The Ultimate Comfort Food

They look wearily out from the seafood display at Coles, eyes slightly sunken but nevertheless fat and shiny. And it's the best bargain on the floor, Atlantic salmon heads for 5 or 6 $ per kilo. They are at peace after a hard life crammed into pens and fed nothing but cylindrical pellets, shot across the water from gunboats, for which they do battle at close quarters, pectoral to pectoral, while the smell of urea wafts up from the bacterial mats beneath them on the sea floor. None could have known a good night's sleep in their lives but it's still better than the world outside. Occasionally there are storms, or seals break through the nets and escapees swim off freely for the first time. But soon they discover the truth of Orwell's slogan; “Freedom is Slavery!” for there is nothing to eat out there in the wide world that looks or behaves like a fish meal pellet and they find themselves completely at a loss; growing gaunt and fading slowly away even in the midst of plenty. Enterprising locals hook or net them while they are still prime; they will always strike at a pellet. Farmed fish are too fat anyway and the west coast Indians of North America before the white man apparently felt the same way about fat fish but for more practical reasons.

A real wild salmon is a pelagic fish which means they swim freely anywhere most of the time except during the spawning season when they congregate at the mouths of the great rivers and are easily netted. The fish stop eating when they enter fresh water and battle their way inland against the current for as much as 500 kilometres to their spawning grounds, following memories and impossibly diluted scent trails to arrive at the gravel beds where they were born. When it is all said and done they die and wash up on the shingle where predators and scavengers of all stripe take them coming, going and gone. Skunks, ravens, eagles, bears, lynx and cougar- transfer their nutrients to the surrounding forests which grow giant trees like nowhere else in the world. But somewhere in between, the skinnier and exhausted fish were caught, smoked and dried by man for winter rations and there were major trading routes by which these were packed all the way back down by the inland people to trade to coastal tribes. The trade must have been an unimaginable hardship. The Indians would have stuck to the higher country as best they could, for along the river trenches the huge igneous mountains, thousands of metres high stabilize at murderous grades as was noted by uncounted Chinese labourers who later perished in the Fraser Canyon while building our road and rail infrastructure. And the Coast Range continues all the way north to Alaska, borded by the ocean and the rivers pour into the cold, deep fjords which are absolutely perfect for....salmon pens!

The Norwegians were just the people to put them there; provincial governments are always suckers for moneyed big-mouths from out-of-town, bearing gifts. It hasn't done the hugely important wild fishery any more good than the forest industry however. In early spring the eggs in the river gravels hatch and the fry begin their journey to the ocean, growing en route in waters fertilized by the bodies of their ancestors. Beset by increased water temperatures, silting and faster run-off they nonetheless arrive at the salt water and the pens, where disease is rife. The farmed fish are fed fungicides and antibiotics to control disease, and unprotected exposure means a high mortality for the young wild fish. Worst of all are the sea lice that swarm around the pens and an attack by two or more is enough to kill a salmon fingerling. But the permanent residents have been coddled along in hatcheries and aren't put out until they are relatively large and strong. As for their own feed, as a cold-blooded organism they grow at a fairly economic yield around 1:10. We take everything so for granted, as if wild salmon or the tenfold mass of baitfish, and bycatch that make up the captive's rations is unlikely to have had any other traditional takers in the food chain. But a shortage of seals has turned killer whale diets to smaller and previously unnoticed creatures; specifically sea otters whose own diet was sea urchins and now the giant kelp beds are being decimated by the same. They were the nurserys for the young fish of so many species, including wild salmon. Who would have thought that other creatures near the top of the chain might be essential in maintaining balance and productivity on our behalf. But in the antipodes there are no wild salmon so farmed fish are all we get. Although the same pellets and chemical brews sustain them North and South don't worry, or at least take comfort - it was worth the sacrifice.

                                         Comfort Food – Fish Head Chowder

Take 3 large salmon heads as fresh as you can find, which should be about $5 worth and carefully scale anywhere that has been missed. Rinse and put them in a medium pot, cover well with water and bring to a boil. When they are cooked but still intact remove from the broth, cut away and discard the gills. These have a very unpleasant texture and if you don't get rid of them early you never will. Return the heads to the broth and meanwhile cut a large potato into thumbnail sized cubes, and a large onion to a similar size. When the heads have fallen to pieces completely and the gelatinous bits separate easily from the bones you have gone far enough for the moment. Allow to cool somewhat and remove the fins and a lot of of the bones with a fork. These are surprisingly plentiful but so thin they are almost insignificant in terms of the mass of meat and gelatin you are getting for your money. If you let the broth cool now for later use, a fork will stand up in it.

Add the onion and potato and go on cooking until these are tender. Add basil, black pepper and any other sweet herbs like marjoram or chopped fresh parsley that would be nice with fish keeping in mind the milk hasn't yet been added; and to make something truly wonderful add an optional large handful of cooked and shelled prawns. Add the better part of a litre of whole UHT milk. It's only a dollar a litre on special and is revolting in tea or coffee but here it is perfect. Add salt to taste – you have left it out until the end so the meat and vegetables will tenderize more quickly and it should still be just the right temperature to serve. With a loaf of bread this will make a capital meal for at least 3 people. Serve in a large bowl with a small saucer alongside in which to spit the endless bones of infinitely varied shapes and dimensions; not suitable for small children. Too bad for them - somehow we are wired to measure proteins - not necessarily as a flavour so much as a feeling of pure pleasure and this has it all.

Logging the Tarkine: Lapoinya, An Australia Day Special

Having honoured those inexplicable, rare people who do wonderful things without pay for the public good; we mostly follow through on the day with an orgy of self-congratulatory chauvinism, frog tupping and ferret racing.  In Bermagui a coffee shop owner put a sign in the window 'Open on National Dickhead Day' and many patriotic souls deluged him with threats of violence and death; as if eager to prove his point, yet he did a roaring trade nonetheless.   I stayed home and celebrated with some long- neglected work on a frog pond, organizing stones and relocated a smallish tiger snake my wife had inadvertently picked up in an armload of trash; my duty of care to her and the frogs.   Next day was also about unpaid work for the public good.   I joined the forest protest at Lapoinya; but no medals for standing between the task at hand and the rights of honest men to an honest living.

