Posted by: graemebird | October 6, 2011

A Tungsten Arrow.

On Pallets

Just two months ago at a 9/11 conference in Toronto. One of the esteemed judges, asked a lecturer a question.  The lecturer rephrased the question, without too much putting words in the judges mouth.

The lecturer said ” What you are asking is how they got the explosives into the building. And my answer to that is “ON PALLETS”

He said something similar to that.  I recommend that answer for all of you.  Question: How did the smuggle the explosives into the building? Answer: ON PALLETS! Its really as simple as that.

So the trucks pulled up after the cleaners were finished and the lecturer pointed out that you would have to be on good terms with the security, and not have the pallets labeled “nano-thermate incendiaries” or something of that ilk. You see there is simply no difficulty with rigging the building up, if enough years or decades are put into the plan, and if enough money and technology is used.

HUGE FUCKING MISTAKE

9/11 was one of the great blunders of human history. It went wrong for similar reasons as to why a perfectly justified Israeli hit went wrong not long ago. You see the technology changed.  The Israelis decided to assassinate a bigshot killer in a hotel in a third party country.

It seems that at least that wing of Mossad hadn’t pulled off a hit of this sort for some time. And hotel security, in the general sense, had improved to such a degree, that almost the entire operation was caught on camera.  Rudd in his gutless way, made a big deal against Israel, on the basis that the Israelis had used faked Aussie passports.  To be fair I expect our guys to make a big deal about this sort of behavior. But always when we scold Israel, it seems to be done in such a way as to deny any human feeling for the problems they face.

Well something similar happened with 9/11.  Because the shadow government carried the false flag out, in accordance with long-established false-flag norms. But they did not take into account the number of hand-held video cameras that were available on that day. Like Mossad in the afforementioned case, the shadow government did not fully take into account the changes in technology in the hands of passers-by.

We assume that the false flag OPTION,  probably had decades, or at least many years of momentum behind it, because the perpetrators,  did not anticipate that just five years later YOUTUBE WOULD COME OUT OF NOWHERE TO BUST THEIR GUILTY ASSES.

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Now that we know for a fact that 9/11 was a shadow government false flag, we have to anticipate that it may have been decades in the making. How do you send truckloads of pallets past security? Simple. You start building security firms before you sell your building to the Port Authority. You see the Rockefellers may well have had a false flag in mind PRIOR TO erecting the fucking buildings in the first place.

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Terrible terrible mistake.  9/11 is a disaster for these assholes.  I read “The Rockefeller File” by Gary Allen prior to being a teenager. I believed it then, thought it was ridiculous by the time I was 16, and now realise that the people I had been dissing these last two or three decades were on the right track all along.

Knowing for a fact that 9/11 was a shadow government false flag, means being able to interpolate that the planning for this false flag may have been there even prior to the buildings themselves.

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AN WHOLE OTHER WORLD AND WITHOUT INTERFERENCE. 

So lets take it as given that enough time, money, planning, and technology, would allow the former owners to smuggle anything they want into the building.  Because thats a fact, and if they have pretty strong control on the politicians, the banking network, covert operations, and the media, they have every right to think they can pull it off. But we still need to figure out the technical side of how they did it, and in this regard the same presenter I was talking about came up with another very useful piece of information:

You see in the twin towers, once you had gotten past security into the lift shafts, you were in an whole new world. You were in another space entire. One where you could operate without interference or fear of being detected.

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Elsewhere we have nailed down exactly what the demolitionists had to achieve with the way they took down the twin towers. To whit:

1. The buildings had to fall as fast as possible.  So as close to free-fall as they could contrive the fall to be. Since free-fall was the maximum possible speed, something close to free-fall was the best they could aim for.

2. The buildings had to fall symmetrically, sequentially, and straight downwards.

3. The Clarke Cabal was to try and get rid of as much as the evidence during the actual fall.  Since the crime scene had to be cleared free of evidence under the nose, or with the connivance of Mayor Juliani, what evidence you could turn to dust in mid-air, you didn’t need to sneak out later.

4. Such explosives as had to be used, had to be as small as possible and as far from the outside windows as they could be contrived to be. Which is not to say there weren’t huge explosions. There were huge explosions, but obviously the use of very large explosions had to be kept to a minimum.”

You may need to keep doubling back to those four points.  If you get lost with the argument, double back to the four points. Its really a very simple story.

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In the past I had thought about “house-niggers” or “pampered-slaves” (as Alan Keyes more diplomatically terms them) …. as good guys but morally and mentally weak.  But the sort of house-niggers that the shadow government, needed to put together, decades or at least many years in advance, to man up the security and lift-renovation firms, had to have an evil and conscience-free streak to them. Its not beyond the bounds of reason that they could have been assessed as to their personality types for this purpose.

The thing is you try to control what you have control of. So that 99% of what was set up would have had to have been set up in that whole other world the culprits entered, when security let them get into the lift shafts.

We discussed earlier how you needed BOTH the steel-cutting thermate incendiaries AND the carefully timed explosions in order to make the buildings fall symmetrically and sequentially.  We discussed also WHY the twin towers had to fall in this special way…. They needed to fall symmetrically. They needed to fall sequentially. Not one or the other. But both at the same time.

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So you can smuggle in, at some leisure, everything you need to smuggle into the lift shafts.  And you have access to the 47-odd core columns that you need to cut and blast in order to make the fall-sequence work.

But the outside skeleton was substantial as well. Forget that NIST bullshit pretense that the building was cantilevered out. The only evidence that that bullshit supports is the evidence for a shadow government.  The outsides of the building were reinforced concrete and a shitload of steel. Now maybe not quite the unbeatable righteous strength of the four-score supporting columns that you have access to in the whole other world of the lift-shafts. But still a mighty force to overcome for the satanic choreographer.

TUNGSTEN ARROWS

What I’m saying here is that hard-headed mini-missiles, or TUNGSTEN ARROWS, needed to be a part of this situation. Now why would I say that? Just go over the material, over and over and think it through. Think how if you were Rockefeller vermin, and you wanted to pull this off how you would do it.

Normally speaking you would have planted a lot of charges everywhere in the building. But it may have been just as effective to plant a whole lot of heat-seeking mini-missiles in the lift shafts,  so that at the right time they could tear through office walls and explode when they made it to where the hot metal near where the periphery was.

What about that hot metal at the periphery? How to get steel-cutting heat out there? Two possibilities would be directed energy weapons around the outside. But there has also been talk of the possibility of painted-on nano-thermate. This of course is speculation.

Where the heat-seeking tungsten arrows are concerned I am thinking along the lines of the starstreak missile. You see you can actually see these missiles as one of the buildings falls. And why not? Since there is always the possibility of the actual disintegration front, running ahead of the timed disintegration front, for a single floor before deceleration put them in sync again. And if the timing runs out of sync then a string of starstreak missiles will fail to detonate and they will turn towards the heat which is now below them. Scandalously we see a string of objects falling faster than free-fall.  Outrageously we see one missile trail coming to the outside, and turning 180 degrees, to follow the superhot metal back into the collapsing mess. Just as you would expect a starstreak missile that had not detonated, to do.

Here they are calling these mini-missiles “darts.


Responses

  1. So very sad to hear that Steve Jobs has died. Anger provoking too; that the medical mafia has let him down. Cancer ought not have been a hard problem to beat, by its very nature.

    But I’m glad of one thing. That his brilliance finally paid off in terms of market share, and company capitalization, before he died. He was brilliant at the start, all the way through, and at the end, but his superior capacity only came through on the share market right near the company’s beginning, and at the very end of Steve’s career.

    The sort of businesses, and the sort of society, that was expanding out of the Volker crunch, were of a mode, that meant someone my age saw the last glimpse of what a functioning capitalism could be. I don’t really blame people for being anti-capitalist, who have not seen that. Who were not paying attention to the American scene in the mid-80’s. We are talking about people who have no sense of those few years after the Volker crunch, when the American economy and society, seemed to be working the way it ought to, and promoting and rewarding the sort of people that needed promoting and rewarding.

    When I would read about Steve Jobs, and some of the others, it really made me want to go into banking. I thought that a banker needed to be the ultimate renaissance man, as he was the genius that decided where to send the available loanable funds. So I thought I’d become that genius and I’d become that banker. How embarrassingly naive!!!

    But I was making these screwy judgements on the basis of Steve Jobs and some of the others around then. I was so determined in this idea, that despite having severe, and untreated concentration problems, I managed to find my way into corporate finance, and was aspiring to the job of “credit analyst” but the fact is it was all credit and no analysis.

    When it was mooted that one of our customers was technically bankrupt, my manager told me we were cool, and could go on lending money because our interest was covered by “bricks and mortar”

    “Bricks And Mortar” in this context meant Lawyers, inflation, and land scarcity. Hardly very righteous things to be relying on. Even with my handicaps I could have probably held on there in the bank, given the motivating factor of the idealism that had been inspired by people like Napolean Hill, Ayn Rand, and Steve Jobs. But once I couldn’t see how I could be doing anything useful, my natural handicaps kind of overwhelmed me and I up and quit.

    Could I have handled it, had I been treated for “ADD” and knew how to make myself healthy, like I do today? Yes I suppose so. I would still have had to get into work before the others, but I suppose I could have dealt with it. And I’d go back to banking even now, if we sorted out a better world in the mode of what I try to explain on this website.

    Surely Steve Jobs was America’s greatest artist of the last few decades? He and his products oozed culture and good taste. People felt an emotional attachment to consumer durables coming out of the Steve Jobs creation process. When you saw an apple computer you would want to touch it. You would want to own it. You knew that no matter what your bedroom or sitting room looked like, an apple computer would make either room look better.

    Steve was bitch-slapped around by the legal establishment, who inexplicably made it fine and okay, for Microsoft to have totally decisive patent protection on an operating system, that Microsoft had stolen and back-engineered off another crowd. The other crowd having gotten shirty with IBM when IBM had come around to make a deal.

    Its hard now not to see shadow government deal-making in such an absolutist approach to patent law. But this legal advantage to Microsoft, was a handicap that skewed the computer industry, away from the logical, clear, AND ETHICAL path, that Jobs carved out for it.

    Somewhere along the line Jobs found out that UNIX was the most stable software known to man. So it was no contest for him. Since programming built on programming, built on programming, it was imperative that you had at your base, the most stable software you could possibly have, or else mistakes and viruses would multiply like weeds.

    The logic of the Microsoft patent went against such clear thinking. Value accumulated to Microsoft almost BECAUSE they had a crap operating system and it was hard to program in MSDOS.

    Jobs once said, and his tone didn’t quite follow him, that he didn’t begrudge Microsofts success. He said something like “Look they DESERVE their success (for the most part). But what I have against them is that they lack culture. And I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big and oppressive way” or something similar to that.

    Thats what apple had. Culture. Or artistic sensibility. Or an ethic to be making the best product you can make and to take pride in that product. If not an artists sensibility at least an artisans sensibility, and an artisans pride in a job well done.

    Its so sad to be saying goodbye to Steve Jobs. He will be missed by people who are more than usually human, on every part of the globe.

  2. Who else is gonna bring you,
    A TUNGSTEN ARROW?

    Who else is gonna bring you,
    A bottle-of-rain?

  3. That’s a great essay, Graeme. You’ve got the gift of language and thought.

    I think you would’ve gone stir crazy in a bank.

    I have almost nothing to do with bank staff but the other week a staffer hailed me up when I was collecting a replacement credit card and convinced me to open a new different account because of all these alleged benefits. But it turned out that every thing she told me was wrong and caused a lot of unnecessary inconvenience for nothing. It was a dispiriting experience because it was such a waste of time and didn’t inspire confidence in banks. Not that I have any.

  4. He was good wasn’t he if a little tame.

    This is my favourite Rod Stewart. Makes me feel like honey.

    • You use certain trigger-words in an unfair way.

    • Wow. He’s a uber-ham in this clip. But. I never knew how extraordinarily beautiful his face was. Those big liquid eyes. You could drown in them. I wonder what he was really like as a boyfriend.

