Bush III?


from here

The original image for the above is a movie poster for Saw V.

Seven Days To Go...

A visual contrast of two speeches by two American presidential candidates.

John McCain has trouble filling all the seats in a small arena.



Barack Obama can fill small cities.



A lot of people, millions of Americans, are going to totally lose their shit if Obama doesn't win. Almost the entire mainstream media is telling them, "Obama will win, McCain will lose", it's a dangerous chant to screw into peoples' heads, anything could happen before election day. The tide for Obama could easily, quickly turn against him, a breaking scandal of jaw-dropping outrage might mean just enough lost Obama votes for McCain to stumble over the line.

If Obama wins, the American government is expecting trouble. And if McCain wins, events could easily turn very nasty indeed."But the news every night said Obama would win! Why didn't he win? Why? Why? Why? Why didn't he win?"

The Department of Homeland Security has helped outfit American police with billions of dollars worth of anti-riot gear, water cannons, military-style vehicles, instant checkpoints, supposedly non-lethal weaponry since 9/11. They won't need much encouragement to get into the streets and use it. Police forces in many larger American cities have been training for election day riots and 'unrest'.

People don't like to feel that something they passionately believe in has been stolen from them.
And you'd expect that the millions of people who are already paranoid about their electronic votes being flipped are going to be hard to calm down or pacify if they see it happening in front of their eyes on election day.

How many more Obama assassination plots will be uncovered in the next seven days?

Most of the European, and Russian media, report on the Obama assassination plots with a stunned disbelief, as though they imagine legions of Deliverance extras heading for the next Obama rally in a convoy of shotgun-wracked pickup trucks, yehawing and shouting through mouthfuls of nicotine-orange tombstone teeth, "Hyuck! I gonna go in bag me one of dem big ones, just like my grandpappy did! Hyuck!"

The American media, meanwhile, seem to accept it as a fact of everyday American life that there are plenty of white, heavily armed American males who are driven insane by the thought of "that one" in the White House. Kind of like, hey, what did you expect? If a black man runs for president, he has to learn to duck and weave. And run, when necessary.

Change is coming, Obama promises, change is coming.

The world waits, in hope, expecting the worst.

One week to go.

It's Only Terrorism When Non-Evangelicals Blow Shit Up

2012 Alaska Nation leader Sarah Palin doesn't believe that people who blow up abortion clinics are terrorists, even by definition :

When asked Thursday night by NBC television presenter Brian Williams whether an abortion clinic bomber was a terrorist, Palin heaved a sigh and, at first, circumvented the question.

"There's no question that Bill Ayers by his own admittance was one who sought to destroy our US Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist," Palin said, referring to a 1960s leftist who founded a radical violent gang dubbed the "Weathermen" -- and who years later supported Obama's first run for public office in the state of Illinois.

"Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that it would be unacceptable to... I don't know if you're gonna use the word 'terrorist' there," the ardently pro-life running mate of John McCain said.

All bombs are terror. Whether they're strapped to the back of a suicide bomber bolting through a crowded weekend market, dropped from a hunter-killer flying robot onto schools, and schoolchildren, in Pakistan, hidden away on a city bus to 'tickle' (as the CIA call it) the enemy in false flag operations, or deposited on the door step of an abortion clinic, all bombs are terror. It's that simple.

Which is why President Bush, and the other leaders of countries devoted to the 'War On Terror' now usually refer to the enemy as "extremists" instead of "terrorists." Not everyone can be labeled a "terrorist", but everyone who loudly resists the police state reality can be banded an "extremist". That way, you never run out of enemies, no matter how many Muslims you slaughter.

"Do We Get Them To Chase Us, Or Do We Just Try To Steal It?"



The Italian police have new toys. These are not practical police cars, more so mobile recruitment ads, a good way to spark up convos with car enthusiast youth, and a great ad for Lambos.

A Top Ten List Of The World's 'Coolest Police Cars'

McCain Campaign Advisor Endorses....Obama

Wow. That's really gotta hurt.

In other news, if you're a political campaign volunteer, and you're planning to fake a story about how some crazed Obamaniac hauled you from your John McCain stickered car and carved a big B into your cheek, it's a good idea to get someone else to carve the B in your flesh and not do it yourself, using a mirror, so the B is backward.

Some interesting rumours flying around about what Barack Obama is actually up to in Hawaii, where he's supposed to be visiting his grandmother. Apparently there's a big meeting happening right now in Hawaii, involving military leaders from the US, and other countries, including Iran, where Obama is representing the United States, as incoming president.

Obama is being briefed and dealt with as though he's already won the election, which of course, he has, even if he doesn't get to the White House, in the end.

Stopping total economic collapse is on the Hawaii agenda, as well as trying to avoid the outbreaks of more war that are expected to follow such a collapse.

Interesting rumours indeed, but just rumours for now, of course. Until they turn out to be true.

George Carlin's Uncomfortable Truths

This was originally posted on this blog on December 15, 2007. George Carlin died on June 28. He saw what was coming, and who was responsible :

"They don't give a fuck about you. The real owners of this country don't care about you. They don't care about you at all. At all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.

"And that's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick being jammed up their arseholes everyday.

"Because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called The American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Greenspan Admits Multi-Trillion "Mistake", But No Apologies

What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made at work? Have you made a bad choice that resulted in your boss losing a bucket of cash? Don't feel bad. We have a world history new champion for monu-mega-mentally screwing up in the workplace.

Former US Treasury Secretary Alan Greenspan's screw ups have helped to wipe away trillions in American wealth, and plunged the world into super financial clusterfuckery. Now he admits, shock, he might have made a bit of a "mistake". Yet it was a "mistake" hailed by those who knew how to profit from it, and did, while the rest of ask, "So, what's this derivatives thing about again?" :

'Yes, I found a flaw,'' Greenspan said in response to grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. ''That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.''

