...the post-disaster world will be just like this one, only worse. All the lousy coworkers and squabbles and crap, but none of the luxuries. The winners won’t be the zombies, just another set of bosses. The end of the world is what you call it when your tribe loses. It may be the end of the world for them, like it was for hundreds of native tribes all over the world, but when your world ends like that, you don’t get to play out the game in some cool ruins out of a video game. Some other tribe takes over, that’s all.
OK, your life is shite. Foreclosed home, job lost, debt, disaster imminent.
So you think the solution is to murder your kids, wife, and then chew on a shotgun, leaving a sticky
mess for the paramedics?
THINK AGAIN!!! There is ANOTHER WAY!
Get every credit card you can and MAX them out.
SELL all your junk on eBay and Craigslist for INSTANT CASH.
Don't file taxes or pay any more rent ---- you're not going to need to do that where you're going......
MEXICO! or Brazil - somewhere with no extradition to the US. And hot weather.
Hell, if you're going to murder yourself and your family, you might as well do it on a sunny beach, sipping Margaritas.
Putting a bullet in the back of little Timmy's head on a tropical beach sure beats the hell out of chasing him around
a fucking trailer park.
Your looted cash will go a lot further in the Southern Hemisphere, and who knows - you might even find a job and
a nice shack in which to live out a life of contentment. Hey, GM just invested $1,000,000,000 of YOUR bailout money
in their Brazilian operation. Maybe they'll give you a job in one of their plants.
And the best bit: South America is full of first rate Cuban Doctors. You'll be free to break your arm or get sick
without ending up a debt slave.
Nice weather, beautiful women, great food, carnivale!!!!!!
And, if things don't work out in South America, you can always kill yourself later. What's the bloody rush?
Here's your daily musical offering. Think like Sparks. Think outside of the box - for real:
When Do I Get To Sing My Way
No, no use in lecturing them, or in threatening them
They will just say "who are you"
Is that a question or not, and you see that the plot
Is predictable, not new
But you're still stunned at the things you will do
No, no use in taking their time or in wasting two dimes
On a call to God knows who
When all you feel is the rain and it's hard to be vain
When no person looks at you
So just be gracious and wait in the queue
CHORUS
So when do I get to sing "My Way"
When do I get to feel like Sinatra felt
When do I get to sing "My Way"
In heaven or hell
When do I get to do it my way
When do I get to feel like Sid Vicious felt
When do I get to sing "My Way"
In heaven or hell
Yes, it's a tradition they say, like a bright Christmas Day
And traditions must go on
And though I say, yes I see, no I really don't see
Is my smiley face still on?
Sign your name with an X, mow the lawn
CHORUS
They'll introduce me, "Hello, hello"
Women seduce me and champagne flows
Then the lights go low
There's only one song I know
There, this home which once was serene, now is home to the screams
And to flying plates and shoes
But I have no souvenirs of these crackerjack years
Not a moment I could choose
And not one offer that I could refuse
George Kenney at Electric Politics has been continuing his excellent series of podcasts. That latest, "The Lost City of Z" is the tale of a real life Indiana Jones. The archives are here. Scroll down the page for the podcasts. I have much catching up to do.
Hysterical user reviews on amazon.com about the new book 'by' "Joe the Plumber". My favourite: "Like an autistic Rush Limbaugh".
Four sausage links of mystery meat:
None of the oil/energy/economic news is any surprise to me. Having read Richard Heinberg's book "The Party's Over" in 2004/2005 - everything is unfolding as predicted. It's still relevant today. Try to pick up a copy.
"It's hard to say how long and deep this recession will be and how soon the global economy -- and demand for oil -- will recover, but when it does, in a year or two, it will immediately run into supply constraints," says Herberg.
In fact, the current financial crunch has already led to the postponement or cancellation over $100 billion worth of oil projects in the past six months, which will aggravate the "supply pathology" when recovery begins, he points out.
At that point, oil prices will ride swiftly back up the escalator, perhaps even beyond their earlier highs. Last year's 'oil shock' was the culmination of a "perfect storm" that built up over five years -- in the sense that "nearly everything that could go wrong went wrong," recalls Herberg.
...oil companies and investors are stashing crude, waiting for demand to rise and the bear market to end so they can turn a profit later.
Meanwhile, oil-producing countries such as Iran have pumped millions of barrels of their own crude into idle tankers, effectively taking crude off the market to halt declining prices that are devastating their economies.
Traders have always played a game of store and sell, bringing oil to market when it can fetch the best price. They say this time is different because of how fast the bottom fell out of the oil market.
“Nobody expected this,” said Antoine Halff, an analyst with Newedge. “The majority of people out there thought the market would keep rising to $200, even $250, a barrel. They were tripping over each other to pick a higher forecast.”
