My Father-in-Law, Inflation, and Speculation in Fire Arms

When my father-in-law was a young man going to school after World War I, inflation in Germany was severe. He took the train to school. One day, when getting ready to board the train to return home, he discovered that the price of a ticket had inflated so high that he no longer had enough money to buy one, and he had to walk the five miles home.

We read of this inflation and economists and particularly monetarist economics tries to interpret it; they call it hyperinflation. I will quote and article from Wikepedia on Hyperinflation, and it is sufficient to give and idea of how hyperinflation is understood:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Root_causes_of_hyperinflation

By definition, hyperinflation is a rapid increase in Nominal GDP (the Money Supply multiplied by the velocity of money) without a corresponding increase in real output (see Equation of exchange). This is often caused by decisions on the part of the central bank to increase the money supply much more than markets had previously expected, often when money is printed to finance government spending. This results in a fall in the demand for money relative to its supply, which in an extreme case can grow into a complete loss of confidence in the money, similar to a bank run. This loss of confidence causes a rapid increase in velocity of spending which causes a corresponding rapid increase in prices. For example, once inflation has become established, sellers try to hedge against it by increasing prices. This leads to further waves of price increases.

(emphasis by underline mine)

Describe for me who and for what there is spending that causes prices to increase 1000% in an afternoon.

If I fancy a boat, am I buying boats one after the other so quickly that the price goes through the ceiling? Or are the poor buying loaves of bread so fast and in such great supply (hoping they have enough money to pay the electric bill to run the refrigerator to freeze and preserve the perishable bread) that the price of bread goes through the roof?

No. It is solely a phenomenon of financial markets. The financial markets are the only locales where "spending" can proceed so quickly - recall the Dow dropping 1,000 points in 10 minutes in May 2010. It is a loss of confidence, followed by markets frantically trying to act as if the pricing system still worked: it is the classic "chicken with its head cut off". The markets "pretend" that they work properly to assign prices - although inflated ones - to goods, but that is nonsense.

Once confidence is lost, everything stops. People will continue to go through the motions for a while, but it is a charade, and an economic analysis of it is a rational exercise in understanding a charade.
At this point, the system is broken: The Government, the Central Banks, the Banks, and the Financial Markets. Nothing beyond these are broken, but the pain and suffering is widely spread.

Yet, we continue to refuse to regulate speculation which causes wide swings in food and gas and other basic necessities. We continue to refuse to install meaningful safeguards against a repetition of the Banking Disaster of 2008. We continue to focus on the wrong areas, and we do so because our philosophy and narrative is so seriously out-of-date that is has become pernicious and destructive: it is our Apocalypto, where we are captives taken to the bloody altars where we shall be sacrificed to a Religion of Destruction, to a Government of War Crimes, and to a Common Sense of Catastrophe.
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note

The classic image of a government press running overtime printing paper money as the cause of inflation is typical of our understanding, At present, the Federal Reserve is doing exactly that, yet our rate of inflation "out in the real economy" is not all that high.

Where is the hyperinflation? It used to be in the price of Housing... now it is in the price of Gold.

Interestingly enough, my research on the price of fire arms and ammunition during the period of 2008 through 2010 - when the media was reporting very large demand - indicates the prices of both goods remained relatively stabile in the areas I have researched. There was no inflation in the price of fire arms even though demand had increased substantially.
Which leads me to a quandary: how to explain that?

The only thing I can think of is the fact that there is no Commodity Market for fire arms, and, therefore, no speculators to drive up the price.

Perhaps Inflation is solely a phenomenon of certain types of goods which lend themselves to speculation. There was considerable speculation is housing during the Housing Boom. Surely there could be speculation in fire arms, but the point is that there is no such speculation right now.

Hyperinflation is obviously a Speculator and a Market; Inflation only a bit less so obvious.

Inflation is another gift and by-product of the financial markets. Furthermore, a great portion of our Economics is a Study of Wall Street and Commodities Exchanges... essentially a man thinking he is looking out a window and describing the scenery to us, while he is actually looking into a mirror... a darkling mirror.
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Class Warfare

The Republicans call President Obama's plan to increase the tax on people making over $1 million per year "class warfare".

