Sheep and Goats

Category: Money

  • AI Explained

    The guy that runs Nvidia was once a janitor. From a disadvantaged family, Jensen Huang attended private grade school in Kentucky from age 9 in the poorest county (then and now) in the country. All students had a work assignment. His was housekeeping. He told Joe Rogan he must have cleaned toilet thousands of times, adding that he had wished people were more careful. Though he didn’t say that the experience  served him well, it plainly did. He is an unusually modest guy. He also confided that he was more driven by fear of failure than a need to excel. ‘I’m not an ambitious guy,’ he told Rogan. Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world.

    He also helped me understand AI. Rogan ran past him the recent case of the director who was going to disable AI. AI’s response when it found out? It threatened to go public about the affair he was having! (He wasn’t really. He’d just slipped it in as a test.) Rogan read ominous foreboding into this. Who wouldn’t? however, Jensen told him what had actually happened. In the course of its training, it had devoured narratives, perhaps novels, in which blackmailing schemes like this worked. So, he explained that the AI application has a string of algorithms regarding infidelity and a string of algorithms regarding blackmail and it just collated and compared, that’s all. Easy. He didn’t say ‘easy,’ I did, and it’s not easy from the standpoint of doing the math, but it is easy from the standpoint of knowing how the thing operates. 

    He reviewed the basic learning method of AI. The listener may ponder over whether it really is learning (as I did), but nobody will deny it gets results. What AI chips bring to the table is sheer brawn, sheer decision-making power. Break a task into the most minute steps imaginable, then break it down again into even more minute ones. Run the first of those tasks by AI, asking it to guess the answer. It will supply millions of answers, all but one of them wrong. Reinforce the correct one. Guided by this success, its next task will include not as many wrong answers. Reinforce the correct one. In this way, it gradually learns to “reason” correctly. 

    This is reassuring to someone who fears AI may usurp the spark of life that we thought can’t happen until God touches Adam’s finger, per the Michaelangelo painting. Not to worry. It’s just a huge numbercruncher. It’s “learning” won’t fool anybody, except for a few materialists who figure thats what life really is, a matter of numbercrunching to the nth degree. It’s like when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, and some fretted that mankind’s goose was cooked, right then and there. Naw, someone else countered. Do you feel threatened at knowing a truck can outpull a man? That’s all it is, just transferred to the mental realm. 

    Don’t say this isn’t impressive. It clearly is. No way would I ever had foreseen it. To others who did, I was inclined to say, “What have you been smoking?” Make no mistake; it’s real impressive. But it still forever leaves that gap in being human. It’s like the limit concept in mathematics, AI comes closer and closer but never quite get there. 

    This explains why it will why it can consistently operate at genius level, then suddenly make a mistake that any two-year old would avoid. This is why, when I’m lazy, it can list eight 5-letter words that will fit what I’ve found so far in Wordle, only two of them are 4-letter words. ‘Oh, sorry,’ it says when called out. Then, upon being asked, it launches into a discussion of how LLMs learn differently from humans. ‘Anyway, here’s a revised list,’ it says, and provides another that also has two four-letter words.

    It still has the remnants of being stuck by the question: “Are crocodiles good at basketball?” Although it could spit out any conceivable factoid regarding crocodiles and any conceivable factoid regarding basketball, that question would cause it to grind to a halt. Now it can handle the question with ease. Now it knows that crocodiles suck at basketball, but this only by running all the stats and finding that no team, from NBA to high school gym class, has ever drafted one. To reinforce this developing insight, it reviews data that good basketball players generally have long arms and compares that with data regarding crocodiles that generally have short ones. I mean, I’m oversimplifying here, as everywhere else, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s not really thinking. It still has no common sense.

    Hmm, why does it not? muse the materialists, who will attempt to distill into algorithms what’s common about common sense. If only they could reach that point that they were enabling an Adam, they wish, and not God. Well, I don’t want to ever sell them short. But, in thinking they can digitalize the sacred through unlimited numbercrunching, somehow I’m reminded of that pop art “experiment” designed to test the scientific folk wisdom, “Supply an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and one of them will write the complete works of Shakespeare. Infinite was not within the budget so they put one computer in an enclosure with six monkeys then awaited with bated breath to see what they would do. They didn’t write any Shakespeare at all; they shit all over the computer!

    Uh oh. A new Nvidia chip is due, next-generational I am told. Jensen praises it up and down. Will this be the one that is like Dino, Fred Flintstone’s dog, that he puts out for the night, but then the dog sneaks in through the window to put him out?

    ******  The bookstore

  • Vomodog Demands Public Auditing

    There has never been a financial scandal among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yet, to their enemies, a gargantuan one is always looming on the horizon. Pushing back at similar charges leveled in Russia by popular media, journalist Katerina Chernova [as related in I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why] pushes back at “money-pumping” allegations. Yes, they are heard all the time, she acknowledges, but “when [people] are asked to name just one victim from whom money, apartments, or something else was taken by the Witnesses, NOBODY was able to remember A SINGLE case in fact!” [Caps hers]

    Vic Vomodog pummels me regularly that he wants to see SEC-style detailed public accounting laid out for him, such as is habitual with publicly-owned companies, but not private. He just wants a line-item list that he can attach a line-item veto to each one—with bellyaching! Believe me, he knows how to do it. “Honest men entrusted with large sums of money give an accounting to those who entrusted them, as a matter of courtesy, appreciation, respect and honor!” he fires at me.

