All Hail Parse & Tikhon Bernstam

And down with the running dog capitalist Instagram!

Facebook forked over a billion dollars for a picture sharing app and a couple of kids cloned it in 30 minutes and put it up on Apple, of course opened source so the world can benefit immensely from the 30 minutes worth of work.  Privately I believe all facebook operations are NSA subcontracting, so no doubt instagram has features that eases the NSA work.  All the better that there is an alternative.

That USA citizens are obliged to invest their pensions in securities that are limited by our social constructs means countless pensioners just contributed a billion dollars for facebook to buy something they could have made for free or maybe $10,000.  Hey, you gotta love capitalism.  And when all of those pensioners are eating Alpo, they can post picks on facebook of interesting ways of serving it.

People who eschew intellectual property rights and love freedom will be dining on free range chicken with beet greens and, walnuts and blue cheese and yams.  And they will post the meal with Anypic by Parse.

I work with hundreds of people starting businesses every year.  Almost all of them rate fear of intellectual property rights infringement as the #1 block to progress.  Parse has shown yet again we need no intellectual property rights regime.  It is urgent we eliminate this regime in entirely in USA.

The IPR lawyers who defend IPR now lack any moral standing in society.  We need to begin to shun them, treat them like pariahs.  They are gate keepers, assuring we are denied a constant flow of good and new.

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Free Market Money

Here is an article sent in by Ricardo on a fellow who was prosecuted for offering an alternative currency.  A couple of lessons:  the Harvard professor decrying the use of gold and silver as money points out that those times where gold and silver are most popular are terrible times.  Just so.  But what he fails to note is they are popular after the state has ruined the currency, so in the bad times hard money returns.  We are there again.

The second lesson is know that always your lawyer is a government worker first and foremost.  If it gets down to you or the state, they will always work for the state.  Always defend yourself in court.

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Three Forms Of Voluntary Policing

The questions as to who is the cop in an anarchist state is simple: you are.  If you are aggrieved, you take it up with your adversary.  If still aggrieved, you take it up with the community.  The community will decide if they care of not, and shun the perpetrator to some degree.  We have three entities that do this...

The Law Merchant is an ancient private code of conduct among merchants.  States have adopted it because it is better that anything a state can contrive.

The gypsys have their own legal system, which is private.  

Diamond merchants have a self-regulation system that has worked for centuries.

The oldest and largest organization in the world has a legal system that is entirely voluntary, the Catholic Church.

Anarchy is not lawlessness, or no government, it means no king (or today, state).  Anarchy works.

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The Iran Carpet Embargo

The United States has placed embargoes on Iranian products, one of which is carpets.

Here is an web address that once worked, but no longer, at least not from the USA.

http://www.persiancarpetexport.com/

I wonder if it works from anywhere outside the USA.  I'd be obliged if someone were to try, and let me know.

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Financial Alchemy

Plenty of people predicted where we are today, and why, as the damage was being done.  None of those people are allowed near the commanding heights. How did they know?  Because we have seen this so many times before.

One hundred years ago a Charles MacKay wrote a book people are still reading today, about the mass delusions of a century before his time.  He outlined the South Sea Bubble, Tulipmania, and what might seem unrelated, alchemy and the effort to turn lead into gold.  Actually, not so different.

Let's look at how alchemy proposed to do so. Here is an actual formula for turning lead into gold. This from Wikipedia...


It goes on, but you get the picture.    Wikipedia notes:

European alchemy continued in this way through the dawning of the Renaissance. The era also saw a flourishing of con artists who would use chemical tricks and sleight of hand to "demonstrate" the transmutation of common metals into gold, or claim to possess secret knowledge that—with a "small" initial investment—would surely lead to that goal.

Indeed!  And here are some of the alchemists 300 years or so ago working on this opportunity:

        Paracelsus (1493–1541)

Basilius Valentinus (Basil Valentine) (15th century)

Tycho Brahe (1546–1601)

Jacob Boehme (1575–1624)

Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

Johann Kunckel (1630–1703)

Count of St Germain (d. 1784)

These people were the Chase Econometrics, MFGlobal, Bank of America, Barclays, Washington Mutual, Citibank of their times.

