Category Archives: Britain

Interest: Buffet’s Golden-Calf Investment Idol Shattered

Britain, Business, Capitalism, Conspiracy, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Feminism, Journalism, Media

American cable commentariat is dominated by horrible bimbos, sporting big hair, overbites, and grating voices that sound as though they’ve been squeezed from the other end of the woman’s anatomy (to use a Greg-Gutfeld analogy I’ve refined). That’s the ubiquitous TV tart’s better angle. Even when these females are kind-of on the right side of the issues, they are boring, second-handers, who spout mind-numbing banalities with great confidence. (I don’t know how a husband or boyfriend puts up with That “Creaky Voice.”)

Unlike the practically unknown Dominic Frisby, the teletart’s assets are not between her ears.

Introduced to American audiences by RT’s Max Keiser, Frisby is “resident gold bug at Moneyweek,” and author of the essay, “Why Gold Is The Currency Of The Free.”

Why can’t cable hosts be more like Max Keiser? Notwithstanding his program’s many idiosyncrasies—lefty nooks and crannies and conspiracy theories—RT’s Keiser Report always introduces its viewers to highly intelligent, often original, individuals who have a great deal to impart and add.

Twenty five minutes (and 49 seconds) into the latest broadcast, Frisby dealt an analytical blow to Warren Buffet’s claim that “gold is worthless as it pays no interest.” Since RT provides no transcript, I quote here from Frisby’s online column, “Gold pays no interest, has no use and no fundamental value – really?”:

“…gold pays no interest. True. But then, nor does cash – unless you lend it to people. The world needs to realise that by putting cash in the bank you are lending it. Gold can pay interest – if you lend it out. And lots of people do (though for what purpose I cannot say). But in this environment of negative real rates (when the central bank rate of interest is below the rate of inflation), who gives a hoot about interest anyway? 1 or 2% interest. Whoopee-do.”

[SNIP]

Exactly. You lose money by keeping cash. Anyone with some savings knows that you might as well not have them, if you are after the yield on your savings.

…Next, there’s this idea that “gold has no use”. Really?
Gold has very little industrial application, yes. It’s too expensive. But no use? Gold, unlike bubbles and government bonds, lasts forever. This makes it a highly effective form of money, as I’m about to explain.
But how can gold be money, runs the next argument, when you can’t go into a shop and buy stuff with it? Absolutely. You can’t.
Err … actually, you can. The gold sovereign is still legal tender. But it only has a face value of one pound, when it’s worth over £250. You’d be a plum if demanded that some poor shopkeeper accept it as payment. (And he’d be a plum if he refused it). But I’m splitting hairs.
As a day-to-day medium of exchange, gold has never found much use. A piece of gold the size of a penny (about £125 or $200 in today’s money) contains too much value for anything other than expensive transactions. Copper, nickel, silver, paper and now digital money have all found far more prolific use.
But to assert that you can’t buy stuff with it therefore it isn’t money, is a facile and ignorant argument. Money is more than just a medium of exchange. Indeed, this is just one of the three essential functions of money: it also has to act as a store of wealth and as a unit of account.
It is gold’s very inert, intrinsic, eternal uselessness – and we have Mother Nature to thank for that – that makes it such an effective form of money. It has no other function other than to be a store of wealth. Even its use in jewellery is an extension of that function – to store (and display) wealth.
Governments can’t print gold, they can’t ‘quantitatively ease’ it, they can’t loan it into existence. They can’t debase it the way they do their own currencies. It just stays there, unconsumed, forever. Which all means that gold is constant – and therefore an excellent unit of account, far better than government money.

Max Keiser stepped in to correct the record about Buffoon Buffest’s stock, which has been down 90% versus gold over the past 10 year.

UPDATED: Bump-N’-Grind Britannia

Aesthetics, Art, Britain, Music, Pop-Culture, Sport

Those of us who’re familiar with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” in the original, were galled, if not surprised, by the distortions a warbler called Ed Sheeran introduced to the number, during the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. (The Idiocracy was charmed, naturally.)

How do you suck the essence out of a piece of music?

Easily, if to judge by the vulgar performances that followed, most of them punctuated by the primal screams of one Jessie J, who also destroyed “We Will Rock You” (admittedly one of Queen’s worst numbers), and drowned out Brian May. Thankfully, Jessie J did not tamper with “We Are the Champions.”

A complex chord progression is the hallmark of many a Queen’s song. Today’s T & A lineup (Brit and Yankee alike) can belt out loud guttural screams. But you need a finely tuned instrument and musicality to sing well.

(An example of such an instrument is Carly Simon’s voice in this live performance of “That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be – 1972.” Hers is an evocative and nuanced voice. As to lyrics; you have to be a literate and complex individual to write as evocatively.)

Jessie J, aka The Crotch, does a poor man’s version of the Beyonce God-awful bump and grind.

There was a choir of kids (they get to them young) who mimed and gesticulated to the hackneyed sounds of “Imagine.” Their affectatious performance was reminiscent of the performance “art” of the 1960s and 1970s. So passe.

There was nothing “Winston Churchill” about the bloke that recited Shakespeare. It shows you how far removed Brits are from their own history. For a better Churchill I recommend the … historians of … Iron Maiden.

