For me, what shows how far America really is falling is that now people of New Hampshire are begging for gasoline from Venezuelan enemy, Hugo Chavez:
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Two years ago, New Hampshire refused to accept heating oil from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the pro-Castro U.S. critic who once called President Bush “the devil.” But with fuel prices rising, well, free oil is free oil.
With the state’s blessing, New Hampshire residents will be receiving some of the fuel this winter.
New Hampshire becomes the last state in the Northeast to embrace the offer.
“A lot of people have said, `We need help and we value any help we can get,’” said Amy Ignatius, director of New Hampshire’s office of energy and planning.
I guess when supposedly proud beggars of New Hampshire say “Live free or die” what they mean is “live on free gasoline from America’s enemy or die.”
What will the Internet look like in Canada in 2010? I suspect that the ISP's will provide a "package" program as companies like Cogeco currently do. Customers will pay for a series of websites as they do now for their television stations. Television stations will be available on-line as part of these packages, which will make the networks happy since they have lost much of the younger market which are surfing and chatting on their computers in the evening. However, as is the case with cable television now, if you choose something that is not part of the package, you know what happens. You pay extra.
And this is where the Internet (free) as we know it will suffer almost immediate, economic strangulation. Thousands and thousands of Internet sites will not be part of the package so users will have to pay extra to visit those sites! In just an hour or two it is possible to easily visit 20-30 sites or more while looking for information. Just imagine how high these costs will be.
Well, 2010 gives me a target date by which to prepare. There's no way a site like this could survive such a process. Fold tent; go home. Grow cabbages. Oh, and f*ck the comm companies. Got cable? Cancel it now and make the bastards bleed.
What’s scary now, for the ISAF’s chances of holding on to the country, is that the Taliban seems to have learned its lesson. It never had a reputation for sophistication, and its hillbilly Pashtun ways weren’t exactly calculated to win hearts and minds. The Pashtun have always been a little strange. They have probably the most anti-women attitude of any tribe on earth. Here are a couple of Pushtun proverbs that give you the general idea: “Women belong either in the house or in the grave,” and “Even one’s own mother and sister are disgusting.” They don’t even claim to find women attractive; for the typical Pashtun warrior, the sexiest thing around is a little boy.
But, like the old saying goes, “pain is the best teacher,” and the pain the Talibs suffered when they were crushed in 2001-2002 seems to have made them a little more humble and flexible. This is something you see in a lot of guerrilla wars: After a defeat, the guerrillas come back much smarter and more patient, because the enemy has been acting like a sped-up Darwin, pruning the movement by killing off the hotheads, the sadists and the crazies, until only the smarter guerrillas, who had the sense to lie low, are left.
Why do they hate us again?
Those fighter jets can’t tell the difference between a wedding party carrying the bride to her husband’s village and a Taliban column moving to the attack. And when in doubt, they tend to assume all large groups on the move are Taliban. For six years, ISAF warplanes have been bombing Pashtun wedding parties and processions. It seems to happen over and over again. I’m not sure why. Maybe weddings are the only time that Pashtuns get together in big numbers, big enough to draw fighter pilots’ attention. Maybe it’s their habit of firing rifles to celebrate. But for whatever reason, we have bombed and strafed enough wedding parties to rouse centuries of hatred from the Pashtuns.
Oftwominds: The Art of Survival. Good stuff if you're trying to figure out a collapse survival strategy that doesn't involve hoarding cans of beans, guns and bullets.
Because the best protection isn't owning 30 guns; it's having 30 people who care about you. Since those 30 have other people who care about them, you actually have 300 people who are looking out for each other, including you. The second best protection isn't a big stash of stuff others want to steal; it's sharing what you have and owning little of value. That's being flexible, and common, the very opposite of creating a big fat highly visible, high-value target and trying to defend it yourself in a remote setting.
Hey you Hippie - that's faggot talk! Maw, git mah gun...
