NEWS: Economic Apocalypse! Lube Up!

Definitely agreed. A significant portion of this entire thread, and FTR's article, is well-constructed bullshit. Much is true piecemeal, which lends it credence, but it depends on the same paranoid delusion that prompted Germans to accomplice the murder of Jews, the KKK to murder blacks, and French Revolutionaries to execute every noble they could find, even though a significant number of those nobles supported the cause with information or financing. It's the same delusion that lets people believe that the Rosicrucians were (or are) real (hint: they're not), the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was anything but an idiot's fiction, or that the Nazi's Hollow Earth theory was true.

Those who call for violent revolution, or who expect to find a cabal in a mahogany boardroom that they can punish, are in for a disappointment. You'll only succeed in becoming the monsters you wish to destroy. You, not the white-bread suits you hate, will set us back a century.

And please, let's try not to roll ourselves back to the Industrial Revolution... that was *such* a fine time for humanity.

Open your minds. Dig deeper. Neither the problem, nor the solution, is so blunt as many of you'd like to make it seem. The way out is through...

~forsta~

Thank you for saying this. For some reason, a lot of people seem to find it more comforting that it's all the work of a few mustache-twirling villains sitting around laughing maniacally, rather than a bunch people being stupid, greedy, and short-sighted. If anyone were to look around at what's actually happening, it's easy to spot that the people doing this are not master manipulators, nor are they ambitious enough for true world dominance. Maybe dominance through the stock market and the economy, but not dominance in the Orwellian sense.

Freedom hater. Don't you see the free market solves everything?!

Gee it would be interesting if one of the people saying this is just gloom and doom BS would actually SPECIFICALLY refute FTR's points with facts and logic. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen..

LOL, my dad used to hang with the Rosicrucians when he was a hippie in the 60's. They exist, man, open your mind! (More specifically, don't let your doubts delude you, research the matter instead. If they are here now and historical information provides evidence of their existence, then certainly they must have existed! But then, I suppose it depends upon your perspective on the matter, are you talking Hollywood Rosicrucian or Philosophic Rosicrucian? There is a difference you know.

So what do you propose, don't change, just go through a period of hard times without adapting? Now that is crazy. I don't subscribe to the notion that governments and systems cannot change for the better, I think that abandoning the current system of failure isn't altogether a bad idea. Humans have been toppling regimes for time immemorable, yet the ideas and philosophies have of the wise have endured to aid and guide us along our paths of change. Ironically, even along these serpentine routes, we forget our past and er over and over again, often repeating the same mistakes of the past.

Just what I was thinking!

No, he didn't. He hung out with a group of people loosely associated with the Golden Dawn and Symbolic Masonry. All of them were self-deluding and not the least associated with the Rosicrucians of the 1614 Fama Fraternitatis, which has itself been shown to be an elaborate hoax, an intellectual game based upon the utopian fever of the time. The people who wrote it didn't even mean for it to go so far.

I'll stick to well-studied history, and you can keep on getting lazy when you reach back any further than the nineteenth century.

I'm not defending Bush, his administration, the corporate power structure (which is itself based on bad decision-making by the legislatures of New Jersey and Delaware in the 1890s), the banks, or any of the rest of it. Bush is culpable for crimes against humanity and should be tried for them. What I *am* suggesting is that the oppression-revolution cycle is not likely to get us much further than it's gotten already, and at the rate at which communication and technology accelerate cultural change (and economic change), we'd be likely to find ourselves back in the same boat in less than a generation, if not in a few short years.

There are bad leaders to string up, if you wish. I won't stop you. But there is no cabal, no stand of ultimate baddies that could be "got" if only you could find them. There's no silver bullet to any of the world's crises right now. There also seems to be little personal accountability. Keep blaming everything on a grand, evil plan, and you'll keep getting a grand, unfixable mess. It's as bad as people thinking their credit will go forever.

I'm not going to refute FTR's points one by one, because one by one most of them are accurate. What I'm refuting is that a revolution would provide anything remotely like a long-term fix (don't think 1776 here, cause it isn't going to happen that way). A long-term fix will have to address shortfalls in corporate responsibility (which creates the short-term thinking that makes corporations pathological regardless of the morality of their leaders), the lack of accountability by leaders to key members of society at large (no double-blind, mitigating level of citizens with the power to hold leaders accountable), and an understanding of the economy as a non-externalizing system (there can be no such thing as an externality in a closed system like Earth). In other words, it'll have to address basic human greed, shortsightedness, and need. You know, difficult stuff.

There are conspiracies, to be sure (we all conspire every time we decide something with one person but fail to let everyone else know about it). There are even coverups, and spin-doctoring is a rampant disease. But there is no grand conspiracy. No one person or group is completely in control. You should find that to be scarier than the idea of the cabal.

So deal with it, and will all the conspiracy theorists please get their heads out of their asses, as you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Thank you.

~forsta~

Stating the current ugly economic facts isn't a "conspiracy theory." Those are the facts. How about offering some SPECIFIC solutions to accomplish what you stated.

