categorizing this stuff (and this is going to take a long time....i'll finish up to before nov 2011 tonight and then try and do about a month per week until i catch up) is getting me thinking about a few things.

it's inflation. i agree. this mess we see around us. but that doesn't mean we should abolish the existing currency system. as problematic as inflation is, serious scarcity in currency is something that cannot have anything but a violent end. so long as population growth is positive, we need to have inflation; if we can start reversing population growth, maybe i'll start agreeing more with deflationary currency models, but that's a different question. i don't want to fight over scraps of gold.

the question is more about how to control inflation, and people are at this inherent disadvantage due to the monied class having control over it. it's as nightmarish from a class analysis perspective as it is from a social darwinist perspective. i lack the naivete required to believe that a state under the people's control can fix it.

so, fuck it. abolish currency. i'll come back to this prescription repeatedly, but it doesn't make it easier to live in it's constructs so long as it exists - or come up with an algorithm for it's destruction.

i know the philips curve is wrong, but i sort of yearn for that sort of simplicity. for a few decades there, it seemed like everybody understood this perfectly. such simple, causal laws. if only it were that simple....

...but yes. it's inflation. it's monetary. this is the dominant, primary cause of the broken economy. and fixing things in the short run requires addressing that, albeit not in the ways you hear the libertarian right suggest.

a convergence in opinions as to cause, a divergence in opinions as to the way forwards.

something else that comes off as ridiculous: the credit rating fiasco of late 2011. talk about an extortion scheme. yikes.

as others have pointed out, the wheel bug has a venomous bite. the mantis had a flight response under the realization that it couldn't really fight against it. this wasn't a fair fight - less like cock fighting and more like feeding a mouse to a snake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JvoFWtBbZQ

"The South China Sea Is The Future Of Conflict"

a military-industrial complex sales brochure. more surreal is that they even bother going through the motions of selling themselves.

part of the reason i just moved to the area is that there's a strong potential to build sustainable local communities in the areas that have been abandoned by industry. this sounds like the kind of area i was thinking of - a residential area that has been partially abandoned and has left behind spaces for squatting and growing in a relative vacuum of capital. i fully understood that such a thing would be quashed, but hopefully not before some experiments could be carried out and a movement could create some momentum to move into further tazs. if the momentum can continue to grow, the tazs will become harder and harder to quash.

the key here is demonstrating that a life outside of slavery is, indeed, possible. i have faith that, once people realize that, they will free themselves from their own chains. i further believe that once people taste freedom they'll have a hard time giving it up.

i see a mass of empty houses and mass of homeless people and suggest the obvious; the landowner sees the same thing and concludes that the empty houses are decreasing his profit, and should consequently be torn down. this isn't an economic system, it's organized psychopathy.

worse is that it's not even a smart investment. buying up the land and turning it into a park, or condos, doesn't solve any of the economic "problems" that exist in the area. it just eliminates a source of affordable housing, further exacerbating the existing social problems. i'd expect the park to be full of squatters and that they'll have to be removed by force. on top of that, whatever is built will lack a market until production returns, which it won't. the result is simply more empty houses.

i could look at it on the bright side. this is going to piss people off. but, i realize the futility of fighting the class war head on.

i have to hope that landowners are, on average, more intelligent than this one and this isn't a trend that will pick up. if it is, however, the result is likely to be a mass of angry homeless people, and that gets me to a second best option in the end.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/10/140-acre-forest-about-materialize-middle-detroit/7371/