Author: Paul Handover

How big bankers became outlaws

[This is another Guest Post from Patrice Ayme which appeared on his Blog on the 28th April.  It has been slightly modified by me. Ed]


Celebrating Goldman Sachs, while acknowledging that it is far from being all their fault.

Point One: We are living in a state of law. Supposedly.

Point Two: That State is democracy, the rule of the demos, the people. It is not the rule of the bankers. Supposedly.

Point Three: Political leaders have recently given PRIVATE unelected individuals, the bankers, the means and the right to create money, the money everybody uses, through debt, ex nihilo, starting from PUBLIC funds  (Called, somewhat misleadingly, the fractional reserve banking system.)

Point Three contradicts the union of Point One and Point Two. Power is supposed to be exerted by the people, but money is power. Big bankers create money at will, with the complicity of the political leadership. So they create power at will.

Thus, the present system incites (big) MONEY CREATING BANKERS TO BECOME GANGSTERS, and then OUTLAWS.

It is as simple as that!

Thus one needs to get rid of the private fractional reserve PUBLICLY funded money creating system.  The situation has been rendered worse in the last decade by the blossoming of synthetic derivatives which are out-of-this-world bets which could not possibly be paid back.

Synthetic derivatives of derivatives transformed a 300 billion dollars loss in real mortgages into a potential exposure of 24,000 billion dollars, thanks to the leverage of the derivatives squared.

Then political leaders, accomplices with the bankers, offered to pay the 24,000 billion dollars, on behalf of taxpayers, leaving the economy in tatters.

Not all is lost: Goldman Sachs got its entire 2008 profit, 13 billion dollars, from taxpayers, through AIG, thanks to US politicians, and the USA loves a winner. Love and dove, there are still many a feather to pluck.

By Patrice Ayme

P.S. Synthetic derivatives are, mathematically and philosophically, a generalization of the license of the privately managed, publicly funded, fractional reserve system, thus proving further, if need be, how erroneous the latter can be.

P.P.S. The fractional reserve system ought to be kept, to provide the capital needed, simply it ought not to be anymore the province of a small private oligarchy gaming it.

Well done, Bill Moyers!

A giant of US television retires from the screen

One of the fascinating aspects of my new American life is seeing how loud the volume of dissent is from the American

Bill Moyers

people about the shenanigans on Wall Street and the Too Big To Fail banks.  There is an intensity and passion that I can’t see happening on the other side of the Pond.  Maybe this is the cultural legacy of a people that just a short time ago, relatively speaking, were opening up this giant country seeking a better way of life than the ‘old countries’.

This intensity and passion is why, in the end, I believe that the solution to the huge crisis that still awaits us will start from this side of the Atlantic.  But it will get a whole lot worse before it gets better, such is the complexity and depth of the fraud that is being visited on decent, ordinary folks in this and many other fine countries.

Bill Moyers of the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS is retiring.  He’s approaching 76 and that’s a grand age to be dealing with the workload and stress of a weekly television presentation.  His last Journal was broadcast on the 23rd April, a week ago today airing two really important topics.  My only regret is that I haven’t been here sufficiently long to view many more of his Journals.

William K Black

In that last broadcast on the 23rd, Bill had two key interviews.  In this Post, I want to bring to your attention his first report, which was an interview with William K Black, now an academic but, just as importantly, a former bank regulator.  William Black really understands what is going on in banking.

The interview is both fascinating and captivating because, well to me anyway, it explains in terms that us laymen can understand, exactly what is going on and why it is so terribly important that legislation and regulations are brought into force to stop this fraud ever happening again.

This interview has not yet made it’s way onto YouTube so I can only post the link to the Bill Moyers website.

But, please, if you care about what is happening to us in whatever country you live in, click on this link and watch the interview.

And if you want to watch the earlier interview that Bill Moyers had with William Black then here it is.

By Paul Handover

Happy Birthday, Hubble!

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been in space for 20 years!

This week, twenty years ago, the HST was launched into orbit.  There’s much online if you want to read about it both on WikiPedia and on the Hubble web site so this post is going to offer just two items.

A beautiful picture

Nucleus of Galaxy Centaurus A

And an interesting audio slideshow tribute from the BBC – click here, introduced thus:

Take a look at some of the sights it has seen in that time with Professor Alec Boksenberg from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge – who was on the European team that helped build Hubble.

By Paul Handover (in awe of what is beyond our skies)

Drunken sailors

With thanks to one of our very regular followers, Gordon, for passing this on.

Well said, that sailor!

By Paul Handover

The beginning of the end for the Eurozone?

A fateful day for the eurozone

…. is how Gavin Hewitt recently headed up a post on his BBC Europe blog.  The headline caught my eye and then when I read the full article it seemed as yet another piece of western civilisation was sliding into chaos.  Maybe it’s my age!

Gavin Hewitt

Gavin Hewitt is the BBC’s Europe Editor and as you can see from his bio, Gavin is a very experienced reporter.  Here’s how this Eurozone article starts:

Friday [April 23rd, Ed] will be remembered as the day the euro needed rescuing. Sure it is Greece that has asked to be bailed out but it was still a day that the architects of the single currency had never envisaged. For when it came to it, there were no plans to save a euro member in trouble.

You see what I mean about grabbing one’s attention!

In fact the article is so powerful that I am going to run the risk of incurring the wrath of the BBC’s legal department by republishing it in full.

