Thanks to Kevin at cryptogon.com for alerting me to this amazing BBC kids' game - a really beautiful piece of work:
To play the game, click the image above, and follow the link at the bottom of the screen called "Questionaut". It's a series of Rube Goldberg like environments, where you must click on various objects to discover the question master. The art direction is superb, and the audio is an ambient masterpiece.
The game reminded me (again) of the British kids shows from my childhood - most made in the 60s and 70s. Nothing today comes close - and this not nostalgia speaking. In the 80s, childrens' TV became a vehicle for shallow product placement - turning infants into consumers from the cradle. I believe that this is one of many factors in the degradation of our culture, as we chase the feces-stained dollar down the U-bend.
Compare the following clips (mostly from the 60s and 70s) to what followed in the 1980s - "He Man", "Transformers", and the grisly plethora of vacuous Saturday morning abominations, and you'll get the idea. The creators of the earlier shows put a little piece of their souls into their work. The marketeers who created what was to follow didn't have souls to begin with...and the results speak for themselves.
Here's the magic:
Clangers: The Intruder.
The Clangers are peaceful aliens who are rudely interrupted by a visiting American space-probe. The opening is reminiscent of Michael Powell's classic "A Matter of Life and Death (aka "Stairway to Heaven (US)". The last minute has a remarkable message about the desirability of visiting Earth.
Camberwick Green (1966).
Camberwick Green - a fixture in British children's TV, and a yardstick for quality. Stop motion animation (as most was at the time), it was brilliantly and affectionately parodied in the recent hit TV detective series "Life on Mars".
Bagpuss (1974). "Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old saggy cloth cat - baggy, and a bit loose at the seams.
But Emily loved him."
Sniff, sniff. Goddamit...I'm 38, and I'm tearing up. WTF?
The Magic Roundabout.
I'm sure this cartoon was a gateway for many British and Irish kids into the wonderful world of mind-altering drugs.
The show was originally made in France, but was completely re-written and re-dubbed for the English audience.
Here it's brilliantly parodied by Bill Bailey.
The Wombles.
A group of furry underground gleaners who subsist by living on the "trash" thrown away by wasteful humans.
Role-models for today's dumpster divers!
Mister Benn.
An apparently dull businessman visits a magic costume shop - where a mildly sinister assistant helps him change into a costume. Each time Mr. Benn changes his clothes, he is transformed into the character whose clothes he is wearing...
Morale: Just because you'll be an accountant, doesn't mean you have to be an accountant...
Tales of the Riverbank.
As a very small child, this show had a strangely relaxing effect on me. That slowly flowing water, or the animals, or some combination thereof was always a calming experience.
There will be LEGO. "Jordan Schwartz’s latest creation is the oil tower from the movie There will be Blood. The construction of the structure is fascinating when considering how all the angles came together nicely in the final product. Way to strike it rich Jordan!"
I drink your milkshake! (Sorry).
The image above shows the solar energy currently fallin on the earth, compared with all wind energy (a product of that solar energy) and total current energy use. This is not to say that we could continue to grow the zombie-culture on solar power ad infinitum (as we have a finite amount of fresh water,soil and air), but it does suggest that our problems may have more to do with human stupidity, greed and evil than anything else.
Daniel Quinn argues in his book "Ishmael" that civilisation is inherently flawed - built as it is on the drawing down of finite resources, and will collapse given enough time. I think about this a lot, though I haven't come to a final conclusion. Every time I read news stories which document the titanic stupidity of humans, I come a little closer to agreeing with him.
Let the doom begin!
The place where you spend one-third of your life is chock-full of synthetic materials, some potentially toxic. Since the mid- to late '60s, most mattresses have been made of polyurethane foam, a petroleum-based material that emits volatile organic compounds that can cause respiratory problems and skin irritation. Formaldehyde, which is used to make one of the adhesives that hold mattresses together, has been linked to asthma, allergies, and lung, nose, and throat cancers. And then there are cotton pesticides and flame-retardant chemicals, which can cause cancer and nervous-system disorders. In 2005, Walter Bader, owner of the "green mattress" company Lifekind and author of the book Toxic Bedrooms, sent several mattresses to an Atlanta-based lab. A memory-foam model was found to emit 61 chemicals, including the carcinogens benzene and naphthalene.
Teflon, it turns out, gets its nonstick properties from a toxic, nearly indestructible chemical called pfoa, or perfluorooctanoic acid. Used in thousands of products from cookware to kids' pajamas to takeout coffee cups, pfoa is a likely human carcinogen, according to a science panel commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency. It shows up in dolphins off the Florida coast and polar bears in the Arctic; it is present, according to a range of studies, in the bloodstream of almost every American—and even in newborns (where it may be associated with decreased birth weight and head circumference). The nonprofit watchdog organization Environmental Working Group (ewg) calls pfoa and its close chemical relatives "the most persistent synthetic chemicals known to man." And although DuPont, the nation's sole Teflon manufacturer, likes to chirp that its product makes "cleanup a breeze," it is now becoming apparent that cleansing ourselves of pfoa is nearly impossible...
...Nonstick pots and pans account for 70 percent of all cookware sold. "Amazingly enough, all the publicity has had no impact on sales," says Hugh Rushing, executive vice president of the Cookware Manufacturers' Association. "People read so much about the supposed dangers in the environment that they get a tin ear about it"
I've been wondering just how much of the stories about Iran are total psy-op bullshit. 90%? 99%? 100%? For every one that says "The End is Nigh" there's another about negotiations. Take your pick:
The Saudi Shura council will secretly discuss national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors, media reports said Saturday.
The Saudi-based King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology has prepared a proposal that encapsulates the probabilities of leaking nuclear and radiation hazards in case of any unexpected nuclear attacks in Iran, the Okaz Saudi newspaper said.
Little by little, millions of Americans surrendered equity in their homes in recent years. Lulled by good times, they borrowed — sometimes heavily — against the roofs over their heads.
