once the current rally interlude is over, it's not hard to see the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU) sinking to around 4,000 -- a level it last hit in 1995, before debt started to play such a large role in corporate and personal finance.
That would entail a decline of 70% from its 2007 peak, or about the same amount the Japanese stock market has fallen since 1990 in the wake of its own debt unwinding. Or the amount the Nasdaq Composite Index ($COMPX) dropped from 2000 to 2002. Or the amount the Russian market has plunged since June.
GE is a bank disguised as an industrial conglomerate. GE Capital is a division of GE, which truly dominates the results of this company. GE Capital has three subdivisions (GE Commercial Finance, GE Money, and GE Consumer Finance). In 2003, GE Capital generated $5.9 billion of GE’s $17 billion of profits, or 35%. By 2007, GE Capital was generating $12.2 billion of their $29 billion of profits, or 42%. Being a bank during the boom years of 2004 to 2007 did wonders for GE’s bottom line. Being a bank now is a rocky path to destruction.
Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we'd see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn't be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there's more work - or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.
And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it's getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation's unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.
One thing that has him spooked is the price of credit-default swaps for major U.S. banks — a derivative that provides insurance against the possibility that they might default on their debt, dooming them to bankruptcy. According to data provided by Bloomberg using a model devised by JP Morgan, the price of this insurance currently implies that the odds of banking giant Morgan Stanley defaulting in the next five years are 45%. For Citigroup, another financial linchpin, they're 21%. "This is astonishing," says Weiss. "If Citigroup fails, it could be disastrous."
20 of the worst cliches. I've been trying to purge my vocubulary of some very bad habits: use of parentheses, ... , - , over-use of first-person singular, etc. etc. etc. It's, like, you know, totally annoying.
AA Gill is the food critic for the London Times. His reviews are unique. Here's one about "Bel Canto":
I’m going to get the food out of the way as quickly as possible, because that was the only way to eat it, and I really don’t want to dwell on the liver tart, an offal brick. The artichoke and smoked salmon salad was plainly the result of a shoplifting sprint to an all-night supermarket; the lamb was a soggy brown muscle. Hopefully the monkfish will have kept its vow of celibacy and not produced any more like it. There was something with lavender ice cream on the top, the colour of melted Barbies, that tasted like a pensioner’s knicker drawer. But all this is by the bye. The USP of Bel Canto is that the waiters sing opera. You get Papageno and Papagena loud and close up. But there is a small design fault here. They can’t sing and wait at the same time, so you can’t ask them to get you another glass of wine, or indeed move you to another table while they’re at it. There were only three other occupied tables. Excruciating was too small a word. It was like being trapped in a Jack Vettriano painting.
Ah, NY Times - it's the new Onion! Here, our noble scribe lambastes the grotty little men who run blogs, for the crime of falling for the Palin/Africa hoax:
But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.
By the end of the week, their complaints had escalated considerably, with Fox News quoting unnamed McCain campaign officials as saying that Ms. Palin had not known that Africa was a continent, not a country, and claiming that she did not know which countries were covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Does the Times think that by unquestioningly repeating an assertion made by Fox News (without casting any doubt on it) that they are guilt free on the matter?
This is the same NY Times which, in 2002/2003 acted as court stenographers for the Bush administration. Their breathless reporting on Iraq's non-existant WMDs revealed them to be credulous fools at best, willing accomplices at worst.
Is the Times insane enough to think that we've already forgotten the wretched spectacle of Judith Miller, and her disgraceful behaviour during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq?
To be accused of being "sloppy" or "specious" by these cockroaches - well, it's a hoot. I see we can look forward to a few more years of decline at the rag that is the Times. What's next? Topless tarts on Page 3?
I'm sorry, this Biblical god fellow is not a very good source for goodness. If we went by that definition, Christmas would be a time when we'd slaughter Amelekites, get drunk and have sex with daughters, stone gay people, and treat molluscs as abominations. None of those things sound very merry to me. Wouldn't there be a better source for goodness that doesn't rely on archaic xenophobia and delusion from bad old books? How about empathy and the general principle that we should do to others what we would like them to do for us? Atheists can follow that one, and they don't believe in god at all.
"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity... I grew up with those people".
Sarah Palin, quoting fascist writer Westbrook Pegler
...many local newspapers around the country have covered recent incidents of racially motivated reactions to last week's election, from flags hung upside-down to the dangling of nooses and cross burnings. As we noted last week, a couple in northern New Jersey who had an Obama sign on their front lawn woke up to find the charred remains of a cross. Local residents today announced a "unity march" to protest the still-unsolved incident...