      • He always did very well with the girls.

        Here is a Tom Waits number he adopted. The most romantic songs are when the narrator is a psychopath.

  5. Right. But my theoretical understanding tells me that the bankers have been in patches, these great wealth destroyers, and more and more so since 1971 ……….. but that in a better world, they are potentially the great wealth creators. The people to find and sponsor the better people. The more talented and the more ethical people. That better capitalism, that we have Steve Jobs to point too, as a non-controversial example, amongst the fellows who made it to bigshot status.

    There are many other only marginally lesser Steve Jobs types out there. They are paralysed or at least hampered in small and medium business, because of the fearful non-market advantages the bigshots have. Supposing you had a business that pulled in 400 000 in total revenues in 1990 and its pulling in 40 million now? Supposing you own and run it. You have to be a business genius to pull that off, considering all the advantages the real bigshots have stashed against you. Thats if you are not a mere real estate investor.

    So there are these people out there. Steve Jobs was the best. But there are a lot more Steve Jobs types out there, straining against the inbuilt disadvantages that small business now face.

    We need to build a society around people like this.

    It will hurt if we don’t.

    • Why do you say the narrator in the song is a psychopath?

  6. Too strong. Socially-isolated would cover it,

    But here is rockin-Rod covering a classic:

    • Well, I was curious as to what you meant, because I too thought (I wonder who wrote the lyrics) that they might go someway to explaining why Stewart might have had a lot of women, but was perhaps never satisfied with any of them. I may be being unfair to him, but my impression. And god knows the temptation to sup widely would have been virtually irresistible not least because he was so damn gorgeous.

  7. I read the other day that banks were first set up by either the church or monarchies to fund church projects or international or imperial wars and that in the case of the feudal and early capitalist states the banks were a way of getting non government producers, land owners and the rich as well as ordinary savers to hand over their money. But because the state always spent more than it borrowed, public debt was born.

  8. Sounds plausible. The Knights-Templars may have been exhibit one on this score.

  9. Stewart was lovely. But the man for me from that era was

  10. Vale dear Steve Jobs

    NY Times October 5, 2011
    Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56
    By JOHN MARKOFF

    Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.

    The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

    Mr. Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with cancer, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

    He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.

    “I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

    By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.

    Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

    During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.

    Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.

    Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

    It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

    “He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”

    “Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

    Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.

    To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Los Altos in 1972, he said, ”the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there.”

    After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

    Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication.

    Apple’s very name reflected his unconventionality. In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time.

    Coming on the scene just as computing began to move beyond the walls of research laboratories and corporations in the 1970s, Mr. Jobs saw that computing was becoming personal — that it could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and business problems — and that it could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers were boxy wooden affairs with metal chassis, he designed the Apple II as a sleek, low-slung plastic package intended for the den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital lifestyle.

    He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

    Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.”

    Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

    Early Interests

    Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, and put up for adoption by his biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a graduate student from Syria who became a political science professor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.

    The elder Mr. Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before returning to his original trade as a machinist, moved his family down the San Francisco Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los Altos in the 1960s.

    Mr. Jobs developed an early interest in electronics. He was mentored by a neighbor, an electronics hobbyist, who built Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from an early age. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.

    Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending Homestead High School in neighboring Cupertino. The two took an introductory electronics class there.

    The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Mr. Wozniak’s mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation’s phone system.

    Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr. Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset.

    Captain Crunch was John Draper, a former Air Force electronic technician, and finding him took several weeks. Learning that the two young hobbyists were searching for him, Mr. Draper appeared one day in Mr. Wozniak’s Berkeley dormitory room. Mr. Jobs, who was still in high school, had traveled to Berkeley for the meeting. When Mr. Draper arrived, he entered the room saying simply, “It is I!”

    Based on information they gleaned from Mr. Draper, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free — and illegal — phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort.

    After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Mr. Jobs left after one semester, but remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing classes. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, he said he had decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his parents’ savings.

    Leaving school, however, also freed his curiosity to follow his interests. “I didn’t have a dorm room,” he said in his Stanford speech, “so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

    He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job there as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still searching for his calling, he left after several months and traveled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple employee. Mr. Jobs returned to Atari that fall. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak, then working as an engineer at H.P., began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. Personal computing had been pioneered at research laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was spreading to the outside world.

    “What I remember is how intense he looked,” said Lee Felsenstein, a computer designer who was a Homebrew member. “He was everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear everything people had to say.”

    Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product.

    In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000. Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer. Starting out in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, they moved the company to a small office in Cupertino shortly thereafter.

    In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation. Faced with a gaggle of small and large competitors in the emerging computer market, Apple, with its Apple II, had figured out a way to straddle the business and consumer markets by building a computer that could be customized for specific applications.

    Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.

    The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was intended to dominate the desktop computer market. I.B.M. would not introduce its original personal computer until 1981. But the Apple III had a host of technical problems, and Mr. Jobs shifted his focus to a new and ultimately short-lived project, an office workstation computer code-named Lisa.

    An Apocalyptic Moment

    By then Mr. Jobs had made his much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox’s research center in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system that foreshadowed modern desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first computers to employ a graphical video display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office desktop.

    “It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments,” Mr. Jobs said of his visit in a 1995 oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear.”

    In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh. The machine was introduced in January 1984 and trumpeted during the Super Bowl telecast by a 60-second commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, that linked I.B.M., by then the dominant PC maker, with Orwell’s Big Brother.

    A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr. Jobs’s pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

    He went on to help Mr. Jobs introduce a number of new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers. Through them Mr. Jobs popularized the graphical user interface, which, based on a mouse pointing device, would become the standard way to control computers.

    But when the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Mr. Jobs lost control of the Lisa project. The board ultimately stripped him of his operational role, taking control of the Lisa project away from, and 1,200 Apple employees were laid off. He left Apple in 1985.

    “I don’t wear the right kind of pants to run this company,” he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, according to a member of the original Macintosh development team. He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.

    That September he announced a new venture, NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a workstation computer for the higher-education market. The next year, the Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot invested $20 million in the effort. But it did not achieve Mr. Jobs’s goals.

    Mr. Jobs also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his fortune — $10 million — on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing company owned by the filmmaker George Lucas.

    The purchase was a significant gamble; there was little market at the time for computer-animated movies. But that changed in 1995, when the company, with Walt Disney Pictures, released “Toy Story.” That film’s box-office receipts ultimately reached $362 million, and when Pixar went public in a record-breaking offering, Mr. Jobs emerged a billionaire. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Mr. Jobs Disney’s largest single shareholder, with about 7 percent of the company’s stock.

    His personal life also became more public. He had a number of well-publicized romantic relationships, including one with the folk singer Joan Baez, before marrying Laurene Powell. In 1996, a sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, threw a spotlight on her relationship with Mr. Jobs in the novel “A Regular Guy.” The two did not meet until they were adults. The novel centered on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to Mr. Jobs. It was not an entirely flattering portrait. Mr. Jobs said about a quarter of it was accurate.

    “We’re family,” he said of Ms. Simpson in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “She’s one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days.”

    His wife and Ms. Simpson survive him, as do his three children with Ms. Powell, his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed; another daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan; and another sister, Patti Jobs.

    Return to Apple

    Beginning in 1986, Mr. Jobs refocused NeXT from the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research center CERN in 1990.

    In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in command, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Mr. Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser. He became chief executive again in 2000.

    Shortly after returning, Mr. Jobs publicly ended Apple’s long feud with its archival Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for the Macintosh and invested $150 million in Apple.

    Once in control of Apple again, Mr. Jobs set out to reshape the consumer electronics industry. He pushed the company into the digital music business, introducing first iTunes and then the iPod MP3 player. The music arm grew rapidly, reaching almost 50 percent of the company’s revenue by June 2008.

    In 2005, Mr. Jobs announced that he would end Apple’s business relationship with I.B.M. and Motorola and build Macintosh computers based on Intel microprocessors.

    By then his fight with cancer was publicly known. Apple had announced in 2004 that Mr. Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer and that he had undergone successful surgery. Four years later, questions about his health returned when he appeared at a company event looking gaunt. Afterward, he said he had suffered from a “common bug.” Privately, he said his cancer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening.

    Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007. Mr. Jobs’s goal was to sell 10 million of the handsets in 2008, equivalent to 1 percent of the global cellphone market. The company sold 11.6 million.

    Although smartphones were already commonplace, the iPhone dispensed with a stylus and pioneered a touch-screen interface that quickly set the standard for the mobile computing market. Rolled out with much anticipation and fanfare, iPhone rocketed to popularity; by end of 2010 the company had sold almost 90 million units.

    Although Mr. Jobs took just a nominal $1 salary when he returned to Apple, his compensation became the source of a Silicon Valley scandal in 2006 over the backdating of millions of shares of stock options. But after a company investigation and one by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was found not to have benefited financially from the backdating and no charges were brought.

    The episode did little to taint Mr. Jobs’s standing in the business and technology world. As the gravity of his illness became known, and particularly after he announced he was stepping down, he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.

    If he had a motto, it may have come from “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which he said had deeply influenced him as a young man. The book, he said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the admonition “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

    “I have always wished that for myself,” he said.

    Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

  11. He didn’t need to die its just such a terrible thing.

  12. Here is the Van Morrison number that resonates with me, probably from when I used to drink a great deal. Not saying its objectively his best number.

    • Van Morrison! I concur. Just love his voice, his music. His voice has become better with age too.

      One of my favourite numbers:

      Ah, but then Moondance, Steal My Heart Away….*sigh* so hard to pick just one.

    • I can see why you would like Real Real, Graeme.

      We all die. We are all brilliant. It is said about Steve Jobs but he shone brightly and his light is still visible to us.

      There’s no real measuring of our brilliance, comparative or otherwise.

      All I know is that when I read stuff and observe the incremental movement of cumulus clouds, I know I have partly created that and that I am in heaven (so to speak).

  13. It is *sad* about…

  14. http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/06/8184537-who-is-occupying-wall-street-not-just-your-average-joe

  15. I’m reading Peter Hall’s “Cities in Civilization: Culture, Technology, and Urban Order”. Apparently in Britain from about 1688 the kings used private savings of merchants and landowners to fund war and in this way a public debt was established. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as part of this evolution, with merchants and landowners taking a share in the national debt and drawing interest from it. Lowish interest rates (3%) had a positive effect on the Industrial Revolution because people were more willing to consider longer-term projects which might in the future offer a better return. This was helpful for the large scale capital projects of factories, railways mines, canals, etc.

    In France, Belgium and Germany at a later date in the Industrial Revolution there also developed forms of financial intermediaries such as joint-stock investment banks funding large scale projects that were semi-public institutions.

  16. I’m not buying the idea that the central bank was a good thing for the economy. That is the official history of the victors talking. The central banks are the most insidious, alien, and devious inventions known to man. A better example of a chartered bank that unambiguously created wealth was the Bank Of Amsterdam, which ran a 100% backed service. Being the only bank of its kind in the world, it gave little Holland a terrific advantage in finance. Holland was a bit like the United Arab Emirates in those days.

    The British were ambitious already. They were serious about their navy. They wanted dominance, were appallingly aggressive, and they were far more populous than Holland. But for a very long time in the 1600’s little Holland whipped their ass. Niall Ferguson for one, puts this down largely to their superior financing.

    • I haven’t read Niall Ferguson. But Holland’s position in the Rhine delta and the fact that most of it was swamp and subjected to flooding meant that it had relatively little room for agriculture or industry and so built its wealth on trade and colonies. It became a commercial sea-faring country extraordinaire (shipbuilding, naval power, fishing) and its feudal aristocracy was undeveloped as were other feudal institutions. It was also invaded in the 9th century by the Vikings who were a kick-arse kind of people and great sea voyagers too.

      The Netherlands were the original ideological laboratory of the Enlightenment, not France.

      The Bank of Amsterdam was set up well before the Bank of London but then the Italians got there first. The Bank of Amsterdam was declared insolvent eventually and taken over by the government.