It must have been disappointing for the media with nothing like the old copy of hard-hatted bogans damaging cars with sledge hammers or cat-calling “Shree Minerals yes! Greenies No!” at creaky, earnest old pensioners like me.   Perhaps I might commission a commemorative t-shirt, just to remind people.  Send your orders in and enjoy at least some of the satisfaction you might have found sporting a genuine “Free Manson” one.

The police intercepted three of us on the road down into the coupe, probably the only cleanskins who by then hadn't yet received our warning and 90 day exclusion order and having failed to even approach the roadwork we could do little more than waste a few moments of their time.  Politely and professionally they read their script, took the obligatory names, rank and serial numbers, and recorded a short statement of our motives. At the mention of Ta Ann my interrogator explained that the logging was NOT specifically on their behalf and it would also produce eucalypt sawlogs and blackwood for Britton Brothers.   We were strolled off the premises; hardly a Cooke's Tour of the coupe but from what I saw I think he has been badly misled.

It's a regrowth forest that was logged sixty years ago and has a very beautiful mix of tall straight regrowth gums and worthless blackwood that may have grown up or previously escaped logging.  It's the sort of place to which Forestry Tasmania occasionally brought naïve visitors to prove their scorched earth policies had a happy ending.   A large landing has been cleared and there were five little eucalypt logs that had been set aside, the ends already opening up in the sun. In the walk up and back I saw only one possible Cat. 1 euc. sawlog, barely more than a butt.   The blackwood all looked like paddock trees or worse; contorted and filled with long-dead branches.  When I was salvaging timber I used to get a lot of good blackwood shorts and split timber because the crown millers were very fussy.   Many of these are probably reject trees from last time and if they had to mill this stuff, the Britton Brothers would puke.  So would I if I had to mill virtually ANY of it as salvage or otherwise– all the eucalypt is too young; small and hence unstable.

It is exactly the same stuff that the Forestry Tasmania brains trust in the 'nineties thought we country sawmillers could process successfully via their mad dream of twin sliding saws on a single shaft; cutting equal 1 or 2 inch flitches simultaneously from both sides of the log by which it might remain straight for the next pass.  Unfortunately eucalypt timber is normally cut on the quarter, with growth rings as close as possible to right angles to the plane of the board, which is towards the heart to impart stability as moisture levels change.  And that requires a bigger tree.   Although the log might have tended to remain straight, the useless boards would have come curling off like barrel staves,and cupped into the bargain as they dried.  

 Even then most of us understood the game was over.  There would soon be nothing and for a few years thereafter when the Hampshire satellite mill was in operation we were taunted by the passing truckloads of perfect young logs, just like these at Lapoinya; skinned and split for woodchips.   It would have taken another fifty or eighty years to become real timber and our overcommitted forest service couldn't wait. Woodchips are now and forever.   It's a global problem – you don't see truckloads of good logs anywhere now in the developed world nor do you see legal truckloads of good logs in the third world.  In western Canada they call them 'pecker poles'.   There are very few jobs in the industry there either.  Although conifers are relatively stable and perhaps as little as two or three 4x2 building studs or even small floor joists come out of a log in an automated mill, most of it is for chips.  The lumber contains the heart and is alright for home building for Joe Average, just not for schools or other government contracts.  And when the Burnie pulp shut down they continued to make paper for a while with better quality imported spruce pulp from all the way over there.   It came in looking like big stacks of watercolour paper, which didn't suggest we should have much confidence in the Howard government pulpwood plantation schemes.  And wonder of wonders those all fell over later in spite of massive subsidies by the public through taxes foregone.

The problem is that between clearing for agriculture and the age-old marriage of political influence and corporate greed we have been cutting our forests probably five or ten times faster than old growth could be replaced.   Selective logging was a necessity when it was being done with oxen but it wasn't good enough for corporate bottom lines and what the hell, there was all that waste that would otherwise be left on the forest floor and could be turned into a whole new pulp and paper industry that would bring new jobs and massive capital expenditure and wouldn't impact on existing...yada yada... But it turned out that woodchip producers had to compete too - customers didn't like the rot or charcoal or bark in defective logs or ANY of the crap from the forest floor.  And to maintain volumes it was necessary to shorten rotations to the high growth phase of a tree 'crop'; back from say 150 years to as little as 40 or 60 and down to 17 on our pulpwood farms. And with each rotation and subsequent burn the crap from the forest floor along with the soil structure and the topsoil itself is destroyed and 40 % of the necessary chemicals for fertility go up in smoke or run into the ocean with the winter rains.  Having been a farmer for a while I can guarantee that trees are NOT just another agricultural crop.   If you treated farmland the same way you would be walking off after three rotations and hunger would be our lot before the kids ever went off to school.   Our grandchildren may be out of the forest forever on a similar logic.

And so in the Lapoinya coupe there are virtually no desirable mill logs yet and there may never be.  Some might be stockpiled as such and FT can tot up the contribution to their legislated quota even while it breaks up and rots away unwanted on the landings and the brash know-nothing Paul Harriss can hold forth and probably replace the Forestry people who did know something and walked away in disgust.  Because there is the one option that it was all about anyway – these are great peeler logs.  It's a relatively new market and luckily we are paying an Asian timber company tens of millions of dollars a year to take them off our hands and process them with local labour. It is in that last we set ourselves apart from little third world nations like the Solomons or Vanu Atu where 'big men', crooked bureaucrats and politicians are simply paid off, the companies rip the heart out of their little islands and are gone.  And if they aren't transfer pricing any profits out of the country rather than pay tax; they are stupider and more upright than reputed, or than everyone else in business these days.

The operation here smacks of desperation.  Somehow the experts got their figures so wrong that we are having trouble finding half the peeler logs that were thought to be available and now we pay 'compensation'.  Have the people responsible lost their jobs or gone onto greater things?   Generally the latter which says a great deal about just who we all are. Or worse was the whole fiasco engineered for personal gain regardless of pending impairment to public finances.  

http://www.tasmaniantimes.com.au/index.php/article/ta-ann-forestry-tasmania-and-the-loss-making-take-or-pay-contracts

To dig down and make sense of it all is not easy – the FT annual report is available but detailed figures are simply not there. What is the domestic peeler log or any actual royalty for instance? The first at least seems to be protected by the old 'commercial in confidence' saw by which our leadership hides their secret malfeasances with industry on our behalf. However a 'back of the envelope' calculation for a perfect world might be 260 thousand tonnes maximum times maybe $40 per tonne equals about 10 million dollars. In fact we supply a miserable 147 thousand tonnes (a 100,000 tonne plus shortfall) and pay out at as 'compensation' at least double the maximum royalty revenue that might have been achieved in a perfect world!  Even if it was possible to follow the money trails to the bitter end without the authority of a Royal Commission there is a question of whether the criminal code would be adequate nor do we hang traitors from lamp-posts or put heads on spikes for the forest ravens.   It's just part of the deal; when the government is involved, moral hazard stands commercial logic on its head.   