Death to viral ads: Things are not what they stream. The celphone popcorn clip was a well known recent example. The clip of the office worker smashing up his cubicle another. The cel ad had me fooled for a bit - but the office worker going ape didn't. The crowd behaviour didn't feel natural. Anyhow, let's be careful out there and not get duped by these sleazebags.
And yet another eXile piece - an excellent analysis of Hitchen's waterboarding:
Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It’s like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.
So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer’s easy: He’s withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it’s too late...
...That’s all it takes to change anybody’s mind about torture, getting one little 11-second whiff of it, even if it’s nowhere close to the real thing. The interesting thing is not that Hitchens changed his mind; it’s the strategic thinking that made him decide to do it now. The timing of this little martyr is the key here, and what it tells you is that Hitchens is declaring martyrdom and getting out. He just unilaterally withdrew from Iraq, and in only 11 seconds.
The Iraq War veteran had called a taxi service to take him to the emergency room. But when the driver arrived, Dwyer shouted that he was too weak to get up and open the door.
The officers asked Dwyer for permission to kick it in.
"Go ahead!" he yelled.
They found Dwyer lying on his back, his clothes soiled with urine and feces. Scattered on the floor around him were dozens of spent cans of Dust-Off, a refrigerant-based aerosol normally used to clean electrical equipment.
Dwyer told police Lt. Mike Wilson he'd been "huffing" the aerosol.
"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged Wilson. "I'm dying. Help me. I can't breathe."
Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher. As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer's eyes had glassed over and were fixed.
A half hour later, he was dead.
A living hell:
One day, he swerved to avoid what he thought was a roadside bomb and crashed into a convenience store sign. He began answering his apartment door with a pistol in his hand and would call friends from his car in the middle of the night, babbling and disoriented from sniffing inhalants.
Matina told friends that he was seeing imaginary Iraqis all around him. Despite all this, the Army had not taken his weapons.
In the summer of 2005, he was removed to the barracks for 72 hours after trashing the apartment looking for an enemy infiltrator. He was admitted to Bliss' William Beaumont Army Medical Center for treatment of his inhalant addiction.
But things continued to worsen.
There are so many internet tough-guys...you've all read them. Tippity tappity, bomb Iran, nuke the ragheads, bla bla bla fucking bla. Many of them (like Hitchens) are well paid shills for their invisible corporate overlords. They seem to have a bottomless pool of courage - as long as the guys and girls being blown up aren't them, or members of their lineage. It's one reason why I'd like to see a full-blown attack on Iran and Pakistan - such a widening of the war would surely demand a draft. That way, those evil shits will have to put their asses where their mouths are.
Onward men - it's the final push to Tehran! We'll be in Berlin by Christmas...
Let the great national growing-up begin.
NYU Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini predicts that Congress will have to intervene in order to bail out the deposit fund.
“They’re going to run out of money, with certainty,” he predicted. “Congress is going to have to recapitalize the FDIC, those $50 billion plus is not going to be enough, by no means.”
It feels like the summer of 1931. The world’s two biggest financial institutions have had a heart attack. The global currency system is breaking down. The policy doctrines that got us into this mess are bankrupt. No world leader seems able to discern the problem, let alone forge a solution.
The International Monetary Fund has abdicated into schizophrenia. It has upgraded its 2008 world forecast from 3.7pc to 4.1pc growth, whilst warning of a “chance of a global recession”. Plainly, the IMF cannot or will not offer any useful insights.
Run, don’t walk, to your bank and get the funds you have clear of this mess before it gets any worse. The safe deposit box … isn’t. There were rules during the Great Depression such that a treasury agent got to paw through any that were opened before the owner got to touch their stuff; gold, silver, and cash could easily be confiscated in an emergency.
While the circumstances surrounding these downfalls vary, one element is identical: the lucrative lending practices of America’s merchants of debt have led millions of Americans — young and old, native and immigrant, affluent and poor — to the brink. More and more, Americans can identify with miners of old: in debt to the company store with little chance of paying up.
