However, dog features put his neck on the line with a 2012 prediction thread, which (given the very real possibility of being banned next time) deserves to survive, and hence is reproduced here, so lets see how things pan out.

2012 – Predicting the Future

So a while back Dickhead took exception to my ridiculing of the Bernank’s Fed for their terrible predictive record of the economy (that they made) and challenged me to prove that the Asset managers I follow are more accurate with their predictions and world views, and I accepted with conditions..

Quote – Dickhead

Pick your favourite and we can watch wide-eyed as his or hers forecasts unfold before us. I supplied four really simple criteria but perhaps you have some others in mind. Let’s hurry, though, because we can start this proposal of yours around New Years and follow your experts as they overshadow everyone in the business.

Quote:  The Dog

“my favourite” hmm, difficult to choose, there are a few. within this group there are alternate views and opinions on micro issues, but within the context of broadly similar macroviews

• Jim Rickards
• Eric Sprott
• Hugh Hendry
• Kyle Bass
• Reggie Middleton
• Steve Keen
• Gordon T Long
• Robin Griffiths
• Ben Davies
• Michael Pento
• Peter Schiff
• Jim Rogers
• Marc Faber

and so if I have until New Years I will accept your challenge, let me collate opinion across the guys who do have a clue, cross reference it with my Contra indicators

• Goldman sellside (Stolper, Jim O Neill etc)
• Whitney Tilson (see the anti Tilson ETF )
• Dennis Gartman
• Jim Cramer
• Bernanke
• Krugman
• Roubini

the problem we have with this though, is it is hugely dependent on what the FED actually do, ie Rickards thinks the Euro will survive and get stronger, and if the FED (IMF whatever) bail Europe out, he will likely be correct.

do you see how they (FED) might have a little inside knowledge with regards to these things and hence *should* be in a position to predict slightly better than outside observers?

So I think the predictions will be along the lines of:

“if they do this, then this.. but if they do this, then this..” is that acceptable?

Predictions start

So lets start with a macro overview to set context. These are my beliefs along with the guys with whom I agree with their analysis.

We are following the timetable for what must come, so clearly laid out by Gordon T Long’s extend & Pretend Roadmap back in Jan 2010 just after Dubai World defaulted (remember that far back?) as shown here, people were talking vaguely about Greece and Ireland as potential problems in the distant future at this point. (Gold dropped $70 in a day, nearly back to what I had recently paid for mine at that point)

as you can see things have moved along pretty much exactly to the roadmap since then, we are now well into the European sub-prime area in the diagram, with problems in eastern Europe - Hungary in crisis - with approx 60% of their mortgage debt denominated in Swiss CHF, the Euro peg and problems look set to seriously test the SNB’s resolve and reserves, not to mention the Swiss and Austrian banks because Hungary have just passed a law that could definitely be classed as an attack in the currency wars to bail out their borrowers at the cost of foreign banks.

The European banking system is suffering institutional electronic-style bank runs out of Greece, Italy and Spain currently, with old style queuing-outside-the-door Bank runs in Latvia (pics)

Meridith’s (and Gordon Long’s more accurately timed) Muni / state calls will start coming in this year, Meridith is like Schiff in his US dollar predictions, early, but ultimately will be correct.

So in essence, I think 2012 will be the year that the wheels properly come off the central planners carts and everybody can finally see and accept:

That we (the global economy) are not recovering, and are not likely to before taking some real hardship.

That we are in fact now in year 4 of what will eventually be known as “The Greater Depression” – Schiff has been saying this for at least 18 months now, and even Krugman finally caught on a few weeks ago, this year the pretence will end for everyone else too.

That we are in a massive and unavoidable debt bubble collapse and de-leveraging, and an ongoing implosion of the western world shadow banking system, and trillions in debt writedowns of one form or another are the only real way out of it.

That housing is still overvalued in many places - http://www.economist.com/node/21540231

Quote:

Based on the average of the two measures, home prices are overvalued by about 25% or more in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden

Europe will not hold together “as-is” – that which is not sustainable, will not be sustained. Greece & Portugal cannot remain in the current system as-is. There will be real defaults, as there is a €4-6 Trillion hole in the European balance sheet.

This will cross the Atlantic and infect the US banking system again via the Trillions of exposure in derivatives, making it absolutely clear to the US that they cannot and will not be “decoupling” from Europe’s problems and growing their way out of anything just yet.

