email archives		2007, January 31, Thursday. Former Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley: Head for the Hills George, was that comment cleared? Another cryptogon post: City Sues Man for Canceling Trash Service US politicians are flavor of vanilla. I've been looking into Palladium. Over sixteen times rarer than gold (but less than half the price), and with many critical uses...with very few reliable suppliers. Here are two articles: Palladium and Gold, and What about Palladium? Forum thread on Palladium here. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 30, Wednesday. Financial Times: The global battle for food, oil and water George Monbiot gets it: Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by about 1,600%. As the equations produced by Professor Roderick Smith of Imperial College have shown, this means that in the 21st century we will have used 16 times as many economic resources as human beings have consumed since we came down from the trees. So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3,200%, by 2138 to 6,400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat. The Global Battle for Food, Oil & Water. Recession 2008: How bad it can get. Foreclosures spike - and will get much worse. Search foreclosures by state: Realtytrac. Survival Acres: Anthropocene Era. The Forum: Un Funnies. Amazing stuff: Top 15 Amazing Coincidences. Nice to see the Carl Jung is in there. American casualties in the "War on Terror": 72,000. Another funky Saturnian moon. Don't protest against the Mercenaries, or you'll end up in Kangaroo Court! The EU is going to have its first President. Just one problem... SpaceX passes another milestone. I need to make enough cash so that I can buy a ticket off this rock. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 29, Tuesday. Gary Brecher: Take America’s Navy Battle Group…Please! Video: David Attenborough on God. And: David Attenborough on Creationists. I can't wait for the 2008 Olympics. Bring the inhalers! Agreed: a Pathological Individualism Is Poisoning Public Life It's been too long since I read Fred Reed: Dulce et Decorum Est I remember lying in the NSA hospital in Danang, across the way from some guys whose tank had been hit by an RPG. I couldn’t see them because my face was bandaged. Still, we talked. They were badly burned, but seemed likely to live, though with ghastly scars. The RPG had ruptured the hydraulics, they said, and the cherry juice cooked off. The two across from me had gotten out. The other two crewmen had burned to death. Apparently they screamed a lot. You panic, it hurts, you are blinded, you can’t find the hatches, that kind of thing. I could tell a lot of stories like that. I don’t because then I get very strange and want to hit something. A loud-mouthed REMF, for example. Don’t take this as denigration of Ralph, though. Intel work carries its perils. He could have broken a nail on his shift key. Sure, a trip to the nails parlor would fix it, but those things hurt. Ralph of course speaks of the sacrifices our boys are making. They aren’t making sacrifices. They are being sacrificed. Sacrifices are voluntary, but if the troops decline to fight, they go to jail. The mechanics go this way: Having an all-volunteer army minimizes objections to the war since no one of any influence has to go; if a lot of high-school grads from Tennessee are getting killed, well, it’s not a good thing of course, but who really cares? This facilitates hobbyist wars. A voluntary army is a small army, so you have to send the same troops for tour after tour until they are half-mad and their families wrecked. Who cares? They are just rednecks anyway—not our sort of people, nobody a general would let his daughter date. What are the current wars about? Ralph thinks, or says he thinks, that our wars serve to protect civilization, decency, and apple pie. This is either boilerplate brainlessness or deliberate cant. Permit me to cite a contrary view: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives…A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 28, Monday. Radio interview with Richard Dawkins. Snark! Just say no to bastard children. Hm. Does your tap water taste like URINE? It's not the recycled amber nectar that bothers me - it's the pharmaceutical residues that they can't get out - the Prozac and Ambien, not to mention the chemicals from the Pill. First glimpse of the Earth flyby asteroid. See the abandoned wonders of the USSR. That's my God: Limbo Space madness - sixties style: a helicopter big enough to carry a Saturn V moon rocket! Jesus light switch. I want one. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 27, Sunday. I arrived back from Vancouver on Saturday afternoon. Great city. Here's my account of the trip, and the lecture (by James Howard Kunstler of "Clusterfuck Nation" fame). Just saw the movie Reign over me. Here's my review. (Minor spoilers). OK, now back to the countdown. Tick tock tick tock tick tock... Greyzone: The End of Finances? Steve Bell cartoon: The Global Economy. Vegetarians, Vegans and all the well-meaning people who shop at "Whole Foods" take note: You Are Not Saving the Planet! Topsoil depletion due to AGRICULTURE is one of the prime movers behind collapse. Always has been, and probably always will be. Ask the Sumerians. Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth. [Why qualify this statement? Hedging their bets in case we find out that fairies and pixies and economists are the givers of life???] "We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture." "It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman. "We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows. NOTE: Even "no-till" farming will slowly deplete the soil of nutrients (phosphorous in particular being a huge biological bottleneck). Much farming is dependent on irrigation, which can salinate soils, eventually turning them into deserts (which is why the middle east, the "cradle of civilisation" is now a desert instead of a forest). Not to mention the use of aquifers for said irrigation - fossil water, which is being mined far faster than it's being replenished. Nice segue into this Namibian ghost-town. Coming soon to a collapsed superpower near you... Note to rocket scientists: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A GREEN SPACESHIP! I really hate stating the obvious, but someone has to do it: Virgin Galactic today unveiled the design of its new, environmentally benign, space launch system based on the X Prize winning technology of SpaceShipOne, which successfully flew into space for the third time in October 2004 and won the $10m Ansari X Prize. I swear, all the "Green" shit is starting to make me puke. Will the skin of the craft be made from corn-plastic? Will it be powered by Richard Branson's farts? Will it reenter the atmosphere on a rainbow of happy elflings singing folk songs? It will in MY ARSE!!! A great interview by George Kenney with Professor Albert Bartlett, the Gandalf of Gloom.A MUST-LISTEN for anyone still operating under the delusion that exponential growth can continue on a finite planet. (Stating the obvious again!) China in power crisis. Notebook made from US Dollars! How the coming home heating crisis could threaten the grid. Another boingboing link: English girls sent to orphanage when mother catches pneumonia! The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: "Have you ever been the victim of rape?" and "Do you have homicidal tendencies?" [Not yet, but give them time, says I] One question asked "are you in a street gang?" to which Gemma replied: "I'm a member of Appledore library." [I really do love the English] Their clothes, money and belongings were taken and they were issued with regulation white T-shirt and jeans. Katie said: "It was like being in a little cage. I tried to go to sleep, but every time I opened my eyes, someone was looking right at me." If the Reich ever needs happy volunteers to shovel the corpses of Arabs/Lefties/Furners into ovens, they'll have no shortage of "Willing Executioners". Dmitri Orlov: Mind the ruins. Heads up (literally): Spy Satellite falls from orbit. The sham(e) of American "democracy": New Hampshire's clowns count the votes! Southern racists use Canadian as a euphemism for "black". Is it still too late to let these fucknuts secede? Damn your leathered hide, Lincoln! We could have let these wankstains walk! Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 23, Wednesday. I'm in Vancouver on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I'm attending a lecture by James Howard Kunstler (of Clusterfuck Nation fame). More postings to follow on Sunday/Monday. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 22, Tuesday. Juan Santos: Celebrating Collapse. Thank god. It’s coming – the adventure many of us have been waiting decades - even our whole lives for. It’s been laying quietly, waiting for us, for this juncture, for thousands of years, and now it’s here. We’re about to go back. Back to normal. Back to a life that- if we can survive to live it - might just be free. Free of all this. Free at last of push buttons, cell phones, nuclear madmen, advertising, prisons, cops, jobs, cars, bosses, screaming bombs, plastics, and every kind of daily sickness. Thunder and lightening are about to explode right overhead, about to shake our windows and walls until the whole place trembles. Some of us can already hear it and feel it. Some of us are listening. Of course it’s going to be horrible, but if this way of life continues, things can only get worse than the worst we can actually imagine now. The day will inevitably come when we wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth, and all life with us, unless things drastically change. OK, this is hysterical. CNN's financial bobbleheads try their best to put a good spin on the market meltdown. "Tell us some good news!" the host begs. The bimbette replies, telling the sheep that this will be good for them. As she speaks, her head is shaking from side to side, no - no - no - no - no. Fantastique! Clusterf*ck Nation: Full-blown panic. Survival Acres: Black Monday (and Tuesday) - Again Soros: Worst financal crisis since WW2. Handy: Thoughts on Disaster Survival. Collapse: Walmart and Waiting for the Shoe to Drop. At a time when most of the world's problems are due to the depletion and destruction of the ecosystems that keep us alive, politicians and people in general continue to see the world through political and economic filters. Even those of us awake to the world being one big cockroach about to get smashed by energy limits, are trapped likes ants in the amber of the system. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 20, Sunday. Alright - deep breaths. Stay calm. It's not looking pretty. For the last few months I've been preaching hard-core economic doom. This site gets between 5,000 and 10,000 visitors a day. I know many people (personal friends) who read it - I didn' realise how many until my recent trip to LA over the holidays. I also know, based on talking to people, that even though they read the links every day, that they're pretty much living their lives without taking concrete steps to protect themselves from the oncoming train-wreck. I'm not saying that the worst-case scenario WILL happen; only that there's a very high probability of Very Bad Things happening - within the next 12 months. Fair warned be thee, says I. I don't feel comfortable telling someone to do X Y and Z; but at the same time I can't pretend that everything's hunky-dory. It won't kill you to diversify - by which I mean: Buy Precious Metals: Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES trust your bank - if you assume that they'll be there in six months, then you're a fool. Remove enough paper cash from your account to last at LEAST 3 months, preferably 12. Buy food (have enough on hand to last at LEAST 3 months, preferably 12). If you have land, START GROWING FOOD! Essentially, ask yourself: "What would I do if I woke up to find that the banking system had imploded?" - because that's very much on the cards. Take sensible precautions, without panicking - that way you won't be flattened in the event of a stampede. Imagine that you're standing on the pinnacle of an active volcano - it's rumbling - and it might explode at any moment - or not. Best approach is to walk away from summit.... Cryptogon: This is going to be worse than anyone thinks... Cryptogon: UK: Panic Selling Shuts £2 Billion Real Estate Fund The Finacial sense newshour is always a fun (?) show. Some mp3 files from the recent broadcasts: The Year Ahead, What's ahead in 2008 and Back to the next depression. A humourous video: What the hell happened to my 401k? Gold: How high is high? In graphics, the state of the planet. Warning on rising Mediterranean sea levels. From the lifeaftertheoilcrash.net forums, it seems the terror-meter is peaking: What you should consider doing ASAP. Another thread: What I want to know is... And another: The Mother of all wakeup calls. This is about the derivative bubble (if that one blows, it's game over). Observer: Is this the end of cheap food? While a litre of orange juice is 57p in Lidl, it sells for 99p in the Co-op. Such products, and staple foods like eggs, bread, frozen peas, butter and cheese have seen price rises of between 20 and 30 per cent in mainstream supermarkets. Mysupermarket.co.uk, which collates supermarket prices daily, puts the overall rise last year at 12 per cent. That means the average family's shopping bill has gone up by £750 a year... ...There have already been riots about food prices in Mexico, West Bengal, Morocco, Senegal and Yemen, although not in Edinburgh. But the factors behind the price rises in Leith are exactly the same as those in Mexico, or in China - where, last Wednesday, the government introduced price controls on dairy products, meat, vegetables and cereals. And while food price inflation hit 18 per cent last year in China, there's no good reason why they should not do that here. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why they should. There have been four chief drivers of food price inflation in the last two years. The first is the huge rise in oil prices: $100 a barrel means food that is four-times as expensive to plant, irrigate, harvest and transport as it was six years ago. Some commodities brokers are now betting on oil going to $200 a barrel within a decade. The second factor is the climate: drought, hurricanes and floods around the world last year made for terrible harvests - from Australia to the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The third is the massive rise in the price of the staple-food commodities: wheat, maize and soya. This has been partly driven by speculation in the markets, partly by the demand for crops to turn into fuel. Survival Acres: The other oil shock. The return of sail! One of France's last WW1 veterans dies. 2007: record year for US wind power. Yikes: Peak Helium. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 19, Saturday. My favorite Steve Bell cartoon ever: Bush's Middle East Peace Tour. 1984 comes to NASA, courtesy of Caltech and JPL: Inquisition at JPL In other words, as the price of keeping their jobs, many of America's finest space scientists were being asked to give the feds virtually blanket permission to snoop and spy and collect even malicious gossip about them from God knows who. Investigators wanted license to seek information as to whether "there is any reason to question [applicants'] honesty or trustworthiness." At one point, JPL's internal website posted an "issue characterization chart" -- since taken down -- that indicated the snoops would be looking for "patterns of irresponsible behavior as reflected in credit history ... sodomy ... incest ... abusive language ... unlawful assembly ... homosexuality." (We'll leave it to others to explain a standard that links incest with unlawful assembly.) Microsoft hits a new low. Even by their stygian standards, this is bad. Run by a neocon, apparently: Facebook is evil. The Economist magazine recently posted a truly inane and inaccurate article rubbishing the notion that hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the natural world - a piss-poor attempt to create a continuum between paleolithic people and modern industrial society! A breath-takingly shabby piece of work, which should draw into question that organ's reliability in general. The piece was called Noble or Savage? Fortunately, Jason Godesky from Anthropik.com is here, to dissect the maggot riddled corpse, line by line: Part 1 and Part 2. A Lego geodesic dome. I can't wait to see this show: Life after People. The opposite of "life after people" is "life with people" - this review of manufactured landscapes is worth reading - I'll add it to my "must-see" list. 2007 was tied for Earth's second warmest year. IF looks could kill: Behold the Gorgon! A grim retelling of recent financial history: The Financial Tsunami Part 2 Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 14, Monday. Many people wonder about investing in gold and silver. I do, but it's not for the faint-hearted. Here's a good rundown on the potentials and pitfalls for gold in an inflationary/deflationary/stagflationary scenario. Lake Meade's water level continues to fall. Via LATOC, Kunstler: Disarray. Voters and candidates in the primary season have been hollering about "change" but I'm afraid the dirty secret of this campaign is that the American public doesn't want to change its behavior at all. What it really wants is someone to promise them they can keep on doing what they're used to doing: buying more stuff they can't afford, eating more shitty food that will kill them, and driving more miles than circumstances will allow. Kunstler gives the lie to people who accuse him of "lacking solutions". In the above article he provides dozens - of course, none of them involve the fetishization of the personal automobile, which is what people mean when they ask for "solutions". Also via lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, a great synopsis of The US Subprime/liquidity crisis. Mish Shedlock: Trapped in Suburbia. Sick, yet funny: Cat Costumes. Politics 101 from Joe Bageant: Greeting card platitudes from Obama The business of local and state politics is the business of turning virgins into whores. The business of national politics is polishing up whores to look like virgins. Of course some whores are nicer than others, but one does not get to play the back room high stakes game of presidential poker by being idealistic. One comes to the table with a lot of dough, a good cover story and a knife stashed in the boot. And even if you win, the guys running the game still own the country. Hillary Clinton can cry me a river of blood. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 13, Sunday. Darwin Award: The Laptop still works! The laptop's owner is smeared across three or four lanes, which is probably just as well. If Hieronymous Bosch were creating political cartoons today, he would be Steve Bell:       NASA's "Messenger" spacecraft will soon fly-by Mercury - the first Mercury probe since 1975. The lamers at newscientist.com seem to think we're living in 1999...why else would they still cling to a subscription model? The Mystery of Planet X. (or the first three paragraphs thereof). Nice work, you stupid/greedy shmucks. Here's a great interview with Dmitri Orlov (hero of the collapse memeworld), and James Howard Kunstler (another). Don't worry about the new-age music at the start, it fades out when the chat begins, about five minutes in. Orlov's a great interviewee - his reading from his new book is a blast. Peak oil: A forecast for 2008 by "Gail the Actuary", one of the pooh-bahs at theoildrum.com. Add another datapoint to the "we're f*cked" graph: Boomers are about to collect. "It's kind of like another step in your life," he says. "It feels kind of good, all these years of working and contributing and I get something back." Witt is among the first of 78 million baby boomers poised to enter the Social Security retirement system in the coming decades, the beginning of the so-called Silver Tsunami of aging yet energetic Americans. Boomers born from 1946 to 1964 haven't just grown up, they've grown older and are ready to make an imprint on the American way of retirement. How great for him. I'll never get a red cent of that money (even though I'VE paid into the Ponzi scheme for years). AND, I'll continue to pay taxes to support the oh-so wonderful boomers until they shuffle off to Florida to die. Ah, freedom. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off the cliff we go: Saudi, Kuwaiti and Chinese Cash Infusions to Save Citigroup. Mike Whitney: The Deflation Time-bomb Many experts are now predicting that home prices will dip 30% by the end of 2008. That means that nearly 20 million homeowners will be “upside-down”, that is, they will owe more on their mortgage than the current value of the house. (Imagine owing $400,000 on a home that is currently worth $325,000!) 40% of all homeowners in the US will be upside-down by the end of next year. This is a grave systemic problem that will have widespread implications. Experts already know that when mortgage holders have “negative equity” they are much more inclined to put their keys in the mailbox and skip town. Hence, the name for this increasingly common practice---“jingle mail”. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson is desperately trying to put together a national “rate freeze” to avoid, what could be, the most devastating surge of foreclosures the world has ever seen. Paulson's rate freeze does not offer “New Hope” as promised but, rather, a lifetime of servitude paying off an asset of ever-decreasing value. Underwater homeowners are better off taking the hit to their credit and letting the bank repo the house. Let the bank worry about it. They created this mess. The housing bubble is deflating faster than anyone had anticipated. Overall sales have slipped more than 40% from their peak in 2005 whereas, prices have gone down a mere 6.5%. Prices, which are a lagging indicator, have a lot further to drop before they touch bottom. Robert Schiller, Professor of Economics at Yale University and author of “Irrational Exuberance” “predicted that there was a very real possibility that the US would be plunged into a Japan-style slump, with house prices declining for years. Urbanscout: Racist Vegans from Dimension X. A Canadian's observations on the US presidential primaries. He's pro-Obama, but he makes up for that by despising everyone else. The Clintons, like the Bushes, have a funny habit of "surprising" election wins - not to mention that they also leave a lot of dead bodies in their wake. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 11, Friday. Boingboing ran a story about a five year old child harassed by TSA goons because his name is on a terror watch-list. At least the little tyke isn't the only one. Pwease, big stwong TSA bwownshirt, keep us safe fwom teh widdle baybees! We don't just harass five year olds: We taser the unborn! Video: A Baptist Woman talks politics. Here's a story that made me cry. For those who think that animals don't have feelings. Hm. What happened to polls in New Hampshire? Diebold favors Hillary... Out of 19 industrialised nations, the US is last. No surprise there. Oil touches $100; signal of pending shortages ignored. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 9, Wednesday. Back in the late 80s/early 90s a co-worker at Bluth animation studios lent me a bunch of audio tapes to help me through the day (drawing inbetweens by hand is very tedious work). One of the tapes was a lecture by Robert Anton Wilson, and dealt in part with the subject of synchronicity: Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "'acausal connecting principle'" (i.e., a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by conventional, efficient causality), "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". The implication is that there is more at work than mere coincidence. It's not the kind of thing that I would believe in, but the last three weeks have worn me down, frankly. Every day since I arrived back in LA on December 15th, people have been calling me to meet up - people that I haven't seen, in some cases, for years. Without getting into specifics, an old friend (who I haven't seen in ten years) appeared in a nearby bar, one that he only visits once in 3 years. So, it just happens to coincide with my 3 weeks in LA, and we catch up on lost time, mend bridges, etc. All in all, a great experience - and one that made the whole trip worthwhile by itself. I spent today emptying out my storage unit (spending $65 a month to store old possessions = dumb). I went out to dinner with my sister and her boyfriend, and returned home. I checked my email...to find a message from another old friend who moved to Vancouver from LA about six years ago - last time I saw him was around 2003. I'd been wanting to get back in touch with him, but wasn't sure how. I'm planning on taking a trip to Vancouver on the 24th, to see James Howard Kunstler's latest lecture. My friend couldn't have know that; I haven't mentioned it on idleworm. I was sufficiently freaked out (and pleased) by that, when I checked the rest of my emails, only to see another message from yet another former co-worker/friend, one whom I haven't met since 2002...who thinks I'm still in Canada (so no "grapevine effect"). This is just the tip of the iceberg - like I said, the last 3 weeks have been a synchronistic roller-coaster. Whether it be "mere chance" or something else, it's a lot of fun! A typical "guy" converstion: Little Gun Babies. Video: The Giuliani Anthem. Video: Barack would approve. Oil options are at $200 a barrel. And people think I'M a pessimist... Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 8, Tuesday. Over the holidays I met an old friend of mine, recently returned from China. She worked on the "Kite Runner" movie, and spent some time in Beijing. The air quality is so poor there that you begin coughing almost immediately - the infamous "Beijing Crud". On one occasion they had acid rain - meaning ACID - it burns the skin on contact. People had to run indoors or risk real harm. I'm looking forward to the Olympics. Let's take a break from the end of the world, and take some precious time out of the working day to watch emotionally disturbed women who spend thousands of dollars on "reborns" - lifelike baby dolls. British TV recently aired "My Fake Baby" - here it is on youtube: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5. I don't know what's more pathetic: the women, or the men who stay with them. All in all, this is Grade-A nightmare fuel. It's worth watching just for the last 15 seconds, where crazy-granny is talking to her six year old nephew in New Zealand. Tony Blair recounts his recent conversion to catholicism. The Czech national library: Did somebody sneeze? The Marching Morons. Mish Shedlock with some hair-raising comments about the spectre of bank failure: No Helicopter Drop For Failed Banks "Helicopter drop" refers to the notion that the Federal Reserve can drop money from helicopters in order to save struggling banks, companies or markets: The key point above is there is no grounds for a "helicopter drop" by the Fed. Furthermore, the Fed would not take such action even if they could. The Fed is a private business, it would not give away free money even if it could, just as Pizza Hut is not going to give away free pizzas to everyone for a year. It is amazing the powers people attribute to the Fed. Close examination shows those powers are nothing but a smoke and mirrors Ponzi scheme that blows bigger bubble after bigger bubble, crisis after crisis. The Fed has indeed wrecked the economy by its serial bubble blowing activity. However, the Fed is powerless to "fix" it, because the only "fix" the Fed has is the very same Ponzi scheme of repetitive bubble blowing that wrecked it. The only legitimate long term fix is to abolish the Fed and let the free market cure the problem over time. Further attempts by the Fed or Congress to "fix" things will only make matters worse. All Ponzi schemes eventually implode, and this Ponzi scheme of repetitive bubble blowing is imploding now. History shows that once confidence is lost in the Ponzi scheme by either the lenders or borrowers, it is all over. Well guess what: It's all over. Those expecting a "helicopter drop" of capital from the Fed to fix this mess will be sadly mistaken. Spengler: Putin for President - of the United States! Big fire at Iraqi Oil Refinery. Accident, tragic accident. Not terrorism. Accident. The recent Tom Hanks hagiographical movie "Charlie Wilson's War" lauds the US intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s (running guns to the mujahadeen - forerunners of the Taliban and Al Qaeda among them). The movie, as I suspected contains egregious errors and omissions. The movie makes mention of aid going to just one mujahadeen leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Actually he received virtually nothing. Nearly half of CIA money went to Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the most hardline of the mujahadeen. Hakmatyar in his younger days had been notorious for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. You can see why that didn’t make it into the film, very difficult to show humorously. Ahmad Shah Massoud was one of the "good guys", assassinated by Al Qaeda shortly before 911. No wonder they wanted to make it seem that Wilson & Co. were supporting the "good Afghans", not the bat-shit crazy ones. Chalmers Johnson reviews the film with that in mind: Part 1 and Part 2. When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a "comedy"), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus, for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles film-maker with inside information from the Charlie Wilson production team, notes that the film's happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a co-producer as well as the leading actor, "just can't deal with this 9/11 thing". Similarly, we are told by another insider reviewer, James Rocchi, that the scenario, as originally written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame, included