    Apparently, he shouldn’t have. From the weekly Bible reading when it was centered on Josiah:

    “Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, and let him collect all the money that is being brought into the house of Jehovah, which the doorkeepers have collected from the people. Have them give it to those appointed over the work in the house of Jehovah who, in turn, will give it to the workers in the house of Jehovah who are to repair the damage to the house, that is, to the craftsmen, the builders, and the masons; and they are to use it to buy timbers and hewn stones to repair the house. But no accounting should be required of them for the money that they are given, because they are trustworthy.” [bolding mine, of course] (2 Kings 22:4-7)

    I had no idea that was there. I was surprised to see it. I have never heard the verse used as justification for not submitting detailed stock-market like quarterly financial reports. I don’t expect an appeal to it. Hitting on the Research Guide brings up nothing. Apparently, the verse has never been cited.

    But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that a group of people whose mission statement is to follow Bible principles come heck or high water is not going to be shoved into ‘Trust—but verify’ public accounting by ever-accusing or suspicious people when the Bible says it is not to be done.

    The round-figure reports that we do get as to how much was spent here and there—this much for disaster relief, that much for missionaries, this much for a Branch build, appear to be in excess of what is scripturally required.

    Every so often I come across some unexpected thing to buttress my high level of confidence in the Governing Body. Every so often I come across some unexpected thing to withstand all these Vomodog-like critics who complain they are “arrogant.” If they were arrogant they would make this scripture their year text. They would say, ‘We don’t have to answer to no one. The Bible says so.’ They have divine authorization to say just that. They have never made use of it. 

    Probably humility enters into it, as well as a desire not to expose themselves to temptation. Obviously, they know of the scripture. Even though they can use it, they may feel it comes across as just too cocky to put it out there. They may feel it presents too much of a ‘Let he who thinks he is standing beware he does not fall’ challenge. It may even represent a rare sense of being PR sensitive.

    And don’t bellyache over this, you mutt! You know I am but inches away from discovering hidden manuscripts detailing the interaction between Josiah and the unusual Israelite named Vomodogiah.

    ****Burns me up, he does—even if we were once BFFs.

    And Truetom said to Vomodog, “Where you been?”

    ‘Oh, from roaming around the earth and going anywhere I please,’ Vomodog replied. ‘What’s it to you?’

    At that Truetom said, ‘Have you beheld the servants at Bethel? How they fear God and turn away from dishonest gain?’

    Vomodog shot back, “Is it for nothing they turn away? Do not we mollycoddle them all (except for the ones we gave walking papers to on Rightsize Day)? But just lean into them a little and see if they don’t steal you blind!”

    At this Truetom threw away his new personality to kingdom come, wondered whatever became of his Bethel application, and replied:

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    (Photo from IMBd of Jack Luden—an American actor of 1930-40 Westerns, nephew of the Luden’s Cough Drops inventor)

    *** Back to Katerina Chernova, as related in Don’t Know Why:

    “She goes on to relate a small fact that is actually huge and that says it all: with Jehovah’s Witnesses, baptisms and weddings and funerals are conducted ‘on a cost-free basis.’ With the Orthodox Church? “We have heard many complaints against it regarding the impossibility of performing any ritual in the event that a person does not have money. That is, you want to be ‘baptized,’—some ‘donation;’ you want to be ‘married,’—it takes so much cash; a ‘funeral,’—it is also not for free.”

    An avaricious organization is not going to cut off these most dependable of all generators of cash.”

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • The ‘Sister’ who Trades Bit Coin.

    Maria followed me on Twitter one fine day and she was drop-dead gorgeous. No, I did not follow her back for that reason. Trust me on this: drop dead gorgeous women throw themselves at me all the time; it is a great nuisance because all I want to do is think about God.

    In fact, I didn’t follow her back at all, not even for the reassuring profile photo she displayed, consisting solely of “Jehovah” in gold-embossed letters. However, I did scroll her timeline and found a suitable place to leave a comment. She soon replied that she had just texted me.

    Sorry, I told her, I don’t do DM. I stay on the public side of Twitter. “Why?” she wanted to know. “Because if I do so I am immersed in dozens of private chats and I can’t keep up,” said I. She responded that, in that case, I could contact her on WhatsApp. I didn’t reply to that one.

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    Next thing you know she has disappeared and all her notifications with her! I searched out her username: “Account suspended for violation of Twitter rules.” Hmm. I searched for the name on Facebook. It links to a certain bit-coin trader, also drop-dead gorgeous.

    No, Maria, my dear, I have all the bit-coin I need, thank you very much—even though you are drop-dead gorgeous, even though your profile does say ‘Jehovah’ so I know you are one of us, probably belonging to the congregation right next door. I’ve no doubt she has a separate profile that says Jesus, another that says Buddha, Dagon, Moroni, Baal, and a dozen others.

    It is called ‘Affinity Fraud,’ winning someone’s confidence through feigned common roots. It factors into the making of E.T—The Sequel, a movie you may not have seen. In the original, cute, adorable, toddler E.T. charms all who are pure enough to let him into their hearts. But in E.T.—the Sequel, he returns as a surly teenager. He curses, spits, brawls, swears, and in the end destroys the earth with his white-hot power beam, starting with Wall Street.

    Steven Spielberg, the movie’s creator, had just lost an ever-loving fortune to the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Both were Jews. Virtually all of Madoff’s victims were Jews. It was affinity fraud. Not that Maria’s scheme is a fraud, necessarily, but her means of contact certainly was. She’s probably not even drop-dead gorgeous. She’s probably an old hen. And even if she is not, so what? Is not Mrs. Harley also drop-dead gorgeous?

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • In Africa Four Families Will Live in that Garage – Part 2

    (See Part 1)

    Years ago a Branch representative from somewhere in Africa made the rounds here—I don’t quite remember why—speaking before various gatherings. He kept marveling that in America everyone has “washing-up machines.”

