Thanks to Kevin at cryptogon.com for alerting me to this amazing BBC kids' game - a really beautiful piece of work:
To play the game, click the image above, and follow the link at the bottom of the screen called "Questionaut". It's a series of Rube Goldberg like environments, where you must click on various objects to discover the question master. The art direction is superb, and the audio is an ambient masterpiece.
The game reminded me (again) of the British kids shows from my childhood - most made in the 60s and 70s. Nothing today comes close - and this not nostalgia speaking. In the 80s, childrens' TV became a vehicle for shallow product placement - turning infants into consumers from the cradle. I believe that this is one of many factors in the degradation of our culture, as we chase the feces-stained dollar down the U-bend.
Compare the following clips (mostly from the 60s and 70s) to what followed in the 1980s - "He Man", "Transformers", and the grisly plethora of vacuous Saturday morning abominations, and you'll get the idea. The creators of the earlier shows put a little piece of their souls into their work. The marketeers who created what was to follow didn't have souls to begin with...and the results speak for themselves.
Here's the magic:
Clangers: The Intruder.
The Clangers are peaceful aliens who are rudely interrupted by a visiting American space-probe. The opening is reminiscent of Michael Powell's classic "A Matter of Life and Death (aka "Stairway to Heaven (US)". The last minute has a remarkable message about the desirability of visiting Earth.
Camberwick Green (1966).
Camberwick Green - a fixture in British children's TV, and a yardstick for quality. Stop motion animation (as most was at the time), it was brilliantly and affectionately parodied in the recent hit TV detective series "Life on Mars".
Bagpuss (1974). "Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old saggy cloth cat - baggy, and a bit loose at the seams.
But Emily loved him."
Sniff, sniff. Goddamit...I'm 38, and I'm tearing up. WTF?
The Magic Roundabout.
I'm sure this cartoon was a gateway for many British and Irish kids into the wonderful world of mind-altering drugs.
The show was originally made in France, but was completely re-written and re-dubbed for the English audience.
Here it's brilliantly parodied by Bill Bailey.
The Wombles.
A group of furry underground gleaners who subsist by living on the "trash" thrown away by wasteful humans.
Role-models for today's dumpster divers!
Mister Benn.
An apparently dull businessman visits a magic costume shop - where a mildly sinister assistant helps him change into a costume. Each time Mr. Benn changes his clothes, he is transformed into the character whose clothes he is wearing...
Morale: Just because you'll be an accountant, doesn't mean you have to be an accountant...
Tales of the Riverbank.
As a very small child, this show had a strangely relaxing effect on me. That slowly flowing water, or the animals, or some combination thereof was always a calming experience.
There will be LEGO. "Jordan Schwartz’s latest creation is the oil tower from the movie There will be Blood. The construction of the structure is fascinating when considering how all the angles came together nicely in the final product. Way to strike it rich Jordan!"
I drink your milkshake! (Sorry).
The image above shows the solar energy currently fallin on the earth, compared with all wind energy (a product of that solar energy) and total current energy use. This is not to say that we could continue to grow the zombie-culture on solar power ad infinitum (as we have a finite amount of fresh water,soil and air), but it does suggest that our problems may have more to do with human stupidity, greed and evil than anything else.
Daniel Quinn argues in his book "Ishmael" that civilisation is inherently flawed - built as it is on the drawing down of finite resources, and will collapse given enough time. I think about this a lot, though I haven't come to a final conclusion. Every time I read news stories which document the titanic stupidity of humans, I come a little closer to agreeing with him.
Let the doom begin!
The place where you spend one-third of your life is chock-full of synthetic materials, some potentially toxic. Since the mid- to late '60s, most mattresses have been made of polyurethane foam, a petroleum-based material that emits volatile organic compounds that can cause respiratory problems and skin irritation. Formaldehyde, which is used to make one of the adhesives that hold mattresses together, has been linked to asthma, allergies, and lung, nose, and throat cancers. And then there are cotton pesticides and flame-retardant chemicals, which can cause cancer and nervous-system disorders. In 2005, Walter Bader, owner of the "green mattress" company Lifekind and author of the book Toxic Bedrooms, sent several mattresses to an Atlanta-based lab. A memory-foam model was found to emit 61 chemicals, including the carcinogens benzene and naphthalene.
Teflon, it turns out, gets its nonstick properties from a toxic, nearly indestructible chemical called pfoa, or perfluorooctanoic acid. Used in thousands of products from cookware to kids' pajamas to takeout coffee cups, pfoa is a likely human carcinogen, according to a science panel commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency. It shows up in dolphins off the Florida coast and polar bears in the Arctic; it is present, according to a range of studies, in the bloodstream of almost every American—and even in newborns (where it may be associated with decreased birth weight and head circumference). The nonprofit watchdog organization Environmental Working Group (ewg) calls pfoa and its close chemical relatives "the most persistent synthetic chemicals known to man." And although DuPont, the nation's sole Teflon manufacturer, likes to chirp that its product makes "cleanup a breeze," it is now becoming apparent that cleansing ourselves of pfoa is nearly impossible...
...Nonstick pots and pans account for 70 percent of all cookware sold. "Amazingly enough, all the publicity has had no impact on sales," says Hugh Rushing, executive vice president of the Cookware Manufacturers' Association. "People read so much about the supposed dangers in the environment that they get a tin ear about it"
I've been wondering just how much of the stories about Iran are total psy-op bullshit. 90%? 99%? 100%? For every one that says "The End is Nigh" there's another about negotiations. Take your pick:
The Saudi Shura council will secretly discuss national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors, media reports said Saturday.
The Saudi-based King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology has prepared a proposal that encapsulates the probabilities of leaking nuclear and radiation hazards in case of any unexpected nuclear attacks in Iran, the Okaz Saudi newspaper said.
Little by little, millions of Americans surrendered equity in their homes in recent years. Lulled by good times, they borrowed — sometimes heavily — against the roofs over their heads.
Now the bill is coming due. As the housing market spirals downward, home equity loans, which turn home sweet home into cash sweet cash, are becoming the next flash point in the mortgage crisis.
Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans — and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.
To get it, many lenders are taking the extraordinary step of preventing some people from selling their homes or refinancing their mortgages unless they pay off all or part of their home equity loans first. In the past, when home prices were not falling, lenders did not resort to these measures.
Declines in US house prices are continuing to accelerate, according to surveys that signal there will be no quick end to the credit crisis.
The price of the average home was 11 per cent lower than a year ago, the S&P Case-Shiller index showed yesterday, as repossessed homes flood the market – and economists predict that the price adjustment may belittle more than half over.
The Case-Shiller index has become one of the most widely followed measures of the US economy because American homes are the collateral that supports hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities and other credit derivatives.
The latest figures cover house prices in 20 metropolitan areas in January, and show that price declines have spread far beyond the once-hot speculative property markets in Florida and the South-west and crumbling industrial towns. Now, Charlotte, North Carolina, is the sole region showing year-on-year gains.
The year-on-year decline of 10.7 per cent in the average house price is worse than anything seen in the last downturn in the early Nineties. Prices fell 2.4 per cent in just one month.
"It does not look like early 2008 is marking any turnaround in the housing market,," said David Blitzer, S&P index committee chairman. "Home prices continue to fall, decelerate and reach record lows across the nation. No markets seem to be immune from the housing crisis."
Don't waste your vote by voting. That's their way of tricking you into thinking you've "done your bit." Abstain, and give them the finger.
England's long decline continues: Woman kicked to death for dressing as a goth.
I've had a few conversations about this scenario. I never cease to be amazed at the passiveness of the next of kin. They cry to a hack from the newspaper about the thugs and their equally guilty parents, but that's the extent of their action. You'd think that sooner or later, one of the victims would rise up and throw a Molotov cocktail through the windows of these savages. That's what happnens in other cultures, why not ours? Are people so beaten down and scared of "Justice" that they're unprepared to enforce NATURAL LAW?
The worst thing that happened to decent people in the 20th century was the doctrine of passivism...emphasis on PASSIVE. The story of Gandhi would have been very different if he'd tried his shtick in 1840, instead on 1940 (when the Empire was broken by two world wars). Ditto with MLK - teach the lower orders to disobey without actually doing anything. Today, "dissent" is no more than totem gestures - silly parades with papier mache effigies, mindless slogans and little else.
Just as "conservatives" don't sacrifice by joining the army (leaving that chore to the poverty stricken), the "liberals" don't do anything that constitutes real risk taking, or curtailing their equally high standard of living.