Greenspan said he was ''partially'' wrong in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected.

Never feel bad about fucking up, ever again. Why should you? Greenspan doesn't even feel the need to apologise to Americans, and the world, for his monumental, history-changing "mistake".

Shit happens, eh?

1000 Days Of Blogging Part One

Whoops, I missed the three year birthday for Your New Reality last month. There's been something like 1300 posts blurted on this blog during that time, including about a million words of opinion, commentary, bitter rants, and not-often-enough attempts at parody and humour.

The initial aim of this blog was to basically record the news events and societal changes that seemed important or particularly interesting at the time. It was an idea of digitally clipping and storing news stories without winding up with piles of old, yellowing newspaper filling boxes, stuffed under a bed.

Finding a few thousand steady, regular readers from a couple of dozen countries around the world, wasn't at the front of my mind when I started this, but it's been an excellent surprise.

I thought, back then, how cool it would be, once every few months, to go and have a read back of a month's worth of archived posts to see what news events I'd already forgotten about, or what small story back then had exploded into a huge event. But tonight's the first time I've actually gone back to the first month of blogging to fully re-read each post. Been to busy writing more blog posts instead. Which is sort of back to the boxes of old newspaper clippings that are never opened and rummaged.

It was a bit scary re-reading that first month. Lots of mistakes, and...a bit of hysteria, well, plenty of hysteria, but then Hurricane Katrina was a week long hysterical TV event, shocking and appalling, daily scenes of horror and deprivation tsunamiing out of the box. I'll do a round-up of some of those stories as part of this series of looking back at three years of Your New Reality (although this may turn out to be the only anniversary re-post, there's a lot going on these days and anything like a series of posts, even reposts, can tend to dwindle away here, never to be mentioned again).

Here's one weird thing I've noticed. I thought blogging would only make me more cynical. But recent posts seem to be far less cynical now. Maybe intense cynicism runs its course, or you just wear it out. Or, perhaps, does regularly, chunky blogging actually make you, dare I say it, optimistic?

Here's a piece from September, 2005. The cynicism squirts out like lemon juice in the eye :

FASHIONABLE SYDNEY SET OUTRAGED AT AL QAEDA TERROR THREAT SNUB

MELBOURNE JOINS 'MOST BOMBABLE' WORLD CITIES LIST

"SYDNEY IS, LIKE, SO OVER," SAYS AL QAEDA'S AL ASUQUF

By Darryl Mason

Sydneysiders are reeling this morning over news that Al Qaeda has announced Melbourne as a possible new target of their worldwide campaign to scare the piss out of people.

This is being seen as a major snub in social and political circles of the 2000 Olympic City, and leading Sydneysiders are calling on Al Qaeda to reconsider their choice of future targets.

The Al Qaeda announcement is also expected to make it even harder for Sydney poltiicians to redirect millions of taxpayer dollars from spending on education, child care and medicines for the elderly to buy CCTV cameras and other anti-terror related security measures.

"It's terrible news," said one Sydney security specialist who has been campaigning for the NSW government to spend $100 million on his line of robot dogs that sniff out bombs concealed in the buttholes of Islamomaniac poodles.

If Sydneysiders are disappointed by the Al Qaeda snub then Melbournians are absolutely gloating at the news that hit front pages and headlines around the world today.

Fashionistas down south claim the Al Qaeda announcement is yet another sign of just how 'cool' Melbourne had become.

"Obviously even Al Qaeda knows Melbourne is the city to be seen in if you have any taste at all," said socialite Rita Tayor. "Melbourne is so cool right now, everybody is flocking here, even bomb-happy, kill-crazy matyrs who hate our freedom."

An Al Qaeda spokesman has confirmed that Melbourne was chosen over Sydney because it is now seen internationally as the 'IT' Australian city of today.

"Sydney is, like, so over," said Al Qaeda media whiz Al Asuquf. "Well, not over, like bombed to hell over. Just over as a fashionable target for self-detonating suiciders."

"We do monitor what's hot and what's not in terms of the world's great cities," said Asuquf, "and Melbourne is definitely hot. We don't want to be seen as being out of touch with fashion trends, and so Melbourne was an obvious choice as the Australian city to honour with a September 11 anniversary threat of looming carnage and mayhem."

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the new Al Qaeda threat confirmed the necessary validity of his plan to track terrorist suspects by satellite, install 'hate thought' detectors in peoples' brains and lock up four year old children fleeing war zones until they learn what Free Australia actually means.

"When you're dealing with terrorists who hate our freedom," said Howard, "it is vitally important to stand up to their threats by restricting the freedoms of Australians as much as possible, to show the terrorists that we will freely continue to fire bomb Muslims from the sky with our freedom jets until the whole world is free."

In the US, President George W Bush celebrated the September 11 anniversary by opening a string of new freedom-related enterprises. Bush oversaw the ribbon cutting ceremonies at the new Freedom Juice Company, the Freedom Jail for Jihadic Newborns, the Freedom Torture Centre and the plush new Freedom Execution Hall.

Bush has also endorsed a new line of products to help fight terror, including Freedom Shackles, the Freedom Infant Decapitator Bomb, Freedom Napalm and Freedom Testicle Electrocuters.

"We have always loved freedom, we continue to love freedom and we will never stop loving freedom," said Bush, who loves freedom, during ceremonies to officially announce that September 11 will now be known as ‘Freedom Day’.

"To celebrate Freedom Day every free citizen of free Western society will be required by threat of torture and detention to freely celebrate their freedom by being free and freely repeating 'I love freedom' one hundred times," said Bush.

"Being free requires the strict enforcement of free laws to enforce freedom," Bush said. "You cannot be free unless there are free laws to make sure you are being free correctly."

Both Bush and Howard have also denied rumoured plans to build a 100 foot tall wall completely encircling Iran, Iraq and Syria to create the 'Republic of Freedomistan'.

