People Say They Won’t Shock Others for Cash, But Do

• From Wired, 
April 7, 2011

• By Laura Sanders, Science News  

SAN FRANCISCO — When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew.

The results, presented April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, serve as a reminder that hypothetical scenarios don’t capture the complexities of real decisions.

Morality studies in the lab almost always rely on asking participants to imagine how they’d behave in a certain situation, study coauthor Oriel FeldmanHall of Cambridge University said in her presentation. But these imagined situations are missing teeth: “Whatever you choose, it’s not going to happen,” she said.

But in FeldmanHall’s study, things actually happened. “There are real shocks and real money on the table,” she said. Subjects lying in an MRI scanner were given a choice: Either administer a painful electric shock to a person in another room and make one British pound (a little over a dollar and a half), or spare the other person the shock and forgo the money. Shocks were priced in a graded manner, so that the subject would earn less money for a light shock, and earn the whole pound for a severe shock. This same choice was given 20 times, and the person in the brain scanner could see a video of either the shockee’s hand jerk or both the hand jerk and the face grimace. (Although these shocks were real, they were pre-recorded.)

When researchers gave a separate group of people a purely hypothetical choice, about 64 percent said they wouldn’t ever deliver a shock — even a mild one — for money. Overall, people hypothetically judging what their actions would be netted only about four pounds on average.

But when there was cold, hard money involved, the data changed. A lot. A whopping 96 percent of people in the scanner chose to administer shocks for cash. “Three times as much money was kept in the real task,” FeldmanHall said. When participants saw only the hand of the person jerk as it got shocked, they chose to walk away with an “astonishing” 15.77 pounds on average out of a possible 20-pound windfall. The number dipped when participants saw both the hand and the face of the person receiving the shock: In these cases, people made off with an average of 11.55 pounds.

People grappling with the real moral dilemma — as opposed to people who had to choose in a hypothetical situation — had heightened activity in parts of the insula, a brain center thought to be involved in emotion, the study shows. FeldmanHall said that insula activity might represent a sort of visceral tension that’s going on in the body as a person pits the desire for money against the desire to not hurt someone. These visceral conflicts within a person seem to be missing in experiments with no real stakes, she said.

“My initial response is it’s a really Milgram-esque experiment, harkening back to where people are induced to do something bad to someone else,” said cognitive neuroscientist Tor Wager of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, famously compelled college students to administer painful electrical shocks to others.

Even though the findings are “a little bit chilling,” Wager says, “it’s important to know.” These kinds of studies can help scientists figure out how the brain dictates moral behavior. “There’s a real neuroscientific interest now in understanding the basis of compassion,” Wager says. “That’s something we are just starting to address scientifically, but it’s a critical frontier because it has such an impact on human life.”

