The War on the Productive

This recent article by Mark Steyn, War on the Productive , makes a good point that I think many of us intuitively already knew.  I am concerned that many of the youth have spent so much time with their iPods, computers, computer games, and pampering by their indulgent parents that they have forgotten how to actually do anything meaningful and productive.  As such, many simply expect someone else to do the heavy lifting while at the same time being free to indulge in the latest hedonistic trend.

Yes there is a war on.  Not between the haves v the have nots, but more of the productive v the unproductive.  The productive always win in the end, as being loud, lazy and obnoxious is not a skill that builds anything.

Work hard and become a leader;

be lazy and become a slave.

Proverbs 12:24.

Sadly, we are becoming a nation of slaves.

What if Freedom is a myth?

Like a Dog returning to his vomit.

This video is amazing for two reasons; 1st this trader tells the truth, and 2nd his greed is palpable.  He sees the end coming (within 12 months), and readily admits that millions will lose their life savings, but also dreams of making big money from this event.  There is an answer to this craziness, but you won't find it from this man:

Shattered Dreams

Most of my life I have asked myself “what if?”  I have always thought that life can be more interesting than it already is by imagining the world in different ways.  Sadly, I came to a realization today that no matter how neat I think it would be, UFO’s and Bigfoot simply do not exist.  I know, bummer huh.

What was the impetus to this great awakening you ask?  Simple.  My cell phone.  I was messing around with it and marveling at what great pictures and movies it is capable of taking.  I got to thinking about all of the interesting clips on YouTube that people have taken with their cell phone.

And then it hit me; with literally millions upon millions of cell phones, all equipped with a fairly decent digital camera, why do we not have some decent pictures of UFO’s or Bigfoot?  Not those cheesy grainy fake pictures, or shaky movies that you just can’t make out.  I mean really good pictures.

With all of the hunters in the woods this time of year we should finally at last have a mug shot of Sasquatch – that is, we would if he existed.

Same for UFO’s.  Those alien abductions?  Someone should have by now captured someone floating out of his or her house and into a UFO on their iphone.  Or perhaps one of the claimed abducted could, while being shown the quadrant of the galaxy the aliens come from, exclaim “hey, could you stand next to the map with me while Zephod takes our picture with my cell phone?”

I’ll keep asking “what if” and looking, but I’m not holding my breath.

As you watch this, think to yourself "where are we as a country right now?"

Are you awake yet?

From Tunisia To The Justice Department: A Clean Sweep For Islam

Posted by Clare M. Lopez Oct 24th 2011 at 7:19 am in Afghanistan, Africa, Featured Story, Foreign Policy,Humanitarian, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic extremism, Israel, Justice/Legal, Middle East, Obama,Strategy, Terrorism, human rights, sharia | Comments (27)

Across a vast expanse of the Muslim world, from Tunisia to Pakistan, the forces of Islam are rising. Tunisian voters have given the Al Nahda (Muslim Brotherhood) party a dominant position in the national assembly that will write the country’s new constitution. In Libya, Chairman of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, has declared he seeks to make Islamic law the basis for legislation.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood campaigns under the slogan, “Islam is the Solution” as Coptic Christians face the worst persecution in decades. Israel just released hundreds of Palestinian terrorists with blood on their hands to ransom Gilad Shalit, an IDF hostage long held by HAMAS in Gaza.

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite dictatorship faces a motley opposition grimly determined to bring it down. With United States (U.S.) backing, the Turks have arranged that most members of the just announced Syrian National Council are Muslim Brothers or like-minded shariah-promoters.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai (the one the U.S. has sacrificed thousands of dead and injured troops and billions of dollars to defend) announced that, should it come to conflict between Pakistan and the U.S., he wants to be clear that he will stand with…Pakistan. He’s in talks with the Taliban, too (so are we). And, just to round out the neighborhood, the powerful Pakistani army commander, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, issued a warning to the U.S. about any moves against the murderous Haqqani Network long sheltered and supported by our Pakistani “ally,” becausePakistan has nukes.

Here at home, the Obama administration’s Justice Department has launched a campaign to extirpate from all training courses under its purview (FBI on down to local law enforcement) any mention of Islamic doctrine, law, or scriptures as a source of motivation for jihadi terrorism. Instructors and trainers who dared inform government students that this is exactly what the jihadis themselves assert are to be blacklisted from ever teaching on a USG contract again.

Pretty much a clean sweep for the forces of Islam wherever one looks these days.

From www.newscientist.com:

I will let this article speak for itself.  Suffice to say that if something like this is said by someone like me I am considered a conspiracy theorist - which I am not.  However, this simply affirms what most of us intuitively have come to believe.  I especially like the comment "The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power."  Duh. Do you think?

-Phaedrus

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

         19 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

         Magazine issue 2835. Subscribe and save

         For similar stories, visit the Finance and Economics Topic Guide

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co 
7. Legal & General Group plc 
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc 
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc 
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA 
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc 
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company 
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance 
41. ING Groep NV 
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP 
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA 
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan 
45. Vereniging Aegon 
46. BNP Paribas 
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc 
48. Resona Holdings Inc 
49. Capital Group International Inc 
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used