...In Midland, Mich., a man dressed in full Ku Klux Klan regalia walked around toting a handgun and waving an American flag. Initially denying it, the man eventually admitted to police that the display was a reaction to the Obama victory. “[The man] had a concealed weapon permit and was walking up and down the sidewalk in front of a vehicle dealership while some motorists shouted obscenities at him and others shouted accolades," police told The Saginaw News.
Parents in Rexburg, Idaho, contacted school officials this week after they learned that 2nd and 3rd graders on a school bus were chanting, "Assasssinate Obama!"
In Britain, Obama's victory has exposed a predominantly white minority's inherent suspicion and mistrust of black people. Christopher Hitchens, appearing on Newsnight last week, declared: "We do not have our first black president. He is not black. He is as black as he is white. He is not full black." Rod Liddle, writing in the current edition of the Spectator under the headline "Is Barack Obama really black?", suggested that "coloured" - a term of reference used in apartheid South Africa - would be more appropriate.
Charles Moore, writing in the same magazine, went even further, observing that the president-elect "does not resemble, in his attitude and demeanour, the racist stereotype of an ape". Simply calling a stereotype "racist" does not absolve Moore of his implicit endorsement of that stereotype.
He uses this remarkable moment in history to remind us all of one of the most brutal and barbaric symbols that has been used throughout the ages to sub-humanise black people. According to Moore: "It is so important that Barack Obama is half white." As a mixed race person, this racist attitude is something with which mixed-race people are all too familiar. The implication is that we are only civilised because we have a white parent.
...at some point the woman decided she wanted to leave, leading to an argument with Foster, during which he pushed her down and shot her with a .40-caliber handgun, police said.
Members of the group set fire to the woman's belongings before dumping her body under brush several miles away.
However, authorities were alerted after Foster's son and another member of the group went to a supermarket in the town of Bogalusa and asked how they could remove bloodstains from their clothes. The shop assistant recognised them and called police, who went to the scene and found five members of the group in the woods.
"The IQ level of this group is not impressive, to be kind," Sheriff Jack Strain told a news conference, adding, "I can't imagine anyone feeling endangered or at risk by any one of these kooks."
Aw, that ain't fair. If cretins like Hitch and Moore can get on the air then why not Buddy Lee, Cletus, Bodean, Jabbo, Ace, Earl, Harley, Opie, Peanut, Roady, and Tootie? Fukkin' east coast racist elitists! Let the REAL haters from "small town" Amurka awn duh TayVee!
Concerns are mainly around toxic nanoparticles that may be able to permeate protective barriers in the body, such as those surrounding the brain or a baby developing in the womb.
The team used the example of asbestos, another innovative material that was later found to be a carcinogenic, to demonstrate the possible implications to health.
Some nanoparticles display similar characteristics to asbestos.
The print media is getting in on it too, with the Brit rag The Guardian saying that Nkunda’s troops may have actually “killed civilians,” as if that was anything unusual in Central Africa...
...Every word, every disgusting damn word, of these BBC and Guardian stories is bullshit. actually makes me sick, listening to these stupid lies over and over. The reason Nkunda’s little army (estimates range from 5000 to 10000 men) advanced into Eastern Congo this week is that the Hutu gangs were getting a little too aggressive about jumping ethnic-Tutsi villages in eastern Congo, killing the men and kidnapping women and girls as sex slaves. Nkunda knows very well nobody else will protect the Tutsi, for the simple reason nobody ever has. So he went in to do it himself.
Another problem in the U.S. is that powerful industries were built around this growing demand. Whatever decision Wall Street takes right now, the demand is going to fall. What will happen to these industries? In 2000, we estimated that 25 percent of the U.S. economy would disappear. Today, we think the number is closest to one-third — if not more.
That's an incredible amount! But what exactly does this mean — the destruction of one-fourth of the U.S. economy? It means an uncontrollable increase in unemployment, a horrible depression, a sharp increase in the effect of social services on the budget... Now, the U.S. is jumping all over the place doing everything its can to rescue this fraction of the economy. The government is stimulating banks and manufacturing... But regardless, in 2-3 years, the U.S. will face a crisis similar to the Great Depression.
The new disposition on Iran is similarly nuanced. The noises are much less warlike. Obama promises diplomacy and dialogue, and relegates force to where it should be: a last, not a first, resort. But his own advisers counsel that Obama is firm on this matter. He has concluded that Tehran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, not least because it would trigger a regional arms race. He will use negotiation to thwart that possibility. But if that fails, the use of force remains an option.
And that's when the new global context could make all the difference. Imagine if John McCain had toured European capitals, trying to assemble a coalition for strikes against Iran. He'd have barely got a hearing. Two million people would have marched in London waving banners declaring: "We won't get fooled again."
But if Obama were to make the case, explaining that he had seen through the nonsense of Iraqi WMD but that the Iranian threat was real, he would surely earn a very different response. In that sense if no other, armed international action against Iran might be more achievable under an Obama presidency than it would have been otherwise.