I'm not saying that we should start blowing stuff up - what I am saying is that people should know that force will be met with FORCE - equal to or greater than theirs. Taser me? I'll burn your fucking house down. Kill my girlfriend? They'll fish your body from a dump, and they'll be lucky to identify your stinking corpse.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a Molotov cocktail to mix.
The Midway Islands are home to some of the world's most valuable and endangered species and they all are at risk from choking, starving or drowning in the plastic drifting in the ocean.
Nearly two million Laysan albatrosses live here and researchers have come to the staggering conclusion that every single one contains some quantity of plastic.
About one-third of all albatross chicks die on Midway, many as the result of being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.
I watched as the deputy manager of the wildlife refuge here, Matt Brown, opened the corpse of one albatross and found inside it the handle of a toothbrush, a bottle top and a piece of fishing net.
“People aren’t going out to eat as much,” I say. “And when they do I think they’re skimping on the tip.”
“You think so?” the owner asks. “My stats say sales are down but the tip percentage is holding.”
“The regulars are still good,” I reply. “But the once a month types? I think they’re holding back five or six percent on the gratuity.”
“I’ll keep on eye on the numbers,” the owner says. “Maybe you’re right.”
“We’ll see.”
To cap off a miserable night, a romantically inclined couple decides to come ten minutes before closing and stay two hours. They tip for shit. I get home at 1:30 AM. I only made $120 for on Saturday night. That sucks.
The next morning I put $40 worth of gas in my gar and drive over to the grocery store. I buy only staples, no luxuries. When the girl at the register tallies up my purchases I get my weekly dose of sticker shock. $1 for two lemons? $4.35 for a half pound of domestic Swiss? Thank God I don’t have to buy Pampers.
...my shopping list is as follows:
4 bunches of bananas
2 bags of pears
3 bags of precut lettuce
2 bags of baby carrots
1 bag of celery
21 containers of low fat/low sugar yogurt
½ gallon of skim milk
For the record, I have never made it through the check-out lane without someone commenting on my purchases. Typically, I’ll be standing in line, minding my own business, when some fat sow with a shopping cart full of pizza rolls says something smug like, “Buy enough yogurt? *snicker, snicker*”
This wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t hear fat people constantly whining and crying about feeling ‘quietly judged’ by the contents of their shopping carts. Trust me, when you’re pushing around a cart full of TV dinners and tater tots, no one really thinks anything of it because that’s what they’re buying too. But God forbid, you buy a couple of bags of lettuce. Then you’re a freak of nature.
There you have it: continuing high energy and food costs, contracting credit, stagnant wages and increasing property debt. Highly leveraged or poor American consumers—this is just about everybody who isn't among the richer rich—are about to get nailed. The day of debt reckoning has arrived as the U.S. receives a long overdue margin call (Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2008).
Consumer spending makes up about 70% of GDP. The money squeeze is a recipe for disaster. Household finance will be getting more unmanageable for Americans, who have been living the high life made possible by easy credit following from rising house prices. The only silver linings are that American exports are up and we're getting more foreign tourists because of the shrinking value of the dollar.
On the oil front, it appears that reduced demand in a cash-strapped American economy is unlikely to lower oil prices much as the recession unfolds, but all bets are off—no one knows how much demand will be affected yet. If China and the other emerging economies truly are "decoupled' from American consumption trends, it won't matter much if U.S. demand falls off significantly in any case.
The Chinese will be partying at the Beijing Olympics while Americans be scrambling around trying pay their mortgages and make ends meet at the fuel pump. Kind of symbolic, don't you think? Here's an idea—why don't we build some light rail systems?
What is happening is that the earth is finite, and we are starting to reach some of its limitations. At this point, most of the "easy to extract" oil has already been removed. There is still oil in the ground, but what remains is becoming more and more difficult to remove.
When we try to find alternatives, we encounter limitations of other types. In some situations, natural gas might be a substitute, but in North America it is also in relatively short supply. Coal is in better supply, but it has serious climate change issues.
Biofuels might be a substitute, but today's biofuels use huge amounts of agricultural land and fresh water, and both of these are in limited supply. Biofuels as they are currently produced compete with other uses for land and water, and because of this, drive up the price of food.
Even the minerals that we might use in batteries, and the uranium we might use in nuclear reactors, are becoming increasingly difficult to extract. We have already removed most of the high quality ores of many minerals. What is left is ores of lower concentration. These ores can still be extracted, but it takes more energy resources to process this ore. The energy resources used for processing the ore are often oil and natural gas, and they themselves are in increasingly short supply.
This whole article should be read. More:
If we look ahead 20 or 30 years, it seems likely that the world will be very much poorer. Personal autos may be rare. Electricity may be unreliable. It is likely that we will have much less in the way of goods and services than we have today. A growing population may add to our problems. If the smaller supply of goods and services is divided among more people, living standards are likely to be much lower than they are today.
If the world is much poorer, I would expect social security and Medicare to be drastically scaled back or even eliminated. There will be so little goods and services in total that society cannot afford to set aside much for the disabled and elderly.
I expect that in 20 or 30 years, many business and governments will have failed. Bonds of these businesses and governments will have little value. Stocks of companies that remain in business will continue to have value, but this value may not be high compared to the cost of available goods. Inflation rates are likely to be high, reflecting the lack of goods and services for people to actually buy if they do have money.
Anyone still reading? Here's another doomer: The Red Menace. (also via latoc):
According to the Bank for International Settlement in Basel, the global derivatives market is worth some $516 trillion - 10 times the value of all the world's stock markets put together. And much of it is based on very little but leveraged optimism; pieces of paper theoretically based on the price of an empty house in Cleveland, Ohio.
Billions have been magicked out of nothing by this financial alchemy, but in the end, there is no way of turning dross into gold, and the reckoning had to come. And someone had to pay - which is where we, the people, come in.
As happened in the 1930s, the whole system is collapsing. We are faced with the choice of colossal bank defaults or hyper inflation: saving the banks or saving our savings. The central bankers decided that they would rather save the banks. So our governments are using public money to bolster banking balance sheets and allowing inflation to rip so that the banks' losses will be devalued, along with the pound in your pocket.
The only salmon farm in Northern Ireland has been thrown into crisis following a devastating jellyfish attack that destroyed more than 100,000 fish.
Record-breaking 32ft shark caught
Billions of small mauve stingers flooded the cages where the fish were kept about a mile into the Irish Sea, off the Co Antrim coast, causing more than £1 million of damage and leaving the future of the company in doubt. Mauve stinger routinely terrorise bathers in the Mediterranean, but are rarely seen in cooler waters
John Russell, the managing director of Northern Salmon Co. Ltd., said last night: "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about, it, absolutely nothing."
Last week's attack lasted nearly seven hours, with the small jellyfish stinging and shocking salmon held in an area covering 10 square miles and 35 feet deep.
Bisphenol-A is the basic component of hard plastics that include baby bottles, linings of food cans, sealants for jars and bottles, and other well-known products that modern people have become dependent on. After several years of news stories about scientific studies and a few legislative attempts to ban or regulate bisphenol-A and other poisonous plastics, a scandal has just emerged involving U.S. government favoritism for corporate perpetrators.
Plastics such as bisphenol-A cause breast cancer, testicular cancer, diabetes, obesity, and birth defects -- although the evidence is often argued to apply so far only to laboratory animals. Other common plastics posing great danger include phthalates (softeners) and PVC (for piping, flooring, containers, etc.).
Fallon's recent resignation may have seemed abrupt to many, but it was a well-orchestrated move. His interview in Esquire depicted him as highly critical of the Bush administration's policy on Iran; the magazine described him as the only thing standing between the administration and their newest war plan. Further, his resignation and "Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's handling of [it] is the greatest and most public break in the Bush team's handling of preparations for war against Iran that we are ever likely to see," wrote respected commentators and former CIA analysts Bill and Kathy Christison on 12 March. "Gates has in fact publicly associated himself with the resignation by saying it was the right thing for Fallon to do, and Gates said he had accepted the resignation without telling Bush first."
Fallon's resignation represents a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, it's an indication of the continued fading enthusiasm for the militant culture espoused by the neoconservatives. On the other, it's an ominous sign of the Bush administration's probable intentions during the last year of the president's term. Sixty-three-year-old Admiral Fallon would not have embarked on such a momentous decision after decades of service were it not for the fact that he knew a war was looming, and -- having considered the historic implications for such a war -- chose not to pull the trigger.
Orwell's engineers continue to threaten us with face recognition. Pray they fail.
