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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • Bill Moyers Journal: Sharing the Blame for the Economic...

    Rated Apr 05 2009 • 2 reviews • politics • pbs.org

    Sharing the Blame for the Economic Crisis?
    Bill Moyers interviews Bill Black on PBS

    Discussing the roots of the economic crisis with Bill Moyers on this week's JOURNAL, former regulator Bill Black said that much of the blame lies with lenders for issuing "liars" loans, in which borrowers claims about their financial situation were not verified.

    Were lenders committing fraud?

    Sharing the Blame for the Economic Crisis?


    youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

    youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

    youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

    The fraud of the century by the banksters.

    Please diffuse this interview. It's the best we have to counteract...
    This needs to go viral.




    8 views
    Bill Moyers Journal: Sharing the Blame for the Economic Crisis?

  • Fox News "war games" the coming civil war - Glenn...

    Rated Feb 23 2009 • 12 reviews • economics, politics, worldviews, society • salon.com

    Fox News "war games" the coming civil war
    in Salon by Glenn Greenwald

    The week-long CNBC Revolt of the Traders led by McCain voter Rick Santelli and the fledgling little Tea Party movement promoted by the Michelle Malkins of the world are obvious outgrowths of this 1990s mentality, now fortified by the most powerful fuel: deep economic fear. But as feisty and fire-breathing as those outbursts are, nothing can match -- for pure, illustrative derangement -- the discussion below from Glenn Beck's new Fox show this week, in which he and an array of ex-military and CIA guests ponder (and plot and plan) "war games" for the coming Civil War against Obama-led tyranny. It really has to be seen to be believed.

    Fox News "war games" the coming civil war

    This is a follow-up of my last posts.
    What's being described here is frightening but we all better be conscious of what is going on if we want to avoid being caught in the inferno...
    Check the war-room videos and make up your minds.
    We are de facto entering a historical societal aberration. After any such previous aberrations passed we wondered aloud "how could such a societal barbarity have taken place?". This time around will be no different.
    This is a time to keep our eyes open and our minds quiet. The path through barbarity is always narrow. Each step counts and what matters is to keep our steps in the middle that means out of the polarities that divide our late-modern societies. Avoiding to become a barbarian ourselves will cost that much.

    The Abyss Stares Back




    1,021 views
    Fox News

  • Soros sees no bottom for world financial collapse|...

    Rated Feb 22 2009 • 1 review • economics, politics, finance • reuters.com

    Soros sees no bottom for world financial collapse
    in Reuters Reporting by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa and Juan Lagorio; Editing by Gary Hill

    Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

    Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.

    Soros sees no bottom for world financial "collapse"

    This is not just one guy. Soros is one of the most successful investors out there. And it is not only Soros. A consensus seems starting to form among economists that what is coming our way is a kind of economic tsunami that is going to inflict much pain all around the world before to stabilize on a radically changed landscape where the centers of economic power will have shifted drastically. It is my feel that the US shall be in the fore of economic recovery a few years down the road. But the daily life of its people shall not resemble what it is today. My post of yesterday about army interference within the US borders has to be seen along the lines exposed within the present post.
    With ghosts in the eyes Ilargi
    The Worst Economic and Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression Reveals the Weaknesses of the Laissez Faire Anglo-Saxon Model of Capitalism Roubini
    How to set up a new u2018good banku2019 Willem Buiter
    The return of capital controls Willem Buiter
    The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions Irving Fisher
    CAUTION: October 87 Re-Run On Deck? Karl Denninger




    5 views
    Soros sees no bottom for world financial collapse| U.S.| Reuters

  • Culture Change - U.S. Govt Prepares for Collapse and...

    Rated Feb 21 2009 • 2 reviews • economics, politics, finance • culturechange.org

    U.S. Gov't Prepares for Collapse and Disruption
    in Culture Change by Jan Lundberg


    Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington's new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s.
    ...
    Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.

    U.S. Gov't Prepares for Collapse and Disruption
    "Bad News From Americau2019s Top Spy" by Chris Hedges
    "U.S. Military Preparing for Domestic Disturbances"
    "Congress Seeks To Authorize & Legalize FEMA Camp Facilities"
    Text of H.R. 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act
    "ACLU Demands Information On Military Deployment Within U.S. Borders: Deployment Erodes Longstanding Separation Between Civilian And Military Government"
    "US Army unit deployed to home front: Nonlethal force for civil unrest"



    Brrr...
    Logical development from the perspective of the establishment isn't it? The same story has repeated itself "ad nauseum" throughout the history of power societies and this same mechanism is now being reactivated. The real meaning of the present power talk is that the establishment is thinking that the complexity of our globalized world could be unraveling...




    23 views
    Culture Change - U.S. Govt Prepares for Collapse and Disruption

  • Calculated Risk: The TARP Visualized

    Rated Feb 20 2009 • 1 review • economics, politics • calculatedriskblog.com

    The TARP Visualized
    in Calculated Risk


    The TARP Visualized


    TARP





















    Excellent illustration of the US government's economic policies...




    28 views
    Calculated Risk: The TARP Visualized

  • Into the Grey Zone: Change we can believe in?

