Submitted by Tyler Durden:What took Ben Bernanke sixty minutes of
mumbling about tools, word-twisting, and data-manipulating to
kinda-sorta admit - that in fact he is lost; Ron Paul eloquently
expresses in 25 seconds in this Bloomberg TV clip. Noting that "we are creating money out of thin air," Paul sums up Bernanke's position perfectly "We've Lost Control!"
Paul’s reaction to more Federal Reserve stimulus:
“It should not surprise anybody, but it is still astounding. To me,
it is so astounding that it does not collapse the markets.
[Bernanke]
said, ‘We are in very big trouble. We are going to do something
unprecedented and we believe it will not hurt the dollar.’ And yet the
stocks, they say ‘we love this stuff.’ But the dollar didn’t do so well
today and the real value of the dollar is measured against gold, and
gold skyrocketed
European Parliament, Strasbourg, 12 September 2012
Transcript: Thank you, well I begin today on a happy note, to
remember, that it is twenty years ago this very week that the United
Kingdom, having been signed up by the Conservative government to the
exchange rate mechanism, broke out of the exchange rate mechanism.
It
was a great liberation for us and of course once having been bitten we
didn't join the euro project thank goodness. Sadly the same is not true
for the rest of Europe and I thought through the last 18 months or so
that the economic logic of why Britain left the ERM would apply
particular to those Mediterranean countries and I foresaw that actually
those countries would leave the eurozone, probably with Greece leaving
this year.
But I now have to accept that I've been wrong about
that, because I have totally underestimated the complete fanaticism, Mr
Barroso of you, your college of commissioners and the European Central
Bank.
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss David Cameron appointing former bankers to Treasury. We look at another former banker who became a Treasury Secretary only to become a bankster - Robert Rubin - and his role in Citigroup bilking Abu Dhabi of billions. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Reggie Middleton about Facebook, fraud and financialization. Source
Few of the many analyses on Federal Reserve policy consider the psychology
of diminishing political and financial returns of Fed promises. Rather than regurgitate the usual economic analysis of the Fed's policies,
let's hazard a psychoanalysis of the Fed. Given the primacy of psychological
factors in human behavior, it is astonishing how little attention is paid to the
psychology of the Fed's statements and policies.
New video: Gordon Long and I discuss "Marginal Return":
Zero Hedge offered just such a psychological insight (with a deliciously Freudian twist)
with this question:
Does the Fed need to re-instill some discipline in order to regain its omnipotence?
Why (For The Fed) It Is All In The Foreplay Exactly. Subservience is a slippery slope, and if the Fed "caves in" to market
demands for a massive QE campaign, then where is the Fed's vaunted autonomy? It's gone.
By Kate Tuttle:The story of Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” starts with Naomi Wolf’s vagina. At 46, in a loving relationship, veteran of years of good sex, she
began noticing that her orgasms were less profound and satisfying. Sex
was still good, but she “no longer experienced it in a poetic
dimension.”
Eventually Wolf’s doctor diagnosed a damaged nerve, which was
repaired surgically; still, the crisis sent her on a journey to confirm
her instinctive feeling about the “brain-vagina connection” and resulted
in this book. Here, Wolf examines the history of how women and men have
regarded female sexuality, how they’ve responded to it in art and
literature, and how the personal and political coexist, sometimes
uneasily, in our feelings about the vagina.
Ecco, via Associated Press
At its best, “Vagina” attempts to reclaim and reframe earlier visions
of women’s sexuality and sex organs — Wolf writes stirringly about the
near-mystical respect accorded by early cultures to what the Sumerians
called the “lap of honey.” Her breakdown of the “[a]luring holes,
beautiful boxes, and valuable treasure chests” that serve as codes for
female genitalia in Victorian fiction is wonderful, as is her tour of
loving, often humorous references in blues songs that praise a woman’s
body for its sweetness and strength. Of the sexual revolution, which she disparages for its anti-Freudian
rejection of the vaginal orgasm (and championing of the clitoral), Wolf
writes: “The post-1970s ‘reclamation’ of female sexuality . . . is quite
mechanical. It is not about the spirit. It is much debased.” Of the
contemporary feminist stance that privileges sexual freedom, including
an embrace of pornography and promiscuity as sex-positive choices for
women as much as for men, she argues that “a nation of masturbating
people who are looking at screens rather than at each other . . .is a
subjugated, not a liberated, population.”
I don't want
to hate evolutionary psychology, but I do. I hate it. It's a field of
study that could be legitimately interesting, if it weren't constantly
being twisted into a justification for backward (and, frankly,
un-evolved) anti-feminist bullshit. Like, sure, maybe a part of me does
want a dude who could kick a rogue triceratops to death, because that
would be pretty hot (plus, hella triceratops meat!). But a waaaaay
bigger part of me wants a dude who laughs at my jokes and cooks the best
chicken wings (so good it's fucked up!!!) and will listen to Game of Thrones
audiobooks with me in the car on the way to see Ginuwine perform at a
local casino. Or, sure, evo psych dudes—maybe I'm just looking for
territorial urination and robust thatches of body hair. Whatever. You're
probably righter about me than I am. Pesky lady-brain!
