The Shock Doctrine and Disaster Capitalism

It’s All a Grand Capitalist Conspiracy

When Milton Friedman died in 2006, the acclaim for his work was nearly universal. Even his ideological opponents, like Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers, treated this Nobel Prize-winning economist — who taught for decades at the University of Chicago — with respect.

Naomi Klein will have none of it. In her new book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” she essentially accuses Friedman of being the godfather of a Mafia-like gang, the Chicago Boys, who have exploited the public disorientation associated with catastrophes and political crises to impose an unwanted free-market ideology on much of the world.

The Singularity

Human history has been characterized by an accelerating rate of technological progress. It is caused by a positive feedback loop. A new technology, such as agriculture, allows an increase in population. A larger population has more brains at work, so the next technology is developed or discovered more quickly.  In more recent times, larger numbers of people are liberated from peasant-level agriculture into professions that entail more education. So not only are there more brains to think, but those brains have more knowledge to work with, and more time to spend on coming up with new ideas.

Superstition

Christian Northeast/New York Times

Pick up any dictionary, and look up the work superstitious and you'll find a definition that goes something like this: 

excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings.

or

a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief.

The questions is, are those beliefs incredulous and/or unjustified?

Controversial new book claims Greeks to be amongst first settlers of New Zealand

Investigations into this unusual rock carving have uncovered that an ancient Greek celestial calendar had been carved into it. The rock carving dubbed Jesus Watch by those who found it was discovered on a Northland farm recently. stuff.co.nz

A new 378-page book released recently, is causing a series of debates on the issue of the first settlers of New Zealand.

According to the authors of the book, Maxwell C. Hill, Gary Cook and Noel Hilliam, “To the End of the Earth” reveals evidence that the Greeks, Egyptians and Spanish were the first to set foot on New Zealand, and not Captain James Cook and Abel Tasman.

Erich Von Däniken - Odyssey of the Gods: The Alien History of Ancient Greece

Well, we certainly received some interesting feedback about our show on von Däniken's book the Odyssey of the Gods. He of course, is well know for writing the Chariots of the Gods (1969).

This time, Erich Von Däniken turns his attention to ancient Greece! Von Däniken's exhausting research suggests that the Greek 'gods' were in fact extraterrestrias who arrived on Earth thousands of years ago. Archaeological evidence and the writings of the ancients, including Aristotle, prove these gods interbred with humans, performed genetic experiments, and bred 'mythical' creatures, such as centaurs and Cyclops. For anyone interested in Greece, extraterrestrial encounters, or the untold story of civilization, Odyssey of the Gods is a fascinating and revolutionary interpretation of ancient Greek sites and legends...

The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy by Yanis Varoufakis

I found a flaw… . a flaw in the model.
                   —Alan Greenspan, October 2008

It’s almost three years since the bubble burst. If understanding really does abhor a vacuum, something about why it happened ought to have been learned. Much has been written on the subject, to be sure, lots of it terrifically trenchant. Journalists like Matt Taibbi (in his superb Rolling Stone screeds) and Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big Too Fail) establish incontrovertibly that there was colossal greed at work on Wall Street. (The bankers, one can’t help noting, admit as much. It’s only the criminal charges they’re a little defensive about.)

But moral narratives alone will never suffice; what’s being reckoned with here, recall, is arguably the greatest systemic failure of all time. The bankers cannot have been the only ones responsible. A more circumspect explanation is to be found in what might be called the “regulatory capture” version of the moral tale, found in books Simon Johnson’s 13 Bankers or Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall. In this version of the crisis, self-interested elected officials and the regulators they appointed are (quite rightly) seen to have stood aside for the banks.

Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds

Father Arsenios at the Vatopaidi monastery, overlooking the Aegean Sea, in Mount Athos, Greece. He is considered by many to be Vatopaidi’s C.F.O., “the real brains of the operation.”

As Wall Street hangs on the question “Will Greece default?,” the author heads for riot-stricken Athens, and for the mysterious Vatopaidi monastery, which brought down the last government, laying bare the country’s economic insanity. But beyond a $1.2 trillion debt (roughly a quarter-million dollars for each working adult), there is a more frightening deficit. After systematically looting their own treasury, in a breathtaking binge of tax evasion, bribery, and creative accounting spurred on by Goldman Sachs, Greeks are sure of one thing: they can’t trust their fellow Greeks.

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