When Gunns Ltd. gave me the flick along with dozens of other contractors, firewood cutters and other small business people there were no tears or compensation, we just had to move on. We just wouldn't be 'big men' in our village any more and better get used to it. That's how it used to be in the real world, but what rankled most was to see so many of our elected reps vying to be seen shaking hands with that pusillanimous little hillbilly who was going to acquire a 'world class pulpmill' for Tasmania.

Some of us had figured out early in the piece the unpalatable fact it could never happen. Something that large would have sucked up virtually all the Tasmanian forests could deliver via natural increase and in that particular place would be hamstrung by cartage costs which are calculated on a per tonne/kilometer basis. State royalties were already being used to subsidise distance to the processing point by which pulpwood royalties for the Burnie mill were reduced to peanuts from as far as the once magnificent Bulgobac coupes on the edge of the Tarkine.  Add wear and tear on transport infrastructure, the cost of financing a billion dollar plus loan, the ups and downs of the commodity cycle; and the pending glut of plantation wood on local and world markets, the state government was going to have to come to the party with unaffordable subsidies and loan guarantees.   And the frightening part of it is that the lemmings were busting to take us all over the fiscal cliff if only they personally got a job out of it and elected officials and their appointees were willing to string them along like fools.

It's good to remember how it was and everlastingly is on Australia day.  There is always that annual outpouring of patriotic republican fervour and a hope we might transcend our present limitations if only we were on our own.   But we are anyway.   Perhaps the monarchy is irrelevant to our supposedly modern nation and maybe some of them are dunderheads.  But the nice thing about them is that with a hereditary position they can endure their 'noblesse oblige'; they are beyond corruption and the petty power plays that are the preserve of liars, bounders, sociopaths and eager glad-handing little nobodies who lust after the limelight of public office; those who most need to be numbered amongst the winners will sink to whatever it takes.  Would a republic make any difference with coal miners lining up to carve into the Liverpool Plains or Galilee Basin or the gas frackers compromising water tables and geological strata the world over, losing on average 4-8% of production into the atmosphere (80 times worse than carbon dioxide) even as reports come in of the warming Arctic Ocean bubbling out methane like seltzer water in places? If true and trending we will blow through the 2 degree supposed limit in little more than a decade. Will the Trumpish fool of the president we are likely to elect serve us better than Howard, Abbott, Rudd, etc.? Recall we almost had Joh Bjelke Petersen by acclamation. I couldn't give a rat's in this context.

At .8 degrees and an 'unprecedented' el nino I thought much of the state would begin to burn this year and spent the spring putting mains water lines underground and standpipes about the yard and sheds, sold over half my sheep which had already eaten the place flat, put the rest onto the hopeless hay crop and installed a large water tank that can be hooked to the water system at a moment's notice. So my productive capacity for the year has been cut to less than half, and last 48 hours 3 inches of rain suddenly arrived to green my paddocks for a week and destroy the harvest of better situated cropping farmers nearby who have dams and irrigation to grow poppies and such which were on the verge of harvest.  Modern agriculture is unlikely to survive a 2 degree temperature increase, in which case neither will our civilization.  The world population will settle, fast or slow at fewer than the billion souls in a past, pristine world who nevertheless struggled violently against each other for a hundred centuries before fossil fuels, super phosphate and industrial fertility.  Or is there some miracle (definitely not the Paris Agreement) by which can we avoid the apocalypse?  Or maybe even hang onto a paternal government and tiny amounts of nature for it's moderating effect and genetic reserves in the face of our exponentially growing demands for more of everything and above all money at any cost?   Who can tell.

This timber thing gets in the blood - our whole species just can't stop - and if the logs and loggers and machinery are all gone not too long before my 90 day exclusion finishes I will go back to Lapoinya with a permit and poke around.   If someone else like me or the firewood cutters don't get in first I will chip the bark of each blackwood still lying wretchedly in the dust or mud and one or two out of a hundred might just be that ugly but special tree that Brittons couldn't be bothered with.   It's the treasure at the bottom of the garden.  If I find it I will cut it up on the spot and carry off flitches and blocks that are exactly right for people I still know – who make veneers, guitars, turnings, carvings, sideboards or the beer coasters that define us as a tourist destination- or even do something with it myself one day.

Ponzi Empire Update August 28 -

The good news is coming in spades; the Chinese have arrested the journalist responsible for their market crash,and he is charged with all manner of mischief; 'market manipulation' and spreading general panic with fabricated lies. How lucky for the incompetent Chinese Communist Party to have a handy supply of capitalist running dogs and their 'agents provocateurs.' And in the west, the New York Fed governor has delivered joy with his cryptic statement that the long-heralded September rate hike is no longer 'compelling' and share prices have responded accordingly. Market manipulation is not a crime when engaged in by the authorities. But there is a downside to these things; the expectation means that having now been discounted by the market, official cancellation of the hike will be treated as a non- event on the day and to the surprise of all, the market will stand logic on its head and resume its downward slide. It's such an old story; buy the rumour, sell the news.

If any market bull out there was actually smart enough to have sold at the peak and has cash reserves to redeploy he would NOT throw it into the flames of high volume panic selling. But it had to come from someone somewhere with very deep pockets. A cynic would reasonably assume the US government has spent tens of billions to stem the tide and almost all the disastrous drops have now been repaired, but how much ammunition is still available? Those buys also have to be unwound at some point.

Technical analysts would have noted the 'gaps' in the pell-mell downhill sharemarket debacle which are the overnight drop by which miserable closing indices are fondly recalled relative to the even more dismal openings next morning and they nearly always herald a reversal that will 'fill' the same. And the reassurances of those in the public eye with most to lose prove wise; those brave and smug souls who held the fort have recovered most of their notional losses. And so the universe unfolds as it should in a bear market and it's called 'the ladder of hope.' That means that each upward blip is heralded as the resurgence of the bull market and there is a short term notional reward for the brave souls who kept the faith.

