For many years, we here at The Privateer (and many others) have been explaining the mechanism by which the production of real wealth has progressively been taken over by the production of “purchasing power”. The onset of the GFC [global financial crisis] exposed these mechanisms to public scrutiny to an extent not seen since the 1970s, or before that, the 1930s. The GFC itself, especially in nations (such as the US) where its impact has been most sorely felt, has greatly increased two things so far. One is the ever growing unease and indignation of the public. The other is the lengths to which the “authorities” will go to keep the REAL reasons for the present malaise away from pubic view and, above all, from public understanding.

–Bill Buckler, The Privateer Report, #661

The reader may be wondering why almost everything in this chapter — in particular its theme that Nixon appears to have been ousted in a nonviolent coup — is not common knowledge. To understand why, it is necessary to contemplate the system through which information is disseminated to the public, and the mind-set with which it is received. The common narrative on the most complex, disturbing events is usually generated by insiders — so-called investigative commissions made up of figures acceptable to the establishment, and by a handful of designated authorities deemed suitably presentable as well. For the rest of us, it is almost always easier on the conscience to accept the most benign interpretation. If everything is tied up neatly, then we do not have to do anything. The key to it all is the gatekeepers.

–Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, p. 245 ‘Denial’

In George Orwell’s brilliant novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the characters, Syme, in discussing the nature of Newspeak, says “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” Newspeak was a systematic attempt by the dictators of Oceania, a totalitarian society eerily similar to North Korea, to control thought by eliminating words that gave rise to ideas they disapproved. What Syme and Orwell are talking about is that the destruction of words is the destruction of ideas.

–Jeff Harding, Why Saving Is Right and Economists Are Wrong

Speaking of fear, for more on scaring people into spending money rather than saving it, check out Eric King’s interviews with Jim Rickards.

Micrographs made in a Florida State University chemistry lab reveal kaleidoscopic patterns in popular cocktails.

Margarita
The images are made by crystallizing the drink on a lab slide, then passing a polarized light through the crystal.

Tequila
Each micrograph magnifies the drink over 1000 times.

Rosé
The work is the brainchild of a Florida State research scientist named Michael Davidson.

Vodka
Davidson first conceived of taking micrographs of liquor as a way to fund his FSU lab.

Sake
Davidson originally used the images as patterns for neckties.

Whiskey
Davidson eventually sold the license to the images to a businessman and fellow researcher named Lester Hutt, who now markets them as art prints through a website called Bevshots.

Daiquiri
The site offers over 50 microscopic images of popular drinks.

Chablis
No two beverage images are the same.

Champagne
Among the other drinks offered by the site are: Cosmopolitan, Bloody Mary and a wide range of lagers and other beers.

White Russian
Bevshots president Hutt observes, “While some individuals select their art based on drink preference, others enjoy pieces that are aesthetically in tune with their decor.”

Pina Colada
The images are customizable and can be displayed on canvas, as metallic prints or as an iPhone app.

Here’s the human-readable URL…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201433200;_ylt=ApDNhTpzdSMEaWz90bRjaEeReZd4;_ylu=X3oDMTM1bTYzdG81BGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMjAxMDA4MzAvMDg1OTkyMDE0MzMyMDAEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwMzBHBvcwMzBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDaGVhdnlkcmlua2Vy

I can’t help but think of P.K. Dick’s Minority Report, and a delicious microbrew. The conflict, the conflict.

http://gonzalolira.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-hyperinflation-will-happen.html

http://gonzalolira.blogspot.com/2010/08/hyperinflation-part-ii-what-it-will.html

http://twitter.com/JamesGRickards/statuses/22005923904

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/8/2_Jim_Rickards_files/Jim%20Rickards%208%3A2%3A2010.mp3

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/07/are-we-trending-towards-deflation-or-in.html

La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los mas preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre; por la libertad asi como por la honra se puede y debe aventurar la vida, y, por el contrario, el cautiverio es el mayor mal que puede venir a los hombres. (II, 58, pags. 984-985)

Guessing which book this is from, you won’t be far off the mark. If only Gilliam had been able to complete his film version…

If one really thinks about it, it’s an incredible spectacle that a lawsuit is being filed with the aim of having Barack Obama enjoined by a Federal Court from killing an American citizen, far away from any battlefield, without any due process whatsoever. That such a suit was never filed during the Bush years, but is now necessary under the rule of this Constitutional Scholar almost a decade after the 9/11 attack, speaks volumes about many important facts.

