banking sector and sovereign debt.
They did this because they identified the banking sector and sovereign debt as the sources of systemic risk. Now that they've effectively shored up these two risk-laden sectors with the full weight of the central state and bank, they presume the systemic risk has been eradicated.
They could not be more wrong. As I often note, risk cannot be disappeared, it can only be masked or transferred. The systemic risk will not manifest in the heavily protected banking sector or the sovereign debt market--risk will break out of sectors that are considered 'safe"--like oil.
Yesterday, I described how The Financialization of Oil has followed much the same path as the financialization of home mortgages in the 2000s: a "safe" sector has been piled high with highly profitable and highly risky debt and leverage.
Once the narrow base of collateral shrinks (as it has in oil), the inverted pyramid of debt and leverage collapses, distributing losses that then trigger defaults as the dominoes fall.
What are the risks that result from the drop in oil prices? We can identify four right off the top:
1. Financial market turmoil. Right now, the extent of the losses created by oil's sharp decline have yet to become visible. Everyone holding the losses is scrambling to hide them and sell positions to limit the losses. The full consequences of losses and defaults will only become public in the weeks and months ahead.
Those who think the losses are confined to the oil patch and lenders are mistaken. How many hedge funds and pension/mutual funds own oil stocks or oil-related bonds, loans and instruments?
2. Currency market turmoil. Venezuela is the leading candidate for currency collapse resulting from the drop in oil prices. Russia's currency (ruble) is already in a free-fall, and though some may blame Western sanctions, the real driver is the collapse in oil revenues.
3. Geopolitical conflicts. History suggests that declining oil revenues tend to spark geopolitical conflicts as those losing revenue seek scapegoats in other oil exporters who refuse to cut production to support higher prices.
There are a host of other reasons for geopolitical conflicts to arise out of oil's price decline. Stronger rivals may seek to exploit the weakened state of oil-exporting competitors. Oil exporters might seek to trim supply by disrupting rivals' production via fomenting domestic unrest. The temptation to invade and conquer rises in parallel with desperation.
4. The unknown unknowns and the rising odds of miscalculation. As I noted in The Oil-Drenched Black Swan, Part 1, the The Smith Uncertainty Principle expresses the multiple ways risk can manifest:
"Every sustained action has more than one consequence. Some consequences will appear positive for a time before revealing their destructive nature. Some will be foreseeable, some will not. Some will be controllable, some will not. Those that are unforeseen and uncontrollable will trigger waves of other unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences."
The highlighted passage echoes the impact of Black Swans and Donald Rumsfeld's famous encapsulation of the risks implicit in the unknown:
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."
Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek noted that there is a fourth category, the unknown known: what we know that we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know.
I think this is an ontological (intrinsic) source of risk: we know our activities and choices are piling up risk, but we refuse to acknowledge this because we do not want to deal with the consequences of all that risk accumulating.
This is the root of Chuck Prince's famous line about dancing (i.e. pursuing reckless financial speculations) as long as the music is playing ("As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance."): everyone engaged in speculation knows the risks are piling up, but to avoid having to exit the game, they deny knowledge of the risks that are visibly piling up.
Then when the house of cards predictably collapses, they can plead ignorance.
The Power of Black Swans lie in the unanticipated consequences of the unknown unknowns. Some of the consequences of lower oil prices are known, but some are unknown. It is these unforeseeable and uncontrollable consequences that are poised to wreak havoc on the global financial system.
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cute how T Boone Pickens predicting $100 oil in next 12 to 18 months
wouldn't be Talking His Book, would he?
Probably not. This is no black swan silliness.
12,000 miles per year @ 20 mpg x $1/gal savings = $600/ year or $50/ month. Big whoop in savings. @30mpg you'd save $400/year. Is it Black Friday yet?
That 600 will be eating up in food price increases.
...multiple percent gain on the S&P and Dow Jones.
Last I heard was that food prices were up because of the higher energy and transportation costs.
Now I hear that they'll stay up because... what? Truckers gotta drive further to avoid fracking mad Frackers?
Water shortages. Fracking does use quite a bit of water, so not entirely unrelated.