Image: elycefeliz/Flickr

Drifting Too Far From Shore: The Unresisted Rise of the Elite

By Chris Floyd

Empire burlesque, April 8, 2011 In the LRB, David Runciman provides some telling insights in a review of recent books about the "off-shoring" of the world economy into tax havens, where the hyper-elite hide their money from the taxes and regulations that ordinary citizens are subject to. The review also deals with the political machinations involved in this corrosive process, which lies behind much of our dysfunctions and discontents. You should read the whole article, which provides rich historical context, but are some excerpts, in medias res: When officials from Delaware toured the globe in the late 1980s advertising their services (and hoping, among other things, to provide a haven for all the hot money that was expected to flow out of Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover to China), they did so under the slogan 'Delaware can protect you from politics.’ Shaxson defines a tax haven as 'a place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere’. But this is the crux: where is the politics? Why aren’t these moves more politically unstable, or at least politically contentious? In the case of Delaware, as with other goldfish bowl communities, size probably tells (for a long time Delaware politics was shaped by the influence of the Du Pont family, whose vast chemical operations dominated the local economy). What, though, about Washington, where the shift to an offshore mindset at the national level might be expected to run up against some serious political opposition? What happened to the representatives of all those people who don’t have lots of money to move around, who can’t relocate even if they wanted to, and who have an interest in a fair, open and broadly progressive tax system? Didn’t they notice what was going on? This is the question that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tackle in Winner-Take-All Politics. They don’t spend much time talking about offshore, but the story they tell has striking parallels with the one laid out by Shaxson. One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to Shaxson, is that local politics gets captured by financial services. In that sense, Washington has gone offshore: its politics has been captured by the interests of a narrow group of very wealthy individuals, many of whom work in finance. For Hacker and Pierson this, more than anything else, explains why the rich have got so much richer over the last 30 years or so. And by the rich they don’t mean simply the generally wealthy; they mean the super-rich. The real beneficiaries of the explosion in income for top earners since the 1970s have been not the top 1 per cent but the top 0.1 per cent of the general population. Since 1974, the share of national income of the top 0.1 per cent of Americans has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 per cent of the total, a truly mind-boggling level of redistribution from the have-nots to the haves. Who are these people? As Hacker and Pierson note, they are 'not, for the most part, superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports. Nor are they rentiers, living off their accumulated wealth, as was true in the early part of the last century. A substantial majority are company executives and managers, and a growing share of these are financial company executives and managers.’ Hacker and Pierson believe that politics is responsible for this. It happened because law-makers and public officials allowed it to happen, not because international markets, or globalisation, or differentials in education or life-chances made it inevitable. It was a choice, driven by the pressure of lobbyists and other organisations to create an environment much more hospitable to the needs of the very rich. It was even so a particular kind of politics and a particular kind of choice. It wasn’t a conspiracy, because it happened in the open. But nor was it an explicit political movement, characterised by rallies, speeches and electoral triumphs. It relied in large part on what Hacker and Pierson call a process of drift: 'systematic, prolonged failures of government to respond to the shifting realities of a dynamic economy’. More often than not the politicians were persuaded to do nothing, to let up on enforcement, to look the other way, as money moved around the globe and up to the very top of the financial chain. As Runciman notes, Hacker and Pierson make a vital point on the true nature of the "political engagement" we see today among our partisan flag-wavers: One of Hacker and Pierson’s complaints about the way we usually regard politics is that we miss what’s really going on by focusing on the show of elections and the competition between parties. This is the theatre of electoral politics, to set alongside the theatre of probity. Too often, they say, we reduce politics to the level of sport: 'This is no doubt why politics as electoral spectacle is so appealing to the media: it’s exciting and it’s simple. Aficionados can memorise the stats of their favourite players or become experts on the great games of the past. Everyone, however, can enjoy the gripping spectacle of two highly motivated teams slugging it out.’ Certainly this has been borne out, to a glaring degree, by our stalwart "progressives" since the election of Barack Obama. There are mounds – mountains – mountain ranges of evidence showing "progressives" staunchly defending, or meekly countenancing, a whole raft of outrageous crimes and follies that they once decried with furious indignation  ... simply because it is now the guy from "their" team commiting them, instead of that goober from the other team. And even among those progressives who do bestir themselves to sternly denounce this or that policy of the Obama administration – one of his many, many "continuities" and exacerbations of Bush’s record on military aggression, civil liberties, torture, the manipulation and overthrow of governments, the orgasmic embrace of Wall Street, the deficit hawkishness, tax cuts for the rich, etc., etc. – you will hear, almost uniformly, the anguished cry that despite all this, we must fight to re-elect Obama. Because otherwise, one of those right-wing extremists might get in and ... er ... continue all the Bush policies that ... er ... Obama is continuing. This is a politics almost entirely without substance, based on unsifted tribal loyalties and unsupported myths – just as we see on the Right.  Runciman and the authors also make a very important point that is almost universally overlooked. The true acceleration of the brutal rule of the hyper-rich that we see today did not begin with the ascension of Ronald Reagan (however avidly he helped the process along); its true origins can found in the grand collapses of political will, the surrender to the elite’s most pernicious power blocs, under the administration of the hapless Jimmy Carter: Elections are seductive, and these days the build-up is so protracted that they can drown out the real business of politics: the way organised groups use pressure – money, lobbying, threats – to squeeze whichever politicians happen to be in power, in order to influence the shaping of policy. Elections also suggest false historical turning points. It is easy to assume that if the rich have been winning in recent decades, the process must have started with the election of the pro-big business, anti-big government Ronald Reagan in 1980 (and concomitantly, Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979). But Hacker and Pierson argue that the real turning point came in 1978, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. This was the year the lobbyists and other organised groups who were pushing hard to relax the burden of tax and regulation on wealthy individuals and corporate interests discovered that no one was pushing back all that hard. Despite Democratic control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, 1978 saw the defeat of attempts to introduce progressive tax reform and to improve the legal position of trade unions. Instead, legislation was passed that reduced the tax burden on corporations and increased the