    Rated Feb 20 2009 • 1 review • economics, politics • blogspot.com

    Change we can believe in?
    in "Into the Grey Zone" by Grey Zone

    It's February and the market is down almost 25% since Obama was elected. The major financials have lost over 30% of their remaining value since Obama announced his non-plan to "save" the banks two weeks ago. We've got people like Rick Santelli on CNBC Thursday doing a major league rant about government subsidizing 'bad behavior' and calling for a "Chicago Tea Party". Meanwhile GM seems to have written off Saab and thrown it to the wolves/creditors. And today's market is just barely above its 2002 low of 7286. That's before adjusting for inflation. The volume of wealth that is being destroyed around us is monumental and we are not going to be able to pay for everything we think we deserve much longer. In fact, at the pace we're destroying wealth, the United States will be a very backward nation in a few more years.

    Change we can believe in?
    President's Day

    youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

    and after Gibbs, the White House press secretary, fumed after Santelli and his Chicago tea party, here is Karl Denninger's point by point answer to Gibbs.
    youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

    As Jim Kunstler writes: "A creepy feeling ushers in President's Day this year as the suspicion grows that nobody in charge of anything knows what to do next. "

    By the way CNBC ran a poll on the "TeaParty", and within 24 hours over eighty thousand people said they would show up! Wow! Social instability is building fast in the US. What will come out of all that? It's anyone's guess. But it doesn't look good for those in positions of power...




    59 views
    Into the Grey Zone: Change we can believe in?

  • Tom Friedman offers a perfect definition of "terrorism" -...

    Rated Jan 17 2009 • 1 review • politics • salon.com

    149 views
    Tom Friedman offers a perfect definition of

  • The Ron Paul File

    Rated Oct 19 2008 • 5 reviews • politics • lewrockwell.com

    135 views
    The Ron Paul File

  • Reversal of Fortune | vanityfair.com

    Rated Oct 19 2008 • 5 reviews • politics • vanityfair.com

    How Did We Get into This Mess?
    in Vanity Fair by Joseph E. Stiglitz

    A unique combination of ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, bad economics, and sheer incompetence has brought us to our present condition.

    Ideology proclaimed that markets were always good and government always bad.
    ...
    We are in the midst of micro-economic failure on a grand scale. Financial markets receive generous compensation in the form of more than 30 percent of all corporate profits presumably for performing two critical tasks: allocating savings and managing risk. But the financial markets have failed laughably at both. Hundreds of billions of dollars were allocated to home loans beyond Americans' ability to pay. And rather than managing risk, the financial markets created more risk. The failure of our financial system to do what it is supposed to do matches in destructive grandeur the macro-economic failures of the Great Depression.

    Reversal of Fortune


    The past as prologue? Lining up for food and water, Louisville, Kentucky, 1937. By Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

    Laughable economic theories conceived in the chambers of academia have been circulated these last decades by the media to make us all believe that economic value rest not so much with real productions but with creations of the mind. And thus Western societies' plunge into services with finance as their backbone.

    Now that the system consecrating this artifice is crumbling its founding ideas and theories have to be extirpated from the collective consciousness. We have to size this crisis as an opportunity to free our eyes and minds of their ideological blinds.

    The last century and a half has been marked by the greatest historical robbery of our individual and vital freedoms. It all started when farmers were rushed in factories and offices in exchange of a salary which cost them their self-sustenance while being hooked into consumerism. Services multiplied while productive activities have been squeezed. The globalization of modernity that nowadays rushes the farmers of the South in factories is challenging Western societies to recourse to always more artifices to keep their system going. Increased complexity engenders fragility. What we are witnessing is the fall of a gigantic and very complex house of cards.

    Hopefully this is when economic necessity imposes on us the rediscovery of our personal and vital freedoms: the right to build our own dwelling, the right to grow our vegetables, the right to participate in local communities...




    69 views
    Reversal of Fortune | vanityfair.com

  • RGE - If Lehman collapses expect a run on all of the...

    Rated Sep 14 2008 • 2 reviews • economics, politics, society, finance • rgemonitor.com

    Lehman collapse to be followed by the collapse of the shadow banking system...
    in RGE Monitor by Nouriel Roubini

    It is now clear that we are again u2013 as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse u2013 an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system.

    Lehman collapse to be followed by the collapse of the shadow banking system...

    I have been distracted these last few months by our moving near NYC (Milford Pa) and had thus no time left for posting comments on SU. I'm still quite much occupied but I think that the accelerating collapse of the Western financial system is something so big in term of the impact it will have on our daily lives that I have to come out of my retreat.

    1. Climate change + peak resources + the side-effects of modernity are part of a process within the long time range. A financial collapse of the Western financial system is part of a process within a far shorter time frame and as such it's impact on all of us is going to obliterate our consciousness of the longer time frame crisis.

    2. The effects of this financial meltdown will not be short-lived they will be felt over quite some years to come. In short we'll have more and more difficulties to access credit and hard cash will become the rule of all transactions. The direct consequence is going to be generalized deflation. The prices of all assets are going to crash because solvent buyers are rare. If you are among the lucky ones to be debt free and holder of cash you will be able soon to purchase any kind of asset or commodity for a few cents on the dollar. If you are carrying debts you're going to become the slave of the realigned financial system.

    3. Whoever is at the helm of the state machinery will be left with the financial charges of huge state debts that the realigned financial system will collect before the state is able to pay for any other expense... This means that research and development, education, the maintenance of the public infrastructure and the social safety net will all suffer budgetary shortfalls. That you are called Obama, Mac Kain. Brown or Whatever will not change the parameters of this political equation.

    Check here what Jim Kunstler writes about all this on his blog Clusterfuck Nation.




    100 views
    RGE - If Lehman collapses expect a run on all of the other broker dealers and the collapse of the shadow banking system