    “You Americans are so spoiled,” he said. Not only does everyone have a car but you even have garages to put that car in. “In Africa, four families would live in that garage.” He stated many times that “life is cheap” in Africa, and how it was so easy to lose it to violence, poverty, unstable governments, whatever.

    He was a great storyteller. He related how he had asked representatives of an area where the work was banned whether they could use anything. Yes, the brother replied. They could really use one of those massive superpowerful Xerox machines. “Of course, you would be arrested (or did he say shot?) if caught smuggling one in……..but you asked.”

    ”We have to get those brothers a Xerox machine,” he turned the thought over in his head for days and spoke about it with others. Finally a group of brothers hatched a scheme to attempt just that. He described a scene at the airport where his carefully laid plans of concealment fell apart and the machine became visible for anyone having half a brain to look there. As if they didn’t see it, as if Jehovah had struck them blind, (these are his analogies, not mine) guards waved them through. Possibly he had some ridiculous threadbare cover story that nobody thought to challenge.

    Yeah, standard of living is pretty high in the States. Expenses too are astronomical. Just like in the developing world, the majority live continually strapped for cash. Most people are equally drowning, just drowning at a higher sea level.  They might be able to send dough to someone far away who asks, but they’d have to sell a lamp or forsake something to do it. Paycheck to paycheck is how the majority live, even in developed lands. 

    Of course, this is by no means obvious to someone from afar who can only see the high lifestyle. Many times it has been pointed out that it is only in developing lands that the friends can truly appreciate Jesus’s prayer to ‘give us today our daily bread.’ In Western lands, where there are mortgages, car payments, insurance policies, and various other amortized expenses, people have no idea what their daily bread requirements are. They just know that when they reach for cash there doesn’t seem to be much of it.

    In general, the constant refrain to keep one’s life simple has had its effect on the brotherhood. Here, you can’t tell who has dough and who doesn’t. Outward appearances mean nothing. Someone outwardly living the flashy life may be hopeless ensnared in debt. Someone with no financial concerns whatsoever may be living low-key. Even Elon Musk says he does not live a life of “conspicuous consumption.” 

    Among the ones who chase after the dough in the West are some refugees once they adjust to their new home. The ones who go this way make poor candidates for the kingdom message. Using pooled resources often from others of their nationality, they buy a spacious home in a fine area and everyone in it works two jobs or more. Usually they are minimum wage jobs, but string enough of them together, and before long they’re living the material life to make any Westerner envious. Family life doesn’t immediately fall apart, since they come from places where ties are strong.

    Then, of course, there is always my screwball friend Curt, the one raised in the circus who had semi-scamming and treating people as marks seemingly stamped into his DNA, the one who by sheer fanaticism, started with nothing and became a millionaire through selling used cars (inherently fraught with scam potential), then sector funds, who drove Fidelity nuts calling them multiple times each day transferring his entire net worth from one fund to another. Yet all the while he lived as though a pauper, not to fool people, but just because he was naturally screwy. In his early days of intense zeal (after which he became pretty much a hermit but always retained his brand of godly devotion—“in the truth,” I guess, though no one ever saw him) people would note how he dressed in torn rags and would buy him clothes. “Oh wow, thank you,” he’d say, put the clothes in the drawer in case he ever needed them, and continue to wear rags. “Don’t ever tell people if you have money,” he would say, “because the first thing they will say is, ‘Oh—can I have some?’

    This is the same yo-yo who went on and on about the “great business plan” when someone sent official looking letters to all homeowners implying the government wanted to standardize house numbers and so you had to send $160 to get a certain style sign that they would send you.” I still see some of those signs around—they’re quite attractive but you did pay for them. “What do you mean, ‘great business opportunity?!’ I would tell him. “They’re scammers who should be shot!”

    ”To most people, Curt was a great pain in the neck,” I wrote in No Fake News. “But to his friends he was—well no, he drove them crazy, too.”

    Don’t get me going on this character. Like Mick Jagger, if you start me up, start me up, if you start me up baby, I’ll never stop, never stop, never never NEVER stop” Curt could make a grown man cry.

    see Part 3:

    the bookstore

  • Q: But be serious on this one. Surely the Stock Exchange is still gambling ?

    Q: But be serious on this one. Surely the Stock Exchange is still gambling ?

    Attend any business school or talk to any banker or businessman. Go to any retirement seminar. Talk to any financial advisor. Contact the Human Resources department of your employer.

    See if the stock market is considered gambling.

    ***

    Q: You are talking from a 'worldly viewpoint', I was meaning from a more scriptural / moral viewpoint of honesty, hard work and conscience.

    It certainly can be indulged in as though gambling, but so can most things. Start a business, for example, and you are “gambling” with many unknowns. Far “safer” to walk into the factory and ask for a job. You are “gambling” every time you get behind the wheel of a car.

    But the basic idea of “investing” in the stock market is not gambling at all. Buying a stock is buying a very very tiny piece of a company. You benefit the company by supplying it with the funds it needs to expand. In turn, you are (a very tiny) part owner of that company, to thrive if it thrives.

    How “moral” it is is anyone’s guess. It depends upon where you are & what companies you invest in. In the case of huge companies, it becomes the case of the tail (the stockholders) wagging the dog (the company).

    If you, for example, own John’s Bomb Company,  then you are content to wait for customers. When you get an order for a bomb, you go into the workshop to make one.

    But when you are a gigantic weapons company with many stockholders to “feed,” you have to keep feeding them. You cannot just wait for bomb orders to roll in—what if there is a period of peace?  If you don’t make and sell a lot of bombs, then you don’t make money for your stockholders, and they go somewhere else where they can make money, taking their dough with them.