Another quote worth noting: “We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary.” (In Borger’s article)

This term, which means “beer” in Spanish, originally came from the medieval French word cervoise. For its part, the French term origianlly stemmed from the Gallo-Roman (that is, ancient French-Latin dialect) word cerevisia, which was used in honor of Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest. It is interesting to note that just about the time that the Spanish were adopting the term cerveza (aroung 1482), the French started to drop cervoise in favor of the term biere– from the Germanic term Bier (from the Latin biber, “to drink”), which was the term that was more popular in northern Europe, where the climate was more favorable to the production of the grains that were used to make the beverage. [(A footnote: the reader might be wondering what term was used in Spain before the adoption of cerveza. Before 1482, the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula had used the completely-unrelated ancient Iberian word ceria or celia, meaning "fermented wheat.")(Footnote #2: The English term ale comes from the Scandinavian term for beer, oel. Although oel collectively refers to all types of beer, you beer purists out there know that the English term ale came to refer only to beer produced using the "top" fermentation process. Beer produced using the "bottom" fermentation process is called lager.)].

Whether all of these etymologies are true — beer from biber? — or not, I’m enjoying them, as well as summer, great weather, great hiking, and beer. Si, se puede.

Aside from Grant’s zinger at the end — note the interviewer’s shocked expression — I’ll turn back to football (soccer), you know, that game in which you play the ball with your feet, and show the best goal of the tournament:

Fantastic left-footed strike. For once, the Jabulani ball may have done the trick, not but slightly falling as it bangs the far upper corner. Amazing! If only the Dutch had matched the rest of their play with such style, in particular in defense. Too bad they played a dirty final game. How does a team defend against overwhelming possession? Could we see a revaluation of man-to-man marking? Defenders would not need to keep pace with the ball, which is mostly impossible anyway at such a level. Perhaps Total Defense is in order… but done without resorting to brute force.

Americans who complain that soccer is a dull game just aren’t listening with their eyes, perhaps because in American sports — basketball certainly, American football, baseball even — more points are scored than in soccer. As a country of more, looking for the bang — think Westerns, “shock and awe”, etc. — we have trouble finding pleasure in subtlety, in the small degrees of spectacle. We just want the bang, again and again like a heroin junkie. That physicality and coarseness that Walt Whitman celebrated as the American grain, still sustain. The corn feeding our red-blooded beef with the lack of quantity…

Today’s final will see many such moments, half a second or less. Watch for them!

“I wouldn’t explain it,” she answered. “I’d toss him a ball and let him play.”

Professional soccer does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives in spite of all the spites. And maybe that’s why soccer never stops being astonishing. As my friend Angel Ruocco says, that’s the best thing about it — its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.’

–Eduardo Galeano, Soccer In Sun And Shadow

Surprises: Kaka getting a red card in today’s game; Italy tying New Zealand rather than trouncing them; the Jabulani ball not resulting in more goals, but less. The last one is perhaps not a surprise, when you think about the hubris (and idiocy) of technocrats who see nothing but the machine of televised money (yes, that’s you, FIFA), rather than the poetry of choice, the risk of play. Here’s to all the players who delight in the play, rather than in the flash of the gold pan. After all, the play’s the thing.

Aye, it is difficult to concentrate with the World Cup in swing now. Perhaps this will be less disjointed than my previous entry, but perhaps not. That said, as always there are interesting developments afoot on the world stage, apart from the greatest event of the greatest sport ever. (Again, dissent is healthy, as Pepe Escobar shows.)

