Money money money?

Money money money?

‘In my dreams I have a plan’

 

Although we are proud of our reputation for being disreputable, confusing, harmful, misleading and offensive it is quite clear that all the best blogs have serious posts by Nicholas Gruen or Peter Martin, Fred Argy, or John Quiggin about Teh Economy. We wish we could join them but we’re at a disadvantage: we don’t know much about Œconomics at all (but we know what we feel).

For most people “the economy” really boils down to how much they can spend on dinner tonight, whether they’re going to have a house tomorrow, what car they can consider buying, what job they can hope for (if any) and whether they noticed things like petrol and bread are more expensive than they seemed to be last month.

Most of us think that there is a THING called “The Economy” which does stuff (mostly scary) and has a mind of its own and has an appetite which must be satisfied. It must be fed and stroked and tamed, or – say some – left alone to grow in its own ugly, vicious, untameable way like a Tasmanian Devil.

But there is no such thing.

Economists just collect and manipulate statistics about what people and institutions did and how much what they did changed from last time and they reify those statistics into this thing they call “The Economy”, as if it’s real. That’s not to suggest that you can’t learn anything from the statistics, just that as long as you give this collection of stats entity you pretend it has a life it doesn’t have, and you say meaningless things like, “ ‘The economy’ is healthy”.

Sure, it’s a convenient shorthand but it gives the wrong impression to simple minds like Sir Roger’s.

Anyway…

The Economy is all about money.

Money – the story goes – is a form of stuff. It is finite and in limited supply and we have to fight for our share of it. We think (most of us) that since it is a money-pie of limited size we should share it more or less equally. We shouldn’t take too much more than our fair share except, you know, if we are prepared to do more for it, or if we’re more clever or luckier than others, or if some people don’t seem to want their piece as much as we do.

We all know the Calvinist philosophy which we used to call “The Protestant Work Ethic” and now call “The Way Things Just Are”: A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day’s Pay. We have to be careful with our money, preserve it, use it wisely; because there is only so much of it and it represents to us good folk, of both Calvinist and Augustinian religious heritage, both the fruit of our labours and our good stewardship.

Most of us, in short, think that money is a real thing and almost all of us think it is created by the government based on real resources. Like gold in vaults.

And it’s not.

We think that the money banks lend us is money that other people have deposited.

It’s not.

This was the bombshell that rocked us yesterday. What we learnt makes too much sense to dismiss it, and it also revolutionises opportunity and possibility: it forces us to think differently about what money really is.

There is no real limit to the money supply, or how much can be created, and how much of it we can have. If you have more it doesn’t mean someone else has to have less. There is no pie to slice. It’s a Magic Pudding! A “Cut-an’-Come-Again”.

If we had read anything as dry (we once thought) as an economic opinion, we would have known that.

Money is not stuff.

Here’s what money is:

Money is debt, it is a promise to pay. When you sign the mortgage papers, the bank creates that money – to all intents and purposes out of thin air.

Banknotes are not ‘money’. They are promises to pay; in other words, IOUs; in other words, debt.

They say ‘obliged to pay’, ‘indebted to’, ‘promise to pay’, ‘redeemable’, ‘entitles the bearer to receive’, etc. etc.

Most of us believe that banks lend out money that has been entrusted to them by depositors. Easy to picture. But not the truth.

Banks create the money they loan, not from the bank’s own earnings, not from money deposited, but directly from the borrower’s promise to repay.

Don’t believe us. How about these famous people?

John Kenneth Galbraith:
“ The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.”

 

Sir Josiah Stamp, Director, Bank of England 1928-1941:

“ The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin.”

 

Graham F. Towers, Director, Bank of Canada:
“ Each and every time a bank makes a loan (or purchases securities), new bank credit is created — new deposits — brand new money.”

 

Reginald McKenna, past Chairman of the Board, Midlands Bank of England:
“ I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that banks can and do create money … And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”

 

Irving Fisher, economist and author:
“ Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”

 

Robert Hemphill, Credit Manager, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta:
“ Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash, or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve.”