All in all, one can say that this recession, if it doesn’t turn into a depression, will be severe and will last at least two to four years. Now you must realise that I am talking about the effects of the recession and not technical recession...
...Technically a recession may last one year, but the effect of that recession on families may last a decade. Some lose their homes, some their jobs, some families will break up and so on and so forth. The human misery of technical recession lasts much longer than the recession itself. Anyway, if the price of houses is dropped by 40 percent in two years, how many years of growth will it take to retake that 40 percent? Usually much longer than people think.
can gold and other commodities' high prices hold? A reader of The Daily Reckoning suggests gold may take a detour back to $400 or lower simply because in the deflation to come, which will be brought on by an escalation of the current liquidity crisis, gold will be sold off to pay for margin calls. Then, if gold is re-valued later as the standard against which all currencies will be measured, it might fall under international price controls, so that suggests some not inconsiderable risk in the flight to gold. Other metals, and the commodities you eat, are less susceptible, because they are getting scarcer by the day, even as world population continues to rise. There may be a bit of a hard asset glut in the short term, however.
Investment manager BlackRock expects tight gold supply and a gradual rising trend in the price which could lift the metal to new highs above the record $1,030 per ounce hit last week.
"We expect a gradually rising trend in the gold price and if that happens we will get to a new high. We are expecting that positive trend to continue, with volatility over the short term," said fund manager Evy Hambro, who runs BlackRock's $17 billion World Mining Fund and co-manages the $8.9-billion World Gold Fund.
Gold traded at $931.60 an ounce on Tuesday, well off a high of $1,030.80 hit on March 17.
"We think the replacement cost of gold today is much higher than where the market is right now," Hambro said, adding that even if the price reached the desired level it would have to be sustained for gold companies to invest.
"Going out to eat, going to the movies, you can't do stuff like that," says Carter, filling up his Firebird at a BP station in Camden, a quiet southern town 80 miles southwest of Montgomery. "You're working for gas now." ...
...For people like Carrie Frye, 33, a mother who commutes 70 miles each day, the choice is about much more than simply cutting back on entertainment.
Frye works at a factory in Selma, Ala., making lawn chair cushions. If she makes her production quota, she might bring in $329 a week. If not, it's $220. Either way, she says the $60 a week she now spends in gas comes out of money for food, the doctor, and buying clothes for her kids.
"I just hope they don't grow that fast," she says, filling her tank of her Jeep Cherokee at the Camden BP.
The one ounce Gold Eagles made by the US Mint have a face value of $50, although the "real" value of the coins varies depending on the spot price of gold. This creates a conundrum: the US GOVERNMENT itself values the coins as $50. So, what happens if you're paid in one gold eagle, instead of cash? What's your income? $50, or $900? Oh dear, the powers that be have made a boo-boo...
If I received a $50 American Gold Eagle (legal tender) as a wage, would I need to claim $50 on my tax return or the market value? Today, the $50 American Gold Eagle was selling for approximately $980.00.
The IRS wrote: You will only be reporting your wages of $50. The American Gold Eagle is now your capital asset (collectible), and any gain or loss on the coin will not be reported as income or loss until you dispose of the coin... snip
...As for the capital gain tax exposure, if the taxpayer makes arrangements to have a portion or all of his or her pay made in American Gold Eagles and holds the coins as long-term savings, for all practical and legal purposes, the taxpayer can avoid paying any tax on that portion of his or her wages.
All the financial rumblings to date pale before the big one: DERIVATIVES:
This weekend’s meeting of four heads of central banks communicates the size of the OTC derivative disaster. It is a system that is broken. A bailout will require the printing of trillions of dollars worth of monetary stimulation making Bernanke’s helicopter drop look like chump change.
The dollar number of pending derivative bankruptcies is the size of the mountain of garbage paper issued by just those who are to be bailed out. That number is greater than the total world economies.
There simply isn’t enough money in the world for central banks to buy up the mountain of worthless paper sold by those who need bailouts; all of which made fortunes for their directors, officers and key people.
When an OTC derivative fails to perform, notional value becomes real value.
The notional value of all OTC derivatives exceeds $500 trillion.
Yes, master: Subliminal messages make us work harder. Expect lots more of this kind of crass manipulation as society swirls down the crapper. donate money to idleworm. I hate this form of mind control with a passion. buy stuff at idleworm's amazon links. Bastards.
By the way, Americans blame the familiar private oil companies for all the trouble with oil in their lives -- Exxon-Mobil, Shell, et al -- but they don't seem to know that oil nationalism is in the driver's seat now. The old private "majors" are only producing five percent of the world's oil. The rest is coming from the national companies -- Aramco, Petrobras, Pemex, et blah blah -- and the very operations of the oil markets are entering a phase of radical instability as they move away from auctioning their stuff on the futures markets and start making long-term favored customer contracts instead.
The bottom line is that high prices for oil is hardly the only thing America has to worry about. Pretty soon the US will have to worry about getting the oil at any price -- meaning, we're in for shortages and supply disruptions sooner rather than later.
I've tried to explain that to people - only to get the 100 mile zombie stare. People have this need to believe that "the oil companies are gouging us".
You may have noticed the dozens of "Vote McCain" ads being fed to the site from google-ads. No problem. I endorsed Bush in 2004 for the same reasons that I now endorse John "Oops I crashed my fifth jet" McCain: because he's the Manchurian candidate.
These little girls are the creepiest things you'll ever see. Poor little tykes. After their "parents" are done with them, Bratz and Disney's "Princess" toys will finish off what humanity remains. Then, they can enter adulthood, primed for a life of "Sex and the City" wannebedom...soulless vamps, primed to drain witless men of their life essence, reducing them to a shuddering cuckolded wreck with an empty bank account.
In the Vietnam War, John McCain was the very worst kind of murderer, spoiled son of a powerful daddy (sounding familiar?) flying modern jets over primitive, defenseless Vietnam, and dropping bombs on women and children from the safety of his little cushioned seat. Probably comes back to the airdeck, gives high fives and "hoo-ah!"s to his fascist little friends, they all laugh, drink their shitty Coors beer,listen to their country music, not even caring about the suffering they cause to poor peasant families.
One day, some fucking Vietnamese guy shot "hero" John McCain down! How the fuck did a Vietnamese guy, primitive, backwards, in pajamas, shoot down a modern A-4 jet? He used a fucking slingshot? Bow and arrow? What it proves is John McCain was a shitty pilot, a loser, that is all. On October 26, 1967, "war hero" McCain’s A-4 given a nice Russian surprise over Hanoi -- he was hit by Russian surface-to-air missile (score: Russia 1, McCain 0). McCain’s jet fell into a lake called Truc Bach Lake on the outskirts of Hanoi.
McCain almost drowned in that lake. But a Vietnamese man, 50-year-old Mai Van On, ran out of his air raid shelter, took a bamboo pole, swam out to McCain, and pulled American "war hero" from the plane wreckage. Vietnamese people were pissed off, they gathered around McCain in a mob and tried to kill him, understandably. This is a guy who just tried to kill them! But Mai Van On saved John McCain from the mob too. This old Vietnamese guy is the real "war hero" because he took a real dangerous risk! McCain, "war loser," was rescued by his enemy who he tried to kill! That is the most pathetic war story I, a Russian, ever heard in my life.
What happened to the country that is the "world's only superpower"? In just a couple of years you went from "world's policemen" to "world's clowns" to your new role as "world's train station whores." For guys like me, or French people like Gilles, or just about anybody on this planet who hates your dumbfuck guts, you give us free comedy entertainment every day.
Makes me wonder - remember when Bush said that he'd get the price of oil to fall by "Jaw-boning" with the Saudis. Oh - my - God.
Cockburn: A war based on lies, lies, lies. Shh...don't tell the American public. They still haven't figured that out yet...and I doubt they ever will, poor dears.
The most notorious lie of all was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But critics of the war may have focused too much on WMD and not enough on later distortions.
national corn crop were used to make ethanol, it would replace a mere 7 percent of U.S. oil consumption, far from making the United States independent of foreign oil.
Yeah, even I fell for that one. I was more trusting and innocent back then. That didn't stop me from being pessimistic about the war's final outcome though (some of us don't view the world through a rose-tinted brain. Here's the golden oldie (or mouldy oldie): The Gulf War 'Game'":
Thanks to the many readers who found the site through that little game, and have continued to read my increasingly depressing prognostications. Hard to believe that it was five years ago already. Time flies when your having fun...