In a nutshell, it all has to get much worse, before it can even think about starting to recover.

China - the bubble bursting is now well underway – as predicted by Hugh Hendry back in 2009

Quote:

From the FT - Hugh Hendry, the outspoken UK hedge fund manager known for his bearish, often contrarian views on the global economy, has seen his ‘China short’ fund rack up gains of more than 52 per cent so far this year, investors have told the Financial Times.Mr Hendry began raising concerns about a Chinese slowdown in 2009 – even uploading a homemade video on to the video sharing site YouTube based on a visit to deserted Chinese real estate developments.

Hendry is also poised right on the threshold of massive profits from bets taken two years ago that Europe was going back into recession, and will start seeing payment as soon as the ECB’s interest rates go sub 1%, I think that is coming this year.

Here he is schooling Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz on the real world economics and (as it turns out) some prophetic advice for the Spanish Finance minister.

Japan - this will be the year it all comes unraveled for Japan, as predicted by Kyle Bass, who this year has been paid handsomely from bets he was making on Greece defaulting in 2008/9, whilst the Bernank was trumpeting his “green shoots of recovery” nonsense.

Here’s Kyle on BBC Hard Talk – this one is unmissable.

highlights include:

“debt has grown globally in the last 9 years from $80 trillion dollars to $210 trillion, so global credit market debt has grown at 13% per year for the last 9 years, where global GDP has grown at 4%”

Quote:

“think about what you just asked me, basically what you’re saying is if Germany goes joint and seperately liable with the profligate idiots in Southern europe, will that “solve” the scenario?..how many of your family members and friends would you go joint and separately liable with?”

Australia - this is the year Australian housing finally catches up with gravity.

Steve Keen was also correct in his analysis of the AU property bubble, but was once again wrong footed on timing by central planners and stimulus interfering with market forces, but this cannot last forever, and with the China slowdown, whether (soft, or hard landing) so goes Aus in 2012.

Canada - same thing which will be the catalyst that exposes the much denied weaknesses in the Canadian banking system

UK - being from the UK originally I can comment in more depth on this one than most countries. In 2012 I think things will start to get really nasty in the UK, with approaching 1000% debt to GDP now

Consumer confidence at record lows as austerity finally starts to hit there (remember, for most homeowners, if you didn’t lose your job in 08/09 things actually got much cheaper for you as mortgage interest rates plunged, most of “working home-owning UK” haven’t felt much from the crisis yet) but now, with no doubt (in my mind anyway) about Britain plunging back into recession, and housing continuing it’s inevitable downward trajectory, I would not be at all surprised to see the rioters back out properly, only this time they will know why they are rioting.

And for the wildcard, I’m going to go with a major energy shock this year, whether triggered by problems in the Middle East – Iran (which I have bet on via Intrade btw) or by Chris Martenson’s analysis of exponential population and credit growth bumping up against finite EROEI with liquid fuels – IMO this lecture is the most important information I saw in 2011. (ignore the fact its at a Gold & silver conference, he doesn’t mention either one once)

And so with all this debt collapse going on around the world, the one thing I think we can definitely rely on is the Central Planners kicking the printing into overdrive and doing everything in their power to try to prevent the tide coming in.

Whether they will succeed in preventing the inevitable once again, or whether they have finally run out of road this time I am not going to guess at, but I am pretty sure they’ll try as hard as they can.

Jim Rickards thinks the US will start QE3 (although it wont be called that) in the form of “targeting NGDP” and they will give no figures and no dates or durations (no accountability) and that it will be triggered by the EURUSD reaching the mid 1.20s.

Quote:

So it looks like we are going to get flooded with dollars. One other thing I would add to that, which I think is extremely bullish for the price of gold, I’ve been talking about QE3, but there is something even more insidious than that which we may see. It’s called NGDP targeting.NGDP stands for Notional Gross Domestic Product. Targeting just means that the Fed is going to pick a target for growth in NGDP and then print as much as it takes to hit that target.

Now notional GDP is not the same as real GDP. In other words, notional GDP is real GDP plus inflation. If the Fed targets NGDP, what they are really saying is they don’t care about inflation anymore, they’ve given up. I’ve said all along the Fed wants inflation and this is a way of getting it. It’s also a way of destroying the debt by cheapening the dollar.

