Friday, March 16, 2012

high tide


The USA seems already to be taking on the appearance of a post-oil economy with growing poverty, mad politicians, pointless wars and a huge divide between the ignorant rich and the resourceful poor. Many are moving to New Hampshire and elsewhere where they can start living independently. Gold and silver is being hoarded, weapons purchased and new skills acquired. House prices have plumetted and the current government continues to develop George Bush's post-9/11 version of socialism. Collapse is in the air. So the latest story coming from the US is both weird and understandable. It's all about Tide, the detergent!

This from Whiskey and Gunpowder, essential reading for anyone who wants to survive over the coming years!

Money Laundering (by Means of Laundry Detergent)
The story from The Daily swept through the Internet with blazing speed. The report: Criminals around the country are stealing an inordinate number of bottles of Tide laundry detergent. This is not because the criminals plan to go into the laundry business. There is not a "grime wave." It seems that these Tide bottles are functioning as a store of value, even a form of money, within many black markets.
As the story memorably puts it, on the street, Tide is known as 'liquid gold.' Harrison Sprague of the Prince George's County, Maryland, Police Department says that his undercover agents are asking for drugs but being offered Tide instead. They are busting drug rings and finding more blue liquid than white powder.
To be sure, some news outlets are raising some questions about this story, pointing out that Tide theft doesn't seem to be a national problem. For my part, I have no problem with the credibility of the report. In fact, it seems entirely reasonable that new forms of currency are popping up in black markets. This is why stores are starting to add anti-theft devices to the bottles.
The driving force here is a war on the dollar. Carrying around vast amounts of cash raises questions among the authorities. It is increasingly difficult to "wash" the money through the banking system. And in any case, dollars are always losing value. So it makes sense to look for other ways to facilitate exchange. This is hardly unusual. The digital economy is getting ever better at bartering services and software as an alternative to letting dollars change hands.
But if we are to think of Tide as money, that means its use goes beyond the barter stage. People aren't acquiring Tide to wash their clothes, but rather to trade for other things, like drugs. In a limited sense, then, Tide is being used to facilitate indirect exchange. That is to say, it has become a money.
Actually, there are many conditions in which alternative monies can come to exist. You can see this among kids when they trade candy following Halloween night. The kids will gather and first begin to barter, but as the trading term continues, one candy will emerge as the one to get -- not to consume, but to trade for other things. For a brief time, one candy will emerge with monetary properties. As trading comes to an end, that very candy will be demonetized and re-emerge as a consumption good.
Money is frequently reinvented under the right conditions, emerging from a commodity currently in use. Cigarettes become money in prison. War zones become hotbeds of currency competition too, in anything from liquor to matches. Throughout history, money has taken many forms, from shells to salt to animal skins. The usual qualities of a commodity that economists say make for good money: durability, divisibility, high value per unit of weight, uniformity of quality (fungibility), recognizability.
Tide doesn't qualify in every respect. However, it is durable in the sense that it doesn't spoil. It is divisible. The tamper-proof top provides a measure of security against counterfeiting. True, it's not as good as a precious metal, but traders aren't worried about that. They are just looking for some marketable commodity that can take the place of the dollar, which has become extremely risky to use for blatantly illegal purposes.
The government's war on the dollar as a means to fight the drug war wins nothing in this case. So long as there is a market, so long as there is demand and supply, there will be pressure to come up with some means to make indirect exchange possible. Or so Ludwig von Mises explained in his treatise The Theory of Money & Credit, written in 1912, at the dawn of the central banking age.
One major problem is Tide doesn't have a stable supply, so its value as a means of exchange will be subject to inflationary pressures. The more that enters the black market, the more its price falls relative to the goods and services it can buy -- the inflationary tide could rise and rise.
But as you think about it, as bad as Tide might be as a currency, there is a sense in which the dollar is actually worse. It costs less to print on linen than it does to make a bottle of laundry detergent, meaning that the dollar is more likely to be inflated into oblivion. And whatever is wrong with detergent, if the price falls low enough, the producer doesn't have any reason to keep making it. Profit and loss signals govern how much is produced. Its physicality alone imposes some limit -- and this is not the case for the Fed's data entries that it calls money.
The monetization of Tide demonstrates something critically important about the institution of money itself. Its existence in the market owes nothing to the government or some social contract. Its emergence, as Carl Menger argued in the late 19th century, grows out of market exchange. Selecting which commodity is to become money is a matter for entrepreneurs and market forces.
No central planner -- even one within the black market community -- decided that Tide should become money. Also note that Tide is produced entirely privately, which provides an indication of what could be true of all money today. We don't need government to select it and make it. The market can handle this just fine.
There is a final lesson to observe in this case: It is sometimes asserted that only government is smart enough to be able to select, make and manage monetary affairs. Surely, private parties can't handle this job, and the attempt will just lead to chaos. But this is not so. Private markets can do all these things, including juggling many different currencies in competition with each other and managing the price relationships between them. This goes on in the developing world all the time, with even young children learning the math and workings of the currency market.
The biggest problem Tide money now faces is a security issue. When you see the armored car driving up to the local Walgreens, you'll know that they are working on getting the problem solved. The sight can make us all nostalgic for the old days when our official money was something at least as real and useful as laundry detergent.