So that's why this Slate article made my day. Researchers cross-referenced people's self-professed desires in a mate with the social egalitarianism in their home countries:
Marcel
Zentner and Klaudia Mitura of the University of York, U.K., asked more
than 3,000 people in 10 countries what they valued in a mate. On a
four-point scale, people rated the importance of various qualities:
chastity, ambition, financial prospects, good looks, etc.-all identified
by Buss and his likeminded peers as being qualities that only men or
only women are evolutionarily predisposed to seek out. The
researchers used a World Economic Forum measure of gender equality to
rank the 10 countries as (a) relatively gender-equal, (b) backwards but
improving, or (c) screamingly sexist (my terms, not theirs). And the
results were clear: The more egalitarian the country, the less likely
men and women were to value traditional qualities that Buss and co.
believe to be innate. In Germany, women said they'd very much like a man
who is a good housekeeper. In Finland, men were more likely than women
to prefer a mate a bit smarter than themselves. In the United States,
women ranked chastity as more important than men did. At the other end
of the scale, in Turkey and South Korea, women wanted mates with good
financial prospects and men valued good cooks.
Ha
ha, ding-dongs. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the most socially
evolved countries are the farthest away from our primeval evolutionary
priorities. That's what progress means
cthulu2016:(I have noticed that it is increasingly commonplace to consider images of
nude human beings under the age of 18 as categorically being "child
pornography"—an assumption that even non-sexual youthful nudity is
illegal.
This is an unfortunate social trend. If take to its logical
conclusion it would require the elimination of a wide swath of art
history and it has the loathsome effect of defining children as intrinsically sexual objects.
The nude child is, traditionally, the quintessential symbol of
innocence. Most people do not think of children in primarily sexual
terms. And the fact that a small segment of the population has corrupt
associations does not dictate that society must, or should, internalize
the pedophilic gaze, and make it our own.
Consider these two images.
The joke in the Esquire cover is that what is clearly innocent in
the classic Coppertone ad would be far from innocent of the girl were an
adult.
Consider how we have inverted that sensibility. If the classic Coppertone ad came out today people it would be more controversial than the Esquire cover! Some would say that it is "child pornography" and sexualizes the little girl.
By Madison Ruppert: In a somewhat surprising report entitled, “Rebuilding TSA into a Smarter, Leaner Organization,” the Subcommittee on Transportation Security of the House Committee on Homeland Security
provided a quite strong critique of the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA), even recommending that the TSA sponsor “an
independent analysis” of the now ubiquitous body scanners. The report not only calls on the TSA to investigate the health risks of the devices but it also recommends the installation of privacy filters on all of the devices. Finally, our so-called representatives have actually pointed out that the TSA has completely and utterly failed to follow the ruling in the case of the Electronic Privacy Information Center vs. the Department of Homeland Security (EPIC v. DHS) in which a federal appeals court to receive public comments on the devices. I find it especially absurd that DHS is now working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on new airport security technology when the TSA has yet to even properly address the concern surrounding the currently deployed devices. The report covers several areas of reform broken up into five
chapters: refocus on security mission, improve passenger experience and
privacy protections, eliminate wasteful spending, support private sector
job growth and eliminate unnecessary or burdensome regulations.
Germany's Constitutional Court ruled the Eurozone's permanent bailout
fund, also known as the ESM, does not violate the country's laws.
Reportedly, there is some ambiguity in the ruling that could beget more
political wrangling. Lauren speaks with Godfrey Bloom, Member of the
European Parliament and the UK Independence Party, about what motivated
the court's decision and the problems that lie ahead for the European
Union.
The police, as shown here are so gay! Robin hood is cool
compared to the police. Gives up peacefully so why does one police
person feel the need to stand on his head when robin hood is prostrate
and not resisting? GAY! Why not be more casual about it, why not be more reasonable and gentle? Because the US police are GAY! I think it is time to abolish the GAY US police state. Best wishes to all US freedom lovers from the GAY UK police state. (Gay is a Southpark reference)
TRANSCRIPT Louis James: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We are here in Carlsbad, California at the Navigating the Politicized Economy Summit, by Casey Research and Sprott Global, speaking with the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island. How can we get more into the politicized economy than that? So, can you update those who weren't here on what you said today? G. Edward Griffin:
Yes. I can't take as long, of course, and how do you make it accurate
and short? The basic thing I was trying to accomplish is to take a look
into the future, because everybody at this conference – or most people, I
guess – are concerned about the way things are changing in the economy.
They know that the old rules that used to apply – the old ideas of
American free enterprise and free markets – the rules have been changed.
We are living in a different environment now. People are wanting to
know, "How does this affect me? And my retirement and my savings? And
what kind of a world are my children going to live in?" This sort of
thing. So my job was to try and project some of these trends that we
find today into the future, and to see what's coming down the line.
Submitted by Tyler Durden: What took Ben Bernanke sixty minutes of
mumbling about tools, word-twisting, and data-manipulating to
kinda-sorta admit - that in fact he is lost; Ron Paul eloquently
expresses in 25 seconds in this Bloomberg TV clip. Noting that "we are creating money out of thin air," Paul sums up Bernanke's position perfectly "We've Lost Control!"