Now the bill is coming due. As the housing market spirals downward, home equity loans, which turn home sweet home into cash sweet cash, are becoming the next flash point in the mortgage crisis.
Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans — and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.
To get it, many lenders are taking the extraordinary step of preventing some people from selling their homes or refinancing their mortgages unless they pay off all or part of their home equity loans first. In the past, when home prices were not falling, lenders did not resort to these measures.
Declines in US house prices are continuing to accelerate, according to surveys that signal there will be no quick end to the credit crisis.
The price of the average home was 11 per cent lower than a year ago, the S&P Case-Shiller index showed yesterday, as repossessed homes flood the market – and economists predict that the price adjustment may belittle more than half over.
The Case-Shiller index has become one of the most widely followed measures of the US economy because American homes are the collateral that supports hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities and other credit derivatives.
The latest figures cover house prices in 20 metropolitan areas in January, and show that price declines have spread far beyond the once-hot speculative property markets in Florida and the South-west and crumbling industrial towns. Now, Charlotte, North Carolina, is the sole region showing year-on-year gains.
The year-on-year decline of 10.7 per cent in the average house price is worse than anything seen in the last downturn in the early Nineties. Prices fell 2.4 per cent in just one month.
"It does not look like early 2008 is marking any turnaround in the housing market,," said David Blitzer, S&P index committee chairman. "Home prices continue to fall, decelerate and reach record lows across the nation. No markets seem to be immune from the housing crisis."
Don't waste your vote by voting. That's their way of tricking you into thinking you've "done your bit." Abstain, and give them the finger.
England's long decline continues: Woman kicked to death for dressing as a goth.
I've had a few conversations about this scenario. I never cease to be amazed at the passiveness of the next of kin. They cry to a hack from the newspaper about the thugs and their equally guilty parents, but that's the extent of their action. You'd think that sooner or later, one of the victims would rise up and throw a Molotov cocktail through the windows of these savages. That's what happnens in other cultures, why not ours? Are people so beaten down and scared of "Justice" that they're unprepared to enforce NATURAL LAW?
The worst thing that happened to decent people in the 20th century was the doctrine of passivism...emphasis on PASSIVE. The story of Gandhi would have been very different if he'd tried his shtick in 1840, instead on 1940 (when the Empire was broken by two world wars). Ditto with MLK - teach the lower orders to disobey without actually doing anything. Today, "dissent" is no more than totem gestures - silly parades with papier mache effigies, mindless slogans and little else.
Just as "conservatives" don't sacrifice by joining the army (leaving that chore to the poverty stricken), the "liberals" don't do anything that constitutes real risk taking, or curtailing their equally high standard of living.
I'm not saying that we should start blowing stuff up - what I am saying is that people should know that force will be met with FORCE - equal to or greater than theirs. Taser me? I'll burn your fucking house down. Kill my girlfriend? They'll fish your body from a dump, and they'll be lucky to identify your stinking corpse.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a Molotov cocktail to mix.
The Midway Islands are home to some of the world's most valuable and endangered species and they all are at risk from choking, starving or drowning in the plastic drifting in the ocean.
Nearly two million Laysan albatrosses live here and researchers have come to the staggering conclusion that every single one contains some quantity of plastic.
About one-third of all albatross chicks die on Midway, many as the result of being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.
I watched as the deputy manager of the wildlife refuge here, Matt Brown, opened the corpse of one albatross and found inside it the handle of a toothbrush, a bottle top and a piece of fishing net.
“People aren’t going out to eat as much,” I say. “And when they do I think they’re skimping on the tip.”
“You think so?” the owner asks. “My stats say sales are down but the tip percentage is holding.”
“The regulars are still good,” I reply. “But the once a month types? I think they’re holding back five or six percent on the gratuity.”
“I’ll keep on eye on the numbers,” the owner says. “Maybe you’re right.”
“We’ll see.”
To cap off a miserable night, a romantically inclined couple decides to come ten minutes before closing and stay two hours. They tip for shit. I get home at 1:30 AM. I only made $120 for on Saturday night. That sucks.
The next morning I put $40 worth of gas in my gar and drive over to the grocery store. I buy only staples, no luxuries. When the girl at the register tallies up my purchases I get my weekly dose of sticker shock. $1 for two lemons? $4.35 for a half pound of domestic Swiss? Thank God I don’t have to buy Pampers.
...my shopping list is as follows:
4 bunches of bananas
2 bags of pears
3 bags of precut lettuce
2 bags of baby carrots
1 bag of celery
21 containers of low fat/low sugar yogurt
½ gallon of skim milk
For the record, I have never made it through the check-out lane without someone commenting on my purchases. Typically, I’ll be standing in line, minding my own business, when some fat sow with a shopping cart full of pizza rolls says something smug like, “Buy enough yogurt? *snicker, snicker*”
This wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t hear fat people constantly whining and crying about feeling ‘quietly judged’ by the contents of their shopping carts. Trust me, when you’re pushing around a cart full of TV dinners and tater tots, no one really thinks anything of it because that’s what they’re buying too. But God forbid, you buy a couple of bags of lettuce. Then you’re a freak of nature.
There you have it: continuing high energy and food costs, contracting credit, stagnant wages and increasing property debt. Highly leveraged or poor American consumers—this is just about everybody who isn't among the richer rich—are about to get nailed. The day of debt reckoning has arrived as the U.S. receives a long overdue margin call (Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2008).
Consumer spending makes up about 70% of GDP. The money squeeze is a recipe for disaster. Household finance will be getting more unmanageable for Americans, who have been living the high life made possible by easy credit following from rising house prices. The only silver linings are that American exports are up and we're getting more foreign tourists because of the shrinking value of the dollar.
On the oil front, it appears that reduced demand in a cash-strapped American economy is unlikely to lower oil prices much as the recession unfolds, but all bets are off—no one knows how much demand will be affected yet. If China and the other emerging economies truly are "decoupled' from American consumption trends, it won't matter much if U.S. demand falls off significantly in any case.
