Common Knowledge Edinburgh Newsletter #33

Build a local community.

There is a lot happening with Common Knowledge over the next month.

We’ve been working with Comedy Unleashed to have a comedy night during the Edinburgh Festival. We’ve also been working with the Speakeasy Comedy Club for another night of comedy during the Festival. Both nights promise to be hilarious, provocative and cathartic. There are also two mystery special guests who we cannot reveal, but who are, at the very least, have a take on the world worth listening to.

17th August, 7.30pm, Leith, Edinburgh

Comedy Unleashed was founded by Andy Shaw and Andrew Doyle because they wanted to go to a comedy gig where they did not have to have the correct opinions about Brexit (‘it’s a disaster’ was the orthodoxy). They wanted comedy to represent different points of view and comedians who challenged a range of beliefs.

From their first few tentative gigs in Leeds, they now regularly host comedy nights in both Leeds and London. The Edinburgh gig is a first attempt in Scotland so we hope it will be a success and from there we can build a comedy scene that keeps comedy’s role of pointing out a few of the absurdities of politics, policies and life in Scotland.

Tickets can be bought here.

24th August, 7.30pm, Edinburgh

The Speakeasy Comedy Club was founded by Michael O’Bernicia who was a comic in the 90s, working under the name ‘The Bernician’. Over the past three years, Michael has become well-known for his alternative pro-freedom views and his exposing of the legal tricks that contravene natural law, particularly in regard to mortgages. His return to comedy is based on his belief that society needs the Jester to speak Truth to the King.

This is the Speakeasy Comedy Club’s first event in Scotland, and as with Comedy Unleashed, we hope that it will be a success.

Tickets can be bought here.

3rd September, The Future of Money, All Day Event, Edinburgh

Cash is under threat and money could be changed into a surveillance and control tool as central banks launch their own digital currencies. The economy is showing signs of strain as war, de-industrialisation and bank collapse threaten. Yet the solutions might be found in credit creation, local banking, possibly Bitcoin and other approaches. How are we to make sense of a world where change is coming but its final shape is unknown?

The Future of Money is an event with three separate interviews with people who are deeply immersed in economics and finding solutions, followed by a free and open Q&A. We hope by holding this event we can raise awareness of the issues and help give people the information they need to find solutions.

Tickets are £35 for early adopters and can be purchased here.

Our interviewees are:

Professor Richard Werner is a world-famous economist. He was the man who coined the term 'Quantitative Easing' in the 1990s when working in Japan as a researcher at the Bank of Japan. He graduated 1st Class in Economics from LSE, then gained a doctorate from Oxford and has studied at the Tokyo Institute. He has been Chief Economist for Jardine Fleming Securities and has sat on the board of directors for Bear Stearns. He has held numerous academic positions. He has developed the Quantity Theory of Credit which is outlined in his excellent book  The Princes of the Yen. He was the economist who prised the admission from the Bank of England that they do indeed create money as credit. He is founding director and chairman of Local First Community Interest Company, which promotes the establishment of not-for-profit local community banks, modelled on the successful German local co-operative, Raiffeisen and Sparkasse savings banks that have enabled German small firms to become top exporters and job creators in Germany.

Michael Northcott is Emeritus Professor of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh and Adjunct Professor at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He is resident fellow at the Budapest Centre for Long-Term Sustainability in 2023. He has published extensively in peer reviewed journals and sole authored and edited books on ecological, economic and medical ethics, on the ‘war on terror’, genetic engineering and climate change. His most recent books are Place, Ecology and the Sacred (Bloomsbury 2015) and God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet (Routledge 2022).   

Oliver Studd is Chief Executive Officer of the Valhalla Network. A project founded by himself, with Professor Richard Werner as its Chairman, that is aiming to establish a de-centralised network of finance which uses Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Studying under Professor Werner, he appreciates the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises to the economy and Valhalla Network is positioning itself to provide funding to these businesses that the larger banks and government do not cater to, despite their effectiveness in job creation and productivity. Oliver's vision could see a revolution in banking and a freeing of local economies from their side-lining by big banks to borrow and invest to increase their growth. 

We hope that you can join us for some or all of these events. They promise to be stimulating, thought-provoking and a good laugh!