It is not just individuals but the entire economy that is now suffering. Practices that produced record profits for many banks have shaken the nation’s financial system to its foundation. As a growing number of Americans default, banks are recording hundreds of billions in losses, devastating their shareholders.
Of the 266 distinct nations or entities on the world today, nearly 100 are now reporting continuing energy shortages, mostly in the form of inadequate electricity supply, but in a growing number of cases, shortages of liquid fuels and natural gas. The actual number of countries affected is probably well over 100 but there are dozens of isolated island-states scattered around the world that are rarely heard from and are almost certainly suffering in silence while waiting for the next oil tanker to come in...
Currently, the most serious situations appear to be in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both are nations with populations in excess of 150 million people that are ensnared in devastating power shortages that have destroyed their export industries. Both are facing water and agricultural problems that threaten their food supplies. Liquid fuels are running short and reductions in exports threaten their ability to import oil and natural gas. It was recently revealed that the Saudis already are forgiving $6 billion of Pakistan's $12 billion annual oil import bill.
On top of this, Pakistan has nuclear weapons and its strategic location is vital to the course of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Worsening blackouts, the liquid fuels shortage and probably the food situation are likely to lead to serious political instability before the year is out.
My wife was a little disturbed by this, but did not complain - viewing it (I suspect) as a harmless hobby. I don’t smoke, I spend about $10 a week on alcohol, don’t gamble, don’t put anything on credit card, and earn a good salary - so she put up with this sudden, uncharacteristic interest in cultivating fruit, brewing, gardening, aquaponics, etc. because it really wasn't a hardship for us.
But her tolerance was under sufferance, and Peak Oil was not really something she wanted to talk about. Then, a few months ago, things changed.
My wife saw the price of petrol shoot up. She started reading disturbing stories in the news about food riots, fuel protests, airlines going out of business, trucking firms struggling, and so on. Pretty much exactly what I was talking about 3 years ago.
More links of sausage-meat:
Dennis Perrin has a chat with a young National Guardsman who's itching to head out to Iraq:
Seems for some of his generation, Iraq and Afghanistan are proving grounds. If you can go and come back in one piece, while hopefully kicking some hadji ass in between, you earn serious bragging rights. It's not about "democracy" anymore, as this kid readily admitted to me. He thought we should just steal their oil and eliminate those who get in the way. I held my tongue more than not, too hot and tired to seriously argue with him. Absorbing what I did say, he assumed that I was an Obama supporter.
"Oh no. Not even close."
"Thank God for that."
"Well, I think I oppose Obama for different reasons than you."
"I'm a Ron Paul man, myself."
"But Paul's against the war."
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders, then added that he's an avid listener of Michael Savage. Nice to see the kid has a sick sense of humor, even if he doesn't know it. I'm sure it'll come in handy where he's going.
It's always fun to bear in mind that most US Politicians are inbred. Bush and Kerry were cousins, both sharing at least one ancestor from the Mayflower (explaining their inherent joylessness). Even Obama is a distant cousin of Dick Cheney. Here's a depressing list of Presidential families:
Jimmy Carter: ninth cousin of Warren Harding, sixth cousin of Richard Nixon
George H. W. Bush: fourth cousin five times removed of Millard Fillmore, fifth cousin four times removed of Franklin Pierce, seventh cousin four times removed of Abraham Lincoln, sixth cousin five times removed of Ulysses Grant, sixth cousin three times removed of Rutherford Hayes, fourth cousin three times removed of James Garfield, seventh cousin twice removed of Grover Cleveland, seventh cousin three times removed of Theodore Roosevelt (also eighth cousin twice removed of Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of Theodore), sixth cousin three times removed of William Taft, sixth cousin twice removed of Calvin Coolidge, tenth cousin of Herbert Hoover, sixth cousin three times removed of Franklin Roosevelt, ninth cousin four times removed of Richard Nixon, seventh cousin of Gerald Ford. Note that these relationships then also apply to George W. Bush, each an additional generation removed.
