I embedded one of Stefan Molyneux’s videos earlier on this blog, called ‘The Story Of Your Enslavement.’

I like Stefan’s videos and include them here because they always make me think and they do so in a way which helps me to understand why my financial and business independence is important, along with many other things. To expand on this, I feel that it is risky to rely on anyone else, because others have their own agenda. Every time I put this theory to the test, the results come back the same – independence and freedom are a crucial part of the ExRat way.

I thought it was fitting to add the follow-up video to that one here. In this video Stefan expresses his viewpoint that statism is just another religion – it has similarities in the churches, symbols, deities, rewards and punishments plus it relies on the control and abuse of children.

He feels that the solution lies in raising our children without the language of the state – instead of aggression, raised voices and hands, bullying, control, punishment and manipulation we should instead choose gentleness but firmness coupled with love.

He suggests that violence is a language that we must unlearn, because then the state will reveal itself as just a silly superstition.

I believe that it’s an important part of anyone’s personal development to find the kind of material that makes us stop, think and ask more questions of ourselves and of the world around us.

I read an article this morning regarding ‘Why The UK Trail Of The MF Global Collapse May Have “Apocalyptic” Consequences For The Eurozone, Canadian Banks, Jefferies And Everyone Else.’

The article draws heavily on Reuters for it’s references which is always a little bit more reassuring. It’s not a quick read but it explains how financial investments are leveraged up to four times larger than they should ever be within the shadow banking system and how this has led to a situation where one weak link in the daisy-chain of debt can now bring down the whole house of cards and more than likely will at some point.

I consider it essential reading for anyone who wants to become more knowledgeable about this subject and if you’re in business or have anything to do with money (all of us, in other words) you really should try and keep abreast of what’s going on in the higher echelons of financial ‘society’ because their shenanigans affect us all.

This is probably the best Keiser report I have seen. If you have ever wondered what on earth really happened within the banking sector and financial markets in 2007/2008 and why, then the first fifteen minute segment of this video will cast a lot of light on the answer.

Max and Stacy talk about Hank Paulson and this interesting and enlightening story. The story is also discussed on Bloomberg, Rolling Stone and ZeroHedge.

In the second half of the video, Max talks to Jon Thorisson of the Eva Joly Institute. In a fascinating interview, Jon talks about the Icelandic banking collapse and how the perpetrators are apparently hiding out in the City Of London.

Max and Jon also talk about the need for people to ‘wake up’ and see what is happening to their financial world around them and Jon asserts that part of this problem is that the press isn’t free and he also explains the ‘plasma screen’ theory.

I’ve embedded a few Keiser report videos on this site, but so far this one is the cream of the crop. If you haven’t watched it, I urge you to take thirty minutes out of your life to listen to some real straight talking.

Lawyers In Hacking Scandal To Earn Up To £200 Per Hour

It’s one of those stories in the newspaper that wasn’t placed on the home page of the website in a manner which would draw attention to it. In fact, since I opened that story about an hour ago, it’s now disappeared off the front page altogether.

I wonder why that happens, eh?  Is it so that the newspaper can appear to uphold it’s impartiality by appearing to ‘report the news’, without mentioning the fact that editorial control means that this interesting story can easily be buried very quickly beneath much more important stories like -

EweTube shows ram’s mating acts

Jacko:top-earning dead celebrity

Amanda Knox and I ‘need each other’ says Sollecito

 

It’s also interesting to note that the headline and sub-heading is actually out-done in terms of shockingness by the final sentence, which many people won’t even see.

This last sentence is the defence offered by a lawyer against the accusation that paying lawyers £200 an hour from taxpayers’ money over a long period of time to work on an inquiry into the hacking scandal is too much money and not value for money.

Here is the ‘attack’ -

Robert Oxley, campaigns manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said of the Leveson inquiry: “With an issue that affects the foundation of democracy, there has to be a proper investigation in to the allegations.

“But it is important the investigation represents value for taxpayers’ money and that the result is to restore faith in the organisations and not to bolster the pockets of well-paid lawyers.”

And here is the defence -

Mark Stephens, of Finers Stephens Innocent, who has worked on previous inquiries, including Bloody Sunday, said the hourly rates were a fraction of usual fees. He said a barrister in an inquiry could command £1,000 an hour, while a solicitor could earn £300 an hour. He said Lord Justice Leveson had to be commended for preventing lawyers treating the inquiry as a “money cow”.

