Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

Speaking of propaganda....
The OSS manual on how to mess things up is strikingly similar to a lot of current accepted norms(!).

CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf

I think they gave wild Bill Donovan the CIA to slow the MIC total takeover of our country? It's been awhile...and all it did was slow things down.

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And then...a manual on how to lie and get your lies believed. FOIA stuff..and this is old news, they're better at it now.

CIAdeceptionMaximsFactFolklore_1980.pdf

How to lie.

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Of course, we are at best second to the British, who still brag about how they lied to both friend and enemy to accomplish various goals in WWII.

Remember, this is stuff they admit right out in front of everyone.

The Darpa total information awareness program - rejected a few times by congress till renamed enough - has been going on a long time too. Here's the next step under Mr Peace prize.
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-darpa-mas ... works.html

They don't even hide it, just depend on us being lazy. Don't need conspiracy theory here - these are stated facts by the actors themselves.

Highly reccomended reading if your BP can stand it.

[Rex Allers]

Hey Doug,

I send my best wishes that your medical issues get better.

As for keeping your chin up, I get the idea, but make sure nobody is swinging at you. I may be biased. Some years back I kept my chin up just before a bicycle crash and broke it in three places.

I know we shouldn't get too political here but one thing you mentioned a couple posts back caught my attention. Actually I think what follows is more factual than political but versions or myths relating to it are constantly brought up in the political realm.

In your conservative footnote you mentioned, "spend less than you make".

Well, yes. That's sensible and ergo makes sense. But when the US government or a rep says it, its actually a bulls**t excuse.

Expanding, it is true for: you and me, our city, our state. But strangely for the US government spending more than "we take in" is a logical sounding, often cited lie.

The distinction? The US dollar is fiat currency. From Wiki's first sentence: Fiat money is a currency (a medium of exchange) established as money, often by government regulation, but that does not have intrinsic value.

The US govt has the ability to create any amount of money at any time with a few keystrokes. That ability is obvious for anything military that we want to do. But what about a decent health care system, or continuing Social Security, or benefits for unemployed during Covid? Um, we have too much debt, not sure we can afford that.

A few years back I learned of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The little I knew sounded like a scam. But actually I now see it is not so much "theory" as observation of how our financial system really works. As a reality check, I suggest that arbitrarily creating too much money will have effects, and if they are negative you should stop. I don't think we've ever gone close to that yet except maybe the military funding.

So I always believed the logical story that the US is in debt and we can't afford that. Then I heard of MMT and this paper is what changed my mind.

http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/p ... s/7DIF.pdf

That's the best version I could find. For most efficiency, you can skip to the labeled page 9 (as copied below) and read on.

--- OVERVIEW
Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy

1. The government must raise funds through taxation or
borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government
spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.

2. With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden
to our children.

3. Government
budget deficits take away savings.

4. Social Security is broken.

5. The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes
away jobs and output.

6. We need savings to provide the funds for investment.

7. It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher
taxes tomorrow

----
Hope I didn't overstep with sharing this here. I really think it is more factual than political.

[Doug Coulter]

No problem - but we should talk about financial theory in "trading markets" where it fits better. What I want to avoid is the current CRAZY blue vs red crap. I'm sick of the made-up "news" and fake grievances and...just the heat and lies.
It seems a distraction from any resistance to the idea that both are just parasites on the body politic now, don't even run things - it's more and more clear that the unelected do and just use the pols for figureheads, and it's all become a self-licking ice cream cone jobs program for losers.

I'm well aware of MMT and have my own theory and understanding involving fiat, its velocity, world reserve status and so on. Like it or not, MMT is being tried, roughly speaking.
I suspect we're going to get some lessons on the results.. "and no one could see that coming"

Well, this is what's always happened with coin clipping in history.

And other issues....
for example -
Due to automation and increasing efficiency in some areas - we really no longer need a large fraction of people to work to produce the stuff we all need - and most of what we want.
As someone who has run a business, it's also true that you're better off without some people working there - they produce little or even negative value.
Capitalism - that thing we used to have before whatever it is we have now, some kind of oligarchy based on crony capitalism? Winner take all by the big boys - I was lucky my biz worked in a niche they didn't care about - does not know
how to handle this one - but there's no obvious alternative, every other system has far worse results and far more coffins are produced. (I'm not anticapitalist, not hardly, but that doesn't mean there aren't some issues).