I'm so glad that I was born in a rat-infested Irish town in 1969, rather than a glorious American city in the 1980s/1990s. Why? Well, so that I didn't have to mentally raped by "New Maths". Here's a mind-warping video demonstration:
The picture is ghastly: Trophy wives, married to Wall St fat cats on obese incomes (the average wage for top hedge fund managers is $US240 million), have seen the writing on their flock-papered walls and are bolting to the lawyers.
They want out before the market bottoms and hubby goes belly-up.
The New York Times says Manhattanites are being forced to cut back on $350 blow-dries and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals.
Which must be terribly hard on the kids.
Another report tells of one husband who, when his net worth tumbled from $US20 million to a miserable $US8 million, took out a massive loan to pay for his wife's wardrobe and holidays - so she wouldn't leave. My immediate reaction to all this was to sink a vitriolic boot into these gold-digging trollops, well, for being gold-digging trollops, and for jumping ship once hubby no longer owns it.
But then it occurred to me, what were these blokes expecting?
Meanwhile, what nobody mentions when recounting this rosy scenario is that oil exports to the U.S. from Mexico are falling at 30% per year--and the U.S. gets 20% of its imported oil from Mexico and Venezuela...
...Bottom line: Saudi Arabia and Russia, which together pump about 23% of the world's oil, are both in depletion decline. So are Mexico, the North Sea, etc.
Obviously, I can not predict the exact shape of the world oil production curve in the next 5 years. What I can do, however, is establish a ceiling for world oil production should demand remain strong going forward. That ceiling, now and forever, is likely to occur in 2011 somewhere between 76 and 77 million b/d.
We are so close to the peak now that quibbles about the numbers cited here do not matter. My familiarity with the oil industry justifies many of the "hidden assumptions" I've made and did not have time to discuss. If you remain unconvinced that a peak of world crude oil production is now almost upon us, nothing I could say further will persuade you in any case.
As I said at the top, this is my official forecast and I will not revise it in the future. I will note for the historical record that in July of 2008 few Americans have come to grips with the implications of a permanent peak in the world's oil supply despite the strong price signal we've seen for several years now. I have done all I could over the last few years to warn everyone about what's coming. My conscience is clear even as my concern remains high.
For me, the time has come to examine measures we might take in the post-peak world.
Already, people who we have never heard of, and who have never sacrificed or contributed an iota, are starting to emerge saying that they have "disovered" Peak Oil...This is just the beginning of a deluge. More than half of those who will wind up on CNN, Fox, ABC and on the pages of our newspapers will be either one of two things: rank opportunists and snake oil salesmen who will distort and peddle bad ideas and self-promotion; or they will be out-and-out disinformation artists funded either by Wall Street or the US government.
Joe Bageant: Charities take advantage of volunteers. No shock there. I gave $200 to an American charity a couple of months ago. My reward? An email reply showcasing their work in Afghanistan, highlighting their support for that disastrous occupation. Yup: I gave money to f*cking neoCONs. Made me feel like a right fool. One good thing - it'll lower my Homeland Security Terror rating.
Afghanistan hit by a record number of bombs. Well, du-uh. Those wedding parties aren't going to blow themselves up, you know...
For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs — more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total — 3,572 bombs.
India's got a Nuclear Sub. Good luck with that, lads.
Shrinking sea ice is significantly increasing the rate at which icebergs scour the Antarctic seabed, a study released Thursday has found.
About 80 percent of Antarctic marine life is found on the seabed and these scours crush animals and plants living up to 500 meters below the surface.
Escalating global demand for fuel, food and wood fibre will destroy the world's forests, if efforts to address climate change and poverty fail to empower the billion-plus forest-dependent poor, according to two reports released by the U.S.-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an international coalition comprising the world's foremost organisations on forest governance and conservation.
