slaveofone’s archive for December, 2007

Coming Soon- The Greatest Depression by slaveofone

Well, I thought I’d end 2007 with a doom and gloom prophecy for the U.S. economy. If you aren’t aware of what’s being going on, you’ve been living in a hole in Pakistan. The biggest housing bubble in U.S. history has popped. The banking system is going down in flames. The Fed is trying desperately to bail banks out by injecting billions into the system and lowering interest rates. This is devaluating the U.S. dollar at an incredible rate and sending inflation soaring. And since all this destruction of the dollar hasn’t helped a bit, the Fed has now promised to unload $40 billion more and will probably lower interest rates further. California had a large hand in boosting the economy as the center of the housing bubble buildup. But now California is the center of the mortgage and housing meltdown and is facing a projected $14 billion dollar budget shortfall next year because of it. The Governator recently said he will declare a fiscal emergency in January. California, the biggest economic player in the U.S. economy, will bring down the rest of the nation’s economy just as it propped it up previously. The transportation industry is facing a crisis. Oil prices have shot to astronomical levels. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than we ever have before in the history of our nation to police and wage war against other countries. Foreign nations who might have otherwise helped support our economy from outside are being scared away as the dollar decreases in value and interest rates fall.

If this continues, I predict a stock market crash and an economic recession sometime between 2008 and 2011 that will make the dot-com fallout seem like a sniffle and the Great Depression like a bit of a cough. Peter Spence, a leading economist in Britain agrees with me: The Government must suspend a set of key banking regulations at the heart of the current financial crisis or risk seeing the economy spiral towards a future that could make 1929 look like a walk in the park.

The economist Ludwig von Mises has this to say: There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought on by credit expansion. The question is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

My advice: Invest whatever money you’d like to keep in foreign currencies and stocks ASAP. Not only will it be there when the economy rights itself, but it will yield returns you couldn’t dream of. And don’t even think about purchasing a home in the next three years.

The Ancient World: Plagiarism by slaveofone

Those intimately familiar with the Hebrew Bible will at once be aware of numerous instances where the authors or editors of the texts could be charged with plagiarism (I put together a short list of some here). However, in the ancient world, this was not the moral or ethical dilemna it would be today. The opposite was the case. Originality was not necessarily a virtue. Writing and editing texts was a specialized art and being able to precisely copy something else or draw on a vast storage of shared literary heritage was considered participating in high craftsmanship.

Consider the following description of the Underworld as taken from three completely different texts composed and edited at different times in Babylonian history.

To the dark house, the abode of Irkalla,
To the house which none leave who have entered it,
To the road from which there is no way back,
To the house wherein the entrants are bereft of light,
Where dust is their fare and clay their food,
Where they see no light, residing in darkness,
Where they are clothed like birds, with wings for garments,
And where over door and bolt is spread dust.

from The Descent of Ishtar

To the dark house, dwelling of Erkalla’s god,
To the house which those who enter cannot leave,
On the road where travelling is one way only,
To the house where those who enter are deprived of light,
Where dust is their food, clay their bread.
They are clothed, like birds, with feathers.
They see no light, they dwell in darkness.
They moan like doves.

from Nergal and Ereshkigal

Seizing me, he led me down to the House of Darkness,
the dwelling of Irkalla,
to the house where those who enter do not come out,
along the road of no return,
to the house where those who dwell, do without light,
where dirt is their drink, their food is of clay,
where, like a bird, they wear garments of feathers,
and light cannot be seen, they dwell in the dark,
and upon the door and bolt, there lies dust.

from the Epic of Gilgamesh

When we approach the biblical texts, it is easy to forget that a prophet, figurehead, or legendry personage didn’t write much (if any) of those texts, but they are to a large extent (in their final forms) the work of one or more elite scribal artisans. In whatever locale the scribes of ancient Israel wrought their art, and whatever their motive for editing, composing, or rewriting their texts, they were part of a certain social system of scholars and craftsmen much like their Mesopamian and Egyptian counterparts. They had no qualms taking something from someone else and incorporating it into their own work or even putting another’s name to it.