…Targeting notional GDP, it’s just a fancy way of saying printing or QE forever. I’m using the phrase QE3 to mean more printing, but I actually think what the Fed is going to do is target NGDP….

Zerohedge’s (Bloomberg) ECB / Fed balance sheet seems like a reasonable guide to the EURUSD direction to me and also implies we should be nearer 1.20 than 1.30 currently.

so it does look likely to be heading downwards first, then up again when the Fed rev the printers up.

Given commodities (and virtually everything else – equities etc) strong correlation to EURUSD most of 2011, this would imply we are probably heading still lower in the first part of the year before the capitulation and printing begins in earnest.

Rickards also predicts a surprise in that not only will China not be letting its currency appreciate, they will be re-pegging and looking to devalue again in the next round of the ongoing Currency War. With the slowdown there and lowering of rates again, this also seems likely to me, to attempt to get back to some good old imported US inflation once more.

So given global printing like never before, some specific price predictions..

Gold - on the low side, if we go with the support/resistance levels of $1705 where it was before the negative lease rate shenanigins and end of year liquidations set in, and add just the average yearly gains this decade of 17% that gives us $1994.

On the high side if we go peak to peak from 2011′s peak – $1910 and assume the same peak to peak rise as this year (34%) = $2550

so I predict we will see gold trade between $2000-$2500 in 2012.

Silver Silver’s long term fundamentals are extremely strong, but it is such a tiny market, and so easily manipulated and held down by interests that hold more in shorts than many years mining could produce, it is more or less impossible to get accurate price discovery, but I will stand by a previous prediction here that we will see $75 in 2012.

Oil currently trading at $100 per barrel as a baseline, with potential energy shocks and massive printing, we have got to take out the previous $147 high, possibly as high as $200.

A few things from my contra indicators that I think wont be happening.

• Goldman’s Jim O Neill’s perennial “Equities up 20%” call
• Gartman / Roubini’s Gold bubble bursting

so there we go, gold, silver, oil, EURUSD and a whole lot more predictions besides. hopefully that’s specific enough for you – lets face it I only have to get a single solitary one right to outperform Bernanke  lets see…

Quote:

Disclaimer - I’m sure you can tell and that I don’t need to say this, but I will anyway, I am not an investment advisor. Do not base any decisions on anything I have said here. You have not paid me for my advice therefore you do not have my permission to trade from it I personally am heavily long physical gold and silver since 2009 and will be staying that way for the foreseeable future.

I will also be taking leveraged positions either short or long in gold, silver, oil, EURUSD and eMini Dow / S&P as opportunities present themselves, and so may have “money where mouth is” on some of these predictions from time to time.

Happy New Year to all.

gas prices getting too high?

Pretty soon humor is going to be the only option left to us to deal with this, so lets start now.

Doesn’t matter to me, dogs like running anyway, humans, not so much..

Original Message —–

From: Dude
To: Dude’s mates

Sent: Monday, February 21, 2011 7:27 PM
Subject: Fwd: Egyptian Revolution Protective Armour

I don’t often get emails these days which make me laugh out loud inappropriately….

So just to outline here – these are makeshift helmets made by the Egyptians whilst scrapping in their current predicament. I shall guide you through these pieces of registered non standard army kit:

Your classic 1979 ‘Tribottle rag’ helmet – a must in any type of combat

A late 80’s ‘boxhat’. The bloke next to him doesn’t appear too sure of its effectiveness

A renaissance period piece of brickwear teamed with a black and cream scarf. Textbook

Old skool 80’s broken bin helmet. Im not sure that tuna sarnie he is about to lob is gonna cause to much destruction. I personally love the fact he needs to lift it up to see

Textbook saucepaning with lifejacket combo. He’s not taking ANY $hit!!

I literally have no idea what this is.

And the winner by 100 miles. This bloke is going to war with 2 baguettes strapped to his ears and a ham salad roll sellotaped to his forehead. I’d def wanna be behind him if someone lobs a load of bricks at me.

The rally cry is “Crash JP Morgan buy Silver” but one of the dog’s associates had a better idea..

..why not get 1 Oz of silver free & help take out JP Morgan just the same?

the dog doesn’t think it’s very likely to work but thinks that a large pile of the shiny metal coins wouldn’t be a bad thing to have to keep the pack of rottweilers over the road at bay when times get hard.

