Spitting Image: Royal Family lose fortune in recession & move to council flat

Queen Elizabeth's nightmare that her family lose all their money and move into a high-rise council block, where they have to resort to crime to survive. Prince Charles later becomes a cabbie. Also stars Princes Philip, Edward & Andrew, Sarah Ferguson & late Queen Mother.

THE GREAT NHS HEIST PRE-ELECTION FREE PLAY

Given the imminent threat to the NHS we have decided to give free access to The Great NHS Heist film, in the run up to the General Election. Information is the lifeblood of democracy & to this end we hope this film will help you decide how to vote and become active citizens in the defence of the NHS.

The free market can't touch it, which adds uneccessary bureaucracy and expense.

Video: Diver removes hooks from sharks mouths.

Watch: Woman hypnotizes sharks, removes fish hooks from their mouths

This woman sticks her hands in sharks’ mouths to help when they get caught on hooks 🦈❤️

Once a shark has had its hook removed, it goes and tells all the others.

Video on twitter

 https://t.co/J7ww9DcuTM

Turning the economic tide: could a radical monetary theory fix Australia's woes? — Martin Farrer

Bill Mitchell, the leading Australian proponent of modern monetary theory, argues that governments should abandon their obsession with budget surpluses

The Guardian

Turning the economic tide: could a radical monetary theory fix Australia's woes?

Martin Farrer

Russia and China Have Built a New Gas Pipeline That Has Everything—Except Profit — Geoffrey Smith

Making a profit is not the object here, as the article goes on to explain. It's part of a larger system in the making. 

Did Amazon make a profit out of the gate? The objective was to dominate the emerging online market down the timeline, and that has been successful.

The Sino-Russian strategic alliance is about building the Eurasian system.

Fortune
Russia and China Have Built a New Gas Pipeline That Has Everything—Except Profit
Geoffrey Smith

Donald Trump Tweet - China and money creation

Why is the World Bank loaning money to China? Can this be possible? China has plenty of money, and if they don’t, they create it. STOP!

Links — 6 Dec 2019

FAIR
With People in the Streets Worldwide, Media Focus Uniquely on Hong Kong
Alan MacLeod

Irrussianality
Napoleon, Kutuzov, and the changing international order
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Mint Press News
Study Reveals How UK Intelligence Works with Media to Smear Jeremy Corbyn
Alan Macleod

Zero Hedge
Epstein Was A Mossad Agent Used To Blackmail American Politicians, Former Israeli Spy Claims
Paul Joseph Watson, Summit News

Zero Hedge
Massive Leak Confirms Turkey's "Gold-For-Gas" Scheme To Evade US Sanctions On Iran
Tyler Durden

The Vineyard of the Saker
Book review: Andrei Martyanov’s “The (real) Revolution in Military Affairs”
The Saker

Pensacola

Gee a Saudi Arabian (OPEC human scum) in the US to learn how to fly an airplane kills a bunch of US citizens... hmmm.... where have I heard about that before?? Hmmmm???

What did Einstein say about DOING THE SAME THING and expecting a different result????

BREAKING: Pensacola mass shooter identified as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a member of the Saudi Arabian military who was in the U.S. for aviation traininghttps://t.co/Tqbe58Sora

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 6, 2019

Boot-edge-edge!!!!

LOL!!!!! Democrat dip-shits....

Buttigieg- “My party’s not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it’s time for us to start getting into that.”

Actually @PeteButtigieg President @BillClinton took the deficit balanced the budget and left America with a surplus. https://t.co/QdanbPrjqR

— Tom D'Angora (@TomDangora) December 6, 2019

BRITISH DEFENCE MINISTRY DOCUMENT REVEALS SKRIPAL BLOOD EVIDENCE IS MISSING – FAKE CHAIN OF CUSTODY MAKES NOVICHOK EVIDENCE WORTHLESS — John Helmer

Usually I aggregate such posts but this deserves featuring.

Dances with Bears
BRITISH DEFENCE MINISTRY DOCUMENT REVEALS SKRIPAL BLOOD EVIDENCE IS MISSING – FAKE CHAIN OF CUSTODY MAKES NOVICHOK EVIDENCE WORTHLESS
John Helmer

Michael Roberts Blog— Understanding socialism

Michael Roberts comments briefly on Richard D. Wolff's two new book, Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism.