Ed Balls
The same T Boone that failed to do the math in urging NG to be the transportation fuel of the future?
fun watching the trench warfare @89 DXY
Weren't we supposed to have like a million people infected with Ebola by now?
Take these dire predictions of imminent collapse with a grain of salt. If/when you start to see international banking contagion from this, then you can freak. Somehow I doubt it gets to that point.
Going against the Ebola tide at one time was considered herecy around these parts. Seize Mars was down voted more than Chaz Bono at a wet t-shirt contest.
+1000 i don't even care about my keyboard, some funny shit there man!
Very true. And lets also not forget all the 'Hindenburg moments' that portend an imminent market crash. Or all the negative GOFO articles every time that happens. But of you point this out, or doubt that this one is "the big one" you get nothing but down votes.
No, thats in 21 days.
It's following the predicted exponential growth rate. Two months ago, there were 2000 dead and 6000 infected. Now that it's 60 days later, the official count is 6000 dead and 18000 infected. Like the lava flows in Hawaii, the slow and steady progression is right on schedule...
Which indicates that increased efforts are merely keeping the infection rate at a steady exponential climb, instead of an increasing exponential climb. At least it is so far mostly contained to a couple countries.
I admit as a vector for a world wide pandemic, Ebola is not a good candidate due to it transmission. Influenza is a far better possibility or another novel virus such as SARS or a coronavirus. Given the poverty of Sierra Leone, it is no wonder they are seeing such cases and any society with these characteristics is at risk. I would not be surprised if more hot spots were seen in the USA due to its ridiculous policy regarding Ebola but only with complete societal collapse would we see numbers remotely resembling Africa. Ebola is more of an issue for those of us in healthcare and our loved ones.
Even with minimal healthcare, Yersinia pestis killed a third to one half of Europe depending on the region. The human population managed to recover. Pandemics rarely completely annihilate a species. It just sucks to be you if you get it.
Miffed
"Weren't we supposed to have like a million people infected with Ebola by now?"
No. extrapolating the original trend rates from July, we were expecting 25,000 infected, 10,000 dead by Christmas.
Looks like we're still on track:
http://healthmap.org/ebola/#projection
Be sure to select "all affected countries"
"If/when you start to see international banking contagion from this, then you can freak."
It will be much too late by then. The door out will have already become too small. Like a burning building with a 12 inch slit in the wall with million of people trying to get out. Good luck.
"Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek noted that there is a fourth category, the unknown known: what we know that we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know."
I'm well on record here that I think this is the most likely scenario to explain our current path.
None of this is about what we think it's about.
BRB...someone's at the door.
I agree, JPM Hater001!
"the unknown known: what we know that we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know ... an ontological (intrinsic) source of risk"
In my opinion Hugh-Smith is typical all those who are published on Zero Hedge in the degree to which he grossly understates the situation, because he appears to "intentionally refuse to acknowledge" the degree to which we are dominated by systems which back up lies with violence, which have been developing at an exponential rate for thousands of years, throughout the history of the social pyramid systems of Neolithic Civilizations.
The oldest book on the Art of War starts by saying that "success in war is based on deceit," and ends by saying that "spies are the most important soldiers."
By and large, guys like Hugh-Smith, who seems typical of authors featured on Zero Hedge, presumes upon Hanlon's Razor far too much. In my opinion, that is because they personally are not able and willing to imagine the MAGNITUDE OF THE MALICE, which has actually been behind the development of human civilizations, to become what they ARE, namely, operating death controls based on the maximum possible deceits, in order to back up debt controls based on the maximum possible frauds.
Furthermore, on deeper levels, guys like Hugh-Smith "intentionally refuse to acknowledge" the necessarily central importance of the death controls. That is, there are at least TWO LEVELS that most people "intentionally refuse to acknowledge." The FIRST LEVEL is that whereby the people who were the best at being dishonest and backing that up with violence actually controlled civilization. The SECOND LEVEL is that whereby the chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life demand that there must necessarily be some death control systems.
Guys like Hugh-Smith write articles which I find theoretically interesting, and worthwhile to read. However, his superficial approach grossly understates how serious the situation is, and therefore, grossly underestimates what any more realistic resolutions of those problems would have to involve. The established political economy is built on ENFORCED FRAUDS, which were the result of the biggest gangsters, the banksters, being able to apply the methods of organized crime to the political processes. THE SOURCE OF THE "MONEY" IS THE MAIN SOURCE OF ALL THE REST OF PROBLEMS.