So what about the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

Money is created by debt. The debts are not supported with stuff, at least not enough stuff to go around. So if everybody called in their debts the system would collapse. For the system to work the banks must borrow from each other. The debt must be passed around. But the banks are scared and have stopped borrowing from each other. That’s why the central banks, especially in the US and Britain, are pouring massive amounts of cash into the system – it’s to encourage the banks to start borrowing from each other again.

There is a video on YouTube which explains it for those of us who didn’t really care for economics at school:

The “Economy” is a magic cut an’ come again pudding.

That makes lots of things possible, new ways of thinking about where an individual stands in the scheme of things.

Not a Civil Society Just Yet

Not a Civil Society Just Yet

 

 

We have a new hero at Values Australia (no, not Manning Clark).
His name is Julian Burnside QC. Not that we didn’t respect him before and agree with him and all like that. But, well…see it’s like this:

We got an mp3 player, for the train or whatever, and to fill it up we scoured ABC Radio National for podcasts.

Science Show, All in the Mind, Philosopher’s Zone, By Design, Ockham’s Razor.

You know the stuff. And of course there’s Big Ideas.

So we downloaded a likely lump about a Manning Clark Lecture:

“Citizens’ rights and the rule of law in a civil society: not just yet”.

It was by Julian Burnside, on the 10th of March this year.

Thought it might be a bit dry but we were so wrong about that!.

We were astonished.

He covers everything we had been trying to say but with such authority and knowledge. So we recommend you have a listen, too.

In his lecture he covered the Sorry statement and the appalling case of an aboriginal man called Bruce Trevorrow.

In the end we were far more inclined to agree with Burnside that some sort of compensation for the stolen generations is appropriate, rather than just the more nebulous idea of an improvement of aborigines’ lot, generally, over time.

“ In the first sitting of the new parliament, the Government said ‘sorry’ to the stolen generations. It seemed almost too good to be true: the apology so many had waited so long to hear. And it was astonishing and uplifting to hear some of the noblest and most dignified sentiments ever uttered in that place on the hill.
[ … ]
The apology was significant not only for marking a significant step in the process of reconciling ourselves with our past: it cast a new light on the former government. It set a new tone. And I think it reminded us of something we had lost: a sense of decency.

 

Most of the worst aspects of the Howard years can be explained by the lack of decency which infected their approach to government:

 

they could not acknowledge the wrong that was done to the stolen generations;

 

they failed to help David Hicks when it was a moral imperative – they waited until his rescue became a political imperative;

they never quite understood the wickedness of imprisoning children who were fleeing persecution;

they abandoned ministerial responsibility;

they attacked the courts scandalously but unblushing;

they argued for the right to detain innocent people for life;

they introduced laws which prevent fair trials;

they bribed the impoverished Republic of Nauru to warehouse refugees for us.

It seemed that they did not understand just how badly they were behaving, or perhaps they just did not care.

He also spoke about the rule of law, incommunicado detention, control orders and preventative detention, the right of the State (and its secret agencies) to withhold evidence, civil rights, erosion of rights, a Bill of Rights and more.

His lecture went further than the ABC podcast includes. Nevertheless the podcast is excellent.

Here’s a transcript of part of his speech which is on the podcast:

“ In 2005 further anti-terror legislation was introduced. The Commonwealth Criminal Code was amended to provide that a member of the Federal Police may apply for a preventative detention order in relation to a person. A preventative detention order will result in a person being jailed for up to 14 days in circumstances where they have not been charged with, much less convicted of, any offence. The order is obtained in the absence of the person concerned, and authorises that the person be taken into custody. When the person is taken into custody, they must not be told the evidence on which the order was obtained.

Thus, a preventative detention order can be made not only without a trial of any sort, but in circumstances where the subject of the order will not be allowed to know the evidence which was used to secure the order, even after the event.