Probably the salient point: "As Wolff has said: 'If you want to understand an economy, not only from the point of view of people who love it, but also from the point of view of people who are critical and think we can do better, then you need to study Marxian economics as part of any serious attempt to understand what’s going on. Not to do it is to exclude yourself from the critical tradition.'”

I would add, at the very least. Marx and Engels, and subsequent Marxists and those influenced by Marx are still highly relevant and they are becoming more so as capitalism is more and more in crisis owing to neoliberalism, neoliberal globalization and the challenge of climate change. Change is coming.

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
Understanding socialism
Michael Roberts

The difficultly with approaching Marx today is twofold. First, he is lightening rod, so most things written are either by proponents or opponents.

Secondly, Marx was a philosopher in his own right and a public intellectual in this time as a journalist and writer of political tracts in the context of the contemporary debates. It would be a mistake to consider him either only from the point of view of economic or even as "an economist."

Marx lived before economics had become a separate academic discipline comparable to the present day. He was a philosopher, social and political activist, political theorist, historian, and one of the founders the disciplines that later became sociology and economics. In fact, when I was grad student in philosophy, I studied the aspects of Marx's contribution other than to economics.

This type of broad thinking falls largely to the philosophers that preceded him. Subsequent to Marx, the fields of knowledge became highly specialized and silos began to form.

Who are accounts really for? – my first column now I am back with AccountingWEB — Richard Murphy

Important. Richard Murphy reports that the era of responsibility to shareholders rather than stakeholders is over. TPTB recognize that capitalism has to be "reset." It's not working as it is and the result is social unrest.

Tax Research UK
Who are accounts really for? – my first column now I am back with AccountingWEB
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Lars P. Syll — The ergodicity problem in economics (wonkish)

Less wonkishly, the basic problem here can be viewed in terms of the logical fallacy of hasty generalization. Hasty generalization involves extending one's one's position, or that held by one's group, universally. In philosophy this result in claims of naturalism to humanity as a whole. For example, natural law is often reducible to a particular set of Western values that is generalized. The "laws" of economics are largely of this sort, and homo economicus as a rational agent that carries them out is basically a reflection of the economists that posited them, assuming all to be like them.

This fallacy has been a temptation from ancient times, but it culminated in the scientific age with the discovery of invariant laws of nature, in physics and astronomy in particular, in that these discoveries could be rendered universally using mathematical expressions. Subsequently, this formalism became a criterion of truth that prevailed for formalists above empirical observation. Owing to the success and prestige of the natural sciences, would-be scientists in other fields, and philosophers as well, sought to emulate the formalism of the natural sciences.

However, the great success of the natural sciences in discovering invariant lays in the ergodicity of the subject matter, which is rendered the mathematical expressions and formal models time-invariant. Lacking ergodicity of subject matter, this would not apply strictly. There is a significant difference between a general case and specific cases. In Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of The Dismal Science, Dani Rodrik argues that of the art or craft of economics is being able to discern which model applies in which case. The natural sciences are not concerned with this kind of decision in the same way. There is a clear difference among theoretical science, experimental science, and engineering.

There is an old joke about some engineers and an economist shipwrecked with nothing to eat other than canned food. The engineers set about trying to figure out how to open the cans by applying their theoretical expertise and practical experience. The economist chimed with, "Let's just assume a can opener."

This actually happened in a less dramatic way. In effecting his synthesis of Keynesian and neoclassical thought, Paul Samuelson was confronted with Keynes having posited future uncertainty at the foundation of the "moral sciences," which we now call social science, including economics.

Samuelson solved the difficulty by assuming ergodicity as a methodological convenience for tractability, as had neoclassical economics in assuming equilibrium. This view became orthodox in conventional economics. The follow-up retort to heterodox objections then became, "The methodological debated is already settled." As Paul Krugman asserted, equilibrium and maximization as a framework.

This doesn't mean that economics or the other social sciences are not scientific or cannot be scientific. It just means that they are not the same as natural sciences and that making claims that approach this are unjustified.

Moreover, there is a difference between the meaning of being a science and being scientific. Being scientific just means observing the scientific method. Engineering is scientific in its approach, but this is applied science.