Oh they've all changed now. Suddenly they all like Obama, so even Republican spokesmen are saying things like: "This great and truly memorable moment shows what a wonderful country we are.
"Sure, during the campaign we called him a sleazy Marxist terrorist dirty Muslim atheist thieving anti-American Arab anarchist lying cowardly darky, but let's not allow that to cloud this joyful, wonderful result."
Some of them almost slip-up and say, "Can I be the first to say how glad I am that this moment, which I've spent my entire life trying to prevent, has happened."
The conviction came a week before election day — too late to replace the longest-serving Republican on ballots in Alaska. If Stevens wins the election and then relinquishes his seat, that’s when things could get interesting.
It would force a special election 60 to 90 days from the time the vacancy occurs. Alaska’s Division of Elections said Palin would make a temporary appointment to hold the seat until a new senator is chosen by special election. One candidate being discussed in Alaska’s Republican circles? Yes, the governor herself. If Palin doesn’t take that step, she could also play the role of kingmaker and hand a political ally the tag of incumbent heading into the special election.
The current occupant of the White House, however, has sedulously prepared for his successor the biggest shit sandwich the world has ever seen, and there is naturally some concern that Mr. Obama might choke on it. The dilemma is essentially this: the consumer economy we all knew and loved has died. There will be pressure from nearly every quarter to keep it hooked up to the costly life support machines even though it is dead. A different economy is waiting to be born, but it is nothing like the one that has died. The economy-to-come is one of rigor and austerity. It is not the kind of thing that a nation of overfed clowns is used to. Do we even have a prayer of getting to it, or are we going to squander our dwindling resources on life support for something that is already dead?
Ah - so, as I speculated at the time, cops wereinstigating violence at the DNC protests a few weeks ago.
Undercover police officers posing as protesters staged a fight with a police commander during the Democratic convention, and it was so convincing they were pepper-sprayed by a deputy who wasn’t in on the ruse, a civil liberties group says.
The officers pretended to struggle with the Denver police commander so it would look like they were being forcibly removed from a big demonstration and their cover wouldn’t be blown, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado said.
Hypnotized by “change” and “race” people could not see the similarities Obama has with McCain/Bush/Republicans. They are all for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although initially Obama opposed the Iraqi invasion, he always voted for the surge and more war funding in Iraq. He wants to leave a residual force in military bases in Iraq, and wants to ship another military surge to Afghanistan to keep bombing Pakistani borders. He supported Israeli terror and aggression against Palestinians and the war against Lebanon. Obama is belligerent towards Iran promising to do “everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”. He was confrontational towards Russia after the war in Georgia. He is for war against “global terrorist” and promised to bring Osama bin Laden in dead or alive. He is for drug wars (protecting drug trade, whose money goes through Wall Street). Locally, he supports the death penalty, pollutant nuclear and coal industries, and had never talked about abolishing oppressive laws such as Patriot Act, homeland security, internet control, and wiretapping and spying on American citizens.
Tuesday night, many saw a bit of blue sky and sun, the effects of which spilled into the following day. I don't know what your experience was like, but here in Ann Arbor, most people I ran into on Wednesday were decidedly giddy. Especially African-Americans. A warm, convivial feeling all around. It was nice, but the reality of this savage world will kill that off sooner than later. For while the symbolism of Obama's victory will always resonate, the man was chosen to manage a corporate/military empire. And so far, our Manager-Elect has not gone against brand. His first cabinet move, asking Rahm Emanuel to be White House Chief of Staff, is concrete proof of that. Obama's followers may still be weeping, dancing, smiling, but the man himself is consolidating his new power, placing the cutthroat Emanuel in a prominent position.
How are you liking CHANGE so far?
America gains a new leader, and North Korea may be about to lose one, if this photo is anything to go by:
Besides the creepy lack of shadows, I think what's flagging the fake for most people is the very odd perspective:
Now it may be that the surface on which the apparatchiks are standing isn't level, in which case I formally apologise to the Intelligence agencies of the Peoples' Democratic Republic of North Korea (well known as a Workers' Paradise). All hail JUCHE!
Three months to go - can we get Bush's approval rating below 20%? Have I ever told you that the guy is a complete and total jerk? Have I? Come on Monkey man, you can do it! One more heave, and you'll be an all-time loser!
Speaking of: Palin2012.com has been registered by Alaskan Repukes.
There is speculation that in the event of Ted Stevens (crooked Republican Senator from Alaska) being reelected, he could be removed from office (likely), to be replaced by - well, ask the Governor of Alaska. Wink-wink. Wink-wink. Ohhhh Yahhh. You betcha!!!
You'd better hope the last few absentee votes break for the Democrat Begich!
After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.
Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.
"Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate," said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. "To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you."
