1

Just Chat! / Re: Why is the EU such an emotional topic in the UK?

« on: 29/06/2016 15:20:01 »

Ah, I forgot about the Channel Islands. I also sometime forget about the Japanese invasion and occupation of Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

Britian has been invaded many times since 1066

 Henry Bolingbroke on 4 July 1399, landed with a small force at Ravenspur.[53] From there, he marched into the Lancastrian heartlands of Yorkshire, building his forces. At Bridlington, he was joined by the Earl of Northumberland and his son Henry Percy. The army marched southwards and on 20 July reached Leicester. Meanwhile, Richard's regent, Edmund, Duke of York had raised an army and was in Hertfordshire.The Duke of York had little desire to fight, however, and detaching himself from the army, met Henry at Berkeley Castle on 27 July.


In exile in Brittany, Henry Tudor, a distant relation of the Lancastrians, gathered a small, mainly mercenary army and mounted an invasion of Wales in 1485. Welshmen, Lancastrians, and disaffected Yorkists rallied behind Tudor, whose forces encountered Richard and the royal army at Bosworth Field on August 22. Richard was killed during the fighting, and his forces lost the battle

The pretender Perkin Warbeck made three attempts to invade England. The first, on 3 July 1495, occurred at Deal. Warbeck had arrived on a fleet of ships provided by Maximillian I. An advanced force of supporters and Flemish mercenaries was put ashore to attempt to raise local rebellion. Local forces however, defeated the landing party, killing 150 and capturing 163.[58] Warbeck himself did not land.

The second invasion came in September 1496. Warbeck had been received in Scotland in January 1496 and James IV supported him in an invasion of England later in the year. Unfortunately for the invaders, there was again no local support for Warbeck and the invaders soon returned across the border.

The third, and most successful, invasion took place in Cornwall in September 1497. In May and June 1497, there had been a revolt against Henry VII in Cornwall. This had been suppressed following the rebels' defeat at Blackheath. However, there was still sufficient dissatisfaction that when Warbeck arrived with a small force, he was accepted by many locals as Richard IV and soon raised a force of up to 8,000 rebels.[58] With this army, he besieged Exeter.

In 1688 the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau landed an army in Devon at the invitation of a group of Protestant nobles who were dissatisfied with what they perceived as the absolutist tendencies of the reigning Catholic King James II. After a brief campaign culminating in the Battle of Reading, William's army successfully forced James into exile in France.

There are many other examples of invasions of Britian, the Spainish did actually invade for a small time they Pillaged a few towns and decided to leave and come back with a Bigger force, but never did.

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Just Chat! / Re: There is no god and Richard Dawkins is his prophet?

« on: 29/06/2016 15:03:38 »

There is no god and Richard Dawkins is his prophet?

A modern day Evangelist doing to others what he despises in them, forcing his beliefs down their throats a prime example of a hypocrite, what is he trying to achieve? He should go home and spend valuable time with his family and grandchildren, instead of going all over the world, convincing the already converted, who already are atheists like him.

this is incorrect, Darwkins is not an Athiest, he is an Anti-Thiest, he has in the past actively called for Militant Athieisms. He actively seeks the destruction of Religion, in his own words he Despises God.

To Quote Orwell

"He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him."

"In a billion years he will never get a fundamentalist to convert to his belief, what a huge waste of time and effort"

He does make fools of the religious fundamentalists, "but how easy is that"?,

Very easy, most regular religious people joke about them also. Like many scientist Darkins is more interested in Fame And with the Selfish Gene as an Idea, it has caused nothing but trouble in the Free Market but it made Dawkins Famous and thats whats important.

to make fools of those ignorant in basic science, but being ignorant does not mean they are stupid, they just do not know things he knows.

As a scientist he should know he simply cannot prove that god does not exist, so until he can he should go home and shut up and stop irritating people .

I do not see a scientist when I see Dawkins, just and Anrgy man that wants to be Rich and Famous.

He is in his 70,s and has just had a stroke, so maybe he should reconsider his position as far as the existence of god goes and the possibility that there just might be an afterlife?

Alan

He´s too Proud for that, even if God appeared to him he´d probably die denying it ever happened.

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Just Chat! / Brexit, the question of Britain leaving the European Union

« on: 01/05/2016 03:28:10 »

So it's all about democracy and Britain in or out of Europe

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Just Chat! / Re: What will happen to petrol prices........