burden on their employees (through a hike in the payroll tax, a regressive measure). All this happened because the politicians followed the path of least resistance – as elected politicians invariably do – and the better organised and better-funded resistance came from the representatives of big business, not organised labour. What took place in the 1980s was therefore an extension of the Carter years, not a reversal of them. The process of deregulation and redistribution up the chain accelerated under Reagan, who was broadly sympathetic to these goals. Yet it happened not because he was sympathetic to them, but because his sympathies were allowed free rein in a political environment where the opposition was muted and the expected coalition of interests opposed to the changes never materialised. After all, as Hacker and Pierson point out, Richard Nixon, who might have been expected to share some of Reagan’s sympathies, had gone the other way in his actual policies a decade earlier, shoring up the legislative framework of the welfare state and maintaining a broadly progressive tax system. ... He acted like this because he felt he had little choice: the organised pressure ready to resist change appeared much too strong. It was only during the Carter years ... that this pressure turned out to be weaker than anyone thought. The politicians of the Reagan/ Thatcher revolution did what they did not because they were committed ideologues, determined to stick to their principles. They did it because they found they could get away with it. This is an important point. Politicians are, with the rarest of exceptions, venal, preening, shallow-minded third-raters. Many of them are psychologically damaged, which is what draws them into the pursuit of power – of dominating other people -- in the first place. Mostly, they like the perks (material and emotional) of power. They are not figures of deep character and solid principles. Strong political resistance -- or even a great lot of noise -- can scare them out of whatever "principles" they find it expedient to hold at any given moment. The Right has triumphed because no one has resisted it. Big Money has bought off and/or subsumed almost all of the institutional forces that once offered some resistance to its iron-fisted rule. Runciman then takes up the obvious question: So where did the resistance go? This is the real puzzle, and Hacker and Pierson take it seriously because they take democracy seriously, despite its unhealthy fixation on elections. Democracies are meant to favour the interests of the many over those of the few. As Hacker and Pierson put it, 'Democracy may not be good at a lot of things. But one thing it is supposed to be good at is responding to problems that affect broad majorities.’ Did the majority not actually mind that they were losing out for the sake of the super-rich elite? In the American case, one common view is that the voters allowed it to happen because they minded more about other things: religion, culture, abortion, guns etc. The assumption is that many ordinary Americans have signed a kind of Faustian pact with the Republican Party, in which the rich get the money and the poor get support for the cultural values they care about. Hacker and Pierson reject this view, and not just because they don’t think the process they describe depends on there being a Republican in the White House: they see strong evidence that the American public do still want a fairer tax system and do still see it as the job of politicians to protect their interests against the interests of high finance. The problem is that the public simply don’t know what the politicians are up to. They are not properly informed about how the rules have been steadily changed to their disadvantage. 'Americans are no less egalitarian when it comes to their vision of an ideal world,’ Hacker and Pierson write. 'But they are much less accurate when it comes to their vision of the real world.’ Why is no one paying attention? ... Hacker and Pierson’s argument ... does not see the weakness of democracy as a matter of the voters wanting the wrong things, or not really knowing what they want. They know what they want but they don’t know how to get it. It’s because they don’t understand the world they live in that democracy isn’t working. People aren’t stupid, but when it comes to politics they are ignorant, lazy and easily satisfied with pat answers to difficult questions. Hacker and Pierson recognise that it has become bad manners to point this out even in serious political discourse. But it remains the truth. 'Most citizens pay very little attention to politics, and it shows. To call their knowledge of even the most elementary facts about the political system shaky would be generous.’ The traditional solution to this problem was to supplement the ignorance of the voters with guidance from experts, who would reform the system in the voters’ best interests. The difficulty is that the more the experts take charge, the less incentive there is for the voters to inform themselves about what’s going on. This is what Hacker and Pierson call the catch-22 of democratic politics: in order to combat what’s taking place under the voters’ radar it’s necessary to continue the fight under the voters’ radar. The best hope is that eventually the public might wake up to what is going on and join in. But that will take time. As Hacker and Pierson admit, 'Political reformers will need to mobilise for the long haul.’ Yet time may be one of the things that the reformers do not have on their side. As Shaxson points out in his account of the rise of the tax havens, one of the reasons for the drift towards deregulation is that politics has been too slow to resist it. This, again, is one of the traditional critiques of democracy: while decent-minded democrats are organising themselves to make the world a better place, the world has moved on. In a fast-moving financial environment, it is usually easier to assemble a coalition of interests in favour of relaxing the rules than one in favour of tightening them. Similarly, it’s easier not to enforce the rules you have than to enforce them: non-enforcement is the work of a moment – all you have to do is turn a blind eye – whereas enforcement is a slow and laborious process. And of course, what happens in a world ruled by Big Money is that the "experts" themselves are bought off; or rather, as time goes by, the system itself breeds "experts" who do not and cannot rise in the system unless they already, naturally, unthinkingly buy into the basic premises of elitist rule. In such a world, even the "reformers" accept the underlying assumptions – and agenda – of the elite, and seek, at the very most, only the most tepid reforms. Do the hyper-rich – the 0.1 percent – now control 12 percent of the nation’s income? Why, goodness gracious, we’ve got to get that down to ... 10 percent, maybe, or even – why not shoot the moon? – 8 percent! That’ll show 'em! Power to the people, man! But of course, to do that, we must not raise their taxes, or regulate their dodgy investment schemes, or punish them when they crash the world economy; and we must continue the valiant humanitarian interventions and assassinations for peace we are conducting in dozens and dozens of nations all over the world, at exorbitant cost year after year – campaigns which perpetuate the extremism and instability they profess to combat, and which ensure there is no money in the treasury to address the actual needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens.  There are no easy answers to this situation, no Gordian knot to cut with one bold stroke, no single doctrine or program that will answer all ills. Especially given the conundrum that Runciman identifies, between the hard, slow slog of genuine change and the rapidity with which the worst elements in society (and in ourselves) can strike. But one thing is certain: adhering blindly (or even with grudging, gritted-teeth "savvy") to organizations and leaders – such as the Democratic Party and its bloodstained standard-bearers – who have demonstrated, time and again, beyond all doubt, their willing, eager embrace of the elitist agenda will only further entr