Then it reverses to new lows at which the same folks swear that if it ever comes back to that last high, that missed opportunity, they are going to get out, but then there is yet another reversal and the manic- depressive 'ladder of hope' continues all the way to the bottom. At which point there is

a. no money to mount a new assault on Mt. Improbable

b. no interest in doing so and the charts flatline like in the Intensive Care ward when all is lost, at which point recovery is no longer 'Mt. Improbable' but a dead cert. (one day) And then fortunes will be made by those with long memories, cash and self discipline.

This is a great opportunity to panic but that may not be obvious for some days or weeks.

Sept.10 Update:Charts

http://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2015-09-08/Bulls-Set-To-Be-Tasered-Again-By-Imminent-Severe-Downleg.html

The Entirely Unexpected Crumbling of the Ponzi Empire continued

"Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four―

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more."

"As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man―

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:―

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire." From 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' by Rudyard Kipling

And so it has come to this. Kipling had it pegged over a century ago. After all that zero-interest rate manipulation of the world economy to maintain the 'recovery' for the last 7 years, this is the direction of CCC ie. junk -rated corporate paper yields – that's the cost of money for corporations deemed most at risk of default; now 16%. Twelve months ago it was 5% and things were looking rosy according to official statistics; Janet Yellen gave her coy assurances, recovery was on track although rates wouldn't be lifted until the time was ripe.  And now the market has decided the wizards have maybe just lost control although the Irving Fishers and Joe Hockeys are johnny-on- the- spot to soothe the fearful.
They claim(ed) that all the conditions for prosperity are in place and there is nothing to worry about.  

"The stock market has reached a permanently high plateau." Irving Fisher, 1929

But there really is something to worry about and it's not the sharemarket so much as the bond market.  Since bank account returns were/are zero or less in some cases (you are CHARGED to keep your money in the bank), all bonds, especially junk was very much in demand amongst savers seeking some kind of a yield.  They hedged risk by buying into ETFs (exchange traded funds) in which they didn't need to fear just one corporate bankrupcy; the ETF owned a BUNDLE of this stuff, and you could trade in and out of your ETFs very easily. Unfortunately there is very little liquidity in the underlying bonds which have to be added or subtracted to the inventory of your fund according to investors cashing in or out. And of course as ever-reduced corporate circumstances are super-charged by fear, yields must rise as sales or purchases of existing bonds compete with new issues. Thus a 7% hit per annum reflecting on the total capital value over several years is a fast trip to poverty for your 411k or whatever you call the saved assets that will see you through your old age. And if you think you don't own this crap, your super fund probably does or barely better- rated, seeing as they are competing with each other to headline great quarterly results.

And none should forget the 2008 debacle where ratings agencies lost most of their credibility, having been paid for their efforts by the borrowers themselves and inexplicably failed to downgrade that debt even when the companies were technically insolvent and it was too late. Once again the taxpayer manned-up to ensure the stability of the global financial system and the silver-tongued wizards mostly hung onto their jobs; most famously amongst or regarding mortgage providers. And so there was one more heading for the British schoolboy's copybook; Dutch Tulip Madness, Mississippi Bubble, South Sea Bubble, Crash of '29, Hitler's Defeat in the East, End of Empire, Savings and Loan Disaster, and then U.S. Housing Crash. A page or two follows each, sometimes only a paragraph will suffice.

Exacerbating the whole affair is the chart of world sharemarkets, vaguely the inverse of junk bond yields. That means many more corporations are coming onto the list of notable downgrades. Even gold-standard industrial shares like Caterpillar was down 25% before the latest swoon.  (Luckily for Burnie we no longer depend on them.)   At some stage CAT will certainly be joined by loss-making speculative marvels like Netflix and with the decline of the real market leaders faith will die and yeah, this be the beginning of the end times when all shall be lost, for there is nowhere for interest rates to go but up where the real market leads and no-one is fit or crazy enough to borrow the banker's free (to them only) monies beyond the walking dead who have nothing left to lose but their credit ratings.

It is only now that the West has actually begun noticing; disaster has been the lot of the BRICS, Cypress, Greece and finally China which puts the whole mess suddenly on our own doorstep. And for Greece the rest of Euroland is throwing new money down the rathole each time a payment comes due. 'To give them time'; but it isn't the Greeks who are being saved, it is the biggest banks in Europe who had noticed an anomaly in bond yields over the EC average, ie. Greek debt paid higher yields on all that free money and they are loaded up the wazoo. When the smoke clears all those derivative contracts that protected big bondholders will be humongous new debt, owed by bankrupt counterparties.

The ancient Greeks had their own headings; and knew that hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis and nothing much can be done about it other than bitch and write tragic (unfunny) plays about people who fall into holes of their own making. But with the intellectual backing of the best and brightest at the US Federal Reserve, its associated institutions and the economic grunt of all Euroland behind modern Greece maybe it was going to be different this time, and prosperity would come to stay on their little, used-up peninsula.  Had not the world's bankers graduated from fraudulent coin- clipping and banknote printing to fool-proof high- speed computer- algorithm- hedged 50 -fold capital leveraging honestly designated as debt (which all currency is acknowledged to be these days) rather than something (anything?) more substantial? And by generating so much money and charging so many smart bankers with flinging it out there while it has some value could the whole world not enjoy the pleasures of exponential growth and consumption brought forward? Why not the folks in Saloniki?   Like they had done in Dublin (there's a missed heading there) and they want to in Burnie and Irishtown (Tasmania) at any cost when pigs shall fly.  But that won't crimp anybodies' election campaign, and the bankers didn't get to put the money out there, their trading divisions were pleased to get it instead and wrote those same derivative contracts knowing the EC would never let a member down.

Prognostication is such a gas. 'The seven headed beast shall arise from the sea,' 'how art the mighty fallen!'  But to make it stick there has to be a sweetener that people can apply to themselves; 'the meek raised up,' the other infidels or iniquitous confounded, the chosen people attain to the land of Israel, North Dakota or some hellhole relatively better than Damascus or Los Angeles.   So there is a slough of books out there about the coming religious come economic catastrophe which really gives me pause. If all those morons foresee disaster maybe I should hedge for the same old by sticking with the one sure-fire recipe for the ignorant which we all are at our core.  There is just too much information out there and the worst category (that never made the Dick Chaney taxonomy ) is the 'unknowns thought to be knowns.'