Added Obama, "It's a great day for our nation."
Though such behavior appears to directly undermine their own well-being, lower-income voters have historically supported candidates determined to screw them six ways to Sunday, including Bill Clinton, who incarcerated them in record numbers and cut the welfare benefits many depended on for day-to-day sustenance, and George W. Bush, who widened the gap between them and the rich and sent thousands of them to die in Iraq. This year's election is reportedly unique in that the nation's poor must not only weigh how deeply and painfully their chosen candidate will penetrate their rectums, but must also consider unforeseen outside circumstances—such as economic collapse and terrorism—that might allow the next president to bend them over and brutally rape them in ways they never thought possible.
Apparently there's some kind of local election going on in the US right now. Blah.
A happy sound:
Work on my new site angry animator continues. (Do me a favour and click on that link - I need to see if the server can handle a small spike in traffic). Thanks!
I have an ongoing plan to break idleworm into four separate sites. All the doom and gloom/politics stays here, just how you home-pagers like it - plus, I'll convert idleworm to a WordPress format, which will allow me to appoint other people as authors - who can update the home page as well! All the games and fun stuff will be off-loaded to another site, yet to be designed. A fourth site will house the energy/growth documentary, as well as any other large scale projects. The forum will be resurrected as well. One step at a time!
Over the years I've had ideas for projects that should be made. I don't have the ability to do them, but it doesn't stop me from wanting someone else to leap in. Sure, Hollywood is busy churning out shitty superhero films and remakes of garbage TV shows from the 70s and 80s. Here's a freebie for the imagination-impaired writers/producers: make a movie about the German film "Kolberg":
Kolberg, begun in 1943, was made in Agfacolor with high production values. At a cost of more than eight million marks, it was the most expensive film of the Nazi era. At a time of war, thousands of soldiers were used in the film, some diverted from their fighting positions at substantial cost. To film scenes with snow during summer, 100 railway wagons brought salt to the set in Pomerania. The film was finally completed at the Babelsberg Studios at Potsdam while the town and nearby Berlin were being steadily bombed by the Allies.
The film was opened in a temporary cinema in Berlin and ran under the constant threat of air raids until the fall of Berlin in May 1945; the film came far too late for the hoped-for propaganda effect. Many theatres throughout Germany were already destroyed.
You have to see this to believe it:
Every one of those men is a soldier, dragged back from the front, to make a movie. I'd like to see a film from the viewpoint of the troops used as extras. It must have been an inkling for many that their leaders were insane. It's thought that this film shortened WW2 by weeks or months, as it diverted so many resources from the German war effort. Here's a moving scene where King Frederick makes a speech (in the distinctive style of a more recent German leader!)
Another item on my wish list - a major TV documentary about the world of mathematics. The personalities are - well - a fascinating combination of human and alien. 13 one-hour episodes (in the format of "Civilisation" or "Cosmos") would cover a lot of ground. Take Paul Erdos, for example:
Possessions meant little to Erdos; most of his belongings would fit in a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other earnings were in general donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life as a vagabond, travelling between scientific conferences and the homes of colleagues all over the world. He would typically show up at a colleague's doorstep and announce "my brain is open", staying long enough to collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom he (Erdos) should visit next. His working style has been humorously compared to traversing a linked list.
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdos drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdos.)[5] After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[6] Erdos won the bet, but complained during his abstinence that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.
He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary: he spoke of "The Book", an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems. Lecturing in 1985 he said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book." He himself doubted the existence of God, whom he called the "Supreme Fascist" (SF) [7]. He accused the SF of hiding his socks and Hungarian passports, and of keeping the most elegant mathematical proofs to himself. When he saw a particularly beautiful mathematical proof he would exclaim, "This one's from The Book!". This later inspired a book entitled Proofs from THE BOOK.
Other idiosyncratic elements of Erdos' vocabulary include:
* children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted e);
* women were "bosses";
* men were "slaves";
* people who stopped doing math had "died";
* people who died had "left";
* alcoholic drinks were "poison";
* music was "noise";
* people who had married were "captured";
* people who had divorced were "liberated" and
* to give a mathematical lecture was "to preach".
Also, all countries which he thought failed to provide freedom to individuals as long as they did no harm to anyone else were classified as imperialist and given a name that began with a lowercase letter. For example, the U.S. was "samland" (after Uncle Sam), the Soviet Union was "joedom" (after Joseph Stalin), and Israel was "israel". For his epitaph he suggested, "I've finally stopped getting dumber."
Here's a youtube link to a one hour drama about Stephen Hawking's early years - worth a gander. (Yeah, it's more physics than maths, but there you go).