Perhaps you don’t live in England or Wales, so you think this has nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. English libel law now applies to everyone on earth. Make any accusation, anywhere in the world, and if the subject can demonstrate that a single person in England or Wales has read it, you could be sued here for every penny, cent, rouble, rupee or renmimbi you possess. The internet and the global nature of publishing ensure that these mediaevel laws have become the most powerful extra-territorial legislation ever drafted.
If any of you made it to the bottom of today's page, congratulations!
In all of my years of observing the farce of “the free market” in the U.S., it has never appeared more absurd than it does right now. This news is remarkable, even to someone as short the U.S. Dollar as me. This is take-your-breath-away kind of news.
Are they using the term “unlimited” because that somehow sounds better than $5.3 trillion, or is there something else we don’t know about yet? U.S. taxpayers and dollar holders are essentially going to eat the real estate crisis.
The advice I used to give was: Get your ass, your family and your money out of the U.S. It’s probably too late for that. Dig in. Shelter in place. Brace for impact, etc.
I would not assume that the banking situation will continue to unwind in an orderly manner.
If the herd begins to smell trouble, it will move with astonishing speed and ferocity. Don’t get caught trying to move your money to the exit as millions of zombies attempt to do the same thing.
First, they came for the Gypsies...All Italians to be fingerprinted. Thus dies my fantasy about retiring to a Tuscan Villa. How to escape the fascist jackboot?
Italy may demand all its citizens be fingerprinted, a move aimed at defusing widespread criticism of government plans to force Roma people and their children to provide fingerprints as a way of tackling criminality.
That policy has been condemned by the European Parliament, by Romania, where many Roma come from, and by religious groups who have compared it to the tagging of Jews by Nazis and fascists in the 1930s.
A parliamentary committee agreed on Wednesday that from 2010 all identity cards, which Italians already have to carry, should include the fingerprints of the bearer. The measure still has to pass through parliament.
The average natural decay of a fleet because of ageing is around 6% a year. When yearly traffic is constant from one year to the next, 6 planes for every 100 go into retirement, and are replaced by newer planes. This means that if airlines cut the world's capacity by a mere 6% each year, old retiring planes will not need to be replaced, and no new aircraft will be sold at all. A 6% capacity reduction is equivalent to just changing the Tuesday flight of the daily San Francisco to Tokyo service from a 747-400 to a 777-300ER. A reduction the economic press or the general public would hardly notice can make Airbus and Boeing assembly lines grind to a halt. US carriers will reduce capacity by 10% to 15% this third quarter of 2008 alone.
Even JPMorgan Chase & Co., which has avoided the worst of the mortgage crisis, is expected to post a 60% drop in profits, according to Crain's New York Business.
As bruised and bloodied as these three banks are, more difficulties lie ahead.
“There is still tons of junk on banks' balance sheets, and no one knows just how bad it is,” said Graham Summers, chief executive of GPS Capital Research.
Mr. Summers has gained enormously this year from shorting the entire financial sector, and he remains bearish.
“After a roughly 20-year rally in financial stocks, we're in the midst of a major correction, and it isn't going to be over after just a few months,” he said.
More than $1 trillion (£500 billion) is held on credit cards in America. In the UK, debts of more than £50 billion have been run up on the plastic. Across the world, somewhere between $2 trillion and $3 trillion is owed on credit cards.
Up to now, the credit crisis has passed by without plastic going into meltdown. Statistics have shown steady levels of arrears, and suggested that many consumers have been successfully paying off part of their balances.
Now there are increasing signs that this last breakwater, shoring up the economies of the western world, is about to crack under ever-increasing strains.
Each member of the Eurozone prints its own banknotes, according to its economic weight, and the notes are numbered in such a way as to make their country of origin identifiable. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the UK's Telegraph newspaper, Germans are avoiding notes with serial numbers from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, instead demanding notes with German numbers that start with an 'X'.
