Off topic, but important.
Categories
-
Join 499 other subscribers
- Follow Climate of Sophistry on WordPress.com
Recent Comments
- Joseph E Postma on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- Joseph E Postma on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- Joseph E Postma on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- Joseph E Postma on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- Joseph E Postma on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- Joseph E Postma on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
- boomie789 on Explaining the Double-Slit Experiment without Probabilism
Climate of Sophistry 
Reblogged this on ajmarciniak.
Of course fractional lending has always been a part of banking ever since promissory notes were first issued. The bank lends the note, instead of lending the actual Gold or Silver, because it needs to keep the physical money on hand to give back to the original depositer of it should they demand it.
The bank charges interest on the promissory note, not just for profit, but also to cover itself against the risk that both the depositer and the holder of the note will wish to have gold/sliver at the same time, thus making it impossible to give the physical money out twice. They go bankrupt.
What central banking does is monopolise banking and take away the risk of insolvency for the owners of it. Because now they have a legal power to meet demands for gold and silver with more promissory notes that the public must accept as money due to government decree. This then leads to corruption because there are no downsides to multiple issuing of notes backed by the same asset other than public discontent.
Not just corruption, but control over governments, a nation’s people, war, death, misery, evil, pseudoscience, fake news, etc.
Off topic, you say?
Well, not if you follow the correlation-equals-causation reasoning of some people:
Hah, nice.
Fiat money = non-physical money
… imaginary money, like imaginary numbers — sound familiar? — Copenhagen interpretation, … live-dead kitties, and all that.
It both is and isn’t, and it only is, because we imagine it to be and trust our imaginations, and it isn’t, because our imaginations are not real, but we act is if they are, which makes it the currency of contradiction.
Hi Joseph. I hope you have been doing well. Glad to see you posting again.
If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend watching the full documentary by Bill Still entitled “The Money Masters”. It is perhaps the most comprehensive documentary ever assembled on the subject of Money, Currency and the Federal Reserve. Absolutely fascinating. I caution, it is almost 4 hours long, but it is very detailed and accurate. A tremendous amount of research and work went into the compilation of this documentary. I highly recommend watching it!
The Money Masters – Full Documentary
By the way, the “gold standard” was a huge mistake. Your video is incorrect about the “gold standard”. Currency is not a representation of the value of a commodity, it is a representation of work (or production) period. To base a currency and tie its value to a commodity (or precious metal) is incredibly stupid and problemattic, for many reasons. Again, watch “The Money Masters” to learn why a “gold standard” is a bad system.
Oh for sure I know all about Bill Still’s documentaries and highly recommend them! Definitely agreed about what currency should represent.
One of the biggest problems with our current banking system and the Federal Reserve (which is neither “Federal” nor a “Reserve”) is Fractional Lending. The fact that a bank can loan you something they don’t even have (at a rate of more than 10:1 now) is nothing short of theft. A bank can loan you $100 and only have to actually possess $10 .. that is, they can loan you $90 that they don’t haven have and charge you interest on something that doesn’t even exist !!! .. that is exactly how our current banking system works and sucks off such a large percentage of production. It is also how the central banking system can make money no matter economic conditions. Fractional lending is the biggest monetary con job ever conceived by humans.
By the way, President Trump could get rid of the Federal Reserve and eliminate 3/4 of our national debt very easily. Simply by systematically replacing Federal Reserve Notes with US Treasury Notes. By the time Trump concluded his 2nd term, the US National Debt would be almost gone and soon after the Federal Reserve would be gone.
I highly recommend watching the Still Report. Bill Still has produced more than 2500 reports over the years, with hundreds of documentaries detailing currency, money and the Federal Reserve. I caution however, because YouTube has “demonetized” Bill Still videos, the opening minutes of each video are packed with advertisement. Bill has to do this to stay alive as YouTube has tried to stifle Bill for years.
https://www.youtube.com/user/bstill3/videos
@Joseph E Postma says: 2019/01/19 at 10:22 AM
So good to see/hear from you again Joseph !!! .. I hope you are doing very well !!!
For what it is worth, I didn’t really like “Astrophysicist Debunks Mainstream Global Warming / Climate Change Narrative FOREVER” video .. just because I don’t like watching poor little seals being ripped apart by polar bears while I am trying to learn some science. Otherwise, it was a good video.
Again, so glad to hear from you again. Keep up the great work my friend !!!
P.S. Seems our friend Doug Cotton is on another “tear Joseph down” quest again over at PSI. Cotton is such a turd.
If money SHOULD represent work, then how would banks have anything to back it?
Work is fugitive — you cannot hold it, contain it in a package, or draw any physical boundaries around it to equate it to a paper note that SHOULD represent it.