Interesting. What do they call wage stagnation, long hours, foreclosures, unemployment, and 30 years of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, joined along the way by the middle-class? Good Times?



Temporary lay-offs! 
 Good Times!
Easy credit rip-offs!  
Good Times!
Ain't we lucky we get them... Good Times!

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Art and Intuition

 

Lord Dooku

also known as Darth Tyrranus

(the nickname provided if you are slow 

in distinguishing good from evil)

The BBC is covering the fracas between George Lucas and the fans of his Star Wars. I think this means the orginal 3 films; no one considered compos mentis could be a fan of Lord Dooku and all the vacuity of the later prequels. I mean, I think the Family Guy take-offs on Star Wars are superior to those later films. (Blast! Now I have the Muzak version of Darth Vader's Theme from the Family Guy Death Star elevator playing in my head!)
It comes down to this, Lucas has been fiddling with the versions and denying access to the original versions of the films about which the fans assert

In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire...

and so on.

There is an excellent quote by Marcel DuChamp:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14944240

In 1957 Marcel Duchamp, the philosophical French artist... gave a lecture on this subject called The Creative Act. He starts it with this thought:

"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity."

He then goes on to argue that the artist is merely the medium for his or her work; that he or she is not fully conscious of what is being produced, much of which derives from intuition.
This is a concept that I've heard many times from authors to artists, where they tell me that their words or thoughts come to them unconsciously or from an unknown source.
Building on this idea of artist-as-medium, Duchamp then introduces the idea that the audience has a vital role in validating something as an artwork:

"'The artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History."

In other words it's not for the artist to decide whether his or her work is any good, it is the job of the spectator, which in turn makes them part of the creative act.

Please note that there are elements here which closely resemble events in the history of religion as well as the history of art. So much comes from Intuition...

And it is hard to assert that Intuition is what we call an "Idea" since it is not fully conscious, if at all.

In fact, the very stuff of creation is within us and we struggle to find a proper "code" or "algorithm" that will render it fully conscious to ourselves and to others. Some of the primary codes lead us to expression in language, some to expression in sculpture, some to music, some to religion, some to physical activity such as Dance and Sports...

Again please note the importance of the Group or Community receiving the communication of the art: the audience. There may indeed be private languages, but there is no private immortality.

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Then and Now

Siefried Kracauer

Reading Siegfried Kracauer's great book From Caligari To Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film published in 1947.  In the present section, he is writing of the German films in the early years of The Great Depression, and has just finished discussing UFA's production of Mensch Ohne Namen (Man Without A Name) made in 1932 and starring Werner Krauss.
The next paragraph begins:

Times were indeed so bad that even qualified specialists could not count on re-employment once they had been dismissed.

Indeed! I have been reading of unemployed professionals - engineers and educators and more - that have been cut off from the business of their speciality for three years now. This is one reason why unemployment benefits have been extended, and this bit of largesse is - of course - under scrutiny by the conservative element.
Well, 99 weeks of benefits is a lot. Goes to show one how things really are here in Arcadia, I guess.

Kracauer picks up the thread with a discussion of Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (The Countess of Monte Cristo) of 1932, another UFA film. Brigitte Helm is cast as a film extra cast as a leading lady. While shooting at night, she drives her luxury car used in the film to a real de luxe hotel, where she is treated royally because of her impressive luggage emblazoned with "Countess of Monte Cristo".
Things happen, and eventually she is found out. With a flair for publicity, the film company soothes over things with the hotel and turns the escapade into a great front-page story which is good for everyone involved: the film is on everyone's lips and she gets a good contract.
So ends that story,

...proving conclusively what all these screens opiates tended to demonstrate: thateveryday life itself is a fairy tale.

Notice how that rings a bell: from fathers seeking to save sons who were supposedly blown away in rogue balloons to good looking people whose only aim in 2009 seemed to be to crash a White House dinner and gather notoriety from it to people exposing way too much on the interenet to flash mobs which have become so common that they are debased into looting zombie hordes.
It sounds so much like Reality TV, which itself is crudely and cheaply scripted, and is so remote from "reality" that when a member of the cast commits suicide, all references to such unpleasantness have to be removed from the film already shot... all this in order to maintain the diseased  fairy tale illusion of our modern lives.