"I thoroughly, and freely, reject these scandalous lies," said Howard at the joint media conference. "But all options are still on the table."

Bush then searched under the table before asking Howard, "I can see the media but where's the joint?"

I think I was watching and reading a lot of British satirist Chris Morris back then.

Another look back at past rantings, later. Maybe.

The Unblinking Eye In The Sky Will Watch You, Constantly

Yes, and you were a stone-cold paranoid nutbag in the 1990s if you believed 'black helicopters' were tracking people and vehicles across states. Soon, you won't even see the surveillance craft, as it soaks up data from your physical shape, gait and shadow, from miles above, and determines if you are engaged in suspicious behaviour.

When necessary, the unblinking 24 hour surveillance may also be able to take body heat readings, to determine, perhaps, if you're 'hot' enough with pandemic flu virus to be....de-registered.

What is tested in the (war) Zone, will be deployed in the Homeland :

Real-time streaming video of Iraqi and Afghan battle areas taken from thousands of feet in the air can follow actions of people on the ground as they dig, shake hands, exchange objects and kiss each other goodbye.

The video is sent from unmanned and manned aircraft to intelligence analysts at ground stations in the United States and abroad. They watch video in real time of people getting in and out of cars, loading trunks, dropping things or picking them up. They can even see vehicles accelerate, slow down, move together or make U-turns.

"The dynamics of an urban insurgency have resulted in a rapid increase in the number of activities visible in the video field of view," according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems," according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

"Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public..."

The resolution capability of the video systems ranges from four inches to a foot...

The video itself is also shaped by the angle to the ground from which it is shot, although there are 3-D capabilities that allow viewers on the ground to manipulate videos of objects so they can see them from different vantage points.

I Blew Tens Of Thousands On Complete Shit, But At Least I've Got A Cool Egg Cup

The most read story on the UK Independent website today :



There's certainly nothing much more interesting happening in the world today, nothing big enough, or world changing enough, to compete with The Ten Best Egg Cups. Anyway, who doesn't love a boiled egg? Particularly with a platoon of buttered soldiers lined up for the compulsory dip n' soak.

So how thrilling could these egg cups be that this story hits Number One? This thrilling :



The above eggcup, which we're assured will allow you to "make a visual statement at the breakfast table", costs about $35.

Have you ever felt a burning desire to make a "visual statement at the breakfast table"? Toxic hangovers with a tumbling gut full of kebab and bourbon do not count.

The Dark, Rising Tide Of Clownism


More images of Clownists gathered at a 'convention' in Mexico here

By Darryl Mason

I'm not worried about communism, socialism, fascism, islamism, globalism or totaltechtarianism. I'm too busy being worried about these creepy Clownists gaining control of the levers of power. And they will do anything to get that power. Those big floppy shoes will not slow them down, and the manic smiles do not hide the darkness in their hearts.

Al Qaeda terrorists?

They have one, maybe two suicide bombers in a bus or truck at most.

These fuckers can pack ten of themselves into one Noddy car.

And already, thousands of them are gathering, for 'conventions'.

Extreme Clownists already have their schools, all over the world, where they indoctrinate new generations of Clownists, they have their false idol god blatantly displayed at restaurants throughout our countries and they are widely beloved, even worshipped, by hundreds of millions of children. We even let them take the floor to spread their anti-frown ideology at our kids' birthday parties, for fuck's sake. And we pay them to do it!

In our elderly years, our grand-children will shake their heads sadly as they ask us : "Why? Why? Why didn't you do something about the threat of Extreme Clownists when you had the chance?"

What will we tell them?

Warning : May Contain Brain Spam

"Sarge, Reynolds Is Thinking About Cheerleader Porn Again"

It's called 'synthetic telepathy.' Ultra-advanced EEG, or something not yet invented, will read brain signals and interpret them into communication. Not a new idea, by any stretch, but a little closer to our reality than science fiction of the 1960s :

Vocal cords were overrated anyway. A new Army grant aims to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. No need to type an e-mail, dial a phone or even speak a word.

Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought.

The Army grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives. The first is to compose a message using, as D'Zmura puts it, "that little voice in your head."

The second part is to send that message to a particular individual or object (like a radio), also just with the power of thought. Once the message reaches the recipient, it could be read as text or as a voice mail.

This story talks about a 'synthetic telepathy' struggling to interpret our words and phrases. The obvious solution would be a new visual language based around universally recognised shapes and symbols. Wouldn't it be easier to think a shape of a certain colour than a whole sentence?

The first development of a wireless communication system based around brain signals, instead of speech, sounds, type or hand signals is, naturally, for military purposes, but its potential uses are legion. iTelepath will revolutionise video games, the stock market, social networking, cinema, music, all forms of communication and discussion, and help further to deisolate the physically and mentally disabled.

Maybe we can build space freighters out of the 10 billion or so mobile phones we'll have discarded by the time this synthetic telepathy comes online.

And a warning, or a wish :

"...people would learn to think in a way the computer couldn't interpret."

The story discusses synthetic telepathy as being based around equipment in a hood or a baseball cap that will read your brain signals. Ridiculous. The cheaper and more obvious way such a system would function would be through it being installed, that is, two little scanner chips on each side of your brain, say, implanted in the flesh behind your ears. But to link into the iBrain network, as with today's internet, you would risk letting into your consciousness, and your dreams, nefarious surveillance and, of course, fucking brain spam.

Imagine if you could be detained, and charged, for your dreams? We already live in societies where convictions for thought crimes (what you may have intended to do, but didn't actually do) are now a reality, and on the rise.

Are you responsible for what your brain gets up to when your alpha-stating?

We will either learn to hide our more immoral thoughts, especially the darkest ones we would never dare share with anyone, even on the brink of death, or we will learn to never think such things, for fear of prosecution.