The Chinese will be partying at the Beijing Olympics while Americans be scrambling around trying pay their mortgages and make ends meet at the fuel pump. Kind of symbolic, don't you think? Here's an idea—why don't we build some light rail systems?
What is happening is that the earth is finite, and we are starting to reach some of its limitations. At this point, most of the "easy to extract" oil has already been removed. There is still oil in the ground, but what remains is becoming more and more difficult to remove.
When we try to find alternatives, we encounter limitations of other types. In some situations, natural gas might be a substitute, but in North America it is also in relatively short supply. Coal is in better supply, but it has serious climate change issues.
Biofuels might be a substitute, but today's biofuels use huge amounts of agricultural land and fresh water, and both of these are in limited supply. Biofuels as they are currently produced compete with other uses for land and water, and because of this, drive up the price of food.
Even the minerals that we might use in batteries, and the uranium we might use in nuclear reactors, are becoming increasingly difficult to extract. We have already removed most of the high quality ores of many minerals. What is left is ores of lower concentration. These ores can still be extracted, but it takes more energy resources to process this ore. The energy resources used for processing the ore are often oil and natural gas, and they themselves are in increasingly short supply.
This whole article should be read. More:
If we look ahead 20 or 30 years, it seems likely that the world will be very much poorer. Personal autos may be rare. Electricity may be unreliable. It is likely that we will have much less in the way of goods and services than we have today. A growing population may add to our problems. If the smaller supply of goods and services is divided among more people, living standards are likely to be much lower than they are today.
If the world is much poorer, I would expect social security and Medicare to be drastically scaled back or even eliminated. There will be so little goods and services in total that society cannot afford to set aside much for the disabled and elderly.
I expect that in 20 or 30 years, many business and governments will have failed. Bonds of these businesses and governments will have little value. Stocks of companies that remain in business will continue to have value, but this value may not be high compared to the cost of available goods. Inflation rates are likely to be high, reflecting the lack of goods and services for people to actually buy if they do have money.
Anyone still reading? Here's another doomer: The Red Menace. (also via latoc):
According to the Bank for International Settlement in Basel, the global derivatives market is worth some $516 trillion - 10 times the value of all the world's stock markets put together. And much of it is based on very little but leveraged optimism; pieces of paper theoretically based on the price of an empty house in Cleveland, Ohio.
Billions have been magicked out of nothing by this financial alchemy, but in the end, there is no way of turning dross into gold, and the reckoning had to come. And someone had to pay - which is where we, the people, come in.
As happened in the 1930s, the whole system is collapsing. We are faced with the choice of colossal bank defaults or hyper inflation: saving the banks or saving our savings. The central bankers decided that they would rather save the banks. So our governments are using public money to bolster banking balance sheets and allowing inflation to rip so that the banks' losses will be devalued, along with the pound in your pocket.
The only salmon farm in Northern Ireland has been thrown into crisis following a devastating jellyfish attack that destroyed more than 100,000 fish.
Record-breaking 32ft shark caught
Billions of small mauve stingers flooded the cages where the fish were kept about a mile into the Irish Sea, off the Co Antrim coast, causing more than £1 million of damage and leaving the future of the company in doubt. Mauve stinger routinely terrorise bathers in the Mediterranean, but are rarely seen in cooler waters
John Russell, the managing director of Northern Salmon Co. Ltd., said last night: "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about, it, absolutely nothing."
Last week's attack lasted nearly seven hours, with the small jellyfish stinging and shocking salmon held in an area covering 10 square miles and 35 feet deep.
Bisphenol-A is the basic component of hard plastics that include baby bottles, linings of food cans, sealants for jars and bottles, and other well-known products that modern people have become dependent on. After several years of news stories about scientific studies and a few legislative attempts to ban or regulate bisphenol-A and other poisonous plastics, a scandal has just emerged involving U.S. government favoritism for corporate perpetrators.
Plastics such as bisphenol-A cause breast cancer, testicular cancer, diabetes, obesity, and birth defects -- although the evidence is often argued to apply so far only to laboratory animals. Other common plastics posing great danger include phthalates (softeners) and PVC (for piping, flooring, containers, etc.).
Fallon's recent resignation may have seemed abrupt to many, but it was a well-orchestrated move. His interview in Esquire depicted him as highly critical of the Bush administration's policy on Iran; the magazine described him as the only thing standing between the administration and their newest war plan. Further, his resignation and "Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's handling of [it] is the greatest and most public break in the Bush team's handling of preparations for war against Iran that we are ever likely to see," wrote respected commentators and former CIA analysts Bill and Kathy Christison on 12 March. "Gates has in fact publicly associated himself with the resignation by saying it was the right thing for Fallon to do, and Gates said he had accepted the resignation without telling Bush first."
Fallon's resignation represents a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, it's an indication of the continued fading enthusiasm for the militant culture espoused by the neoconservatives. On the other, it's an ominous sign of the Bush administration's probable intentions during the last year of the president's term. Sixty-three-year-old Admiral Fallon would not have embarked on such a momentous decision after decades of service were it not for the fact that he knew a war was looming, and -- having considered the historic implications for such a war -- chose not to pull the trigger.
Orwell's engineers continue to threaten us with face recognition. Pray they fail.
All in all, one can say that this recession, if it doesn’t turn into a depression, will be severe and will last at least two to four years. Now you must realise that I am talking about the effects of the recession and not technical recession...