  17. I try and listen to John Perkins whenever I can these days. His experience as an “economic hitman” really puts our version of privatization and our appalling private (and now public) debts in perspective.

  18. Sinclair Davidson is a Keynesian and full of shit. That is the most surprising thing about my experience of Australian economists. I realised that I couldn’t be Chicago School any longer. Because these nincompoops thought of themselves as Chicago School, and they were all fucking Keynesians. Reminds me of when I thought of myself as a patient greenie, but could not longer see myself as green, because so many of the greens were anti-wealth loony-toons.

    Here is Sinclair on Krugman:

    “That’s the title of an excellent little book by Paul Krugman. Whatever you think of him as a New York Times columnist Krugman is a fine economist who deservedly won the Nobel prize for his work in trade theory.”

    He’s not a fine economist. He’s a crap economist. He’s a fine statistical researcher. The Nobels NOW goes to new-model-inventors and statistical researchers. It very seldom goes to good economists. Yes yes it is true that Krugman did work that was considered stupendous, and I think probably was stupendous, in his 20’s and 30’s. But that makes him a great statistical researcher who deserves the Nobel, on the basis that that is what they now tend to give the Nobel for. Actually on that basis he probably deserved the Nobel prize by the time he was 30. The impression I got was that he had done enough for a dozen phd’s by then, and everyone kind of knew-it, even before he released his first popular book. (Very good book by the way).

  19. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Now I see what Sinclair is doing. He’s attempting to keep his learning curves dead flat. He’s using Krugman, and an old book of Krugman’s, so that he can deny that we have a systemic imbalance that is bankrupting us and hollowing our deal out.

    “One of the most popular, enduring misconceptions of practical men is that countries are in competition with each other in the same way that companies in the same business are in competition. Ricardo already knew better in 1817. An introductory economics course should drive home to students the point that international trade is not about competition, it is about mutually beneficial exchange. Even more fundamentally, we should be able to teach students that imports, not exports, are the purpose of trade. That is, what a country gains from trade is the ability to import things it wants. Exports are not an objective in and of themselves: the need to export is a burden that a country must bear because its import suppliers are crass enough to demand payment.”

    Yes that is indeed the Ricardo concept of comparative advantage. But you you dumb cunt, seem to think that this concept means that we lose our ownership of all things, get into the maximum debt, and (you stupid cunt) lose all our manufacturing.

    The above quote of Krugman’s applies perfectly to A FUNCTIONING SYSTEM OF MONEY, BANKING AND FOREIGN EXCHANGE.

    Clearly it doesn’t fucking apply to the failed and totally artificial system we have on the fly. Can you not get the FUCKING MESSAGE Sinclair. I’ve been shouting at you about it for a very long time. And you just don’t seem to get it.

  20. So Mr. Bird

    Would you have signed Smoot Hawley? And would you re-introduce tariff protection and import quotas in Australia and if so would you resign membership of the WTO?

    Thanks.

    • No of course not you fucking idiot. Smoot-Hawley was a disaster. I’m assuming that you are Joseph Cambria, since only he would try on an aspersion of such baseness and dishonesty.

      What we are saying here is that Sinclair and the others are so powerfully ignorant of economics that they:

      1. Perceive no imbalance
      2. Would not know how to correct the imbalance, that they do not perceive, without tariffs.

      Essentially your moronic question has you confessing to the above two points.

      • So what question would you like me to ask you, Mr Bird?

        YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF ASKING AN HONEST QUESTION. YOU COULDN’T SO MUCH AS PLAY AN HONEST VERSION OF THE CARD-GAME “PATIENCE”. YOU WOULD ALWAYS CHEAT YOURSELF AT “PATIENCE.”

        AN HONEST QUESTION IS WHERE YOU ARE TRYING TO FIND SOME ANSWERS. NOT WHERE YOU ARE TRYING TO SET UP A GOTCHA MOMENT OR MAKE SOME ENTIRELY BOGUS RHETORICAL POINT. ASK SOMEONE ELSE ABOUT IT. THIS IS LIKE TRYING TO EXPLAIN GUILT AND INNOCENCE TO A RATTLESNAKES PLEA BARGAINING ATTORNEY.

    • Yeah I checked, Indeed it was Cambria. What was I saying about the upward-mobility of the truly stupid? You would think this wop would be able to ask a valid question that wasn’t dishonest, ignorant, or both.

      • Mr. Bird

        Would you therefore rate Smoot Hawley

        WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU FUCKING MORON!!!!!! FUCK YOU ARE A STUPID WOP. YOU ARE PRIMITIVE CAMBRIA. FUCK YOU ARE SUCH A DUMB AND DISHONEST CUNT.

      • GOOD LORD YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME JOSEPH CAMBRIA, THAT YOU ARE SO DIMWITTED, THAT YOU CANNOT THINK OF ANY WAY TO CORRECT OUR FINANCIAL IMBALANCES WITHOUT TARIFFS?

        TARIFFS WON’T CORRECT OUR FINANCIAL IMBALANCES. TARIFFS WON’T HELP YOU LEARN ABOUT ECONOMICS IF YOU LACK THE BRAIN POWER TO COPE WITH THE SUBJECT.

        THE FIRST THING TO DO IS GET A STRAIGHT ANSWER FROM THAT MORON SINCLAIR TO THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:

        “IF WE HAVE SOLD ALL OUR RESOURCES AND ASSETS, AND HAVE BORROWED ALL WE CAN BORROW, AND WE HAVE LOST OUR MANUFACTURING ……. THEN ON WHAT BASIS DO WE CREATE WEALTH AFTER THAT?”

        WHAT PLACE IS IT THAT YOU QUISLINGS THINK YOU ARE TAKING US? THIS IS NOT MERELY A TRIBAL QUESTION TO DO WITH TARIFFS. YOU’VE JUST GOT TO FUCKING GROW A BRAIN CAMBRIA.

      • GOOD LORD YOU ARE A GREASY, SLIMY, LYING WOP CUNT. JUST FORGET ABOUT EVER COMING TO SYDNEY, NOW THAT YOU HAVE SHOWN YOUR HAND AS BEING DETERMINED TO LIE ABOUT ME, AND PRETEND THAT I FAVOR TARIFFS. BECAUSE I’D BREAK YOUR NOSE, AND KICK YOU IN THE NUTS THREE WAYS; FAST, HARD AND CONTINUOUSLY. SO MUCH SO YOU COULD FORGET ABOUT THE NUT-DOCTOR AND GO STRAIGHT AWAY TO ENGAGING A GYNECOLOGIST.

        NOW SUPPOSING YOU ARE NOT MERELY TRYING TO CAST ASPERSIONS? SUPPOSING YOU WOULD WANT TO KNOW HOW TO REBALANCE POLICY TO FIX UP THE FINANCIAL IMBALANCE?

        IF YOU WANTED TO KNOW THAT YOU WOP CUNT, WHY DID YOU AND MARK DISRUPT ME ON CATALLAXY? THERE IS NO ONE ANSWER TO THAT. THE IMPORTANCE IS KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE DOING. THERE IS NO ONE POLICY TO THAT, THE IMPORTANT THING IS GETTING THE POLICY MIX RIGHT SO THAT ITS NOT SKEWED ONE WAY.

        I TRIED TO SLOWLY GO ABOUT EXPLAINING HOW TO FIX THE FINANCIAL IMBALANCE, AND SINCLAIR DIDN’T HAVE TO LIFT A FINGER. HIS FAITHFUL RETARDS, JOSEPH CAMBRIA, AND MARK HILL, SHOWED UP AND STARTED GETTING IN THE WAY, AND LYING RELENTLESSLY.

        LYING AND BEING A CUNT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH LEARNING ECONOMICS CAMBRIA.

      • YOU CAN NEVER STOP LYING CAN YOU? YOU JUST CANNOT SEEM TO CEASE AND DESIST. YOU NEVER ASKED ME A PROPER QUESTION YOU LYING WOP CUNT. YOU JUST TRIED TO PRETEND THAT I WAS IN FAVOR OF TARIFFS. I’VE NEVER BEEN IN FAVOR OF TARIFFS.

        YOU HAVEN’T EVEN FUCKING FORMULATED A SERIOUS QUESTION.

        IF I WAS IN FAVOR OF TARIFFS, I WOULD SAID SO AND SAID WHY.

        NOW. IF YOU WERE THE LEAST BIT INTERESTED IN OUR FINANCIAL IMBALANCE AND HOW WE MIGHT CURE IT, YOU WOULDN’T HAVE FUCKING GOT IN THE WAY, AND YOU WOULDN’T HAVE ENCOURAGED MARK HILL TO DO SO ALSO.

        NOW IF YOU WANT TO ASK A PROPER QUESTION, FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, FORMULATE IT WELL, AND MAKE IT A PROPER QUESTION. NOT A LYING ACCUSATION FROM THE 99% FULLY PAID UP AND OWNED CUNT-OX SIDE OF YOUR PERSONALITY.

  21. Graeme, there are still a million or so manufacturing workers in Australia, though many of those would be small businesses. American manufacturing has gone through the floor too, gone off shore in many cases and the only way it will come back is if international capital and China invest there because it can pay American workers the same level of crap wages paid in China itself or Bangladesh of Kenya.

    That is probably in store for poor old America sooner than we think.

    • The US is in big trouble. As ultimately every country is, who decides that it doesn’t need to be able to make things.

      There is never an economic situation so powerful that the bankers cannot come in and lay waste to it. That is what happened to Japan in the 80’s and the US in the 2000’s. Its the same process that Perkins describes for screwing up third world countries but applied more comprehensively.

  22. As I said to Bob Ellis over at the ABC:

    “Graeme Bird :
    06 Oct 2011 7:53:43pm
    The problem is not so much that the better economic-science is worthless. The problem is that Australian economists are oh so ignorant of economics, properly considered. They are so powerfully ignorant that they have INVERTED the true meaning of “comparative advantage.” and are using their synthetic, cuckoo-concept, to justify selling the farm and losing our ability to make stuff.

    Bob. Its because they are ignorant Bob. Thats the take-home-story here. And I’m blue-in-the-face about it.

    Alert moderator”

  23. The upward-mobility of the truly-stupid:

    “NAB appoints Ken Henry to board…”

    People don’t seem to realize that you need a healthy society for the Steve Jobs types to rise to the top, and for Ken Henry facsimiles, to get around in second hand clobber, and face being beaten with sticks, by the children on their street.

  24. I worked in manufacturing twice in my 20s, once in steel production and once in metal manufacturing. I thought of trying to get a job in the mines too because they were hiring women and the pay was awesome, but then I didn’t really want to live where the mines are so didn’t pursue it.

    But the couple of years I worked in manufacturing were some of the best times of my life though the work was very hard and tiring. Women get the worse end of the stick in factory because the men usually got to sit down for some of the day while women were on the go the whole time. One job I had involved running six machines three times as high as me, filling and emptying them, stacking the loads on pallets and fixing the damn things when they got chocked or went haywire.

    But I loved the social nature of them, the mix of people and skills. And the parties and after work pub sessions were incredible. Of course I was a total blonde bombshell then and a leftie so I was like catnip to the hot tradies and even had to beat off some of the usually odious foreman who mostly gave me a hard time because I was a shop steward both times.

    • Manufacturing work gets more meaningful, challenging, and pleasant the more capital-intensive it is. The natural evolution of things was for us to have more and more capital-intensive manufacturing as time went by. But the Australian economists, being morons, interpreted economic science as to mean that instead of getting more and more capital-intensive manufacturing, we were to offload our manufacturing. First to China. Then to Africa. In other words manufacturing was an accursed affliction that these parasites, wanted to offload to people they did not respect.

  25. Graeme, when I used to look at Catallaxy and comment there way in the distant past I honestly can say I learnt ABSOLUTELY NOTHING USEFUL about economics. I’ve learnt far more from your comments here which have had the added benefit of prompting me to do my own reading and thinking. Of course I have been interested in macro economics since my early teens because of my interest in politics.