Hitler TV

Thank God Hitler was defeated in World War 2, otherwise we would probably be living in a world where long speeches by politicians are pumped into our homes through 'television' and big screens are erected in public squares to rally the masses through carefully staged media events and powerful, nationalistic imagery. The 'television' in our loungerooms would also be showing endless documentaries about Hitler's life, beliefs and the Nazi Party.

Imagine a world like that, and give thanks that the millions who died in World War 2 helped to stop Hitler's evil plan to control the minds and culture of people through 'television'.

There were also plans for 'Reality TV' shows, which would tell people how they should be living their lives. Hitler wanted the masses to spend their free time sitting in front of a hypnotic box, soaking up state propaganda and sports broadcasts, obeying what they are told to obey, believing what they are told to believe :

Adolf Hitler was on the verge of creating an Orwellian-style cable TV system to broadcast Nazi propaganda around Germany.

Screens would have been set up in public places, including in laundries so housewives could tune in, according to a documentary based on papers and tapes found in his bunker.

Prototype programmes included Family Chronicles: An Evening With Hans And Gelli, an early reality TV show depicting the wholesome Aryan life of a young German couple for the rest of the population to model themselves on.

...the engineer Walter Bruch was asked to make 'people's television' a reality.

He tabled a document to Hitler called 'Plan to supply people's transmitter to German homes,' and the laying of a broadband cable between Berlin and Nuremberg was begun, it claimed.

Josef Hebbels, who masterminded the plan, told Rudolph Hess's sister Margaret, who was also working on the scheme: 'We'll be able to show whatever we want. We'll create a reality, which the people of Germany need and can copy. Your task is to teach German women to live this way'.

"We'll create a reality..."

Why does that sound familiar?

It was repeated by the BushCo. 'White House senior advisor', otherwise known as Karl Rove, in 2002 :

"'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality...we'll act again, creating other new realities."

Sure They Can Steer Them, But Can They Hold A Gun At The Same Time?

It's a damn shame we're not legally allowed to race them.



Japanese TV is so surreal.

Boo!

The New York Times casually discusses ghosts and hauntings, in Northwest Conneticut, with barely a skeptic in sight. Excerpts :

''This is a ghost that seems to take great pleasure in mischief,'' said Ms. Baranski from the 1787 farmhouse that the family of her husband, Matthew Cowles, bought in Litchfield County about 50 years ago. ''We'll buy a new hammer, a pair of scissors, a flashlight, and it will literally just disappear, gone completely from where we'd set it down. Then, years later, it will manifest itself in the strangest places of the house.''

''This is by no means a malevolent force,'' Ms. Baranski said, ''but he has made his point that he opposes all things electronic: computers, refrigerators, lights and televisions,'' which she said all act up. And faxes? The machine just won't work. ''Forget faxes. My agents and managers want to come and have a séance just so they can send me a fax. It's as though he resists the very idea of modernity.''

For Ms. Dano and her husband, Frank Attardi, having a ghost is something they have both come to accept as ''absolutely true, and absolutely wonderful, and we, too, are not crazy,'' she said.

''We have a ghost and her name is Madeline,'' said Ms. Dano from her 1700's Colonial in Litchfield County. ''Her name is written here, on the wall of the borning room,'' which is a small room reserved in old houses where people were born or died. ''She died when she was about 14, and I truly believe it is her ghost that we and several others have encountered.''

''She has never let me see her, but I have heard her. And Frank, who used to be the ultimate skeptic of all time, has felt her. Once, I was in the keeping room,'' she said about the kitchen, ''and Frank said, 'Are you doing laundry? I keep getting this incredible smell of roses.' Then, he was in the barn and he was overpowered by this smell of roses again.

''Then my friend Jeanette was here and she saw a shadowy image of a girl about 14 wearing a blue dress, with a man in a long black suit, maybe her father or brother?''

Another time, ''Frank and I were in the keeping room having something to eat, and I was saying to him, 'You know, if we ever leave this house' and all of a sudden the door slammed, hard. There was no one there. There was no wind. It was Madeline telling us she doesn't want us to go.''

An incident with their plumber validated the couple's beliefs, Ms. Dano said. ''He came to us completely traumatized and said, 'I can't work here. This place is haunted.' Every time he'd turn his back, the toilet would flush; it would just go berserk. Madeline was trying to spook him, and you know what? It worked.''

James O'Shea, a Litchfield restaurateur, said his 1785 home is haunted by a gray-cloaked lady and he has a half-dozen witnesses to back him up.

''Northwest Connecticut is the spookiest place on earth,'' he said. ''There are more ghost sightings in Litchfield County than there are black bear and bobcat sightings combined.''

All across Connecticut, actually, there are inns, restaurants and museums full of ghost stories. There's the Red Brook Inn in Old Mystic, where guests have come screaming out of their rooms after seeing a transparent woman wrapped in a black shawl; the Pettibone Tavern in Simsbury, where employees swear about a ghost who pokes diners in the ribs, lights candles, moves drinking glasses, and turns lights on and off, and the Adrienne restaurant in New Milford, which the owners and employees said was occupied by the spirit of a young boy.

There are some cemeteries around the state, too, that paranormal researchers said are haunted. At the Christian Lane Cemetery in Berlin, Nancy Caswell, co-founder of the Southern New England Ghost Hunters Society, said she took a video of ghostly, mist-like ''ectoplasm'' encircling a tree and an audio recording of the voice of a young English boy asking, ''Are you the keeper?''

Can this really be, or are all of these people perhaps a tad twisted?

''Science can explain a lot, but not everything,'' said Stuart Heywood of Mystic, who was a biology professor for 26 years at the University of Connecticut. ''I can tell you as pure fact that dishes used to go flying out of the cabinets at my old house in Storrs. Not just falling out, but flying out, with force.''

Read The Full Story Here

"Everyone Loves Me. I Love Me!"



As a Facebook friend of Homecoming Queen Annie Jennings points out, she's "beautiful on the outside, but more importantly on the inside."

