I love the smell of genocide in the morning. Wait...no I don't...
On Monday's episode of "The Pat Kenny Show" on Irish radio there was a shocking interview with Paul Polanski about UN run Gypsy death camps in Kosovo. This is NOT hyperbole - these people are being left to die on a toxic dump. (The Monday link will only work until next Monday, when it will be overwritten by the subsequent show). Here's an article about these wretched hell-holes:
Despite growing signs of illnesses among the children -- memory loss, convulsions, vomiting and walking problems -- bureaucratic infighting has kept them from being moved in the UN-administered province...
"This is not a human but life of animals. The last food assistance that we got in February had expiration date of October 2004," said Qosa...
Besides the crushing poverty which strikes even the most hardhearted, two of three camps are located near a toxic metal waste dump, left over from the Trepca mines, once among the largest in Europe, with reserves of lead, zinc and gold...
Roma activist Paul Polanski said exposure to toxic metals had devastating consequences on the health of the residents, especially among the children.
"Over twenty children in the Zitkovac camp have the same symptoms: they lose memory, walk funny, often vomit and have convulsions," Polanski said.
"They need to be treated urgently because the toxins create irreparable brain damage," Polansky warned.
Habib Hajdini from the Zitkovac camp warned that nothing has been done since the first signs of poisoning, saying such a stance was "unbearable."
"But even the worst is when you see that no one is doing anything ... while we ourselves are powerless," Hajdini said.
According to Polanski, most of the damaged children won't make it past 20.
Never again, eh?
I often wonder why so many people (especially on what passes for the left) have such faith in the UN - an outfit which seems to exist as a fig leaf for the powerful. Resolutions are used to legitimise the war with Iraq by the Americans, then the occupation, yet resolutions against Israel are vetoed (by the US). Let us not forget the lovely tales of UN "peacekeepers", as they journey the planet on their child-rape tour (at Taxpayer expense):
Ach; I could sit here all day googling "X UN PEACEKEEPER RAPE" - just replace "X" with your country of choice, and see what comes up. Fun for all the family. It just goes on and on and on ... and the stories are often dated from the early 1990s. A long pattern of criminal behaviour and crimes against humanity.
Even one of my own got in on the act:
An Eritrean government spokesman sums it up succinctly:
"These people call themselves peacekeepers, when in fact all they want is a long holiday and a chance to fool around with our women. They did not respect our country, our culture or our people."
Try reading through all those links (from mainstream news organs) and tell me you have any faith left in those creeps. To Hell with the United Nations...a revolting organisation, apparently stuffed to the gills with rapists, paedophiles and assorted monsters of the first magnitude.
Deep breaths. Calm...
Lego goodness will make me happy:
This piece on Hitler youth style Green fascism is shocking - even by the degraded standards of the British Reich. Brainwashing kids to report on eco-crimes by their parents? Christ on a recycled crutch - none of this conservation claptrap is going to make an iota of difference as long as we have an economy based on exponential growth! Anything that fails to tackle that Gordian knot is nothing more than totem behaviour - utterly meaningless...like reducing the current on an electric chair by 1%.
Again, here's a one hour long video of Albert Bartlett's famous lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy". They should try teaching THAT to kids, not second-rate wooly headed sub-brownshirt bully boy bullshit.
Eff me, I feel cranky now.
In a nutshell, we don't have a tough uncompromising movement or leadership with curbing global warming as its focus. We have anti-poverty and social justice groups and campaigns posing as green but with a "plentiful lack" of serious proposals to overhaul the entire capitalist/consumer society. It is quite clear that marginal and incremental economic reforms will not slow down the economic growth beast much less threaten its existence.
It appears that even those members of society who have lived at the bottom are not ready or willing to admit that this society is neither sustainable nor reformable. Perhaps they are whistling in the dark. But it is more likely that these reformist groups are being encouraged in their schemes by funders and forces cemented to the concept of economic growth and to capitalism at all costs who welcome the emphasis on jobs and renewable energy as a distraction from the daily reports of accelerating climate change. The revolutionaries, however, are nowhere to be seen.
I've got news for them. Nature doesn't distinguish between rich and poor.
The sclerosis of American life is shocking. If you go further north up the Hudson River, to Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, you'll see a nation that seems ready to crawl off and die. There, it appears too far gone to even put up a proxy fight on a video screen. Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all. I have no doubt we're heading into a convulsion that will wring much of this junk and dross into the backwaters of history. We're capable of being something better than this, of putting our time on earth to better use, including a more respectful treatment of the land we inhabit. This year and the next will be the years of letting go, and out of that we'll commence a re-becoming.