...Technically a recession may last one year, but the effect of that recession on families may last a decade. Some lose their homes, some their jobs, some families will break up and so on and so forth. The human misery of technical recession lasts much longer than the recession itself. Anyway, if the price of houses is dropped by 40 percent in two years, how many years of growth will it take to retake that 40 percent? Usually much longer than people think.
can gold and other commodities' high prices hold? A reader of The Daily Reckoning suggests gold may take a detour back to $400 or lower simply because in the deflation to come, which will be brought on by an escalation of the current liquidity crisis, gold will be sold off to pay for margin calls. Then, if gold is re-valued later as the standard against which all currencies will be measured, it might fall under international price controls, so that suggests some not inconsiderable risk in the flight to gold. Other metals, and the commodities you eat, are less susceptible, because they are getting scarcer by the day, even as world population continues to rise. There may be a bit of a hard asset glut in the short term, however.
Investment manager BlackRock expects tight gold supply and a gradual rising trend in the price which could lift the metal to new highs above the record $1,030 per ounce hit last week.
"We expect a gradually rising trend in the gold price and if that happens we will get to a new high. We are expecting that positive trend to continue, with volatility over the short term," said fund manager Evy Hambro, who runs BlackRock's $17 billion World Mining Fund and co-manages the $8.9-billion World Gold Fund.
Gold traded at $931.60 an ounce on Tuesday, well off a high of $1,030.80 hit on March 17.
"We think the replacement cost of gold today is much higher than where the market is right now," Hambro said, adding that even if the price reached the desired level it would have to be sustained for gold companies to invest.
"Going out to eat, going to the movies, you can't do stuff like that," says Carter, filling up his Firebird at a BP station in Camden, a quiet southern town 80 miles southwest of Montgomery. "You're working for gas now." ...
...For people like Carrie Frye, 33, a mother who commutes 70 miles each day, the choice is about much more than simply cutting back on entertainment.
Frye works at a factory in Selma, Ala., making lawn chair cushions. If she makes her production quota, she might bring in $329 a week. If not, it's $220. Either way, she says the $60 a week she now spends in gas comes out of money for food, the doctor, and buying clothes for her kids.
"I just hope they don't grow that fast," she says, filling her tank of her Jeep Cherokee at the Camden BP.
The one ounce Gold Eagles made by the US Mint have a face value of $50, although the "real" value of the coins varies depending on the spot price of gold. This creates a conundrum: the US GOVERNMENT itself values the coins as $50. So, what happens if you're paid in one gold eagle, instead of cash? What's your income? $50, or $900? Oh dear, the powers that be have made a boo-boo...
If I received a $50 American Gold Eagle (legal tender) as a wage, would I need to claim $50 on my tax return or the market value? Today, the $50 American Gold Eagle was selling for approximately $980.00.
The IRS wrote: You will only be reporting your wages of $50. The American Gold Eagle is now your capital asset (collectible), and any gain or loss on the coin will not be reported as income or loss until you dispose of the coin... snip
...As for the capital gain tax exposure, if the taxpayer makes arrangements to have a portion or all of his or her pay made in American Gold Eagles and holds the coins as long-term savings, for all practical and legal purposes, the taxpayer can avoid paying any tax on that portion of his or her wages.
All the financial rumblings to date pale before the big one: DERIVATIVES:
This weekend’s meeting of four heads of central banks communicates the size of the OTC derivative disaster. It is a system that is broken. A bailout will require the printing of trillions of dollars worth of monetary stimulation making Bernanke’s helicopter drop look like chump change.
The dollar number of pending derivative bankruptcies is the size of the mountain of garbage paper issued by just those who are to be bailed out. That number is greater than the total world economies.
There simply isn’t enough money in the world for central banks to buy up the mountain of worthless paper sold by those who need bailouts; all of which made fortunes for their directors, officers and key people.
When an OTC derivative fails to perform, notional value becomes real value.
The notional value of all OTC derivatives exceeds $500 trillion.
Yes, master: Subliminal messages make us work harder. Expect lots more of this kind of crass manipulation as society swirls down the crapper. donate money to idleworm. I hate this form of mind control with a passion. buy stuff at idleworm's amazon links. Bastards.
By the way, Americans blame the familiar private oil companies for all the trouble with oil in their lives -- Exxon-Mobil, Shell, et al -- but they don't seem to know that oil nationalism is in the driver's seat now. The old private "majors" are only producing five percent of the world's oil. The rest is coming from the national companies -- Aramco, Petrobras, Pemex, et blah blah -- and the very operations of the oil markets are entering a phase of radical instability as they move away from auctioning their stuff on the futures markets and start making long-term favored customer contracts instead.
The bottom line is that high prices for oil is hardly the only thing America has to worry about. Pretty soon the US will have to worry about getting the oil at any price -- meaning, we're in for shortages and supply disruptions sooner rather than later.
I've tried to explain that to people - only to get the 100 mile zombie stare. People have this need to believe that "the oil companies are gouging us".
You may have noticed the dozens of "Vote McCain" ads being fed to the site from google-ads. No problem. I endorsed Bush in 2004 for the same reasons that I now endorse John "Oops I crashed my fifth jet" McCain: because he's the Manchurian candidate.
These little girls are the creepiest things you'll ever see. Poor little tykes. After their "parents" are done with them, Bratz and Disney's "Princess" toys will finish off what humanity remains. Then, they can enter adulthood, primed for a life of "Sex and the City" wannebedom...soulless vamps, primed to drain witless men of their life essence, reducing them to a shuddering cuckolded wreck with an empty bank account.
In the Vietnam War, John McCain was the very worst kind of murderer, spoiled son of a powerful daddy (sounding familiar?) flying modern jets over primitive, defenseless Vietnam, and dropping bombs on women and children from the safety of his little cushioned seat. Probably comes back to the airdeck, gives high fives and "hoo-ah!"s to his fascist little friends, they all laugh, drink their shitty Coors beer,listen to their country music, not even caring about the suffering they cause to poor peasant families.