We believe that few Australians are aware of just how far John Howard and his morally-neutered hired guns like Ruddock, Andrews, Vanstone and Mick Keelty went, in the name of “security” to tear down their legal rights and liberties.

Australians generally, we think, are unclear how little of what they believe they have they really have left. Perhaps, as Burnside suggests, they don’t want to know, as long as they’re doing all right and it’s not affecting them. But of course it does affect them and it will.

Habeas corpus is dead and stinking not only in the US but now here in Australia as well. Dwight D. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave over what John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, with Dick Cheney and George Bush and the supine American Senate, did to habeas corpus in the US:

Here are Ike’s Remarks Upon Receiving the America’s Democratic Legacy Award at B’nai B’rith:

“ Why are we proud?

We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend – or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus Act, and we respect it.”

With this lecture Julian Burnside — for standing up and saying what is so — has for us moved from “respected” to “hero”.

Here is the recording  of Burnside’s Manning Clark Lecture from ABC’s Big Ideas:

The Ancient Marinara

The Ancient Marinara

 

He’s a Legend, and our friend

 

We wish he wouldn’t describe himself as “ancient”. That tends to put us at the edge of a category we fiercely resist.

Richard Neville, one of the founders of homepagedaily.com, was the infamous, notorious publisher and editor of Oz Magazine.and author of Hippie Hippie ShakePlay Power, amongst many others. Unrehabilitated 60s icon, iconoclast and futurist. And our friend, or at least our supporter and adviser, in the earlier and more threatened days of the Ministry of Mateship and Fair Dinkum Values, aka ‘ValuesAustralia’.

Here he is with chilling news on the grim future for the globally-heated rich:

The Old Tart Vanishes

The Old Tart Vanishes

 

Levers and pulleys of a flimsy fantasy machine

 

It’s all about perception, as they say, and in politics perception is truth.
But, as MacDonalds say, for a limited time only.

We were struck over the last few days by the sudden disappearance of what most were convinced was a terrifying, gargantuan, impenetrable, impervious monstrosity.

The heavier than lead, harder than granite monument of Speer-like dimensions to power, greed and fear, that was the Howard government has evaporated without leaving any trace but the faint and fading echoes of a few squeaking, frightened rodents as they scuttle away from the light of responsibility.

And now we are left, as if suddenly woken from a spell, blinking in the sunlight of possibilities we had forgotten how to dream of.

It began with the Apology, the Sorry that could “never” be said, when Brendan Nelson began the capitulation with his appalling speech which was, nevertheless, a capitulation. In fact he capitulated both to his party and to Kevin Rudd, and that was his problem.

Of all the living ex-Prime Ministers, only Howard was absent from Parliament House. And when we then saw him on his morning walk all we saw was a little, pathetic, weak and broken old man.

In the last week at least two of the once great and powerful who so arrogantly and righteously controlled our lives intimated that they would be leaving the ignominy of the backbenches.

On Monday night on 4 Corners we saw the remnants of the old liberal leadership ram the daggers into the back their ex-leader, who was already politically dead.

We were allowed to see the levers and pulleys of the flimsy fantasy machine they had used to hoodwink us all. And we could see clearly what weak fools they are, what fools they had been, how they had fooled us, and how they had been so comprehensively and easily intimidated and fooled by Howard.

And now on Tuesday:  WorkChoices – Howard’s ‘great legacy to the nation’, the legislation which, if it were rolled back by Labor, we were assured, would undo twelve years of ground-breaking and masterful industrial relations reforms leading to disaster, calamity and the end of the world – has been, as they report, unanimously, swiftly, quietly and ruthlessly killed off. It is as if it had never been. It has evaporated into nothingness along with every other thing the Howard government claimed it stood for.

And now, of course, there is nothing they do stand for. There is nothing left for them to stand for.

The complete repudiation of the Howard experiment by not only the people of Australia and the Labor Party but also unanimously by Howard’s own party is probably the most justified and satisfyingly comprehensive retribution in Australian political history against an unbelievably awful and corrosive man and his equally horrible fags¹. Howard’s legacy is nothing but a bitter, fading after-taste.

