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If you suffer the twin misfortunes of living in America and being in debt, do yourself a favor and read this. Legal servitude awates the bankrupt:
| Under the new laws, in many instances, debtors are restricted to monthly living allowances mandated by the IRS, regardless of individual circumstances upon the same quasi-criminal standards used to prosecute unpaid taxes. Under the new laws, in some cases, debtors are required to live under court supervision with all disposable income applied to the full payment of all debts for a period of five years or until paid in full. |
Unfortunate DVD blurb...
2006 September 14, Wednesday
My favorite cartoonist is back from hiatus. Steve Bell! Here's another...
2006 September 12, Tuesday
Interesting. Josef Goebbels has a profile on imdb.com, (as does you know who) for his work on the nazi propaganda films. Kolberg sounds interesting, in a twisted Götterdämmerung kind of way. Check out Hitler's profile - the poor guy should be getting residuals!
Heh heh heh: America's coming economic meltdown. If it does happen, it'll be the most predicted collapse ever.
More acknowledgement that Iraq is F#cked
I'd never heard of the British slaughter of 300,000 Kikuyu. Jolly good job on the cover up, eh what?
| But there are simpler reasons, bravely revealed in Caroline Elkins's account of the slaughter of some 300,000 ethnic Kikuyu of Kenya, the torture of hundreds of thousands more, and the internment of the entire Kikuyu population, in mid-20th-century Kenya. As Elkins reveals, the Brits simply destroyed every record of the massacres they could find, and -- unlike the French, Germans or other conscience-harried colonials -- kept the settlers' oath of Omerta, never revealing what they did to the "Kukes" to anyone except other vets whose anecdotes were as bloody and full of blame as theirs. The difference between the British Empire and other fascist empires is not that these guys were nicer. Nobody who reads this book could continue to believe that, if they were fool enough to believe it beforehand. The difference is that the Brits were good at it, and had no conscience to trouble them. Thanks to that careful incineration of records and highly adaptive national sociopathic disorder, "...there would be no soul-searching or public accounting [in Britain] for the crimes perpetrated against the hundreds of thousands of men and women in Kenya." |
2006 September 11, Monday
Crazy busy - so posting will be erratic for a couple of weeks. I'll do what I can!
As I don't watch TV news (be afraid, they want to kill us, fear, terror, mayhem, be scared!), I almost forgot that this was the 911 anniversary. This brings back memories:
| The visual shock was great, of course. Particularly when our little president was discovered by the ubiquitous TV camera in a Florida school where he was reading to his peers from "The Pet Goat", an inspirational tale calculated to encourage small Americans to stand tall: "like", as he would put it, "they should." An aide interrupts the reading; murmurs something in the presidential ear: the presidential eyes widen...What then did our very own Romulus Augustulus do during the rest of September 11th? He read some more of "The Pet Goat", knowing that his puppet-meister, vice president Cheney, was safely embedded in some secret spot. Then the little emperor was hustled away in Air Force One for a tour of our most luxurious bunkers where he might avoid the attentions of new attackers, should they come. |
| It won't even start to produce oil until 2013, if everything goes according to schedule. Then, it (the entire tertiary GOM zone) may eventually produce 400,000 barrels per day. That's about how much Mexico's Cantarell field declined in production this year. And how much it will decline next year. And the year after. Ultimately, 3 billion barrels of oil will fuel the world--at current consumption levels--for about 35 days. |
Norway's oil production peaking...
As I write, gold is back under $600! Hooray! Buy the dips.
2006 September 7, Thursday
Comedy: Baggage-Handling Mix-Up Sends Dirty Bomb To St. Louis
Blather.net posts a fascinating article about The Pyramids of Guimar (in Spain's Canary Islands). Scroll down the page for the photos.