Think of the absurd extreme, which is less absurd by the decade:
We finally could build a few factories, lights out, full automation, that make everthing needed - we almost at the point of that "Star Treck" economy being possible. Hooray!?
But who's going to build that - realizing that when no one has (or needs) a job. there are then no paying customers to justify the expenditure.
Fail.
How do we get there form here? A lot of smart people and I have worked on that one, but the first hint of a red team tears down any suggested approach so far - and we've been thinking about it for decades.
And of course, "things and stuff" aren't all the human animal needs - we need purpose, we need other touchy-feely things like affirmation. We have human nature, and any scheme that assumes people will just start "acting right" if
we educate them WILL FAIL, is failing, has always failed. We're human.
Any plan needs to handle that.

Now that is something I'd love to get in a discussion - where it fits. Maybe someone has a better idea, you never know - and I'm all about good ideas. It's been said of one side of the aisle that they want to hear ideas, but then are shocked that any but their own even exist - and have to be shouted down. That ain't me.

Since ultimately "follow the money" has yet to be anything other than verdicial - maybe the markets section fits some of this better. Money is a market thing, after all.
Yes, governments can deficit spend - as long as the supply of bucks stays in the same proportion to the supply of goods and services, it's balanced. Go too far beyond that and you have inflation, which is a f-you tax on everyone, and generates a need for a military to run a protection racket worldwide- the old might makes right deal, with a better marketing department.

Go ahead and start a thread over there, and we'll see how it develops.

[Bob Reite]

Social Security is not "broken". Once the boomers die off, the ratio of retired to working will be back to where it was. Medicare is the real problem. When Medicare first became law, medical expenditures were only 2 something percent of GNP. Now it's 25 percent! Ticker Guy predicts that by 2025, Medicare will be broke, and any attempt to fix it by "printing money" will result in a Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe hyperinflation where everyone loses.

[Rex Allers]

Doug,
Thanks for the suggestion to move to the "trading markets". Sounds good but I don't think I really have the chops to discuss with any finesse so I think I'll just let it go. I just wanted to offer that paper link for anyone who wasn't acquainted with the basics of MMT.

I personally wouldn't want much of the bandwidth here to be taken by this sort of stuff. Plenty of other good sites for that.

Bob,
Anytime I hear about Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe hyperinflation, I immediately think purposeful hyperbole. And if our system is really spending 25% of GNP on Medicare, it seems it should be obvious something needs fixing.

How come most other countries are doing so much better at providing medical services to their citizens? We need to remove the extraction businesses from the medical systems. Insurance, big pharma, etc. All the scum middle men and profiteers.

But can any of this get fixed with our two-flavor oligopoly? Unlikely.

[Doug Coulter]

There certainly is a lot of storytelling going on about these things....
Neither welfare for old folks program is likely to end or even change a lot. That 3rd rail thing. A way will almost certainly be found. Even the self-funding of the theoretcially sounder SS has been a joke since the government ended keeping it separate and just dumps it all into the general fund. But somehow the checks come.

I should reproduce some of my recent medical bills. It's as Belk says. What used to be a multi thousand dollar bill still is - but after "Adjustments" and "other considerations" and a couple hundred from Medicare, there are under $100 left for me to pay, net to hospital/doctors is about $250 - for what was a $2000 bill originally - and what they used to try to get me to pay, Of course, they are still trickling in, but it looks like even some pretty intense care - far above and beyond what my friends in Canada and UK say they'd get (yet another BS story our there is that outfits like NHS are good) - costs less than my SS check for this month (and mine are on the small side/poverty level - under $1k). That's two stays in emergency rooms/critical care with every diagnostic test there is - a couple I didn't think of myself. The radiology bill for the cat scan and the chemical stress test with isotopes was under $300 net to the hospital, only part of which is billed to me.
Either that or the bill I was sent it complete and utter fiction and perhaps government is really giving the hospital more - and generating that "medicare is going to break us" line that way.
Really, it's the meds as far as I can tell, and I'm lucky to be on all generics that are dirt cheap. That is an issue, and importing them from say, Canada - same stuff but their government forces negotiation (isn't part of the crony system with pharma) works if you don't mind bending the law a little.