    So there is an irresistible temptation to make your market. That’s why the armaments companies have a huge presence in government circles as lobbyists. It is not merely to say, ‘Hey, if you need bombs, we are better than that other company.’ More significantly, it is to say, ‘The world is a very dangerous place, with many many enemies that must be kept in check. You cannot have too many bombs on hand, and as it turns out, we make them.’

    For the longest time, Russia (or the Soviet Union) has been identified as the king of the north, who puts his trusts in fortresses. It is he who hosts public parades of weapons rolling through the streets—boasting in military might.  Still, right now, the U.S. is bombing more countries than he.

    This is but the most blatant example. Parallels can be found in most industries—energy, food, chemical, pharmaceutical, banking, for instance. They can’t just wait around for people to order their product. They must, in order to “feed” the stockholders, go out and make markets, and expand ones already made.

    It is entirely separate from “gambling,” and might be seen as the bigger evil. After all, if you have some money, you are “gambling” far more by sticking it under your mattress. You are gambling that there is no fire or thief. And if you put your money in the bank, you know very well that they are not just sitting on it. They are putting it in the stock market in hopes of making a profit. Or they are loaning it out to other people, who may not pay it back. How’s that for gambling (with your funds)? 

    ***

    PurpleStar: Should/could this sort of worldly basic idea be possible to find in this spiritual advice: "Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." 

    If yes, perhaps Jesus was not only spiritual Teacher but also successful Wall Street Investment Advisor?

    Well…..if you insist upon going there, then you must also include Pharoah’s daughter, who went down to the Nile bank and withdrew a small prophet.

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    photo by RosieTulips

  • Inside Job – the Documentary

    ‘Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Matt Damon wants to interview me. Me! He’ll autograph one of his pictures, and (blush) he’ll probably want one of my own. After all, he’s reached the top of his field and I’ve reached the top of mine.’

    But wait! Matt Damon is interviewer for a movie called Inside Job. About the root causes of the 2008 financial collapse! [the one replaying in Europe at this writing] Aren’t you worried that he may ask embarrassing questions?

    ‘Nah! He’s just a dumb actor. What does he know? I’ll razzle-dazzle him. He may be good at pretending to be a successful person, but I’m the real thing! He’ll be thrilled to meet me. Not a problem. I’ll generously grant him a few minutes of my time.’

    But it turns out that Mr. Damon is not so dumb after all. Plus, he’s a quick study. Plus, he’s been coached by the best. It’s just my guess, but I think the filmmaker used him as bait, to lure in unsuspecting hotshots. You never see his face, just like in the old days when you never saw a newsperson’s face—before they immodestly decided that they themselves were also news and so had to have their mugs on screen. But with Mr. Damon, it’s back to the old ways; you never see him. You only hear his voice.

    And if Glenn Hubbard (Chief Economic Adviser to the Bush administration and Dean of Columbia Business School) fell for the Damon bait, I’ve no doubt he’s lived to regret it. “This is not a deposition, sir,” the cornered Hubbard huffs, getting hot under Damon’s unrelenting questions. “I was polite enough to give you time, foolishly, I now see. But you have three more minutes. Give it your best shot!”

    I knew he was toast the moment he said it. If only I could have warned him. Words like that don’t work. I know, because years ago I used those exact same words on Mrs. Harley when she was ragging on about some shortcomings that she imagined I had. It’s amazing what a woman can do in three minutes!

    But Mr. Hubbard is not the film’s villain. Not by any stretch. He has a role, but it’s only a tiny one. He’s in a cozy “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” society, that’s all, which nets him a good chunk of change. ($100,000 to testify in defense of a couple hedge fund managers, who were nonetheless convicted of fraud) But that’s very small potatoes compared to the massive misdoings that Inside Job lays bare. All the really big fish were smart enough to lay low—they weren’t taken in by any ‘Oh boy! Let’s talk to Matt Damon!’ ploy. They have enough dough to buy and sell a hundred Matt Damons.

    Painstakingly, Inside Job lays out what led up to financial disaster in 2008. “This crisis was not an accident,” the film asserts. “It was caused by an out-of-control industry. Since the 1980s, the rise of the U.S. financial sector has led to a series of increasingly severe financial crises. Each crisis has caused more damage, while the industry has made more and more money.”

    Back in the day, the film explains, if you wanted to buy a house, you approached a bank for a loan. And then for the next ‘what seemed a lifetime’ you’d pay off your mortgage. The bank was careful loaning you money because it was their money. They wouldn’t loan it if they thought you might not pay it back. Isn’t that simple? It had been that way forever.

    But starting in the 1980’s investment banks went public, raising millions from the stock market, and came up with new ideas to make money. Since Americans had never defaulted on their mortgages—I mean, who wants to lose their home?—even in times of crisis, it was the absolute last expense one would renege on—why not buy those mortgages from whoever wrote them, then sell them to investors in the stock market, reaping a fat commission on the way? Of course, no investor’s going to buy a single mortgage, but if you bundled them up several thousand at a time, then it became something people would invest in! Brilliant! Profitable! A win-win! Did anyone see the flaw?

    The mortgage writer held that mortgage for only a short time. He sold it to an investment bank straight away, who also held it only a short time. The bank put it on the stock market for individual investors to purchase. So, in time, it occurred to these two middlemen that they needn’t worry too much about whether the mortgage could be repaid, so long as they could stick it to some investor further down the line, who was removed from the original translation and might just assume that it was a sound investment! Especially if outside authorities—call them rating agencies—like Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P—assured them that those investments were absolute rock-solid. Rating agencies did just that! After all, they drew their fees from those very same investment banks bundling the mortgages, and money blinds people. If they ever came to have misgivings as the mortgage quality deteriorated, they chose to look the other way. Such investments enjoyed the highest ratings right up until they crashed.