Now the strategy is storage. Anyone who can buy cheap oil and store it might be able to sell it at a premium later, when the global economy ramps up again.
The oil tanks that surround Cushing, Okla., in a sprawling network that holds 10 percent of the nation’s oil, have been swelling for months. Exactly how close they are to full is a closely guarded secret, but analysts who cover the industry say Cushing is approaching capacity.
There are other storage tanks in the country with plenty of extra room to take on oil, but Cushing is the delivery point for the oil traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange. So the closer Cushing gets to full, the lower the price of oil goes.
Some oil is ending up in giant ships and staying there. On these supertankers, rented by oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, there is little for crews to do but paint and repaint the decks to pass time.
More than 30 tankers, each with the ability to move 2 million barrels of oil from port to port, now serve as little more than floating storage tanks. They are moored across the globe, from the Texas coast to the calm waters off Europe and Nigeria.
Snip.
There are so many players in the international oil market that no one has enough control to sway prices. OPEC slashed production by more than 4 million barrels a day, and still the price of a barrel of crude languishes near $40. At its peak, it traded at $147 a barrel.
Experts aren’t sure what will happen when all that oil finally comes ashore.
One fear is that with oil prices so low, companies will slash drilling and production, setting the world up for an energy crunch that would send prices soaring. The number of oil and gas rigs operating in the United States has fallen a staggering 39 percent since August.
Others say prices would plummet if companies forced millions of barrels onto the market at once.
“If everyone’s running for the exits at the same time, they’ll engineer a price collapse,” Flynn said.
The forecast production profile assumes that Saudi Arabia's ultimate recoverable crude oil reserves (URR) are 185 billion barrels (Gb). However, it is possible that Saudi Arabia could have an additional 25 Gb from discovered undeveloped fields and future discoveries. A higher URR of 210 Gb implies that the additional production increment could decrease the total decline rate from about 2015 as shown by the dashed line in the chart below.
More:
Many readers will question the validity of my URR estimates, shown in Figure 1, thinking that the true KSA URR must be higher. A perceived high URR is in the national interest of KSA because it needs its customers to continue their demand for oil leading to sustainable high oil prices for KSA. If customers thought that KSA had less than 100 Gb of oil left then conservation and switching to alternatives would increase. KSA has been creating this perception of overabundant oil reserves for at least sixteen years because it believes that this will maximize the price of its remaining oil.
Mr. Naimi, pictured below, has said on many occasions that the KSA can add another 200 Gb of reserves. In December 2004, Naimi said that reserves could be bolstered by another 200 Gb. In an April 2008 speech, Naimi was still talking about adding the same 200 Gb to increase remaining recoverable reserves to 464 Gb. In April 2008, cumulative crude oil production of KSA was 114 Gb which means that the his total potential crude URR is about 578 Gb which represents an impossible recovery factor of 96% based on Zagar's estimate of oil initially in place of 600 Gb (Fig 4).
It is time for Mr. Naimi to tell the truth about remaining KSA reserves. As the true remaining reserves are probably much lower than Naimi's claimed 260 Gb, a full disclosure of KSA reserves, by field, would not only allow more effective future oil production and consumption planning but might also help increase short term oil prices which would be favourable to all OPEC members.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the fund it uses to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.
“Without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year,” Bair wrote in a March 2 letter to the industry. U.S. community banks plan to flood the FDIC with about 5,000 letters in protest of the fees, according to a trade group.
“A large number” of bank failures may occur through 2010 because of “rapidly deteriorating economic conditions,” Bair said in the letter. “Without substantial amounts of additional assessment revenue in the near future, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero or even become negative.”
He is the director of two funds which are buying greenfield land in Brazil and existing farms in Canada and starting to farm it. The funds are clearing the land, fertilizing it, irrigating it and hiring farmers and, Rogers said, some day will probably sell the land but that is a remote prospect.
"If I'm right, agriculture is going to be one of the greatest industries in the next 20 years, 30 years."
Food inventories are at their lowest in 50 years, Rogers said, while the oil and mining sectors are also good bets.
A 58-year-old Wal-Mart employee who said he “couldn’t take it anymore” lit himself on fire outside the Bloomingdale store where he worked late Thursday night and was later pronounced dead at a hospital, authorities said this morning.
In an interview, his son said his father went to work last night with nothing seeming out of the ordinary. “This had nothing to do with the economy. I want to make that clear,” he said, adding that the family may never know the reason for the public suicide.
Maybe he torched himself when he realised that his son was an ass-kissing parasite on the rectum of corporate America. Poor bastard.