Another film that needs to be made: a heavyweight documentary about the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Maybe westerners wouldn't be so blase about messing around in the Persian Gulf if they knew a bit more about the recent history. From Gary Brecher's article, The War Nobody Watched
Imagine a war that went on for eight years, caused more than a million casualties, and went through five distinct phases, with every kind of combat you could ask for from huge tank battles, human-wave offensives, artillery duels and amphibious assaults to exotic stuff like naval battles and dogfights with squadrons of MIGs and Sukhois up against American F-14s and F-4s.
Sounds pretty great, right? Well, if you're old enough to remember 1980, it happened right in front of your eyes and if you were like most Americans, you probably weren't interested. It's the Iran-Iraq War I'm talking about here, and most people barely noticed it. It was like that old hippie line, "What if they held a war and nobody came?" The armies showed up all right, but the network news crews didn't bother, even though they were always showing footage from lame little fake wars like Nicaragua and Ulster.
There's still time to visit Iran and interview veterans and survivors. Nobody's going to do it, because they'd need not just money or balls, but both. Oh well.
And the Iranians kept coming. Like the Russians in WW II, they just didn't mind dying, and it started to spook the Iraqis. Saddam tried pretending nothing had happened: in the spring of 1982 he pulled all Iraqi forces back to the 1980 border. All that did was get the Iranians excited. They kept coming, with a huge human-wave attack on Basra. The poor militia bastards, with no training or coordination, just ran at the enemy yelling about Allah. They died like flies, up against Iraqi tanks and minefields. It was one of the most bloody, stupid assaults since 1945.
Saddam knew he had to do something. Well, you know the saying: "when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." Saddam went shopping through every Warsaw-Pact weapons factory that would let him and his oil money in. He bought everything from MLRS systems to T-62s, but the big-ticket item was a whole fleet of the new Soviet Mi-24 attack helicopter.
If you've read about what the Mi-24 did to the Afghans (before we gave them an edge with the Stinger), you can imagine what a fleet of factory-fresh Mi-24s did to the Iranians' human-wave attacks in 1983. It was a slaughter, and the Iraqis proved that even if they weren't much good at dying, they were good at killing. In one Iranian human-wave attack the Iraqis flew 200 Mi-24 sorties, hosing down the poor Shiite bastards like crop dusters going over a cabbage field.
Saddam's military engineers turned the marshes on the border into artificial lakes, like giant moats in front of the Iraqi lines. And he told his commanders they had one more weapon: gas. The Iraqis started using Mustard Gas, the sickest weapon of WW I. Even the Nazis never dared to use it, but Saddam's troops used it to break up mass infantry attacks. And nobody much cared. That's the story of this whole war: nobody outside of the two countries gave a damn what happened. From 1984 on, the war was like a stuck LP. The Iranians spent lives like Foch and Kitchener on the Western Front, and the Iraqis tried to kill Persians without risking their own cowardly hides.
Did you know that some Christian dingbat has dubbed today the “Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies?” Well here they are, at the Wall Street bull statue thing, praying to Jesus for money. The dingbat has explained, “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems.”
Well chaps, I've started another website (with two more to come). It's a blog specifically dedicated to the art of animation:
Angry Animator.
Currently it's just housing the first three tutorials that I put together. I'm hoping to expand it from time to time, as well as place links to funny animations that I stumble across. It'll probably end up duplicating a lot of the funny links from idleworm. I'll also write some screeds on the state of the animation industry. It's PG-13 (I think). I'd like it to be reasonably student friendly.
Idleworm will change, for the better. Right now I hand-code it, which is tedious. I'll be switching it over to a proper blog format, which will make it easier to update - and possibly allow for more than one person to add updates...
Before xmas, I hope to resurrect the idleworm forum, as well as do a lot of house-cleaning. I need to mail off cartoon artwork to donors (yes, I still haven't done that), as well as peel off the idleworm cartoons onto a games-only site (more webdesign, crap), and a site purely for the Oil Documentary. No rest for the wicked.
Ha! The notion that climate scientists in the 70s had a consensus about a new Ice age is total bunkum. The AGW deniers have repeated this lie so often, and so loudly, that most of us began to believe it. A couple of magazine covers does NOT a consensus make.
The Living Planet report calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. As a result, we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr every year - double the estimated losses made by the world's financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis - say the report's authors, led by the conservation group WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund. The figure is based on a UN report which calculated the economic value of services provided by ecosystems destroyed annually, such as diminished rainfall for crops or reduced flood protection.
The problem is also getting worse as populations and consumption keep growing faster than technology finds new ways of expanding what can be produced from the natural world. This had led the report to predict that by 2030, if nothing changes, mankind would need two planets to sustain its lifestyle. "The recent downturn in the global economy is a stark reminder of the consequences of living beyond our means," says James Leape, WWF International's director general. "But the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological credit crunch."
Mike Ruppert: The Hidden Gold Premium.