Being a science assumes a framework in terms of which theories can be compete. For example, the framework of physics includes the conservation laws, which are universal and independent. Of course, there is change over time in physics owing to motion and entropy, for example. But these phenomena are explained using models that data supports. The explanation (formula) is time-invariant, even though the data change.

Economics has no such framework, which is why there are competing views of how to approach economics in the first place. "The law of supply and demand" is not the same as the conservation laws in physics, and the assumption of equilibrium is not ergodicity.

Not being ergodic, economics is not a natural science, which is not the same as saying that economics cannot discover universal invariances that data support regardless of time series, economics, like the other social sciences, being historical. Moreover, social systems are complex adaptive system subject to reflexivity (learning from feedback) and emergence (change that is unforeseeable based on priors).

So the next time someone says, "Where's your model," ask them, "Which one?" 😀

Not one in business or finance takes forecasts as the same as or similar to the physics, and no one confuses weather forecasts to astronomical invariances. But economic forecasts and the reasoning which they are based are often treated as dogma in policy circles. That's a problem.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
The ergodicity problem in economics (wonkish)
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Michael Hardt And Antonio Negri — Empire, Twenty Years On — V. Ramanan

Most important at this aristocratic level of Empire is the extent to which, despite appearances, its general contours remain unchanged. From this perspective, the much-heralded return of the nation-state—along with nationalist rhetoric, threatened trade wars and protectionist policies—should be understood not as a fracturing of the global system, but rather as so many tactical manoeuvres in the competition among aristocratic powers.

The elite may no longer be titled aristocrats, but the class structure of feudalism and the imperial designs remain in place.

Vietnamese proverb: "The dung heap remains the same, only the flies change."

The diagnosis is obvious. But can the workers of the world unite to change the status quo?

This involves replacing the hierarchical organizational model based on class power that is prevalent with an inclusive consensual organizational model that establishes genuine governance of, by and for the people. That would be some type of democratic socialism on a global scale.

What would that look like practically speaking, and how to get from here to there?

Globalization is happening owing to the introduction of technology that makes it possible. The bottom line question is what interests are going to control it. Dominance and submission has been the ongoing political dynamic across history. The difference now is the scale that technology has brought..

The Case for Concerted Action
Michael Hardt And Antonio Negri — Empire, Twenty Years On
V. Ramanan

Treasury and Fed attempting to coordinate monetary policy

They are going to add a lot of Reserves to Depositories next week:

Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven Mnuchin said he’s work­ing closely with Fed Chairman Powell to make sure there are am­ple re­serves fol­low­ing fund­ing strains in money mar­kets in September, which he attributed in part to bank liquidity rules.https://t.co/xA76QhGFvV

— Kate Davidson (@KateDavidson) December 5, 2019

Treasury ops adding about 38B Tues+Thurs and Fed adding another 25B via new operation Monday... 20B social security Weds... maybe 75Bish total... then it will all quickly reverse with qtrly taxes due on Monday the 16th... might bring total Reserves at Depositories closer to 1.7T by end of week...

Laurel & Hardy: Rare Interview with an Iconic Comedy Duo (1947) | British Pathé

This old clip just turned up on my phone. I thought it was good.

Stephen F. Cohen - Who Is Making US Foreign Policy?

An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.

I recent survey I came across was checking for antisemitic views in the American population. One question was, Do you think Jews hold too much power in this country? The answer yes was considered to be an antisemitic viewpoint.

In the UK, 80% of Conservative Party politicians are members of Friends of Isreal, and something like 30% of Labour Party politicians are.

The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington’s permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a “deep” or “secret” state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington’s foreign-policy “blob,” as even an Obama aide termed it, will remain.

The Unz Review 

Stephen F. Cohen - Who Is Making US Foreign Policy?

Philip Giraldi: The International Zionist Conspiracy - it poisons everything it touches

The Unz Review 

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/the-international-zionist-conspiracy/

George Galloway - The Clintons, Epstein, and the CIA

More conspiracy theories, you decide?

Is the US run by organised crime?

The Clintons, the Clinton Body Count, blackmail, the Mossad, the CIA, cocaine, drug smuggling, Epstein, and Prince Andrew.