The nordic countries that do have decent state health care,,,,they're dropping back as it was funded by things like north sea oil, which is going away. In other words, we preemptively take your national wealth and redistribute it before you see it, and call it government largesse - in reality the government creates nothing but rules - there is no "them" that pay for things like this, it all comes outa your pocket one way or another, with some maldistribution of who gets the bills, admittedly - but still, not "them", it's US. The oil rich countries in the ME have or did have pretty good programs for their mostly in poverty people - those 25 or so families donate a tiny fraction of their oil wealth to hold off revolt.

In the US we call that "Welfare" but IMO it's also paychecks for those clerks who do nothing but do their nails and maybe stamp "no" on some permit request; you probably shouldn't even need permission to do whatever on your own land. How much value does that person really generate? Isn't their job just a way to keep them out of other trouble?


Based on our Baghdad bob reporting with an agenda, I'd bet that things like the costs and viability are kind of skewed. FWIW, you can have some serious inflation - we do - without it going full Weimar. It was over 100:1 in the last century.
Whoever gets to touch the money first - the top end of the Gini world - doesn't care. Inflating away debt, most of which was printed into thin air to start with - is not a new thing. Kyle Bass quoted Bernanke talking about handling all the bad debt by "we'll just destroy the dollar" - and the Fed has. The only reason certain things are cheap is military action, and the greatest scam ever pulled. We get other countries (like China) to send us real things - some are even high quality like the new tooling I just bought myself for my birthday - in exchange for bits we just say exist - no printing needed, those zeros are easy to add via the old computer accounting.

Wasn't it Henry Ford who said something like "If the people knew how banking worked, there'd be a revolt tomorrow"? As I learn more...whoever said that was right, modulo how hard it is to get people to put down the beer, cheetos and pron and get off the couch - just because we have a new opiate of the masses, doesn't make it less powerful.

The GDP calculation is utter BS - government spending - which was either extracted from real production via taxes, or printed into thin air - is added. Its not additional, it's at best redistribution. With hedonics, the cost of living has become the cost of surviving. Beef goes up? Well, we'll just remove that from the calculation and substitute chicken. Numbers for medical, well, see above - suddenly it's a lot cheaper than before, by the wave of a pen.

As I research and find actual facts - which are thin on the ground, I find that most of what people assume must be true is a "story" that would embarass all but the most accomplished liars. But since they are now mostly just useful idiots who have been taught to believe the supporting falsehood, they don't even realize how they're merely advancing the "narrative" - see tha tlink above, it's important, especially since by executive order (BO) it's now legal for the government to lie to its people.
FASB rules now allow banks to mark bad collateral to whatever they want. In a fractional reserve system, that means they can lend against nothing, not the usual 10:1 (at last count it's over 35:1).

It's not all bad news - somehow it works anyway (until it doesn't?). My thesis above that it really doesn't take but a fraction of us being productive to make it all fly isn't based on no data(!). The rest appears to be a jobs program for those who would have made even more trouble otherwise. That's the real basis for the socialism/welfare in this country - but things work better if you make them at least pretend to work, as idle hands are the...you know the rest.

This is making the rounds, it's not photoshopped, and yes, CNN is known to be out there. But it's just a matter of degree, if you want ot know the news, it's better just to do your own journalism. It's one reason I was boosting google+ (which still works, they just made it harder for new people to join). I have some great stories to tell from that - but the upshot is that most of the grief of the world is governments created, the people seem to get along just fine when it's one on one. And we mostly kind of know this - it's an underlying dissatisfaction that leads to unrest for any proximate other excuse.