Here it is:

Read the rest of this article

Remarkable people: Prof James Lovelock

The father of Gaia

A week or so ago, the BBC under their Beautiful Minds series, screened a programme about James Ephraim Lovelock, more popularly known as Professor Jim Lovelock.

Prof. James Lovelock

(Picture taken from this article – in itself well worth reading.)

The programme demonstrated that Lovelock’s mind is more than beautiful, it is still capable, at 90 years of age, of thinking in ways that are very rare in today’s societies where conformity is such a powerful force.

As always, WikiPedia has an excellent reference on Prof. Lovelock and I encourage you to read it plus Lovelock’s own website which makes up in content what it may lack for presentation!

Luckily there is an extract from the BBC programme on YouTube – please watch this and reflect on exactly what Lovelock is saying.

And if you are up for more, then settle down for thirteen minutes and watch this next video.

James Lovelock is the Darwin of our times.

Now to put this into some context (this is me speaking as a layman!).

Please read the rest of this post

Skydiving stunt or utter madness?

From the Daily Mail (UK Newspaper) online

Just crazy!

A skydiver has pulled off an astonishing stunt by climbing out of a glider’s cockpit, crawling along the wing and then somersaulting underneath and stepping onto the wing of a second glider flying below.

Paul Steiner then moves back onto the main fuselage of the second glider while the first glider turns upside down and flies overhead so that he can reach up and hold the tail fin at 100mph, forming a human link between the two aircraft. He then leaps off and parachutes back to the ground.

The spectacular stunt, captured on YouTube, was carried out by the Red Bull skydive team 2,100 metres above the mountains in Styria, Austria. And they look mightily relieved as they returned to their airfield.

More incredible pictures here.

By Paul Handover

More on the SR-71, Part 2

The second part of the guest post by Captain Dave Jones. Ed.

Part One was yesterday which I introduced as follows:

The SR-71, a truly great aircraft

John’s couple of articles about the SR-71 here and here reminded me of the time that I was given an article by my instructor at Mojave. He was a military test pilot and ended up with NASA and he was one of a select few to fly the Blackbird as a civilian….a great chap to talk to…  I continue with Part 2

     The SR-71 was an expensive aircraft to operate. The most significant
cost was tanker support, and in 1990, confronted with budget cutbacks, the
Air Force retired the SR-71. The Blackbird had outrun nearly 4,000 missiles,
not once taking a scratch from enemy fire. On her final flight, the
Blackbird, destined for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, sped
from Los Angeles to Washington in 64 minutes, averaging 2,145 mph and
setting four speed records. 

        The SR-71 served six presidents, protecting America for a quarter of
a century. Unbeknownst to most of the country, the plane flew over North
Vietnam, Red China, North Korea, the Middle East, South Africa, Cuba,
Nicaragua, Iran, Libya, and the Falkland Islands. On a weekly basis, the
SR-71 kept watch over every Soviet nuclear submarine and mobile missile
site, and all of their troop movements. It was a key factor in winning the
Cold War. 

 Read the final part of this great story

More on the SR-71, Part 1

This is a guest post from Captain Dave Jones.  Dave and I go back many years to the time when I was studying for my Instrument Rating, a flying rating that allows one to fly in the same airspace as commercial aircraft.  He is what I call a Total Aviation Person!  Dave read the posts from John Lewis about the SR-71 and mentioned that he had once had a instructor at Mojave Airport, California who had been a civilian SR-71 pilot.  Ed.

The SR-71

The SR-71, a truly great aircraft

John’s couple of articles about the SR-71 here and here reminded me of the time that I was given an article by my instructor at Mojave. He was a military test pilot and ended up with NASA and he was one of a select few to fly the Blackbird as a civilian….a great chap to talk to…

This is his article [broken into two posts because of its length. Ed.] with an intro from my instructor.

Awesome story about a truly great aircraft. I only let it go as high as Mach 3.27 once (the design speed was 3.2) but it could do all that is in this story, Cheers, Rogers

In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin
disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist
camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the
damage our F-111s had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a "line of death,"
a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra, swearing to shoot down any
intruder that crossed the boundary. On the morning of April 15, I rocketed
past the line at 2,125 mph. 

        I was piloting the SR-71 spy plane, the world's fastest jet,
accompanied by Maj. Walter Watson, the aircraft's reconnaissance systems
officer (RSO). We had crossed into Libya and were approaching our final turn
over the bleak desert landscape when Walter informed me that he was
receiving missile launch signals. I quickly increased our speed, calculating
the time it would take for the weapons-most likely SA-2 and SA-4
surface-to-air missiles capable of Mach 5 - to reach our altitude. I
estimated that we could beat the rocket-powered missiles to the turn and
stayed our course, betting our lives on the plane's performance. 

 Read more about this amazing story

Man proposes, nature disposes.

A salutary reminder of the power of nature

This is being written at 15:00 UTC on Tuesday, 20th April.  It’s still anyone’s guess as to when the airspace that commercial aircraft fly in will be free from volcanic fallout.

Nature disposing

Based in Arizona but planning to fly to the UK in about three weeks, it’s also very frustrating finding really good, accurate information to help one think through plans and back-up plans.

But here’s a web site for UK glider (sailplane) pilots that goes a very long way to providing really solid information.  Check it out. (And, once again, thanks to Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism for finding the site.)

Well done GlideMet.

By Paul Handover (ex British Gliding Association pilot/instructor.)