Yes corporations should be more accountable and how exactly are you goint to accomplish that with our current system? Certainly you're aware both major parties are at the beck and call of industry. For example look at the 300 billion bank bailout that easily passed the Senate with support from both parties. It's nothing more than transferring bank losses on ridiculous home loans from banks to taxpayers. I'm all ears for your solutions on how you solve this with our current system.

I'm not here to state a solution. If I had a solution, it couldn't be summed up in pithy statements on this website. What I *am* saying is that doomsayers (like FTR) and grand-conspiracy theorists (like many SG commenters) aren't proffering any solution at all beyond the short-term, hard-to-make-an-argument-for-in-the-twenty-first-century, ground-up violence, and that violence is as likely as not to hit the wrong target anyway.

Besides that, the enemies are no longer armed with muskets.

I'm not here to spell out a solution for anyone here; I'll spend that effort with more productive folks. What I *am* saying is that last century's (or centuries') thinking is not at all likely to solve this century's problems.

To repeat, many of the commenters and quasi-politicos here should consider removing their heads from their asses, because they're jammed in there at least as far as the average I-can't-give-up-my-PS2 consumer's noggin is inserted into his or her posterior.

~forsta~

I've no quarrel with you as to the roots of of the Rosicrucian movement (arguing over its founding upon a hoax is actually quite trivial), it mattered little to members from the older branches of the Golden Dawn or Symbolic Masonry, or the younger ones like the open source version of the Golden Dawn; all considered themselves, philosophically, to be Rosicrucian (although, traditionally, they were to refute or deny such claims).

The philosophical precepts of the movement indeed borrowed many concepts and ideas of the ages, blended into a complete, syncretistic and often contradictory, heretical alternative to prevailing convention (no matter the equally shaky or historically inaccurate origins either, mind you). To that extent, and at least historically they did exist from the 17th century onward. But as I have said before, such argument is trivial amidst the fact that philosophically they did and do exist, despite their historically inaccurate origins (to me, this is no different to Christian faith, Christians did and do exist although no definitive evidence supports that Christ actually ever existed).

Beyond that point, I think that is entirely relevant that we are discussing spiritualism in regard to societal change (although I don't exactly think it is an accurate for us to invoke the specter of conspiracy theories in reference to them). Although occult in its origins (and shared by many other movements other then just those Rosicrucian in nature),concepts of blending spiritual awareness with natural laws to effect change upon the physical realm have begun a convergence with science. Whist this chimera of science and spirit remains controversial, one cannot argue with the fact that despite our individual identities and unique perceptions of reality, many of us are governed by collectively agreed upon ideas and concepts.

Though the expression of these collective constructs may be counterproductive or even false, often, they areembraced as immalleable and universal. These constructs may also be likened to living systems that behave as though they have a life unto themselves. Though we may not fully understand these systems, we support them as a cell does to an organ, and organs, the body. Yet when an organ is failing and the body is threatened, does it not make sense to find a curative process to eliminate this threat? Of course, not everyone agrees which method is the most effective, and in fact, the whole body may even resist the best curative efforts.

The point I'm trying to make is that human beings have adapted and revised our lives to a set of rules and standards that run counter to our long-term survival. For example, economic productivity is just one aspect of our existence; quality, density, and sustainability are just a few other descriptive systems that overlap and interact, helping to define us and the environment we live in. Under the current regimen, they are spinning out of control, unless we find ways of altering these interactions and collectively implement them into our daily lives, then through the folly of complacency, we risk losing it all. If we do act, then we will not be setting ourselves back 100 years, rather we will be preserving our place in the future. For that matter, what's wrong with a little bit of regression, I think that the continued exploitation of resources to feed the material and energy demands of our current consumer driven economy and the marketing driven psyche behind it, are completely unnecessary and unsustainable if we are to survive.

Whoops. meant to respond to Forsta.

I'm not at all surprised that you don't have any specific solutions or the people here apparently aren't worthy of hearing them. You speak in worthless generalities which does nothing to solve the problems at hand.
I'll offer some specific solutions.

1. The crashing dollar and soaring commodity prices can mainly blamed on the US budget deficit, trade deficit, and slashing the Fed funds rate to 2%.

The budget deficit should be reduced immediately by 1. getting out of Iraq and other foreign countries 2. A line item veto for the pork projects 3. means testing Social Security and Medicare

Trade deficit: any country with a dollar peg will have duties imposed on their products in line with the amount their currency is undervalued to the dollar. Warren Buffet proposed a similar plan that I can find if anyone is interested

Funds rate. Anytime the US Funds rate is cut below inflation, a bubble will be borne. The rate should be raised to the inflation rate with food/energy of 4%.

No worries.

I never advocated violence, so don't pretend I did so. You're absolutely full of shit for implying I did. I made a joke about someone building a guillotine in their garage. Get a fucking clue. People like you are the reason I don't miss these boards one bit.

Yet, ironically, people like him are what make these boards so goddamn entertaining.

True dat.

And good bye, again.