Friday, March 09, 2012

lessons from the usa




Taken straight from Whiskey and Gunpowder.


Whiskey & Gunpowder


by Brandon Smith


March 9, 2012



How to Become an American Extremist...In Style!






For most of us in America today, childhood was a time of vast and unassailable dreams. What we could become, what the world could become, was limited only by the strength of spirit setting aloft our ideas, and this strength, as all young people instinctively know, is infinite. While the possibilities of the future seemed boundless, few of us, including myself, ever considered “political extremism” as a viable lifestyle decision. Astronaut? Maybe. Filmmaker? Sure. Enemy Belligerent? Not so much...






Frankly, history has proven over and over again that the majority is usually wrong about most things. Groups and collectives do not create, or discover, or advance humanity. Only individuals are capable of this. All great concepts begin as seeds within independent people, and then spread like wildfire as they educate others. A society that strives for artificial normality and collectivist harmonization is a society on the verge of chaos and death. Only free hearts and minds give man hope of survival.






In my view, that which is extreme is NOT that which violates the boundaries of “normal” society, but which violates the boundaries of inherent truth, and conscience. In an honest society, an extremist is someone who denies the universal foundations of existence, and tries to play demigod in a fantasy world of moral relativism and rationalized criminality. A disjointed freak of nature that seeks to impose his twisted will upon others. Unfortunately, “normal” society is not honest. And the honest definition of extremism is not the most popular amongst the frothing elitists that reside over the functions of our political structure today.






Life is a bummer like that...






So instead, why not embrace the label that the establishment is so keen to pigeonhole us with, and make it our own? I have found that the less I care about the critical eye of others, the more free I am to change things for the better. Certainly, by any standard of our current national leadership and by the throngs that support it, I am an extremist. Luckily, this does not concern me. It is not important to be accepted by the mainstream, it is only important to remain objectively correct in one’s position. In the grand scheme of the world, to be a thorn in the side of so-called “proper society” is a sure fire path to a life without regret. America was founded by undesirables, and built by non-conformists. We are a nation whose blood is thick with defiance and outright knock-out revolutionary badass anti-authoritarian hostility. We cut kings down to size.





At least, we used to...







In modern America, it’s not nice or pleasant or practical to approach political problems with the attitude of a radical. That puts people off. And there’s nothing worse than having people not like you, right? Better to play the game and hope that a better world will simply materialize out of the ether. Don’t rock the boat, especially when you’re in it...