Happy Birthday to me...happy birthday to meeeeee.... My parents mailed me a wonderful pressie: the DVD of "Strumpet City" - one of the few truly great achievements of Irish TV - a drama set in Dublin, 1907-1914, which chronicles the class war between the working class Dubliners and their Feudal Overlords. Thanks Mum & Dad & brother!
I just got back from my holiday a few miles from Eugene, Oregon. Fuck me, but this state is beautiful. My friends just bought a 3 acre property with good land, and a small orchard. Not too shabby. Even better is the fact that they OWN the land, and the property tax is very small. Any of you thinking of a good place to live in the event of a collapse could do a lot worse.
Funny thing - whenever I talked to people about Eugene ("anarchist capital of America") they broke 50-50 pro and con. Well, walking through the farmers market on Saturday and seeing people smoking pot NEXT TO THE COURTHOUSE puts me in the "pro" faction. I went to an ecovillage there - very nice people. The land around the city is dotted with medium sized farms and vineyards - and one soon becomes relaxed by the physical environment.
The Pacific NW is one of the few parts of the country not deluged by meters of snow in winter, which is a godsend.
I hate to say this, but Oregon kicks Ireland's ass in the beauty department. Sorry, Motherland, but truth is truth. I'd have no problem spending the rest of my life here. I always felt a discomfort in California - the feeling that people had no business inhabiting that part of the planet in serious numbers. You can't look at that scrubby place and justify cities of 15,000,000 people. Oregon makes me want to take up fishing. I might even start deer-hunting (that, or bring back the wolves).
I'm a right lucky bastard, to live in such a wonderful place.
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.
This poor bastard suffered 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 (Ł500 billion) is held on credit cards in America. In the UK, debts of more than Ł50 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...
...hat 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."
Remember all my chatter about the banks teetering on brink? They Still Are.
I've long had a soft spot for Niue. It's one of the most isolated places on Earth - a 100 sq. km island in the South Pacific. When I started idleworm in 2000 we had a mailing list. One of the very first people on that list was from Niue - which only has a population of 1,700. (They tend to emigrate to New Zealand, which is sad). It sounds like a great place. One downer: as it's a coral island, you don't get many nice sandy beaches. Not a bad spot to ride out the apocalypse, perhaps. Here's a nice site with lots of photos and descriptions.
Paper or plastic? PAPER OR PLASTIC? GnrrrGhghghghgh (strangled gasp, choke, CHUNDER!) If you care enough to ask, why don't you BUY a CANVAS BAG and get it over with? GROW UP, for CRUD's sake. 11am, and I need a beer already.
Blame the high oil price on speculators? Not Likely.
I believe the effects of the weak dollar and the "speculator premium" account for about 20% of the current NYMEX price. A price "tumble" down to $110-$115/barrel would not surprise me at all. Oil prices have dropped almost $10/barrel in the last two days. I believe that prices in this range are nearer to what the fundamentals dictate at this time. The oil price could stay at this relatively "low" level for a short while before resuming its inevitable rise. But a price slide to $60-$75/barrel is impossible because continuing tightness in the market precludes it. The soaring demand for middle distillates combined with the relative scarcity of light sweet crude oil does not permit such a market "correction."
Not so sure about the impossiblity of a return to $60. After all, were we to enter a Depression, surely a dramatic fall would be possible? Of course, we'll all be in FEMA camps by then, so fat lot of good it'd do us.
"The National Government will as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation was built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."
My New Order, Adolf Hitler, Proclamation to the German Nation at Berlin,
February 1, 1933
[Hall's] sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.
In March, Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. In the suit, Hall claims his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggests that the United States military has become a Christian organization.
"I think it's utterly and totally wrong. Unconstitutional," Hall said.
Hall said there is a pattern of discrimination against non-Christians in the military.
Two years ago on Thanksgiving Day, after refusing to pray at his table, Hall said he was told to go sit somewhere else. In another incident, when he was nearly killed during an attack on his Humvee, he said another soldier asked him, "Do you believe in Jesus now?"
Many preachers and politicians have joined together in a new movement: to distort and rewrite history to favor their own agendas. On the airwaves they routinely condemn atheists and claim Adolph Hitler was a follower of their unholy views. True historical fact neither favors or spares allegiance to any cause, politics, or religion...