How to survive economic collapse (30 minutes):
The bill that could break up Europe. Some of the most pessimistic articles on Europe are coming from The Daily Telegraph ("Torygraph") and The Economist...hardly bastions of Euro-love. That said:
Yet if a country such as Hungary or one of the Baltic three went under, west Europeans would be among the first to suffer (see article). Banks from Austria, Italy and Sweden, which have invested and lent heavily in eastern Europe, would see catastrophic losses if the value of their assets shrivelled. The strain of default, combined with atavistic protectionist instincts coming to the fore all over Europe, could easily unravel the EU’s proudest achievement, its single market.
Indeed, collapse in the east would quickly raise questions about the future of the EU itself. It would destabilise the euro—for some euro members, such as Ireland and Greece, are not in much better shape than eastern Europe. And it would spell doom for any chance of further enlarging the EU, raising new doubts about the future prospects of the western Balkans, Turkey and several countries from the former Soviet Union.
Juries have the inherent right to ignore the law. This is called jury nullification. Here's a real example, years ago, a man's son was raped by a karate instructor. The instructor fled the state, was caught, and extradited back. On his way back through the airport, the boy's father shot and killed the instructor and immediately surrendered to police. This was all caught on tape. The father was charged with pre-meditated murder, but the jury found him not guilty. This is jury nullification. Even though it was clearly murder, the jury didn't convict and cannot be required to convict.
In many states, including my state, the judge and the lawyers are not allowed to inform juries of this inherent right of nullification, but they have it. Taxpayers/citizens need to understand this right and inform others on it. If you ever sit on a jury where someone is being charged by the Feds for cheating on their taxes, weapons violations, any other b.s., remember, you have the inherent right not to convict, even though you may not be told of this right. Further, as an individual, you can force a hung jury, even if no one else will go along. I'm talking about criminal trials here.
This is one way people can fight back. However, notice how under all these new laws, like the Military Commissions Act, the Fed Gov't tries to do away with the right of a jury at all. Under that act, if you are deemed an "enemy combatant" then the gov't takes the position that you have no rights under the bill of rights.
While some forecasters think job losses in February stayed in the ballpark of about 590,000, a few economists think the labor market got much worse in February and are expecting losses of 650,000, 700,000, or in one case, even 800,000.
Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.
Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.
"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's best known neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."
With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it was the centre of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the centre of each circle representing a man and woman. It is a theory the tourist board in nearby Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet; see Adam and Eve.
Schmidt is sceptical. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy", and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.
It gets stranger:
Coqueugniot describes Schmidt's hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was a meeting point for rituals as "tempting", given its spectacular position. But surveys of the region were still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic."
Vecihi Ozkaya, the director of a dig at Kortiktepe, 120 miles east of Urfa, doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500-year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.
"Look at this", he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilisation."
The biggest study of life in the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans ever carried out, involving more than 500 polar researchers from 25 countries, has discovered at least 235 species that are common to both poles – even though they are almost 7,000 miles apart.
"This raises a whole bunch of evolutionary questions," said Professor Russ Hopcroft, of the University of Alaska, one of the leading scientists conducting the study, which is part of a 10-year worldwide census of marine life. "We think of the Arctic and Antarctic as similar habitats, but they are separated by great distances."
Of course, God-botherers will use this as a "gotcha!", but the Thermohaline current would be a more elegant explanation than Mister Beardy and his magic cloud.
There’s nearly $5 trillion worth of insured deposits in the American banking system. But the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) is less than 1% of that total: $18.9 billion. And it’s falling fast, down from $52.4 billion (-64%) at the end of 2007.
They can barely let the words pass their lips, but some of the EU's most important policymakers were forced this week to discuss what was once unthinkable: that at least one of the 16 eurozone countries might be on the brink of ditching the single currency.
Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, admitted that the 10-year-old eurozone was under "extreme strain", with weaker countries struggling to keep their economies afloat in the face of the devaluation of other currencies, such as sterling and the dollar.
It’s true – the United States and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) have a lot of gold in reserve. Some of you fear a good chunk of that gold could be dumped on the market, acting as a sharp break to the yellow metal’s rise.
Let’s start by asking the question, just how much gold do these guys have?
The World Gold Council regularly updates the stats on official holdings of central bank reserves. According to December 2008 data from the WGC, the U.S. holds 8,133.5 tonnes (metric tons) of gold. The IMF holds 3,217.3 tonnes.
When you do the math, that adds up to 11,350.8 metric tons (tonnes), or 12,512 short tons, of gold. Converted to ounces at $1,000 per ounce, that’s a touch over $400 billion bucks worth of bullion.
A tenants' mutiny at Grand Central Market was resolved last week after a group of merchants who had withheld their February rents came to an agreement with the landlord and paid up.
As part of the resolution with landlord The Yellin Company, rents will be lowered and advertising fees charged to the tenants will be eliminated.
Adele Yellin, president of the Yellin Company, said that the move will lower costs for the 40 merchants.
Four degrees may not sound like much - after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. "It can be considered the Anthropocene," says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.
The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan's native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.