Mandatory genetic screening, probably for insurance reasons, will one day mean that Down Syndrome children, like Annie Jennings, could become extinct. Why do we presume that these children are somehow 'backward' or less intelligent than most others? If they don't fit in well enough with our society, is it their fault or the fault of our society?

I once asked a Down Syndrome kid why he and his friends on the bus I used to catch always laughed so much. "Because it's fun." Then they all laughed.

When I first started riding that bus, it was filled with miserable looking people, usually pissed off about the craparse day they had at work. That soon changed after the Down Syndrome kids became regular riders. The rest of the passengers looked forward to the kids getting on, and every afternoon, within minutes of those kids boarding, everybody on the bus had a smile on their face. Those that weren't laughing along with them.

One afternoon, a Down Syndrome kid of only 10 or 11 got up in front of the whole bus, totally fearless and uninhibited, and announced that everyone was going to sing along with him to the 'Wheels On The Bus' song. And almost everyone did. It was utterly magical.

How did the rest of us 'normies' lose so much of that pure joy of simply being alive?

"For You, Dad" - From Old Pots & Pans, An F1

Beautiful story, about practical recycling. It took 20 years, but these two brothers have finally completed their race car built from old junk they found scattered around their property.

The two brothers, Zhao Xiushun and Zhao Baoguo, wanted desperately to pay tribute to their late father who died in an earthquake 32 years prior. After some pondering of what best could honor their father, they came up with the idea to build their own pseudo racecar out of pots, pans, bikes, steel doors and anything else they could muster. Inspiration, of course, came from their father who always told them, "It's no big deal to drive, but it's quite something to build a car."

Full story is here.

The brothers claim they learned how to build the car solely from magazines and books, and it can hit 100mph. Excellent!

"Thanks Dumbass Stock Brokers, I'm Wealthy Now And I'm Outta Here"

A 37 year old hedge fund manager who saw what was coming, bet against the mortgage market, made an 870% profit, cashes in, bails out and writes this amazing letter about his adventures :

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, "What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it." I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list those deserving thanks know who they are.

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. Please do not expect any type of reply to emails or voicemails within normal time frames or at all. Andy Springer and his company will be handling the dissolution of the fund. And don't worry about my employees, they were always employed by Mr. Springer's company and only one (who has been well-rewarded) will lose his job.

On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government. Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man's interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft's near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken.

Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won't see it included in BP's, "Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions," television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM's similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female. The evil female plant -- marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week. Please people, let's stop the rhetoric and start thinking about how we can truly become self-sufficient.

With that I say good-bye and good luck.

All the best,

Andrew Lahde

I'm guessing when he "returns" it will as a cashed-up entrepreneur in the New Hemp Industry that will help revive economies, clothe the poor and feed (some) of the hungry.

One In Three FBI Agents Were Pulled Away From Investigating Wall Street To Focus On The 'War On Terror'

After September 11, 2001, America was supposed to rebuild. But instead, the worst period of fraud and corporate thievery the country has ever experienced was unleashed from the trading floors and office boardrooms on Wall Street onto the American people.

Future researchers into this period of history are no doubt going to turn up many more extemely suspicious, and nasty, little surprises than the ones hinted at in this New York Times investigation :

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials.

The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. Current and former officials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes.

The FBI had many thousands of agents and specialists keeping an eye on Wall Street, until September 11, 2001. The FBI were forced to re-assign many of these extremely specialised agents to pursue so-called 'terrorist financing', leaving Wall Street to do what it wanted, and that's when the real mega-billion dollar frauds and the casual looting of the American Treasury truly began.

So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.

Perhaps that was the idea?

Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.

According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I. data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.

Where the worst, most nation-ruining fraud occurred, the resources to stop it had already been stripped away.

Prosecution of frauds against financial institutions dropped 48 percent from 2000 to 2007, insurance fraud cases plummeted 75 percent, and securities fraud cases dropped 17 percent.

And those who had the insider information on just where the FBI was completely lacking in its ability to detect and prosecute white collar fraud were free to go nuts, and really crank up the mega-fraud on the American people.

It could be a frenzy of fraud that costs Americans tens of trillions of dollars before it's all over.

The ShitStorm Waiting For America's Next President

In a lengthy, and somewhat convincing, endorsement of Barack Obama, the Washington Post editorial team sums up the United States today, and its place in the world. If you read this in a book of fiction even ten years ago, you'd never believe it could become reality :

Start with two ongoing wars, both far from being won; an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan; a resurgent Russia menacing its neighbors; a terrorist-supporting Iran racing toward nuclear status; a roiling Middle East; a rising China seeking its place in the world. Stir in the threat of nuclear or biological terrorism, the burdens of global poverty and disease, and accelerating climate change. Domestically, wages have stagnated while public education is failing a generation of urban, mostly minority children. Now add the possibility of the deepest economic trough since the Great Depression.

Stone Age Trippers

Getting high, seeing visions, and trying to make sense of them, has been a fundamental part of the human existence for thousands of years. Religion was probably the best way to explain those vivid, confusing experiences to non-users. Drugs have shaped the paths of our civilisations, and sparked some of the greatest inventions and innovations of our ages.

The proof and knowledge of humans' ancient history of drug use slowly becomes more clear:

It has long been suspected that humans have an ancient history of drug use, but there has been a lack of proof to support the theory.

Now, however, researchers have found equipment used to prepare hallucinogenic drugs for sniffing, and dated them back to prehistoric South American tribes.

They found ceramic bowls, as well as tubes for inhaling drug fumes or powders, which appear to have originated in South America between 100BC and 400BC and were then carried 400 miles to the islands.

While the use of such paraphernalia for inhaling drugs is well-known, the age of the bowls has thrown new light on how long humans have been taking drugs.

Scientists believe that the drug being used was cohoba, a hallucinogen made from the beans of a mimosa species. Drugs such as cannabis were not found in the Caribbean then.