This quote from an Australian kid regarding the death of the Crocodile Hunter made me laugh:
| Daniel, 11, asked: "Why did it have to be Steve Irwin? Why couldn't it be someone older like Sean Connery?" |
James Lovelock holds forth on our doom:
| He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops -- from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more. Then, he says, it adjusts. Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean. "There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover." |
| How will our splendid Spaceship Earth so quickly become the oven of our doom? As we sit at his table in Devon, Lovelock expands on his vision. It begins with the melting of ice and snow. As the Arctic grows bare -- the Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster than had been expected -- dark ground emerges and absorbs heat. That melts more snow and softens peat bogs, which release methane. As oceans warm, algae are dying and so absorbing less heat-causing carbon dioxide. To the south, drought already is drying out the great tropical forests of the Amazon. "The forests will melt away just like the snow," Lovelock says. Even the northern forests, those dark cool beauties of pines and firs, suffer. They absorb heat and shelter bears, lynxes and wolves through harsh winters. But recent studies show the boreal forests are drying and dying and inducing more warming. Casting 30, 40 years into the future, Lovelock sees sub-Saharan lands becoming uninhabitable. India runs out of water, Bangladesh drowns, China eyes a Siberian land grab, and local warlords fight bloody wars over water and energy. Lovelock sees the look on your face and pauses. "Look, this is why it's a gloomy book," he says. "Would you care for some more tea?" |
Note to self: always mix coffee with whiskey. Sizzle.
A little optimism (of sorts): The strategy of salvage by J.M. Greer has a nice analogy for the current situation:
| We’re in much the same situation as family members who have to decide on medical treament for an elderly parent with half a dozen vital systems on the verge of giving out. If the only outcome we’re willing to accept is keeping Dad alive forever, we guarantee ourselves a desperate, expensive, and futile struggle with the inevitable. People, like civilizations, are mortal, and no matter how much money and technology gets poured into the task of keeping either one alive, sooner or later it won’t be enough. On the other hand, if we accept that Dad is going to die sooner or later, and concentrate on giving him the best possible quality of life in the time he has left, there’s quite a bit that can be done, and real success comes within reach. This can also have the additional benefit of making life better for later generations, because the money that might have been spent paying for exotic medical procedures to keep Dad alive for another three months of misery can go instead to pay college tuition for his grandchildren. The same thing is likely to be true in the twilight years of industrial civilization; the resources we have left can be used either to maintain the industrial system for a few more years, or to cushion the descent into the deindustrial future - not both. |
| In a salvage economy, each of those half a billion alternators is a potential energy source. Take one, add some gears and chain salvaged from a bicycle and some steel borrowed from an old truck, spend a week carving and sanding a 5-foot length of spruce into a propeller, and you’ve got a windmill that will trickle-charge a set of scavenged lead-acid batteries and run a 12-volt refrigerator taken from an old RV. Take half a dozen more, add more bicycle parts, wood in various dimensions, and a year-round stream, and you’ve got a waterwheel-based micro-hydro plant that turns out 12 volts night and day at pretty fair wattage. |
2006 September 6, Wednesday
Heh heh heh: Bush diddles while Iraq burns
| At the Pentagon, senior officials privately refer to Bush as "numnuts" and call his actions "nitshit." Some worry openly about the President's mental capability and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently called a number of senior officers on the carpet and told them to tone down the rhetoric. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of Bush's few supporters in the international community, is looking for ways to distance himself from the President and recently allowed his deputy prime minister John Prescott to openly call Bush's policies "crap." "The President's administration is coming apart at the seams," says a longtime GOP consultant. "He lost the support of the American people long ago and more and more Republicans are jumping off the good ship Bush." |
Save 200 old people, get sued.
A Society of Victims is a great analysis of victim psychology. Worth reading.
| ...contemporary clinical psychology can be compared to the practice of medicine in the late 19th century — a handful of serious, responsible practitioners, a lot of quacks, very poor controls, little accountability, almost no science. It was only by a slow accumulation of painful experience that medicine was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a world of scientific validation, of accountability. In clinical psychology, this process has not even begun. |
2006 September 4, Monday
I found this great video of a George Carlin screed through the Deconsumption site. Superb! Do you want to fight back against the money masters Carlin hates? Stop buying their products.