So, there has to be some physical thing that represents the work it would take to acquire that physical thing, and one of those things representing lots of physical effort to get it is gold. Gold is tangible, containable, and transferable. How would one transfer work, without a physical medium to represent it?
@Robert Kernodle … totally WRONG! … WORK backs it .. period.
Please Robert, go watch a few of Bill Still’s videos on the subject. Gain an understanding of what “currency” actually represents. You cannot give value to the currency itself. That is completely nuts and is precisely why so many currencies have failed throughout history.
Ask yourself this, does currency represent the value of a commodity (like gold) or does it represent work and production? … If currency represents the value of a commodity, then what represents work? … why should the value of an inanimate object affect the value of my work? … Do you know why systems have tied the value of commodities to the value of currency? … TO MANIPULATE THE VALUE !!! .. that is the whole purpose of tying currency to a commodity!!!
Do you really think a government run central bank would be better? That was tried in the 19th century and it did not work. I know what the Federal Reserve scam is like but it’s better than a socialized central bank.
#Joseph Postma: Have you heard of Dr. Reinhardt’s books doing linguistic and logical critiques of modern physics and cosmology? Such as, “THE LANGUAGE AND LOGIC OF
PHYSICS, METAPHYSICS AND MYSTICISM
The Philosophy of Science Applied to Modern Physics Reinhardt, Dr. Douglas.
The real reason for AGW is to overcome environmentalist opposition to nuclear energy. That’s why it arose after Three Mile Island. AGW results in laws and regulations requiring clean CO2 free energy and once everyone learns that the other types are uneconomical they will opt for nuclear energy.
The Milankovitch effect is admitted to fail to explain the glacial maximum. There is no known cause of the glacial maximum.
squid,
At the moment, I don’t have that much time to invest in those videos. For now, I am simply responding to the idea that a society can conduct business on a concept where money represents something fleeting, as opposed to representing something substantial, to which we can assign a quantity of work to acquire that substance.
I want to buy an egg from you. I’ll pay you a dollar for the egg. How do I prove to you that my dollar is worth a certain amount of work?, and HOW much work is my dollar worth? — who would determine this standard? How much work equals a dollar? How does this definition not change as fleetingly as anything else? Today two hours of work, say, will buy me the credit to pay you a dollar for that egg. In five years, the standard is increased to three hours of work, say, to buy me the credit to pay you a dollar for that egg? How is work not subject to inflation? and, if it is, then how is an inflatable fleeting entity any better than an inflatable commodity standard or an inflatable debt standard?
I’m really out of my element here, and so, hopefully, you’ll forgive my ignorance, and recognize my responses as basic responses that a lot of ignorant people would have who would have to adopt your definition of what money should represent.
Define “work” as a backing entity for money. Is it an hour’s worth of digging a hole with a shovel? … an hour’s worth of digging a hole with a backhoe? … an hour’s worth of digging a hole with dynamite? Is it based on calories expended in a physical task? — 300 calories of physical exertion, say, equals a dollar?
It just seems so obscure.
“Do you really think a government run central bank would be better?”
@theoryofthesecondsun
“Do you really think a government run central bank would be better?”
Actually .. yes… and historical data proves it. The United States has suffered greater and more frequent recessions since the Federal Reserve Act. Congress should be following our Constitution that clearly demands that only the federal government shall “mint coin”. Federal Reserve notes are unconstitutional in the first place.
But the real problem isn’t so much who is minting coin, but who is setting interest rates. The fact that interest rates are arbitrarily (artificially) set is one of the biggest problems. Coupled with fractional lending and you have nothing but an artificial monetary market specifically designed to take your money. This kind of monetary market has failed repeated throughout history. Again, watch the documentary “The Money Masters”.
Most people are shocked to learn that the most successful and longest lasting (by centuries) currency in human history was nothing but a stick of wood. It was a fiat currency represented by a stick of wood (I don’t recall the name of it now, watch “The Money Masters” to learn about it).
There should be absolutely no fractional lending. I cannot lend you $10 if I don’t have $10 .. but a bank can lend you $10 while only possessing $1 .. so they are lending you $9 they don’t have and charging you interest on $9 that doesn’t exist. Furthermore, it is the very banking cartel that is lending you that money, printing that money, that is determining what interest rate you are going to pay for that phantom money that they don’t even have. The free market should be determining what the value of “interest” is. There should be no mandatory “uniform” interest fee. It should be negotiated per transaction.
Having the Federal Reserve (or Congress) artificially set an interest rate is by very definition price fixing .. and anyone with any economic sense whatsoever should know what happens when you artificially fix prices.