A Day In The Life Of A “Homegrown Terrorist”

By Giordano Bruno of Neithercorp Press:


There was a time when having one’s name listed in the despised ranks of those villains that governments often categorize as “terrorists” involved quite a bit of leg work, as well as an ominous running resume of death, destruction, and general mean spiritedness. Of course, if one examines the history of every modern country which eventually disintegrated into despotism, the definition of who the “enemy” is tends to become rather broad rather quickly. That is to say, the more criminal the leadership of a country becomes, the easier it is for the average person to find himself labeled a criminal by that same leadership.
Today, one does not need to blow up buildings, take hostages in political motivation, send anthrax through the mail, or even wave a gun around in a public place to be considered a terrorist threat. In fact, a man could never leave his house and still find himself under suspicion as an enemy of the state. The Department of Homeland Security has released numerous standardized guidelines to law enforcement offices across the country which are meant to make it “easier” for police and others to identify a possible terrorist. If you were to take at face value such documents as the now famous MIAC Report, the Virginia Fusion Center Report, the DHS’ “see something, say something” campaign, the Enemy Belligerents Act, the post trial statements of the Department Of Justice in the Liberty Dollar case, or the wild spewing rhetoric of establishment mouthpiece organizations like the SPLC, then you would discover that a likely terrorist is:
Anyone who talks frequently about the Constitution, or ill of the government
Anyone who supports the idea of a Constitutional Militia
Anyone who fights against anti-gun legislation, or owns many guns (man do we LOVE guns)
Anyone who supports state sovereignty and 10th Amendment issues
Anyone who supports Ron Paul (the ultimate sin according to the SPLC)
Anyone who believes the private Federal Reserve is destroying our economy
Anyone who talks about the “New World Order”, or global government (does this include men like George Soros, Joseph Biden, Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbot, George McGovern, Mikhail Gorbachev, Richard Nixon, etc.?)
Anyone who discusses economic collapse as a reality in the U.S.
Anyone who speaks out against the IRS
Anyone who participates in “Hacktivism” (including those who leak documents embarrassing to government)
Anyone who participates in any form of activist group
Anyone who argues that the Left/Right political paradigm is a scam
Anyone who promotes Anarchist views
Anyone who distrusts FEMA (as if Katrina did not give us ample reasons)
Anyone who believes a truly independent investigation of 9/11 is rational and called for
Anyone who home schools their children
Anyone who flies a Gadsden Flag
Anyone who stores survival goods and food
Anyone who uses shortwave radios or HAMs
Anyone who watches movies like ‘Freedom to Fascism’, with anti-Fed messages
Anyone who operates private barter and trade networks
Anyone who stores gold and silver or uses them as an alternative to the dollar
Basically, ANYONE who dissents through independent political organization or protests through non-participation in the corrupt system might as well be Al Qaeda…
http://www.constitution.org/abus/le/miac-strategic-report.pdf
http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/gc_1156877184684.shtm
http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1278023105905.shtm
http://www.cdt.org/blogs/harley-geiger/us-intelligence-reports-continue-confuse-political-dissent-terrorism
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_liberty_dollars_raid
I could go on for pages with this stuff, but I think you get the picture. In a world where refusing a naked body scan at the airport earns you intimidation and a demeaningly thorough pat down, it is clear that now wherever we go we are all considered “suspects”. Why would I turn down a naked body scan, one might ask? Well obviously because I have something to hide; namely my genitalia from the prying eyes of the TSA. To be frank, my privacy and the privacy of all Americans is more important than your safety. Get over it.
America is moving closer to financial derailment, and with that kind of destabilization often follows the escalation of what we call the “police state”; a governmental framework that is designed specifically to protect the longevity of the core system that created the disaster in the first place, remove civil liberties one bite at a time while demonizing any person who dares to question the necessity of the system, and institute new social dynamics meant to acclimate the public to the loss of the freedom and prosperity they once enjoyed. That is, to condition them to accept the loss as “inevitable” and for the “greater good”.
Most unsettling but absolutely predictable has been the recent tapping of the SPLC and ever present establishment front man Mark Potok as the on camera media hit squad against organizations like Liberty Dollar, and anyone else attempting to promote alternative methods of currency and commerce outside of the corporately controlled economy. U.S. Attorney Anne Tompkins’ post trial statement in the case against von NotHaus that “Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism” was just the beginning. Potok has now come forward stating:
“He (von NotHaus) is playing on a core idea of the radical right, that evil bankers in the Federal Reserve are ripping you off by controlling the money supply,” said Mark Potok, spokesman for the group. “He very much exists in the world of the anti-government patriot movement, whatever he may say. That’s who his customers are.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_liberty_dollars_raid
Here’s what I love about Mark Potok; his ability to vomit unsupported accusations and make absurdly false associations all while making the absolute truth sound “insane” to the useful idiots out there in TV land. First off, how does Potok define the “radical right”? It sounds scary, but what does it mean? Who gets to decide what the radical right is? The SPLC? Is a right wing radical or extremist anyone who just happens to disagree with Mark Potok’s world view, or the global elitist vision of the future? Potok routinely haunts the transmissions of MSM networks to squat on our television screens and unleash a putrid torrent of Ad hominem attacks without ever having to actually qualify what he says. It truly is awe inspiring.
His style of propaganda comes from a long tradition of Alinsky-esque dishonesty in debate. When the SPLC argues a point, their goal is not to get to the truth of a matter, or to explore the complexity of an issue, it is to oversimplify the issues, to ridicule the opposition and taint their image in the minds of audiences before the audience ever gets a chance to hear the other side of the story. How often does Potok utter phrases like “radical”, “extremist”, “terrorist”, “white supremacist”, or hot button names like “Timothy McVeigh” while discussing legitimate activist groups like the Ron Paul campaign, Oath Keepers, the Tea Party Movement, anti-Federal Reserve groups, etc? The purpose behind this is to condition average Americans to automatically interpret the terminology as being mutually related. To hear Oath Keeper, for instance, and think “Timothy McVeigh”.
This tactic of false association invariably leads to more generalized definitions of criminality, or terrorism, and then to more intrusive legal actions and legislation.