However, the SOURCE of the SOURCE of that "money" was the murder system that backed up the monetary system. That was the path whereby the history successful warfare based on deceits and treacheries created the political economy based on fundamentally fraudulent accounting systems. The PARADOX inherent in that SOURCE OF SOURCES was that there must necessarily be some death control systems, and there are! However, those death controls were most socially successful by being the most deceitful.
That is the foundation for the ENFORCED FRAUDS, which drive bubble economics, to aggregate systemic risks to become runaway criminal insanities. Meanwhile, guys like Hugh-Smith illustrate the typical ways that reactionary revolutionaries respond to learning more about that, wherein they continue to have the same old-fashioned beliefs in false fundamental dichotomies, and their related impossible ideals. That is Hugh-Smith is another typical example of what I call a Black Sheeple, who presents a relatively good analysis, within its own frame of reference, upon a superficial level, BUT NEVER GOES DEEPER.
There are some that go through the FIRST LEVEL of understanding that the government is the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gang of criminals, which currently happen to be the international bankers, that dominate almost all the governments in the world. However, I am not aware of anyone who then goes on through the SECOND LEVEL of better understanding regarding how and why we ended up with our death and debt controls being done through the maximum possible deceits and frauds.
The aggregated RISK of globalized electronic fiat frauds, backed by the force of weapons of mass destruction, is trillions of times BIGGER than anything which previously existed in known human history. However, almost NONE of that is understood better by anyone, as illustrated by those who continue to believe in the same old-fashioned false fundamental dichotomies, and their related impossible ideals, which always actually make the opposite happen in the real world.
In principle, the problem that the human species faces is how to operate better murder systems, through better militarism, after the development of weapons of mass destruction. That is imperative because the current death controls are what back up the established death controls: MONEY IS MEASUREMENT BACKED BY MURDER.
The accumulating RISKS are all being amplified to more astronomical SIZES by their driving mechanisms, which are systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, which never can stop those lies being false, no matter how much those lies are enforced, but rather, only drives society as a whole to become more criminally insane, since those triumphant systems of lies backed by violence become more psychotically detached from relatively more objective facts, since the mechanisms WITHIN society reward people who agree with lies, and punish people who do not agree with lies.
Thousands of years of social slavery systems, based on backing up lies with violence, have made and maintained our current political economy, based on ENFORCED FRAUDS, which therefore run ever increasing RISKS due to the ways that ENFORCING FRAUDS is never able to stop those frauds from being false, although, WITHIN society, the enforcement of those frauds successfully operates systems of organized lies and robberies, which makes the pyramidion people INSIDE the social pyramid systems become relatively more wealthy and more powerful, and therefore, even more able, WITHIN society, to continue to back up lies with violence, despite that overall resulting in that society becoming terminally sick and insane, to the degree that it becomes increasingly psychotic.
I REPEAT, there are at least TWO LEVELS upon which we can perceive that we are living inside of a civilization controlled by enforced frauds, which are driving RISKS of that system's eventual psychotic breakdowns. The FIRST LEVEL is that the political economy is controlled by lies backed by violence, while the SECOND LEVEL is that there must necessarily be some system of death controls.
The FIRST LEVEL is that our actual death controls (backing up our actual debt controls) are done through the maximum possible deceits about themselves. The SECOND LEVEL is that the established systems and their controlled opposition groups stay within that frame of reference of the maximum possible deceits about death controls, (backing up the maximum possible frauds in our debt controls.)
Guys like Hugh-Smith appear quite typical reactionary revolutionaries, who do some relatively good analysis of the superficial levels through which the political economy's enforced frauds are accumulating greater and greater aggregates of systemic risks. However, on the FIRST LEVEL, he does not appear to face the facts of the degree to which there is malice, rather than incompetence, behind those events. Furthermore, with respect to the SECOND LEVEL, he does not appear to perceive that at all, or certainly not in any systematic way, which is articulated forthrightly.
