Yes John,

it is a pity that too often in our societies we measure success by our ability to create conflicts in order to manage these to our own advantage. Often we seek a promoted pay-off rather than a solution. We revitalize at having trumped someone good and improper, even under "moralistic" guidelines designed for the looser to accept the guilt.

Most of the top echelons of society (including politicians) live well from this kind of success designed to half-bury the other people, because the unburied half is needed to do the dirty work and bring home the bacon in brown paper bags. Nice semantics and polished propaganda help to elevate this process to godly proportions.

In this system, the poorest are a nuisance since they can't be used to produce anything and they have nothing but hungry needs. Charity props up our good side thus, while on the other hand we kill any possibility of a proper social system.

In the mob of the unwashed, with no means to fight but our good fists, we are often victims of "encroaching freedom", that is to say not being able to properly fight others people who claim we stop "their freedom to restrict our own freedom".

We have buckley's chance to fight their rights to make our life a moralistic misery without other foundation than their pointing a finger at our small excesses while they indulge beyond belief.

We cannot fight their "rights" to teach dogmatic poppycock lies under a religious doona — designed to maintain power by brainwashing the lemming mobs.

The people with the money and power often buy their peace at a length, even if it appears to be twice the wanted price to their poor neighbours' eyeballs — neighbours who cannot sing thereafter without being sued since they've been bought out. For the rich person, buying this silence from the poor cost only a few crumbs, pocket money in a total budget of creating greater conflict with the weakest and old, in the cattle of rich peers to ween out and grab the extra treasures — hey, why live without the illusion of the golden cowpats?...

Games rich people play... success is but a toil or a bullet for losers and a glorified trophy picture on the wall of the winners.

The structure is so built that the more we have, the thinner the ranks. At the top of the pile very very few enjoy the 360 degree view. Most of us have trouble looking up from our feet to our own navel... and are we free to do so?

Below, most people in the "managed democracy" (a dangerous pyramid rather than a level playing field)  are made not to care much past the mundane comforts brought by the framing of the learned enslaving ethic of this "necessary evil to avoid at all cost" (WORK as defined by mark Twain). Our work is only worth what the "system" (designed by the elite) is prepared to pay as long as we borrow more than we get — to make us loose our potential of revolt or grand awakening. Meanwhile, the natural Earth suffer because, to tell the truth, the system is out of control...

Sure, some of us manage to shake the shackles, but please do not tell anyone if you do: the mobs will pounce on you with envy, while the rich will buy your happiness away with offers that could be hard to refuse — they don't want your spoiling happiness on the fringe of their own pleasures.

And the price of things for the lower mobs must always go up to satisfy the top pyramid climbers... while these can afford to pay much less for goods by "knowing in detail our basic needs" — needs which they do not have to stylistically worry about, themselves... 

The lure of golden cowpats makes us look at our feet when we should be looking to the sky... 

 George Soros: 'We face the most serious recession of our lifetime'

George Soros, 'the man who broke the Bank of England', tells Edmund Conway of his fears for the economy

"This is a period of wealth destruction. The people who make money will be few and far between. There will be a lot more money lost than made." When George Soros - the phenomenally successful hedge fund manager - says this, you know something is wrong, very wrong. And indeed it is. The 77-year-old billionaire sinks back into the sofa in his Chelsea townhouse and exhales.

He has managed to make money almost consistently for over half a century - from his early days as one of the world's first major hedge fund traders to his involvement in Black Wednesday as the man who "broke the Bank of England", and in the latter years generating multi-billion-dollar annual profits throughout the 1990s. The conditions today are almost uniquely dismal, however.

"I think this is probably more serious than anything in our lifetime," he says. In short, his feeling is that the United States and Britain are facing a recession of a scale greater than the early-1990s, greater even than the 1970s.

"I think the dislocations will be greater because you also have the implications of the house price decline, which you didn't have in the 1970s - so you had stagflation and transfer of purchasing power to the oil producing countries, but here you also have the housing crisis in addition to that."