Opiates can be obtained from species such as poppies, while fungi, which was widespread, may also have been used.

Archeologists have suggested that humans were extracting mind-expanding drugs from mescal beans and peyote cacti as far back as 5,000 years ago, but have not found direct evidence that this is true.

They consider that drugs were being used to induce spiritual or trance-like states by people who had religious beliefs.

The presumption is that the religious beliefs existed before humans experienced the mind-and-reality altering effects of hallucinogenic drugs. It is more likely the other way around, that it was the drugs that sparked the religious beliefs in fearful, superstitious people, still hiding from the night in caves, across those dozens of centuries before we settled into villages, then towns, then cities and left the hallucinogens for the forest people, and the explorers of consciousness.

Without drugs, particularly hallucinogens, there would be no God.

Hunter S. Thompson Eviscerates Bush Co. And The American War Industry

Excerpts from a revelatory interview with the good Doctor of Journalism from late 2004, one of the last interviews he did before he took his own life :

"The presidential election is pretty much going to be a life or death matter for the next generation."

"This Bush Cheney machine in the Whitehouse is the most dangerous situation I ever seen in the country. This country is in worse shape today than I have seen it in, and so fast down the same path… if Nixon was running against George Bush. I’d vote for Nixon. Yeah... I never thought I’d say that."

"The main thing to understand is that Bush is not some sort of likable cowboy, some aww shucks person who is a man of good will. Compassionate Conservative. NO, he’s a front man for a gigantic combine of religious zealots and oil billionaires, and voting against Bush will stop this whole encroaching glacier or iceberg… meanwhile the machine keeps going.

"People are just getting poorer- loosing more jobs, more health insurance, more pension funds. Bush has destroyed the economy in the country, but he has not destroyed the economy of Halliburton, the oil company that Dick Cheney was president of before he became the Vice President of the US."

"He has been a disaster for a president, for the country. He’s been a good boy for Halliburton and the oil industry, that’s what he does, that’s where he grew up. He grew up in the petroleum clubs of Houston, which is a huge power center of world evil. But he’s not good for the country… they come in and steal a trillion dollars from the national treasury in the name of war on the rest of the world."

"The lie is the really that Bush and Cheney don’t deserve to be fired and put in jail, they do. And why he would run for president is and be re- elected is almost beyond my ability to comprehend it."

"The first time I saw George Bush, he came into my hotel room in Houston, and passed out in the bathtub. How’s that for a story. He was drunk. He was not invited, he came into the room with some friend of his who was invited and he disappeared, and the next time I saw him he was passed out in the bathtub, he had vomited on his seersucker suit- that’s a good image. I’ve done worse things under a variety of substances, including drink. But to me that’s the most interesting thing he’s done as a human being..."

"....this country has gone from a prosperous nation at peace and now four years later we’re a broken nation at war, that’s a huge turnaround. It’s the effects of a failing economy- although the war making machine- Christ, that’s doing better than ever, corporate profits for companies that make airplanes, security devices, and machine guns. Their profits are up 200 percent over the year before."

"I think this country is heading into the Dark Ages. I believe George Bush will be seen as the Adolph Hitler of his time. And Dick Cheney will be seen as having committed war crimes worse than Hitler, and they will be put on trial and judged; they’re such religious freaks. What kind of maniac will declare war on the rest of the world? And turn the country into what nazi Germany was."

"Apathy is what got us George Bush. Too complicated, too crooked, politics is a vicious business when you’re running for president. The most powerful job on earth- maybe not for long, but right now, and people will kill, that’s what they do in politics. You eliminate people...."

And these Hunter S Thomspon quotes from one of his last pieces of published writing, Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail, 2004 :

"There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe -- and that is Rove's problem: His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters."

"Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush -- Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain -- all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.

That is why George W. Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc.) controls all three branches of our federal government today."

"Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous 'trickle-down' theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow 'trickle down' to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote."

"(Bush stealing the 2000 election) was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while, and it was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal biphetamine and stay awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps & his bombers & his dope-addled general staff.

They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War -- as long as you are winning -- and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new Hitler youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at night for the generals. They were fanatics.

That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are not much different today. We still love War.

George Bush certainly does. In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it."

"If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today..."

"When young Bush was at Yale in the Sixties, he told the same joke over and over again for two years, according to some of his classmates. One of them still remembers it:

There was a young man named Green
Who invented a jack-off machine
On the twenty-third stroke
The damn thing broke
And churned his nuts into cream.

'It was horrible to hear him tell it,' said the classmate, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. He lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his back put there by young George. 'He burned this into my flesh with a red-hot poker,' he said solemnly, 'and I have hated him ever since. That jackass was born cruel. He burned me in the back while I was blindfolded. This scar will be with me forever.'

There is nothing new or secret about that story. It ran on the front page of the Yale Daily News and caused a nasty scandal for a few weeks, but nobody was ever expelled for it. George did his first cover-up job. And he liked it."

"I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day, and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite of what it says: u.s. transfers sovereignty to Iraqi interim 'government.' Hot damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election! It is a deliberate cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi people than we are about to stop killing them."

"The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change."

"(President Bush) is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.

Only losers play fair, and all winners have blood on their hands."

Hunter, we miss your words and vicious insight so very, very much. You wielded a typwriter like a gatling gun.

MI5 Head : Iraq War Was Motivation For Terror Attacks In England

People still believe that the Iraq War did not inspire, or lead to, acts of deadly terrorism. Tony Blair said this was not so. So did President Bush. Former Australian prime minister, John Howard, repeatedly claimed the invasion of Iraq and the slaughter of civilians had no link to the catastrophic rise in terrorism, after 2003. Some people still believe this, one of the truly great lies of a war utterly debased by lies and deceit.

The people with access to the information, however, know for a fact that the 'Iraq War Did Not Increase Terrorism' propaganda was, and is, complete and utter bullshit :

A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.