I'll say it again: the next time you hear some sociopath statesman in a suit call for war with country X, follow Dermot's simple advice:
1. Go to Google.
2. Type in the following: Country X oil energy natural gas
All will become clear...painfully clear.
This should be good for a laugh - Ireland's best selling toilet paper newspaper the "Irish Independent" ran some articles in the immediate aftermath of America's "victory" in Iraq, written by one Eilis O' Hanlon - an Anne Coulter wannabe with an accent and slightly smaller Adam's apple. Here, for your edification and amusement, is what passes for journalism in the Emerald Isle:
Vincent Browne, too, has had a bad war, although he was careful to attribute his dire predictions to the UN. "All this terrible violence, according to a UN agency, will place about 10 million Iraqi civilians at risk of hunger and disease and give rise to close to a million refugees. In addition, of course, to slaughtering thousands of them."
As we have seen, the refugee camps remain empty and the Iraqis look remarkably happy.
Hey, Eilis - here's an offer you can refuse: I WILL BUY YOU A PLANE TICKET TO IRAQ, IF YOU LIVE IN BAGHDAD OUTSIDE THE GREEN ZONE. That way, you can enjoy the fruits of liberation, just like a regular Iraqi woman. My email is dermot@idleworm.com. I am not joking about this - I will pay your ticket. Baghdad. Free trip.
...ask the Iraqis whether they want Saddam back, or would prefer to make a mess of things in their own time, and in their own way (which is what Aristotelian democracy means) and you will get your answer. Already there is hope for something better than a Shia state (although that would be objectively much better than Saddam's secular hell) on the horizon.
Same offer to the anonymous scribe of the rubbish above. I will pay for your plane ticket if you want to spend a MONTH living in Baghdad, like a regular Iraqi. That way you can enjoy your "Aristotelian Democracy" in the flesh. Weather's nice this time of year, I'm told.
Steve Bell's cartoon history of the Iraq War - from an English perspective:
20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, and that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption. If the entire national corn crop were used to make ethanol, it would replace a mere 7 percent of U.S. oil consumptIion, far from making the United States independent of foreign oil.
One-third of the foreclosed houses inspected so far in north Minneapolis are candidates for demolition, according to the agency trying to rehab the state's largest concentration of empty housing...
...many pose a range of problems, from neglect issues like rampant mold to functional obsolescence due to size or floor plan. Some simply cost too much to fix. One house the agency toured contained only 500 square feet of space -- less than a standard one-bedroom public housing high-rise apartment -- carved into four apartments...
...One reason...is that about two-thirds of the foreclosed homes were owned by investors rather than occupants.
we are ruled not by a government but by a class. Here the media are crucial. Unless you spend time outside of America, you may not realize to what extent the press is controlled. The press is largely free, yes, but it is also largely owned by a small number of corporations which, in turn, are run by people from the same pool from which are drawn high-level pols and their advisers. They are rich people who know each other and have the same interests. It is very nearly correct to say that these people are the government of the United States, and that the federal apparatus merely a useful theatrical manifestation.
Finally, though it may not be deliberate, the schools produce a pitiably ignorant population that can’t vote wisely. Just as trial lawyers don’t want intelligent jurors, as they are harder to manipulate, so political parties don’t want educated voters. The existence of a puzzled mass gawping at Oprah reduces elections to popularity contests modulated by the state of the economy. One party may win, yes, or the other. But a TV-besotted electorate doesn’t meddle in matters important to its rulers. It has never heard of them.
To disguise all of this, elections provide the excitement and intellectual content of a football game, without the importance. They allow a sense of Participation. In bars across the land, in high-school gymns become forums, people become heated about what they imagine to be decisions of great import: This candidate or that? It keeps them from feeling left out while denying them power.
From 2007: Survival Acres lives on freeze dried foods for a month. Matt Savinar sent me some sample of Mountain food's meals a couple of weeks ago. Not too bad - certainly edible. So far I've had scrambed eggs, and chicken & rice. (I haven't eaten chicken in a while, but I did sample the meat for research purposes). Quite amazing what can be done with food - the packets are practically dust when you open them - but once boiling water is added, they reconstitute into food. My dietary habits don't involve meat though, so I'm almost certainly fuxored WTSHTF.
For weeks South Africa has suffered rolling blackouts caused in part by a shortage of coal. Gripped by unusually bitter snowstorms, China recently banned coal exports for the next two months. And at Newcastle in Australia, the world’s largest coal export terminal in the world’s largest coal exporting country, the queue of bulk carriers waiting to load has been known to stretch almost to Sydney – 150km to the south.
Coal, so long the Cinderella of fossil fuels, is not just in demand but in desperately short supply. The world’s biggest producers and exporters are struggling, and the price of imports to Europe has doubled to almost $140 per tonne over the past year. “It’s a global crunch”, says John Howland, managing editor of McCloskey’s Coal Report.
The immediate reasons for the price spike are soaring demand, inadequate infrastructure and bad weather. But now there are also gnawing doubts that global coal production may within the next few decades face fundamental geological constraints, or “peak coal”.
So how do you keep the bugs away? Simple: bugs, like all animals, are attracted to certain smells. They like things that smell like food, and our blood reeks of food to them–especially if we eat high-grain, high-sugar diets. The key is to cover yourself in smells that bugs dislike, so they’ll stay away from you. Conveniently, these tend to be smells that humans love: mint scents, citrus scents, woody scents… the type of thing you can find chemicals imitating in scented candles. So bug juice not only keeps the bugs away–it also works as perfume! And since its base is olive oil, it makes your skin soft too.
One UK economist warned that the world is now close to a 1930s-like Great Depression, while New York traders said they had never experienced such fear. The Fed's emergency funding procedure was first used in the Depression and has rarely been used since.
A Goldman Sachs trader in New York said: "Everyone is in a total state of shock, aghast at what is happening. No one wants to talk, let alone deal; we're just standing by waiting. Everyone is nervous about what is going to emerge when trading starts tomorrow."
In the UK, Michael Taylor, a senior market strategist at Lombard, the economics consultancy, said on Friday night: "We have all been talking about a 1970s-style crisis but as each day goes by this looks more like the 1930s. No one has any clue as to where this is going to end; it's a self-feeding disaster."
Up to 80 per cent of all Asian and African wheat varieties are susceptible to the fungus, and major wheat-producing nations to Iran’s east – such as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – should be on high alert, FAO warned.
“The fungus is spreading rapidly and could seriously lower wheat production in countries at direct risk,” said Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division.
He urged the control of the rust’s spread to lower the risk to countries already impacted by high food prices.
Iran has said that it will bolster its research capacity to tackle the new fungus and develop wheat varieties that are rust-resistant.
Called Ug99, the disease first surfaced in Uganda and subsequently spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, with both countries experiencing serious crop yield losses due to a serious rust epidemic last year. Also in 2007, FAO confirmed that a more virulent strain was found in Yemen.
Experts have been trying to come up with an explanation for what happened to the salmon population. Some fishermen think that the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005 and too much water was drained or water was drained at the wrong times, according to the article. Oceanic changes could be a factor, as could predator fish that may have been successful due to a diversion dam. Pipes attached to pumping stations that divert water line the river and could be a factor.
I'm guessing that the salmon swam up Denial river.
The Irish were driven to America by debt, and they are leading the Western world in household debt today. The London Daily Telegraph reported on March 13, 2008 that household debt in Ireland has reached 190 percent of disposable income, the highest in the developed world; and that the Irish banking system is suffering such acute strains from the downturn in the housing market that it may have to nationalize its banks.1 The same may soon be happening in the United States, and for much the same reasons.
..."debt slavery" or "debt peonage" was not just an accidental development of history. It was a deliberately-planned alternative to the slave arrangement in which owners were responsible for the feeding and care of a dependent population, and it is still with us today. Although European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery. They preferred "the European plan": capital could exploit labor by controlling the money supply, while letting the laborers feed themselves.
Traversed more by cracks than cars, Taft Road just south of St. Johns is falling apart.
It has deteriorated so much that Clinton County officials are on the verge of letting nature have her way.
They would grind down what is left of Taft into bits of stone and leave it - gravel to gravel, dirt to dirt.
Other alternatives are too expensive, officials say. Those include spending $100,000 to repave the mile-long stretch or endlessly patching it with material that can cost even more on a per-ton basis.