One day, some fucking Vietnamese guy shot "hero" John McCain down! How the fuck did a Vietnamese guy, primitive, backwards, in pajamas, shoot down a modern A-4 jet? He used a fucking slingshot? Bow and arrow? What it proves is John McCain was a shitty pilot, a loser, that is all. On October 26, 1967, "war hero" McCain’s A-4 given a nice Russian surprise over Hanoi -- he was hit by Russian surface-to-air missile (score: Russia 1, McCain 0). McCain’s jet fell into a lake called Truc Bach Lake on the outskirts of Hanoi.
McCain almost drowned in that lake. But a Vietnamese man, 50-year-old Mai Van On, ran out of his air raid shelter, took a bamboo pole, swam out to McCain, and pulled American "war hero" from the plane wreckage. Vietnamese people were pissed off, they gathered around McCain in a mob and tried to kill him, understandably. This is a guy who just tried to kill them! But Mai Van On saved John McCain from the mob too. This old Vietnamese guy is the real "war hero" because he took a real dangerous risk! McCain, "war loser," was rescued by his enemy who he tried to kill! That is the most pathetic war story I, a Russian, ever heard in my life.
What happened to the country that is the "world's only superpower"? In just a couple of years you went from "world's policemen" to "world's clowns" to your new role as "world's train station whores." For guys like me, or French people like Gilles, or just about anybody on this planet who hates your dumbfuck guts, you give us free comedy entertainment every day.
Makes me wonder - remember when Bush said that he'd get the price of oil to fall by "Jaw-boning" with the Saudis. Oh - my - God.
Cockburn: A war based on lies, lies, lies. Shh...don't tell the American public. They still haven't figured that out yet...and I doubt they ever will, poor dears.
The most notorious lie of all was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But critics of the war may have focused too much on WMD and not enough on later distortions.
national corn crop were used to make ethanol, it would replace a mere 7 percent of U.S. oil consumption, far from making the United States independent of foreign oil.
Yeah, even I fell for that one. I was more trusting and innocent back then. That didn't stop me from being pessimistic about the war's final outcome though (some of us don't view the world through a rose-tinted brain. Here's the golden oldie (or mouldy oldie): The Gulf War 'Game'":
Thanks to the many readers who found the site through that little game, and have continued to read my increasingly depressing prognostications. Hard to believe that it was five years ago already. Time flies when your having fun...
I'll say it again: the next time you hear some sociopath statesman in a suit call for war with country X, follow Dermot's simple advice:
1. Go to Google.
2. Type in the following: Country X oil energy natural gas
All will become clear...painfully clear.
This should be good for a laugh - Ireland's best selling toilet paper newspaper the "Irish Independent" ran some articles in the immediate aftermath of America's "victory" in Iraq, written by one Eilis O' Hanlon - an Anne Coulter wannabe with an accent and slightly smaller Adam's apple. Here, for your edification and amusement, is what passes for journalism in the Emerald Isle:
Vincent Browne, too, has had a bad war, although he was careful to attribute his dire predictions to the UN. "All this terrible violence, according to a UN agency, will place about 10 million Iraqi civilians at risk of hunger and disease and give rise to close to a million refugees. In addition, of course, to slaughtering thousands of them."
As we have seen, the refugee camps remain empty and the Iraqis look remarkably happy.
Hey, Eilis - here's an offer you can refuse: I WILL BUY YOU A PLANE TICKET TO IRAQ, IF YOU LIVE IN BAGHDAD OUTSIDE THE GREEN ZONE. That way, you can enjoy the fruits of liberation, just like a regular Iraqi woman. My email is dermot@idleworm.com. I am not joking about this - I will pay your ticket. Baghdad. Free trip.
...ask the Iraqis whether they want Saddam back, or would prefer to make a mess of things in their own time, and in their own way (which is what Aristotelian democracy means) and you will get your answer. Already there is hope for something better than a Shia state (although that would be objectively much better than Saddam's secular hell) on the horizon.
Same offer to the anonymous scribe of the rubbish above. I will pay for your plane ticket if you want to spend a MONTH living in Baghdad, like a regular Iraqi. That way you can enjoy your "Aristotelian Democracy" in the flesh. Weather's nice this time of year, I'm told.
Steve Bell's cartoon history of the Iraq War - from an English perspective:
20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, and that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption. If the entire national corn crop were used to make ethanol, it would replace a mere 7 percent of U.S. oil consumptIion, far from making the United States independent of foreign oil.
One-third of the foreclosed houses inspected so far in north Minneapolis are candidates for demolition, according to the agency trying to rehab the state's largest concentration of empty housing...
...many pose a range of problems, from neglect issues like rampant mold to functional obsolescence due to size or floor plan. Some simply cost too much to fix. One house the agency toured contained only 500 square feet of space -- less than a standard one-bedroom public housing high-rise apartment -- carved into four apartments...
...One reason...is that about two-thirds of the foreclosed homes were owned by investors rather than occupants.
we are ruled not by a government but by a class. Here the media are crucial. Unless you spend time outside of America, you may not realize to what extent the press is controlled. The press is largely free, yes, but it is also largely owned by a small number of corporations which, in turn, are run by people from the same pool from which are drawn high-level pols and their advisers. They are rich people who know each other and have the same interests. It is very nearly correct to say that these people are the government of the United States, and that the federal apparatus merely a useful theatrical manifestation.
Finally, though it may not be deliberate, the schools produce a pitiably ignorant population that can’t vote wisely. Just as trial lawyers don’t want intelligent jurors, as they are harder to manipulate, so political parties don’t want educated voters. The existence of a puzzled mass gawping at Oprah reduces elections to popularity contests modulated by the state of the economy. One party may win, yes, or the other. But a TV-besotted electorate doesn’t meddle in matters important to its rulers. It has never heard of them.
To disguise all of this, elections provide the excitement and intellectual content of a football game, without the importance. They allow a sense of Participation. In bars across the land, in high-school gymns become forums, people become heated about what they imagine to be decisions of great import: This candidate or that? It keeps them from feeling left out while denying them power.