    And crash they did. Financial types were enticed by fat commissions. Over the span of two decades, it became easier and easier to get a mortgage. People could do it with limited income, sometimes even with no income, since it got so that oftentimes nobody bothered to check if the applicant was creditworthy or not. Home prices began rising so quickly that people would buy one, even if they couldn’t quite afford it, with the notion that they could flip it for a big profit in just a few months.

    Here’s Alan Sloan, senior editor of Fortune Magazine, interviewed by Inside Job: “A friend of mine, who, who’s involved in a company that has a big financial presence, said: Well, it’s about time you learned about subprime mortgages. So he set up a session with his trading desk and me; and, and a techie, who, who did all this – gets very excited; runs to his computer; pulls up, in about three seconds, this Goldman Sachs issue of securities. It was a complete disaster. Borrowers had borrowed, on average, 99.3 percent of the price of the house. Which means they have no money in the house. If anything goes wrong, they’re gonna walk away from the mortgage. This is not a loan you’d really make, right? You’ve gotta be crazy. But somehow, you took 8,000 of these loans; and by the time the guys were done at Goldman Sachs and the rating agencies, two-thirds of the loans were rated AAA, which meant they were rated as safe as government securities. It’s, it’s utterly mad.”

    They were called CDOs, “collateralized debt obligations.” There’s more. By 2006, the big investment banks realized the CDOs they sold were risky and might fail, so they began buying insurance, called credit default swaps (CDS) from AIG Insurance, so that they would reap a profit if the CDOs really did go bust. Obviously, they stopped selling those toxic CDOs, right? Nope. All the while they continued to market CDOs as a high-quality investment! Meanwhile, they continued to buy CDSs till it dawned on them that AIG itself might go bust (which did happen). So they insured against even that!

    But wait! Could all this possibly happen under the watchful eye of regulators? Again and again, Inside Job reveals how regulators saw all this developing—and did nothing. One such regulator, a former Fed banker, is convulsed with the worse case of the stammers I’ve ever seen trying to explain his role to Matt Damon: “So, uh, again, I, I don’t know the details, in terms of, of, uh, of, um – uh, in fact, I, I just don’t – I, I – eh, eh, whatever information he provide, I’m not sure exactly, I, eh, uh – it’s, it’s actually, to be honest with you, I can’t remember the, the, this kind of discussion. But certainly, uh, there, there were issues that were, uh, uh, coming up.”

    The top investment bank executives all steered clear of Matt Damon, correctly smelling a rat, but they couldn’t really avoid Congress. The film provides footage of these big-time bankers being grilled by various legislators. Watch them squirm! It’s loads of fun. But don’t kid yourself. They only squirm to a point. And a little squirming can be endured if you’re nonetheless walking off with a personal profit of millions, even billions of dollars.

    Another aspect of the film which has a curious effect: Whenever you see a picture of some people, and one of them is the United States President, and the camera begins to zoom in, you know it’s going to zoom in on the President, until presently the other nobodies fall of the frame. Inside Job zooms in on the other guys, all high-powered banking types who, the inference is clear, are really running the show. Here is footage of Ronald Reagan and his Treasury Secretary, former Morgan Stanley CEO Donald Regan, and it is Regan who is the focus. There is Bill Clinton side by side with his Secretary Treasurer, then Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin, and it is Rubin who takes the spotlight. Ditto for George W. Bush and later Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson; the same for Barack Obama and Tim Geithner, former President of the New York Federal Reserve branch. Who is not reminded of Amschel Rothschild’s words of almost two centuries ago: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Democrats in power? Republicans? Doesn’t matter. “It’s a Wall Street government,” says Robert Gnaizda, former director of the Greenlining Institute, with no reform in sight.

     

    ***~~~***

     

    Trashing bankers was manifestly the way to go in late 2008, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are nothing but opportunists when it comes to finding topics of discussion. I had no overwhelming love for bankers in the first place, so I improvised the following:

    “Hi. We’re speaking today about a group of people no one likes,” I began my house-to-house presentation. “Bankers.”

    The householder replied: “I’m a banker.”

    “No, no, no, I’m not talking about you…” I backpedaled. “I mean big-time bankers!”

    “I’m a big-time banker,” she pursued. “So are all my family.” For crying out loud! What are the chances? Believe me, there was nothing about the street to suggest big-time bankers lived there. I still think she was pulling my leg, but you won’t have to stretch your mind too far to picture that the call sort of fizzled.

    My companion was mortified. He still brings it up to suggest how embarrassed I must have been. But I wasn’t. Light and semi-flippant is the way I like to go; that way you can readily retract if you see you’ve missed your mark. It is exactly the right tone to cut through apathy, cynicism, or dullness, and we have a lot of that here in the United States. Plus, if you find you’ve come across a different type of person, you can immediately modify your tone. This will not work everywhere. It might not even work in most places. In some places it will come across as downright rude, but in the U.S.A, at least where I live, it’s just right, at least for me. It doesn’t work for Mrs. Harley, but then, her approach doesn’t work for me. We all have to make the most of the personalities we have.

    I was aiming that day to speak of security, specifically financial security, since it didn’t seem to exist just then. Remember, the whole world was on the edge at the time. “World on the Edge,” were the cover words for The Economist Magazine, presented with such gravity that I almost thought I had picked up my latest Watchtower by mistake.