    And as I’ve said before, my go to place for economics today is Naked Capitalism and a couple of other economic/political blogs that have superlative analysis and riveting comment threads.

  26. Well that is a very sweet thing to say and thanks for putting up with all the bad language. But you have hit the nail on the head when it comes to learning economics from Catallaxy. The economics profession, from a cultural point of view, works in such a way as to prevent people from learning economics. Much as NASA seems to work in such a way as to prevent people from going into space, learning about Mars, and so forth.

    So that when someone asks an economics question on Catallaxy, they can expect no straight answer from the working economists there. The working economists hang back and follow a policy of “circle the wagons and send out the retards.”

    I was always willing to give straight answers to questions. But the Catallaxians always held back and tried to get others to disrupt anyone who would give straight answers. As George Bernard Shaw said; “professionalism is a conspiracy against the laity.”

    What I hoped to convey to you is that your goals may or may not be righteous, but there really is good and bad ways about going about those goals should you choose them.

    So that for example the idea of spreading the mining boom wealth around, may or may not be right, but once you choose to do so, the answer was the opposite of what Ken Henry came up with. The answer was to encourage the states to put royalties through the roof, then to re-balance the federal-state grants ……. but not to up the company tax, which is always a wealth-destroyer.

    And suppose you want a more egalitarian society. I try to show you and others that you can get that up to a point, without being too destructive, but not usually by the traditional measures.

  27. Here is the presentation most pertaining to this thread. The lecturer is Niels Harrit. But I’ll have to listen to it all again to be able to put time cues down for verification of key ideas on this topic.

  28. Graeme, I’m starting to have a rethink about the Steve Jobs (may he RIP) legacy.

    Have a look at this. It’s pretty persuasive. And I have to say I have never bought or owned an Apple product. And I’m happy.

    http://gawker.com/5847338/steve-jobs-was-not-god

  29. And this comment is devastating.

    He DID NOT:

    1. He did NOT revolutionize music or how we buy it. He took what was existing (ie digital music over the internet) and wrapped iTunes around it. Basically forcing everyone to use his service.

    2. He did NOT revolutionize how we listen to music. He took what was existing (ie mp3 players, etc) and wrapped an iPod around it. Basically forcing everyone to use his application.

    3. He did NOT revolutionize computers. He did back when he founded Apple but not when he came back.

    4. He did NOT revolutionize phones. He took what was there (ie Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, etc) and wrapped an iPhone around it.

    5. He did NOT revolutionize apps on a mobile phone or similar device. He took what was there and wrapped iTunes around it. Basically forcing everyone to use his application.

    6. He did NOT revolutionize tablet computers. He took what was there (ie too many to list) and wrapped an iPad (iPod Touch first) around it. Basically forcing everyone to use his service.

    He DID:

    1. He did hire people to come up with great products that people took notice of and became a successful venture.

    2. He did help create Apple computers (I’m not talking about the actual computer but he did do that with Woz).

    3. He did make people notice him.

    4. He did use his influence to build the momentum that now follows Apple products.

    5. He did keep his products at a certain factory after it was public that people killed themselves after working at a terrible place working on his products.

    6. He did ruins people’s lives by suing (or threatening to sue) people for no good reason.

    7. He did have a crooked judge allow a search of someone’s home because a tester dropped his phone.

    8. He did allow crooked cops and employees to search someone’s home under false pretenses because a tester dropped his phone.

    9. He did fire people for talking either too much or didn’t drink the “apple” juice.

    10. He did last longer with his cancer than anyone else should have because he was rich.

    There’s more on both sides but I’m tired…

  30. I don’t really see the point. Think of what Steve did. Xerox had an obscure research project, wherein they came out with the idea of the mouse and the windows. The rest of the industry was determined to lock in its priesthood and specialist status by continuing to subject us to this MS-DOS command line bullshitartistry. Steve had seen a better world and he was determined to bring it to us. And he was kicked out of his own company and treated like that Greek God who brought us fire because of it.

    When he gets back in business the norms of the industry are still a crap operating system that sat on top of the totally crap MS-DOS. Gates was paying programmers 2 billion a year and would have been shelling out more if he could have gotten enough talented programmers. He was monopolizing on all the best programming talent because of his patent rights, and he needed to keep moving to keep his monopolistic position. But consider the incredible waste over time that situation was AND CONTINUES TO BE TO A GREAT EXTENT. Here we have all the talent banging their head against a wall, in service of a powerfully inefficient software base, whose inefficiencies get worse and worse the more you build. Like modern physics but worse again.

    From a relative point of view this was wealth destruction par excellence. Steve Jobs would have nothing of it, and this industry-wide dysfunction would be all there was but for him. He did what he thought he had to do. He found the best software (Unix) and stuck with it against all naysayers. Then he used his great charm and powers of persuasion to convince Gates not to lock up his programmers but to let them program under the Apple standard as well.

    So Steve Jobs greater contributions are just beginning. Since the industry standard will one day be the best software standard we can have, and the curse of the Microsoft patent will be broken and thanks to one man and one man only, the entire industry of computing will not have fallen into gross dysfunction as so many other industries have succumbed to Saint Augustinian realities of the City-Of-MAN.

    Saint Augustine talked of the city-of-man and the city-of-God. I follow the Audio Assassins point of view and speak of POOTOWN versus AUSTRALIA-CITY.

    We were in pootown insofar as the entire digital industry was concerned. And even beyond his death Steve Jobs is guiding us towards Australia City. People who appreciate quality, honest business, and the finer things in life shall revere the name of Steve Jobs down the centuries.

  31. Well I do feel a little uncomfortable with putting so much glory on one individual.

    What did he invent that was so groundbreaking? That qualitatively changed and improved masses of peoples material and spiritual lives?

    And didn’t the Apple products necessarily involve the grunt work of countless anonymous skilled workers without whose labour and other value-adding inputs the products would never have been realised?

    • He overcame the natural human tendency towards institutional dysfunction. And he did this virtually single-handedly.

      From my point of view institutional dysfunction is the norm and getting things right the exception.

      • Well, I’d be interested in that story. How an individual beat institutional dysfunction. But I do ask again to what end, exactly, that was so innovative and democratic and enabling at all that.

        But then institutionalisation is also a human invention that has enabled so much, indeed been essential to so much we have achieved. It is all so very complicated and the more we learn the more complicated everything becomes at the same time as more pieces fit into the infinite puzzle.

        You never stop thinking and puzzling though and that is great and I relate to that. Closed minds bore me stupid.

      • Well for example we are on the internet, with a mouse, windows and pointer format, whereas the rest of the industry was quite happy to saddle us with command-line obscurantism. That is pretty democratic right there. But you are never going to be able to commute the benefits or identify the indeterminate amount of humans he saved. We would only see that and be able to guess at a computation when something like medical services were involved. The reality is that anyone who improves the economy would be able to be judged a life-saver on first principles. Except that much of any value created gets hived off ninto banker earnnigs government departments, and real estate values, and so you don’t see the lfiesavnig ganis of gettnig thnigs rgiht. my computer si playnig up so I’Ll come back and fix things up soon.

  32. I do think there have always existed inventors and creative artists whose output is inexplicable except in the terms we use to describe them, such as “genius”.

    But then a lot of other second rank people, who are not in the same league, can yes produce amazing stuff but their ability to do so is dependent on the contribution and input of many others, and whose work, frankly, and when examined with a clear eye, represents a tweaking or repackaging of essentially what already existed, rather than a breakthrough invention.

    People could carry around music and stories or radio programs on small devices, Walkmans, long before the Ipod. And then there was the portable cassette player.

  33. It is true that we will need to see institutional dysfunction corrected in many industries before we can unequivocally say: Look here these people made things better for the poor the world over. Just the computing industry alone won’t give us that clear understanding. But at least Steve Jobs showed us that “one man can make a difference” in terms of making things work properly.

  34. An older relative got mugged a week or so ago at midnight at Circular Quay when he was walking back to his hotel after a dinner with friends. He doesn’t remember what happened. He woke up in St Vincents Hospital in Darlinghurst. His face on one side was cut and bruised and his eyebrow stitched. He’s back home after having an MRI which revealed nothing of immediate worry, though he is still suffering from concussion.

    But, interestingly, the MRI revealed an interpretable road map or history of neurological events that he hadn’t been aware of except in their manifestation of specific episodes or experiences he can date and now correlate to the brain evidence from the past. Amazing stuff.

  35. Hey Graeme, have you seen this video about explosions in building 7?
    Is this real evidence of a controlled demolition?

    NOTHING ANYTHING THE CRIMINAL SILVERSTEIN SAYS PROVES ANYTHING ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. BUILDING SEVEN IS A PROVEN CONTROLLED DEMOLITION, NOT BY WAY OF THE PANICKED SILVERSTEIN CONFESSION, BUT BY WAY OF THE SYMMETRICAL WAY THAT IT FELL. YOU HAVE TO CUT ALL THE MAIN SUPPORTS SIMULTANEOUSLY TO GET A SYMMETRICAL FALL.

    BY THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENTS OWN NEW STANDARDS, SILVERSTEIN NEEDS TO BE WATERBOARDED TO LOOSEN HIS TONGUE.

  36. If every Apple device was switched off tomorrow, what would be the net effect?
    How much work wouldn’t get done?
    That’s right, none.
    Apple are the Mattel of information technology and they wouldn’t exist unless they had been bailed out with Microsoft money and managed to develop a cult of zealotry amongst the technically feeble.

    You have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to MS-DOS.
    It was a hard-ball play by a young poker player and it fundamentally changed the world.
    Microsoft have acted like a startup ever since.

    And it was Bill who took the Xerox Alto prototypes and created something actually useful.
    Useful because everything that Microsoft do is designed for someone else to create value and make money.
    I hope that history will be able to tell the difference.

  37. No it was not Bill who took the Xerox ideas and made something useful you dolt. It was Steve who did that. Had it been up to Gates we would be stuck with command lines forever and a day. We would also be stuck with Bills crap operating system for the next hundred years, and all the waste, viruses, and delay this implies. Bills fortune represents the triumph of the most arbitrary application of patent law imaginable.

  38. What could possibly be your poker-playing point. Here was a case of unjust enrichment that cost the world multi-billions in lost productivity and expense and it was just these guys back-engineering someone elses achievement!!!! You really have to be a serious house nigger to imagine that this was a deserved showering of wealth upon these people.

  39. No way to vote against the banks…but people have finally woken up to kleptocracy in the US.

  40. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/300482-1

    There is a God. A news program worth watching. And isn’t she drop dead beautiful.

  41. Yeah its good news alright. Imagine them being so dense at catallaxy that they don’t support the protests. Their economic understanding is so lame they cannot see a connection between the feds misappropriation of 16 trillion dollars and the problems of the US economy. Its a black mark against Herman Cain that he’s tried on this happy-talk about the banks not being to blame.

  42. New York University students and teachers join the protest

  43. The Cat crew are mostly fascist leaning, Graeme. I’d say they’d be on the other side of the barricades when it turns nasty except most of those lard-arses don’t move from their desks. But they’ll be cheering on the banks and government hoons and paid thugs as they hoe into the sans culottes.

  44. Mark Ruffalo is a dear, gentle man and one of my favourite American actors.

    Here’s what he wrote:

    It is a thing of beauty to see so many people in love with the ideal of democracy, so alive with its promise, so committed to its continuity in the face of crony capitalism and corporate rule. That should be celebrated. It should be respected and admired.

    Their message is very clear and simple: get money out of the political process; strive for equality in taxation and equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, social status, sexual preference or age. We must stop poisoning our food, air and water for corporate greed. The people on Wall Street and in the banking industrial complex that destroyed our economy must be investigated and brought to justice under the law for what they have done by stealing people’s homes and savings.

    Jobs can and must be created. Family farms must be saved. The oil and gas industry must be divested of its political power and cheap, reliable alternative energy must be made available.