From 2007: Survival Acres lives on freeze dried foods for a month. Matt Savinar sent me some sample of Mountain food's meals a couple of weeks ago. Not too bad - certainly edible. So far I've had scrambed eggs, and chicken & rice. (I haven't eaten chicken in a while, but I did sample the meat for research purposes). Quite amazing what can be done with food - the packets are practically dust when you open them - but once boiling water is added, they reconstitute into food. My dietary habits don't involve meat though, so I'm almost certainly fuxored WTSHTF.
For weeks South Africa has suffered rolling blackouts caused in part by a shortage of coal. Gripped by unusually bitter snowstorms, China recently banned coal exports for the next two months. And at Newcastle in Australia, the world’s largest coal export terminal in the world’s largest coal exporting country, the queue of bulk carriers waiting to load has been known to stretch almost to Sydney – 150km to the south.
Coal, so long the Cinderella of fossil fuels, is not just in demand but in desperately short supply. The world’s biggest producers and exporters are struggling, and the price of imports to Europe has doubled to almost $140 per tonne over the past year. “It’s a global crunch”, says John Howland, managing editor of McCloskey’s Coal Report.
The immediate reasons for the price spike are soaring demand, inadequate infrastructure and bad weather. But now there are also gnawing doubts that global coal production may within the next few decades face fundamental geological constraints, or “peak coal”.
So how do you keep the bugs away? Simple: bugs, like all animals, are attracted to certain smells. They like things that smell like food, and our blood reeks of food to them–especially if we eat high-grain, high-sugar diets. The key is to cover yourself in smells that bugs dislike, so they’ll stay away from you. Conveniently, these tend to be smells that humans love: mint scents, citrus scents, woody scents… the type of thing you can find chemicals imitating in scented candles. So bug juice not only keeps the bugs away–it also works as perfume! And since its base is olive oil, it makes your skin soft too.
One UK economist warned that the world is now close to a 1930s-like Great Depression, while New York traders said they had never experienced such fear. The Fed's emergency funding procedure was first used in the Depression and has rarely been used since.
A Goldman Sachs trader in New York said: "Everyone is in a total state of shock, aghast at what is happening. No one wants to talk, let alone deal; we're just standing by waiting. Everyone is nervous about what is going to emerge when trading starts tomorrow."
In the UK, Michael Taylor, a senior market strategist at Lombard, the economics consultancy, said on Friday night: "We have all been talking about a 1970s-style crisis but as each day goes by this looks more like the 1930s. No one has any clue as to where this is going to end; it's a self-feeding disaster."
Up to 80 per cent of all Asian and African wheat varieties are susceptible to the fungus, and major wheat-producing nations to Iran’s east – such as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – should be on high alert, FAO warned.
“The fungus is spreading rapidly and could seriously lower wheat production in countries at direct risk,” said Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division.
He urged the control of the rust’s spread to lower the risk to countries already impacted by high food prices.
Iran has said that it will bolster its research capacity to tackle the new fungus and develop wheat varieties that are rust-resistant.
Called Ug99, the disease first surfaced in Uganda and subsequently spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, with both countries experiencing serious crop yield losses due to a serious rust epidemic last year. Also in 2007, FAO confirmed that a more virulent strain was found in Yemen.
Experts have been trying to come up with an explanation for what happened to the salmon population. Some fishermen think that the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005 and too much water was drained or water was drained at the wrong times, according to the article. Oceanic changes could be a factor, as could predator fish that may have been successful due to a diversion dam. Pipes attached to pumping stations that divert water line the river and could be a factor.
I'm guessing that the salmon swam up Denial river.
The Irish were driven to America by debt, and they are leading the Western world in household debt today. The London Daily Telegraph reported on March 13, 2008 that household debt in Ireland has reached 190 percent of disposable income, the highest in the developed world; and that the Irish banking system is suffering such acute strains from the downturn in the housing market that it may have to nationalize its banks.1 The same may soon be happening in the United States, and for much the same reasons.
..."debt slavery" or "debt peonage" was not just an accidental development of history. It was a deliberately-planned alternative to the slave arrangement in which owners were responsible for the feeding and care of a dependent population, and it is still with us today. Although European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery. They preferred "the European plan": capital could exploit labor by controlling the money supply, while letting the laborers feed themselves.
Traversed more by cracks than cars, Taft Road just south of St. Johns is falling apart.
It has deteriorated so much that Clinton County officials are on the verge of letting nature have her way.
They would grind down what is left of Taft into bits of stone and leave it - gravel to gravel, dirt to dirt.
Other alternatives are too expensive, officials say. Those include spending $100,000 to repave the mile-long stretch or endlessly patching it with material that can cost even more on a per-ton basis.
Now, apparently, we'll also opt for a bail-out of all those who tried to become rich by getting something for nothing at both ends of the Ponzi scheme called the housing bubble -- the "little guys" who signed mortgage contracts they could never hope to pay off, and the Wall Street playerz who bundled these hopeless contracts into fraudulent securities (and their enablers in the ratings agencies, plus the hedge fund smoothies who tried to cash in by using recondite algorithms to dissolve the risk associated with imprudent lending.) The bail-out is likely to accomplish nothing except the more rapid bankruptcy of government at all levels and a second Great Depression at ground level (worse than the first one).
Video: Hummer H2 off-roading. This explains a lot. These things aren't about winning wars, or driving cross country - they're meant to intimidate civilians and pedestrians.
Losers, you're so fucked you do not even know what is coming! You think it's bad now, just because Bear Stearns has a cactus branch in your assholes? Ha! It's only a small taste, my friends. Get ready to sell your old clothes and trinkets outside of bus stations like our babushkas used to in the 1990s, because you are fucked now in a way you simply cannot imagine, you are fucked just like you fucked Russia 10 years ago!