Yet the issue of overpopulation and its equally thorny partner, overconsumption, remain near the centre of Ehrlich's study. Reiterating what environmental scientist James Lovelock stated recently, Ehrlich says: "We have grown in number to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease." No longer is it clear that technology, so often cited as means of maintaining growth, isn't ecologically counterproductive and fostering a population bubble that must sooner or later burst.
The charm and the curse of the population debate is that one must inevitably return to the subject of fruit flies. When a female finds a pile of rotting bananas, she lays her eggs and the population explodes. When the bananas are used up, the population crashes. Some females find another pile of fruit, and the process starts over. "Our problem is we only have one pile of bananas," Ehrlich says.
I looked down at the loaf of bread and realized it is about two thirds the size it was last month. Then it clicked: All kinds of edible goods are shrinking in China these days. The rice crackers I like to nibble on at the office are in the same sized package as always, but the crackers themselves have shrunk dramatically.
Annual inflation officially ran at 8.5 percent in April and 7.7 percent in May, and the government is doing all it can to rein it in. If I remember correctly, Premier Wen Jiabao said in March the government would pull inflation down to 4 or 4.5 percent for the year.
So the pressure is on to keep prices steady. That means most Beijing residents who go out to eat much have noticed things like shrinking portions at restaurants. Soups are more watery. And at the grocery store, there are no ads for “Bigger! Better! Improved!” Rather, goods are getting smaller.
Astounding, isn’t it? While Ms. Xiong wouldn’t say so, it’s clear that a lot of additional tourists aren’t going to show up. Some appear to have difficulty in getting visas. One German reporter said at the news conference that some Germans are returning their Olympics tickets because they can’t get visas to travel to China.
Security may also be a concern for some tourists. Another factor may be high prices at hotels. Five-star hotels still have plenty of rooms available but they are going for $500-$800 a night.
Hm. Perchance they're too scared of the fifty thousand anti-terrorist stormtroopers armed with FLAMETHROWERS?
According to Brooks, Obama said that “in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush administration”, doing more, to take one specific example, to arm the Lebanese military. (This schedules a bloodbath in Lebanon in Year One or Two of the Obama administration.) Obama’s bottom line to Brooks was straight-up Caesarism: “The [U.S.] generals are ight-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”
Let our prayers be for incompetent emperors who talk tough but screw up.
...don't be fooled, Obama could turn out to be worse than McCain, much worse. No one doubts that he is brighter and more charismatic than the irritating senator from Arizona. And no one underestimates his Pied Piper ability to galvanize crowds and stir up national pride. But what good is that? Obama works for the same group of venal plutocrats as Bush; a fact that was made painfully clear just last week when he voted to approve the new FISA bill that allows the president to continue spying on American citizens with impunity. Obama is a constitutional scholar; he understood what he was voting for. He was sending a message to his supporters that they don't really matter; that what really counts is the small gaggle of powerful corporatists who run the country and believe the president is above the law. That's what his vote really meant.
So, why vote for him? We don't need a glamor boy to trash the Bill of Rights. Any old autocrat will do. Just pick a name from the "resident scholar" list at the American Enterprise Institute. That ought to do it.
And we don't need another paper-mache president who tries to conceal America's war crimes behind stuffy-sounding pronouncements about the "Islamofacism" and other terrorist mumbo-jumbo. What we need is someone with enough guts and moral fiber to shake up the political establishment, put an end to the wars and covert operations, and clean up Wall Street...
...what the world really needs is a five or ten year break from the United States; a little breather so people can unwind and take it easy for a while without worrying that their wedding party will be vaporized in blast of napalm or that their brother-in-law will be dragged off to some CIA hellhole where his eyes are gouged out and his fingernails ripped off. That's what the world really needs, a temporary pause in the imperial violence. But there won't be any sabbatical under Field-Marshall Obama; no way. As journalist Bill Van Auken points out in his article on the World Socialist web site, Obama may turn out to be the point-man for reinstating the draft:
There's talk about a State Funeral for Maggie Thatcher, in the event of her demise. Piffle and tosh!