 

£1000 an hour? That’s some income. £200 an hour isn’t to be sniffed at – I’d take it. Take a moment to consider the state of the economy around the world and also to consider exactly what it is that these people do – how much value do they provide society for that money?

I guess that they would take the position that they are essential in ‘upholding law and order.’ Others would suggest that it’s people and earnings like this that will ultimately be responsible for the total breakdown in law and order.

I think it’s safe to say that there’s a lesson here.

After a little break, The Keiser Report returns to the ExRat blog. I watch both of Max’s half-hour shows each week but I haven’t been inspired to embed them here recently, but this one was excelllent and made the cut.

In the first half, the part which caught my eye was about Harry Markopolos who apparently tipped off the SEC about Bernard Madoff and his activities some time before he was finally exposed -

The Keiser Report refers to this MP3 recording which is an interview with KingWorldNews, summarised on that page as such -

Markopolos stated, “The Bank of New York is going to go down, Eric.  Between Bank of New York Mellon and State Street, these two institutions have stolen between $6 to $10 billion from tens of millions of Americans retirement savings accounts.  It’s been a hell of a crime spree for the bank, but now they are being brought to justice.”

Markopolos also told KWN, “The New York Attorney General filed suit on Tuesday (against Bank of New York Mellon) for stealing money from pension funds on currency transactions.  This theft has been from tens of millions of Americans, policemen, firemen, librarians, municipal workers, judges and the list goes on and on and they’ve been doing it for decades.”

If you listen to Max’s commentary on this and hear part of Markopolos’s recording, he explains how pension funds are used and abused by traders as a dumping ground for any trades which go wrong and how transactions by pension funds are manipulated by those who administer them in order for those traders to skim percentages off of each transaction.

One of the reasons why I feel that this is interesting is because as an ExRat, it’s important to understand why we are self-employed and why it’s important to reject ‘the system’ which society tries to funnel us into, starting in school for most of us.

Max even confesses that he himself has done similar things while working on Wall Street (7.20 in the video.)  He calls this a ‘look-back trade’. Max explains -

“You put on a big option trade, a volatility trade, at the end of the day. You don’t give an account number to the options dealer on the desk because they’re you know, in line for a big Christmas bonus. Then at the end of the day, if it’s a loser, you dump it into a pension account or you give it to a corporation for a tax loss. If it’s a winner, you go into an account that you’ve already got a pre-arranged relationship with where there’s a massive kick-back. And most of the trading on Wall Street is like this.”

In the second half, Max talks with Charles Hugh Smith, the author of An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times. I found this interview quite interesting, not least at 17.20 in the video where he suggests and discusses with Max an alternative direct action plan for the ‘occupy’ movement which could have even more impact and involve the population at large.

Also at around 18.20 he explains how vastly increasing the number of banks would stop the current monopoly of a handful of banks from creating ‘a mass concentration of wealth to buy the political process.’

I present these pieces of information here in order to assist the budding entrepreneur to  re-educate themselves about current affairs by absorbing alternative viewpoints in order that they can remove the blinkers which are conveniently placed upon us and reinforced by the mainstream media and to counteract that disinformation which is all around us.

‘The Money Masters’ is an excellent film produced by Patrick Carmack and directed/narrated by Bill Still, and released sometime around 2004 as ‘The Money Masters’, but repackaged and released in 2009 by Still as ‘The Secret Of Oz’ – this is the repackaged version.

It covers fractional-reserve banking, the Federal Reserve, central banking, the bond market and many other related subjects and attempts to explain why this monetary system is problematic and fundamentally flawed.

The main premise (generalised somewhat) is that the financial system has been designed and set up to reap the spoils of the many for the benefit of the few.

In this repackaged version the new premise is that ‘The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz’ by L. Frank Baum has many parallels with the financial system and perhaps the prevalence of what could be construed as hidden symbolism within the original story was a surreptitious way of ‘getting the message out’ to the people about the need for monetary reform, without Baum endangering himself in the process.

You can find quite a lot more background information about the two versions of the film here at the Wikipedia link.

This is the second in the series of the ‘Money As Debt’ films by Paul Grignon and this one was released in 2009. You can see the first one, released in 2002 by clicking HERE.

This second film was made as a response to the global financial crisis of 2008. Therefore it goes a little further into interest burdens, bailouts, stimulus packages and the ‘gambling economy.’

It also explains aspects of the law and how they relate to the financial system and the economic crisis. I will add ‘Money As Debt 3 – Evolution Beyond Money’, as soon as it becomes available for embedding.