The Liberty Dollar case is now being used by the DOJ in an effort to set a precedent, which would make it easier for the government to prosecute any barter network utilizing gold and silver as competing currencies to the dollar. The message is clear; you are not allowed to change the system. You are not allowed to buck the system or criticize the system. You are not even allowed to walk away from the system. You will sit down, you will shut up, and you WILL participate, whether you like it or not.
This philosophy is typical of autocratic nations around the globe. The citizenry is denied the ability to actively have a say in their own government because the parties involved refuse to represent them, or even stoop to abusing them, then, they are denied the option to protest this lack of representation, and then, they are also denied the choice of opting out and walking away. A slightly more extreme example of this would be the Chinese propensity for hating the Tibetan people and wishing they would disappear, while also shooting Tibetan natives who take the hint and attempt to leave the country by hiking over the border. Thus, the people are not just an enemy to be silenced or run off, they are also property which must be fenced in and subjugated.
Potok condescendingly attacks the idea of the Federal Reserve ripping people off and controlling the money supply as “radical” (both accusations are true and have been well documented Ad Nauseum by numerous financial analysts from both sides of the political spectrum. I challenge Potok to debate me or any other alternative economist on this in depth). But the real kick is that Anne Tompkins and Mark Potok both connect the movement towards any barter and trade away from the Federal Reserve controlled construct as being an extremist endeavor which will supposedly wreak havoc on the mainstream economy. This casts millions of Americans into the role of domestic terrorist without them ever lifting a finger in anger or violence. Again, you are not allowed to have your own economy, or your own money. You have to play by the rules, their rules, and become a part of the team.
Being that I apparently seem to fit many of the DHS/SPLC selected characteristics of a homegrown terrorist, and most of the people I know, work with, and are friends with, do as well, I feel it is incumbent upon me to give you a personal peak into the everyday existence of such a “dangerous affront” to civilized society. For all you terrorism voyeurs out there, let’s delve into the deep dark recesses of the life and psyche of the average establishment nominated homegrown extremist…
7:00 AM: I wake up this morning and every morning with thoughts on how I may better expose the Federal Reserve and the fetid, morally bankrupt corporate bankers who constructed it. Drink orange juice. Change out of my Gadsden Flag pajamas and jump into the shower. Sing the lyrics to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’. Rinse. Repeat.
8:00 AM: I jot down my immediate thoughts for the next terroristic macroeconomic analysis article I plan to complete later in the day with my long horrifying trigger happy terrorist fingers on my terrorist built supercomputer. I also eat a blueberry muffin, probably heated to sumptuous perfection by bakers of the terrorist persuasion. As you know, we are everywhere. Booga booga…
9:00 AM: Go out for my five mile jog. Have to stay in tip top condition if Homeland Security plans to hunt me down for all those goods and silver I’ve been trading on the evil right wing extremist ultra maxi secret black market. Flea markets, farmers markets, garage sales, private exchanges of eggs and milk, all under the nose of the IRS! You name it, I sully the “pristine” nature of the Federal Reserve system with it.
10:00 AM: Arrive at my day job where I talk to fellow employees and even employers CONSTANTLY about the stagflationary threats to the U.S. economy, the inherent tyranny of the central banking philosophy, the complete idiocy of the Keynesian methodology, the risk of Treasury depreciation and the loss of the greenback’s world reserve currency status, along with the need for sound money initiatives, localized commerce, state sovereignty legislation, and personal defense. Somehow, they have not yet realized that I am a terrorist. Mark Potok needs to get his message out there more effectively…
6:00 PM: Arrive home from a hard day’s work. Make dinner devoid of artificial sweeteners, chemical preservatives, and high fructose corn syrup. For some reason, I care about my overall health and shudder at the prospect of feeding from the corporately produced slop trough, which only seems to slowly morph any unsuspecting human being into a 300 pound boil infested bottom feeding kankle troll with the logical and intuitive capacity of a sea monkey. Watch rerun of Three’s Company (Hey, that show is funny…)
7:00 PM: Sink into couch for some much needed rest.
7:15 PM: Get up off of couch and start my second job as a terrorist writer. We are indeed relentless.
11:00 PM: After spreading my vicious propaganda about how the leaderships of both major political parties support nearly the same exact legislation and only seem to disagree in rhetoric, or when the particular issue is ultimately unimportant to the progression of globalization, as well as the inevitable downfall of the American financial system facilitated by the deliberate creation of the derivatives crisis by the Federal Reserve and global banks like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, etc, I then have a shot of whiskey. Sometimes its depressing being a terrorist, and you have to take the edge off.
12:00 AM: I now answer many emails from other would be terrorists across the country who have been wiled by the undeniably rich and sexy allure of the lifestyle. Being labeled a terrorist is truly fun and exciting. Being constantly aware of the Godzilla-like rampage of international banks and the Fed across the ruins of our monetary system while half of the public is more concerned about what kind of Gordita they want from Taco Bell is immensely comforting. All the extra attention we receive from such highly placed individuals as Janet Napolitano makes us feel like celebrities. I imagine any group in history who has been singled out by government for their political and social views or their desire to fix the obvious inadequacies of their authority structure has felt the same way……fabulous.
1:00 AM: Time to sleep. Warm milk? Check. Air conditioning at optimum temperature? Check. Bed spread neatly folded for easy access? Check. Low playing mood music? Check. Loaded semi-automatic pistol under pillow? Check. (This is actually true in some cases, and you know what? I salute those people.) Commence operation Sheep Count. Try to supplant the concerns and the tensions of a world tomorrow that could be drastically different and even more frightening than the one we live in today. Worry that I should be sleeping less and working more to prepare others for what is coming. Hoping that my belief in the greater potential of mankind is not a waste, and that my efforts will yield something better for those generations that follow my own. Yes, I am an extremist, and a deviant. I will never stop pursuing the tidings of liberty, regardless of the cost. I am a madman. However, this makes me wonder, what does it mean to be deemed a madman in a society run by madmen? What does it mean to be judged a deviant in a nation dominated by deviants? Why is it that a so called “terrorist” in an atmosphere of dread and tyranny always seems to end up being but a man who only seeks to be free?