The thought experiment for that goes like this. You have one giant pile of stuff, and one giant pile of money. Right now there is enough money so that one-dollar gets one pound of stuff. Now, if you double the amount of that money, then it takes two dollars to equal one pound of that stuff. Unless the pound of stuff doubles in size, you have just caused 100% price inflation. So, operations like just zapping a half a trillion or so into existence out of thin air means just a bigger pile of money going after the same amount of stuff. So that's what we have going on now. These are financial engineering acts of desperation to save a system by giving it more of what got it to this point in the first place... debt. So when regular people like me think about that, they think, that doesn't make any sense, and they lose confidence.
That's in the real world. On TV things are still good though. So if you don't like what you're reading here, then go turn on the TV. You'll feel better.
A great Electric Politics interview with Dr. H. Bruce Franklin about The Menhaden, the most important fish in the sea...and how humans are endangering it.
Happy St. Patrick's day. Don't drink too much, or you'll be sorreeeeee...
I've finally created an amazon link for UK visitors to shop through. So, if you go there through this link: amazon.co.uk and buy your doo-dads, I'll get some shiny new shillings.
I've also added a link to amazon.de for my many German readers. Again, if you follow that link and shop, I'll get some Euro & cents.
And now, time to wipe my arse with my dwindling collection of dollars. All hail Preznit Bush and his ongoing mission to destroy America from within. Which leads me to:
Only now, CNN tells people to get in on "gold rush". Nice one CNN; idleworm readers were being told that back when the metal was $470 an ounce. Note how the article still advises against physical possession, in favour of stocks - in spite of the fact that the recent run up saw physical gold increase in price, even as stocks decreased!
Farmers have known for centuries that soil doesn't necessarily contain all of the nutrients that plants need. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that manure spread on fields helped crop production immensely. Arab civilizations collected the written knowledge about farming. Somewhere along the line, farmers realized that ground up bones provided nutrients. By 1815, England was importing so many bones for bone meal that people on the Continent starting complaining:
"England is robbing all other countries of their fertility. Already in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipsic, and Waterloo, and of Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manorial equivalent of three million and a half of men...
...like a vampire she hangs from the neck of Europe."
Donner and Kucharik's findings suggest that if the U.S. were to meet its proposed ethanol production goals, nitrogen loading by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico would increase by 10-19 per cent.
To arrive at this figure, Donner and Kucharik combined the agricultural land use scenarios with models of terrestrial and aquatic nitrogen cycling.
"The nitrogen levels in the Mississippi will be more than twice the recommendation for the Gulf," says Donner. "It will overwhelm all the suggested mitigation options."
The results of the study call into question the assumption that enough land exists to fulfill current feed crop demand and expand corn and other crop production for ethanol.
If Codex gets its way, as it already has in the European Union and Australia, the following events will ultimately occur:
* Consumers will have available to them only 28 or so dietary supplements that are far too small in dosage to have any discernible impact on any human being. High potency nutrients will not be available either with or without a physician's prescription, since these life-sustaining molecules will be forbidden under any circumstances.
* All animals grown for human consumption will be mandated for treatment with antibiotics, growth enhancers, and hormones.
* All food available to the public will be irradiated, with the exception of locally grown food.
* Herbs will not be available unless they undergo multi-million dollar scientific trials similar to those used for drugs.
* All native seeds will be confiscated and the use of genetically modified (GMO) seeds will be mandated.
* The "acceptable" limits of toxins in the food supply will be increased, including the allowance of seven specific toxins that were previously banned by Stockholm Convention, a global treaty signed by 120 nations to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants.
36% of scientists at NASA are Indians: Govt survey. Assuming that those figures are accurate - if that doesn't illustrate the fall of US dominance, and the rise of India (and presumably, China), what does?
...as many as 12% scientists and 38% doctors in the US are Indians, and in NASA, 36% or almost 4 out of 10 scientists are Indians.
If that's not proof enough of Indian scientific and corporate prowess, digest this: 34% employees at Microsoft, 28% at IBM, 17% at Intel and 13% at Xerox are Indians.
And the House of Elders also heard some startling facts about a country that's still stuck with a Third World tag — 20% of gold in the world is used by Indians and nine out of 10 diamonds used in the world are made in India.
Unfortunately, we are behaving in ways that suggest we do not know there is a serious problem."
Here's a handy site for those of you wondering about the future of cooking (I know you're out there, freaks): Solar Cooking Plans. I've made the "Cookit" myself - quite easy, even for a Klutz like me.
The black areas represent the least productive areas of the ocean, which have increased 15% from 1998 to 2007. The warming of the surface of the ocean is thought to increase stratification within the water column, preventing the nutrients in the cool deep ocean from rising to the surface. Without the mixing, there is limited ability for life to take hold.
Total boss Christophe de Margerie warned that oil production may be nearing its peak. He now believes the world will never be able lift production from the current level of 85m barrels per day. One hundred is out of the question, he says, much less the 115m that so many optimists assume. The CEO of ConocoPhillips agrees with him. The oil companies duly announced their 2007 results, and masked in statistics combining oil and gas production was the alarming fact that all, bar Total, had suffered falling oil production. This is not what we expect of an oil-addicted world on course for 115m barrels a day.
The CEO of Hess was the next oil boss to blow a whistle, telling an oil industry conference in Houston that oil companies, oil-producing countries, and consumers need to act now. "Given the long lead times of at least 5-10 years from discovery to production," he said, "an oil crisis is coming and sooner than most people think. Unfortunately, we are behaving in ways that suggest we do not know there is a serious problem."
I was wondering why idleworm's traffic tends to stick at 6 to 10,000 visitors a day. Last night I met a friend who told me the answer: "It's just so depressing!"
I can't disagree - it is pretty grim. I try to find happy links to break up the doom (I found some funnies on Sunday's post, see below). However, you do yourself no favours by ignoring what's happening out there. We're one straw away from breaking the camel's back. Maybe the old girl will keep on hobbling - I don't know - I just don't feel like betting the farm on her. That said, here's your Monday Morning Medicine:
Americans shit and piss out all the drugs they consume to take them away from wretched American reality, then drink their drug-filled treated water, poorly treated because their government is too broke from wars and from payouts to oil oligarchs. Poor bastards. It is time America began to behave like a civilized country: to stop invading other nations, and to stop making incredibly shitty movies. But this is like asking a pigeon to behave like a tiger.