But for those straw-chewers from Deliverance country who revelled in hatred towards their fellow humans, in racism, in their piggy-squeals for the death penalty, because Howard gave them permission, what is left for them, now they no longer have permission? Onto whom can they now encrust themselves? Wilson Tuckey?

For an excellent analysis of the collision between narcissism and entitlement and the “death, decay and a not insubstantial stench” that the 4 Corners story stirred up, read Possum‘s insights here.

¹ which we mean, of course, in the Tom Brown’s School Days sense.

A Man’s a Man

A Man’s a Man

Robert Burns statue in Writers Museum Edinburgh

Within the first five seconds we were hooked

 

We were on the way to work, tuned in to Radio National’s Book Show, a replay of the opening address by Andrew O’Hagan from last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival .

Sudden fauvist swathes and splashes of bright primary colours, seduced by the promise of intrigue and adventure and of amazing stories.

Andrew O’Hagan: Sydney Writers’ Festival Opening (Excerpt):

“ In our house we didn’t have many books, but there was a large yellow kitchen table where my mother sat at the centre of all her evidence.

 

I grant you she wasn’t the Norton Anthology of Literature, but she knew every song that was ever sung in Glasgow. And my father, when he was there, would appear from his adventures with a crimson face and stories you wouldn’t believe. Except of course I would believe all of them, being sick in the head and the youngest of four.

 

Between them my parents barely read a book in their lives, but I’ve come to feel there was literature in everything they said. “I had a book once,” my father once told me in a moment of pride. “It was green. Do you remember that book, Nancy? It was up on top of the fridge. Green it was. Stood there for ages. Greeny-coloured.”

 

“Away ye go ya daft pig,” my mother said. “That was the telephone book, that manky battered old thing.”

 

She turned to me.

 

“He only uses it to get the numbers of people he can go and buy dogs off. Bringing them in here: as if I don’t have enough to clean.”

 

“The book was definitely green,” said my da. “Green as a pound note. And don’t listen to her: it wasn’t a phone book or anything like it. It had a story in it and everybody died, I remember that sure enough.”

 

…a large yellow kitchen table where his mother sat at the centre of all her evidence…

We were intrigued. What evidence? Evidence of what? What an opening line!

So we knew this was a writer worth listening to. And then he said the other things. The inspiring things; the dark things.

He talked of the old world and of new worlds – new worlds known only in imagination and exotic stories, in dreams. Dreams that can come true through the power of literature to pave new paths to possibility. 

“ But who were we? For me, it was the less legendary granda, the one who sailed to Sydney and came back, I heard, with packets of dates and chocolates and large foreign dolls for my mother. The memory of him was the one that described us better, for the journey to Australia was an excursion into the blue heaven of our imagination.

 

I have to tell you, I grew up to believe there is no other nation but the one you can build and honour in your head, and for kids growing up that way, in a Scotland filled with faded songs about the grandness of our destiny, the thought of new beginnings in virgin lands became a beautiful dream.

 

To travel over the sea to a place free from the torpor of national attributes – not one without its own historical controversies, and one with its own deep traditions – but nevertheless a country that seemed built to be filled with high hopes.

 

In the cold winter nights outside Glasgow, I often lay and imagined my grandfather Charlie having a hot Christmas somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef, eating strange fruits, surrounded by coloured fish, and hearing talk we’d never known. Australia was the dream state of our working class childhoods, the Xanadu of the wee small hours, and that dead old sailor was to my unquiet mind a great engineer of imagined worlds, a crown prince of enchantment, the ultimate wizard of Oz.