You can contact Giordano Bruno at: giordano@neithercorp.us

Harsh Times – A New Normal

From Goldseek,  Friday, 8 April 2011 

By Richard (Rick) Mills
Ahead of the Herd 

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information

The approaching storm I wrote about in last year’s article The Rising Cost of Survival has certainly struck many countries with a vengeance. I thought it would be an appropriate time to revisit.

In 2008, a spike in food prices resulted in food riots around the world. The recession brought prices down while record crops allowed some stockpiles to be rebuilt and gave us a respite from the turmoil.

Unfortunately 2010 was a disaster for crops and their stockpiles. Severe droughts, record heat waves and fires combined with floods to cut crop outputs and global grain stockpiles,at the end of the 2010/11 season, were at a three-year low of 341 million tonnes.
By the end of 2010 the global price of food had hit a new record high - the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) index of 55 food commodities hit 214.7 points - the previous high was 213.5 in June 2008.

Food prices are forecast to grow by more than another 30% this year. In a worst case situation of critical shortages, analysts, in a survey conducted by Bloomburg, say prices could skyrocket by as much as 75%.

The FAO said last December that global output of all cereals (including rice, wheat and corn) will drop 1.4 percent to 2.23 billion tonnes this season, while demand will rise 1.8 percent to 2.26 billion tonnes. That will push global stockpiles 6 percent lower to 525 million tonnes, and mark the first cereal deficit since the 2008 food crisis.

“If people don’t have enough to eat, they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate or they can die.” Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN’s World Food Program

Almost half of the planets population lives on less than $2.50 a day - roughly 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 per day. The world’s extreme poor exist almost exclusively on what is a buy today, eat today plant based diet - wheat, corn or rice provide the bulk of their calories. When food prices soar these people lack the money to feed themselves and their children - when your living on a couple of dollars a day, or less, and most of your income already goes to feed your family there’s no money to cover a price spike in the cost of survival.