...we look to Bloomberg.com to read, "Derivative trading fell 21% to US$539 trillion in the fourth quarter, the biggest drop in at least 14 years, as the freeze in money markets reduced the need to hedge risks, the Bank for International Settlements said."
This is made plainly horrific when one notes that global GDP, the sum total of all the goods and services produced on the entire planet in an entire year, is about $50 trillion. So derivative trading dropped to "only" more than 10 times global GDP! We're freaking doomed!...
...Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis newsletter is one of the places you can go to see the utter calamity looming, as, "there are $45 trillion of credit default swaps out there. A default on a mere 10% would cause an economic disaster. Unfortunately, it's guaranteed to happen."
The FDIC has begun to increase staff at many of its regional offices to deal with the anticipated rash of bank failures in states hardest hit by the housing bust. California, Florida and parts of the southwest will definitely need the most attention. These states are undergoing a housing depression and many of the smaller banks which issued the mortgages and commercial real estate loans are bound to get hammered. They simply do not have the capital cushion to withstand the tsunami of defaults and foreclosures that are coming. Depositors should make sure that all their savings are covered under FDIC rules; no more than $100,000 per account. Money markets are not insured...
...With oil, gold and food prices soaring, the Fed has been roundly criticized for cutting rates and risking further erosion to the value of the dollar. (This morning the dollar fell to $1.53 on the euro!) But Bernanke is right; the real danger is deflation. We are at the beginning of a consumer-led recession; characterized by weakening demand, lack of personal savings, declining asset-values (particularly homes) and over-indebtedness. The Fed's increases to the money supply via low interest rates will not effect the dramatic economic slowdown that will be evident within the year. Trillions of dollars of derivatives, over-leveraged subprime assets and otherwise bad bets are all unwinding at the same time draining an ocean of virtual capital from the economy. If credit keeps getting destroyed at the present pace, the country will be in the grips of a depression-like slump by 2009...
...An article in the New York Times by Morgan Stanley's Asia chairman, Stephen Roach, states that the country is not in a cyclical downturn, but post-bubble recession. There is a big difference. The Fed's interest rate cuts and Bush's “Stimulus Plan” are unlikely to stop housing prices from continuing to fall nor will they miraculously fix the problems in the credit markets. The massive expansion of credit in the last 6 years has created a $45 trillion derivatives balloon that could implode or just partially unwind. No one really knows. And no one really knows how much damage it will cause to the global financial system. Stay tuned.
Owners have begun squatting in their own foreclosed homes. One man has been doing this since 2005 - nobody knows who owns the mortgage - so he's been living rent/mortgage free for all that time. I expect to see the MSM scumbags push the "walk away" idea to their readers ... to keep them from living rent free for two years.
There is no clean way to sell the home that would guarantee "clean title" hence a foreclosure is the only means to separate the property from the dead-beat speculator/squattor. Banks do not want to spend the $50,000 required to take a home through a foreclosure and clear the title — only to put the house back on the market for a deeper loss afterwards. Most likely, they have not revealed these owner occupied defaults to their shareholders, thanks to the sheer numbers of non-performing loans on their balance sheets, and the daunting task of foreclosing on all of them. This is the ultimate seizure and full stop of the market whereby everyone is standing in a stalemate. As one broker said to me, "these bums sitting in $3,000,000 homes overlooking the water are likely to be left alone by the banks for 2 years before the banks even get serious about foreclosure." So here is the difference between “walking away,” these folks are doing anything but walking away, they are sitting on lounge chairs sipping martinis living cost free! (not to mention that they have ceased paying property taxes and insurance). I can only imagine what this market will look like in the coming years . . .”
Haha! Gadget's failure could triple cost of 2010 census. The cost of dimishing returns is a bitch, no? BTW, all good citizens should f*ck with the social engineers by describing their ethnicity as "other".
The hand-held mobile computers that are supposed to replace the pens and paper long used by census takers aren't working properly, and delays could send the cost from $600 million to as much as $2 billion.
Hillary thinks Obama isn't good enough to be President...but she'll still have him as her Vice President. The Clintons, ladies and gentlemen. Give them a big hand.
...the world’s looming energy crisis could be even more severe than anyone imagines. In the International Energy Agency’s latest long-term forecast, to satisfy economic growth global coal consumption needs to rise 60% by 2030, and coal-fired electricity generating capacity has to double. But if Zittel and Rutledge are right, there is little chance of those predictions being fulfilled. And as global oil production goes into terminal decline within the next decade or so, there is even less chance that synthetic coal-to-liquids fuels can make up the crude deficit.
But the good news is that the imperatives of climate change and peak oil are identical. “In the long run economies that rely on depletable resources are doomed to fail”, says Dr Zittel, “the coal peak makes it even more urgent to switch to renewable energy without delay”.
NOTE: If the only purpose of these energy technologies is to allow the continuation of a mindless growth based consumer dystopia, then we're still screwed.
Will a second child contribute to global warming? Well, duh, yeah. But if you don't have that kid, will it really make a difference? No. As long as we've got a financial system built on growth, the stuff is going to get used. The question to ask is this: "If I have a second child, will that child curse me for bringing it into a Hell-Planet in which humans face a mass die-off?" This about THAT, Mister Green.
FOOD:
Thanks China, for adding lead to tea. (from 2007):
William Hubbard, a former deputy commissioner of the FDA, told NPR about one Chinese factory that manufactures herbal tea.
"To speed up the drying process, they would lay the tea leaves out on a huge warehouse floor and drive trucks over them so that the
and buy your doo-dads, I'll get some shiny new shillings.