It’s regarding Mike Norman again, the dog’s been over at his Comedy-Norman-Omics blog trying to engage him in serious debate, but LittleMikeyDoggy apparently can’t even debate a dumb dog and keeps deleting my comments, so I’m going to host a Normanomics session on WordPress and see what the general public thinks here.

We’ve mentioned before (once or twice) the famous (and highly amusing) occasion where Mike Norman graced our TV screens in a debate with Peter Schiff about the housing bubble, and Norman is:

1. as wrong as it was possible to be
2. pretty damn funny, mainly because he was cluelessly laughing at Schiff, thinking he was right, when he just could not have been more wrong, then, and ever since.

If you haven’t seen it before, you should probably acquaint yourself with it now, and if you have, watch it again, because it is pretty damn funny..

Mike Norman (who works for “John Thomas” Financial – I kid you not ) ..believes and I quote:

“This whole notion of bankruptcy is a non-starter in a country that issues it’s own currency, and where all of it’s debts and obligations are denominated in that currency, and where there’s no convertibility into Gold, or some other currency, or some other fixed rate of exchange”

Seriously, he really thinks this, watch the video if you don’t believe it. The relevant part starts at 1min 12 secs.

And here’s Peter’s thoughts on Mike’s lunacy.

“One of the things Norman said that was just so amazing, they were having this discussion on  National Health insurance, and whether or not we can afford it, given our financial circumstances, and Mike Norman tried to point out that:

“the whole discussion is nonsense, there’s no limit to what the government can afford, we can have anything we want, now that we’re no longer on the Gold standard we can have everything, because the government can print money, and that whatever the government wants it can afford, because it can print the money to pay for it..”

“..I mean this is the type of economic wisdom..? ..Just print money? ..this is it? this is his solution? everything is free? I mean too bad the world isn’t that easy, according to Mike Norman there should be no hunger, there should be no starvation or famine, there should be no economic downturns of any kind, anywhere in the world,  ..all governments need to do is print money and they can have whatever they want, they can simply print prosperity into existence by running money off the printing press, it’s absolutely amazing..

..the fact that governments can print money whenever they want, that’s not a good thing, according to Norman this is fantastic, its the greatest thing since sliced bread, that we dont have to pay for anything..

..as if being on a Gold standard prevents prosperity, and now that we dont have a gold standard, we can have whatever we want..

..somehow Norman things that Governments create purchasing power when they print money..”

Here’s the video, the relevant part starts at 3 mins 10 seconds.

So who’s right here? – See this dog was always under the impression that using paper certificates in exchange for bones was alright as long as you actually still have some bones in reserve when the time comes.

If however you’ve already eaten all your bones, and then borrowed trillions and trillions more bones from the pack of Rottweilers over the road,  having promised you will definitely repay them at some point, (but with no actual way of ever repaying them) that at some point the pack of Rottweilers whom you owe those bones to are going to realise you’re full of shit, and not want your bone certificates any more?

Mikey Pitbull Economics Norman, thinks not. Apparently the government can just keep spending, either bones the rottweilers are stupid enough to still lend, or after that bone certificates we print.

But Mikey, one question, once the Rottweilers dont want our bone certificates any more, what will we give them to get more bones then?

..MikeyDoggy, you have got one rude awakening coming to your fantasy paper-bone world in the not-too-distant future, – didn’t yo’ silly bitch of a momma ever tell you there’s no such thing as a free Bonio?

More classic Mike Norman nonsense

Mike Norman is still a cock (John Thomas) 2010

Economics Numpty of the Year 2009 – Mike Norman

Mike Norman vs Peter Schiff on Gold 2008 (great video )

]]> http://doggings.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/mike-norman-vs-peter-schiff-round-ii-is-the-us-bankrupt/feed/ 3 doggings Mike Norman http://doggings.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/whats-wrong-with-war/ http://doggings.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/whats-wrong-with-war/#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:54:53 +0000 doggings http://doggings.wordpress.com/?p=853 ]]> Being an ex dog of war this Dog knows a bit about it, and more specifically recognizes others that do too. And this guy does.

John Kozy – www.jkozy.com – Rarely do humans make this much sense, and even less often American ones.  Respect is due.