In 2008, global food prices spiked to all-time highs, and hunger riots erupted from Haiti to Morocco. In January, 2011 protests and food riots began in Algeria and quickly spread. For the second time in only three years we’re facing a full blown food crisis:

·         A record heat wave and growing water crisis in India

·         India has an 18-percent annual food inflation rate

·         17 million acres of Pakistan’s most fertile crop land flooded

·         Drought has crippled Argentina and Bolivia

·         Brazil has been hit with catastrophic floods

·         Unprecedented damage to crops in Florida due to freezing weather

·         Record setting rains destroyed massive numbers of crops in California

·         South Korea destroyed millions of farm animals after an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease

·         A record 43.6 million Americans received food-stamp assistance in November 2010

·         In the Philippines, where one out of four live on less than $1.25 a day, the government raised the retail price of rice sold from state stockpiles by 8 percent and will reduce the size of the countries rice inventory to about 30 days worth of consumption

·         Saskatchewan, Canada - long considered one of the world’s bread baskets – last year 10 million acres of wheat could not be planted because of wetness

·         Bolivia cut fuel subsidies which increased gasoline prices by as much as 82 percent

·         Six million people in North Korea are in urgent need of international aid and the country as a whole is highly vulnerable to a food crisis

·         Malaysia reduced subsidies on fuel and sugar and the inflation rate rose to a 19-month high in December 2010

·         Togo will stop subsidizing electricity prices  and prices are expected to rise by as much as 25 percent

·         Fresh water for irrigation and drinking is getting harder to source and more expensive

·         Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins

·         Jordan recently increased public salaries and subsidies to counter protests over falling living standards

·         The governments of Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines have all warned of possible food shortages

·         The U.S. Great Plains won’t get sufficient rain to relieve dry conditions. Texas is suffering its worst drought in 44 years and the dryness stretches to Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas

·         The World Bank stated that 44 million more people have fallen into hunger due to food prices in 2010

·         A return of La Nina (a cooling of the Pacific Ocean) may derail efforts by farmers to ramp up production of corn, wheat and other crops

"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". Thomas Robert Malthus

Malthusian pessimism has long been criticized by doubters believing technological advancements in:

• Agriculture
• Energy
• Water use
• Manufacturing
• Disease control
• Fertilizers
• Information management
• Transportation

would keep crop production ahead of the population growth curve. Malthus’s prediction hasn’t come true because, so far, rising agricultural yields have always outpaced population growth. Unfortunately yield increases have generally leveled off and supply is barely keeping up with demand.

“The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people." Achim Steiner, UN Undersecretary-General and UNEP’s Executive Director
Many vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes and seed crops are dependent on pollination and that service is provided mostly by bees - one of the most important global pollinators of native plants.

"The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance." Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist

The bumblebee is disappearing – bumblebee numbers are declining in Europe, Asia and North America. Honey bees are also disappearing at an alarming rate - colony loss in North America, since 2004, has resulted in fewer managed pollinators than any other time during the last fifty years.
"Sovereign nations are beginning to stockpile food to prevent unrest. You artificially stimulate much higher demand when nations start to increase stockpiles." Jim Gerlach, A/C Trading
Governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can:

·         Saudi Arabia’s cereal imports may reach a record this year

·         China is looking abroad for potentially massive quantities of wheat and corn

·         Wheat purchases by Algeria, North Africa’s largest importer after Egypt, climbed to 1.75 million tons in January

·         Morocco, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon issued tenders to buy wheat and/or rice

·         The Mexican government is buying corn futures to avoid unmanageable tortilla price rises

·         Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases

·         Bangladesh is trying to secure record grain supplies and tripled its rice import target

·         Saudi Arabia plans to double its wheat inventories, the country is going to stockpile a 12 month reserve

"This is only the start of the panic buying." Ker Chung Yang, commodities analyst at Singapore-based Phillip Futures
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said corn stockpiles, on March 1, declined 15 percent from a year earlier as demand for animal feed, fuel and food climbed. In the week ended March 24, U.S. exports for delivery before Aug. 31 doubled to 1.91 million metric tons from a week earlier. Supplies held by farmers fell 26 percent from a year ago and represented 52 percent of total U.S. stockpiles, the smallest since 1973
“Declining U.S. grain supply was a surprise, and the market is adjusting to a tightening situation. Export demand improved.” Chad Henderson, market analyst for Prime Agricultural Consultants Inc. 
All of this puts added pressure on prices. And there’s more:
Currently there is a drought in China which has affected 35.1 percent of their wheat crop.China’s drought may cut the chance of rebuilding global stockpiles. China bought 116,000 metric tons from the U.S. in the week ended March 17, the most for any week since July 2005 and in China 2010 was a net importer of corn for the first time in 14 years.
In an emergency China could bid up and buy whatever they want because of the massive size of their US dollar component of foreign reserve holdings.
"Because there is already much more capital available in the world than hard commodities, speculators can increase the price of consumable commodities, like foodstuffs or energy, much higher than traditional consumers and producers can react. When derivative markets are linked to commodity markets, this nearly unlimited capital from the financial sector can cause excessive price volatility." Hedge fund manager Mike Masters