...When Hitler was an infant in Austria, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic church, became an altar boy, and was later confirmed as a "soldier of Christ". Within the confines of the church, he was first taught the term “perfidious Jew” (treacherous Jew). Not until 1961, was this despicable term removed from the church’s teachings. In Hitler’s day, however, hatred of Jews was prevalent and openly expressed. The two major religions of Germany, Catholicism, and Lutheranism perpetuated anti-Semitism. Moreover, Hitler especially admired Martin Luther, who openly hated the Jews. Despite Luther’s denunciation of the Catholic Church for its corruption, he supported the centuries of pogroms sponsored by the Pope against the Jews. "The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves," and "We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them," Luther stated in his book, Table Talk. Abiding by these beliefs in his rise to power, Hitler wrote in his book, Mein Kampf, "... I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." In a Reichstag speech in 1938 several years later, he quoted those same exact words. The Nazi Party soon took control of the courts, local government, and all civic organizations except the Protestant and Catholic churches. Contrary to popular beliefs, the most evil man in contemporary history, Adolph Hitler, was a Christian. Is this an indictment of all Christians? Not at all! From every religion and from every nationality characters of ill-repute are born and raised.
The story of Army Spc. Jeremy Hall has a happy ending, of sorts. His atheism got him out of Iraq. He finished his tour in the States...possibly saving him from death or mutliation in the war. I hope he has many, many atheist children to pass on his genes.
God works in mysterious ways, no?
Meanwhile, I grind on with my film. Only 17 scenes to go to complete sequence 2. I'll post some clips soon. It's looking good! If only I didn't have to use Flash!
Vote Bush/Cheney 2008! I hate to say it, but I'd love to see this happen.
First, overdue thanks to Chuck F. for his $50 donation! Sorry about the delay - been up to my oxters in work. I've made great progress on the seven minute long second sequence of my animated film. It's two-thirds complete, and should be finished within a couple of weeks. That will be the half-way point of the film. Fifteen minutes down, fifteen to go. Peak cartoon.
I've been wondering what happened to Clay Bennett, whose cartoons stopped appearing on the Christian Science Monitor a while ago. Clay emailed to let me know that he's now working for the Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee! Needless to say, we've got some catching up to do!
Every time I saw a car towing a motorboat this holiday weekend, I wondered what was going through the head of the towee. Did they have a sense that darkness was falling on their careers in motor sports? Did they have an inkling that an oil-and-gas crisis is upon us and just not give a shit? Or were they just going through the motions, following some implacable rote programming induced by, say, forty-odd years of TV addiction and a diet based on corn-syrup byproducts?
The holiday to me was a creepy hiatus from an ever more desperate reality overtaking the nation like a miasma. Meanwhile, the mainstream media's ongoing narrative has gotten stuck in the moronic groove of "drill drill drill." The belief of people like Larry Kudlow of CNBC and uber-mega-idiot John Stossel of ABC-News is that we could go back to $1.50 gasoline if only congress would open the offshore exploration areas and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This view is just plain erroneous. Nothing we get out of these regions will come close to offsetting the ongoing depletion of worldwide oil resources, or even arresting our own losses.
LA Times article on suburban ghost towns. I scanned through the comments that followed the article, and found this gem:
Image, not just crack houses but crack suburbs. Whole tracks of houses where gangs and crime can thrive. Even worse, imagine terror cells taking over whole housing tracks. Scary.
Posted by: Bob Smythe | July 02, 2008 at 12:50 PM
Bob, what's scary is that there are so many people like you, who apparently think that the piece of pop-culture detritus known as "24" is a documentary. NOTE: 24 is grade-A Goebbels bullshit, and anyone dumb enough to think that those stories are in any way credible should lose the following:
* Their right to vote.
* Their drivers licence.
* Their reproductive organs.
You can keep your passports though, assuming you have them. Might do you no harm to get out more. Try the Colombian Jungle: room and board are free, for up to six years.
As oil breaks into the mid 140s, CNN continues to abrogate its journalistic duties with dreck like this: Who to blame for the price of oil? That's the way - find scapegoats. Surely WE can't be to blame - the ones who've pumped the reserves like Bejesus, as if a finite resource was going to last forever. I could spend an hour or three trying to express my contempt for this disgraceful dreck, but I've got work to do.
Earlier this month girls at a further education college were reprimanded for wolf-whistling at builders.
Officials at West Kent College in Tonbridge, Kent, warned pupils the behaviour was "totally unacceptable," and said any student caught harassing the contractors would face disciplinary action.
Yeesh, guys. Grow a pair! Payback's a bitch, eh?
After Joe Bageant, my favourite good old boy is Fred Reed. Marrying Up.
I used to think that Bush would be like President Stillson in the movie "The Dead Zone". Goodness, how the last seven and a half years have flown by. Don't forget though, President Hairy-knuckles does have a few months left, so he still may achieve his Divine Mission of bringing Jesus back to Earth on an ICBM. If not, waiting in the wings, is John McNasty:
McCain has a secret reputation as a man with a ferocious, unpredictable temper. He is a man who has a knack for pursuing vendettas against those he thinks have slighted him, even if they are lowly aides.