    This movement transcends political affiliations. America has been debased and degraded by greed. This has touched 99% of America’s population. The other 1% is doing just fine – with more than a third of the wealth of this nation. We all know people who have been hurt by the big rip-off. We all know people who have lost their jobs or their homes. We all know people who have had to go and fight wars that seem to have no objective and no end – leaving families for years on end without fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

    The 99% of us have paid a dear price so that 1% could become the wealthiest people in the world. We all pay insanely high energy prices while we see energy companies making record profits, year after year. We live with great injustices in the land of justice. We live with great lawlessness in the land of the law.

    It’s time to check ourselves, to see if we still have that small part that believes in the values that America promises. Do we still have a shred of our decency intact in the face of debasement? If you do, then now is the time to give that forgotten part a voice. That is what this movement is ultimately about: giving voice to decency and fairness.

    I invite anyone and all to participate in this people’s movement to regain your dignity and what you have worked for in this capitalist society. Each of us is of great value to the whole. Do not forget your greatness. Even when the world around you is telling you you are nothing. You have a voice. You want a better life for your children and the people you love. You live in a democracy. You belong, and you deserve a world that is fair and equal. You have a right to take your place and be heard.

    Show up at an Occupy Wall Street gathering in any major city in the US. Hit your social media outlets. Tweet it. Facebook it. Talk it up. It’s easy to do nothing, but your heart breaks a little more every time you do.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/02/occupy-wall-street-99-per-cent

  45. “But they’ll be cheering on the banks and government hoons and paid thugs as they hoe into the sans culottes.”

    Yeah it seems that way for sure. When I met Cambria and Soon (with Steve Edwards and Rafe were there) we tended to agree on most things. I didn’t know that 9/11 was a false flag, and so was more hawkish then the others, and wanted to bring the main Islamic terrorist sponsor countries down with air and proxy war.

    But two suggestions brought spontaneous derision from Soon and Cambria only. That the peak oil model was a pretty good model. And that we needed a slant, an inbuilt bias, in favor of small against big business. I ought to have taken from their visceral bias against the little guy that these were pretty radically different “libertarians” to what I thought we were supposed to be all about. But Rafe and Edwards didn’t have that reaction.

    Big business is supposed to come out of small business success. Some people reverse this cause and effect and they note that big business is successful. So right there, people of this inclination, have a reason to like bigshoteria, in a reversal of the heirachy of the thinking process. We need to have that handicap for big business, not so that there won’t be big business, but so we can be confident in the merit of the big business that comes through that handicap.

    Good tip from BVA. I’ve been assiduously watching Alyona since he linked her. Cool in the same way Max Keiser is. Slightly lefty but no hint that they are against a more legitimate form of free enterprise.

  46. Culturally we rightly tend to put down envy as a negative emotion. Envy can burn a person up. So you can see how a virtuous person like Herman Cain, who has come through under such massive handicaps, likely had to train himself to not fall for enviousness, and to instead concentrate on improving his own position. Note that he likely came through in that same time period. The key to upward mobility was to be in a good position coming out of the Volker crunch, when the economy and society seemed to be working like it ought to. And Cain seems to be of an age where he may have taken off in business around that time.

    So he looks at the protesters and he sees that they are being counter-productive from their own point of view. But we ought not have a society where a reasonable person has good cause to be resentful of the wealthy. My example is of the congestion tax. Imagine if you are driving 5 abreast on your 80cc motorbike to work. And everyone can get to work on bicycles, little motorbikes, scooters and so forth, safely, because the congestion charges take most of the cars off the road during the peak times and the small motorbikes get to run for free.

    Now you see a very expensive car driving past you on the right-hand lane, Maybe the wheels cost 150,000. But instead of being envious all you want to do is clap. Here is a fellow who is probably working late providing the bike-riders with the jobs you are riding to work to get too. Here is a fellow who faces the handicaps of the bigshots and still would appear to be rich. And here is the bloke who is paying for the roads through his congestion taxes. You might want to wave to him or pull aside so you can fulfill your urge to applaud.

    Envy is indeed a corrosive emotion. But you cannot just wave it away in the face of a crony-fascist and corporate enuch takeover. We would rather want to live in a setup where one doesn’t have to be powerfully disciplined to avoid too much envy. We would want to be proud of those people who have succeeded in business, and not be merely sucking up to all the rent-seekers who are running things right now.

  47. This looks pretty sweet to me:

    • Ok if you can swim. I can.

  48. Roseanne Barr talking on Max Keiser’s show. She jokes that she is running for President of the US and Prime Minister of Israel, as a “twofer”. Keiser had a bunch of twitter questions for Roseanne.

    One question that was asked was:

    If given the opportunity to confront Lloyd (Blankfein) or Jamie (Dimon) what would you say to them?

    Barely skipping a beat Roseanne says “you are under arrest.”

    Its particularly good that Roseanne is on the warpath for the Goldman Sachs bigshots and other thieving criminals, because you can run across a lot of propaganda that this crime spree that the bankers have been engaged in is somehow a Jewish thing. (One even wonders if the shadow government criminals may not be trying to spread this idea.) But here is Roseanne, never trying to hide her Jewishness, and her tv character, more than normally American, and she’s going after this “white-shoe-boy” mafia, as hard as anyone.

    Roseanne shows up about 13 minutes and 40 seconds in.

  49. Graeme, re Holland, Did you know the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois democracy actually began first in Holland, not France or England?

    Why do you think that was so?

    It always goes some way to explaining your statements about Holland’s financial system being ahead of anywhere else.

    • I think the Amsterdam bank was part of that, as well as the united arab emirates structure of the place. But I suspect that some advantages came about at the same time as a move towards steel usage in producer goods.

      You see you had producer goods in the medieval setup, but they tended to be largely wood constructed, and therefore they could not be the source of accumulated lasting wealth. So I suspect that along with the 100% backed bank, you probably may have had a threshold reached with the production of heavy steel capital goods. Naturally it would take some work to see how close such a thesis would be.

      We would need to find out more about the energy industry of the time. As well as a number of other leads.

  50. sorry, it ALSO goes,,,

  51. Obama really needs to die in the gutter with a body full of bullets. To think he murdered an American for the crime of exercising his free speech rights. He really must die. He is a confirmed terrorist.

    Obama is not a known American citizen. But he murdered a known American citizen, for simply exercising his constitutionally protected free speech rights.

  52. We’ve been occupied by Wall Street for years,

  53. the corporate greed is disgusting,

  54. Another miserable US jobs report
    By Barry Grey
    8 October 2011

    US payrolls grew at a snail’s pace in September, far more slowly than required to bring down near-depression levels of unemployment, while the crisis of long-term joblessness worsened, according to the Labor Department’s monthly employment report, released Friday.

    There was a net increase in non-farm jobs of 103,000, the result of an increase of 137,000 private-sector jobs and a loss of 34,000 government jobs. Economists estimate that it takes a net gain of at least 150,000 jobs per month to keep pace with normal population growth, so a figure of 103,000 heralds a further growth of joblessness.

    Even the miserable figure of 103,000 is greatly inflated, since nearly half of the “new” jobs—45,000—are accounted for by the return to work of Verizon workers who struck for two weeks in August.

    The response of the Obama administration to Friday’s dismal employment report exuded complacency and indifference. Administration spokesmen uniformly hailed the report as a positive indication of an ongoing recovery, which, however, was not proceeding rapidly enough, and used the report to promote Obama’s American Jobs Act.

    The payroll figures for August and July were revised upward by a combined 99,000, but that only brought the average monthly payroll gain since April to 72,000. As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal Washington think tank, pointed out in its analysis of the jobs report, the rate of job-creation since April is sharply lower than the prior 14 months (123,000) and “that didn’t do much more than keep up with population increases.”

    Predicting that the official unemployment rate, which remained at 9.1 percent for the third straight month in September, will begin rising again, the EPI wrote: “This country has 14 million unemployed people, and the job growth rate has unmistakably slowed down since the spring” (emphasis in the original).

    In the first half of this year the economy grew at the slowest pace since the recession, which began in December 2007, officially ended in June 2009. The total number of people counted as officially unemployed rose in September by 25,000.

    The minimal increase in private-sector jobs was partially offset by the continuing onslaught on public-sector jobs. Of the 34,000 reduction in government jobs, 33,000 were in state and local governments, which have shed 641,000 jobs over the past three years.

    Almost half of that decline (247,000) has come from cuts in local public schools, which needed to add 48,000 teachers and education workers just to keep pace with increasing enrollment—adding up to a public education gap of 326,000 jobs. Of the 34,000 government jobs shed last month, 27,000 were those of teachers and other education workers.

    The depth of the jobs crisis and the resulting social distress is more accurately reflected in the Labor Department’s figures on so-called “underemployment” and long-term unemployment than in the headline numbers for payroll growth and the official jobless rate. What the government calls the underemployment rate—in actuality a more accurate measure of joblessness—rose in September to 16.5 percent from the previous month’s 16.2 percent. This is the highest underemployment rate this year.

    This category adds to those counted as officially unemployed those workers who want a job but have recently given up looking and those who want to work full-time but have been forced to take a part-time position. In September, a staggering total of 25.8 million workers belonged to this category (14.0 million officially unemployed, 2.6 million counted as “marginally attached” to the labor force, and 9.3 million “involuntary” part-time workers).

    Even more indicative of the state of social conditions in the US, after more than two years of nearly double-digit unemployment, is the fact that the average unemployed American has been out of work for a longer period than at any time since records began being kept in 1948—63 years ago. The average duration of unemployment rose to 40.5 weeks in September, up from 40.3 weeks in August.

    To put this figure in perspective, through the end of the 1980s, the average length of joblessness ranged between 10 and 15 weeks. Until May 2009 it never exceeded 21.2 weeks, the high point reached in the recession of the early 1980s. Today it is nearly twice that.

    Some 6.2 million people, or 44.6 percent of unemployed Americans, were out of a job for more than six months in September. This is close to the record long-term jobless rate of 45.6 percent reached in the spring of 2010. The number of workers unemployed for more than six months increased by 208,000 in September. The number who had been jobless for more than a year was 4.4 million, up from 4.3 million a year ago.

    These figures reflect a level of social devastation that corresponds not to a supposed “recovery,” but rather to a depression.

    As the EPI noted: “More than two years into the official recovery, the United States has yet to produce anything close to the rate of job growth that will put its backlog of unemployed workers back to work before the end of the decade” (emphasis in the original).

    Young workers and minorities have been particularly hard hit by the economic crisis. Unemployment in September was 17.4 percent among workers age 16-24. Among workers younger than age 25 who are not enrolled in school, unemployment over the last year averaged 21.6 percent for those with a high school degree and 9.6 percent for those with a college degree.

    Among those workers with only a high school degree, unemployment was 9.7 percent. For those with a college degree it was 4.2 percent. But all education categories have seen their jobless rates roughly double over the past four years.

    Unemployment in September was 16.0 percent for African-American workers and 11.3 percent for Hispanic workers.

    Among the industries adding jobs in September were construction, retail, temporary help services and health care. However, manufacturing employment fell by 13,000, its second straight monthly decline.

    The US Postal Service cut 5,000 jobs in the course of the month. It has announced plans to close hundreds of facilities and slash 220,000 jobs by 2015.

    Friday’s employment report comes on the heels of other reports pointing to a deepening of the slump.

    On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 6,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 401,000. And the placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that announced layoffs soared in September to the highest level in more than two years.

    Employers last month announced plans to cut 115,730 jobs compared with 51,114 in August and 37,151 a year ago. As a result of the layoff announcements in September, the total number announced in the third quarter—233,258—was more than double the level of the second quarter and the highest since 2009.

    Other recent reports reflect the depth of the social crisis facing millions of American workers and young people. The US Census Bureau on Thursday reported that the percentage of Americans who own their own home has suffered its steepest decline since the Great Depression. The rate of home ownership fell to 65.1 percent in April 2010, 1.1 percent lower than in 2000. This was the biggest drop over a decade since the 1930s, when home ownership plunged 4.2 percent.