Now, apparently, we'll also opt for a bail-out of all those who tried to become rich by getting something for nothing at both ends of the Ponzi scheme called the housing bubble -- the "little guys" who signed mortgage contracts they could never hope to pay off, and the Wall Street playerz who bundled these hopeless contracts into fraudulent securities (and their enablers in the ratings agencies, plus the hedge fund smoothies who tried to cash in by using recondite algorithms to dissolve the risk associated with imprudent lending.) The bail-out is likely to accomplish nothing except the more rapid bankruptcy of government at all levels and a second Great Depression at ground level (worse than the first one).
Video: Hummer H2 off-roading. This explains a lot. These things aren't about winning wars, or driving cross country - they're meant to intimidate civilians and pedestrians.
Losers, you're so fucked you do not even know what is coming! You think it's bad now, just because Bear Stearns has a cactus branch in your assholes? Ha! It's only a small taste, my friends. Get ready to sell your old clothes and trinkets outside of bus stations like our babushkas used to in the 1990s, because you are fucked now in a way you simply cannot imagine, you are fucked just like you fucked Russia 10 years ago!
The thought experiment for that goes like this. You have one giant pile of stuff, and one giant pile of money. Right now there is enough money so that one-dollar gets one pound of stuff. Now, if you double the amount of that money, then it takes two dollars to equal one pound of that stuff. Unless the pound of stuff doubles in size, you have just caused 100% price inflation. So, operations like just zapping a half a trillion or so into existence out of thin air means just a bigger pile of money going after the same amount of stuff. So that's what we have going on now. These are financial engineering acts of desperation to save a system by giving it more of what got it to this point in the first place... debt. So when regular people like me think about that, they think, that doesn't make any sense, and they lose confidence.
That's in the real world. On TV things are still good though. So if you don't like what you're reading here, then go turn on the TV. You'll feel better.
A great Electric Politics interview with Dr. H. Bruce Franklin about The Menhaden, the most important fish in the sea...and how humans are endangering it.
Happy St. Patrick's day. Don't drink too much, or you'll be sorreeeeee...
I've finally created an amazon link for UK visitors to shop through. So, if you go there through this link: amazon.co.uk and buy your doo-dads, I'll get some shiny new shillings.
I've also added a link to amazon.de for my many German readers. Again, if you follow that link and shop, I'll get some Euro & cents.
And now, time to wipe my arse with my dwindling collection of dollars. All hail Preznit Bush and his ongoing mission to destroy America from within. Which leads me to:
Only now, CNN tells people to get in on "gold rush". Nice one CNN; idleworm readers were being told that back when the metal was $470 an ounce. Note how the article still advises against physical possession, in favour of stocks - in spite of the fact that the recent run up saw physical gold increase in price, even as stocks decreased!
Farmers have known for centuries that soil doesn't necessarily contain all of the nutrients that plants need. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that manure spread on fields helped crop production immensely. Arab civilizations collected the written knowledge about farming. Somewhere along the line, farmers realized that ground up bones provided nutrients. By 1815, England was importing so many bones for bone meal that people on the Continent starting complaining:
"England is robbing all other countries of their fertility. Already in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipsic, and Waterloo, and of Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manorial equivalent of three million and a half of men...
...like a vampire she hangs from the neck of Europe."
Donner and Kucharik's findings suggest that if the U.S. were to meet its proposed ethanol production goals, nitrogen loading by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico would increase by 10-19 per cent.
To arrive at this figure, Donner and Kucharik combined the agricultural land use scenarios with models of terrestrial and aquatic nitrogen cycling.
"The nitrogen levels in the Mississippi will be more than twice the recommendation for the Gulf," says Donner. "It will overwhelm all the suggested mitigation options."
The results of the study call into question the assumption that enough land exists to fulfill current feed crop demand and expand corn and other crop production for ethanol.
If Codex gets its way, as it already has in the European Union and Australia, the following events will ultimately occur:
* Consumers will have available to them only 28 or so dietary supplements that are far too small in dosage to have any discernible impact on any human being. High potency nutrients will not be available either with or without a physician's prescription, since these life-sustaining molecules will be forbidden under any circumstances.
* All animals grown for human consumption will be mandated for treatment with antibiotics, growth enhancers, and hormones.
* All food available to the public will be irradiated, with the exception of locally grown food.
* Herbs will not be available unless they undergo multi-million dollar scientific trials similar to those used for drugs.
* All native seeds will be confiscated and the use of genetically modified (GMO) seeds will be mandated.
* The "acceptable" limits of toxins in the food supply will be increased, including the allowance of seven specific toxins that were previously banned by Stockholm Convention, a global treaty signed by 120 nations to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants.
36% of scientists at NASA are Indians: Govt survey. Assuming that those figures are accurate - if that doesn't illustrate the fall of US dominance, and the rise of India (and presumably, China), what does?
...as many as 12% scientists and 38% doctors in the US are Indians, and in NASA, 36% or almost 4 out of 10 scientists are Indians.
If that's not proof enough of Indian scientific and corporate prowess, digest this: 34% employees at Microsoft, 28% at IBM, 17% at Intel and 13% at Xerox are Indians.
And the House of Elders also heard some startling facts about a country that's still stuck with a Third World tag — 20% of gold in the world is used by Indians and nine out of 10 diamonds used in the world are made in India.
Unfortunately, we are behaving in ways that suggest we do not know there is a serious problem."
Here's a handy site for those of you wondering about the future of cooking (I know you're out there, freaks): Solar Cooking Plans. I've made the "Cookit" myself - quite easy, even for a Klutz like me.
The black areas represent the least productive areas of the ocean, which have increased 15% from 1998 to 2007. The warming of the surface of the ocean is thought to increase stratification within the water column, preventing the nutrients in the cool deep ocean from rising to the surface. Without the mixing, there is limited ability for life to take hold.
Total boss Christophe de Margerie warned that oil production may be nearing its peak. He now believes the world will never be able lift production from the current level of 85m barrels per day. One hundred is out of the question, he says, much less the 115m that so many optimists assume. The CEO of ConocoPhillips agrees with him. The oil companies duly announced their 2007 results, and masked in statistics combining oil and gas production was the alarming fact that all, bar Total, had suffered falling oil production. This is not what we expect of an oil-addicted world on course for 115m barrels a day.
The CEO of Hess was the next oil boss to blow a whistle, telling an oil industry conference in Houston that oil companies, oil-producing countries, and consumers need to act now. "Given the long lead times of at least 5-10 years from discovery to production," he said, "an oil crisis is coming and sooner than most people think. Unfortunately, we are behaving in ways that suggest we do not know there is a serious problem."
I was wondering why idleworm's traffic tends to stick at 6 to 10,000 visitors a day. Last night I met a friend who told me the answer: "It's just so depressing!"
I can't disagree - it is pretty grim. I try to find happy links to break up the doom (I found some funnies on Sunday's post, see below). However, you do yourself no favours by ignoring what's happening out there. We're one straw away from breaking the camel's back. Maybe the old girl will keep on hobbling - I don't know - I just don't feel like betting the farm on her. That said, here's your Monday Morning Medicine:
Americans shit and piss out all the drugs they consume to take them away from wretched American reality, then drink their drug-filled treated water, poorly treated because their government is too broke from wars and from payouts to oil oligarchs. Poor bastards. It is time America began to behave like a civilized country: to stop invading other nations, and to stop making incredibly shitty movies. But this is like asking a pigeon to behave like a tiger.
...we look to Bloomberg.com to read, "Derivative trading fell 21% to US$539 trillion in the fourth quarter, the biggest drop in at least 14 years, as the freeze in money markets reduced the need to hedge risks, the Bank for International Settlements said."
This is made plainly horrific when one notes that global GDP, the sum total of all the goods and services produced on the entire planet in an entire year, is about $50 trillion. So derivative trading dropped to "only" more than 10 times global GDP! We're freaking doomed!...
...Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis newsletter is one of the places you can go to see the utter calamity looming, as, "there are $45 trillion of credit default swaps out there. A default on a mere 10% would cause an economic disaster. Unfortunately, it's guaranteed to happen."
The FDIC has begun to increase staff at many of its regional offices to deal with the anticipated rash of bank failures in states hardest hit by the housing bust. California, Florida and parts of the southwest will definitely need the most attention. These states are undergoing a housing depression and many of the smaller banks which issued the mortgages and commercial real estate loans are bound to get hammered. They simply do not have the capital cushion to withstand the tsunami of defaults and foreclosures that are coming. Depositors should make sure that all their savings are covered under FDIC rules; no more than $100,000 per account. Money markets are not insured...