She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.

Asked what impact the war had on the terrorist threat, she replies: "Well, I think all one can do is look at what those people who've been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I'm aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take."

"So I think you can't write the war in Iraq out of history. If what we're looking at is groups of disaffected young men born in this country who turn to terrorism, then I think to ignore the effect of the war in Iraq is misleading."

The Secret Of Great Comedy? It's All About Empathy

A rare thing indeed. An insightful explanation of why uncomfortable comedy works so well, and is so hugely popular, from Ricky Gervais, writer and star of The Office and Extras (plus two of the funniest live in concert vids you will ever see). The full story is here :

"A friend used to do this card trick where, for about 10 seconds, you thought he'd really messed up, before all was revealed to be part of the act. I grew to love that 10 seconds, of people feeling sorry for him, of feeling a bit smug. And I've always tried to do that. People thinking: this is terrible, this is awful, this is uncomfortable.

"Redemption is my favourite thing. As an atheist, I think forgiveness is the greatest virtue. You have to be a very harsh person to not accept someone genuinely saying sorry.

"In every good comedy or drama someone represents us. If they're redeemed, we feel we've been liberated, or saved. If it's done well, you're part of the journey. That's why everything begins or ends with empathy. If you've got that, you've got nearly anything. Everything else is the icing on the cake."

"...I don't think there's any real altruism. But you want to be in a society where everyone's all right, otherwise it's not OK for you...it's not a good place to be. Deep down, we'd like everyone to be happy, because then you're happy."

"Laughing is infectious. Crying makes you feel a bit sad. We're hard-wired. So if you get empathy on screen, it hits you on an emotional and subliminal and fundamental level.

"Someone can do a hundred of the best one-liners. You'd laugh. But they could throw in a false punchline and you'd still laugh because you've got the rhythm. You won't remember one of them, and you won't care. But with Laurel and Hardy, say, I like them because I want to hug them. I laugh because I fucking love them. I can't laugh at someone I don't like. If someone's hurt you it's not funny. It's not that you stop yourself laughing; it's just not funny."

"After The Office, there was a rush to play unsympathetic characters. But with a lot of them, there was no redemption and no worthwhile journey. You need representation, not just embarrassment. The Office would never have worked had Tim not existed. You need someone to roll your eyes with. You can't just have decapitated jokes."

"I like doing things that are Trojan horses. You start people watching with the knockabout stuff but then you take them to a different place. Otherwise it's empty. It's just white bread.

"Think of the people that aim low and still fail. There must be nothing worse than selling out and still being fucked."

"I Don't Believe It! You're Drunk! Again!"

"No, Actually, I'm Fighting Cancer"

Will there ever come a day when a visit to the doctor will end with the doctor recommending you go home and start chugging six packs?

Err, probably not. But some university researchers think they've found a way to use beer to battle cancer. A Nobel Prize loometh!

They're using genetic engineering to create beer that contains resveratrol...

So why would someone want to make beer with resveratrol in the first place? It's a naturally occurring compound that some studies have found to have anti-inflammatory, anticancer and cardiovascular benefits for mice and other animals. While it's still unclear if humans enjoy the same benefits, resveratrol is already sold as a health supplement, and some believe it could play a role in the "French paradox," the seemingly contradictory observation that the French suffer from relatively low rates of heart disease despite having a diet that's rich in saturated fats."

Did I Say Too Much?

Dictionary.com definition of "Intervention" :

1.	the act or fact of intervening.

2.	interposition or interference of one state in the affairs of another.

"We're In Crazy Town, USA"

Hearing this sort of talk on a mainstream news channel, from someone other than Ron Paul, is way overdue. Would it have made a difference if CNN had reported such then obvious news a year ago? Two years ago? We'll never know.



We now have what we have, what has been dealt out to us. All of us. Which is perhaps the most bizarre thing about this financial terrorism. The other terrorists can take out a skyscraper, tear apart trains, blow apart thousands of Humvees in Iraq, but the financial terrorists lay waste to the futures of everyone, across the planet.

Ironically, like many terrorist organisations over the decades, the financial terrorists are also funded by taxpayers. But in this reality, this stunning new likely reality of a Greater Depression, the ones driven to suicide by the poisonously destructive ideology are not the terrorists, but the victims.

Parking Bay 94 Is Now Open




On a mountain on Mars, a 'doorway' has been found. Natural feature, of course, "boring old wind erosion" or something.

It's not exactly the 'Red Planet' anymore, is it?

A planet of extremes, is home to the largest mountain in the solar system, the largest canyon in the solar system and intensely severe dust storms. It is also home to the only other likely option for humans to live within our Solar System.

In the next two decades, if not sooner, humans will leave Earth for Mars, knowing they will never come home again. That they will live the rest of their days on another planet. In a bubble, obviously.

"Sarge, Reynolds Is Thinking About Cheerleader Porn Again"

This becoming reality has to be many decades further into the future than this story claims, but it is a future vision that is both incredible to comprehend, as a new means of communication, and dangerous in the extreme to the very idea of privacy that we have cherished for most of our human existence :

Vocal cords were overrated anyway. A new Army grant aims to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. No need to type an e-mail, dial a phone or even speak a word.

Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought.

"I think that this will eventually become just another way of communicating," said Mike D'Zmura, from the University of California, Irvine and the lead scientist on the project.

The Army grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives. The first is to compose a message using, as D'Zmura puts it, "that little voice in your head."

The second part is to send that message to a particular individual or object (like a radio), also just with the power of thought. Once the message reaches the recipient, it could be read as text or as a voice mail.

To those who might be nervous about thought-based communication turning into a sci-fi comedy of errors, D'Zmura says not to worry. Mind-message composition would take specific conscious thoughts and training to develop them. The device would also have a on/off switch.