    However, the drop-off from the peak of home ownership at the height of the housing bubble in the middle of the 2000s was more than 4 percentage points.

    A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reported that the biggest increase in the number of Americans living in multi-generational households in modern history has occurred in the last three years. Mass unemployment has forced millions of people to move in with relatives. As a result, more than one in six people in the US are living in such households.

    Labor Secretary Hilda Solis on Friday spoke of the report “exceeding expectations” and added, “I am encouraged by much of the recent data we’re seeing, but we know more must be done to speed our recovery… The policies this administration has pursued have added jobs back into the economy, but we need to work faster and on an even bigger scale.”

    Katherine Abraham, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, described the September jobless rate as “unacceptably high,” but went on to boast: “Despite a slowdown in economic growth from substantial headwinds… the economy has added private sector jobs for 19 straight months, for a total of 2.6 million jobs over that period.”

    She neglected to mention that hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs have been destroyed and that 6.6 million jobs have been lost in all since the start of the recession. To make up the jobs gap resulting from the loss of those jobs and the new ones needed to keep pace with the growth in the working-age population, the economy would have to generate 11.1 million new jobs.

    Obama touted his American Jobs Act at a Thursday press conference called in advance of Friday’s employment report. This token bill, which economists estimate would create considerably less than a million jobs, consists largely of more tax incentives for businesses combined with a cut in Social Security payroll taxes for companies as well as workers. That will deprive the Social Security Trust Fund of hundreds of billions in revenues.

    Most of the cost of the bill would be covered by hundreds of billions in cuts in social spending over the next decade, including major reductions in Medicare and Medicaid, the basic health care insurance programs for the elderly and the poor.

    Obama and the Democrats are cynically promoting this phony “jobs bill” by linking it to a tax surcharge on millionaires—something they well know will never be passed by Congress. In any event, they are pushing for bipartisan agreement on a comprehensive tax “reform” that would sharply lower tax rates for corporations and the wealthy.

  55. Anti-Wall Street protests continue to spread to cities across the US. According to the web site Occupy Together,“Meetups” to plan protests have been established in more than 900 cities.

    The Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last month in New York, has expanded now to dozens of towns, including Tampa, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia; Washington, DC; Boston; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Chicago; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis; Houston, San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Nashville; Portland, Oregon; Anchorage, Alaska; and a number of California cities.

    The demonstrations—fueled by anger over social inequality, unemployment and a vast decline in living standards for the overwhelming majority—are also gaining international support. There are calls on Facebook for a global demonstration on October 15 in cities in more than 15 countries, from Dublin to Madrid, Buenos Aires to Hong Kong.

    “Occupy Melbourne” in Australia is planning an October 15 protest in City Square, and similar calls are being organized on Facebook for protests in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The “Occupy the London Stock Exchange” Facebook page has more than 6,000 followers, and has announced plans to occupy Paternoster Square beginning October 15.

  56. University student discussions at Occupied Boston
    The spark will become a flame.

  57. http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city/

    The first demand of any populist movement for the reform of the American financial industry (e.g., Occupy Wall Street) should be the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had been largely repealed by the Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act of 1999. Why?

    The Glass-Steagall Act split the finance industry into “commercial” banks and “investment” banks. Commercial banks sell credit (make loans) to individuals and businesses whose collateral is real (money, government bonds, land, property, durable goods, valuables, industrial plant and equipment). Investment banks “play the market” (stocks, commodities, currency, derivatives, unsecured “paper” and “virtual” assets) and extend venture capital (gamble on “start-ups”, e.g., the “next Apple”, currently just a hobby corner in a dreamer’s garage).

    Prior to November 12, 1999, no banking unit, whether an independent business or a division of a larger corporation, could engage in both commercial and investment banking. Glass- Steagall imposed a firewall that prevented the flow of commercial bank funds into investment bank loans. Deposits in commercial banks — but not investment banks — are insured (up to $250,000) by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which was created as part of the Glass-Steagall Act.

    The intent of the Glass-Steagall Act was to protect “the people’s money” on deposit in their “local banks” from being siphoned into gambling pools and lost, as in 1929-1932 and 2007-2008, by investment banking “big players” who pissed away “other people’s money” in the Wall Street casino. The crash of 2008 proves that human nature has not changed since 1933, and that the Glass- Steagall regulation of banking psychology is as necessary today as it was in 1933, and earlier!

    Because commercial banks could not invest in the bull (rising) stock market of the 1990s, avarice-inflated political pressure built to repeal Glass-Steagall, and “benefit” commercial bank depositors by allowing the banking industry to use depositor funds “more productively”, by investing in the ever growing financial markets, instead of the same old slow-growth petit bourgeois bricks-and-mortar businesses of everyday life. Investment bankers salivated at the prospect of adding the virgin wealth of commercial deposits to their piles of gambling chips: “it takes money to make money.” So, with promises of greater wealth for the greatest number, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed in 1999, repealing the Glass-Steagall banking firewall.

    The fundamental economic problem today is the same as during the Great Depression: jobs. A return to Glass-Steagall would create a sound commercial banking system, which could only lend for popular, as opposed to elite or insider, economic growth (loans for: cars, homes, business expansion a.k.a. “construction”), and this would mushroom jobs locally, not offshore.

    Since banking is the business of making money by selling credit, commercial banks restricted from speculating in stocks would return to traditional lending backed by real collateral. They would have no other choice, since just sitting on their reserves would not generate profits.

    Commercial bank income including any government “bail outs”, recycled into loans as described, would fuel job creation and be seen as an acceptable form of relief, by the entire political spectrum. When the government bypasses the banks to put relief checks directly into the hands of people (negative taxes), even if in the form of “pay” for “public jobs” the recipients perform, it is seen as “welfare” in the most parasitic sense. So, for most Americans to see government sponsored/stimulated job creation as “real”, the government has to launder its money through a sound commercial banking system. Job creation can be just as immediate either way, but to do it as “economic stimulus” instead of “welfare”, it is necessary to have a Glass-Steagall regulated commercial banking system in place.

    As one — admittedly quite imperfect — indicator of national economic strength, consider the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) during the last 17 years. The value of the stock market (New York Stock Exchange, NYSE) as measured by the DJIA increased by a factor of 3 between 1994 and the end of 1999 (DJIA from 3700 to 11,100 in 5 years), during which commercial banking was regulated by Glass-Steagall. Repeal of Glass- Steagall was signed into law on November 12, 1999.

    The market today is about 5% to 10% below its level of January 2000 (the “Clinton bull high”, CBH; DJIA at 11,723), 11 and 3/4 years ago. During that interval, we experienced: some market ups and downs post 9-11, a historic peak in October 2007 (DJIA at 14,164, the housing bubble) at 20% above the January 2000 level (CBH), the NYSE crash of 2008-2009 (down to 57% of CBH), a two year rally peaking at 9% above the CBH (May-July 2011), then an 18% drop in mid-summer 2011 to 9% below the CBH, and dribbling about that same level since. Repeal of Glass- Steagall has not brought greater wealth to the greatest number these nearly 12 years.

    The many gifts from the Federal Reserve to the “big banks” a.k.a. investment banks, in addition to the TARP money they received (up to $700B allowed by the Troubled Asset Relief Program law) was not recycled into commercial banking, but instead held in readiness for continued speculating (investment banking without Glass-Steagall restrictions), and of course bonuses.

    I have suggested before that the US Treasury could have just cut each of 300,000,000 Americans a $2300 tax-free check (the total equals the TARP hit) and we would certainly stimulate the economy and create jobs. But, of course, this is odious “welfare”. It would be fragrant and orthodox if instead one were getting a fair interest loan from a neighborhood bank, to put a toolbox in your pickup truck and start a handyman business.

    Reinstating Glass-Steagall would cut through all the disingenuous Republican bullshit about “government handouts” and “socialism” as regards any Keynesian kick to the economy to generate jobs.

    Such a job-creating surge could be started as quickly as any direct welfare — if we had a sound commercial banking system. And that could be produced immediately once the Glass-Steagall law was renewed.

    Manuel Garcia, Jr. an unemployed American engineering physics graduate

  58. New York Times Editorial Board supports OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT

    • We can take it that the OWS movement must be really taking off, if we are already seeing certain sections of the ruling class
      attempting to “channel it”, that is co-opt it. I have been hearing
      that some Obama administration officials are eager to use
      this movement to try to help push through some of their own
      agenda. All this, despite the fact that presumably most movement participants take a jaundiced view of both major parties.

      And imagine, not so very long ago, virtually all of the establishment news media, including the NY Times, were imposing a blackout on coverage of the movement..

      The demonstrations are well placed to grow and remain permanent given that their core is an entire young generation of university students and graduates who can’t get work and won’t get work. They’ve got nothing to lose and all the time in the world to make a revolution or at least turn the business as usual order upside down,.

      • BVA, I don’t think this movement can be easily co-opted by any sectional interest or political party. It is too broad and deep for that. And it’s just as much anti the Democrats as it is the Republicans. See clipped text below.

        btw, how cool is the call-and-repeat-reponse of the speakers and crowd at the demos in NYC all because Mayor Bloomberg has banned megaphones or other amplification.

        What it has done is forced speakers to be concise and punchy, gives a voice, literally, to the crowd and unites the group beautifully, and in doing so, boosts morale and the experience of strength in numbers and in solidarity.

        From Business Insider (online, Oct 5, 2011:

        One of President Obama’s most depressing failures is the way he has dealt with Wall Street.

        When Obama came to office in January 2009, he had the opportunity to radically change the Wall Street status quo: reversing the “bailout doctrine” of the Bush administration,
        seizing and restructuring zombie banks like Citi and Bank of America, increasing capital requirements, and reinstating the Glass Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking so the 2008-2009 financial crisis could never happen again.

        But, instead, President Obama hired the same ex-Wall Street team that had implemented Bush’s Bailout Doctrine, most notably Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

        Under the logic of “we simply don’t have a choice,” Geithner then proceeded to alienate most of mainstream America by arguing that the Wall Street status quo had to be preserved or society would collapse.

        Meanwhile, stung by criticism that he was being too soft on the banks, Obama then compounded the mistake by portraying bankers as greedy “fat cats”—thus alienating Wall Street, too.

        God’s gift to Wall Street.

        And so, three years later, we’re left with the same unrestructured zombie banks, the same Too Big To Fail policies (unofficial, of course), the same ongoing bailouts, the same popular hatred of Wall Street—which appears, to mainstream America, to have escaped the crisis unscathed—and the same “talk tough but do nothing” approach that makes both Wall Street and Main Street seethe about the Obama Administration’s approach to the banks.

        Earlier this week, for example, Obama pandered to Main Street by blasting Bank of America for its debit-card fee, while saying nothing about the ongoing Bush-era bailout policies that continue to reward banks just for being banks (The Federal Reserve continues to pay BOFA and other banks “interest on excess reserves,” for example, and helps them replenish their balance sheets by perpetuating zero percent interest rates.) And yesterday Tim Geithner told Erin Burnett that the Administration will “prevail” over Wall Street on the Dodd Frank regulation…even as bank stocks hit new lows, Geithner begs Europe to clone the US bailout, and the talk begins again about the need for another round of US bailouts.

        Of course, aggressively addressing capital requirements and restructuring zombie banks three years ago would have turned Wall Street against Obama—but Wall Street’s now against Obama anyway. Meanwhile, blaming Wall Street for its contribution to the country’s problems—and actually backing up the talk with action—would have won over the rest of the business community and Main Street. Instead, Obama has infuriated both sides for his ineffectiveness on this issue—and Wall Street remains unchanged.

      • My working hypothesis is that the ruling class house-niggers (not black people …. rather pampered slaves-lite) and their shadow government overlords, will try and co-opt anything at all, and move it towards their strategic stakes-in-the-ground. Failing that they can just breed confusion, and exploit potential rifts between people who ought to be allies.