Climate change

In 2010 the world’s breadbaskets of Russia, the US, Australia, China, Brazil and Argentina were slammed by heat waves, flooding, droughts or freezing weather.
The worry about, and direct threat of, ongoing climate change impact on agriculture isn’t about the slow almost imperceptible changes caused by a gradual shift in our weather patterns. The greatest worry is that climate change might intensify already extreme events.

And with extreme events being exacerbated by climate change an already stressed agricultural industry (by loss of arable land, shortage of fresh water for irrigation, increasing human population, staple food crops used for bio-fuel production, increasing energy costs and developing countries changing diets) is increasingly having a more difficult time feeding and clothing the world.

Many climatologists believe that the ongoing climate change the earth is undergoing will increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. According to insurer Munich Re, 2010 had the second highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980 and most were weather related.

Continuing climate change is a fact, unseasonable weather and permanent changes in precipitation patterns are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Conclusion

This week wheat and soybeans are up 8 per cent and corn hit a record high of US$7.73 a bushel.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) farmers in the US expect to plant one of the largest corn and soybean crops in history. Wheat production is up in China, Russia and the Ukraine - India is enjoying strong rice harvests. Growers in Brazil and Argentina have reaped bumper harvests. But production is barely keeping up with demand.

The USDA says inventories of corn and soybeans are plummeting. The supply of corn is at a 15-year low and soybean inventories are at record lows. Canola inventories are also down.

“World agricultural markets have become so finely balanced between supply and demand that local disruptions can have a major impact on the global prices of the affected commodities and then reverberate throughout the entire food chain.” A recent report from HSBC

Living on the edge - US grain production filled critical shortages in world supply three times in the last five years:

• 2007-08 drought hit Australian wheat
• 2009 drought hit Argentine soybeans
• 2010 drought hit Russian wheat

“This has been a demand-driven bull market. I do not think we can see a big enough increase in U.S. acreage to rebuild inventories back to a comfortable cushion in one year. It is going to take two years of good weather and good yields. There is absolutely no room for any weather problems anywhere in the world this year.”  Jim Farrell, chief executive officer of Omaha-based Farmers National Co.

Good weather, and good yields for two years in a row just to get back to comfortable levels?
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, in a recent report “Over time, supply growth can be expected to respond to higher prices, as it has in previous decades, easing pressure on food markets, but this will take time counted in years, rather than months.”

It is estimated that the population of the world reached:

• One billion in 1804
• Two billion in 1927
• Three billion in 1960
• Four billion in 1974
• Five billion in 1987
• Six billion in 1999
• Projected to reach seven billion by early 2012
• Eight billion by 2030
• By 2050, the world's population is expected to reach around nine billion - minimum and maximum projections range from 7.4 billion to 10.6 billion
• By the mid 2060s it’s possible that 11.4 billion people will inhabit this planet

Over the next fifty years, as we add another 4.5 billion people to the world’s population, global demand for food will increase almost 70% if population growth predictions are correct.

Already approximately 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night.  Somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds - most are children under the age of five.

“Rising food prices are a threat to global growth and social stability and the world is just one poor harvest away from chaos.” Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank  
We have to realize that higher food prices and the resulting civil unrest are not a temporary condition but a New Normal and adjust ourselves accordingly.

Is a New Normal, the coming Harsh Times, on your radar screen?

If not, maybe it should be.

Richard (Rick) Mills
rick@aheadoftheherd.com
www.aheadoftheherd.com

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***

Richard is host of www.aheadoftheherd.com and invests in the junior resource sector. His articles have been published on over 200 websites, including: Wall Street Journal, SafeHaven, Market Oracle, USAToday, National Post, Stockhouse, Lewrockwell, Casey Research, 24hgold, Vancouver Sun, SilverBearCafe, Infomine, Huffington Post, Mineweb, 321Gold, Kitco, Gold-Eagle, The Gold/Energy Reports, Calgary Herald, Resource Investor, FNArena and Financial Sense.

***

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This document is not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for any investment. Richard Mills has based this document on information obtained from sources he believes to be reliable but which has not been independently verified.

Richard Mills makes no guarantee, representation or warranty and accepts no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness. Expressions of opinion are those of Richard Mills only and are subject to change without notice. Richard Mills assumes no warranty, liability or guarantee for the current relevance, correctness or completeness of any information provided within this Report and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein or any omission.

Furthermore, I, Richard Mills, assume no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or, in particular, for lost profit, which you may incur as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this Report.
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