My assertions are that we should go through a series of intellectual scientific revolutions in the philosophy of science, which then apply to political science, and especially to the combined money/murder systems. My conclusions are that the existing systems are necessarily due to governments being the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gang of criminals, while the only genuinely better resolutions to those social situations would require better organized crime, because there must necessarily be some murder system, to back up some money system.
I say that human intelligence emerges as the internalization of natural selection. So far, from the perspective of the SECOND LEVEL, it makes sense that the history of warfare developed death controls to be done through the maximum possible deceits about themselves, which simultaneously resulted in the significant controlled opposition groups to the established systems also operating INSIDE of the biggest bullies' bullshit world view, regarding the death controls, or the murder systems, whose ideology was militarism.
The issues regarding RISKS that human beings now face are whether or not they can go through quantum leaps of better understanding natural selection, in order to develop better systems of artificial selection, which is made imperative by the SECOND LEVEL OF DEEPER RADICAL TRUTHS, but also made practically impossible by the FIRST LEVEL OF DEEPER RADICAL TRUTHS.
By and large, the vast majority of people "intentionally refuse to acknowledge" any of the BASIC FACTS regarding the death controls, that back up the debt controls. The mechanisms behind that are the history of the social successes based on operating systems of organized lies and robberies, whereby those who were the best at doing that were able to make and maintain the kind of civilization that we are currently living INSIDE, where the foundation of its political economy is ENFORCED FRAUDS, which are driving themselves to become more and more criminally insane.
In that context, the greatest RISK that we face is our collective FAILURE to understand the ways that natural selection became artificial selection. We are operating human evolutionary ecologies through the maximum possible deceits about themselves. INSIDE that overall context, we are operating a political economy based on the maximum possible frauds, whose abilities to be enforced never resolves their problems, but rather, only drives those problems to get bigger and BIGGER!
A THIRD LEVEL of more radical truths would require the creative synthesis of the FIRST & SECOND LEVELS. I.e., there are death controls, which are being done through the maximum possible deceits, and there must be some death controls, which could theoretically be done through greater use of information enabling higher consciousness. There are NO possible solutions which do not have death controls at their core. However, there are NO better death controls without profound paradigm shifts in the ways that we perceive those, because the biggest bullies' bullshit now dominated the philosophy of science, and especially political science, because human ecology operates through murder systems which developed to be most successful when most deceitful, while political economy developed to be most successful when most fraudulent.
All combined, that collective social situation has become criminally insane, and therefore, is headed towards psychotic breakdowns, which are the kinds of RISKS which Hugh-Smith has been discussing. However, I REPEAT, he grossly underestimates the degree to which the existing systems are malicious, rather than due to incompetence, and moreover, he appears to miss totally the point that there must necessarily be some human murder systems operating some death controls.
WTF
pick up the doobie and step away from the keyboard.
Ad hominem proves nothing BobRocket, other than to paradoxically reinforce my point that human societies are actually controlled by lies backed by violence, in which situations rhetorical tricks are more influential than relatively objective assessments of the facts.
FACTS like privately controlled banks make the public "money" supply out of nothing as debts, which situation is the result of the triumphant application of the methods of organized crime to the political processes, which are the main feedback loops that drives all of the rest of the RISKS which follow from having fundamentally fraudulent accounting systems, which get away with utterly absurd bullshit about themselves in the public spaces, due to the ways that those have ENFORCED FRAUDS.
There is NO other way that one can fully understand the social situation wherein private controlled banks get to make the public "money" supply out of nothing, as debts, while government enforces that fraud. Furthermore, those are the basic reasons how and why our political economy continues to drive itself deeper and deeper into generating numbers where the debt slavery systems have generated debt insanities, which continue to respond to that problem by making even more "money" out of nothing, as more debts, (while some of the most extremely evil people on the planet, like Dick Cheney, tell us not to worry about that, because those debts do not matter!)
If you do not understand what I am writing, BobRocket, what that actually demonstrates is how profoundly ignorant you are about the real political situation that surrounds us, which is driving the established systems towards psychotic breakdowns, because the ONLY thing those systems do is try to perpetuate themselves by backing up bigger lies with more violence. For example, under Present Obama, the total debts of the USA have about doubled, inside an overall context where anyone who looks at the real numbers recognizes that those are INSANE, because they are based on the abilities of frauds to continue to be enforced forever.