The formula is so simple.   In love, business or investing always target the unloved.   Your chances are better if only because your entry level risk and outlay is relatively very low and you have little to lose but your self-respect.

And the trouble with Biblical Prophecy and the like is that it is only obvious in retrospect, which is not much use. 'The sea shall deliver up its dead' could mean the resurrection of  all us munchkins for another bite of the cherry or just stinky global warming-delivered gigantic methane farts from icy muck on the freezing bottoms of the deepest oceans that will tip the planet into a human-free Venusian hell-world.  There is quite a discrepancy here so these things would be good to know. The cold war soviets were involved in all manner of think-tank operations, psi-war and metaphysical research that would keep them ahead of the west, and of course the CIA had to match them wherever and however insane. They also decided to analyze the bible as if it were an actual piece of secret code to be broken and perhaps thereby discover something concrete to work with.   Many thousands of hours of supercomputer calculations with billions of iterations generated a lot of English phrases but most were as cryptic as the original book. The only one that was truly close to having spoken to us in our time was “Bobby, don't go to Dallas.”

That's probably my joke, but nothing is certain these days.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3450566-if-history-is-any-indication-junk-bonds-and-copper-are-telling-us-exactly-where-stocks-are-heading-next

And for a really good analysis of the share market and where its heading try this link.  Remember there is a limit on the depths of disdain and the contempt that may yet be visited upon the unloved; it is absolute rejection and ultimately total disinterest.  It is  there the foundations of great fortunes shall be built, but never exempt fraud, faith, theft and nepotism.

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/forget-the-dips-sell-the-rips/?utm_source=wysija&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mailing+List+AM+Tuesday

Does God or Anybody Else Really Want a Plebiscite?

            "Matin's one thing the Lord and I see eye to eye on but

             durned if I can figger why He went and created them      

             consarned green-gutted turnip worms!"
                          from 'Tobacco Road' by Erskine Caldwell

The logical thought processes of children and simpletons are such a hoot; so guileless in their innocence. It's not until they grow up and start dealing with the broader social consequences of their own damnfoolery that it isn't funny anymore.

That is especially true in politics; always in the public eye; utterly dependent on a fickle and diverse constituency, and burdened with the co-incidental bonehead ideology of your faithful support base who understand your silence perfectly well as long as they get an occasional wink and nod.   One wink too far and the whole farce unravels in a twinkling of an eye.  But there may be a way out: if the will of the people on gay marriage rights reverts back to the people then let hellfire or a more temporal embarrassment fall back on their own heads for a change.  “Let a thousand schools of thought contend” as Chairman Mao famously wrote, but they really mean it this time.   Let the people decide the fate of same sex  couples, and having been tossed the hot potato we have no choice but to rejoice.

Most of us won't. We didn't elect these people to shirk their responsibilities. We, the vast silent majority who are so cavalierly claimed as everybody's constituency might rather take our cue from the Book of Job and silently endure our many pestilences as we await our chance to turf these fools.   It might be thought that the writer here is outside the box for having opened his mouth, but it isn't so.  This isn't part of a debate on the mechanics of marriage equality because I don't give a rat's if gays and lesbians marry or how people define their marriages, partnerships or whatever.   As a liberal it isn't my business how other people pursue happiness and fulfilment as long as it doesn't actually impinge negatively on someone else's, which is something Tony Abbott and a fraction of his brain-dead big L essential partisan support base can't comprehend.  The thing is, regardless of our own orientation we all know someone and the polls are unequivocal.

In my extended a family a young woman in another country has married her girlfriend, and they organized to have a baby. Her (highly educated, professional - probably a negative in the all- important numbers game) mother says “It isn't what I would have chosen for my children, but they are deliriously happy, and who could stand in their way?”

A rhetorical question this; in which 'who' translates as 'what kind of slimeball.'

And the other thing about it is the same old which is always money. The unravelling of the great united Liberal party leadership has shown up another glaring disconnect which is the way these people handle public funds. They came in not only as our bright-eyed saviours replacing a dysfunctional Labour government but as angels of probity and thrift to repair the budget.  That's something all of us great unwashed sympathize with even though we like to be personally exempt where belt- tightening is concerned.  Yet most of us man- up to our patriotic duty; not that you are given much choice if you have left the workforce.  There is an army out there in the CES scrutinizing every receipt of yourself and the housemate that regularly or once shared your bodily fluids.  They don't care about sex or marital status.  There is no hypocrisy in the bureaucracy when it comes to  your hip pocket.    They have lists of everything you own and they insist on regular asset revaluations if to their advantage.  They subtract deemed receipts on investments, losing or otherwise which include a pound of flesh from whatever you might be so stingy or cunning as to have given away in the last decade.   My own part pension has been cut off nearly as many times as it has been received at God knows what cost to public finances and now its gone which must double the savings to the public purse.   A stinking $90 a week came at compliance costs of time and travel that would have paid the same had I continued dragging myself to work.  Most of that was due to government IT failings.  If the cheques had continued to   arrive regularly it would have been worth about $4500 a year which isn't quite enough for the speaker's famous short helicopter ride or a half a holiday in Kakadu for the elect and their families.   And now we are being offered a 100 million dollar exercise in futility to haul the monkeys down off their own petards.

In terms of budget repair that's TWENTY THOUSAND TIMES worse than the helicopter ride which inspired an inquiry to redefine 'the rules' (for them) which will take a committee of appointed experts several months and many millions of dollars before they can report their findings. But it really shouldn't be that complicated; all these problems could easily be resolved by leadership with the 'ticker' to take a moral stand or come down a tad from 'ticker' to the more descriptive Spanish term 'cojones' as in "a weakling without cojones who has never seen his wife's privates".   Anyway why should we need rules on this matter?  If your moral code is the criminal code, please do the world a favour; step in front of a bus, resign or start by staying out of public life. There are more suitable professions like 'share market tout' although that seems be part of the political job description these days as our elected house of reps morphs into some redundant, impecunious and noisy department of the Commonwealth Employment Service.   The CES will NOT be valuing their own incomes, assets and chopping political pensions accordingly. 

So there's an absurd gap between public and political entitlements and they just don't get it. Some of the back-benchers might and Malcolm Turnbull certainly does. Unfortunately he can't hide his contempt in the party room and they hate his guts or he would have been drafted for the leadership months ago. 