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I Remember When...

...I first met Comrade Stalin; he was just a shlub like the rest of us, riding the subway to work in Moscow.

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Mel Gibson's Use of Violence

It was obvious that the violence in Apocalypto was metaphor for the degradation and decline of a civilization.
Mr. Gibson seemed to be aware of the fact that most of us miss the point of such things, so he put a quote of Will Durant's at the beginning to sort of point us in the right direction.

Now I have to watch The Passion of The Christ again, because I surely did not understand Mr. Gibson's use of violence in that film. The only thing I got from it was the use of the Aramaic preposition "baina"
meaning "between": baina_k wa baina_hum  "it is between you and between them" referring to Judas' payment for the betrayal. (We would say "between you and them" whereas Aramaic repeats the preposition.)
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Santa Croce

Watching Room With A View on TCM, She-who-must-be-obeyed and I pretend that "Santa Croce" is not the Church of the Holy Cross, but instead refers to the Church of the well-known saint, Saint Crochety!

So I do a Walter Brennan imitation, portraying him as gouty and prone to ill whimsies and quite cranky, ending it all with a "saints be praised!"

I like it, and figure there must be a number of male and female saints Crochety who will intercede for us, the Church Militant and Irascible that are yet here on earth.
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UBS

Once again a "rogue" trader has misplaced $2 Billion.
That much money would indeed burn a hole in one's pocket, so it's easy to see how it happened.

I believe UBS was the entity behind the latest investment scheme my local bank ran by me. I was insulated by the fact that they use a financial counselor who is so perfectly bizarre ( he pronounces the name Crédit Suisse as "Credit Sue"... I can overlook the Americanization of "crédit", but to turn the French word "Suisse" (Swiss, or of Switzerland) into "sue" is way too goofy) that were he to offer me $10 for a fiver, I would probably decline.

Anyway, two billion is a big number. Everything is big numbers these days, especially when you put them into context. Ten million seems not so big a number at first, but when you put it in the context of a Wall Street bonus to one individual in a time of poverty, unemployment, and foreclosure, it suddenly becomes astronomical.

Megabytes became Gigabytes become Terabytes; trades are sent across the world at the speed of light - or slightly faster. Disasters grow in size and the length of time it takes to recover from them, and everywhere one looks, the black swan statistical outliers are nesting next to the egrets in the marsh.

When the Tower of Babel was built, the builders sought to be like God, but it was not a matter of the height of the building: to reach the heavens where - we suppose - God dwelled; ancient men were not as stupid as all that, even though we like to pretend they were; the Tower was a masterpiece of planning, design, magnitude, and complexity, and it was in this manner the builders of the ancient metropolis of Babel sought to emulate the Holy. 

However, they experienced a serious loss of control... things fell apart... their ancient stockmarket indices dropped 1,000 shekels in 10 minutes... the irrigation grid broke down...

...and the rest is history.

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Wherein I Solve the Drug Problem

I propose a Bail-Out: just as we used Socialism to spread the cost of the financial disaster over the entire country, I propose we Socialize the profits of the Drug Trade.

Legalize Drugs, place them under strict regulation, and use the profits for the good of the entire body social, not just for the pleasure of Drug Lords and those in power whom they suborn with bribes.

The bit about legalization has been discussed before, but by politicizing it with the iconic word "socialism" we can open the doors to entire new discussions, where both Parties of the Obscure and Dull may argue about Legalization for Private Profit versus Legalization for Socialism, thereby ensuring that a committee will be appointed to make recommendations... and that is farther along than we have gotten so far.
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Skynet

SKYNET has taken over the Congress and the White House, The Federal Reserve, and is actively undermining the Euro.