Those FACTS have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not I may be smoking marijuana. Rather, the apparent way that you fail to understand those FACTS merely reinforces my points regarding the degree to which most people are so clueless that they do not have a clue how clueless they are! You write "WTF" because you have barely any understanding of the real social situation around you!
WE LIVE IN A CIVILIZATION CONTROLLED BY THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE DECEITS AND FRAUDS, WHICH FACTS ARE THE SOURCE OF THE RISKS, AS WELL THE SOURCE OF THE ALMOST TOTAL FAILURE TO RESPOND TO THOSE GROWING RISKS IN ANY WAYS OTHER THAT TO MAKE THOSE RISKS GET GREATER!
Yeah, I was talking about aliens.
Metaphorically speaking, most of the ruling classes live in such a different world, and have such different sets of values from the majority of human beings, that the ruling classes are "aliens" to the rest of the human population.
As far as whatever literally MIGHT be "aliens," and whether they travel through different "dimensions," in which the word "alien" is merely a new term for "demon," I have NO first-hand knowledge. It is difficult to tell where the blending between metaphorical truths versus literal truth actually changes gears from one to the other. I have found that many people who speak about those matters make almost no effort to distinguish between metaphorical truths versus relatively literal truths.
In my view, the top of the social pyramids, or the pyramidion people, are the topmost of the top human "carnivores." They are the men that prey on men. Not necessarily as literal cannibals, but as slave masters, that control other people through backing up lies with violence. The banksters who profit from wars, and every other evil thing that they can possibly do, metaphorically speaking act like "aliens" or "demons" compared to the vast majority of people. However, the top predators still fill a niche in the human ecology, which must have some death control systems done somehow.
The human ecology can be metaphorically described as:
Vicious Wolves, and
Domesticated Dogs,
controlling way more
Zombie Sheeple, that
include Black Sheeple.
Almost everyone who is published on Zero Hedge fits into the group of Black Sheeple, as one kind or another of reactionary revolutionaries. They continue to promote the values of the people who are the productive/prey, while they criticize those who are acting as the predator/parasites. Those Black Sheeple tend to promote bogus "solutions" based on the notions that everyone should act like better Sheeple.
On the other hand, I promote the idea that genuine solutions must be based on everyone acting like better Wolves. I think that there are good reasons why militarism is the supreme ideology. The ideology of the murder system deserves to be recognized as the supreme ideology. Within that context, all of the theories of economics are actually subsets of militarism. However, the ways that the death controls are done with the most social successes through deceits, in order to maintain the debt controls which are most successfully operated INSIDE society through the maximum possible frauds, are the problems that I identified in the comment above.
From a practical point of view, the Sheeple, or the productive/prey people, are the majority of people, to whom the real values and behavior of the minorities that are the predatory/parasites appear to be like that of "aliens" or "demons." In general, each different group of people is deeply stuck in their own rut, of having developed to live INSIDE of their kind of niche, INSIDE of the overall human ecology and political economy systems, which they tend to not perceive, and to not want to perceive.
In my view, the greatest longer term problem is the degree to which controlling civilization through systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS makes it practically impossible for that civilization to engage in any better overall rational risk assessments. The economics of ENFORCED FRAUDS drives there to become more serious SCIENTIFIC FRAUDS. Most of the risk assessments that dominate our society are grossly disproportionate, and ridiculously irrational, because they primarily promote the interests of the ruling classes, whose primary objectives are to continue to be able to control those who they rule over, through the means of backing up lies with violence.
Systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS not only drive runaway social polarization. More importantly, ENFORCED FRAUDS drive human beings towards doing irreparable damage to the natural world. Throughout most of human history, the greatest RISK to some human beings were some other human beings. Therefore, we ended up with weapons and warfare as the most important priorities. That enabled the creation of sovereign states, through the survival of the War Kings, whose powers were eventually captured by the Fraud Kings, the banksters, so that civilization is now controlled by ENFORCED FRAUDS.