Following on the theme of austerity… UK Prime Minister Cameron’s announcement came just after Bilderberg ends. Hmm. And to think that all those so-called “conspiracy theorists” are loony, who for far longer have been carping on this theme than the anemically servile mainstream media only now taking things seriously. But, you know, there’s always the key “news” that Scarlett Johansson has a new hairdo. That’s not even entertaining.

Choice excerpts from a post on Rick Ackerman’s site:

David Cameron’s new Government in Britain announced Tuesday that it will introduce austerity measures to begin paying down the estimated one trillion (U.S. value) in debts held by the British Government. Let’s let that sink in for a moment, for it is a stunning announcement. Now repeat it: Britain will introduce austerity measures in order to eliminate the deficit and begin paying down the national debt. And that being said, we have just received the signal to an end to global stimulus measures — one that puts a nail in the coffin of the debate on whether or not Britain would “print” her way out of the debt crisis. That would have virtually guaranteed an eventual hyperinflation that would have spread to all Western nations, destroying the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency in the process and ending several hundred years of Western economic dominance.

Hyperinflation would also destroy the central bankers’ power, which I think is the real meaning of the fear in “ending several hundred years of Western economic dominance.” They are not easily giving up their monetary power to “politicized” institutions such as, er, Congress. The fine art of dissembling, indeed, although I do appreciate the buried discussion by Fisher that

We cannot count forever on the largess or the misfortune of others to mask our own imbalances here at home—for fiscal profligacy in Washington today hinders our ability to address fiscal challenges tomorrow.

These challenges are coming. Off balance sheet, there lie two massive, unfunded liabilities not accounted for in the “conventional budget accounting” of the federal government—most significantly, Social Security and the government obligations of current Medicare programs.

Pundits and analysts like to focus on the year in which Social Security will go permanently into the red on an annual cash flow basis—which recently was projected to occur in 2019 but could occur as early as 2016. But they largely ignore the severity of the broader problem: accumulated entitlement debt over the infinite horizon. According to our calculations at the Dallas Fed, that unfunded debt of Social Security and Medicare combined has now reached $104 trillion—trillion with a ‘T’—in discounted present value. And while much attention in recent years has been devoted to Social Security, the lion’s share of the total entitlement shortfall (nearly $90 trillion) actually comes from Medicare. This is a prodigious number. Others—like Pete Peterson’s foundation, which uses a different time horizon in its methodology—calculate the unfunded liability at north of $40 trillion, growing by a sum of $2 trillion to $3 trillion per year. No matter. The problem is frightful, whether you take his numbers or ours.

Back to Ackerman:

Hardest hit will be major exporting nations like China and India who depend on Europe and the Americas for their bread-and-butter income. Aid programs to the Third world will be gutted, and I cannot yet imagine the consequences that will bring to the poorest people on earth.

Following a Google search for the Wizard of the Baca Grande, what if that be The Plan? Let’s take it to be fiction, for now, and we can admittedly find such a story compelling…

Here is how writer Daniel Wood describes a ride and conversation with Maurice Strong when visiting the ruggedly attractive Baca Grande ranch:

“I leave the Baca with Strong, retracing our route of a week earlier. We pass the Lazy U Ranch and turn South on Highway 17. Strong tells me he has often wished he could write. He has a novel he’d like to do. It’s something he has been thinking about for a decade. It would be a cautionary tale about the future.

‘Each year,’ he explains as background to the telling of the novel’s plot, ‘the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEO’S, prime ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead.’

With this as a setting, he then says, ‘What if a small group of these world leaders were to form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse? It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders.’

‘They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. They’ve engineered a panic, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can’t close. The rich countries’ and Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out the window.

I sat there spellbound. This is not any storyteller talking. This is Maurice Strong. He knows these world leaders. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it.

‘I probably shouldn’t be saying things like this,’ he says.” (West Magazine, May 1990)