Yes, where were Iron Maiden, or real virtuosos like Ian Anderson (also a bit of a history buff, in as much as he knew a thing or two about … Jethro Tull).

The above Brit superstars were overwhelmingly … male. A man who can wield an axe would intimidate a chorus-line of prancing nuns and “men” stomping about with garbage cans.

The closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics would have been far improved had the hip organizers left Freddie Mercury up on the screen and played “Queen.” Come to think of it, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” replayed over and over again would have been preferable to the camp celebration of kitsch that unfolded.

UPDATE (Aug. 14): In reply to a Facebook reader: You said what I did not. The Chinese did do a better job of the Olympic ceremonies. Theirs were artful, if rigid, displays of skill, and, while the Chinese ceremonies had a cultural flavor—they were without political overtones.

The Ass With Ears And His Ali Baba Thieves

Barack Obama, Britain, Business, Europe, Healthcare, Socialism

“The Ass With Ears And His Ali Baba Thieves” is the current column, now on RT:

IdiotCare, aka ObamaCare, kicks in once a company is 50 people strong. In a word, as the business begins to grow. The costs imposed by the healthcare mandate compel small business to duck-and-dive so as to stay alive.

In a televised interview, Kari DePhillips, the co-owner of a small PR firm, explained how the health-care law would impact her fledgling enterprise, and what she was doing to stay in business. (Small business, incidentally, is already adept at negotiating the legislative impositions of affirmative-action laws.)

DePhillips, of The Content Factory, told Fox News’ Gerri Willis that she is “scrambling” to comply with the mandate, for she must provide employees with healthcare or face fines. For this plucky woman, the year 2012 will mark the first time the cost of healthcare per employee “broke the $10,000 mark”! “Multiply that by 50,” and this entrepreneur is in hock to the tune of $500,000.

Unless she curtails her ambitions, those are the additional costs America’s Ass With Ears (Barack Obama) will be imposing on Mrs. DePhillips.

Suitably, hiring “fewer people or hiring in a different capacity” were two of the options explored on The Willis Report. The first alludes to part-time, “1099 contractors.”

Moving to the state of New Hampshire, as part of the “Free State Project”— and in the faint hope that the Granite State will nullify the Affordable Care Act—is another option DePhillips intended to explore.

Unmentioned was the incorporation option. Create a new business, at considerable costs, each time your company reaches 49. As this is hardly a viable option, it is best just to stay small.

“I’m a 1099er,” confirms a British reader. “My customers all split their businesses up years ago to stay under 50. Might’ve been the Family Leave Act along with a bunch of other legislation lumped in with it.”

Britain has morphed into a nation of sheep and shopkeepers, whose vaulting ambitions were on display during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. I am referring to the song, dance and Hosannas the host country gave to its National Health Service, or NHS.

Like the Europeans and the English, Americans will have to learn not to shoot for the sky. …

Read the complete column, “The Ass With Ears And His Ali Baba Thieves”, on RT.

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Enoch Powell At 100

America, Britain, English, IMMIGRATION, Literature, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Race

Enoch Powell’s famous, much-maligned “rivers of blood” speech has devolved over the years to suit Powell’s adversaries. Delivered in Birmingham, in April 1968, notes The Times Literary Supplement, the famous segment read as follows:

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. . . . To see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

The TLS’s welcome, if marginal, mention of Powell is on the occasion of the publication of Tom Bower’s “balanced critique of Powell’s rhetoric”: Enoch at 100: A revaluation of the life, politics and philosophy.

Helped along by oodles of ignorance, the “foaming Tiber mutated over the years to ‘rivers of blood’, notionally streaming through British cities as the tide of immigration rose unchecked.” (TLS)

As Bower points out, “the official figure for immigrants at the time was relatively small”:

“only 7,000 males every year”, but “the government did not announce that annually a further 50,000 dependants of established immigrants were also entering Britain”.
Powell’s fear was less of immigrants as such (though his “Rivers of Blood” speech contains passages about “negroes” which might land him in [a British] court today) than of a breakdown in “social cohesion”.

“Repeatedly,” it is observed in this TLS editorial, Powell “pointed to rioting in American cities, then at a fearful pitch. Why was Britain inviting the ‘tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence’ of the country?”

Stupidly, the TLS editor joins in blaming Powell’s “oratory” for making “immigration a taboo subject by silencing even reasoned opponents of immigration and multiculturalism who feared being tarnished as racists.”

From the fact that “plain talk about the topic is rare, even dangerous,” the TLS concludes that Powell is at fault.

Oh my!

I do like what Saul Bellow said about the “intractable phenomenon” in the US: “we lack a language in which to talk about it.”

IT being unfettered immigration, also known as “The Suicide of the West.”

Still, I’m pleasantly surprised that the TLS (July 6, 2012) made even marginal mention of Enoch at 100. Surprised because the TLS, once so objective and rigorous, is tilting to tinny, lefty, obscurantist postmodernism. (To modify a Joan Rivers witticism, Why would you want to reproduce a rash?)

That’s one way to reduce circulation, and suck the joy out of English literature (“the English-speaking people” is a concept TLS reviewers now routinely mock or “deconstruct”).