    The 65th chapter of Isaiah points to happier, more secure times, and I wove this into my presentation: “And they will certainly build houses and have occupancy; and they will certainly plant vineyards and eat [their] fruitage. They will not build and someone else have occupancy; they will not plant and someone else do the eating. For like the days of a tree will the days of my people be; and the work of their own hands my chosen ones will use to the full. They will not toil for nothing, nor will they bring to birth for disturbance…”

    Many people sense today that they are building and planting so that someone else can live the good life. Protesters were then camping out on Wall Street and major U.S. cities, angry about the top 1% of the population controlling 99% of the wealth. President Obama was preaching for all he was worth about creating jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Was it an ill omen for him that even Steve Jobs died while he was doing so? So it seemed that folks might be receptive to this Bible promise recorded in Isaiah, that under God’s kingdom rule, they will see good for their hard work, rather than finding that they just dig themselves deeper into a hole while someone else sees good for it.

    Recall that the banks had just been “bailed out.” They’d been given massive cash transfers, funded by the taxpayers, and taxpayers weren’t happy about it. Would anyone bail them out of their money troubles? Or would those banks, now that they had been saved, go easy on the small fry indebted to them? Not a bit of it! Instead, they began tossing people from their homes, as the housing market collapsed, jobs withered, and folks fell far behind in their mortgages. Yes, they booted them out right and left until someone uncovered a law that said you actually had to read documents you were signing when someone’s home was at stake. Banks weren’t doing that. They were robo-signing. The courts said they could no longer carry on like that. So they had to hire people to actually read the stuff, which slowed them down a bit. But only temporarily.

    Doesn’t this just make one’s blood boil? Doesn’t it call to mind Matthew 18:23-34?

    “…the kingdom of the heavens has become like a man, a king, that wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. When he started to settle them, there was brought in a man who owed him ten thousand talents [60,000,000 denarii]. But because he did not have the means to pay [it] back, his master ordered him and his wife and his children and all the things he had to be sold and payment to be made. Therefore the slave fell down and began to do obeisance to him, saying, ‘Be patient with me and I will pay back everything to you.’ Moved to pity at this, the master of that slave let him off and canceled his debt. But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves that was owing him a hundred denarii; and, grabbing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay back whatever you owe.’ Therefore his fellow slave fell down and began to entreat him, saying, ‘Be patient with me and I will pay you back.’ However, he was not willing, but went off and had him thrown into prison until he should pay back what was owing. When, therefore, his fellow slaves saw the things that had happened, they became very much grieved, and they went and made clear to their master all the things that had happened. Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘Wicked slave, I canceled all that debt for you, when you entreated me. Ought you not, in turn, to have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I also had mercy on you?’”

    As one senator (Ron Paul) pointed out, since the total bank bailouts eventually came to $17,000 per person, with no discernable economic benefit, you might have just given the money directly to the individual Americans. The results could hardly have turned out worse, and might well have turned out better. Debts would have been paid down, new purchases made, small businesses started. So that’s why I led off with my “bankers” presentation. It’s not something I would ordinary do.

    Inside Job went on to win that year’s academy award for best documentary. Director Charles Ferguson, accepting his prize, delivered the only serious line during that entire star-studded silly night: “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong!” The pinnacles of human achievement rise ever mightier, but so do the wrecking balls grow more massive to level them all in an instant. Perhaps the following excerpt from his movie is the most telling:

    Charles Ferguson: “Why do you think there isn’t a more systematic investigation being undertaken?”

    Nouriel Roubini (professor, NYU Business School): “Because then you will find the culprits.” (November 2011)

    From the book TrueTom vs the Apostates!

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  • Offering my Sacrifice to the Gods

    Volkswagen is ending production of the New Beetle, first begun in 1997. That beetle was the reincarnation of the original Beetle, which was itself ended in 1978. Every hippie on earth drove a Beetle back in the day.

    It’s time. It is a smart move on Volkswagen’s part, for reasons beyond mere sales. With people routinely screaming that their opponents on anything are ‘like Hitler,’ you know it is only a matter of time before a company offering a car that actually was inspired by Hitler is subject to wrath itself.

    I never owned a Beetle, but a friend did. My car was a 64 Rambler Classic station wagon. I decaled a bumblebee stripe around the rear end, wagon and all.  Sometimes we took my car and sometimes his as we explored the old logging roads in the Adirondacks during college days. Many of those roads would disintegrate into pure forest when they reached back far enough.

    Emerging from a quasi-road onto a dirt road only slightly more real, my friend, who was driving, asked: “Anything coming your way?” “Just a school bus,” I said, and he laughed, for we were in the middle of nowhere. He pulled out and a school bus took off his front bumper.

    I did have a Kharmann Ghia afterwards, which was a sportier Volkswagen offering, and I have two memories of it. The first is when I was alone with it performing the same house-to-house ministry I do now, decades ago when I was much dumber than I am now. Now, VWs barely heated at all. So I had gotten it into my head that maybe a portable kerosene heater would be a good idea; I could roll the windows down a bit for the fumes. As I do even today, I waited till I actually needed it, on one frigid suburban street, to try it out. I didn’t want to fire it up right there in the car. At least credit me with not being that dumb. I lit it outside, and a two-foot high flame shot into the air because I had not done it right. What would any homeowner glancing out the window have thought? “Oh, man, another religious nut, this one offering sacrifice to the gods!”

    The other memory that lasts of my Karmann Ghia is when I pulled into my folk’s drive right behind their station wagon. No sooner had I shut the engine off than the backup lights of wagon ahead came on and my brother launched out and into my headlights like a rocket for Saturn. This is the same brother who took my stamp collection and who cheats at Scrabble. I didn’t have a lot of dough back then, so I fiber-glassed over the two gaping holes and bought two truck-mounted headlights and mounted them between front side fenders and hood. The car looked like a frog. I drove it in field service afterwards until I got rid of it, but I was always careful to avoid the street in which I had sacrificed to the gods.

