I remember when I used to create artwork for punk, indie & rock acts and the guy that sat across from me used to play electronica with Mckenna talking over it. I heard it a lot and for years I thought he was annoying & insane [both Mckenna and the kid that sat across from me lol), yapping about drugs and aliens... it seemed absolutely absurd.

... Almost a decade later I took a couple of puffs of the real magical adventure and I've listened to Mckenna probably a few times a week for years

Those puffs of the real magic dragon, the real genie in the bottle, the real portal to other dimensions will make a person sensitive to petty monkey human judgements and though I have forgiven myself for being judgemental of Mckenna, I will always remember that I had been. Be gone monkey judgements!

Have I mentioned how much I like reading pieces by Thomas Frank?

He had a piece in the Guardian two days ago about the Podesta emails and it's just brilliant. Excerpt:

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

Most organisations claiming to be non-partisan are using that term in a very Orwellian sense anyway.

Yap, Judicial Watch strike me as a bunch of blowhards, yet I still applaud their effort in trying to bring to light some of the illegalities HRC has been engaged it.

Yap, the cops killed Terrill Thomas.

Yap, wheat and rye, mostly. Some maize. It's been a week since the last snow fell, but it remained cold enough to maintain a thin layer on top of everything.

Those wind turbines on the second picture were in the process of going offline. There's hardly any wind at all. Solar panels are working splendidly though, cloudless sky all day and perfect working temperatures.

Oh my god shut your yapping fucking faces no one cares what you have to say you regurgitating marketing automaton.

Game looks cool.

8:18 – "Germany is very financially responsible".

The clip makes a few good points, twists others and omits some central issues. But I want to comment on the quote above most of all, because it forms the basis for all kinds of arguments and recommendations.

The claim that Germany is financially responsible stems from what has been paraded around domestically as the "schwarze Null" (black zero), meaning a balanced budget. Given how focused most economic debates are around the national debt or the current budget deficit, it shouldn't come as a surprise that not running a deficit evokes positive responses in the public. If there has ever been an easy sell, politically, it's this.

However, it's not that simple.

For instance, the sectoral balance rule dictates, by pure accounting identity, that the sum of public balance, private balance and external balance is 0 at all times. In case of Germany, this means that the balanced public budget (no surplus, just a fat zero) requires a current account surplus of the same size as private savings – or an accumulation of private debt. For someone to run a surplus, someone else has to run a deficit. In this case, foreign economies have to run a deficit vis-á-vis Germany, so that neither the German government nor the German private sector have to run a deficit.

The composition of each sector is another topic entirely, but the point remains: no surplus in Germany without a deficit in the periphery. If everyone is to be like Germany, Klingons have to run the respective deficit.

My question: is it financially responsible to depend on other economies' deficits to keep your own house in order? Is it responsible to engage in this kind of behaviour after having locked yourself into a monetary union with less competitive economies who have no way of defending themselves through currency devaluation?

Second point: capital accounts and current accounts are two sides of the same coin. If Germany runs a current account surplus of X%, it also runs a capital account deficit of X%. Doesn't explain anything, but it's the same for the countries at the other side of these trade imbalances. Spain's current account deficit with Germany meant a capital inflow of the same size.

Let's look at EuroStat's dataset for current accounts. Germany had run a minor current account deficit during the late '90s and a small surplus up to 2003. From then on, it went up, up, up. Given the size of Germany's economy within Europe, that jump from 2% to 7.5% is enormous. Pre-GFC, the majority of this surplus went to... yap, PIIGS. Their deficits multiplied.

Subsequently, capital of equals size flowed into these countries, looking for investments. No nation, none, can absorb this amount of capital without it resulting in a massive misallocation, be it stock bubbles, housing bubbles, highways to nowhere or lavish consumption. Michael Pettis wrote a magnificent account (Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73) of this and explains how Germany handled a similar inflow of capital after the Franco-Prussian war: it crashed their economy.

As Pettis correctly points out, the question of causality remains. Was the capital flow a pull or a push?