the following line for Avrakotos: "Remember I said this: There's going to be a day when we're gonna look back and say 'I'd give anything if [Afghanistan] were overrun with Godless communists'." This line is nowhere to be found in the final film. Today there is ample evidence that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels, governmental services, relations among different ethnic groups, and quality of life - all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present government of President Hamid Karzai, which evidently controls little beyond the country's capital, Kabul. But Americans don't want to know that - and certainly they get no indication of it from Charlie Wilson's War, either the book or the film... ...My own view is that if Charlie Wilson's War is a comedy, it's the kind that goes over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house. Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia." Bear in mind that "Charlie Wilson's War" is the product of American "liberals". God help us. We continue merrily on the road to full blown authoritarianism, one paralysed woman at a time: In the nearly 20 years since Victoria Sando was paralyzed by a suicidal ex-boss who shot her five times in a parking lot, the 55-year-old Dania Beach woman has had days when she thought life could not get any tougher. But that was before she was rousted from bed at 5:30 a.m. last week and taken to the Broward County jail on orders of a circuit court judge who slapped Sando with a six-month sentence after she failed to show up for a hearing on a domestic battery complaint. And in jail is where Sando remained Friday, without her motorized wheelchair, her service dog Fudge, her glasses or, as yet, any opportunity to appear in court and be represented by an attorney. Anyone considering a move to Ireland needs to research the wretched state of our healthcare system (systematically ruined over the last 10+ years by a right wing government): Private patients skip the cancer queues Private patients with suspected cancer are getting fast-tracked to treatment in state hospitals while their public counterparts are left waiting. The shocking trend emerged in a major survey of private patients who needed investigations to find out if they had cancer. Confirmation of a quicker system for those who can pay for their health service will re-ignite claims that money talks -- and saves lives. The revelation comes against a backdrop where even "urgent" public patients with potentially serious symptoms can wait up to two months. Charming. I'm sure Mary Harney (Minister of Health, and de facto leader of an extreme free-market wingnut party) will be tossing and turning in her sleep all night. "Disaster capitalism", Irish style... Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 7, Monday. I found some funny links to mix in with the oil: Ted Rall: Decision 2008! Mike Huckabee is a bigger freak than Bush, but at least he supports Canada's igloo parliament. How to grow 5,756 LBs of food on 1/10th of an acre. You've probably seen this: Spoilt 15 year old pageant contestant. Does she wipe her own ass, one wonders? Ha. Every UK home to face a 15pc energy price rise. Great story, and not a word about peak oil. No need to mention the ongoing collapse in Britain's North Sea oil production (which peaked in 1999, and is now falling off a cliff). Mexico is now joining the UK in the "we're screwed" column. At least this article mentions the peaking of Mexican oil production; however, it then proceeds with the fairy tale of "deep water" oil - as though the Canterell oil field (one of the biggest half dozen ever found, in very shallow waters) can be replaced by oil fields under miles of ocean and rock in the middle of a hurricane hotspot. Dream on. CERA and Daniel Yergin are major oil optimists...and are paid handsomely for their "expert" opinions. Have a look at this page for a good laugh - their prediction for oil prices over the last seven years are compared to what actually happened. Not even close. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the best image. Nuremberg Zoo will allow the newborn polar bear cubs to die if they're rejected by their mothers. Mr Maegdefrau, quoted by the German news website Focus, said "we should have faith in nature and accept that sometimes with new mothers things just don't work out" "Faith in nature?" If they had faith in nature, the bears wouldn't be in captivity in the first place! (Bangs head on keyboard) Boingboing: Tiny Houses. Carl Warner's foodscapes. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 5, Saturday. I've chatted with a few regular readers of this site recently (in person). Both have commented on other people's remarks about idleworm - that it's a bit grim. That might be an understatement. I just don't see any other way to present the links I find; I'm not trying to be willfully doomish - it just happens to be the case that the world is going off the rails at an increasingly fast pace. I think you'd have to be blind (or watching CNN) to think otherwise. Anyhow, I do try to interject the occasional entertainment to lighten the bitter pill. This is amazing...proof, if proof were needed, that the MSM regards the general public as a bunch of morons: Lone trader caused 100 dollar price for oil. One trader is being used as a reason for $100 oil - ONE MAN - never mind the collapse in Mexico's oil production, or North Sea production, or the abysmal EROEI on tar sanda, or booming demand from Chindia, or instability in Nigeria, or the assassination of Bhutto. Or the distinct possiblity that global oil production has peaked, which, if true, will have very nasty consequences for the global economy (ethanol, cheap solar power & alternatives notwithstanding). Spooky UFO footage from the Space Shuttle mission STS-80. Here's more spacey goodness. Meanwhile, JPL's brave little rovers continue to explore Mars! Learning to love yourself is a pointless waste of time. The true cost of cheap chicken. Forget oil: the new crisis is food. Homesteading on $3,000! Don't say I don't offer positive links. That's a good 'un! If people don't like the idea of subsistance farming on 2 acres with no iPods or Plasma TVs, then all I've got to say is: BOO-HOO! Tom Whipple: Diesel Crisis. Via lifeaftertheoilcrash.net: brain-dead predictions about housing. 2012 = buyers' market!!! David Strahan: Hear no Peak! The gist: there are no massive oil deposits yet to be discovered in Saudi Arabia. Portland's urban scout on the hypocrisy of veganism. I've got nothing against veganism myself (I try to be as vegetarian as possible), I'm just annoyed by the notion that vegans/vegetarians are somehow "saving the planet". A diet based on grains is as antithetical to a healthy environment as heavy industry. Monocropping has ruined more than its fair share of the natural world. I won't waste too much time prognosticating on the US (s)election, as the outcome is utterly irrelevant. However, I did enjoy seeing Hitlery Clinton placed third, and Giuliani beaten into sixth by Ron Paul. Saints preserve us from liberal claptrap! Rudy Giuliani = 911 whoremonger. Dance on those corpses Rudy; hell, even Ron Paul whupped your skeletal ass. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 4, Friday. Hope he's wrong: 2008: The System Breaks. The entire banking system will go bust in the Untied States this year, in a highly visible manner, as the entire world watches in total horror. The nation in custodial duty for the world reserve currency, the USDollar, will suffer a failed banking & bond system, which undoubtedly will result in a grotesque USEconomic recession. It is just a bit late in its arrival. The parade of disasters will be mindboggling, offering little respite. Even the Plunge Protection Team, armed with $1500 billion in black bag money, pilfered largely from Fannie Mae in the two districts harboring the home towns for the sitting presidents from 1988 to 2000, will not be capable to stem the tsunami of stock market sell orders. They might focus attention on the biggest and baddest corporations, but the banking stock index collapse reveals how the PPT could only hold up the S&P500 index, but not their buddies in big banks. SADLY, 2008 IS THE YEAR THE SYSTEM JUST PLAIN BREAKS. I'm assuming that the pessimists are right, and taking appropriate counter-measures. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2007, January 3, Thursday. NOTE: My email is fritzing out (it did this over the holidays too). Bear with me; it should start to behave in a few hours. Sad news. A great writer has died. George MacDonald Fraser: 1925 - 2008. GMF wrote the "Harry Flashman" novels, a series of adventures set in Queen Victoria's Empire. Flashman lies, cheats and steals his way way go glory, in spite of the fact the he's a coward and a cad. Great stuff. If you can, try to find the "Books on Tape" performance by David Case. Spike Milligan: There's a fly in my soup. Don't watch if you're French, German, Israeli or Irish. The odds of a January asteroid impact on Mars are raised to 25 to 1! How to toilet train your cat. No more litter! Financial doom from strike-the-root: The Year Ahead Financial doom from the guardian: Is this the big one? Ah, scientists. They separate twins and have them raised in different families, as a deliberate experiment in human psychology. We're all just glorified fruit flies to these f*ckers. World's biggest building coming to Moscow. The Dubai Disease is spreading. Sesame Street series 1 is for adults only. Our modern children have such delicate sensibilities, it seems. More monstrosities: Snorting a chemical instead of sleeping. This should keep the human-drones buzzing for an extra 20 or 30 hours a week, packed tightly into their cubicles human veal crates. Hooray for corporate America, and their allies in the pharmaceutical-military-industrial complex! Now we are human commodities! Who needs freedom? UK mall bans grandparents for trying to photo their grandkids An amazing piece of headwear. (Via growabrain. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. previous posts - about us - contact