Now consider the formula above for turning lead into gold.  And now consider some of the formula used today to turn, well, air into gold.




This is simply financial alchemy. In a hundred years, after the coming disasters which discredit this madness, and is replaced with some new madness to which people readily subscribe, our descendants will sneer at us.  And you consented to give your power to these people to control your financial well being.    And they are not done, they are doing with student loans what they did with housing, right now, today.  With the real estate bubble, at least there was actually a house, and you could walk away from it.  With student loans you'll be another unemployed MBA, and you cannot bankrupt your student loans.  You'll have nothing but be trapped for life.  If you do not understand this, you have no idea who you are up against.

Update:  After we bailed out GM, they went out and began making loans for cars to people who can not pay back the loans.  Here we go again.  Let GM die, open source all auto patents (get the state out of automaking), and watch the industry revive.

No matter what happens next, you cannot complain.  If you wanted to know, you could have asked.  Plenty of people were saying so while the damage was being done.  You ignored the warnings.  Now you are being told the next election matters.  Not at all.



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Why Unemployment is Always Voluntary

Because you can always get creative and make something out of cheap materials.   I learned that from Ted Van Doorn who came to USA in the 1950s as a stateless person and made himself rich with lots of design, inexpensive materials.  Check these out:

Here...



and Here...



If you are on unemployment or some other social welfare, and you are otherwise able-bodied, you are denying us the good of your creativity.  And creativity is something you must always work at, it's not something you can do later.  Life catches up and overwhelms if you do not keep up with creativity.

Here is Ted Van Doorn's autobiography, a fascinating read.



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Your Kid On Ritalin?

You made a mistake.  Friends of mine whose kids are on Ritalin get angry with me when I tell them I have the gift of ADD, and they made a terrible mistake putting their kids on Ritalin.  But, but, but...

Doesn't matter.  We all make mistakes, sometimes terrible ones.  And yes, you may have harmed your kids for life, parents do that.  No doubt I have done so to my kids in some way.  C'est la vie. But the time to stop is now, so other kids are not harmed.  And until we understand these drugs are wrong, we'll never come up with a cure or therapy to help undo the damage done to your kid.  And that work, undoing the damage, is a new business opportunity.

And always remember, medical records are not secret to protect you, they are secret to protect the drug companies and the government.

Here is a roundup from an MD on Ritalin like drugs:


Eric Harris age 17 (Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 in Colombine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and injured 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.
Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.
Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Thirteen-year-old Chris Fetters killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Twelve-year-old Christopher Pittman murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Thirteen-year-old Mathew Miller hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Fifteen-year-old Jarred Viktor stabbed his grandmother 61 times after 5 days on Paxil.

Fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin) a 14-year-old opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..

Young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.
James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California
Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic's file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.
Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.
Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself soon after his prescription of Lexapro had been doubled.
Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.
Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family's Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.
Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said ".... the damn doctor wouldn't take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…")
Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,
(Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself)
Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.
Matthew Miller was 13 saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty and school. The psychiatrist recommended Zoloft for him. Seven days after beginning the Zioloft samples, his mother found him dead… hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.
Kurt Danysh, age 18 and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.
Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5^th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.
A ten-year-old boy from Houston shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.
15-year-old Hammad Memon shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and "other drugs for the conditions."
22-year-old culinary student Matti Saari shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.
27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.
18-year-old Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.
14-year-old Asa Coon of Cleveland, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.
16-year-old Jon Romano, taking medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.



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Our Elders Are Wising Up

He's not the best shot in the world, but old folks will have to start to defend themselves now.  No reason they can't.   (Not sure if he needs a bigger gun or more time at the range.)

The queen has the right idea too.  When your son wants to be king, a queen sits uneasy on the throne.