These films are ideal for anyone who is new to this subject, as they take their time to explain complex concepts and utilise animations to demonstrate the important points.

This is the ideal ‘starter’ video to point people towards when you are having a discussion with someone who has no idea how the monetary system really works and no clue about fractional-reserve banking.

As more people come across this subject, the typical response to an explanation of just how fundamentally flawed and skewed the whole financial system is, tends to be one of disbelief.

There are some criticisms of this film and even the filmmaker Paul Grignon admits that ‘his presentation of fractional-reserve banking may have been “misleading”‘, but it’s a good place to start.

You can read a little more about this 2002-released film by clicking HERE. Grignon has so far made three films in this series so I will also add the other two to this blog, although the third film – ‘Money As Debt 3 Evolution Beyond Money’ is not available for me to embed just yet. The second one, ‘Money As Debt 2′, can be viewed by clicking HERE.

These films are animations which, although a little basic in terms of presentation seem to be the ideal format for films of this nature.

It can be educational to examine these things more closely, which is precisely what the typical newspaper reader/commenter doesn’t bother to do, in an entirely predictable example of confirmation bias, which the writer is clearly aware of and hoping for.

The first thing to do when confronted with a poll is to search for the sample size – search being the operative word, because it’s typical to find that those who publish their conclusions based upon these polls tend to make this information difficult to locate.

Secondly, one should look for some kind of bias regarding the demographics of those being polled. So for example, a poll about attitudes to child-rearing might provide polar-opposite conclusions if the sample is made up entirely of mothers as opposed to fathers, or parents as opposed to non-parents.

Here is an interesting example that I stumbled across today -

Headline in newspaper – (from this link)

Lifestyle ‘is better in Poland than Britain’: Less crime and violence – and it’s cheaper too.

It’s important to take a moment to stop and consider the headline (above), because it’s likely to demonstrate the main deception that the writer is attemtping to make.

Just 5 per cent of Britons describe themselves as happy
Poland, France, Spain and Italy all have less material wealth, but fared better than the UK

Next we should examine the sub-heading (above), which will probably attempt to reinforce the deception as well as sometimes also doing the opposite – by offering a little truth in order to water down the deception of the main heading (which everyone will read) the sub-heading can also reassure the sceptical (more likely to also read the sub-heading) via this watering-down process.

The main fallacy used by polls and their resulting write-ups is the unrepresentative sample fallacy which can clearly be observed throughout the headline and sub-heading. Specifically, unless the whole of Britain is polled it is extremely poor and misleading journalism to use a sub-heading such as ‘Just 5 per cent of Britons describe themselves as happy.’

There are many more lessons to be found regarding propaganda within the article (for example, to ask yourself ‘what are they trying to achieve via this deception?’) but let’s move on to the first and most necessary part of our process here – finding the actual poll that the article is written about.

You will notice that nowhere in the actual article does it explain where the poll results are derived from. The only place where I can see it is at the bottom right of the first graphic – ‘Source -USwitch.com’.

So we head off to Google search engine and a quick search for ‘USwitch poll’ returns two pages and one of them is the poll we are looking for – USwitch poll August 2011.

Of course, the first consideration is that this is a poll (apparently – but see below for clarification) conducted by a commercial company (not a dedicated polling company) which is in the business of providing online price comparisons of various consumer utilities and everyday purchases, such as insurance and communications contracts.

Next we should eagerly look for the sample size of people polled and any demographic bias. What we find is that many of the statistics used for the pollsters to arrive at their own conclusions are firstly (1) drawn from a variety of sources and secondly (2) these statistics are manipulated somewhat using formulae devised by the pollsters.

Examples -

1) the poll is designed to compare Britons with the rest of Europe, but some of the statistics used are derived from sources which use international statistics – EG -

Working hours based on average usual weekly hours worked on main job. data from OECD/ ILO http://laborsta.ilo.org

2) an example of the formulae -

 Income data is net income after taxes (in GBP) for a two-earner married couple, one at 100% of average earnings and the other at 33% with 2 children. Data from from the Taxing Wages reports by OECD (these reports are currently not available on the OECD website).

So already, we have found two areas where the statistics are being skewed, before the newspaper gets their hands on them and skews them even more with creative headlines.

But back to the core fallacy, the unrepresentative sample. It’s right at the bottom of the article on the USwitch page -

The accompanying poll was carried out by Opinium Research. Sample size of 2,036 Nationally Representative (UK adults aged 18+) between 26^th and 29^th August 2011.

