Baked

EU Bailout Rumor

The original link is no longer working but its headline is still there.
Rumor is that the EU faces 16 trillion pounds in losses ($23.5 trillion).

If this is true, the entire global financial system is baked.
Like a potato.
Because the U.S. almost certainly faces similar losses.

Wow.
It really is done.

Sin City

"Sure, but I thought I might be able to talk some sense into you.
And I probably would've had to paste you one getting the gun.
And I don't hurt girls." - Marv

The End Of Paper Money

Investors are buying record amounts of gold bars and coins

$550 Billion Bank Run

Russian Banking Collapse

New Bailout May Top $1.5 Trillion

Fannie Mae Needs $200 Billion More?

The United States abandoned the gold standard thirty-eight years ago.
Paper money always fails because it lacks a mechanism to enforce long-term value.
A new commodity-based standard for money is coming, most likely with gold as a major component.

Induction

I) Electrical Induction - "A charged object may induce a charge in a nearby neutral object without touching it."

II) Joseph Goebbels - "If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth"

Perhaps if you repeat often enough, even the truth becomes a pervasive belief. Advertising seeks to turn predisposition to action. In a bell-curve distribution of behavior, there are usually buyers predisposed to purchase a product. Advertising seeks to convert that predisposition into a concrete effect. The graphs shows an example of memetic induction. YouTube.com comes online in early 2006. Within six months, hit counts for "you", "yours" and "yourself" are rising in tandem with YouTube's network traffic. The theory is that constant repetition of "YouTube" in people's minds induces associations with similar words like "you" and "yours".

My Diffraction Theory states that periods of memetic susceptibility can be inferred through semantic analysis and exploited.

The Induction Theory is part of my DEFCON 17 presentation. Police are well-aware of the "copy-cat" syndrome; a unique and visible crime inspires a few predisposed people to mimic the crime. Consider these recent events in terms of "Diffraction Theory", "Induction" Theory" and copycat crimes:

Australian Fire Arson - According to the latest reports, there were multiple, unrelated arsonists, i.e. copycat crimes. What if many information sources had been broadly seeded with the concept of "fire" and "arson" prior to the outbreak? I haven't previously written about the synthesis of memetic manipulation and physical action but the concept has been in my mind for the past two years.

The Mumbai Attack -. Here is a similar concept, a synthesis of tactical information, physical action and propaganda broadcast.

He's Still Dead, Jim

In Dec, 2005, I predicted that Mono for Linux was Dead On Arrival. The Monobots threw a fit, of course, cursing me long and loud but the past three years proved me right. Mono has gained almost no traction in the marketplace.

My reply to Neil McAlister's recent Mono column and the Slashdot Mono discussion returned a hitcount which implies Mono is STONE COLD DEAD, despite a small pickup in activity on Indeed.com. Nobody cares enough to even read about it.

He's still dead, Jim.

Dominique In Action

Yikes!

No, it's not The Dominique but I couldn't help but think of her...

Holographic Universe

The Holographic Universe

"If true, everything interpenetrates everything else in the entire universe. The electrons in the deepest microtubules of your brain are connected to the electrons emitted by stars millions of light years away."

"The human being may be nothing more than a television receiver floating through an endless sea of frequencies that we then translate into a sense of reality that is both shared and individualized to some respect. However, all must have the same ability to share, because the whole is affected by any part."

"Paranormal experiences would also be explainable. Just like electrons can know what the other is doing across infinite distances, so too could human beings know what others are thinking or doing, because the distance is an illusion and the connection is solid and without exception. There is no translating between minds, because we share in the same pool of consciousness at some infinitely small level. It's only a different channel on the television set of mind."


A global mechanism for commonality versus differentation
And a universal transaction layer.

233 Years

The United States survived wars, plagues and depressions for 233 years but it may not survive forty years of paper money. The Federal government looks increasingly like a dysfunctional system in systemic failure. I expected a resurgence of States rights but it seemed so obvious that I didn't bother with an official prediction.

New States Rights Movement
Sound State Money Movement

Why

It's a cycle. Tolerable debt turns intolerable, then irrational. Good intentions become white lies, then larger lies, deceit, corruption. The slide down the Slippery Slope.

We know that Lehman Brothers collapsed The Bubble. But why now? Why them? The Bubble was in motion for many years, perhaps decades according to Kondratieff Wave Theory. It appears the Treasury allowed Lehman to fail as a warning to financial speculators. But why now?