...With oil, gold and food prices soaring, the Fed has been roundly criticized for cutting rates and risking further erosion to the value of the dollar. (This morning the dollar fell to $1.53 on the euro!) But Bernanke is right; the real danger is deflation. We are at the beginning of a consumer-led recession; characterized by weakening demand, lack of personal savings, declining asset-values (particularly homes) and over-indebtedness. The Fed's increases to the money supply via low interest rates will not effect the dramatic economic slowdown that will be evident within the year. Trillions of dollars of derivatives, over-leveraged subprime assets and otherwise bad bets are all unwinding at the same time draining an ocean of virtual capital from the economy. If credit keeps getting destroyed at the present pace, the country will be in the grips of a depression-like slump by 2009...
...An article in the New York Times by Morgan Stanley's Asia chairman, Stephen Roach, states that the country is not in a cyclical downturn, but post-bubble recession. There is a big difference. The Fed's interest rate cuts and Bush's “Stimulus Plan” are unlikely to stop housing prices from continuing to fall nor will they miraculously fix the problems in the credit markets. The massive expansion of credit in the last 6 years has created a $45 trillion derivatives balloon that could implode or just partially unwind. No one really knows. And no one really knows how much damage it will cause to the global financial system. Stay tuned.
Owners have begun squatting in their own foreclosed homes. One man has been doing this since 2005 - nobody knows who owns the mortgage - so he's been living rent/mortgage free for all that time. I expect to see the MSM scumbags push the "walk away" idea to their readers ... to keep them from living rent free for two years.
There is no clean way to sell the home that would guarantee "clean title" hence a foreclosure is the only means to separate the property from the dead-beat speculator/squattor. Banks do not want to spend the $50,000 required to take a home through a foreclosure and clear the title — only to put the house back on the market for a deeper loss afterwards. Most likely, they have not revealed these owner occupied defaults to their shareholders, thanks to the sheer numbers of non-performing loans on their balance sheets, and the daunting task of foreclosing on all of them. This is the ultimate seizure and full stop of the market whereby everyone is standing in a stalemate. As one broker said to me, "these bums sitting in $3,000,000 homes overlooking the water are likely to be left alone by the banks for 2 years before the banks even get serious about foreclosure." So here is the difference between “walking away,” these folks are doing anything but walking away, they are sitting on lounge chairs sipping martinis living cost free! (not to mention that they have ceased paying property taxes and insurance). I can only imagine what this market will look like in the coming years . . .”
Haha! Gadget's failure could triple cost of 2010 census. The cost of dimishing returns is a bitch, no? BTW, all good citizens should f*ck with the social engineers by describing their ethnicity as "other".
The hand-held mobile computers that are supposed to replace the pens and paper long used by census takers aren't working properly, and delays could send the cost from $600 million to as much as $2 billion.
Hillary thinks Obama isn't good enough to be President...but she'll still have him as her Vice President. The Clintons, ladies and gentlemen. Give them a big hand.
...the world’s looming energy crisis could be even more severe than anyone imagines. In the International Energy Agency’s latest long-term forecast, to satisfy economic growth global coal consumption needs to rise 60% by 2030, and coal-fired electricity generating capacity has to double. But if Zittel and Rutledge are right, there is little chance of those predictions being fulfilled. And as global oil production goes into terminal decline within the next decade or so, there is even less chance that synthetic coal-to-liquids fuels can make up the crude deficit.
But the good news is that the imperatives of climate change and peak oil are identical. “In the long run economies that rely on depletable resources are doomed to fail”, says Dr Zittel, “the coal peak makes it even more urgent to switch to renewable energy without delay”.
NOTE: If the only purpose of these energy technologies is to allow the continuation of a mindless growth based consumer dystopia, then we're still screwed.
Will a second child contribute to global warming? Well, duh, yeah. But if you don't have that kid, will it really make a difference? No. As long as we've got a financial system built on growth, the stuff is going to get used. The question to ask is this: "If I have a second child, will that child curse me for bringing it into a Hell-Planet in which humans face a mass die-off?" This about THAT, Mister Green.
FOOD:
Thanks China, for adding lead to tea. (from 2007):
William Hubbard, a former deputy commissioner of the FDA, told NPR about one Chinese factory that manufactures herbal tea.
"To speed up the drying process, they would lay the tea leaves out on a huge warehouse floor and drive trucks over them so that the exhaust would more rapidly dry the leaves out. And the problem there is that the Chinese use leaded gasoline, so they were essentially spewing the lead over all these leaves," said Hubbard.
...rising food prices in Afghanistan are creating a crisis that is so far silent but that could manifest itself in urban riots, increased recruitment to the insurgency, and increased planting of both opium poppy and cannabis to earn cash incomes to buy food at the higher prices.
HEALTH:
Violent Acres: Return from the Dead. A scathing description of the modern American health system:
My Doctor is busy and overbooked, so I have to sit in his waiting room for an hour, sick and miserable. Then I’m escorted into another room where I’m forced to sit, sick and miserable. Finally, he will enter. I will explain my symptoms while he is only half listening to me. He’ll jot some stuff down and inform me that I need some tests done. Since we can never do the tests that day, I usually have to schedule another appointment. I do and when I come back a week later, I take my tests. Then, a few days after that, I have to come in to get the results of said tests. Then my Doctor decides that he’s just going to refer me to a specialist and I have to repeat the entire wild goose chase with some other guy I’ve never met before.
I’m sorry, but when I’m sick, the very last thing in the world I want is a list of fucking errands to run. Besides, when all is said and done, my sickness has usually run its course anyway and all I have to show for it is a list of wasted co-pays.
INTERNATIONAL
President Blair? Anyone But Him as EU leader! Ah come on - give him a chance to do for Europe what he did for the UK - turn it into a surveillance obsessed police state.
Let us briefly recall some of the other incidents since the notorious 1995 kidnapping, beating and gang rape of a 12-year-old girl by two marines and a sailor in Kin village, Okinawa. The convicted assailants in that outrage were Marine Private First Class Roderico Harp, Marine Private First Class Kendrick Ledet and Seaman Marcus Gill. Other incidents of bodily harm, intimidation and death continue in Okinawa on an almost daily basis, including hit-and-run collisions between American troops and Okinawans on foot or on auto bikes, robberies and assaults, bar brawls and drunken and disorderly conduct.
On June 29, 2001, a 24-year-old air force staff sergeant, Timothy Woodland, was arrested for publicly raping a 20-year-old Okinawan woman on the hood of a car.
On November 2, 2002, Okinawan authorities took into custody Marine Major Michael J Brown, 41 years old, for sexually assaulting a Filipina barmaid outside the Camp Courtney officer's club.
On May 25, 2003, Marine Military Police turned over to Japanese police a 21-year-old lance corporal, Jose Torres, for breaking a 19-year-old woman's nose and raping her, once again in Kin village.
In early July 2005, a drunken air force staff sergeant molested a 10-year-old Okinawan girl on her way to Sunday school. He at first claimed to be innocent, but then police found a photo of the girl's nude torso on his cell phone.
I couldn't put it better:
"The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies."
Thomas Merton, November 17, 1962.
Examples of Stupid Science from the past. Lead wine? How depressing. Let me reach for some Prozac. I really should talk to my doktor about my restless leg syndrome.
Richard Heinberg, one of the few sane men on the planet: Beyond Technofix.
It’s not just climate change that threatens us, but depletion of resources including oil, natural gas, coal, fresh water, fish, topsoil, and minerals (ranging from antimony to zinc, and including, significantly, uranium); as well as destruction of habitat and accelerating biodiversity loss—which is exacerbated by climate change, but is also happening for other anthropogenic reasons. In essence, there are just too many of us using too much too fast.
Thus the problem is not merely technological; it is cultural in the deepest sense. Starting a couple of centuries ago, our species embarked on a path of unprecedented growth, founded on a temporary subsidy of cheap hydrocarbon energy. Climate change is a side effect of fossil fuel consumption, and has emerged as the most critical symptom of our growth binge. But unless we address the core of the problem, other symptoms will soon overwhelm us even if we manage technically to resolve the dilemma of carbon emissions.
Addressing the core of the problem means letting go of growth; in fact, it means engaging in a period of controlled societal contraction characterized by a stable or declining population consuming at a per-capita level far lower than is currently taken for granted in the industrialized world.
Several US film-makers have made anti-war movies, only to face the silence of the lefties, and the vile threats of the gutless Bill O' Reillys...chickens to a man. Too bad our patriots don't see fit to crawl out from behind their keyboards, join the effing army and serve their nation in UNIFORM. I wonder why?