 

It didn’t matter what reality had to say on the matter. Australia was the place to start again. I remember families going off from Scotland never to return. They were … emigrating. And to my mind those small friends of mine are kind of legendary because of their early engagement with open possibility. It never occurred to me that they Australia would stop them from growing, but I see now that they were infantilized in the minds of those they left behind. They grew Down Under, but not for us, who would always remember those emigrating heroes as boys we waved off in the knowledge we would probably never see them again. They were the high-flying flamingoes, those boys and girls who had followed my grandfather past the Cape of Good Hope, to a place that appeared, despite its own dark shadows, to make a virtue of BECOMING rather than a prison of BELONGING.

 

I remember watching a programme with my father in the 1970s about people in Adelaide who were trying to build a community of whitewashed houses. They were drinking pink wine and smiling. I’ll never forget it. The pink wine. The smiles on them. “In this part of the world,” said the presenter, “the idea is to be all you can be.”

 

The line seemed to me at the time like a thing out of Shakespeare. I’d never heard such a concept before &mdash Be All You Can Be. The white houses. The pink wine. The smiles on them. It was like Keats, I tell you. Like Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitgerald — all those people in their beautiful clothes at Jay Gatsby’s party, drinking this stuff — what was it called? — WINE.

 

Be All you Can Be. It was like an ancient Chinese proverb. A kind of haiku. A word from the lips of the great and bottomless pool of belief across the world.

 

“What did he say?” asked my father.

 

“Be All You Can Be,” I said.

 

He crushed a can of McEwan’s Export and threw it down by our two-bar fire.

 

“What?”

 

“Be All You Can Be.”

 

“What a load of shite,” he said.

 

Of course, it wasn’t really Australia. It was the thought of it. It was the imagining of it. And the great vehicle of such powerful imagining, says O’Hagan, is literature.

“ If we are truly alive, we have a duty to connect with the planet we inherited and that others will inherit in their turn. If we are truly alive, we have a role to play — every one of us — in the realization of peace and tolerance in our time.

 

If we are truly alive, and if we know what the imagination can do, it will not be in us to sit dormant whilst the planet is ruined by unfettered commerce or whilst thousands are killed by the pre-emptive and ruinous urges of Christian or Islamic fundamentalisms.

 

If we are civilized, we imagine our way past political coercion or selfish pride.

 

We speak truth to power.

We question our media.

We spring to the defense of liberty.

We take care of the world’s resources.

We interrogate corporations and we upbraid ourselves and our hungers and our needs.

We listen to the past.

We question our feelings of superiority.

We teach our children the truth of our culture and what it has done and what it has failed to do.

We keep a close watch on this heart of mine – yours and yours and yours.

And we never forget that we are moral beings and not machines.

This is what we do if we are truly alive. This is what we do if we live close to our imaginations.

[ … ]

I believe it is a failure of the imagination that allows famine or terror to reign in the world.

A man who throws half the contents of his fridge into the trash on a Monday morning fails to imagine, next time he visits the supermarket, that whole villages in Eritrea have children gasping for a droplet of milk. The politician or the general who orders a soldier to release cruise missiles from 5000 feet does not imagine the innocent men playing cards in the teashop below. He does not imagine their loss or the grief of their loved ones. The terrorist[/tag] at the controls of a plane cannot imagine the dreams of the secretary on the 102nd floor, planning her wedding and making a bid for life.

 

Failures of the imagination are behind the conduct of our woes — and so we as we gather here to salute literature and the imagination we also come to denounce those failures of the imagination that harm and betray and destroy life.

O’Hagan finished his speech by quoting his countryman, Robbie Burns.

“ Burns was a poor man who came at last to enrich the world — and I finish with these words I seem to have known since birth, his “Marsellaise” to the human spirit. 

A Man’s A Man For A’ That

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that;
The coward slave – we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that.
Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that. 

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities an’ a’ that;
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that. 

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a’ that,)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

 

So Burns was part of the struggle for equality and rights and democracy, the Scottish Enlightenment. “A piece of defiant uppityness such as ‘A Man’s A Man’ could get a man hanged, or transported to a life of hard labour in Australia. Burns had seen this happen to free thinkers like Thomas Muir,” says the BBC.