The coup was to be on April 19, 2011 according to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. No atomic warheads, though. April was when the House notified everyone the debt ceiling was to be held hostage:


Posted on Friday, April 15, 2011 2:07:33 PM by NormsRevenge

CHICAGO (AP) -- Failure by Congress to raise the U.S. debt limit "could plunge the world economy back into recession," President Barack Obama declared Friday, and he acknowledged that he must compromise on spending with Republicans who control the House to avoid such a crisis.
"I think he's absolutely right that it's not going to happen without some spending cuts," the president told The Associated Press in an interview in his hometown, agreeing with House Speaker John Boehner's assessment.
Obama urged swift action, saying he doesn't want the United States to get close to a deadline that would destabilize financial markets. He said he was confident Congress ultimately would raise the limit.

Why does SOLCOM not hear our prayers and lamentations?
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More Thoughts on 9/11... and Preparing for 10/2: Nickle Mines

This was our 9/11.

       ---------- Amish leader

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting

The Amish school shooting was a shooting at the West Nickel Mines School, an Amish one-room schoolhouse in the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines, a village in Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 2006. Gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV took hostages and eventually shot ten girls (aged 6–13), killing five, before committing suicide in the schoolhouse...

 Amish community response
On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, "We must not think evil of this man."Another Amish father noted, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God."

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts."

A Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them. Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts' widow, parents, and parents-in-law...
Marie Roberts wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors thanking them for their forgiveness, grace, and mercy.

...Some commentators criticized the swift and complete forgiveness with which the Amish responded, arguing that forgiveness is inappropriate when no remorse has been expressed, and that such an attitude runs the risk of denying the existence of evil; others were supportive.

Donald Kraybill and two other scholars of Amish life noted that "letting go of grudges" is a deeply rooted value in Amish culture... They explained that the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful...

Here we see a refusal to balance evil with more evil.
By refusing to balance an act of violence with equal or more acts of violence, we avoid the risk of over-compensating, and when we over-compensate with "evil", we risk becoming evil ourselves.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/amish7.htm 

Gertrude Huntington, a specialist on Amish children, said:

"They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death. The hurt is very great ... But they don't balance the hurt with hate."

In Teacher Guidelines for Helping Youth in the Aftermath of the Shooting in the Amish School, we read:

Resist the impulse to always have an answer. We often feel that we need to have an answer or to take away the pain… to give hope when there is fear. Sometimes this is our own discomfort in seeing children suffer. Often the best answer is to reassure children that you don't know how it will all turn out OK, but that you know that the way we get through difficult times is to do it together. Kids and parents, kids and teachers, kids and their friends, that this is a time for us to all be there for each other.

Resist the impulse to always have an answer...
It reminds me of my post on Cynicism yesterday. Resist the impulse to always judge, to always force a clearly cut decision and answer. Resist the decision to start endless bloodletting. Turn the other cheek...

Turning the other cheek does not mean not resisting evil. Nor does it necessarily imply total pacifism... I only have 2 cheeks, actually, so I can only accept 2 of your slaps before other options may present themselves. We seek to restore balance, not to go so far from the port side of the ship that we begin to develop a dangerous list on the starboard side.

Let us remember October 2 is coming up, so let's memorialize it appropriately.

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Alex's Dad

Alex's Dad has me listening to Jazz! Today we experienced Horace Silver, and then The Modern Jazz Quartet. I like it. It is like discovering a new world... or a new ocean, standing on that proverbial peak in Darien and whatever.
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Tractatus Tweetus

There are books being published which consist of the Tweets of the compiler of the book... I think "author" is going too far here. The books are just Tweets. I mean, even I could look brainy if all I had to do were to write down obscure insights in less than 200 words or whatever.(She-who-must-be-obeyed nudges me here and says "That is what you do, 'though you do not always stick to exact word count.")

Anyway, so there are books of Tweets to read on your Kindle, all of which will be lost when the electric power grid fails.

This is all a result of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus...
the book is pretty much put together like a Tweet compilation.

This is an excerpt from the book Laconia
http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2011/05/laconia.html



Very Wittgenstein... or bits and pieces from the ancient Greek Poets in the Loeb Library's Lyra Graeca where the disparate snippets of lyric poetry snatched from oblivion are compiled, such as the enigmatic scrap from Sappho:

"...more golden than gold..."

I guess I mean that if this keeps up, our literature will appear to be "lost" and surviving only in unconnected scraps long before the archaeologists of the future dig them out of the ground at the level of the Kindle Katastrophe.
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