The dataset linked above says it all happened at just about the same time, in all countries. It also happened at the same time as Germany's parliament signed of on "Agenda 2010", which is the cause of massive wage suppression in Germany. Germany intentionally lowered its unit labour costs and undercut the agreed upon inflation target (2%). German employees and retirees were forced to live below their means, so the export sector could gain competitiveness against all the other nations, including those in the same currency union. Beggar-thy-neighbour on steroids.

Greece overshot the inflation target. They lived beyond their means. But due to their size, it's economically negligable. France stayed on point the entire time, has higher productivity than Germany and still gets defamed as the lame duck of Europe. Yet Germany, after more than a decade of financial warfare against its fellow members of the EU/EZ, is hailed as the beacon of financial responsibility.

Mercantilism always comes at the cost of others. And the EU is living proof.

Keynes and others made the same argument against the Treaty of Versailles. You mentioned how that turned out.

Folks did in fact learn from that mistake, but after everything is said and done, it was the Soviet expansion that made the case. Germany was the frontier and to turn it into some shithole or even a failed state would have made it worthless in the struggle against Soviet expansion. Germany was expected to a) keep them in check, and b) serve as a prime example of how much better life is within the realm of capitalism. If it hadn't been for T-34s in Berlin, I'm not entirely sure we would have been treated as favourably as we were.

In any case, even after much of the debt was written off, the remaining payments were stretched out over decades, so as to not be too much of a drain on the economic development of the country.

Still, it's not the same with Greece. We only torched half the continent, but they dodged their taxes. That's a million times worse, it seems.

While we're on the subject of tax evasion: Luxembourg alone accounts for about €20b-€30b a year of lost tax revenue in Germany. Yap, the tax system implemented by none other than troika member Jean-Claude Juncker is more of a drain on the public budget in Germany than Greece could ever be.

"Dirty Harry (Schtung Chinese New Year Remix)":

Erhu: Hou Shih Chieh
Keyboards: Johnny Yim
Percussion: Tung Tang
Guzheng: Morton Wilson
Chorus: Jaxqueline Fu, Mazy Yap, and the Lok Sin Tong Primary School
Rap: MC Yan
Chorus Lyrics: Chantal Sun
Programming & Mix: Tung Tang
Produced by Ann Yeung & Tung Tang
Executive Producers: Morton Wilson & Hans Ebert
Mixed at Schtung Music Ltd, Hong Kong.

Available on 'D-Sides', I'm told.

Spiegel now reports of an NSA branch called "Follow The Money".

Guess what they do...

Yap, they collect information about international money flows and feed them into their aptly named database "TracFin". 84% is said to be credit card related data, though VISA again claims to know fuck all about it.

TracFin also includes everything they extract from SWIFT, which was something we predicted during our protests against the program in 2009. They publicly shamed our movement as being driving by paranoia, yet here we are. Again. Strictly enforced data privacy... my ass.

Yap, it's spam. VS account name uploaded this, YT account name uploaded this -- same thing.

*ban

Yap, the pole collapsed.

And here's the real question. Name one current product based off of any hypothesis/theory that was posited and proven by 'Creation Science'. Too hard? What about any process, maybe based on the geology or biology research.

Read the above link.

That link does not provide evidence of any usefulness of "creation science" it simply mentions that some real scientists are also creationists. I think what Hatsix was asking for was if there has been any progress made because creation was assumed or discovered via actual science. Lets say a creationist that solves a particular problem in biology because he or she used creationism or "creation science" instead of, or in addition to, just, well... science.

At present, the very best we have seen of "creation science" are rather pathetic attemps at poking holes in evolution by people like Michael Behe who keeps yapping on about how something is "too complex" to have evolved. Even if these people had been completely successful of bringing down Darwin once and for all (they arent even close), that wouldnt be ANY help whatsoever to actually justify calling it "creation" science (or intelligent design).

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by ReverendTed.

Women's monthlies follow the lunar calendar.

I can see Lunar Yap being a euphemism for yonny.

And yeah. Romney and Ryan do torment my vagina.


>> ^critical_d:

I Torment My Lunar Yap