A-hah! Had “A Man’s A Man” (or more correctly, “Is there for honest Poverty”) not been as overwhelmingly successful as it was, Burns himself could have been transported to Botany Bay, as fellow Scots Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer and William Skirving were in 1794. Muir escaped in 1796 on an American ship which had been sent to rescue him. He fled to France, still in the midst of its Revolution.

America had only recently won its own independence from Britain. In France Muir worked with the famous Thomas Paine who agitated for American Independence. Paine famously wrote Common Sense and The Rights of Man – a guide to the ideas of the Enlightenment. (Muir had been a student of John Millar, Scottish philosopher and historian and author of The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society [1771]).

It is extraordinary to realise with what sacrifice, and courage, and how recently, people fought – and often died – for ideals which now seem so obvious and which we take for granted, and the ferocity with which the establishment opposed those ideals.

It is also salutary to note the patience with which corporations, religious zealots and governments are winding back these obvious rights and freedoms.

And it is important to understand the central role that writers played in gaining those rights and will continue to play in protecting them.

PS: If you would like to see what Andrew O’Hagan’s writing space looks like, you can visit the amazing Writers’ Rooms section at the Guardian. Other authors include Raymond Briggs (The Elephant and the Bad Baby), Caryl Phillips, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Margaret Drabble, John Mortimer, Will Self, Antonia Fraser, David Hare, Michael Frayn, and on and on — the list is much longer than this.

Happy Saturnalia

Happy Saturnalia

 

Absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment 

 

 This time of year is a traditional celebration of the birth of an extraordinary man – a long-haired mystic who revealed the secrets of the universe and forever changed the way we see the world. He is one of the most universally revered historical figures of all time.

Yes, 25 December (in the “Old Style“) is the birthday of Sir Isaac Newton.

His birthday was retrospectively celebrated in antiquity by the Romans in the festival of Saturnus, or the Saturnalia

Or perhaps the birthday of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. Other cultures also celebrated the winter solstice as Yule, or the birthdays of various gods.

The Romans attributed to the god Saturnus the introduction of agriculture and the arts of civilized life. Falling towards the end of December, at the season when the agricultural labours of the year were fully completed, it was celebrated in ancient times by the rustic population as a sort of joyous harvest-home, and in every age was viewed by all classes of the community as a period of absolute relaxation and unrestrained merriment.

 

During its continuance no public business could be transacted, the law courts were closed, the schools kept holiday, to commence a war was impious, to punish a malefactor involved pollution. Special indulgences were granted to the slaves of each domestic establishment; they were relieved from all ordinary toils, were permitted to wear the pileus, the badge of freedom, were granted full freedom of speech, partook of a banquet attired in the clothes of their masters, and were waited upon by them at table.

 

All ranks devoted themselves to feasting and mirth, presents were exchanged among friends, cerei or wax tapers being the common offering of the more humble to their superiors, and crowds thronged the streets.

Seems oddly familiar…

It was Newton who formalised the importance of gravity in the motion of the planets and his laws remain largely the basis on which today we are able to compute the trajectories and forces to send spacecraft to explore our solar system. (with a little help from Einstein)

One of these craft, Cassini, has been exploring Saturn and its moons and sending back amazing images. Last year it sent back this extraordinary [mosaic] image:

You will be able to notice this:

Interior to the G ring and above the brighter main rings is the pale dot of Earth. Cassini views its point of origin from over a billion kilometers (and close to a billion miles) away in the icy depths of the outer solar system.

 

This image of Saturn is eerily reminiscent of a monument to Newton that was never built.

 

Étienne-Louis Boullée was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose work greatly influenced contemporary architects and is still influential today… His style was most notably exemplified in his proposal for a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton, which would have taken the form of a sphere 150 m (500 ft) high embedded in a circular base topped with cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles.

So Happy Saturnalia to one and all!

And as our special seasonal gift to you, here are two videos to put a smile on the face of you, your friends and family:

 

Germany vs Greece: The Millennial Match

 

 

Women: Know Your Limits