It's the first time in ten years we have had snow and it has been bitter for a week.  There hasn't been any grass growth this winter and we are facing the mother of el ninos this spring.  We have been adjured not to politicize these things by talking climate change; maybe it's just part of the natural variation by which species are regularly swept from the world.  Two days ago I noticed a ewe in labour down the wet and wind-swept paddock.  It's unmistakable even from a long distance,  they lay on their sides with a hind leg stretched straight out off the ground and muzzle in the air.  The lamb was only partly born and I walked the ewe up the hill to a small shed, being regarded the whole time by this vaguely familiar, prick-eared, demonic, tortured little face staring out at me; just like on TV.  She had twins, tiny and premature, hardly bigger than puppies and I helped pull them out because she was too weak and they were too immature to present their forefeet first.  One still had its eyes sealed.  Even with food for the ewe and shelter they were dying for lack of milk she couldn't produce, and a surfeit of milk substitute which they couldn't handle.  

This morning I got out of bed certain of the worst.  Michael Roche of Queensland Resources Council is on the radio crying for the 14000 desperate Townsvillians who were so looking forward to working at the Carmichael coal mine, going beyond the government's 10000 job figure even, while Adani Corp. has claimed to need only 1464 people.  Of course there is a long-term small multiplier and a short construction surge.  Perhaps there are also thousands  of people in other towns from Bowen to Brisbane who are also looking for work.  Absolutely everyone in the world was so keen to cash in on the rewards of growth and development; high prices inspired huge capital expenditures with accompanying huge debt burdens and now the inevitable oversupply means no-one can prosper.  Some casualties of the commodities bust are gone now; some as big as Glencore are hypothermal but still breathing sonorously. 

http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/glencore-billionaire-club-loses-half-its-members-as-stock-dives-20150820-gj3uka.html

 And the last lamb was dead, even as its mother had finally come into milk.  I looked on Gumtree to find an orphan and there it was. 

"Spots, an adorable healthy week-old orphan lamb happily adapted to the bottle.  This little fellow will take a lot of attention.  $100."

Maybe there are people out there without some kind of life partner but lots of leisure, money and undirected love to give, but a grown sheep in good condition is barely worth that kind of money.  I would have taken the skin off the tiny corpse and tied it over a ring-in, which the ewe would have accepted as her own in an  instant.  Or if  the situation was reversed given the lamb away to save knocking it on the head.  Notch up yet another 14002 people out there with sh** for brains.

Deconstructing the F 35 Boondoggle

"Eekoff!  Eekoff!"

"That naughty Tubby Bear has put ginger beer in the tank of my car instead of petrol!"

                                                             from "Noddy and the Aeroplane" by Enid Blyton

And so Noddy's car coughed and was still.  It was thanks to Big Ears (and the bear) that little Noddy got the use of an aeroplane in the last book of the series.  Unfortunately this is unlikely to be Tony Abbott's last disaster in his own series but he is in the good company of several nodding little wooden men; heads of government who couldn't say no to our great strategic patron.  But some are smarter than others and are furtively seeking the exits. 

"It's a great plane, great plane!" he exclaimed stepping from the cockpit of a mock-up.  Maybe it had been planned as a photo- op with a real one but they aren't quite flying properly yet, nor will they ever in any satisfactory sense.    Of course it isn't all his baby but he knows you have to go along if you want to get along.


http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-military-industrial-complex-finally-did-it-invented-a-trillion-dollar-plane-f-35-that-will-add-zero-value-to-national-security/


http://www.ausairpower.net/jsf.html

So how did it come to this?  Better yet to ask how does mediocrity defend itself in a communal milieu; be it kindergarten, a political party, corporation or civilization.  Tubby Bear was only supposed to wash the car but turn your back and the cunning little bounder is servicing it for his own ends.

Firstly an admission that I have no experience with aeronautical engineering, hardly knowing a flap from an aileron.  But the methods, tools and principles are the same and I could confidently build an aircraft in my garage.  That's something every musician understands.  They can all play Beethoven.  Some play it well, but only Ludwig Van could compose it.  As a self-taught engineer of one-offs for myself and others I am in the enviable position of never having had to get anything off the ground.  It's when you are airborne like on a bridge or held up by wings that the mathematics counts to the nth degree.  My own work requires none of that, it rests firmly and humbly on terra firma; sleek and  functional; well beyond the standards of health and safety or the penny-pinching economics of mass production.  And humbly because as a non-visionary who can actually do things I understand that in everything we do we stand on the shoulders of giants - from smaller men who built the machines that roll and weld perfectly square and dimensioned, straight hollow steel members, and the geniuses who worked out how to produce the perfect super-hard spheres and cylinders and races that constitute the bearings we take for granted and buy off- the- shelf for a pittance.  Without these my work would be uncertain and clunky and our civilization would grind to a halt.  On the upside the German blitzkrieg could never have rolled over Poland.  And somehow that took a while to sink in; the allies never got around to bombing Schweinfurt until 1943.
http://www.thirdreichruins.com/schweinfurt.htm

And at the top of the hierarchy stand the men who discovered the boxes - the ones that ridiculous dreamers think outside of which are also known as the laws of nature.  That's where our calculations come from and no-one with an education wastes time imagining anything outside of that.  We don't write off the possibility of the supernatural absolutely but life is short and your chances are shite.  But you see these fantasies all the time in glossy magazines - the artist's conception of some giant airliner -as big as an Airbus 380 with  solar panels covering the wings, and through the picture windows happy passengers stroll or lounge in the comfort of some stratospheric saloon that makes today's first class look like a cattle crush and there is a headline: "The Future of Civil Aviation".  Hey they make kid's solar toys that fly OK.  Which is true and so would this if it could be only a single millimetre thick and fly around at walking speed with no payload whenever the sun peeked through.  A principle isn't enough, the metrics have to be possible.

"But solar panels are getting more efficient, now up to 27 %."

So at 100 % efficiency the toy could go 15 km an hour.  The extra lift can float lots of extra weight per square centimeter; maybe you can four times the thickness/strength and thereby double the dimensions of the craft.  And that last is roughly the mathematics of the problem.  When I was a boy some of the comic books had a single page in every issue; Ripley's 'Believe It or Not'.  The most famous item was "If a flea were the size of a man it could jump over the Empire State Building."   In fact a flea  has an exoskeleton and couldn't even jump if it was any bigger than a bumblebee.  Everything is competitively constructed and in all ways bounded by the limits of possibility. The exoskeleton is obsolete above the waterline long before you get to mouse size, and if you are going to go scaling you have to get it right.