Edmund Burke’s statement, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it” is frequently cited, but in truth, even history’s obvious lessons are unrecognized by many who know history very well.

There was a time when every school child could recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, especially its famous peroration: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” But that resolution has largely gone unfulfilled. So exactly what did the Civil War accomplish?

Most certainly, it preserved the union territorially and abolished slavery—two noteworthy things. But the slaves who were freed, rather than being benefited by their freedom, were left in the lurch, and the prejudicial attitudes of Confederate whites were most likely hardened; they certainly were not softened. So although the war united the nation territorially, it failed to unite its peoples, and that division is still evident today.

After the 2004 Presidential election, The Dallas Morning News ran a feature about this division titled Beyond the Red and Blue. Using the red states that went to President Bush and the blue states that went to Senator Kerry, it pointed out how red and blue states ranked in various categories.

• People in red states are less healthy than those in blue states.
• People in red states earn less than those in blue states.
• People in red states are less educated than those in blue states.
• More people in red states live in mobile homes than those in blue states.
• The red states have higher birth rates among teens than the blue states.
• More people are killed by guns in the red states than in the blue states.

And the Dallas Morning News missed a number of other inferior attributes of the red states.

The red states have higher rates of poverty, both generally and among the elderly, higher rates of crime, both general and violent, have higher rates of infant mortality and divorce, and have fewer physicians per unit of population than do the blue states.

These statistics do not paint a pretty picture. And since the red states are commonly referred to as the conservative heartland, one would think that the people who live in these states would vote against conservative candidates merely on the basis of their own rational, self interests. But they don’t.

There’s an obvious clash here, for the red states are the home of that group that calls itself “moral America.” But how can a moral viewpoint countenance poverty, crime, and infant mortality? What kind of morality is it that doesn’t care for the welfare of people? Just what moral maxim guides the lives of these people? Certainly not the Golden Rule, the Decalogue, or the Second Commandment of Christ. From what I have been able to gather, moral America needs a new moral code. The one it has is, to use a word the members of this group dislike, relative.

So what motivates the conservative nature of the people in the red states? Let’s look at some history.

For a century after the Civil War, the south voted Democratic, but not because the people shared any values in common with the rest of the nation’s Democrats. (Southerners even distinguished themselves from other Democrats by calling themselves “Dixiecrats.”) These people were Democrats merely because the political party of the war and reconstruction was Republican. And when, in the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic Party championed an end to racial discrimination, these life-long Democrats quickly became Republicans, because the Republican party had in the intervening years become reactionary.

What motivates these people even today, though most likely they don’t recognize it, is an unwillingness to accept the results of the Civil War and change the attitudes held before it. When a society inculcates beliefs over a long period of time, those beliefs cannot be changed by a forceful imposition of others. The beliefs once practiced overtly continue to be held covertly. Force is never an effective instrument of conversion. Martyrdom is preferable to surrender, and even promises of a better future are ineffective.

So what did the Civil War really accomplish? It united a nation without uniting its people. The United States of America became one nation indivisible made up of two disunited peoples; it became a nation divided, and the division has spread.

Therein lies a lesson all nations should have learned. By the force of arms, you can compel outward conformity to political institutions and their laws, but you cannot change the antagonistic attitudes of people, that can remain unchanged for decades and longer waiting for opportunities to reassert themselves.

Any astute reader can apply this lesson to the present day’s activities in the Middle East. Neither force nor promises of a future better than the past can win the hearts and minds of people. And soldiers who die in an attempt to change another people’s values always die in vain.

All wars, even when carried on by the strongest of nations against weak opponents, are chancy, and their costs, in every respect, are always much more than anticipated, even putting aside the physical destruction and the lives lost.

Nations that have started wars with the psychological certainty of winning rarely have, and when they have, the results were rarely lasting or those sought. As Gandhi once observed, “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”

The Crusaders, fighting under the banner of Christ, could not make Palestine a part of Christendom. France, under Napoleon, conquered most of Europe but lost it all and Napoleon ended up a broken man. Prussian militarism prevailed in the Franco-Prussian War, but in less than a century Germany had lost all. The Austrians in 1914 could not only not subdue the Serbs, the empire and its monarchial form of government were lost. The Germans and Japanese after 1939 and astounding initial successes were reduced to ruin.