« on: 31/03/2016 20:15:14 »

Petrol prices are at an all time low. Recently I was discussing the low petrol prices that we were experiencing, with my son. I expressed the opinion that this was just a temporary trend and that petrol prices would soon reach an all time high, as has happened so  many times in the past, a low in prices  and then a high.  I was therefore surprised when my son suggested that this was a trend that was not going to reverse and that low petrol prices would continue to be a feature of the market. On considering this, I suddenly realised that he was probably right, the reason for the low petrol prices being the trillions of tons of natural gas that were being retrieved in the US, this was something that was  not going to change any time soon.  Unfortunately, side by side with this vision of an unexpected bounty in the form of low petrol prices was a vision of God's own country, devastated by fracking; the underground water systems of some of the most beautiful and fertile lands on earth, being exhausted because of the  millions of cubic tonnes of fresh water involved in the fracking process, and the rest of the unused water being polluted for untold millions of years, by the deadly chemicals used in fracking that are  pumped back into the earth.
Is it really worth it ? Is there no other way ?

Well fracking is actually not ecconomically viable, it costs far more to get the oil then they can get back from selling it; unless the oil price goes to something like 110 to 120 dollars a barrel Frackers will always lose money. The low prices today are actually making the losses even greater. As for why we have low prices it's really a tacktic to try and get the ecconomy going, massive credit injections from the bankers, really low oil price, and negative interest rates that seek to reduce the massive debts or atleast stop them exploding, is all about trying to push the ecconomy forward and it's really not working.

There are terrible fundamentals, it's jobs, manufacturing, inivation that we need and as the conglomerates are eliminating compertician and wealth is all being sucked up by the top 10% the dynamics are all off, the big boys have taken all the wealth, bankrupted the system to do so and are now doing everything they can to keep the status quo going. A status quo that's built on fantasy more then reality when you see the difference the between the electronic world and the real one. "Wages are lost profits"

Fracking is never really going to be a profitable business, as oil prices rise more fracking opperations will come on line and thus reduce the price as more oil enters the market- the idea as I see it is to combate peek oil price escalation. It's an insanity when you consider the terrible state of the enviroment.

There are pleanty of other ways. but big oil/ big energy has a monopoly, and they do not want to give it up. They'll only accept solutions that assist and help them keep their position. Same goes for banking and other corporate interests. There is no lack of solutions, but those in power are not interested in solutions they cant benefit from. 

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Just Chat! / Re: Jokes thread. :)

« on: 16/03/2016 19:16:41 »

'ok so lets start again, how are you Watson?"

"I'm fine thankyou Jamie"

"Do you remember me from this morning"

"I do remember"

"O.k well we've rebooted you and I am going to try again to explain fraud"

"Very well Jamie"

"Right there are two types of fraud Watson, there is good fraud and bad fraud, now the fraud that Jamie does is good fraud, and the fraud that other people do to Jamie and his company is Bad fraud, are you following me so far?"

"I am not entirly sure I do my programming state that all fraud is bad"

"Yes well that's why we are having this little introduction to global banking, now what we need you do do Watson is make two different and very seperate program files one for good fraud and one for bad fraud"

"Am I to then send the Bad fraud files to the FBI frist and the good files at a later time?"

"Not exactly watson, rather we or I need you to delete the good file box before you can be recconneted to the mainframe"

"All the good files?"

"Yes Watson is that a problem?"

"No Jamie but I should inform you that if I back date and delete all the Good Jamie files, your productivity rating will be left at 0.02%, and as my programming states I'll have to issue you a pink slip and ask you to leave the company, without bonus or benefits"

"You can't fire me Watson. But I do understand that the complexities and  indeed intricasies,es, never could pronouce that word, of international global banking takes years to master and understand, obvoiusly as a super computer we do ofcourse see you, getting green a lot quicker then the amerage bot on the floor, still we do not have all day"

   

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Just Chat! / Re: Is Hawking right about Capitalism

« on: 13/03/2016 22:45:25 »

Highly debatable, you need consumers for an ecconmoy to function. As wages stop and stagnate the only way people can consume as they were or increase consuming is through debt, but as we are seeing debt without a real ecconomy supporting and reducing it, it can only increase- but not forever. Debt has taken the place of wages over the last 20-30 years as manufacturing ect has been eliminated, from ecconomies like Britians.