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Gates & Darwin Join Forces

Following George Bernard Shaw's suggestion for getting rid of undesirables, following Darwin, the nazis came up with Zyklon B.    I believe the powers that be learned their lesson and now use slower acting chemicals to destroy populations.

Having failed to make any change in education, in spite of billions spent, Bill and Melinda Gates have thrown in the towel on education and now are getting back to their first efforts, reducing population in Africa and  Asia.  For women, for the children, all that.

The problem with capitalism is it denies us innovations to address problems because it concentrates too much power in too few hands.  Between usury, intellectual property law, and taxing the many to protect the few, freedom is so constrained that we are denied the good of all the competitors.  The Gates know their billions are safe from taxes in their "charity" as long as they stick with the program.

Update:  How come those white people who think there are too many people on the earth always work at reducing the number of people brown and darker?

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Ancient Design

Pythogoras invented a cup that forces one to drink within limits.  Pour too much, and you lose it all.   Check it out.

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David Stockman On What's Going On

David Stockman was Reagan's Budget Director until he told the truth and got canned.  he didn't care, he just kept telling the truth.  He is an example of two things:

1. Countless people saw this economic disaster coming, and said so.

2.  People whose philosophies are beneficial or know what is going on cannot be in Government leadership.

There are no exceptions to this.  Name one.

Here is an excellent review of where we are and how we got here, and what to do about it.  What he left out is the banks and consumers are doing the housing bubble thing again, right now, and worse, with educational loans.  It is worse because before at least there was a house.  Now we have java coders taking on huge debt to be come roofers, and roofers taking on huge debt to become java coders.

The really bad part is this ends in war.  Well, what goes around comes around.


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Cocoa From Nigeria

On Jul 21, 2012, at 11:41 AM, a.s wrote:

For the exercise, I did a data search on raw cocoa powder and discovered that over 50% is imported from the Netherlands. with the next source accounting for roughly 12% from Malaysia. This is a surprise to me because I am sure the Netherlands does not grow cocoa, and considering their average selling price is slightly higher than the world's average. So why is the Netherlands so dominant, I ask? Is their process is that much better than the others?

Yes, that is why we get the facts, they are often surprising.  You wanted to import from Nigeria, and you find out the product you want to trade in comes from the Netherlands.  The cocoa beans come from central Africa, but that is not what anyone wants.  They want the powder, and after it is processed by the best place in the world, the Netherlands.  Since the processing is the chief value of the product, that is the "source."  And apparently, Malaysia is another source.  My guess is Malaysia both grows the beans and processes it into powder.

As to specifically why, there the research as part of this week's lesson, should tell you why.  If nothing else, you have a question to ask your competitors and customers:  how come?

One part is the numbers you are processing right now, the other is the research steps where you google and go to the library to read trade journals etc on cocoa...  you'll find stories on "how come Netherlands.."

Also, talking to customers and competitors will tell you much...

You do understand this is not accidental...  it is western capitalism to take the raw materials form Africa and perform the added-value elsewhere.  China is giving Africans a better deal than that, so Africa is turning to China as a trade partner.  Bill Gates famously said poor people cannot afford his products.  Of course, because USA management is so expensive.  Poor people all over the world can afford Chinese products.  Countries with poor people have cheap labor too, cheaper than China.  Because Chinese has cheap management, they can supply poor countries.  Communist China is clearly doing more to lift mankind out of poverty than all of the programs extended by capitalist countries, only because China is using free market means to do so.

On Jul 21, 2012, at 12:44 PM, a.s wrote:

I do understand it is not accidental. In fact that is the trigger/impetus for my interest in trying to import from Nigeria. Now more than ever, raw materials are being processed locally for export. We need to to bypass places like the Netherlands. My challenge is trying to find where the customers are.

I disagree with the challenge.  The customers are very easy to find.  You can find a list of cocoa buyers online. The problem is getting the product right so they buy from Nigeria instead of Netherlands.  Not only do the powers that be make sure Netherlands gets the business, they make sure Nigeria does not get the freedom to have reliable infrastructure in order to get the business.