The results of those ENFORCED FRAUDS are not only the greatest RISKS that we face, due to those driving social polarization and destruction of the natural world, but also, the triumphs of those ENFORCED FRAUDS makes more rational assessments and responses to any other real RISKS, outside of the threats of some human beings to other human beings, practically impossible to put into proper perspective, nor respond to more effectively.
Metaphorically speaking, human beings have become their own "aliens." Civilization is dominated by people who are practically "demonic." However, that includes the degree to which any better responses to the chronic political problems inherent to the nature of life, along with all of the other RISKS from natural factors, overwhelmed by the primary systems, which are the human control of other human beings through systems of lies backed by violence, such as manifested now by our political economy being based on ENFORCED FRAUDS.
From a sublime point of view, it is ASTONISHING how practically everyone takes for granted the situation that private banks are legally allowed to make the public "money" supply out of nothing as debts, while governments ENFORCED THAT FRAUD! For those few who learn about those central social facts, it continues to be ASTOUNDING how about 99% of the rest of population continues to act like Zombie Sheeple regarding the ways that they are INSIDE of that runaway debt slavery system, which is creating numbers which have become debt insanities.
The ruling classes that made and maintained those social systems ARE fleecing the Zombie Sheeple to exhaustion, while setting them up to be slaughtered. However, the vast majority of the people who are ruled over have been conditioned to feel that they do not want to know about that, and therefore, continue to tend to deliberately ignore it. Moreover, the few who do publicly protest that runaway social insanity situation tend to be controlled opposition, or Black Sheeple, who do not promote any better death controls, to back up better debt controls.
As far as I can tell, at the present time the best we get in the relatively significant public spaces are Web sites like Zero Hedge, which point out the degree to which the Vicious Wolves, directing their Domesticated Dogs, are controlling the vast majority of the Zombie Sheeple (in ways whereby those Sheeple are being fleeced to exhaustion, while being set up to be slaughtered.)
However, on Zero Hedge it continues to be the case that the featured articles are those written by the various kinds of reactionary revolutionaries, or Black Sheeple, who continue to promote the values of the productive/prey people are being the source of "solutions." Furthermore, those few who comment more perceptively about the relative maliciousness of the banksters tend to continue to also have grossly superficial notions regarding what would be better death controls, such as calling for those banksters to be hung or guillotined.
Just like there is NOT enough production to ever keep up with the runaway debt insanities, and taxing the rich could not come close to being enough to pay for the runaway debt insanity numbers, which already exist, and are automatically getting worse, faster, so too, different death controls that MIGHT be applied to the rulings classes are actually orders of magnitude too insufficient.
From the point of view of most people, death control concepts are too totally taboo for them to think about those. The people who actually specialized in being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, metaphorically appear to be "aliens" or "demons" to the vast majority of the Sheeple, who live INSIDE their roles as the productive/prey.
The majority of the mainstream morons do not understand, mostly because they have been conditioned to not want to understand, how the ruling classes actually live by being predatory parasites. The majority of people are utter Zombie Sheeple, who do not perceive the degree to which the ruling classes are Wolves in sheep's clothing. Furthermore, those Sheeple are not aware of the degree to which the opposition groups to the established systems were controlled, so that the apparent opposition bleats the moralities of the Sheeple as the "solutions" to the problems created by the Wolves controlling civilization.
The irony that the Wolves taught the Sheeple to bleat their morality is not recognized by most of the Sheeple, including the Black Sheeple, especially since the Wolf-like People are professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, who are skillfully able to pretend to think and behave like the Sheeple when in public. The biggest bullies' bullshit world view totally dominates the controlled opposition. Only in secret, covertly, do the Vicious Wolves act like the top predators, or think like parasites.
There is no doubt that, metaphorically speaking, the ruling classes are like "aliens" or "demons" relative to the vast majority of other people that they rule over. After all, the ruling classes are actually the best organized gangs of criminals, that covertly operate through the maximum possible deceits and frauds, in order to be able to dominate civilization with their systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS.
However, the DEEPER LEVELS OF RADICAL TRUTHS are that natural selection pressures always existed. After one has any life, then the death controls over that life are the central features that direct the development of the evolutionary ecologies of that life. Human systems were based on them being able to build brains which could built a model of their world, with a model of themselves within their model of that world. That ability was channeled by the history of warfare to develop artificial selection systems operating death controls through the maximum possible deceits and treacheries, which then became the basis of a political economy built on ENFORCED FRAUDS.