Great interview with American composer John Adams (two pages): Hallelujah Junction. Unless you're a fan, probably not of interest.
In my days at catholic school, which turned me into an atheist faster than any secular school probably would have, we had a nun in the fifth grade who told us that if you bit into the Eucharist, blood would squirt out into your mouth. She meant to scare us into not biting the wafer of course but it had the adverse effect and just made us more curious about the circulatory system of the communion wafer. Several of us made a pact that at the next Mass, we would bite into the body of Christ and see if he would indeed bleed. We were not sure exactly what would happen since we were taught that lying is a sin and surely Sister Mary Margaret, a bride of Christ, would never think about blackening her soul with even a venial sin. But the idea of blood squirting out of a wafer seemed laughable and having recently learned the Scientific Method we set out to find out for ourselves.
Obama wants to enlarge the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in Afghanistan; to attack Pakistan's territory if it obstructs any unilateral US mission to kill Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror in a hundred countries, creating a new international intelligence and law enforcement "infrastructure" to take down terrorist networks. A fresh start? Where does this differ from Bush's commitment on 20 September 2001, to an ongoing "war on terror" against "every terrorist group of global reach" and "any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism"?
The November summit in Washington could produce some unwelcome surprises which were hinted at by Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister, Olarn Chaipravat, who told Bloomberg News: ,
"The message of this initiative is for China to consider whether or not China would open up its banking system and allow the strongest currency in the world, which is the Chinese yuan, to be the rightful and anointed convertible currency of the world."
Surely, the present financial malaise which has its roots in Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve, has demonstrated that the dollar must be replaced as the world's "reserve currency" and that America must be deposed as the de facto steward of the global economic system. Leadership implies responsibility and the US must be held to account for its failings. It's time for a change.
Ironically, least affected by the crisis are Islamic banks.
They have largely been immune to the collapse because Islamic banking prohibits the acquisition of wealth via gambling (or alcohol, tobacco, pornography, or stocks in armaments companies), and forbids the buying and selling of a debt as well as usury. Additionally, Shari'ah banking laws forbid investing in any company with debts that exceed thirty percent.
"Islamic banking institutions have not failed per se as they deal in tangible assets and assume the risk" said Dr. Mohammed Ramady, Professor of Economics at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals. "Although the Islamic banking sector is also part of the global economy, the impact of direct exposure to sub-prime asset investments has been low" he continued. "The liquidity slowdown has especially affected Dubai, with its heavy international borrowing. The most negative effect has been a loss of confidence in the regional stock markets." Instead, said Dr. Ramady, oil surplus Arab nations are "reconsidering overseas investments in financial assets" and speeding up their own domestic projects.
Eight years ago, in May 2000, Saudi Islamic banker His Highness Dr. Nayef bin Fawaaz ibn Sha'alan publicly gave a series of economic lectures in Gulf states. At the time his research showed that Arab investments in the US, to the tune of $1.5 trillion, were effectively being held hostage and he recommended they be pulled out and reinvested in the tangibles of the Arab and Islamic markets. "Not in stocks however because the stock market could be manipulated remotely, as we have seen in the last couple of years in the Arab market where trillions of dollars evaporated" he said.
He warned then that it was a certainty that the US economic system was on the verge of collapse because of its cumulative debts, ever-increasing deficit and the interest on that debt. "When the debts and deficits come due, they just issue new Treasury bonds to cover the old bonds due, with their interest and the new deficit too." The cycle cannot be stopped or the debt cancelled because the US would no longer be able to borrow. The consequence of relieving this cycle would be a total collapse of their economic system as opposed to the partial, albeit massive, crash of 2008.
"Islamic banking", said Dr. Al-Sha'alan, "always protects the individuals' wealth while putting a cap on selfishness and greed. It has the best of capitalism - filtering out its negatives - and the best of socialism - filtering out its negatives too." Both systems inevitably had to fail. Additionally, Europe and Japan did not need to be held accountable and indebted to America anymore for protection against the Soviets.
"The essential difference between the Islamic economic system and the capitalist system", he continued "is that in Islam wealth belongs to God - the individual being only its manager. It is a means, not a goal. In capitalism, it is the reverse: money belongs to the individual, and is a goal in and of itself. In America especially, money is worshipped like God."
In sum, the crash of the entire global economic system is a result of America's fiscal arrogance based upon one set of rules for itself and another for the rest of the world. Its increased creative financing deluded its people into a false sense of security, and now looks like the failure of capitalism altogether.
The whole exercise in democracy by force against Arab Muslim nations has almost bankrupted the US. The Cold War is over and the US has nothing to offer: no exports, no production, few natural resources, and no service sector economy.
The very markets that resisted US economic policies the most, having curbed foreign direct investments into America, are those who will fare best and come out ahead.
