Grateful Dead

You gamed the system!

"The dangers of tipping into a debt compound trap – as described by Irving Fisher in Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depresssions in 1933 – outweigh the risk of an expanded money stock catching fire and setting off an inflation surge later. Debt deflation is a toxic process that can and does destroy societies as well as economies. You do not trifle with it. But deliberately creating inflation “consistent” with the Fed’s mandate – implicitly to erode debt – is another matter. Nor can this be justified at this particular juncture. M3 has been leveling out. M2 has begun to rise briskly. The velocity of money has picked up. The M1 monetary mulitplier has jumped. We have a very odd world. The IMF has doubled its global growth forecast to 4.5pc this year, and authorities everywhere have ruled out a serious risk of a double dip recession. Yet at the same time the Bank of Japan has embarked on unsterilised currency intervention, which amounts to stimulus, and both the Fed and the Bank of England are signalling fresh QE. You can’t have it both ways. If the US is not in deep trouble, the Fed should not be thinking of extra QE. It should step back and let the economy heal itself, if necessary enduring several years of poor growth to purge excess leverage. Yes, U6 unemployment is 16.7pc. But as dissenters at the Minneapolis Fed remind us, you cannot solve a structural unemployment crisis with loose money. Fed is trying to conjure away the hangover from the last binge (which Greenspan/Bernanke caused, let us not forget), as if to vindicate its prior claim that you can always clean up painlessly after asset bubbles. Are the Chinese right? Are the Americans and the British now so decadent that they will refuse to take their punishment, opting to default on their debts by stealth?" Article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard alluded to by Lilly. Now my take: I am no an economist but my simplistic view is that you can't erode debt with deflation with the possibility of setting off a prairie fire of inflation. Our medicine is a couple of decades of unemployment hovering around 20% to preserve this generation's greed grab -- till the next generation devises their wealth grab from the producers (poor workers). Anybody care to meet me for a beer at The Haymarket in Chicago next Saturday Night?

...the Dead as Master marketers because they let their fans trade tapes free. What a crock! I would submit you have TO LIKE the band in the first place. The truth is: 1) The Dead never had a #1 hit 2) LSD 3) Magic Mushrooms As usual with everything else with the Grateful Dead, it became successful through ass-backwards anarchy. What a shuck to make money!! (The book, that is)

... from the USA nationally syndicated program "All Things Considered" which has a segment in the morning called "Morning Marketplace Report" which has no URL (I think) because as it is overwhelmingly listener funded, you have to be a member to receive the morning pod cast once trhe segment has gone live from 6:50am to 7:00am Mon-Fri.. I could be wrong about that, but in any case this is real and I don't have a way to access it. Sorry, it is worth a listen just for the sophmorpic masters thesis quality of it (the commentators kind of alluded to the whole thing being quite inane).

...(Tape trading as marketing ploy), I would assert that you have to have a motivation to begin with -- which I feel safe to say in this case, especially the Dead, never did, They were always known as never having had it together commercially in any way, forget about scheming to trade tapes to hype the band. Witness the Grateful Dead Movie, losses from which kept them almost constantly on the road for 18 months (lucky us, poor them). Beyond that, it was the true Grateful dead Music Lovers then, and especially today, who were/are the continuation of the tapers/viners. Then there were those who were mutant-hybrid combination's, like myself, that threw psychedelics and radical politics into the mix (and whatever else was in the kitchen sink). ~ Long live the Grateful Dead! ~

I'm willing to concede you may have a point! ~ Long stop the Grateful Dead! ~

Most of the world's surviving tigers are high in the Himalaya, like around 15 thousand feet, a place where human beings are relatively rare. They have complex systems of trails and one male tiger may roam more than 500 miles in establishing an area where a mate may be found (sounds like some deadheads I know from West Texas). Most of those high Himalayan Tigers are found in the last Buddhist Kingdom left in the world, Bhutan, where the animals are protected by royal decree. Trade in exotic animals like tiger parts is extremely lucrative and hard to stop at poor crossroads like the Kathamandu Valley. I just had a great idea for choking off the trade in illicit tiger parts. More on that later, but, thanks Lilly. You may have given me an idea for my life's work for the next ten years or so... I hope it is very effective.

I'm not one to throw fairy dust. I'd be be sure to have at least 2 NGOs to monetarily and administratively oversee me. No flights of fancy. Just enough of an idea (at least) to chuck money at and have more than a reasonable chance of success with something to build upon. Sorry to be so cryptic but give it a month or two to gel and the you'll see why. In the meantime, if you have any ideas about snuffing out Tiger penis envy among the less educated oriental cultures, I'm all ears! ~ Just a saint of circumstance, Just a tiger in a trance ~

Do you really think you can change an ancient cultural tradition at the snap of your fingers? I agree it's not good that they take the endangered species, but sadly, there will always be a demand. I remember when Condaliza Rice stated the she was going to the Middle East and she would get it all straightened out in a matter of weeks. This feud has been going on for THOUSANDS of years, it's not going to be solved quickly or easily, and neither is the black market trading animal parts. More arrogance, anyone?

Think you need to read just a teenzie bit closer before you flame my idea I haven't even yet espoused. Though perhaps I was unclear in the phrasing. What I meant was I need to talk to some experts, academic and otherwise, for a couple of months and write a coupe of grant proposals that have a 75% or better shot of working before I can even BEGIN the project. If you're writing under a pseudonym, ratsnkats, care to let us in on who you are??

I am thinking of finding a couple of NGOs like from the Japanese (strangely enough they might want to throw some cash in the way of their whale fiascoes) and from the Australians and perhaps the Dutch or Germans or Swedes or Norwegians -- maybe the old-line US environmental's too. Even a budget of ten milion dollars could put a sizable force on the ground in Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkhim and Darjeeling, plus a few surrounding areas. The problem is corruption. If this had huge fanfare to start with & government support in total it would only take about a year for the poachers to get back to work, their very grisly work -- which, I might add, is NOT nonviolent. Not least of all from the tiger's side, though they (the tigers) seem to have more justification than anybody else. Even if funding could be kept constant, the voracious Chinese demand for "medical" parts, with very little scientific evidence on the "medical", would be almost impossible to abate without starting some wildly untrue rumor like "all Asian tigers have aids." You start to see the problems involved here and despair is a byproduct. Imagination may be the key. Bright thinkers with keen incite - C'mon, know you're out there. Just another tiger in a trance looking for a St. of Circumstance

Convoys of Americsan fuel trucks are being struck regularly at a Paki-Afghan border point while several groups of terrorists are are stalking the streets of Europe with automatic weapons and grenades, waiting for the opportunity to create a Mumbai style incident (started, incidentally, by a renegade CIA officer in Mumbai). I would say it safe to say that things are moderately to very moderately out-of-control - by anybody's estimate. I think it's time to say that there is nothing to be done here except, in coalition with US allies, use WMD to show we ain't fucking around anymore. Which is, of course, an unacceptable option for sane people.