Now that those ENFORCED FRAUDS have become globalized electronic fiat, backed by the threat of the force of atomic bombs, the greatest RISKS to human beings continues to be ourselves! That situation also makes all other RISKS from all other factors greater, because the degree to which our civilization is controlled by ENFORCED FRAUDS makes responding to any real RISKS outside of that kind of civilization extremely problematic!
The ONLY genuinely better resolutions to the RISKS require better death controls, in order to back up better debt controls, however, for all the reasons I reviewed above, what actually exists are the most deceitful death controls, backing up the most fraudulent death controls, which includes how the controlled opposition groups tend to promote bogus "solutions" based upon the impossible ideals that there ought not be any death controls that human beings are conscious of, while the ruling classes continue to amplify the established systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS, to astronomically greater and greater SIZES, necessarily driving civilization as a whole towards RISKS of the eventual psychotic breakdowns of those systems, in ways which are extremely unpredictable, since THOSE EVENTS WOULD BE PEAK INSANITIES!
Those coming times, where the established systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS reach their points of PEAK INSANITIES, will surely appear to many people to be something like that manifested by "aliens" or "demons," because those will be severe social storms blowing through in ways which go out of control. The energy constantly being pumped into systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS, channeled through globalized electronic frauds, backed by the threat of the force of weapons of mass destruction, is automatically getting bigger and BIGGER!
While guys like Hugh-Smith can somewhat perceive those RISKS, he continues to stay within the frame of reference of the people who are basically the productive prey, who have too little sympathy for the "devil," which is that there must necessarily be death controls. In my view, the oldest and best developed social science and social engineering was militarism, as the ideology of the murder system. Better militarism is the the imperative for better resolutions of our problems, regarding how to deal with the range of possible RISKS.
However, at the present time, the vast majority of the people do not perceive those problems, while the few that do then to then continue to promote the same old-fashioned "solutions" based on impossible ideals. I emphasize that not only are we actually living in a Bizarro Mirror World, where everything appears proportionately backwards and distorted, because governments are the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals, but also, almost everyone continues to promote bogus "solutions" which are proportionately backwards and distorted, because those are still being proposed INSIDE the frame of reference of that Bizarro Mirror World.
What we need is to go THROUGH that looking glass! The genuine solutions have to be based on realistic assessments of the actual problems, such as that money is measurement backed by murder. In order to deal more effectively with the social facts that our political economy is based on systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS, we must develop better death controls to back up better debt controls. However, from the point of view of the vast majority of people, i.e., both the Zombie Sheeple, and the Black Sheeple, their bullshit "solutions" are based on some sort of impossible ideals, that there should not be any death controls, or at least none that human beings are consciously aware of.
The on-going situation is that we operate our actual death controls through the maximum possible deceits, to back up debt controls based on the maximum possible frauds, while the greatest of RISKS is the degree to which everyone tends to deliberately deny and ignore those basic facts, as well as the deeper reasons how and why those sets of basic facts developed. The ruling classes operate the existing systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS by being professional liars and immaculate hypocrites about those systems. The people that they rule over are mostly brainwashed to believe in that bullshit, while the few that are not totally brainwashed still tend to follow any relatively good analysis of those basic facts with bogus "solutions" that are still based on impossible ideals.
Around and around we go ... Human beings have become their own "aliens," or their own "demons," while going THROUGH more profound paradigm shifts to more fully understand how and why that situation developed is imperative IF we are going to resolve those problems in any genuinely better ways. The central core of natural selection are the death controlling conditions. The central core of any kind of artificial selection must also be its death controlling conditions.
At the present time we have the problem that progress in physical sciences and technologies has nothing like that in political science, because we developed to operate our artificial selection cultures through the maximum possible deceits and frauds, while our greatest blind spot is towards the RISKS from having done that! In theory, it would be possible to have a more scientific society, that made greater use of information, enabling higher consciousness about the death controlling conditions. However, in practice, the established systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS require people to deliberately ignore those facts, while burying those facts as deeply under bullshit as they possibly can.