But even the winners are losers.

Americans won the Mexican War and acquired the southwestern United States, but that conquest brought with it unfathomable and persistent problems—racial prejudice, discrimination, and an irresolvable problem of immigration and border insecurity. Americans likewise won the falsely justified Spanish American war and acquired a number of colonial states but were unable to hold most of them. The allies won the Second World War, but France and England lost the colonies they were fighting to preserve, and these two powers, which were great before the war, were reduced to minor status (although both still refuse to admit it). Israel has won five wars against various Arab states since 1948, but its welfare and security have not been enhanced, and Arab hatred and intransigence has grown more common.

People need to realize that after a war, things are never the same as they were before, and that even the winners rarely get what they fight for.

War is a fool’s errand in pursuit of ephemera.

At the end of World War II, American leaders wrongly assumed that America’s superpower status gave it the means to impose its view of what the world should be like on others everywhere. Then came Korea and the assumption proved false. Despite all of the destruction and death inflicted on the North Koreans, their attitudes went unchanged. The lesson went unlearned. It went unlearned again in Viet Nam, after which Henry Kissinger is reported to have naively said, “I could not believe that a primitive people had no breaking point.” The Vietnamese never broke. Now again Americans are foolishly assuming that the peoples of the Middle East will change their attitudes if enough force is imposed for a long enough time and enough promises of a better future are made. History belies this assumption.

Unfortunately, history teaches its lessons to only those willing to learn, and the American oligarchy shows no signs of having such willingness.

So let’s start singing bye-bye, Miss American Pie

Warring is nothing but a bad way to die!

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who blogs on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer.

He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com

The dog thinks his writings should be part of the US education syllabus.

The dog had a laugh at Mikey boy a while back and froze frame his stupid video to show the real Mike Norman to all those stupid enough to be fooled by numpty’s permanently bullish smiling over-tanned dentist commercial face.

Guess what? Google thinks it the second best picture of him out there.

The dog doesnt really do webstats, but looked tonight and we’re representin’ Mikeyboy in Google images with quite a few hits a day now.

bet he loves that

Well this dog would like to report that Norman is not such a cock any more but a quick glance at his lame blogspot blog shows that he still has as much clue as he had back when Peter Schiff was right.

here hes advocating that the government starts buying stock to artificially prop that up too (as if they dont anyway, PPT anyone?)

He STILL doesnt get it after all this time, Mike Norman, in 2010 you are still a cock.

lets check that again, just because Norman is Soo funny. enjoy..

He’s never believed much in insurance, or more specifically in the companies themselves as lets face it, they’re in the business to make money, which statistically means that more people will pay them their fees than will collect.

So if you’re one of life’s gamblers you have good odds that you can usually just not bother, and deal with the problems, whether it be car, home or pet, whenever it arises, cheaper than paying insurance all that time and then claiming.

Especially as companies do all they can to wriggle out of paying using small print in their contracts, delaying payment, demanding receipts for 6 year old stuff, the list is endless of the ways they try to renege on their obligations, fuckers.

Of course there are exceptions, cars need 3rd party insurance, buildings need fire insurance, I’m not talking about real genuine insurance here I’m talking about this last decade’s insurance scams, since the Insurers decided they liked the Bankster’s action and decided to get in on it themselves.

Yes, all those scuzzy “would you like extended protection on that” scammers, the way Dixons wont sell you a PC without a sitdown consultation with one of their (insurance) sales staff whose prime purpose to be there is to get you to sign a 5 year cover policy for a $300 laptop, worth way more than the PC over that time.

And the worst of this lot are the PPI pedlars, Payment Protection Insurance, taken out on loans to cover payment, often bundled into the price without your knowledge or consent, just try and ever get one of those fuckers to pay come the time, I dare you.

Well anyway, enough ranting, the good news is that you can now quite likely get it back

See the vast majority of these policies were “mis sold” ie not suitable in one way or another, not even told, pressured, you name the ways the sleazeball commission-driven “salesters” dumped this crap onto people, if you can think of it, they already did it.

As it turns out, so has the dog over the years, albeit unwittingly in 2 of the three instances.

Well (huge) thanks to the guys at Simplicity PPI Claims the dog got a rather substantial cheque back last week, and immediately swapped it for some real money

Yep,  Gold.