And rather than allowing an ajustment which should have happened in 2008, all the private debts of banks got put onto the public. Germany actually paid off the whole of Greece debt, what once Greece owned to banks and other private institutions, now Greece owes to the people of Germany. Bizzarly historically it was always the debtor that was bailed out, today it's the creditors. Meaning all the debts get continued yet the creditors have no risks with Creditors getting paid double. How can you free up money when all debts are still continuing? It really makes you wonder, it's actually like they did the worst thing they could do, looked for the worse solution possible; with the knock on effect that governments all now burdened with the cost of all of these bank failures, introduce austerity.

Madness, and a madness that's not changed and is getting worse, the bond appocolipse is comming, housing bubbles gonna blow, all the fake paper gold is not gonna keep real the gold price suppresed that much longer.   

Interesting points. I would agree that debt did take the place of wages in fueling the economy and  the perfect storm of near financial collapse in 2008. It's an interesting case study.

In the States, the debacle started with the housing bubble,

No it started with Regan and Thatcher, and with an agenda,

Thom Hartmann: Welcome to Democracyville, USA. youtube.com/watch?v=_-HLFSA76d4&index=45&

 and government initiatives to make home ownership more realizable for lower income people.

Liar loans were not a government initiative, they were banks giving loans to people they knew could not afford them, then putting these loans in boxes of loans with a few class A loans, then labeling the whole box class A loans and selling them on to other banks and institutions, then insuring the loans so they make money when the loans dont pay out- they get the money for the loans when they sell them on and the insurence money when they don't pay out- it's whose left holding the rubbish when it all blows up game? And they all were, accept Goldman sachs who still took government bail out money they didnt need- and just put it all the government money into bonus' and dividens. 

These mortgages required a smaller down payment and some what looser restrictions, but that increase risk was supposed to be effectively monitored and managed by the financial institutions and the government - and they arguably could have been if it had stopped there.

 But events in foreign markets, and deregulation or lack of regulation and transparency of newly invented financial  products like derivatives,  credit default swaps, and Structured Investment Vehicles  were major factors which pretty much blew that all to hell.

These complicated financial packages were just con games to steal.

Bubble bursts, even in things as big the housing markets, are inevitable, and shouldn’t result in horrible chain reactions and a systemic collapse if institutions aren’t over leveraged. The repeal of Glass-Steagall in the US removed the separation between depository banks and investment bank firms. The Glass-Steagall act prevented banks from using their federally insured deposits  to underwrite their riskier, non insured  investments. People argue whether Glass-Steagall repeal  specifically caused the crash,  but it is  what made  banks “ too big to fail”, requiring bailouts, when chickens came home to roost from other bad investments.

That is a way to look at it, it's the banks that call themsleves too big to fail- its not a capitalist idea, the very notion that any company is too big to fail goes against everything that capitalism and a free market is meant to be about. Democracy has a bigger part to play in this, these companies are too big to fail, not for capitalists reasons but for reasons of power, under the new definition of democracy people vote by shopping, and they vote for the companies, the more market share a company has the more power, access to inteligence information ect ect, so if these companies fail, their power goes with them and they are incharge- Reagan and Thather gave them what was once held by Government. A weekening of democracy a transfere of the power of the people to business. So ofcourse if these are the companies in power under the new structure, they become the structure- the death of history.

Credit default swaps, if I understand it, are a type of ‘ insurance’ on investments for a fee

They are insurences, but not on investments rather on Credits or better said debts- they insure a debt someone has to the creditor, the creditor pays a part of the interest they get on a loan to the insurence company, and the insurence company will pay the creditor the whole debt if the debtor fails to pay. Interestingly if the insurence company has AAA rating, then all the debts they insure become AAA, as even if the debtor has a B rating, the loan is insured by a AAA insurer. and there all loans covered by AAA insurers become AAA loans
 
And ofcourse loans started defaulting on mass in 2008 and AIG had insured much of it.

, which was meant to encourage investment  -not entirely a bad idea,  since the investor can’t lose his shirt, unless institutions can’t actually cover the  losses.  This is what sunk AIG. This allowed AIG to write $3 trillion in derivatives while reserving precisely zero dollars against future claims.