BY GOD'S THROBBING SCROTA, THERE'LL BE NO STATE FUNERAL FOR THIS WITCH!
Go hither, dear reader, and vote Maggie down. Why not a compromise - we throw a bucket of water over her head and drop the melting carcass down an abandoned mineshaft in Northern England. All this to the sound of a brass band - Ooomp pah pah Ooomp pah pah. Then to the pub for a pint and chip butties. Yar, that's a plan.
This is great stuff. Peak Oil guru Matt Simmons is interviewed on CNBC, by a panel of smirking cretins. As the interview progresses, Matt (a former adviser to Bush) becomes increasingly doomerish, finally saying that we could run out of food in a week, if things get really bad. Watch the expressions on the faces of the hosts. No Red Pill for these guys...they'll need it as a suppository.
Pay attention to the guy called "Joe" - a clueless specimen who can't talk about events any further out than next week. Funny stuff. This and more at The Oil Drum.
President Bush said Tuesday he is taking action to help people with falling home prices and high gas prices.
Bush highlighted plans to stabilize the mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and lift the ban on offshore oil drilling as two steps his administration is taking to address some of the nation's economic ills.
'It's been a difficult time for American families," Bush said at a press conference. "We must ensure we can continue providing credit during this time of stress."
You never let up, do ya Dubya? A moron to the bitter end of your ruinous reign. Hurry up and destroy America - you've only got another six months. Chop chop.
I'm still fuming about Turkey. You scumbags are on my shit-list, big time. Big fucking mistake, my friends. BIG mistake.
Sunday was a shitty day. First, the site got hacked by trumped up script-kiddies in Turkey. Fuck you Turkey. Have I said that already? THEN, Indymac bank goes tits up with 4K of my cash in its belly. Fuck you, financial overlords in New York and Washington. Ho ho. Funny right, given that I've been warning you guys about bank failures for - what - SIX OR TWELVE MONTHS NOW? Anyhow, I've got funds all over the place, which decreases overall risk, while paradoxically increasing the risk of losing something somewhere.
As I typed this, I heard an explosion behind me; some idiot brat with a BB gun shot at my window, cracking it - for a moment I thought my laptop's hard-drive had exploded. NOT a pleasant experience. If I find the little shitstain, he'll see how he likes having his "toy" rammed down his throat.
"Perhaps the new bubble could have something to do with watching movies on cell phones," said investment banker Greg Carlisle of the New York firm Carlisle, Shaloe & Graves. "Or, say, medicine, or shipping. Or clouds. The manner of bubble isn't important—just as long as it creates a hugely overvalued market based on nothing more than whimsical fantasy and saddled with the potential for a long-term accrual of debts that will never be paid back, thereby unleashing a ripple effect that will take nearly a decade to correct."
The site was hacked by someone from Turkey last night. Seems they "only" defaced the main page and messed up the forum (that's how they got in - shitty SMF security). It's an organised group. I'm not the only target. Anyhow, no forum for a while, and I've blocked the entire country of Turkey with the .htaccess file. So if you're in Turkey and somehow managing to read this - tough. No choice in the matter.
If I resurrect the forum, I'll have to do it on another server. I can't have the main site being compromised like this. I don't know how many of the files here were available to them. They could have downloaded everything, the pups. Not that there's anything worth stealing - I just don't like the idea that they may have installed malware somewhere on the site. I'll be systematically deleting folders and reuploading them just to be on the safe side.
Thanks guys; a day in which I could have worked on the movie will be spent cleaning up your shit. You don't want a real job? I totally understand. Please don't fuck around with mine. I don't want to take a plane to Ankara to hand out an ass-paddling.
I don't know if the passwords on the forum were compromised. If you use your forum password for email or other things, (silly if you do) then you should change it NOW, just to be on the safe side.
I backed up the forum a month ago, so it'll be easy to restore it - like I said, only when I get it on its own server, off this one.