For those of us in the Liberty Movement, this passive approach just doesn’t satiate our ravenous hunger for the bizarre. And by “bizarre”, I mean honest. Our time here is short, and usually ugly, and filled with people and circumstances and disasters and biases and abhorrences and painful moments and sometimes smells that we would much rather not deal with. The least we can ask for is a little truth. If I have to be confronted with crusted wheezing gas-bloated nightmare figures like John McCain or Joseph Lieberman, men who would label me a terrorist if they could, then I should be allowed the satisfaction of a concrete fact or two before I am shipped of to the nearest Halliburton run military sanctioned prison facility for re-education and naked dog-piling (which these men seem to particularly enjoy).






The truth is the first and greatest sin in the dark pestilent pit of any active tyranny. I recommend it highly. Seek the truth, and ye shall be fined...or jailed. This is the first step towards a glorious career as an American extremist, and living such a lifestyle can be fun and exciting, if one follows these simple guidelines:








1) Make A Ruckus






Identify the imperative issues of the day that most people don’t want to be confronted with........and then talk about them constantly. But don’t just talk about them; talk about them intelligently and with an informative stance. That really drives the willfully ignorant crazy. Make your position and the facts behind it visible in the mainstream, through writing, videos, protest, graffiti, bumper stickers, tatts, whatever...






The establishment’s first line of defense is not necessarily to suppress the truth, but to keep it on the fringe of society, out of sight of the average citizen. Your job is to shove the truth in people’s faces, so that they are forced to at least acknowledge that it exists, even if they don’t want to accept it.






2) Laugh At Petty Authority






Most authority in our modern world is, really, only petty authority. True authority is fostered by a sense of respect that is earned through leadership by example. The greatest authorities are those who teach, not those who command, and political governance is null and void if that governance was attained through subversion and lies.






Of course, this view is a proven fast track to the nearest solitary confinement cell, but hey, living such a rock ‘n roll flavored “extreme” existence is not without risks...






Extremists recognize that a dishonest politician is only a conman in a nice suit, and nothing more. They recognize that a law enforcement official that has no regard for Constitutional liberties, or for human decency, is just a gun toting goon in a badge and costume, and is not due any more respect than a common criminal. They see alphabet agencies as extensions of a system that no longer holds any principles beyond sustaining its own wretched existence, and rightly look down upon those who would sell out to such cancerous bureaucracies for a paycheck and some undeserved prestige. They laugh at such people, because in the grand scheme of things, these “great pillars” of our nation are, in fact, tragically ridiculous.






3) Refuse To Be Pegged With Arbitrary Labels






I once entered into a debate with a long time Democrat over the painfully farcical presidency of Barack Obama. After discovering that I held the same exact views on George W. Bush, he became frustrated and nearly infuriated, because he could not place me into a preconceived political box. He complained that my stance could not be readily categorized, and this interfered with his ability to argue with me.






I replied.... “Good! That’s exactly the way it should be!”






Extremism itself is an arbitrary label, whose definition is shifted by those in power to fit any person or group that happens to get in their way at any particular time. However, to take this label and make it ours, we definitely can’t allow ourselves to be affiliated with hollow and meaningless political parties like the Democrats or the GOP, not to mention all the prefabricated and shallow philosophical platforms they engender. Every problem and situation should be approached as new, and should be dealt with using social and legal methods that WORK, as opposed to those that happen to follow a particular party line. There should be, at bottom, as many political viewpoints as there are individuals, not only two homogenized standards that we are forced to choose from in the hopes that one will be “less destructive” than the other.






4) Prepare For Life Without Window Shopping






A surefire way to become an extremist today is to suggest preparation for any kind of disaster. For the average American, there is no such thing as a tomorrow without Happy Meals and Nikes. To suggest the possibility is akin to dancing naked on the freeway with a Gadsden Flag. Despite the fact that in countries across the planet setting aside goods for survival is as common as mowing the lawn here in the U.S., many in America can’t fathom adopting such habits. This is because many still believe that the system will protect them from harm no matter what happens. The “extremist” thinks differently.