Go to 1:46:00

This link might take you straight to the spot.

https://t.co/UPrD13Gwoa

Bill Mitchell — Q&A Japan style – Part 5b

This is the final part of a two-part discussion about the consequences of a currency-issuing government exercising different bond-issuing options. The basic Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) position is for the currency-issuing government to abandon the unnecessary practice of issuing debt (which is a hangover from the fixed exchange rate, gold standard days). Currency-issuing governments should use that capacity to advance general well-being and providing corporate welfare to underpin and reduce the risk of speculative behaviour in the financial markets does not serve any valid purpose. However, when we introduce real world layers (politics, etc) we realise that some pure MMT-type options are not possible. This question introduces just such a case in Japan. Given the political constraints, we are asked to choose between two options for central bank conduct, when the government does issue debt: (A) Buy it all up in the secondary bond markets. (B) Leave it in the non-government sector. In this final part, I go through some of the considerations that might influence that choice....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Q&A Japan style – Part 5b
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Michael Roberts Blog — Economics as a social science

There is no substitute for the ‘big picture’. Economists should not be doctors but social scientists, or more accurately they should develop an economics that recognises the wider social forces that drive economic models, in particular, the social mode of production that is capitalism. That is political economy, mostly not taught in universities and certainly not practised in international agencies....

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
Economics as a social science
Michael Roberts

Potholer54 - The Moon is Made of Cheese -- and other scientific conspiracies

Peter Hadfield on conspiracy theories.

Abby Innes - This general election is a choice between the end of democracy or the end of neoliberalism

Britain at a crossroads.

Boris wants to turn Britain into a low wage ecomomy, despite neoliberalisn consistently failing for forty years.

Given the dismal empirical record of forty years of pro-market reforms, the only way this Conservative Government can create the low tax, low regulation, law and order state of Neoliberal fever dreams is under the cover of other projects. Brexit offers a unique opportunity: it allows a government of economic extremists to manipulate our cultural identity to endorse a rewriting of the entire institutional rule-book. The recent assertion by Michael Gove that Brexit offers no lesser a liberating moment than the fall of the Berlin Wall is exactly wrong. Electoral success for the Conservatives will complete the capture of state authority by private business actors and consolidate the Conservative Party as a self-serving broker, first and foremost, between the residual powers of the state and the now largely unrestrained economic power of large private business and increasingly extractive financial interests.

LSE

Abby Innes - This general election is a choice between the end of democracy or the end of neoliberalism

Subhash Kak - Quantum Supremacy Is Unlikely, Scientist Says

I don't know if this is a good thing or bad thing. Quantum computers seemed to be so powerful I thought they mignt be dangerous, on the other hand, they may have saved a lot of power - which would have be great for cryptocurrencies. 

Because they work on quantum probability, it seems you can never be sure how it's going to go. 

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated "quantum supremacy" — that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity and, therefore, the Google announcement should be taken "with a large dose of skepticism."

This wasn't the first time someone cast doubt on quantum computing. Last year, Michel Dyakonov, a theoretical physicist at the University of Montpellier in France, offered a slew of technical reasons why practical quantum supercomputers will never be built in an article in IEEE Spectrum, the flagship journal of electrical and computer engineering.

Live Science 

Quantum Supremacy Is Unlikely, Scientist Says

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Donald Trump is losing his trade war with China, and running out of economic time

Donald Trump has got away with his many trade wars over the last eighteen monthts because the US economy has been on steroids, a form of macroeconomic cheating that briefly steals growth from the future but catches up with you.

The rest of the world has been struggling with an auto-led manufacturing slump. This came close to recession conditions earlier this year and touched bottom in August.

The Telegraph 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Donald Trump is losing his trade war with China, and running out of economic time

Ben Norton - Ukrainian neo-Nazis flock to the Hong Kong protest movement

Ukrainian fascists who previously fought in a US-backed neo-Nazi militia joined the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, sharing their tactics and showing off their tattoos.

Neo-Nazis from Ukraine have flown to Hong Kong to participate in the anti-Chinese insurgency, which has been widely praised by Western corporate media and portrayed as a peaceful pro-democracy movement.