So the poll was actually conducted by a dedicated polling company. But who in their right mind would suggest that you can accurately define the attitudes of a nation with a population of over 61 million (according to 2006 estimates) by polling 2,036 people?

This is roughly one three-hundredth of a per cent! That’s 0.00333(reoccurring) of a percent.

But there’s more. Now that we have found the company who conducted the poll, let’s just take a brief look at their website.

I found this page called ‘Research based PR stories – fact or fiction?’

Extracts -

It was Benjamin Disraeli who said that, ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics’. He might have been referring to some of the research-based PR stories that crop up in the media. A headline such as ’80 per cent of Brits face pension misery’ may grab the attention, but, if the research behind the headline is of dubious quality, then so is the story.

For me, the real culprit, however, is poor questionnaire design. Put yourself in the position of a panellist taking part in an omnibus survey. You’ll be expected to answer questions on a wide variety of topics. If you don’t know an answer, chances are you’ll take a guess, as opposed to ticking a ‘don’t know’ box. This is a particular problem in financial research, where most questions revolve around how much people earn, borrow, save, invest and spend. I don’t know about you but, off the top of my head, I couldn’t tell you what interest rate I’m paying currently on my mortgage or what my annual car insurance premium is. And I might not want to admit my ignorance, so would probably take an educated guess. If I’m not alone in doing this, then the survey findings – and resultant statistics – are going to be completely skewed.

Market research is great at producing headline-grabbing news stories, but ‘damned lies’, as Disraeli put it, are not worth the paper they’re written on.

It’s nice to see that the company responsible for this poll feel exactly the same way that I do about propaganda. No doubt they will be releasing a press-release shortly to explain their decisions regarding their interesting formulae, their ridiculously low sample size and to rebuke the Daily Mail for their use of this poll to construct their umm, ‘conclusions’?

The point which they make in the middle quote (above) is entirely valid. We have no idea what form the questioning in this poll took. But anyone with a brain knows that you can easily skew the results of a poll before it is taken by using multiple-choice instead of open questions, with the choices specifically chosen in advance for nefarious reasons.

When challenged on this, it is easy to defend by stating that it’s too much work for researchers to extrapolate results from the answers to open questions (so intead we use a computer to read the results), plus one could also point out that the interpretation of the answers by the researchers could be used to add bias to the findings – therefore multiple choice is ‘more accurate’.

The whole point of my article is to demonstrate the educational value of paying attention to these polls, the sample size, the demographics (or lack of information about them) and how these results are taken by other sources and extrapolated into sweeping generalisations.

What lessons can we learn about polls, statistics, newspapers and those who read them and take their findings at face-value? For example, as of this time (9am on the morning of publication) there are 190 comments on this article and only one that I can find, where the commenter doesn’t appear to be completely taken in by the deception. He calls himself ‘ExRat’

I hope that you find this useful and educational.

‘Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.’ Albert Einstein.

‘It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.’ Mark Twain

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.’ Buddha.

‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.’ Winston Churchill.

Updated -

I knew there was another article similar to this which used a sample of 2000 people in a poll to draw sweeping conclusions about the British consumer, although at least this one clearly points out the sample size in the article, right at the end of it -

Consumer Confidence Improves For First Time In Five Months

As you can see, this article is a fair bit more informative and factual than the previous one, but still – why do they choose to survey only 2000 people?

The GfK survey was based on a sample of around 2,000 people and conducted between September 2 and September 11 on behalf of the European Commission

Things that make you go hmmm.

I saw this video earlier and thought it was worthy of embedding here for a few reasons. If you consider how much speculation, argument and literally how many words have been said on this subject, then I think that it is highly educational to examine how one person has managed to encapsulate one side of the argument and many of the most relevant points into a short video.

It’s even more relevant for anyone who is trying to get their message across via the internet in this day and age where publishers are having to try and adapt to the sound-bite attention span of the average internet surfer.

It might well be wise to assume that one of the most valuable skills to posess is the ability to deliver your message in as much of a punchy, brief, accurate and uncluttered manner as possible. Of course, when you are working with the spoken word plus other audio along with images, animations, video clips (the main options available to video publishers) if you can get these to knit together in the most effective way possible in order to accomplish that goal, you win.

In my opinion, this video wins. It gets the message across, holds your attention and concludes before your cup of tea has gone cold.