    D412CC2B-004C-45A1-ACC3-45BBD559FEE8

     

     

     

  • Climate Change and Global Warming: To Be or Not to Be?

    The former local weatherman, Kevin Williams, tweets a photo of all his weather chums at a restaurant. "Aha!" I said. "I KNEW it. It IS a cabal! There IS collusion!" He liked that.

    Now, I happen to know that Kevin Williams thinks global warming is a hoax. It is no secret. He is very open about it. He follows and sometimes retweets content of the man-on-a-mission climate change denier JWspry. (NOT, so far as I know, any connection to the JW of Jehovah's Witnesses) So I tweeted: "Are they across the board on global warming or on the same page, one way or another?"

    No answer.

    So I tweeted: "Ahh. Avoiding the answer to that question is the key to continued cohesion. Probably as it should be. Not everything has to be a fight."

    He liked that one.

    Untitled

    Of course. You can't fight all the time. People believe what they believe, according to how they interpret the facts. Or more likely, they believe what they believe, and then spin the available facts to give themselves intellectual cover. We are not nearly so unemotional as the champions of critical thought would have us believe. We are dominated by emotion forged in experience and we thereafter consult our brains to make it fly logically.

    It is even as the Bible says with spiritual things. "Prove to yourselves the good and acceptable and perfect will of God," says Romans 12:2. "Taste and see that Jehovah is good," says Psalm 34:8. What if someone tastes and sees that he is bad? Other than to advise he check his taste buds, there is little you can do about it. So don't get into judging. Present your version of truth as persuasively as you can and leave it at that. God knows whether he is a Trinity or not. He also knows whether he exists or not. Let him sort it out.

    I asked Kevin (or was it JWspry?) about a previous post I wrote of how there was now 'Weather on Steroids.' He said it all depends upon what is reported. If you eagerly report all record highs and ignore all record lows, it does create that impression. Reporting means a lot. As Florence was churning over the Atlantic to deluge the Carolinas, everyone warned how it was especially fearsome because it was gathering strength over exceptionally warm waters made so by climate change. In fact, they were exceptionally cool waters and the surprise was that it became such a monster despite that.

    Every time we hear, "it was the hottest summer since the year such and such," that means it was hotter in that year, and if anything, we are witness to global cooling, with lower highs. The stranded polar bear photo has admittedly been misrepresented, Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' book has been lambasted for mishandling data to paint dire scenarios which have not panned out. To the extent emotion is the true driver in human affairs, Upton Sinclair's quote is the one to watch: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Big money is involved, either way, in climate change.

    Me, I don't go there. It's not my cause. If humans are not ruining the earth in a Revelation 11:18 scenario via global warming, it is not as though they are too responsible to ever ruin the earth; it is that their combined activity is not powerful enough to do it. They are ruining it in plenty of other ways. To the extent 'ruining the earth' reflects the ruining the earth scenario of Genesis 6, it is not environmental factors at all being spoken of, but violence. Do we live in a violent world today? Tell me about it.

     

    ******  The bookstore

     

  • Oxycotin

    I beat CBS to the punch by two years in what they said about the Oxycotin pharma fraud. It is in the Prince chapter of Tom Irregardless and Me, there because Prince died a victim of that fraud. Since the Prince chapter is Chapter 1, it is even in the free preview section.
     
    I didn’t mention the company or the drug by name. I followed the lead of Watchtower publications, which seldom names individual villains. You do not name a villain, for as soon as you name one, you create the impression that removing that villain will fix things. Instead, if you should succeed in taking him out, another villain immediately steps into his shoes and the play continues with barely a hiccup.
     
    It is the play we are watching, not the heroes and villains in it. You do not have to know the names of the actors to follow the play – it can even be a distraction if you do. The names don’t matter. If one actor doesn’t show up for curtain call, they simply plug in a substitute, and the play continues.
     
    'Tom Irregardless and Me', in the Prince chapter, quotes a Dr. Johnson, who wrote to say he was
     
    “forced to paint an unflattering picture of the industry that I have been a part of for the last 15 years. I wish I could tell you that this epidemic was due to an honest mistake. That the science was unclear or had mixed results that only later became evident. But I can’t. I also wish I could tell you that the only reason the problem persists is a ‘lack of physician awareness.’ But I won’t. The reason this opioid problem started and the reason it continues is sadly for the most American reason there is – business.”
     
    At one time, Dr. Johnson points out, American doctors prescribed opioids as did doctors everywhere: for pain relief from cancer or acute injury. He then tells of a drug company, introducing a new opioid product in 1996, that swung for the fences. It didn’t want to target just cancer patients. It wanted to target everyone experiencing everyday pain: joint pain and back pain, for example:
     
    “To do this, they recruited and paid experts in the field of pain medicine to spread the message that these medicines were not as addictive as previously thought…As a physician in training, I remember being told that the risk of addiction for patients taking opioids for pain was ‘less than one percent.’ What I was not told was that there was no good science to suggest rates of addiction were really that low. That ‘less than one percent’ statistic came from a five-sentence paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. It has come to be known as the Porter and Jick study. However, it was not really a study. It was a letter to the editor; more like a tweet. You can read the whole thing in 90 seconds.”
     
    The CBS story of 5 days ago reveals a former drug rep of the company who spills for them.. I had it all two years ago, and it is even more damning. I didn’t put it in the book because illuminating Prince’s JW life was the object of the chapter, not crusading against pharma.
     