He realizes that there have been too many instances in the past when government was not helpful to those in the midst of catastrophe, and in some cases, was even the cause of greater harm. He seeks to remove his dependence on this system, and procure the insurance necessary to help himself if the need ever arises.






The Federal Government has seen fit to identify the mere act of prepping as a sign of possible extremism, so, let’s get “extreme”, shall we? I would rather be extreme and alive, than a non-threatening and law abiding corpse.






5) Build A Terrifying Gun Collection






If the contents of your house doesn’t scare the living hell out of your yuppie next door neighbor, then you aren’t an extremist yet. Time to pay off the layaway on that 50. Cal!






Firearms ownership is a widespread American pastime, and is growing by the month. However, there seems to be a misconception that this pastime is about our “sportsman’s heritage”, or self defense against local crime. Nope. That’s not why the extremist stockpiles an arsenal (an arsenal is defined as however many guns you happen to have when the ATF shows up at your doorstep). He owns scary guns to defend against rogue governments and the rise of the totalitarian dynamic. Freaky, I know...






Forget all this sportsman nonsense! We own weapons to dissuade oligarchy from getting comfortable on our couches! Our concern is not the wildlife...






6) Question The Accepted Reality Of Everything






You can’t be an extremist if you believe everything you hear from the TV. Actually, you can’t be an extremist if you believe ANYTHING you hear on the TV. An extremist takes absolutely no stock in what the mainstream media says without further investigation, and would rather be caught dead than caught parroting talking points from cable news broadcasts.






Is a certain philosophical or political position suddenly considered “common knowledge”? Be suspicious. Is a particular methodology or debate point appearing in every journalistic outlet at the same exact time with the same exact one sided narrative? Time to pull out the B.S. detector. Is a politician opening his mouth and talking? Have a shovel handy...






The extremist’s job is not necessarily to be contradictory just for the sake of contrariness. It is, though, his job to be critical, discerning, and discriminating against that which doesn’t hold up to the light of candid examination. While there is always room for a certain amount of “interpretation”, ultimately, if a circumstance rings false, it must be exposed. Period.






Even if that exposure is harmful to the state of our country or our culture in the short term, deceit left unchecked in the long term is the single greatest destroyer of entire civilizations, and is absolutely unacceptable, especially to the extremist...






I think it is clear that extremists in an environment of despotism are in most cases people who refuse to abandon that which makes humanity whole. We are, indeed, dangerous, but only to those who would do liberty harm. A life of conformity is a life wasted, and a life of slavery is no life at all. Whatever we may be called today, what we leave behind is ultimately what defines us. Labels are irrelevant.






If I am an “extremist” because I refuse to participate in the delusion that is America in the new millennium, then so be it. I am more than happy to join the long list of insurrectionaries who inhabit this nation today and who have been the legitimate makers of the world for generations. Everything in history revolves not around governments, but rule-breakers. They alone decide whether humanity will live tight in the fist of the authoritarian machine, or live free in the wilds of unbridled independence.
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british boys






There's something special coming out of Bristol right now, the fantastic Marmalade Sky. With their memorable anthemic songs and mod style they blast everyone else off stage at the moment. As Dan ambitiously declared at the start of their Louisiana gig last night 'We are the Future!'

You know I'm good at tipping bands and if you'd taken my advice over the last few years you'd have got to see Plan B, Enter Shikari and Mumm-ra well before they got, respectively, too bland, too big and broken up ...

The Louie is probably my favourite venue. In all my years in bands I've never played anywhere so small. I've been in bigger living rooms! Last night was fun but too many people missed it!

Their next gig is at the Cooler in Park Street on Good Friday. You will really doing yourself a big favour if you get to see them whilst you still can. But be careful, if you're a bit delicate or wimpy keep out of the moshing area!
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