        Now we see at Catallaxy even some of the more reasonable people falling for the lamest sort of stuff. Posting a picture of a bloke allegedly taking a crap on a police car. We see people seagulling around, looking for gotcha quotes and gotcha moments. So they are looking for people to lose their temper, or for stupid people to say things excessively leftist or excessively violent, or at least undirected in their advocacy of violence. Because for fucksakes. Should we be able to prove and blame one half dozen people for the misdirection of 16 trillion in funds, and should we have a way of knowing for a fact that these six are in the top twenty most culpable, we ought to slit their throats on the instant without delay. We could do not other.

        Of course no such situation could ever occur. We are not given to certain knowledge and so could not infer the conclusions that would justify such hesitation-less bloodshed. But the point is not to be advocating violence. The point is that ruining a great nation, and bringing fully half of the world economy to depression, by the misdirection of 16 trillion in the US alone ……… is not okay. Its far from fucking okay. And so we have to support the occupation with all due gusto, and simply work on trying to refine the message of these people, whereas the bad and wealth destroying bastards who are running things will be working hard to suck the conservatives in and confuse the issue.

  59. Yesterday thousands were in Washington Square Park NYC for an OWS general assembly.

    Love live our revolution . We have nothing to lose but our chains.
    (Greetings from Egyptian activist to American people.)

    What took you so long? Welcome.

  60. Howard Icky is Joe Cambria you think, Graeme?

    This new pseud is an unconsious reference to how he makes himself feel, no? Too much of the snout in the trough of government largesse, peut-etre?

    JC is Catallaxy’s favourite big-government welfare for banks broker.

    How embarrassing for Sinclair Davidson, Judith Sloan, Rafe Champion!

  61. lol what a woman

  62. Very gutsy move by Geraldo. Here he admits to being open minded about building seven:

  63. And here Geraldo comes clean as having investigated this matter and understanding that physics really does matter.

  64. “Now we see at Catallaxy even some of the more reasonable people falling for the lamest sort of stuff. Posting a picture of a bloke allegedly taking a crap on a police car. We see people seagulling around, looking for gotcha quotes and gotcha moments. So they are looking for people to lose their temper, or for stupid people to say things excessively leftist or excessively violent, or at least undirected in their advocacy of violence.”

    It’s lame stuff, eh. Only intellectual lightweights would try it on or believe it. But then it’s a free world. But those dudes are on the losing side of history and it must hurt.

    Me, I’m in 7th heaven. The 18-25 year olds who are at the heart of Occupy Wall Street have a received wisdom and historical knowledge that is breathtaking because it has been hidden. Not any longer.

    Their innate internationalism and grasp of the ideals of economic justice, their antipathy to corporate greed and the trashing of democracy, stands at a qualitative higher level than that of any preceding generation.

    This is history in the making, exactly as it always has been, by people standing on the shoulders of previous generations of movers and shakers.

    I can’t wait to hear their new music.

  65. Sinclair Davidson has tested me a number of times. But his latest post is the worst. Its typical Sinclair in that he’s hiding his completely fucked, tribal, dishonest, and untenable view behind a stupid young man who has gotten the entirely wrong end of the stick.

    http://catallaxyfiles.com/2011/10/09/hypocrites-2/

    And Sinclair, who has been pretending to be a libertarian for a very long time, has the nerve to call the protestors hypocrites. He claims that they weren’t stolen off. All utter lies.

    I’m going to have to call for him to step down, and fuck off back to Africa. His fucking tribalism, is unacceptable, does not sit well here, and would reproduce the conditions of his own miserable country in time.

    I cannot describe how fucking sick I am of these fake conservatives, and hypocritical ignorant primitives like Sinclair Davidson.

  66. Sinclair Davidson is a racist, authoritarian shit whose mob supported and benefited from apartheid.

    And he’s a dope. He has contributed nothing that I know of to intellectual life or knowledge in Australia. He’s just a paid up shill for crony capitalism.

    Imagine having him teaching you at university, even if its was only marketing or book-keeping.

    Quelle horreur!

  67. Just watching a show on the tv, wherein Chevron seems to be polluting some area in the Amazon. Its a terrible thing to see, because Chevron is a terrific leader in the technology of recovering resources that would be uneconomic for others to pull up. There seems to be something wrong with the way the big corps behave, and it may be a feature of our inflationary fractional reserve system, based around ubiquitous debt.

    Anyhow if these assholes don’t get their act together in the Amazon, then that would be a good reason to exclude them from any more property acquisition here. We might allow them in as subcontractors only, for some local crowd. Some locals who better take some responsibility for their actions.

  68. It is quite funny and ironic that that dopey Joe Cambria-like, (with the exception of his looks) motor mouth trader has been a catalyst for the growing OWS backlash.

  69. My internet is downloading slow at the moment. But if you are talking about the alleged trader who claimed that Goldman Sachs is running everything, well I cannot see what he has said or did that is unethical. He told it like it is, for the most part, and asked people to try and get prepared to so as to maintain the value of their hard-earned savings. I don’t see what else he could possibly do. He would appear to be trying to wake people up to how poxy the situation has become.

    The banking elite used to be content to sit back and steal off everyone in a pretty low-key way. The Egyptian dictator may have stolen 600 billion off his people over 30 years. But the bankers have stolen-embezzled and misappropriated 16 trillion over just two years. This is before adding more low-key grift funds that used to be their business-as-normal mode.

    So the situations are absolutely comparable. Plus the bankers murdered 3000 on 9/11 and launched a string of wars on skewed pretenses. It may be that we would have been right to take down Saddam anyhow, but its not the same thing to do it on the basis of a false flag. The consequences are in theory, and in practice, radically different. It was not a question of take-down-Saddam versus don’t take-down-Saddam. It was always rather a question of doing things for good and honest reasons.

    So the killing of so many people, many of them Americans, can be blamed on the shadow government, whose chief nexus surely intersects with the banking industry. They must be blamed and their crimes against Americans alone are fully of the same magnitude as that of the Egyptian dictator against HIS people.

  70. Graeme, that trader has caused so much outrage and disgust not just because of his personal take that a recession is an advantage to grubs like him because they can play the stockmarket and may be make money out of many others loss and misery. But also because he obviously doesn’t get the point that tens of millions of Americans have no savings or assets that they can protect. They are people who live from week to week by various means regardless of whether they are working or not.

  71. Hmmmmmm. But he wouldn’t be saying what he was saying if he didn’t want to wake people up to the criminality of the banking industry. As it turns out I don’t think he’s a market insider. I think he’s doing the right thing with a mild amount of subterfuge.

  72. Perhaps so. But he is not really of much interest or even relevance in the big picture. The people demonstrating against Wall Street and corporate-government greed and theft are way ahead of him. I just thought it was fitting that his honest (I agree) statements were being used as fuel for the forces of righteousness.

  73. This is moving very fast and spreading laterally

  74. I think it will basically be a full-blown Northern Hemisphere movement.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    On another note, here is a serious expert on energy-economics. People don’t realise how very different energy economics is from the rest of economics:

    [audio src="http://www.netcastdaily.com/broadcast/fsn2011-0309-1.mp3" /]

    • Demand curves don’t slope downwards, Mr. bird?

      WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU MORON? OF COURSE DEMAND CURVES SLOPE DOWN. MORE IS DEMANDED AT A LOWER PRICE. YOU ARE JUST SUCH A MORON FELLA. SEE YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF THINKING ABOUT ECONOMIC ISSUES. THE BEST YOU CAN DO IS ASK STUPID QUESTIONS. ASK AN HONEST QUESTION FOR A CHANGE YOU PRIMITIVE WOP CUNT.

  75. Here’s the lying wop in operation again, attempting to justify state terrorism:

    “Here’s a discussion on the legal doc that allowed the killing of the terrorist in Yemen.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?_r=2&hp

    There was no legal document you dickhead. The reality is that this was the unlawful murder of a US civilian. In other words an act of terrorism. The victim has not been shown to be guilty of terrorism. The usurper has been.

  76. Gold. I haven’t laughed so much in ages.

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/alan-grayson-shreds-p-j-orourke-on-occupywallstreet.html

  77. I love this dude. Where has been all my life?

    http://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/02/09/rep-alan-grayson-on-radio-free-dylan/

    • Listening to him right now. Yeah. All good stuff. Just so sad to see the US falling to pieces like this. But its really about banker and elite insider management, and attempting to make it look like its still a democracy.

      • Yep. Historically speaking, America’s moment as the globe’s “sole superpower” barely outlasted Andy Warhol’s notorious 15 mins of fame. The American Century was swiftly throttled in three hubris-filled very recent stages: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the Wall Street meltdown (a result of casino capitalism).

      • There’s no real substitute for the Americans, to bankrupting all the larger banks, with a two-thirds, one-sided jubilee. I cannot see any other way for them to get back to economic health. Because to get the capital markets to work, and to get the high savings, we would want them to go immediately to monetary conditions of “growth-deflation”. But that won’t work without a two-thirds one-sided jubilee, because the scope of peoples debts are such, that the low spending growth would be paralysing for most of the people the Americans need to be moving and active to effect a recovery.

        So just acting as a sort of doctor, and diagnosing the illness, even if I was a pro-banker partisan, I cannot see a way forward without bringing these people low.

  78. http://rt.com/news/occupy-wall-street-people-391/

    Graeme, I think most people would be over the moon if this remained a Northern Hemisphere thing. When America is this sick it’s going to do a lot of damage to the rest of the world unless it is turned topsy turvy.

    “Two miles from the chaos, at the United Nations, even financier and billionaire George Soros weighed in on the populist uprising.

    “Actually, I can understand their sentiments, frankly,” he said. “The decision not to inject capital into the banks but to effectively relieve them of their bad assets, and them allow them to earn their way out of a hole, gave the banks bumper profits and that allowed them to pay bumper bonuses. As I say, I can sympathize with their grievances.”

    • These sorts of statements just aren’t going to show up in the lamestream media. Anything to take it away from the banks stealing 16 trillion, and the shadow government forcing the sexual molestation of anyone who gets onto a plane, in order to mentally prepare them for tyranny, and a situation where anyone can be murdered by the government at any time.

  79. They say the main mark of a psychopath is a person who thinks empathy is a form of weakness.

    I’ve always felt empathy and I can tell you have too.

    But your erstwhile sparring acquaintances on Catallaxy not only don’t feel empathy, ever, they’re incapable of it. And they even revel in that incapacity.

    The poor deprived sods.

    The worst offenders imo are:
    JC
    Jason Soon
    Sinclair Davidson
    dotty (Mark Hill)
    C.L
    dover-beach

    But then I also picture them all as unattractive, dense, cranky, middle aged dudes with their trousers hoisted up to their armpits, and for this and other reasons I’m quite sure in real life the joke’s on them, in more ways than one.

  80. oh, and daddydave, he of the creepy name.

  81. More good stuff from RT

    http://rt.com/news/yeti-siberia-science-footprint-421/

  82. My internet is coming in dribs and drabs. I don’t think that crowd will find Yeti. The humans are slow-moving, relatively sedentary, noisy, and they have no night-vision goggles. But with a bit of luck they may find footprints with excellent dermal ridges.

    • HE’S PROVEN TO EXIST. WE HAVE HIM ON FILM, SIGHTINGS, FOOTPRINTS WITH DERMAL RIDGES, AND SO FORTH.

  83. long live taiwan
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ten_Day

  84. Exactly. Taiwan forever. Taiwan Uber Alles. Happy birthday and all that.

  85. “Top of the list in the right-wing songbook, though, is the non-existence of climate change. Bolt is utterly obdurate when it comes to the subject.”

    What a very strange and Orwellian statement. It would be straight leftist projection. But the use of Orwellian language makes the statement just very odd. Ken you may not realize it. But climate change has always been real. For as many billions of years as the planet has been around. Bolt knows this. Apparently you don’t know this. You might want to clarify your position. Are you claiming that climate change is a recent phenomenon? What exactly are you claiming?