A funny thing happened on the way to the Commodities Exchange...
The current official price of Gold is $730 an ounce. This is odd, given that gold dealers are finding it hard to find sufficient coins to meet collector demand. On eBay, I've seen gold eagles which have a theoretical value of $760 or $770 routinely selling for $950-$1000. This suggests that there's a difference in price between ACTUAL GOLD and PAPER GOLD (the kind that Wall Street is so fond of - the kind that can be created on a computer hard drive with the push of a button...)
Yesterday, I was mugged by a member of the McCain/Palin campaign.
I was walking down the street when some asshole flew by in a helicopter, firing at me with a machine gun. I remember hearing a shout of "You Betcha!", and seeing a flash of a $10,000 Louis Vuitton handbag. A bullet grazed my cheek.
I remember an awful woman with an alaskan accent trying to sexually assault me. She was white. I definitely remember that. She was a WHITE woman. I managed to fight her off,but not before she carved some words on my forehead:
I almost forgot: here's the direct link to my youtube channel. If you're a sporadic visitor, be sure to subscribe to it - that way you'll get automatic emails to update you about fresh animated works.
Commercial banks borrowed a record of $105.8 billion a day, on average, from the Federal Reserve's emergency lending window over the past week, according to Fed data released Thursday.
Suffering from the ongoing credit crunch, banks turned to the Federal Reserve for funds, blowing through the previous borrowing record of $99.7 billion, set last week, the central bank reported.
US states are running out of cash. Across the country, state governors are facing the possibility of not being able to pay their policemen, teachers and firemen this month. That's because, when the world's credit markets went into deep freeze, local governments had their lifeline – the municipal bond market – cut. And this source of funding is critical to the daily running of government. Since tax revenues vary from month to month, states raise cash to build bridges or pay their bills by issuing municipal bonds.
So, unless Washington weighs in with a huge bailout for the municipal bond market, public services in America are set to be stripped to the bone. And that means that projects to build new bridges, repair roads and lay water pipelines are likely to be cancelled as states, fearful of civil unrest, divert precious funds to pay police and firemen. As such, California, for example, may find it difficult to resist the temptation to dip into the $20bn that it has set aside for rebuilding its threadbare infrastructure. It seems that the urgent task of replacing America's rusted water mains and faltering bridges may well have to wait a little longer.
The European Think-Tank GEAB makes a Big Prediction: that in the Summer of 2009, the U.S. will default on its debt. Overnight, a "new dollar" will replace the Greenback.
The sudden shock that will result from the US defaulting in summer 2009 is partly due to this decoupling of decision-making processes of the world’s largest economies with regard to the US. It is predictable and can be dampened if global players start to anticipate it. As a matter of fact, it is one of the topics developed in this 28th edition of the GEAB: LEAP/E2020 hopes that the September shock has “educated” the world’s political, economic and financial policy-makers and made them understand that it is easier to act by anticipation than in a panic. It would be a pity if Euroland, Asia and oil-producing countries, as well as US citizens of course, discover one morning of summer 2009 that, after a long-week-end or bank-holiday in the US, their US T-Bonds and Dollars are only worth 10 percent of their value because a « new Dollar » has just been imposed.
...nothing in her growing volume of stupidity on display tops her answer to a third grader who wanted to know what a Vice President does.
From a television interview with KUSA in Colorado:
Q: Brandon Garcia wants to know, "What does the Vice President do?"
PALIN: That's something that Piper would ask me! ... They're in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.
Say what? The Vice President presides over sessions of the Senate and serves as the tie-breaking vote in case of a tie. That’s the only role the Constitution gives to the Vice President when it comes to the Senate.
In charge of the Senate? This no doubt comes as a surprise to Harry Reid, the majority leader of the Senate and the guy who’s really in charge.
Perhaps the greatest of Bush's many failures: Pakistan, which is now on the brink of total chaos:
Pakistan is experiencing power cuts that have led to hourly blackouts, a doubling of basic food prices and a currency that has lost a third of its value in the past year. "The awful thing is there's no solution in sight – neither in the war on terror nor on the economic side," Mr Khan said during a visit to London. Heightening the sense of national emergency, the government yesterday turned to the International Monetary Fund for $15bn (£9.3bn) to cope with a balance of payments crisis caused by a flight of capital, after previously saying that applying to the IMF would be a last resort.
Almost every day there are retaliatory attacks against police and soldiers and Western targets. Hundreds of soldiers and an unknown number of civilians are losing their lives. The national parliament rejected the US influence on the government by adopting a resolution last night calling for an "independent" foreign policy and urging dialogue with the extremists.