Since making the film, Haggis has screened it to soldiers and has been shocked by further discoveries. "There is the highest suicide rate in the military in 30 years right now. I was screening this film for some troops and their family members in Washington DC, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, 'Thanks so much, it was a really hard film to watch. My husband was in active duty, and when he came back he hung himself.' Then another woman came up and said, 'Thanks for making the film. It was really hard to watch because I saw my son in it. He was in Iraq, and the first week back he shot himself.' I walked out and another woman came up to me and said, 'My husband was an Iraq war vet. I was really afraid for the first two weeks until he hung himself.' "These are three women who didn't know each other and this is within seven minutes of me walking out of the theatre. What the fuck is going on?"
Haggis has asked the same question as De Palma - where are the images? "During the Vietnam war, photos were shown that were disturbing, like the one on the evening news of the young child burned by napalm." He doesn't bother asking why they have been excised from the network screens. "It's not brain surgery that when you see a picture of a kid with no head, you can't sell deodorant any more."
Physicist Joshua Pearce of Clarion University of Pennsylvania has attempted to balance the nuclear books and finds the bottom line simply does not add up. There are several problems that he says cannot be overcome if the nuclear power option is taken in preference to renewable energy sources.
For example, the energy input required from mining and processing uranium ore to its use in a power plant that costs huge amounts of energy to build and operate cannot be offset by power production in a high growth scenario. There are also growth limits set by the grade of uranium ore. "The limit of uranium ore grade to offset greenhouse gas emissions is significantly higher than the purely thermodynamic limit set by the energy payback time," he explains.
In addition, nuclear power produces a lot of heat as a byproduct and this directly heats the Earth. This is only a relatively small effect, but as energy consumption grows it must be taken into consideration when balancing the energy equation.
However, it is the whole-of-life cycle analysis that Pearce has investigated that shows nuclear power is far from the "emission-free panacea" claimed by many of its proponents. Each stage of the nuclear-fuel cycle including power plant construction, mining/milling uranium ores, fuel conversion, enrichment (or de-enrichment of nuclear weapons), fabrication, operation, decommissioning, and for short- and long-term waste disposal contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, he explains.
Nuclear may stack up against the rampant fossil-fuel combustion we see today, but only by a factor of 12. This means that if nuclear power were taken as the major option over the next forty years or so, we would be in no better a position in terms of emissions and reliance on a single major source of energy than we are today given the enormous growth nuclear required over that timescale.
The idiotic bomb attack on the New York recruiting office isn't good. Once this cretin's political "manifesto" is revealed, expect life to take a turn for the worse for anyone to the left of Bill O'Reilly. I hope he doesn't have idleworm in his bookmarks. No, I don't think this is an "inside job" to discredit lefties. If it were, it would have been a bit more - effective.
I enjoyed "I Am Legend", apart from the cack-handed religious subtext, crappy ending and the CG zombies (real actors will always beat animators). Nice to know that the studio crapped out on the ending. Here is the original one. Much better. See Hollywood? No needy-weedy for big blammo bang bang ka-boomie.
Saturn's moon Rhea may also have rings.
One of the great composers of the 12th century was Perotin, also known as "Perotinus Magister" - Perotin the Great. Sad that so many people are unaware of this remarkable individual. One of the first composers to escape the monophonic constraints of Gregorian Chant, his music is distinguished by the use of long drawn out drones, contrasted by other voices that sing very quickly, moving around the drone. Very few of his works survive, but those that do are remarkable.
Beata Viscera (ignore the visuals, just listen). This isn't my favorite piece, but it should give you a general idea. Hunt him down if you have any interest in classical music.
Here is a description of the new musical style of polyphony, from a 12th Century philospher:
"When you hear the soft harmonies of the various singers, some taking high and others low parts, some singing in advance, some following in the rear, others with pauses and interludes, you would think yourself listening to a concert of sirens rather than men, and wonder at the powers of voices … whatever is most tuneful among birds, could not equal. Such is the facility of running up and down the scale; so wonderful the shortening or multiplying of notes, the repetition of the phrases, or their emphatic utterance: the treble and shrill notes are so mingled with tenor and bass, that the ears lost their power of judging. When this goes to excess it is more fitted to excite lust than devotion; but if it is kept in the limits of moderation, it drives away care from the soul and the solicitudes of life, confers joy and peace and exultation in God, and transports the soul to the society of angels..."
John of Salisbury (1120 – 1180)
We have become so debased as a culture that very few people are capable of writing the preceding passage, let alone the music. (Yes I know John of Salisbury's quote above is a translation into modern English. I'm pretty sure, however, that his original was no less elegant...certainly more eloquent than "awesome, dude!"
The US Homeland Security Department said the FBI was investigating the incident but there was no sign of an immediate threat to the United States.
"There continues to be no credible information of an imminent threat to the homeland at this time," a department spokesman said.
God forbid that the Homeland decides that anti-war activists are a threat. I get dibs on the top bunk in the KBR Concentration Camp.
Interesting: Inkjet printed solar cells. Always exercise caution when reading about these breakthroughs - nevertheless, solar and solar thermal are one of the few potential technologies that might help us muddle through. I remain agnostic.
Lance Cpl. David Motari serves in the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment at Kane'ohe Bay, Hawaii. In this video he appears to throw a puppy off a cliff whilst serving in Iraq. Blogosphere lights up with "is it fake or is it real?" debate; opinion seems to depend on political affiliation. I have no problem believing that it's real. Um, well, hard as it may be to think that a marine could kill a puppy for fun, over the last few years we've been treated to:
Everywhere that there's a US military base worldwide, the rate of sexual assault and rape increases between 300% and 600%. Just ask the people of Okinawa... the presence of just 30k American soldiers amongst 1 1/2 million Okinawans has resulted in Okinawa having six times more sexual assaults than the rest of Japan, virtually all of the crimes being attributed to US Army and Marines. NO ONE should be surprised that these bastards are sadistic enough to throw a puppy off a cliff... they gang rape 14 year olds.
Having said that, if these shitstains DID throw a live puppy off the cliff, I'd happily vote to have them castrated on live TV. Forum discussion.
Jim Oberg offers a calmer analysis of the spy satellite shooting. I still think it was a nice demonstration of American technology - "All your satellites are belong to us", so to speak.
A few torched MacMansions, and now they'll be able to disappear environmentalists. Note the speed with which an act of ARSON was defined as an act of TERRORISM. Better scrape the Green Party sticker off your car's bumper, unless you want a one way ticket to a gulag.
A caller, discussing how Clinton and Obama are both terrifying or whatever, made the comment that "my 12-year-old says that Obama looks like Curious George!" As my jaw hit the steering wheel, Rush chuckled and they moved on to the next topic. Upon coming back from a commercial break, however, Rush made an announcement: he apologizes, he didn't know who Curious George was, let alone the fact that he is a monkey, and to drive home the point proceeded to spend about 30 minutes denying any knowledge of pop culture in general, professing ignorance, in turn, of Snoopy, The Simpsons, and "cartoon monkeys" of any sort.
in terms of sustainable advances, though some have been sustainable-- for example higher yielding crops--a substantial amount of China's grain production increase has come from over-pumping aquifers. As you probably know, water tables are falling all over china, including the North China Plain. The challenge is to find out how much of China's grain is being produced by over-pumping.
"I never thought I would see anything like this in my life," said James Steele, an HSBC economist in New York.
That last whining bitch made me laugh out loud at my office desk. Poor James Steele, poor America! I'm trying to remember how much Americans pitied Russia after the financial crisis in August 1998. What I remember was a lot of editorialists and think-tank analysts saying it was all Russia's fault. I remember them saying that since Russia was starting to turn away from disastrous IMF free market economics, that the West should cut off all aid and teach Russia a lesson, even if it meant Russians would starve to death.
Robert Earle, the main character in James Howard Kunstler’s new novel World Made by Hand, exemplifies the hard life that people of his time are forced to live.
Robert’s wife died of encephalitis; his daughter, of the Mexican flu outbreak that all but wiped out the town’s younger generation. His son left home to see the world, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
Robert finds solace in his job as the town carpenter, trout fishing in the nearby creek, playing fiddle during year-round rehearsals for the annual Christmas carol service and attending Sunday church (a lively affair with preaching and hymns). He dreams of one day owning his own horse.
Based on what I’ve described so far, you may have concluded that this is going to be a review of a novel set in the Old West or primitive Colonial New England. It isn’t. James Howard Kunstler’s new book is set in the town of Union Grove, New York—in the future.