In a way the dog’s quite grateful to all the Insurance thieves, unbeknownst to them they acted as a compulsory savings scheme, and although they thought that money was permanently stolen, turns out they were just hanging onto it for a few years when theres no doubt this dog woulda pissed that golden handshake up the wall.

nice.

As Britain’s political class pretends that its arranged marriage of Tweedledee to Tweedledum is democracy, the inspiration for the rest of us is Greece. It is hardly surprising that Greece is presented not as a beacon but as a “junk country” getting its comeuppance for its “bloated public sector” and “culture of cutting corners” (the Observer). The heresy of Greece is that the uprising of its ordinary people provides an authentic hope unlike that lavished upon the warlord in the White House.

The crisis that has led to the “rescue” of Greece by the European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system which itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war that is rarely reported as such and is waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.

What makes Greece different is that within its living memory is invasion, foreign occupation, betrayal by the West, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou, was described by the French sociologist Jean Ziegler as “a machine for systematic pillaging the country’s resources”.

The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal reserve Board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs and other American hedge fund operators which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited 360 billion euros in Swiss banks. The largest Greek ship-owners transferred their companies abroad. This haemorrhage of capital continues with the approval of the European central banks and governments.

At 11 per cent, Greece’s deficit is no higher than America’s. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the American corporate ratings agencies, which “downgraded” Greece to “junk”. These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.

What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar scale. In Britain, the “rescue” of banks like Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his passion for the avaricious instincts of the City of London, these gifts of public money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other the booty they call bonuses. Under Britain’s political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the United States, the situation is even more remarkable, reports investigative journalist David DeGraw, “[as the principal Wall Street banks] that destroyed the economy pay zero in taxes and get $33 billion in refunds”.

In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred the debts. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers in charge. For the European Union and the IMF, the opportunity presents to “change the culture” and dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have “structurally adjusted” (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world.

Greece is hated for the same reason Yugoslavia had to be physically destroyed behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks are employed by the state, and the young and the unions comprise a popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels’ tanks on the campus of Athens University in 1967 remain a political spectre. Such resistance is anathema to Europe’s central bankers and regarded as an obstruction to German capital’s need to capture markets in the aftermath of Germany’s troubled reunification.

In Britain, such has been the 30-year propaganda of an extreme economic theory known first as monetarism then as neo-liberalism, that the new prime minister can, like his predecessor, describe his demands that ordinary people pay the debts of crooks as “fiscally responsible”. The unmentionables are poverty and class. Almost a third of British children remain below the breadline. In working class Kentish Town in London, male life expectancy is 70. Two miles away, in Hampstead, it is 80. When Russia was subjected to similar “shock therapy” in the 1990s, life expectancy nosedived. A record 40 million impoverished Americans are currently receiving food stamps: that is, they cannot afford to feed themselves.

In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches 13-18 million child deaths every year. “This,” wrote the economist Lester C. Thurow, “is neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself.”

The same imperial forces have used horrific military weapons against stricken countries whose majorities are children, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which Britain is actively engaged, was allowed to intrude on the British election.

The people on the streets of Athens do not suffer this malaise. They are clear who the enemy is and they regard themselves as once again under foreign occupation. And once again, they are rising up, with courage.

When David Cameron begins to cleave £6 billion from public services in Britain, he will be bargaining that Greece will not happen in Britain.

We should prove him wrong. www.johnpilger.com

There’s a human who tells it like it is and doesn’t mince words or suffer nonsense at all. Rarely are humans this honorable and courageous in speaking out against the mass delusion and at times pure evil that is religion.

From the Washington Post Ratzinger is the perfect pope

Paedo Priests

“Should Pope Benedict XVI be held responsible for the escalating scandals over clerical sexual abuse in Europe?”

Yes he should, and it’s going to escalate a lot further, as more and more victims break through the guilt of their childhood indoctrination and come forward.

“Should he be investigated for how cases of abuse were handled under his watch as archbishop of Munich or as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer?”

Yes, of course he should. This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares to set foot outside his tinpot fiefdom of the Vatican, and he should be tried in an appropriate civil – not ecclesiastical – court. That’s what should happen. Sadly, we all know our faith-befuddled governments will be too craven to do it.

“Should the pope resign?”

No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly – ideally – qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job.

He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.

No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution – while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.