In those years of innocence there was a service station near home overlooking the Trans Canada Highway run by some Jehovah's Witnesses.  They had wearied after living through a couple of unmet deadlines for Armageddon and while remaining ever hopeful, had grudgingly settled down to a life of ordinary toil.  Outside the shop, standing proudly on the tarmac and proclaimed by signage stood the "Do-All Jack" and it was visible to the entire nation as it passed by.  It must have belonged to one of the congregation.  At that time automobiles had frames; and this was an old Ford or Chevvy frame with the mechanicals intact and a short boom pivoted from vertical off the back end.  Cable wound pulleys replaced the back wheels and the hydraulic brake system had been split by adding another brake cylinder which gave fairly precise control of the operation with a clutch pedal and the two joysticks braking either side of the differential.  More cables somehow rigged to those and other pulleys held up the boom.  You could see that it was a second-rate crane and might be used to hammer in fenceposts or drill a well; perhaps it could pull out small stumps.  Perhaps a careful,  lucky operator could work it successfully without anybody getting killed or maimed.  I never learned how it was to be moved about to do those things because it had no wings or wheels.  To the most casual observer it was obvious that it did absolutely nothing very well.

And so with the help of Ripley, the Jehovah's Witnesses and Tubby Bear we can reconstruct the development of the F35.  It might have been a great concept and will go down in history as might-have- been a great aircraft.  The thing on the drawing boards in the engineering department at Lockheed Martin was a sleek and stealthy twin engine fighter/bomber with a great power to weight ratio that would exploit the latest new lightweight materials for the skin and airframe and could thereby have room for some extras and still fly right up beside the hottest conventional machinery for a long time to come.  Of course there might have been unexpected structural problems with the new technology but that's to be expected and it was nothing that couldn't be rectified.  As in Darwinian theory the unviable permutations are removed by sexual selection or death and it's not often you get get to choose without running the program.

It happened something like this.  Lockheed-Martin's aging, glad- handing General 'Tubby' Olsen (USAF, ret.) who owes his position to called-in favours met with the rest of his marketing staff and asked themselves some searching questions.  Like 'what has our plane got that General Dynamics doesn't have in spades?' and more important the unspoken one of 'how do we make our mark on this thing and  continue to appear indispensible?'  And they spoke to the bean counters who knew that volume sales to their allies were the only way unit costs could be kept down and validate their own positions and prestige via the balance sheets.  So it had to have sex appeal or the operational equivalent.

"We toss a few cookies to the allies.  They get some jobs.  We got stealth.  We got.....uh.. what about STOVL like that Harrier thing?"  They had never forgiven the Marines for going to the Brits over that one.

"Christ that's an idea.  You could fly the b**** out of any field or off a barge.  Even the Greeks could afford a carrier."  The massive general appeal would leave the sales competition in the dust and although the Greeks could have their carrier; cost overruns would ensure it would be forever planeless.

The Harrier is small and old and ugly.  As a short take-off vertical landing aircraft (STOVL) it has directional jets and a lot of power for its substantial weight.  It can lift off virtually straight off the ground, is incredibly agile and a great attack aircraft.  But it doesn't fly far and fast and you couldn't sell Australia or Canada on it.  When the engineers heard the news they were ropeable.  One of them screamed, tearing at his hair.  "Both those f***ing engines have to be at full power each end of the flight.  You can't wind turbines up and down against each other in this kind of thing.  We can't write the software!  Where and how the hell with everything else do you propose we put in the ducting?"

But management was convinced and  adamant and tossed them a billion dollars and gave them a year to look into it.  And once you have spent a billion dollars it's just like home at which you can look back but you can't ever go back.  And meanwhile the marketeers had wasted no time pulling out all the stops with the customers who were already convinced.  So Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing was written in stone and there was only one way out, one more compromise.  The concept was heading for the special rendezvous the gods of hubris save for so many technical wonders of the world:  the Titanic with its iceberg, the Hindenburg with its mooring mast, the Do-All Jack with destiny.   It had to be a single engine aircraft.

That would have been alright if it was as small as the Harrier.  But it couldn't be because it is also a long range fighter/bomber and the concept has been scaled up so now there are 15 tonnes of this pig to boost into the air, twice the weight of the Harrier.  Ripley's flea was not a goer because weight hence structural and energy requirements run away exponentially against a linear increase in size.  The engine has to produce a minimum of 1:1 thrust to aircraft weight,  to bring the thing straight down successfully,  and is itself a prisoner of the same principle.  At full power the turbine blades are stressed to the edge of failure.  It produces the highest thrust to engine weight ratio of any jet engine ever.  It can't be pushed any harder, so far engines last about 15 hours and still can't power the plane abreast of the competition.  Nor are there  runways that can take all those tonnes of super- heated blast on the tarmac. So we have bought into something that will carry all that junk with it but nonetheless be limited to ordinary landings on ordinary runways.   It will be fully operational as such for pilots presently being born, which gives time for 2 more world wars with a re-construction of the U.N. or its successor in between.   Worst of all a quantum leap in metallurgy is required to begin to make it a threat to someone else and nobody knows if that is possible.  If not, Australia's security AND budget have been compromised for the long term.  In rational markets nobody buys into things like that, especially with an open-ended price tag.  Unless.

Back when the Witnesses came around on Saturdays in the course of their duty they used to say"We are the generation that will never taste death."  Nevertheless the service station proprietor died, and it must have been quite a surprise.  But that's alright, everybody miscalculates occasionally and most people do little harm thereby.  The business was demolished to widen the highway and the Do-All Jack disappeared at the same time, having sat those many years doing nothing.  They managed to carry it off for scrap in the end.

