Doesnt it all just seem a bit too good to be true? According to the media we just dodged the biggest economic crisis since the 1920′s. Wrong. So wrong. The worst is yet to come. Of that I have no doubt at all.

“The people have been lulled into a false sense of safety under the rouse of a perceived “economic recovery.” Unfortunately, what the majority of people think does not make it so, especially when the people making the key decisions think and act to the contrary. The sovereign debt crises that have been unfolding in the past couple years and more recently in Greece, are canaries in the coal mine for the rest of Western “civilization.” The crisis threatens to spread to Spain, Portugal and Ireland; like dominoes, one country after another will collapse into a debt and currency crisis, all the way to America.

In October 2008, the mainstream media and politicians of the Western world were warning of an impending depression if actions were not taken to quickly prevent this. The problem was that this crisis had been a long-time coming, and what’s worse, is that the actions governments took did not address any of the core, systemic issues and problems with the global economy; they merely set out to save the banking industry from collapse. To do this, governments around the world implemented massive “stimulus” and “bailout” packages, plunging their countries deeper into debt to save the banks from themselves, while charging it to people of the world.

Then an uproar of stock market speculation followed, as money was pumped into the stocks, but not the real economy. This recovery has been nothing but a complete and utter illusion, and within the next two years, the illusion will likely come to a complete collapse.

The governments gave the banks a blank check, charged it to the public, and now it’s time to pay; through drastic tax increases, social spending cuts, privatization of state industries and services, dismantling of any protective tariffs and trade regulations, and raising interest rates. The effect that this will have is to rapidly accelerate, both in the speed and volume, the unemployment rate, globally. The stock market would crash to record lows, where governments would be forced to freeze them altogether.

When the crisis is over, the middle classes of the western world will have been liquidated of their economic, political and social status. The global economy will have gone through the greatest consolidation of industry and banking in world history leading to a system in which only a few corporations and banks control the global economy and its resources; governments will have lost that right. The people of the western world will be treated by the financial oligarchs as they have treated the ‘global South’ and in particular, Africa; they will remove our social structures and foundations so that we become entirely subservient to their dominance over the economic and political structures of our society.

This is where we stand today, and is the road on which we travel.”

More of this very worrying article here.

Roar?

This week marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year. This will be a very special Year of the Tiger. The year of the Tiger comes in between the Year of the Bull and the Year of the Dragon. I think the Bull is a fitting symbol for the West these days, virile and aggressive but lacking in wisdom and patience. The Dragon is very old and wise but is perhaps too cautious and passive and can be seen as a symbol of the East. If you mix the best elements of the Bull and the Dragon, the result is a Tiger.

This has already been a huge year for me and I think this world has got a big year coming  up…Gggrrrrrr.

My American cousin brought around an old photo album on Christmas day from her visit to the UK to see us… plenty of embarrassing photos and long forgotten memories of a more innocent time in life…

Luke, Clara, Piers rocking it 1986 styleee…

What is with the “news” these days??

Tony Blair and George Bush knew there were no WMD’s but, having run out of reasons to attack Iraq, just went ahead anyway!

As if it hadnt been obvious from the start, this is now being reported as “NEWS”

Global Warming (renamed Climate Change) has been clearly shown to be a sham, intended to allow Governments endless reasons to tax and control their minions…

Dubai finally admits that actually it cant afford to build a ludicrously overbudget supercity from scratch….and most all bubble asset classes go over the cliff again…

9/11 Texts released on WikiLeaks show some extraordinary inconsistencies, suggesting that perhaps the Bush regime wasnt entirely honest about things? Surely not more lies?

Is it just me or are things really starting to unravel, just as the MSM would have us all belive that things are getting back to normal and pfffew we managed to avoid a massive depression. Double dip anyone?

Modern historians will look back at the defining events in this period in history and marvel at the disgraceful behaviour that went entirely unchecked for so long…

For a more eloquently written version of this outrage and other things you can check my brothers site here, as I just noticed that we posted about the same topics at about the same time…does combined outrage make any difference?

“A weak currency arises from a weak economy which in turn is the result of a weak Government.” Gordon Brown, during the Pounds devaluation after it was withdrawn from the ERM (before he made it to power by default)

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”, Ludwig Von Mises

Buddha’s second noble truth: The cause of suffering is desire.

It’s holiday season down here in NZ. What I failed to realise until we went up to Cardrona was that this means the resorts are absolutely packed with thousands of complete idiots…(imagine everywhere about as busy as a northern hemisphere Christmas)

So after waiting 30 minutes to ride the first lift, we headed out the back of the resort and went for a long hike. Later in the day, with the queues still ridiculous, we came off the mountain and went for a wander through the old Cardrona township.

In the early 1960′s, the previous owner of our family house started collecting beer mats, and nailing them up on the wall in an outbuilding. When we sold the house years later, I painstakingly removed all 391 of them from the wall, thinking they might be worth something one day.

They have been in storage for the last 12 years gathering a lot of dust and very little value.

As I am going to be moving out of London soon, I decided to document them before they go back to gathering dust…

Here’s a few…