I'm very glad to have found Dennis Perrin's website. Here, he chronicles his "debate" against two Zionist lunatics:
| From here the "debate" went south in a hurry. Whenever Nada or I tried to make a point or respond to Klein and Zion, one of them, or sometimes both, would interrupt, yelling into the mike in order to drown us out. It was then I noticed that Zion had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch stashed under the table. In the moments when he wasn't bellowing, he poured himself drink after drink, getting more hammered as the night wore on. And of course the more hammered he got, the more abusive he became. |
| A long line formed in the left aisle of the Hall as audience members waited for their turn to speak directly to us. Soon it became clear that most of the questions and criticisms were aimed at Klein and Zion, which they couldn't believe. "Is this audience full of Arabs?!" Zion drunkenly shouted. "We've been set-up!" In fact, several of their critics were Jewish, including an older man who said he was an Israeli from Haifa who took serious issue with Zion's raving. He followed up a point I'd made earlier about Israel's alliance with Christian Phalangists in southern Lebanon, and how this brutal occupation helped give rise to Hezbollah. ("Brutal?" Zion shouted at me. "Are you fucking crazy?!") The Israeli man noted that Lebanese Christian rightists were in league with the German Nazis during World War II, and how shameful it was for Israel to be associated with them. Zion was so loaded at this point that he thought the man called Israelis Nazis, which of course he hadn't. But reality meant nothing to Zion as he screamed at the man, "Fuck you Jew-boy!" As the man quietly returned to his seat, Zion kept yelling, "Don't you walk away from me, Jew-boy!", undeterred by the audience's open outrage. |
Spengler defines 9 elements of American Culture:
| 2. Burnt coffee at exorbitant prices. The most popular cafe chain, whose name decent people do not pronounce, burns its coffee beans to produce what Americans mistakenly believe is an authentic European taste. Proper coffee, by which of course I mean Italian coffee, is bittersweet, not burned. Americans evidently hate the wretched stuff because they drown its flavor in a flood of milk, in the so-called "latte", something I never have observed an Italian request during many years of travel in that country. By contrast, Italians drink cappuccino, mixing a small amount of milk into the coffee and leaving a cap of foam. If Americans do not like it, why do they buy it at exorbitant prices? They do so precisely because the high price makes it a luxury, but an affordable one for secretaries and shopgirls. 3. Dishwater masquerading as tea. Order tea from an American, and you will receive a cup of lukewarm water and a tea-bag. No beverage on earth is more revolting than this. This and the previous item bring to mind a riposte attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "Waiter, if this is coffee, then bring me tea. But if this is tea, then bring me coffee." |
The following article promotes homeopathy (which I do not). Nevertheless, it's got some interesting info on pet food. What NOT to feed your pets:
| ...dogs and cats that have been fed commercial pet food have been poorly nourished for decades. The Animal Protection Institute of America (located in Sacramento, California) published a scathing investigation on the pet food industry in the spring of 1996. According to this report, “What the pet food manufacturers fail to mention is that meat by-products, digests [animal tissue broken down by chemical or enzymatic hydrolysis], and meals are also filled with other substances such as cancerous material cut away from the carcass, Styrofoam packaging containing spoiled meat from supermarkets, ear tags, spoiled slaughter meat, road kill, downer animals [animals that collapse and die from unknown causes], and others.” Another source of meat that you won’t find mentioned on pet food labels is dogs and cats. In 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that euthanized companion animals were found in pet food. Although the pet food industry denied the report, the American Veterinary Medical Association confirmed the story. |
Hooray! Today, we struck our first blow against Lunar Tyranny. Shock and Awe!
2006 September 2, Saturday
I wish the seat in front of my computer was a portable toilet. It would really help a lot.
When I saw this image, one word came from my mouth unbidden: FUCK. Be sure to look at all 10 photos. At least you know where to buy a couple of hundred acres of undeveloped real estate.
Think twice before buying a plasma TV... unless you're planning on growing pineapples in Greenland, of course.
| "But the look of our city will have changed completely within a few years," says Høegh, gazing at brightly colored wooden houses hugging the bare, rocky ground. He imagines the spaces between the houses filling in with birch, ash and poplar trees in the future. The wind has already carried seed from Canada, northern Europe and Iceland to Greenland. "The trees will soon be as tall as the houses." |
I guess the Republicans finally got some photos of Bill Maher in a compromising position with a sheep in lingerie: The Clausewitz of Comedy Central. Now you know how it works.
Wicked: Exploding Passports
Creepy: Walt Disney World fingerprints visitors
Evil: 10 things food companies don't want you to know
Wow: How Channel 4 assassinated President Bush
Jan Lundberg: Where's your ecovillage as meltdown approaches?
This man is 100 years old, yet puts men a quarter of his age to shame. Amazing!
2006 September 1, Friday
Eery and beautiful photo of Uranus. No jokes please.
Astronomers are planning a rebellion to re-instate Pluto. Proper order.
Behold the U.S. real estate bubble. POP!
Ah, I'm in flavor country! The Radioactive Ciggy...
Will the end of oil be The end of food?
Preparing for a crash nuts and bolts. Good advice here.
Books and items that might save your life. I recently bought the grain mill, and 400lbs of grain. I haven't had time to use them yet though - very busy at the moment.
From Latoc: Thriving in the age of collapse, part 1.
Death to The Incandescent
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