An Israeli government minister warned yesterday that increasing rocket fire from Gaza would bring Palestinians a Shoah – the Hebrew word normally used to denote the Nazi Holocaust inflicted on Jews during the Second World War.
St Petersburg is nothing short of awe-inspiring: a scaled-up Venice of wedding-cake palaces dotted with gleaming spires and cut through with grand avenues and canals. Parts of the city are romantically decrepit, looking as though they could crumble into the water at any moment; but by and large, Russia's cultural capital remains a city of staggering opulence and breathtaking harmony. And it is a global as well as a national treasure: the entire centre is a Unesco world heritage site, the only one of its kind.
But all that is now in jeopardy - thanks to the Okhta Centre, a gleaming skyscraper that British firm RMJM has been commissioned to create for the city. Probably the most controversial construction project on the planet, the Okhta tower will stand 396 metres high, making it the tallest building in Europe; it will be bigger than the Empire State.
I've been tweaking the look of the site over the weekend.
idleworm's earnings for February were $171.09 (google ads); $3.78 from amazon sales and $40 donated by David Reid (many thanks!) - total: $214.87. This is good, but could be better, given that the site gets between 6 and 10,000 visitors a day.
My goal has been to reach $1,000 a month, at which point I'll be able to live off the site income, and not depend on commercial work. I'm two months behind on my film - a half-houranimated documentary about oil/energy/collapse. At the moment I'm in LA, finishing a short-term job; at the start of April I'm hoping to get back to Portland and resume full operations. I put about 3 to 4 hours into the site daily...and that's not including the film, which will take up to 80 hours a week once resumed.
When I continue the film I'll post regular clips and updates, documenting the progress. Readers will be able to follow along as it's created.
All this is by way of a gentle reminder to any visitors who may be able to offer support - but only if they can afford it. Look after yourself FIRST. If you have cash to spare, then consider:
1. You can buy goodies at the idleworm store. I make a small commission on all sales. No extra cost to you. I've gathered some great books/items. Many I've already bought myself.
2. Donations via Paypal or Amazon. Donors of $20 or above will get credit on the Peak Oil cartoon. Donors of $90 or more can pick a Worst Wing pencil sketch of their choosing. Thanks to Carl Burdick for his January $100 donation (he gets the "Easter Island" cartoon).
3. Bookmark this link to amazon (right click on it, and select "add bookmark") and shop through there. Again, I make a small amount from all sales...no extra charge for you.
4. Got a friend who loves doom and gloom and wicked humour? Email them the site address. More readers = joy. Your reward? Karmic goodness.
So ends my new ritual - the first of the month status-update/guilt-trip/shakedown.
I would also remind you to buy some food supplies. If you've been reading this site over the last few weeks, you'll know how dangerous our situation is. As long as you eat the food you buy, how can you lose? The prices will only go up. Three great sources (I make nothing from these sites):
2. LATOC store. Matt Savinar's site; another fantastic resource.
3. Beprepared.com This is the LDS site - with great items at fairly low prices. I notice that their 1-year supply is out of stock, and has been for a while.
Now, back to the doom-fest.
So, it gets worse: United Tech offers $2.63B for Diebold. As if the crooks at Diebold weren't untrustworthy enough to count the votes, UTC crawls out from under a rock. Who is UTC?
During the 2004 election cycle, UTC was the sixth largest defense industry donor to political campaigns, contributing a total of $789,561. 64% of UTC's 2004 contributions went to Republicans. UTC was also the sixth largest donor in to federal candidates and political parties in the 2006 election cycle. 35% of those contributions went to Democrats; 53% of the funds were contributed to Republicans.[3] Several prominent politicians have served on the board of directors for UTC, including: former Sen. Howard H. Baker, Jr. (R-TN), Antonia H. Chayes, former Undersecretary of the Air Force, Charles Duncan, Jr., former Secretary of Energy, Jamie S. Gorelick, former Deputy United States Attorney General, William J. Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and Christine Todd Whitman, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have identified UTC as the 43rd-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States, with roughly 430,000 pounds of toxic chemicals released annually into the air.[5] Major pollutants indicated by the study include manganese, chromium, nickel, and related compounds. [6] The Environmental Protection Agency has named UTC as a potentially responsible party for at least 23 Superfund toxic waste sites.[7]
What would happen if you gave Saudi-style oil money to a northern European country? Instead of palaces to their own vanity and fundamentalist Islamic schools across the globe, what would they spend their money on?...
...A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. “The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”
UK banks write off over 6 BILLION in bad debt. You mean to tell me that Doris the cleaning lady who makes $18,000 a year can't afford to pay back her $1,000,000 mortgage? Astonishing - who could have imagined?
The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.
The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.
In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.
Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"
James LovelocK: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
As I write, late on Sunday evening PST, the Asian markets are in freefall - down many hundred points. Ah, another fun week looms before us.
The innocent laughter of six-month-old baby Mohammed al-Bor'i stopped forever on Wednesday night when shrapnel from an Israeli missile and rubble struck the infant in the head, minutes after he enjoyed his last meal.
"The baby sucked milk, he was playing with his mother; I was reading a book when a rocket hit the Ministry of Interior," said Nasser al-Bor'i, the baby's father.
With the first missile, the electricity was cut and darkness filled the ill-fated house. Stones and pieces of the asbestos ceiling fell onto the head of the laughing child. The explosions continued as two other missiles hit the building.
"I looked for my baby in the darkness between the rubble; I did not know where he was. When he cried once I followed the direction of his voice," Nasser al-Bor'i said. "My hands touched my baby who was breathing hard; I felt warm liquid on my two hands and realized that he was wounded."
Al-Bor'i carried his son to the nearby Shifa Hospital as the blood streamed from his tiny head. In the hospital, al-Bor'i became hysterical when he realized that his only child had been killed.
Tears poured from al-Bor'i's eyes when he saw Mohammed's shoes. "After five years of treatment for sterility, [my wife and] I had a baby. I can't imagine that I lost him in a second."
Toys, a plastic bike, a crib and clothes were covered by the heap of rubble inside Mohammed's bedroom. Cutout magazine pictures of laughing babies decorated the walls, a sad reminder of the joy lost in the strike.
Mohammed's mother sufered shock and fell unconscious when she realized that the child had died. She laid on a hospital bed while her baby was in the morgue. On Thursday morning she cried when she returned home from the hospital to see Mohammed's empty crib.
Mohammed al-Bor'i was not the only child to be killed in the series of Israeli air strikes across the Gaza strip on Wednesday. In the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabalia, three other children, Anas al-Manama, 10, Bilal Hijazi, 11, and Mohammed Hamada, 11, were also killed in an Israeli air strike, Palestinian medical sources reported.
Your tax dollars at work, America. Now run along to Church and pray to your loving God for sixty minutes. Mischief managed.
Recently released photos from Abu Ghraib. I'm still waiting for them to show the videos of children being raped. It would be amusing to hear Rush Limbaugh and mAnne Coulter justify that little episode.
I also had a laugh from this story from the Wall Street Journal about a gullible American soldier who fights and dies for America, and meanwhile, he must abandon his American house because he can't pay for the mortgage--because of the war he's fighting in!...
...Actually when I stop laughing I feel some pity for this American soldier. Should I? I don't know. I'm trying to remember pity that Americans feel for Russians in the defeat of Afghanistan or so-called "Cold War defeat." While I'm going through my memory trying to remember the American sympathy for Russians suffering, I'll continue to laugh at this soldier-sucker and the whole country of declining morons.
At least the quality still knows how to play silly buggers in the Stans. It's all fun and games, until someone steps on a clusterbomb.
This is why you guys should spend more time on the forum - Zoltan, one of the regulars found this playmobil toy:
Check out the reviewers' comments on amazon:
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.
The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I've heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I'll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).
More:
This is great learning too for young brownshirts.
I am waiting for a few accessories though, kids size jackboots and a toy Taser. Think how much fun that will be for your young Martin Bormann types. I envision a low voltage say 5KV instead of 50kv to give a realistic but non-hazardous jolt.
Next we can have a nice Nerf Nightstick and little Heinrich can have great start getting ready for his future job with the TSA, local police force or the new STASI ( Secure Transportation And Safety Inititive)
Be the first on your block.
I also look forward to the upcoming Halliburton Play detention center real simulated barbed wire.
More:
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it's a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer "well, it's because the terrorists have already won". Yes, they have won.
I also highly recommend the Playmobil "farm fencing" so you can take your escorted airline passenger away and fence him behind bars as if he were in Guantanamo Bay.
and buy your doo-dads, I'll get some shiny new shillings.