The list of worrying incidents is long. In 1995 he ended up almost physically scuffling with aged Senator Strom Thurmond on the Senate floor. And, according to some accounts, in 2006 he had a fight with Arizona congressman Rick Renzi, throwing blows in a scrap whose details have only recently been detailed in Schecter's book. Schecter unearthed another unpleasant incident from 1992 in which McCain, tired after a long day's campaign, reacted badly to his wife Cindy teasing him about his baldness. 'At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you c*nt,' McCain snapped in front of eyewitnesses. Schecter says he has three sources for the story. McCain's campaign have denied it.
Such public outbursts, and many other private ones, have concerned people even in his own party. Former New Hampshire Republican Senator Robert Smith publicly voiced his concerns, once saying McCain's temper ' ... would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger'. That sentiment was echoed by Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who told a Boston newspaper: 'The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.'
Cute. Christopher Hitchens (previously a member of the human race) wants to help Iraq by sending them books for their Universities. Books. Books, books, books. Hmm. Books. Yes. Lots and lots of books, to help lure the "White Man's Burden" into the Western Sphere. Books. Books. Books. Lots. Books. Why does this bother me?
Oh yes.
Now I remember...
BECAUSE THE US DESTROYED THE NATIONAL LIBRARY IN BAGHDAD IN 2003!
To be fair to Hitch, maybe he was sleeping off a few bottles of Pinot Gris at the time, so he might have missed the event first time around. Given the fact that he was one of the cheerleaders for the war, you'd think he'd have made an effort to keep up with events in realtime. Guess not.
Now I like a drink as much as the next man, ahem, but friends, if I ever do a Hitchens, you have my full permission, NAY - my demand - for an intervention.
What is it with being a chickenhawk? Is there a "leave brain outside door" requirement? Try Con Coughlin from The Daily Telegraph, who chides the BBC for failing to report - wait for it - "good news" in Iraq. What is the good news?
The news that the Iraqi government is opening its oil fields for development by international companies should be an occasion for rejoicing.
Iraq has the second largest known oil reserves in the world - and only about one third of the country has been properly surveyed. At a time when the world is desperately short of oil, and prices have hit an all-time high, Iraq could help alleviate the pressure on the West's hard-pressed economies.
Well, at least the moonbats are finally admitting the obvious: that the war was all about oil and control of reserves. Right? WRONG!
This is the same BBC, don't forget, that spent years saying that Britain went to war over Saddam's WMD. Despite all the furore of the Hutton investigation - which disproved that particular canard and heaped the greatest humiliation on the BBC in its entire history - the BBC now says Britain went to war over Iraq's oil.
Make your mind up, you BBC producers and correspondents. Was it WMD, or was it oil? And while we're at it, is Iraq still in the grip of "a full-blown civil war", as John Humphys never tires of informing his Today programme listeners?
So Con, you're saying that the "good news" is that WE GOT THEIR OIL! - but that the war wasn't about oil? To read Con (well-named, no?) you'd think the BBC started the bloody war, not those criminals in Washington and Downing Street. Then he delivers le bon mot...
We all like a good argument, but let's have one based on hard facts, not on assumptions and woolly-minded liberal thinking.
I'd like to draw a cartoon about this bear of little brain, but some things are beyond parody these days...unless you're Steve Bell!
The authoritarian personality does not want to give orders, their personality type wants to take orders. People with this type of personality seek conformity, security, stability. They become anxious and insecure when events or circumstances upset their previously existing world view. They are very intolerant of any divergence from what they consider to be the normal (which is usually conceptualized in terms of their religion, race, history, nationality, culture, language, etc.) They tend to be very superstitious and lend credence to folktales or interpretations of history that fit their preexisting definitions of reality (thus the Founding Fathers of the US are conceptualized of as supporters of white nationalism.) They think in extremely stereotyped ways about minorities, women, homosexuals, etc. They are thus very dualistic- the world is conceived in terms of absolute right (their way) Vs. absolute wrong (the "other" whether African American, liberal, intellectual, feminist, etc.)
OMG! Iran is building nukes! A vicious dictator with Nukes (who isn't an Israeli!) ATTACK! ATTACK! WAR! KILL! DESTROY! Oh wait - maybe not...recall the missiles!
But the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.
The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.
That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”
If you want to edit "Democratic Party" to "Democrat Party" you really should do it by hand. It's much more accurate. See, whenever I encounter the words "Right wing Republicans" I get to replace it with "Fascists", "Idiots", "Moonbats", "Goose-steppers", "Brownshirts", "Six-fingered knuckle-draggers", "Hitler lovers", "Falangist F*cknuts", "no-neck KKK troglodytes", etc. Much more creative.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony of using a stereotypical description of right wingers, having criticised them for same. Thing is, they deserve it.