The military operation against the so-called Pakistan Taliban is concentrated in the largely autonomous tribal areas that border Afghanistan. A total of 120,000 troops and paramilitary forces have been deployed against what senior officers say is a skilled and tenacious enemy. "They do not fight in one place, you cannot fight them in one place. It's basically guerrilla warfare," said Lt Col Haider Baseer, a military spokesman. "The area is mountainous, it's vast. And everybody carries a gun. It's the culture."
what makes Scandinavia particularly magical is what it lacks. "There is no national anti-gay rights movement," writes Zuckerman, "there are no 'Jesus fish' imprinted on advertisements in the yellow pages, there are no school boards or school administrators who publicly doubt the evidence for human evolution ... there are no religiously inspired 'abstinence only' sex education curricula ... there are no parental groups lobbying schools and city councils to remove Harry Potter books from school and public libraries ... there are no restaurants that include Bible verses on their menus and placemats, there are no 'Faith Nights' at national sporting events ..."
Sounds like many countries outside the US. I don't think you need to visit Scandinavia to find a sane society.
Merrill Lynch & Co., UBS AG and JPMorgan & Chase Co. are telling senior bankers in Asia to fly coach on short-haul flights and reduce non-essential travel as they step up cost cuts, officials at the firms said.
UBS advised bankers this month to travel economy class for flights of up to five hours, two officials at the biggest Swiss bank said, asking not to be identified because it's an internal policy. Merrill employees have been told to travel economy for flights of as much as three hours since mid-September, two executives at the firm said.
Global shipping is grinding to a halt because of the refusal of banks to issue letters of credit.
I was alerted to this by TJ Marta, RBC Capital Market's New York-based fixed income strategist on the weekend, during an interview for the ABC's Inside Business program.
In fact the Baltic Dry Index of bulk shipping rates has collapsed by 89 per cent – from 12,000 in May to 1355 last night. In October alone it has fallen 61 per cent. Rates for Capesize vessels used to ship grains, iron ore and coal have fallen 95 per cent.
In his column in the London Telegraph last night, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote that he believed shipping was now slowing as fast as it did in late 1931.
Khalid Hashim, managing director of Precious Shipping, Thailand's second-largest shipping company, was quoted in the Taiwan News yesterday as saying: "Letters of credit and the credit lines for trade currently are frozen. Nothing is moving because the trader doesn't want to take the risk of putting cargo on the boat and finding that nobody can pay."
Here is the deal in even simpler terms. In order to prevent the "Great Depression II", the Fed and the Treasury have embarked on a series of measures similar in nature to those that caused the great depression.
The root cause of the great depression was the unsound lending patterns leading up to it. Those same unsound lending practices, now carried to the very limits of legality via Bernanke's alphabet soup of facilities, cannot possibly be the cure.
In retrospect, the title of this post is inaccurate. It really should read Fed is Attempting to Cause "Great Depression II".
Here's a recent animation I've done. It's a test piece for a sequence in my film which tries to explain the futility of exponential growth on a finite planet:
I think I'll start front-loading the home page with funny stuff, and leave the doom for afterwards. Since I started posting scarier economic content - justifiably - the site's traffic has tapered off - as in, HALVED, over the last six months. Well, I tried to warn people - I was yelling about bank failures and a systemic crisis at least as far back in August - 2007.
You might get a kick out of reading those past posts here, and here, and here. I guess people don't want bad news. If I keep it up, I'll probably end up with seven or eight regular readers. Honestly, I'm stumped. No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose. Anyway, first the funnies:
Banks and dealers’ overall direct borrowings from the Fed averaged a record $437.53 billion per day in the week ended October 15, topping the previous week’s $420.16 billion per day.
forget the now-familiar tales of mortgages gone bad. The next horror for beaten-down financial firms is the $950 billion worth of outstanding credit-card debt—much of it toxic...
...The consumer debt bomb is already beginning to spray shrapnel throughout the financial markets, further weakening the U.S. economy. "The next meltdown will be in credit cards," says Gregory Larkin, senior analyst at research firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. Adds William Black, senior vice-president of Moody's Investors Service's structured finance team: "We still haven't hit the post-recessionary peaks [in credit-card losses], so things will get worse before they get better."
Current emergency meetings on banks and markets are still only in the stage where politicians and central bankers are bickering over how to create a few more hundred billions Euros and FRNs. But toxic MBS pale in comparison to the mushrooming growth of the derivatives market. According to figures released in the quarterly review of the BIS (pp A103) in September the total notional amount of outstanding derivatives in all categories rose 15% to a mindboggling $596 TRILLION as of December 2007.
Consumption of resources is rising rapidly, biodiversity is plummeting and just about every measure shows humans affecting Earth on a vast scale. Most of us accept the need for a more sustainable way to live, by reducing carbon emissions, developing renewable technology and increasing energy efficiency.
But are these efforts to save the planet doomed? A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy.
As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.
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