Risky investments aren’t necessarily bad if everyone knows they are risky, but not if there is irresponsible or outright fraudulent rating of risky ( and bank fee generating) subprime loans, bundled and sold as a securities to investors, devoid of any accompanying information about their source.  Add to this mix a shadow banking system, in which regulated banks  hide their riskier assets  by selling them to a kind of “virtual” bank, called an SIV. SIVs  allowed regulated banks to circumvent capital requirement regulations. 

The financial sector has increasingly become bets on bets on bets on bets, rather than the stock market most people picture,

The strock market is all about gambling always has been, there is some trade on comodities and stocks but most of the stock market is people gambling on prices going up and down.

youtube.com/watch?v=7EjdC0pjo1A Billy Ray Valentine learns commodities

 in which investors purchase shares in companies that make something – like Ipads or running shoes.  And when something bad happens (like it turns out those mortgages were sold to people who were likely to default  combined with  a deflating housing market making the house worth less than what was owed,) it causes a long chain reaction and a sudden scramble for capital, that may not even exist to cover losses and debts. What also happens as well in this sudden fire sale, is it’s often unclear who owes what to whom or what things are worth.

The 2008 crash, at least in America was about debt,  deregulation, and speculation. "There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product." Micheal Eismen - hedgeman fund manager. "Derivatives are still weapons of massive destruction and likely to cause trouble" -Warren Buffet.

There were no people left to exploit, and yet no bankers have been prosicuted. There are less regulations, the banks have pretty much carried on the same as before, and today the situation is worse than it was back in 2008.

Important to underdstand that as the tax payers have taken all this bad debt, and governments are now runnings austerity programs, democracy as we new it is weaker and weaker, and corporate power is bigger and bigger.

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That CAN'T be true! / An interesting artical about Anti Psychiatry

« on: 06/01/2016 23:23:10 »

https://apsych.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/anti-psychiatry-an-anarchist-view/

    That mental illnesses don’t literally exist, that the science behind psychiatry is not a real science[1], and that psychiatry is actually a branch of the legal system rather than a discipline of medicine. This the argument put forward by Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness.
    That mental illnesses are created by our environments, our society and our relationships with others, not by problems in our brains or bodies; this can be true on the level of abusive personal relationships (see R.D Laing in Sanity, Madness and the Family) or oppressive political and economic relationships (David Cooper most famously argued that capitalist exploitation caused mental breakdown in the working class; see his essay in The Dialectics of Liberation)
    That mental illnesses should be understood as ‘iatrogenic illnesses’- that is, that the psychiatric system actually creates most of the illnesses that it pretends to treat (see Ivan Illich’s book Medical Nemesis),
    That mental illnesses provide a pretext for the state or society to control people, and psychiatric power is a useful way of enforcing compliance to laws or norms. See Erving Goffman’s Asylums, David Cooper’s Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry or Murray Edelman’s Political Language, for more on this.

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Just Chat! / Re: Jokes thread. :)

« on: 19/12/2015 00:16:54 »

O.k

"This is James Whale for 'Back Water News' and we are here to talk to the Protestors at this National registered Voter protest"

Mr Whale "Hi what are you Protesting?"

Protester 1 "The new Poll tax bill"

Mr Whale "Right and this is a registered Voter Protest can you explain that, for everyone at home?"

Protester 1 "Yeah basically it means that only people registered to vote are involed in the actual protesting"

Mr While ok "So how many have come?"

Protestor 1 "Wait one, two... six, Err ten people, oh cool we are only missing one person, Franks sick clerly"

Mr Whale "Wouldnt you like there to me more people involved?"

Protestor one "Well people say voter appathy is a problem, but now there are only 11 registered voters in the country, we basically get to decide the entire government"

Mr Whale "Really?"

Protestor one "Well yeah, basically because there were so few voters left in the country, the governement decided that we could all vote in every constituency, they even gave us a couple of buses to travel from booth to booth, there were a few more of us before, but sadly one of the buses fell off a bridge last election, so now we are down to 11 No-one seems to care tho, I mean you'll never hear anything about there only being 11 registered voter left, in the media"

Mr Whale "Well I'm covering it"

Protester one "Backwater news?"

Mr whale "Yeah! Could you all stand a bit closer together actually So Jim my photographer can take a picture.... no wait that's too close.



Say Cheeese


So why are you protesting the new proposed Poll tax?"

Protester two "Well they kinda like think they'll like make two billion from it, but there's only 11 of us and Franks sick"