And Prime Minister Tony Abbott has so much to deal with, he can't keep his finger on every pulse.  The natives are restless over trade deals undealt, the price of coal and iron ore, treatment of the desperate dispossessed who risk death in our blue ocean, the squeals of cut-off part pensioners; hibernating in their crumbly, mouldering  little Sydney biscuit-boxes with unlikely, eye-popping million dollar price tags and they are still too self-serving to rejoice that their stinking stipend is freed up for national defense and budget repair.  At every venue he faces some noisy and unruly circus of the disaffected with signage and funny clothes.  Heading homewards one afternoon he encounters another lot -  it seems to have a 'Wizard of Oz' theme.  There are the usual college kids with funny hats, lollipops and streamers.  A big bloke is dressed badly as the cowardly lion, the Wicked Witch of the East is there with her broomstick, helicopter and jet plane toys, and there are other animals.  The car slows and stops.
"Shall we move these silly people along?" the driver asks impatiently, tugging distractedly at his protruding earlobe.
The PM silently gives his assent.  The driver leans roughly on the horn.

 "Parp parp!" 

The Joe Hockey Real Estate Primer Part 3

Lemmings have had really rotten press for a long time and it's all Walt  Disney's fault.  It seems like forever that  his name has been synonymous with clean and cutesy family entertainment, but in hard times he was just one more moneyed sociopath out of a number of power and nubile- obsessed swine who could make and break careers at a whim and in the McCarthy era it became deadly serious.  Between Disney,Tail Gunner Joe, Richard Nixon and the president of the screen actor's guild Ronald Reagan, dozens of supposed communist sympathizers in Hollywood and elsewhere were blacklisted including Charlie Chaplain.  So no-one was too big except Allen Ginsberg who didn't give a damn and taunted them at the hearings.  "You should have seen me reading Marx!"
But as for lemmings as a metaphor for mindless public hysteria -  that well- known clip on Disney Studio's nature series where the lemmings; desperately trying to escape the Malthusian horror of close  contact with their fellows, arrive finally at an oceanside cliff and throw themselves over into the icy water.  This was later admitted to have been fabricated.  In fact they are a timid and conservative creature except where mating is concerned and they were trapped, corralled and pushed off the cliff with a low scraper.  Likewise the little black bear; tumbling endlessly down the hill had been thrown over for our amusement.

If the social  and financial ruin of human beings isn't enough to damn someone, the lemmings and bear cub ought to suffice.  Walt is presently in cryogenic storage awaiting the scientific advances that will see him thawed and returned to wealth and influence in some time and place where posterity requires another narrow, nefarious and self-serving jerk.  In the meantime it's colder than hell.

I had planned to argue that lemmings were not an appropriate metaphor for the pursuit of home ownership in the face of an increasing disconnect between renting and ownership cost.  But the housing bubble has been going on forever here and expectations of capital gains have become part of our birthright.  So with an ever- increasing majority willing to take on magnified risks and the subset of smug investors willing to subsidize rentals; prices have reached nosebleed levels in the major cities and only a highly- skewed conventional wisdom and record low interest rates could possibly lever those whining and envious Gen Ys onto the merciless 'home ownership ladder;' with an average mortgage of three hundred thousand dollars for any low- grade biscuit box in the city.   But Disney changes all that.  They and all of us are victims of a pyramid of invisible context; the basis of which is the necessary death of money.

Why did something so desirable and convenient have to die?  Many books have and will be written on the subject.  But for those of us with a long-term memory it started with personal experience in childhood; faced with those difficult decisions about immediate or delayed gratification.  Did you save a dime for college or spend it on an ice cream bar?  At the time college was presented as the virtuous alternative but by the time we got there, 10 cents didn't come close to buying an ice cream bar anymore even if it had been gathering compound interest for ten years.  We would have been ahead if only we had bought blue chip shares, houses, art or antique motorcycles, and so our indoctrination was begun at least fifty years ago.  Only a schmuck saved money; in half a century that  10 cent ice cream bar became a $3 ice cream bar which is a 97% capital loss on your piggy bank's contents whatever the cant about 'hedonic deflators' which is the dubious proposition that today's ice cream bar isn't 30 times the price because you are purchasing a BETTER bar with waffle cone and crushed peanuts.   Money is dying faster than we ourselves, but however fast it is NEVER enough. 

It's Economics 100!  Supply and demand!  If you satisfy demand via increased capacity and inventories especially for capital goods and enduring, worthwhile things beyond food, Catherine wheels and MIRVed warheads, you can't keep those factories humming, workers employed and paying rent and taxes and spending, spending, spending, driving money velocity and borrowing to drive money supply ever upwards; motivating everyone to dump this crap from your wallet while you can still  find a taker at the old price.   And so demand is raised and consumption of all things is brought forward because everyone knows it will cost ever more in the future.  One consequence however is the boom and bust cycle and in the slowdown the eventual failure of neo-Keynesian theory when no-one in the real world who needs to borrow can borrow; nor does anyone who can borrow have  a reason to.

And beneath all that glisters and froths in the sunlight come the low growls and squeals of the contextual machinery driving the juggernaut:  the corporatization of the world of business where those magical market mechanisms ideologues pray to also happen to include the market for power and influence by which competition is for little people only, who still by some odd mental gymnastics identify themselves and their grocery or stationery shops with the titans; Henry Ford, Warren Buffet; ubermenschen even unto the fictional John Galts of the world.  All our cabinet ministers too have cut their teeth on Ayn Rand, a sociopathic little jezebel who never invented anything beyond her characters and some variations on pole dancing.  She was fascinated by psychopathic criminals and Allen Greenspan studied at her feet.  Maybe he was one of her lovers, whichever he found the inspiration to do whatever it took to transform himself from an unknown little Jewish saxophonist and hard money theorist to the financial genius 'Easy Al' who presided over the Federal Reserve, strutting the world stage during those golden years when clueless school kids and starlets made share market fortunes-they were better at it  than anybody - and the ultimate end of American financial primacy was written in the bedrock.

The bubble economy was engineered via liberalisation of the banking system; including the repeal of the Glass Steagal  act which then allowed bankers to leverage themselves and profitability to new heights without the old prudential regulations that protected their capitalisation and customer's deposits.   It was as if you couldn't write loans if you had to actually determine your customer's creditworthiness and this has been taken to the final extreme in the Over The Counter derivative business where esoteric financial agreements are constructed, bought and sold with incredible leverages and liabilities to ultimately god knows who.  And when still- existent laws are purposefully or inadvertently broken, token fines are agreed upon that inevitably fail to match the magnitudes of the resultant profits and become simply a cost of business.  And should all this ever have to be unwound it will take 20 years of legal wrangling between non-existent entities and money and the world as we know it shall come to an end.  Or maybe we do know kind of; via George Orwell and Robert Mugabe.

Next The Mathematics of the Fall