  86. Panic of the Plutocrats

    By PAUL KRUGMAN

    It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change
    America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably
    hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and
    politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest
    hundredth of a percent.

    And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the
    extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic
    royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

    Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if
    growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the
    police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police
    overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been
    nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of
    2009.

    Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs”
    and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential
    candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of
    waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My
    favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that
    the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people
    don’t deserve to have them.

    Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his
    own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of
    trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement
    that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

    And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the
    protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

    The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader
    syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged
    in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged
    the system is.

    Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild
    over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as
    being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which
    would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in
    risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a
    loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen
    Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s
    invasion of Poland.

    And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth
    Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts.
    Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth
    case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was
    radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s
    famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

    But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms.
    Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she
    has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a
    chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host.
    Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

    What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of
    the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.
    They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got
    rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear
    benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose
    aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their
    fellow citizens.

    Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by
    taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit
    and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of
    heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes
    that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower
    rates than middle-class families.

    This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they
    see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious,
    no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the
    stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more
    urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth
    Warren.

    So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply
    trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s
    oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their
    wealth.

  87. Columbia faculty statement: NEW YORK, NY, October 10, 2011:

    Today faculty from Columbia University released a petition signed by over 300 professors expressing their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Signatories to the petition come from across the faculty of Columbia University and Barnard College. In their petition, the professors join the Occupy Wall Street movement in condemning the growth of economic, social, and political inequalities. According to the petition, claims that the movement lacks focus are inaccurate and ignore the many important issues that the Occupy Wall Street movement has raised.

    “I understand the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement clearly,” said Columbia professor and former University provost, Jonathan R. Cole. “The movement speaks to the growing economic inequalities in our society: 1 percent of the population holds almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; as inequality has increased taxes on the wealthy have plunged; often wealth rather than merit determines who receives educational opportunities; and millions of citizens have lost their homes while those on Wall Street, who are responsible for much of the economic crisis, are rewarded rather than punished.”

    Many professors expressed admiration for the movement’s ability to refocus public debate to include discussion of equality and economic justice. “While my generation of scholars focused on the important issues of civil rights and women’s rights, it has been said we did not do enough to draw attention to the growth in economic inequality. There’s just enough truth in this for me to be very moved in a personal way that so many people from all walks of life, old and young, are uniting now around a platform of basic economic fairness,” said Bruce Robbins, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. Professor Hamid Dabashi said, “We owe it to the generations of students we have taught to oppose the systematic erosion of the common good, of the inalienable rights to a decent healthcare, to public education, and to a dignified life.”

    The professors also believe that the movement provides an opportunity to address these issues with students. “As a law professor, I feel a particular responsibility in speaking out in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests,” said Katherine Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. “Lawyers have played no small role in providing legal cover for the overreaching and irresponsibility undertaken on Wall Street. My hope is that Columbia Law School will see these protests as an opportunity to remind our students that legal ethics require that lawyers be bound to represent not only private, but also larger societal, interests.”

  88. http://asiancorrespondent.com/66717/occupy-wall-street-protests-staged-by-chinese-pensioners/

  89. http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Occupy-Wall-Street-protests-have-now-spread-to-Ireland-131442713.html

  90. OMG hug a cop today.

    • Good Lord that is such fantastic work. There is an whole underground left and right that is not anything like the polished filtered Murdoch (and other lamestream media) version of things.

  91. The thing is that if you are there surrounded by other protesters, you are going to feel that you are bringing in a new era. But the reality is that most of these movements are going to be co-opted by outside forces, who just sit there and analyse, and figure out how to skew the movement to their purposes, or at least to an acceptable outcome for themselves.

    Now it must be noted that no matter how rich the outside forces are, they are not capable of taking on a mass-movement, head on, using a crash-or-crash-through strategy. Athenians like me often have a terrible history of dismissing Eastern thinking as mumbo-jumbo. But the world is now run by followers of Sun Tzu. And these people are fully beating up any remaining Athenians senseless and making sure they are set up for a good scape-goating sooner or later, or making sure they are not upwardly-mobile.

    So no-one is going to stop the protests. Rather they will sway them to their purposes. All that can be hoped for is that the protests become, better and better targeted. And that they start fully targeting the federal reserve, and the major criminal banks.

    • Culture jamming, ain’t it grand. Some trace its origins to the medieval carnival, certainly to artists like Charlie Chaplin and a new generation of radicals and subversives discovered it again in the 1980s and now again today. What new heights will it reach?

  92. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

    THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  93. Back in the 80’s Richard Perle described Moscow as “a place where people lie all the time” and of course he was right. Now the centre of lying has moved, and “Russia-Today” is where you go for fair and balanced coverage of the US scene.

    Here is what, at least seems to be, a very fair rendering of whats going on. Actually I wish Russia-Today were NOT so fair. I wish they emphasized the need to take down the federal reserve.

  94. Since the banksters thought it was just sweet and ethical to gang-bang the community for 16 trillion or so, really justice would only be served by a one-sided jubilee that was calculated to be of a scope of about 32 trillion, so that the fractional reserve banks were all taken down, and having to asset-strip themselves to make good with the cash.

  95. US Marine veterans join protests.

  96. And I like people like Shaun Hannity and Herman Cain. But they have so much got the wrong end of the stick on this matter. Not so much bad people, as so ambitious and hard-working they’ve lost track of what has been going on.

  97. “Mr Soon, banks should be public service operations providing loans to households for big ticket items and small businesses so they can invest.”

    I cannot for base ideological reasons endorse such a plan. But there can be no question that such a setup, if the banks can be chartered with specific guidelines, would be vastly superior to our cronyist “four bludgers” policy. Ludicrously known as the “four pillars” policy.

    The thieves are good at coming up with all sorts of phrases to cover over the low Mafia operations they undertake. For example when JC wants to steal off you and give your wealth to the banks he talks about “recapitalisation of the banks” This is gangster talk for stealing. When he wants to steal off you, give your wealth to the banks, so they can lend to big cronies who already owe the bank money he says “don’t you think its important to recapitalize all those companies?”

    Actually I think its important to recapitalize me. And any seventy-two females of my choosing. So lets not fool ourselves about the thieving nature of fractional reserve.

    There is no use getting in an argument with Professor Quiggin and others and pretending that the socialist bank could not work better than the cronyist situation. At least you could ensure it that the bank lent for purposes of wealth creation, and not for consumer addiction, or speculative gains. But a 100% backed bank, under growth-deflation, would work better still, than the socialist alternative. Its a clear one, two three ranking where wealth creation is concerned, with our current situation the worst setup available to us.

  98. The video below is disturbing.

    Back in the ’60s, the line against antiwar protesters was that they disrespected American veterans and the American flag.

    On Monday night, Boston police broke up the Occupy Boston protest, and in the process, they tore down an American flag and knocked down at least one American military veteran.

    A group of Veterans for Peace stood in a line in front of the Occupy Boston protesters, and after the police warned the entire group to disperse, a line of cops marched out of the darkness and seemed to move on the veterans first.

    John Nilles, a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran, told the Boston Globe he was knocked down during the arrests. “I have absolutely no use for police anymore,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

    You can hear protesters on the video screaming over and over, “We are veterans of the United States of America.” It’s chilling.

    The video is dark, so it’s hard to see exactly what’s happening, but when the American flag starts to totter, it’s like the Iwo Jima moment in reverse.

    It’s sad there were no news cameras with their bright lights to illuminate what happened. The first version of this video I saw was murky; this one is clearer. It’s unsettling enough even under cover of darkness; it’s obvious why the police didn’t do this in broad daylight.

    Still, I’m with Olympic hero John Carlos, who told the crowd at Occupy Wall Street on Monday not to vilify the cops. “Take into account that they are between a rock and a hard place because they have a mandate to do their job,” Carlos told the crowd. It’s true: They’re taking orders from their bosses. Maybe this protest will change who their bosses are.

    http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/11/the_worst_ows_moment_so_far/singleton/

  99. Statement from Veterans For Peace

    http://www.veteransforpeace.org/news_detail.php?idx=115

    Statement from Veterans For Peace Regarding the Incident in Boston Last Night, by Acting Director, Mike Ferner

    Last night in Boston, our members displayed real courage, standing nonviolently between police and people in the Occupy Boston protest. Police were given orders to clear the park and initial reports I’ve heard say that some VFP members and perhaps others were injured by the police and that fifty people were arrested. If there were injuries, we hope they were minimal. VFP never condones the use of violence.

    We need to keep in mind that police officers are in the same 99% as we are, providing the muscle, sweat, blood and money used by the 1% who own and govern. The most important thing we share with the police is our humanity. We appeal to police in every corner of America to maintain their humanity and think about it when they consider orders they are given.

    The largest democratic uprising in U.S. history was that of the Populists in the late 1800′s. Of them, Lawrence Goodwyn, author of “The Populist Moment,” wrote that they “…created the psychological space to dare to aspire grandly.” That is what the dozens of “Occupy” movements are doing throughout America today — daring to aspire grandly and aspiring to the grandest ideal of our nation, which is democracy.

    We are just at the beginning stages of a powerful, new rising of democratic energy and ideals. We will remain human but we will remain silent no longer.

    • Its just very sad isn’t it. A new generation of cops brought up to be mere functionaries of a state gone criminal, in a generation known for its nihilism. For them to be hurting older vets is just cowardly. Particularly since if they weren’t righteous vets they could arm up and wipe those young cops out easy enough.

  100. Tom Joad: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.

  101. On another note, I really like this guy. I suspect he’s an atheist, like myself, and yet, like myself, he has a lot of criticisms for the current official versions of evolution. Whereas I find that people who take very fringe ways of answering the same problems, often have a more reasonable way of arguing their case,and their paradigms can be more in keeping with the data.

    Certainly Michael Cremo and Lloyd Pye are both reasonable people. Unlike mainstream evolutionists they aren’t going around ignoring the data. One hesitates to make these observations, since at catallaxy they don’t appear able to discern between ones own belief,and the ability to appraise another fellow, as going about things in a reasonable way.

  102. In May 1932, 20,000 World War I veterans called the Bonus Army marched on Washington and camped on land near the White House to seek immediate payment of service certificates, essentially additional pay, promised to them by Congress. Many of them were destitute and unemployed. The mood of those veterans was similar to what we are seeing now with veterans participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

    The guy addressing the rally is Smedley Darlington Butler, a Major General in the Marine Corps and at the time of his death in 1940 the most decorated marine in US history.

  103. To clarify, they were supposed to get paid for the difference between their military pay and their civilian wages according to legislation passed in 1924 but would have to wait until 1945. Since many were unemployed and destitute they demanded immediate payment.

    The Bonus Army was driven from its encampment following a full-scale military assault led by General Douglas MacArthur that included six tanks, fixed bayonets and plentiful use of gas.

  104. I’m just stunned by this from the Chinaman:

    “Ron Paul is on another Fed conspiracy theory bender, I see. Whar a nutjob.

    Cain was right in his original response. he shouldn’t have lied.”

    Just a total denial of reality from Jason Soon.

  105. Something similar to this was posted at Catallaxy not long ago:

    http://paranormal.about.com/od/ancientanomalies/ig/Most-Puzzling-Ancient-Artifact/Shoe-Print-in-Granite.htm

  106. I really must blame the Murdoch press for the Chinaman’s ignorance. They aren’t reporting the scope of the scandal here. Perhaps Jason thinks that they merely lent the 700 billion that Hank Paulson requested, and that this has been paid back with a profit to the government. A lot of people speak in this way. Cambria talks like this but I didn’t think anything of it since Cambria always defends these criminals. Cambria actually came out and claimed that the government had made a profit from the bailout. These people live in a fantasy world.

  107. Stop the press. CL has found a solution to how all three buildings came down, consistent with the government story. Except that the idiot hasn’t. Rather he’s just decided that the word “troofer” is good enough to maintain his fantasy world.


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