    In fact, not only was the drug far more addictive than doctors and reps were led to believe, but the pain relief it delivered only lasted a few hours, not the 12 that was advertised. Yet, when complaints of such were received, the company would not permit reps to advise patients to take it more often, since that exposed the fact that the much more expensive drug was no better than what was already being used for pain. Instead, the advice was to increase the dosage, and that obviously served to intensify the addictive quality. Prince and millions like him got hooked on a drug that the doctor prescribed, and when doctors started to get squirrelly, withholding supply for fear of what they were unleashing, these ones were driven to the black market to find substitutes.
     
    It is here in the first chapter, Prince, which, to my knowledge, is the most complete, and perhaps only, published collection of the artist's JW experiences and interactions. And it is in the free section.
     

  • Trump Strikes Syria – How to Read This

    Trump bombed Syria and made a lot of people mad. How can you not make them mad when you’ve killed 15 people? He broke a lot of things, too, but he can always say: “Look, Vlad, what’s the big deal? I’m a billionaire. You’re a billionaire. But them some new planes out of your own pocket if it takes that to placate them.” The people are a different matter. But even that is mitigated by pointing out they were all (or almost all?) military people who have signed on to the program.

    For some inexplicable reason, I feel I have a read on this guy. I long have. It surprises me to think so few do. Even that is hard to know for sure because in this scenario, as in all others, liars spin the facts this way and that for their own purposes. In the case of a President, the motivation to do so is high.

    At any rate, his actions clearly turn a lot of memes on their head. Clearly, he is not a pawn of Putin, as U.S. media has insisted for months. Clearly, he does not hate Muslims, as they have also insisted. It is now spun that he is impulsive and acts from the heart. “Trump said he would not do Syria! No way! No how! Then he saw a picture,” I have heard.

    Or perhaps it is all spin. The trouble with conspiracy theories is that, once a few of them prove to be true, you readily swallow the next one coming down the pipe. There are cabals hanging about and they do try to skew things. But these cabals have hated Trump from the beginning. I think it is because he is not one of them and they don’t feel able to control him. We all know that Trump is not a Republican. He took over the Republican party. It might just as well have been the Democratic party. He simply read the tea leaves and saw that, at the moment, the Republican party was easier to commandeer. When he says ‘drain the swamp,’ he is not referring to one party or the other.

    Anyone in small business, which I have been, can easily conceive of a businessman who loves his country but thinks the slippery boobs have ruined it, saying: “There!  I built my business. Now let’s see if I can fix the country.” A BIG businessman can easily miss this because he is primarily worried about Trump’s effect on the stock market, but a small businessman doesn’t care, or at least it is not his chief concern. If your experience is something else entirely, you heard the ‘grab them by the you-know-what’ and concluded life around him was a 24/7 brothel. I always thought It was nonsense. I always agreed with him that it was ‘locker room’ talk. I did this because I have been in the locker room and they do not read Plato in there.

    He can spin this as I believe it really is. There are some things so barbarous that you cannot go there. Chemical weapons are among them. They are not good, especially when you have just had photos of the victims thrust under your nose.  He did what he did impulsively, from the heart. Yet even that cannot be determined with certainty. Insiders said he leaned on and took options from the military people. He didn’t hastily tell them what to do. He let them tell him, and chose from the choices they presented.

    It is easy to conclude that they, however, are swayed by the business model. When BigDefence gets too big, it must keep the profits rolling in. If it does not, the stockholders will bolt for some noble competitor – say, BigPharma. So if the world threatens to get too peaceful, they must stir up the pot. It is the United States, not Russia, that is bombing many countries. It will never be fixed because money drives everything here. You solve nothing by taking out a bad guy. Another bad guy simply sees a fine new career opening. It is the play that must be changed, not the actors in the play, who simply follow the script given them – sometimes begrudgingly, sometimes with gusto. Human reformers can change the actors, but they cannot change the play. Only God’s Kingdom will do that.

    In a world where barbarities are commonplace, it is tough to know where to draw the line. “What’s one more slaughter in the greater scheme of things?” is easy to say. Is it preferred for Trump to say: “Ah, well – shit happens?” Obama drew a line in the sand and it was instantly crossed. Perhaps leaders should keep their mouths shut over such things, and not make grandiose remarks about slaughter being ‘unacceptable’ (duh) and how people will ‘be held accountable.’ They won’t be, usually. Why carry on as though they will, except so as not to look like a helpless fool. And don’t carry on about people being ‘cowardly.’ They may be despicable, but surely it is not cowardly to be willing to die for a cause – any cause, from Boy Scout to Barbarians-R-Us. Also, don’t whine on about how the terrorists are trying to change our way of life, but we won’t let that happen. If anything, they want us to maintain our way of life and thereby be easier targets to kill. And even the terrorists will say: “Look, they elect their leaders over there, and the leaders come over and kill all our loved ones. That makes them not so innocent after all.” Victims of massive suffering and evil, many turn into unreasoning animals that must be taken out, like putting down a vicious dog. But that doesn’t mean you must judge them for it; many in the West become unreasoning animals with far less provocation.

    A man that recoils at the use of chemical weapons and reacts immediately can be spun as not such a bad thing. He can say to Putin: “Sorry. I lost it. but nothing has changed in the big picture. Let’s work together when it is expedient to fix the world.”

    It’s not my cause. I am a neutral Jehovah’s Witness, interested in these things only as ‘current history.’ All human governments will drop the ball; the only question to be answered is upon which toe will if fall. The Kingdom arrangement, as detailed in the Bible, is the only permanent answer. So if you have read these words and said: “Harley is an idiot! I’ll write to tell him so,” please don’t. I will respond by saying: “you forgot to mention that I am also a moron.”

    (See the Foreword of No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash - it is in the 30% free preview section)