@Robert Kernodle says:
2019/01/20 at 5:42 PM
Wow Robert .. all I have to say is that you have a whole lot to learn about economics and monetary systems. For the bulk of human history we had none of what you are suggesting and some of those monetary systems flourished for centuries. It is the modern monetary systems that have failed. The same systems that you say must be based upon some intrinsic, arbitrary commodity. Here, let’s base our “currency” air. It would be no different than basing it upon gold. And again, is the value of that currency representing gold when I pay you to mow my lawn? .. no! .. it is based upon how much my other neighbor is willing to pay you to mow his lawn and how much bread I can buy from my other neighbor with that same represented work. The perceived “value” of gold has nothing to do with that transaction, and in fact alters the actual value of the work the currency represents .. artificially! .. that is called currency manipulation .. our buddy (sarcasm) George Soros is an expert at this. He is expert at taking advantage of this very weakness and is able to use it to steal wealth from nations. This is nothing new.
Again Robert, learn a little bit about what “currency” really is, what it represents and how it works. You have an incredibly distorted view of this subject just as I once did, as I too used to believe a “gold standard” was a good thing. It is not. I too used to believe we needed a Federal Reserve .. we do not .. in fact, we not only do not, it has been detrimental to the success of our economy. We have been very fortunate that our economy has been able to, so far, survive in spite of the Federal Reserve.
Robert Kernodle 2019/01/19 at 3:27 pm
Yah I think the idea is that gold is supposed to represent a roughly fixed amount of work. But in the end, there’s no need to do that, as the currency can be regulated anyway. To prevent fraud, sure, it helps to have a fixed backing. IF we could have a currency that worked for the people, and death sentences for those who tried to mess with it, then it could be regulated perhaps. If you had a global currency then it would always lead to corruption. However in a nation-state system, then we would have competing currencies where currency manipulators becomes less trusted, and their currency reduces in value, etc., kind of like how the stock market works. This is probably why the powers that be hate the nation state system and wanted a world-government/currency system, because then they could do whatever they want and there would be no international accountability on currency, etc. We need a nation-state system, with competing currencies, and competing Meritocracies, etc.
I do not think that a private-interest bank run independently of the elected government has any compatibility with a Republic democracy.
@Joseph E Postma says:
2019/01/21 at 9:42 AM
BOOM! .. you nailed it .. btw .. we used to have exactly that .. Nation-State system with competing currencies. And it used to be extremely successful. At one point in our history, we had as man operating currencies in the United States. And by the way, we didn’t have a single “recession” until the banking system was “centralized” (see 1st Bank, 2nd Bank, etc…)
But again, the real problem is not so much who is issuing currencies (minting), the issue is the valuation and especially interest on lending and how/what sets the interest rate. “Fractional” lending in particular has opened the door wide open for theft. Every second of every day the central banking system in the US, headed by the Federal Reserve, is stealing wealth by skimming a % of money right off the top for lending something that doesn’t even exist. They are literally stealing your work and production right out from under you, right in your face and in full view. Yet so many people fail to understand how our monetary system works so they don’t even realize they are being robbed, right in their face. This is all by design and has been operating like this for a century or more (source: “The Money Masters”).
I will point out once again. Bill Still is probably one of the foremost authorities on the history of currency, monetary systems and our Federal Reserve. There is probably nobody on planet Earth more knowledgeable on these subjects than he. He has spent a lifetime researching these subjects. I value his opinion on these matters foremost over anyone else. I could not even begin to touch his knowledge on these matters.
Sorry, typo … should read “we had many operating currencies…” .. .and I mean concurrently ..
@theoryofthesecondsun
Perhaps that author is becoming suspect of so-called scientific logic. However, he states:
“The word “logic” is derived from the Greek word, “logos” (which means “word”) so language is the basis of logic.”
which is a cute sort of analysis, but is incorrect. Mathematics is the basis of logic, or mathematics and logic are actually the same thing. He, and you, should read Mike Hockney instead.
FYI, some years ago I turned down an offer to work for the Federal Reserve in Dallas, TX. (didn’t want to relocate at the time). It was a fascinating place to tour. My days there for the interview process were very interesting. Of course their slant was to glorify themselves, but I digress. Still was a fascinating experience.
No, he’s talking about informal logic or logical fallacies, such as “ad hoc” (“for this”) reasoning, as this is the basis of the claim that time dilates. He demonstrates that time does not dilate.
#Joseph E. Postma: He says that to change one variable in the speed equation S= distance/time such as the time would be inconsistent and disproportional so it is ad hoc. So are the informal logical fallacies based on mathematics? For example, ad hoc reasoning such as when physicists invented time dilation?