I leave you with our new Bagdad Bob....you should see the memes out there today on this one - "the titanic made a watery but mostly peaceful voyage" or "Japanese tourists visit Perl Harbor".
https://youtu.be/LKrL9GO1JuA?t=7

[Doug Coulter]

Added, - noticing the severe inflation we have - reported or not, is a big part of why I went off-grid and invested in tools, rather than crap.
I live darn well on $874 a month income, and that's how. No bills other than phone/internet (no cel, no call waiting, caller ID etc - just the bits, maam).
The amount you get depends on what you paid in as taxes, and I managed not to pay much. It also depends on when you start, and I started early.
Food...is still pretty cheap if you cook, and I'm a good cook.
Power - kind of free, I have to keep it working.
Taxes are nil as I never got building permits. I pay for things like auto insurance and tires. I got newer reliable vehicles a long time back...I barely have 50k miles between two of them.

Shop materials are mostly scrap and discards from others. We sure do waste a lot in the US - it's a real good idea sometimes to just stand by the trashcan and pick up everything from metal to appliances to furniture. We call the dumpsters the local recycling center - if it's good, people leave the stuff outside the box. Bill F of course has donated tons of goodies from various places as well. I have bought some expensive things - back when I had money - which have turned out to be decent investments - I'm not running out of toys, not even close.

[Doug Coulter]

I enjoyed this recently declassified Russian film on Tsar Bomba. The world's quickest large area snow remover (really, it's amazing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJhZ3i-HXS0
I was grooving on the Russian practical approach to data collection - nice mechanical scope cameras, cool old radio transmitters, the TU 95 with it's counter rotating props and so on. Well made documentary.

Now I'm going to have to find a way to get an old Physics Today magazine online. At one point much later, a meeting was arranged between the Russian and American nuke scientists, techs - and spies, to rehash old times and what actually happened...it was fascinating. And not much like the public was told at the time (no surprise). If I can put my hands back on the physical copy to get the date and so on, maybe I can find a link to it online. It'd be a heck of a job to scan in all the cool stuff - a bunch of the articles were really good, and the ads for the now-old scientific gear are part of the experience.

I didn't embed this video as you should just go there to watch it, and turn on the captions (the audio is Russian).

Not a good weather/energy day - I could drown on the way to the shop.

That low power Pi-4 build was "on time"...less need for generator is a good thing.
I can play with my birthday present tomorrow - I got myself a quick change toolpost and other goodies for my lathe...I'm kind of improving that thing, not a refurb as it's not worn out, but it just wasn't quite super good from China to begin with. Has potential, though - it's a good copy of a South Bend as far as I can tell.

[Doug Coulter]

I haven't been able to put my hands on the physics today hardcopy yet. But I DID find out what issue it is - and a link, sort of: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.881526

I say sort of because while they say that during this Covid lockdown, it's all available to all who register, that appears to be a "nope" -hence the DOI (pay and pay and pay) in the link.

I wrote them to complain..."GoodLuckWithThat". Perhaps a reader here can find the Nov 1996 issue of Physics Today or figure out how to pry the articles out of their website?

It's jam packed with revelations on how development, spying, and a bunch of side issues actually happened, far different than what we were told - and told by the people who did all those things themselves. Really good stuff.

I''ll keep looking, but like I said - the whole magazine is worth it. That's a lot of bits.

Here's another link...not that it gets past the table of contents - at least you can see what they're saying you can have free, but then not letting you. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/49/11

[Doug Coulter]

Got'em in my hot little bit box - those who won't be stopped...can't be. It's going to take awhile to upload what's probably a big copyright issue....stay tuned, it's worth it.
Will probably wind up in the data section - I'll stick a link here when and if.
Follow the blue...
I found the "Seeing Joe in a rain barrel" especially interesting, as my Dad began his career at NRL and knew all about this - and told me. I used the trick myself to see Chernobyl (easy...the creek was hot, no tricks required) and I believe Fukushima (barely - about a count an hour after heroically reducing 200 gal of water from a rainstorm that formed there and dropped here, and after building a really big lead castle to keep out the background). At that low level you could (and Carl did) dispute what I think I saw, but it was something.

Given my little bit of experience working in the "intelligence community", what they say here jives with how the people I knew "held their mouths" - the attitudes, how things were done, a separate story for those really in the know, those who just needed "lucky guesses" but didn't need to know where they came from, and the public. Yep, it was like that. In fact, it's a great example in how to interpret some of the BS that's now told by those guys. I guess I used to be more of a useful idiot then than now.