Practically ever week an American citizen gets and email from a Nigerian offering to share a hundred million somehow unethically obtained.  No one believes it, but it hurts Nigeria's reputation.

AS an importer, the customers in USA will be buying from you, not Nigeria.  No one will care if it is from Nigeria or Netherlands.  But if the quality is even slightly off, you will not recover.  Getting Nigeria to make consistently  the first rate quality will be your toughest, biggest challenge.  If you try to make same quality lower price, or lower quality lower price, you will fail.

Here again, by selling an end-user product, designed by you for USA market, you will be defining quality and product with your customers, and establishing that level anew.  The quantities will be very small, so the profits wider and you can absorb mistakes.

Trying to deal in commodity grade consistent standard product from Nigeria is to almost guarantee you will soon enough get an off quality shipment that will destroy your business and reputation. It takes generations to get to Netherlands quality, and Niger has been denied that oppty for generations.

Plan B has so many problems... Plan A I think is better for you.

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Econometrics

Let me show you a formula upon which your retirement depends.  It is called a plain vanilla greeks vega:



Understand that?  Maybe Ben Bernanke could identify all the symbols and what the stand for, but the bottom line is they relate to your property, your pension and your paycheck.  They relate to those items, but they are a formula calculating the results of a set of circumstances in the market.  Well, a market is neutral.  Circumstances are neutral.  What the formula expresses is the non-neutral actor, that is human action, in the marketplace.

Do you truly believe that the people who are responsible for your well being can reduce human action to a formula?  You have already bet your future that they can and do.

And it is not just this formula, there are all sorts of formulae, magic incantations that will turn lead into gold.  Want to see more of them?  Go here, read through, and then at the bottom consider all of the magic incantations Wall Street uses to turn dross into gold.

Let me tell you bluntly: that formula is pure mumbo jumbo, to put it politely.  Check out the swaption or the vertical spread.  In a century, after the system goes down and mankind yet again improbably rises, they will laugh at us as much as we laugh at the alchemists.  And rightly so.

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Bo Xilai and Chinese Economy

The always perceptive Sean Corrigan has an essay over at Cobden that is well worth a read.  there is one point with which I will take exception:


To understand why this was the case, consider the phrase a very senior member of the Chinese Communist Party recently employed: ‘the only two things that can threaten the regime are inflation and corruption’. So has it ever been, throughout China’s long history.

Given that, the observation that the 2009-10 stimulus delivered a massive, socially-imperilling dose of both these evils, it did not require too much nerve to hold to the idea that the relief of the monetary stringency gradually imposed (in the official markets for money and credit, at least) last year would be maintained until the fear of an imminent implosion rebalanced the scales of political calculus – above all, in this, a leadership transition year and doubly, trebly so when the Party apparat’s inner schisms were revealed with the dramatic purge of Bo Xilai and his Chongqing henchmen.

Although it may be inscrutable to Westerners, it is very likely that Bo Xilai was a victim of corrupt malefactors, and has been settled in a safe place until the malefactors are routed, upon which Bo Xilai will enjoy new found influence.  The common reading of these events may very well be exactly backwards.

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Righteous Leftists

Alexander Cockburn died, a hard left writer who had that rare integrity that had to be respected even if you disagreed with his politics.  His main outlet was Counterpunch, an online magazine which was always an interesting read.

I have a hard time reading leftists, and for that matter rightists, because so often it is just a schtick and their internal contradictions show too easily. With Cockburn and Noam Chomsky there is never a disagreement as to the facts, just an honest disagreement grounded in weltanschauung.

Cockburn had a column for years on the War Street Journal OpEd page, where I first encountered him. I was more of a conservative back then than a radical, and I'd say Cockburn's integrity helped me see the world in a more radical light.

Noam Chomsky is alive and kicking, and his book on how we in USA are programmed to have our views, Manufacturing Consent, is a classic. The process is alarmingly simple.  And a fine antidote to getting programmed.



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