I am not sure what all that means. Given that this fellow doesn’t understand the basis of logic, it extends that his conclusions will be incoherent.
Please read Mike Hockney instead.
#Joseph E. Postma: Contrary to Mr. Hockney, scientists do know what time is and Reinhardt correctly explains it. It’s not the physical or mental time of Mr. Hockney. It’s an abstraction.
Go ahead and summarize then. What is time? What does science and Reinhardt say that time is?
It’s an abstraction of constancy and change. “Our ancestors put these two observations (constancy and change) together to conceive of a constancy in change. Thus, a clock which measures time is something that has a constant rate of change that can be broken into regular intervals and by which we can measure other varying rates of change or things that change irregularly. Thus, change is observed, and time is inferred from that observation. Time is a human invention and a metaphysical phenomenon rather than a physical thing as Einstein made it out to be. Therefore, the idea of time slowing down or speeding up as a result of interacting with mass and energy was illogical to me. High speeds or heavy gravity might slow down a timepiece, but it could not slow down a perfect conception in the mind. Even the most accurate clocks made of radioactive Cesium deviate from perfect time. And where is that clock with perfect time from which we know accurate clocks deviate? That clock is a Platonic timepiece embedded deeply in the minds of humans.” [Reinhardt, Douglas. THE 3Rs: REASON, REALITY, AND RELATIVITY: A Linguistic Analysis of Relativity (Philosophy of Science Applied to Modern Physics) (p. 5). Kindle Edition.]
That argument is so circular, incoherent, and stupid it boggles the mind merely attempting to understand what the person is actually trying to say…which seems to simply be that everything is an illusion.
So, he states that 1) change is observed in nature, 2) a clock regularly changes and from this we can measure rates of change, 3) we call this time, 4) thus time is a human invention.
That’s so amazingly stupid. Point 4 contradicts point 1. And nature already has clocks, in the form of day-night cycles, seasons, etc. If we observed change happening “out there”, then this does not equate to time being a human invention. The very act of thinking itself necessitates time, for thinking is continuous development of thoughts which are changing. This is all reducing to the autistic materialist conception, to the Kantian conception, that it is the human mind which generates existence. He’s simply following Kant. Well, Kant was refuted.
“Time is a human invention and a metaphysical phenomenon rather than a physical thing as Einstein made it out to be. Therefore, the idea of time slowing down or speeding up as a result of interacting with mass and energy was illogical to me.”
Umm…human inventions and metaphysics are not the same thing…not analogous. The sentence makes zero sense. Second, time is about, as was just defined, changes. The changes are certainly physical. Relativity is about the rates of given changes, how given changes can be measured differently. Third, it is illogical to him because his thoughts aren’t based in logic in the first place, and hence he cannot generate coherent thoughts for himself.
“High speeds or heavy gravity might slow down a timepiece, but it could not slow down a perfect conception in the mind.”
WTF does this even mean…this is putting things together which have no connection. Anyway, no humans have travelled at a significant c fraction, and so we don’t know what effect it would have on thinking rate. Time doesn’t apply to a concept in and of itself…the subject of relativity is physical phenomena.
“And where is that clock with perfect time from which we know accurate clocks deviate? That clock is a Platonic timepiece embedded deeply in the minds of humans.”
Actually, we know that accurate clocks deviate by measuring them against other accurate clocks. And they deviate for known reasons…due to instrumental accuracy. Sure, we have an idea of a perfect clock in our mind…and so!? lol That doesn’t mean we invented time. WTF?!
That paragraph is all just so incoherent. The point seems to be that time is a Platonic Form in the mind of humans. This doesn’t explain why that Platonic Form exists in the first place. As I said, he seems to be echoing Kant somewhat…but Kant has been refuted.
You should really read Mike Hockney, and establish a rational basis for thought, and discover what rational thought is.
“Contrary to Mr. Hockney, scientists do know what time is and Reinhardt correctly explains it.”
Sorry, not true. Please read Hockney.
Sorry you did not get it. I tried to help. “which seems to simply be that everything is an illusion.” He didn’t say anything of the sort. You ignored the context I gave, that time is an abstraction. The abstraction is the invention. Change is in nature. Time is an abstract measure of constancy in change. The point is against the idea that time can dilate. Are you trying to defend time dilation as something that is not metaphysical or not an ad hoc invention(fiction)? The math proves that time does not dilate because that would require changing the time in the speed equation without commensurately changing the distance.
Fed makes me sick! Crazy how most people do not understand the difference between currency and money.
– And hence, this is how they make so much money by stealing our work and production. It’s a nice little carnival game if you can get yourself a piece of it.
Monetary inflation tax is theft.