On Zero Hedge, one routinely find far better articles than one can find in the mass media. However, those articles continue to almost always be relatively good analysis, which then collapses back to bullshit "solutions," because those articles continue to understate how bad things really are, and therefore underestimate what it would really take to address those deeper problems. Primarily that means that most articles on Zero Hedge presume Hanlon's Razor type perspectives, attributing the social situations as due more to incompetence than due to malice. Furthermore, that means that failure to face the realities about the existing death control systems enables continued promotion of impossible ideals, which do not deal with the death control issues forthrightly, but rather tend to side-step those, by resorting to the kinds of transcendental poetry words, commonly found repeated in the context of old-fashioned religions and ideologies, which indulge in those kinds of magical words, as their ways to avoid direct discussions of the death control issues.
Even those few commenters who post on Zero Hedge, that understand better those deeper levels, which reveal the banksters, or rulings classes generally, as being like predatory parasites, or metaphorically like "alien demons" compared to the productive prey, continue to be quite superficial in those respects, when it comes to their kinds of over-simplified set of bogus "solutions," which are not based on enough of a paradigm shift with respect to perceiving the death control issues.
Human beings killing other human beings was historically one of the greatest of all RISKS, which therefore has dominated everything else, and entangled all other RISKS through the apparently infinite tunnels of deceits, through which the murder systems ended up being operated, that then resulted in our having political economy based on ENFORCED FRAUDS, as the greatest of all, increasingly psychotic, RISKS!
You mean
"In principle, the problem that the human species faces is how to operate better murder systems, through better militarism, after the development of weapons of mass destruction. That is imperative because the current death controls are what back up the established death controls: MONEY IS MEASUREMENT BACKED BY MURDER.
established debt controls
DOH! damn near perfect comment ..\/. .\/..
Thanks for pointing that mistake out, MEAN BUSINESS.
It is almost impossible to properly proofread one's own writing, since one tend to always see what one meant to write, rather than what one actually wrote.
After anyone replies to a comment, then it can not longer be changed. However, for my own records I repeat most of the stuff I post on Zero Hedge on my own Web site Forum, and there I will make the correct you pointed.
For all the writing you do it's ridiculous to point out mistakes in grammer or spelling etc (like the 4 in your reply LOL!!!), but for those who haven't been reading your posts here since about September of last year, and/or struggle to understand what you're saying as I do, I thought this was important to point out. My decision to not ask you if you meant debt controls was MEAN'S way of saying at least there's one idiot paying attention! even though I was thinking your reply might prove me wrong leaving me looking at the winter break still hopelessly lost! It didn't, phew!
I'm ready for a little vacation. I hear Peru is nice this time of year ; )
Thanks Radical Marijuana and Zero Hedge
Soon,
MEAN BUSINESS
Ah, "winter" in the Southern Hemisphere could be nicer!
Yes, it will hurt. But, pain is good. It tells you you're alive, at least on a temporary basis.
Unknown unknowns! That's what Rumsfeld said;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk
We all know that none of the problems arsing from the GFC have been solved. Money printing has simply elevated asset prices and further skewed wealth and income distribution.
Thus the next GFC will be bigger that Ben Hur and if that does not materialize then perhaps we are entering a long term death spiral that will see us all become happy as North Koreans where an all controlling complex of 0.01% together with a mikitary/police/big pharma/ judicial/surveillance system ensure thar we are drugged, duped and diposed of with maximum efficiency.
The stock market is now like a used car that has been running for 10 years. Something goes wrong, and you pay to get it fixed. But what was fixed was the most vulnerable part of the car, and in fixing it, something else now becomes the most vulnerable. So you fix that, and the next vulnerable part fails, and so forth and so forth... You have to draw a line at some point, because the repair bills are going to be more than the cost to just do a trade-in on a new car. (i.e. bite the bullet and have a reset).
All the Fed 'fixes' are leading to disruptions elsewhere.
We need a reset.
Resets are painful at first, but best in the long run.
If a Black Swan come out of saftey, then look out for a failure in Treasuries. US default after the new rethuglican congress take over.
We death controlled some folks
Radical Marijuana
I agree with most of what you say but for fucks sake can't you make it shorter ?