The ability to predict behavior is the ability to control behavior.

In a free market, no single actor can influence the market. But as debt grew and consolidated into fewer hands, the Financial Oligopoly grew and a positive feedback loop developed. The Lehman Brothers failure was a counter-balance to the moral hazard of previous bailouts. Conformity of behavior was the indicator of that hazard. The investment banks engaged in ever-greater leverage and risk, intending to continue until failure occurred, expecting to be bailed out. The Lehman failure was a function of conformity and consolidation, a failure from a monoculture of belief.

Differentiation creates a wide range of response to action, so it's harder to predict, harder to manipulate. A system (such as the credit rating system) which seeks or encourages conformity has decreasing stability.

WFC

In June, 2008, I called Wells Fargo as a short at $26. WFC pretended to recover, then finally collapsed to $13.74 (50% loss) in January. But I admit, I wouldn't have had the courage to stay short.

Today I pondered on how credit ratings created a "yes-man" society in the United States. As ratings grew in use and importance, more people focused on the letter of the law instead of its spirit. They took small, immediate action for their rating at the expense of long-term position. And they were ignorant of the Tragedy Of The Commons from increasing debt. Their ratings rose but not from their character or integrity, which was the intent of the original system.

This is the Observer effect - the act of measurement creates incentive to manipulate the means of measurement.

Real-time incremental risk was front-loaded into the future. The accumulation of many small risks became future systemic risk, and eventually a systemic failure as even "excellent credit" risks defaulted on credit cards, car loans, and even prime rate mortgages.

America became a "yes-man" society; a skyscraper with a rusted-out framework, waiting for collapse. The system bypassed the truly ethical and cautious, and flagged high-risk behavior as "normal" and "desirable".

Home Appraisal

Most pessimistic home appraisal I've seen so far!

Fountains Of Wayne

It came to me
Suddenly
I sat in Starbucks
For an eternity

The hours pass
The days go by

But has anybody
Really tried
To cross that line?
To get inside?

Pretenders

No, not the musical group. My Internet pals. Well, my ex-pals. Kurt, Beck, Nate, the Three Stooges, all pretenders of one sort or another. They trail me around the net, desperate to prove something, anxious to possess things I don't care about; territory, money, position, sex... who knows what? Anxious to snap up the scraps I leave behind? I don't care to know, I purged their auras for a reason. Likewise, I don't know what she intended but she showed me The Path when my pseudo-life broke down.

What matters is what we do in The Now, in the temporal space of our consciousness.

Worldwide Riots

Worldwide Riots

On Sept 12, 2007, I predicted that riots would break out by summer of 2009.
There's no riots in the U.S. yet but... my prediction still has six more months to come true.

Supernatural

I napped for thirty minutes during my trip back to Boise. Then I didn't sleep for two days. Bits floated through my mind; the layers of The Crash, debt, fractional banking, jobs, memes, her, Seattle. She called as I entered PF Chang's and took a sudden interest in my insomnia.

"Have you had supernatural strength?", she asked.

"What? No".

What was she talking about?
What kind of question is that?

She persisted, "Anything unusual happen?"

"No". Wait. Yes. I played awesome pool. In fact... yes, it was almost supernatural. I ran five balls on the break, each shot lined up the next without conscious thought. Aaron the bartender shot once and then... I glanced the blue 2 ball off one stripe, then another stripe and into the side pocket. I never made a shot like that before. I followed up with a 100 degree cut down the length of the table, then another table-length cut sank the eight. Aaron's eyebrows jumped and he asked, "Who ARE you?" and we laughed.

"How did you know?", I asked her.
"It's common in some people. Go home and sleep".
And then I realized how much she's helped me.
With the surgery, with sex, with life.

The Delusion Pandemic popped into my mind last night. Ah-ha, that's what was bubbling in my mind for the past few days. In October I'd read a medical research paper about communicability of happiness as a disease vector. I strolled around the University and downtown as I booked my flight to San Francisco. Synchronicity is real. Dom was right. She showed me The Path. If the Pandemic is real, it explains who I am and why. Why I couldn't get back on track.

I see it.

On Monday, an anonymous poster, perhaps Lochner or Doug or Nate as a subconsciously jealous joke, accused me of having no friends. That's close to the truth but I don't mind. I am who I am. If it isn't enough for others, it's still enough for me. The Real Estate Bubble was never invisible to me. We drive forward.

"Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who can you trust
With your love these days?"