The Greyzone 

Ben Norton - Ukrainian neo-Nazis flock to the Hong Kong protest movement

Sputnik — ‘A Threat to Global Humanity’: For 70 Years, NATO Has Formed ‘Matrix’ of Imperialism

“We said that this gathering [the summit] should be seen as a threat to global humanity. It’s quite clear from its history - that is NATO’s history - that it is a structure that is used to maintain and advance Western global capitalist interest, and for that it should be seen as a threat. Most of the interventions by NATO have been beyond the pale of legality,” [Ajamu] Baraka, [national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace,] told hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon.

“The very fact that this structure has the kind of respectability among Western forces is quite troubling and … reflects the current contradiction, which is a contradiction between the Western interests, Western powers, Western capitalist powers and the vast majority of global humanity,” he continued, also referring to NATO as a “very important instrument” used by the ruling elites to further their capitalist and white supremacist goals....

Not buying "spreading freedom and democracy."

Sputnik International
‘A Threat to Global Humanity’: For 70 Years, NATO Has Formed ‘Matrix’ of Imperialism

See also

Douglas Valentine is an investigator and author with a rare and tenacious approach toward research. His writing results in uniquely incisive and revealing books on the dark side of U.S. intelligence activities and the National Security State. His latest book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, draws parallels between CIA operations in Vietnam—as exposed in his well-known 1990 book, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam—and recent/current operations in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. In the following interview, Valentine reflects on a variety of issues including the Phoenix Program, plausible deniability, paramilitary wars, drug trafficking, sabotage, blackmail, propaganda, Operation GLADIO, class interests of the CIA establishment, Trump, the Mueller Report and the Bidens. —CAM Editors

Doug Valentine has written numerous books and articles on the CIA based largely on interviews with former CIA officers revealing how the CIA is not just an intelligence organization tasked with intelligence gathering and analysis, as many suppose it to be, but also it is also a paramilitary operational organization tasked with carrying out covert operations based on plausible deniability.

Internationalist 360º
Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate Known as the CIA: An Interview with Douglas Valentine

Heidi Boghosian and Michael Steven Smith

Insurance Companies Are Spending Millions on Attack Ads Against Medicare for All — Alan Macleod

Healthcare corporations are spending millions of dollars on astroturfed attack ads against Medicare for All. The Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future, for example, a coalition of hospitals and insurance companies, has spent $1 million on a television campaign against changes to the current healthcare system they profit from.

The commercial presents the Partnership as a grassroots organization of concerned citizens, rather than that corporate front group exposed by The Intercept that it is. It features a range of actors of different races, ages and occupations expressing their concern over Medicare for All. “We come from different walks of life but we agree on one important thing: we don’t want to be forced into a one size fits all government insurance system” the commercial states, without telling the viewer that “we” does not refer to human beings, but an amalgamation of corporations. It warns that any changes to the system would result in “higher taxes or higher premiums” and “lower quality care” and features one actor scoffing over the idea of “politicians and bureaucrats in charge of our healthcare.”...

Mint Press Review

Insurance Companies Are Spending Millions on Attack Ads Against Medicare for All
Alan Macleod

British Deep State contra Jeremy Corbyn

Defend Democracy Press
Army and Secret Services are threatening Corbyn with coup d’ etat

British Secret Services attack Jeremy Corbyn

British Generals: They like crimes like the Iraq War and Libya bombing, they hate Corbyn!

A real threat: A very British coup

The Independent

British Army 'could stage mutiny under Corbyn', says senior serving general
Caroline Mortimer

Indians Shall Not Govern — Maria Paez Victor

The diplomat then proceeded to tell me who was and who was NOT Latin American, and pointing to the photo of a needy child which graced every table, he said: “For instance, that child there is not Latin American”. Astonished I asked how can you say that? She is Peruvian! “No, she is Indian. Latin Americans are those of us who stem from Spain and Portugal.” He was not kidding nor making some sort of epistemological statement on the origin of Latin languages. He was unashamedly, sneeringly , racist, making a clear distinction between himself and that poor child. Our conversation deteriorated from then on to reach a point when he said that “those” children got sick because their mothers were too ignorant to know how to care for them....

Who said that fascism is dead?

Counterpunch
Indians Shall Not Govern
Maria Paez Victor

See also at Counterpunch
Bolivia’s Five Hundred-Year Rebellion
Peter Lackowski

How Can We BEAT Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is the defining economic idea of our current moment, and we're all suffering for it. What is it, and how can we beat it?