naked capitalism

lk says:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-23/state-pensions-find-private-equity-bites-as-blackstone-cuts-jobs.html

kevinearick says:

Currency, Frames of Reference, & Belonging

Currency is governance, belonging to frames of reference, in a dimension of dimensions. We pay people to the extent they wind the empire’s clock, to repeat its History. If you look at the data, spreading the work out requires roughly 20 hrs/wk/person or 3 hours every day. Of course those choosing to do nothing else willingly give up their privacy, and seek to command the same of others, to the end of equal outcomes, make-work.

Who sits in a corner office planning bridges and cities to nowhere, 18 hrs/day, expecting real people to follow the direction of economic activity multiplier effects, and why would anyone compete for the opportunity to be so stupid? Ask China. Empires are built by mental eunuchs. What China learned, before the dawn of European colonialism, was that attacking others destroys self, because it invites attack from within. The empire rots from the inside (beltway) out accordingly.

The robot professor measures brain activity and learns that the body moves before the brain engages, up the old evolutionary chain, to the brain, which rationalizes self actuation into a belief of free will, to which it seeks positive feedback from the mirrors surrounding it, in a lie that rationalizes lying. Just reward clock social behavior with credit-controlled spending through the global HR system and you have the black hole of collapsing event horizons you see before you.

Of course corporate could create 2M jobs between now and Christmas, but what would it get other than more solar panels from China and more energy contracts to Obama’s cohort? Trading debt, investment in the slavery of others, obfuscates the non-performing asset base, right up until it deleverages, when the participation “credit” relativity circuit blows up, and intelligence has emigrated, leaving nothing but replication of the master/slave relationship inherent to a clock.

On one end is real income with no real assets. On the other is assets with no real income. At system reset, angle of incidence change, where do you want to be? What the occupiers are learning is that democracy, majority representative rule, is a soft bully centrifuge, which relies upon the desire to belong, to match the pattern, for power, on a path of diminishing returns, just like the tea party movement. It’s still feudalism.

The key to an empire is swapping self-worth for non-recurrent material wealth, a piece at a time until the participants are all choosing the Pavlov swap currency, at less and less corporate cost, in the form of increasingly diverse shoddy work products, until all that remains is the hopium. Intelligent parenting is not quite so simple because the empire, of peer pressure, must increasingly focus on leakage to grow the ponzi, in the form of early childhood education, Family Law.

Replicating parents train children to depend upon the replication as an authoritarian measure of self-worth, raising slaves for the empire from which they get their own sense of self-worth, in the form of more and increasingly shoddy, least-common-denominator replacements, like Microsoft. Accordingly, they are all terrified of being alone, with no mirrors, and will accept any empire frame of reference assigned, as the Order of Things, bullies bullying bullies.

Intelligent parents embed a sense of self-worth in their children accordingly, despite the escalating cost of empire to do so. The physical senses are like an addiction, because they may only record the past, in a self-preserving feedback loop creating the event horizon. They will not accept any input over time without an event horizon pattern match.

Children with self-worth employ imagination in a positive feedback loop, which acts as the empire’s negative feedback loop. The intelligent kid doesn’t match cards by sight, but rather by seeking the unknown, allowing the gravity of empire replication to do most of the work, with its misdirection of gamesmanship.

It is not unusual for cops to have 5 or even 10 businesses running off of Criminal Justice, which process kids at the churn pool. That’s what its union exists to do. It’s a sponge. The kids in Seattle are learning that now. Don’t voluntarily stand in front of a loaded gun expecting something good to happen. Government has crowded out organic income production from the bottom up, and so craves the last 1%, leaving the sharks to eat each other in a feeding frenzy. Never again is an empire oxymoron.

Expect the empire to isolate you into fear and depression as the penalty for non-conformance, by rewarding increasingly arbitrary, capricious, and malicious conformance / belonging, where the participants act happy on a stage built for the purpose, seeking ever greater prizes to assuage their anxiety. That is the value of Facebook.

Train others to train your children accordingly. A real union does not balance concentrated power with concentrated power; it distributes power when and where it is needed. The solution to the professor’s problem is, of course, to make Friday Monday, and Monday the beginning of another job. If you do not exercise discretion, like anything else, you lose it.

Wall Street trades debt slavery for the eminent domain to exploit the planet. It has its place in a civil society, but it is at the foot of the table. It only appears to be at the head to the willfully mesmerized diplomats, talking their way to fame and glory. The casino bets on entertainment. War is good for business.

Now, we all are waiting for them to light up their system. Should be quite the fireworks. Over the long term, you do not play to win; your rights are inalienable. Others play to lose, in a false lottery built for the occasion.

Max424 says:

from: McClatchy re: oil speculation

“Despite weak demand, the price of a barrel of crude oil surged …bla, bla, bla…”

Weak demand? Far from it. Global demand for oil has never been higher. Over the last 8 quarters, world consumption of oil SURGED from 86.8 million bpd to its current, 89.6 million bpd.

When is this bury-your-head-in-the-sand bullshit going to stop? Demand is up; way up! And supply is not; supply of crude oil flatlined at 74 million bpd WAY back in the year 2004, and the gap between 74 and 89.6 is being made up by turning –in VERY expensive ways– corn, tar, rock, and Venezuelan muck into usable petroleum products.

Again, I’ll point out this out; in 2010, total world oil consumption exceeded total world oil production by 5 million bpd, and reserve oil stocks reacted accordingly, by rapidly depleting. Those are the facts.

Oil speculation is dangerous, it has proven to be incredibly damaging (oil spike, 2008), and in my opinion, it is downright criminal, but in the much greater scheme of our drama, it is but a minor character –think the Wicked Witch of the East, in MGM’s 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3199/2728824047_4775ed2f58.jpg