"When I was a kid I occasionally said things that were inappropriate, and I learned not to do that," said D'Zmura. "I think that people would learn to think in a way the computer couldn't interpret. Or they can just switch it off."

Learn to switch off your mind, so the computer doesn't register what you're thinking...

Hybrid cars, electric cars, hydrogen cars, and now an air-powered car.

That pod for the people looks like it might also effectively contain and concentrate methane emissions, from the people, another potential fuel source, when you want your pod to go faster than 40mph. Still no wings on any of these future alternative energy vehicles. That's why so many of them look so dorky.

Cheney Undergoing "Electrical Shock" To Keep Him Alive

In follow up to Monday's story, We Ain't Seen Dick, here's an excerpt from a story today explaining exactly where the Vice President of the United States is, and what he's been doing :

Vice President Dick Cheney experienced an abnormal heartbeat Wednesday morning, went to the White House physician and scheduled a hospital visit to "restore his normal rhythm."

For the 67-year-old Cheney, who canceled a campaign event he was to attend later Wednesday in Illinois, it will be the second time in less than a year that he will have the cardiological procedure.

The vice president's office said that after experiencing a problem, Cheney saw the White House physician. It was discovered there that he was experiencing a recurrence of atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart, said Megan Mitchell, a Cheney spokeswoman.

As a result, Cheney was scheduled to go to George Washington University Hospital in the afternoon for an outpatient procedure — an electrical shock — to restore his normal rhythm, Mitchell said. Cheney was remaining at the White House until time for the procedure, and participated in regular morning briefings with President Bush, among other duties.

Cheney told Bush of his condition. The president responded "like he would with any friend," said spokesman Tony Fratto, by wishing the vice president well and telling him to "go and make sure the doctors do what they need to do."

Will Cheney last until January? Or even late October?

Neither Bush or Cheney appear to have left the White House, or the Washington area, in a couple of weeks. The suspicious might suspect they're under house arrest or something. But that of course would be quite mad.

The Casino Of Your Livelihood

Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Muhammad Yunus, explains what happened to the 'great' economies of the world, and how we got here, on the brink of something dark and terrible, for everyone (excerpts) :

For a long time, the main priorities have been the maximization of profits and rapid growth -- but that focus has led to the current situation.

Capitalism, with all its market mechanisms, has to survive -- there is no question. What I excoriate is that today there is only one incentive for doing business, and that is the maximization of profits. But the incentive of doing social good must be included. There need to be many more companies whose primary aim is not that of earning the highest profits possible, but that of providing the greatest benefit possible for human kind.

Today's capitalism has degenerated into a casino. The financial markets are propelled by greed. Speculation has reached catastrophic proportions. These are all things that have to end.

In the US, the financial system has completely split off from the real economy. Castles were built in the sky, and suddenly people realized that these castles don't exist at all. That was the point at which the financial system collapsed.

The Full Interview Is Here

We Ain't Seen Dick

So where's Vice President Dick Cheney? Any truth to rumours passing through some military circles that Dick is ill? In a critical way?

His last public appearance, according to the VP's website, was October 3. Here's how he looked :



His last words :

...we've kept our focus on the future, we've kept the right priorities, and we've made wise choices. History will be the judge -- and history, I believe, will say, job well done.

What sort of (late) October Surprise would the Washington DC funeral of the vice president be?

Here's hoping Dick is still okay. He still has a lot of questions to answer, for many years after BushCo. ends. War crime trials are not short.

I'm A Missile, I'm Here To Kill You, But I Can Wait



It knows you will be leaving the house, eventually. It flies in and circles, high above your house, for ten hours, its missiles poised to fire on you within 60 seconds of its cameras making a positive identification.

Unlike other missiles, this one can wait around...

A revolutionary missile that can stalk a target until the perfect moment to strike is being developed by the Ministry of Defence for use against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The so-called lurker bomb will also be able to shadow British troops for up to ten hours or 100 miles, ready to take out enemy targets with surgical precision at a minute’s notice.

Fire Shadow’s ability to ‘stooge’ above the troops means it can be guided to a target within seconds. And its deadly precision requires only a small warhead of 50lb, compared with the RAF’s smallest bomb of 500lb.

Fire Shadow can be guided to its target by troops on the ground with lasers, by operators in aircraft or helicopters, or by the Army’s new Watchkeeper surveillance drone.

The concept of a lurker bomb is the cornerstone of the MoD’s Indirect-Fire Precision Attack project. Fire Shadow is one of six projects that include an artillery shell that can electronically ‘sense’ its target, a new anti-aircraft missile for the Royal Navy, and advanced guidance for the new Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS).

It will also make one hell of a convincing blackmail-extortion weapon.

You get a phone call, you're told to deposit $5 million into an account, the missile is flying, you can't escape it, it knows exactly where you are, you have six hours to come up with the cash or the missile takes you, and whoever happens to be around you, out.

Architect and photographer Wally Pacholka has been shooting images of the galaxy above us, around us, for 30 years, from stunning locations across the United States.

More on the above image, taken from inside a cave in Utah, and not from a moon orbiting Saturn, here

You can visit Wally's exhibition of magnificent prints here

We wipe the starfield, mostly, from our skies with city lights, and with that stunning vista banished, we lose the sense of wonder about the universe that has awed upright apes, and no doubt many other animals on this planet, night after night for millions of years. Our first grunted questions to each other surely must have been, with lots of pointing to the twinkling star and flashing planet filled crow black sky above, "So what's that all about?"

When we lose that awe of the night skies, it's little surprise then we have such trouble wrapping our minds around the Dreamtime stories, and the mythical ancient tales of other original people, for whom the sky came alive every night.

The night skies of the Northern Territory are not quite as vivid as the above and below starfields, but on a clear, moonless summer's night, it comes close. I once watched a 30 minute long meteor shower in the skies above a cabin in the lower Sierras. I had a camera, but I decided to leave it inside. I never regretted it. If there was a camera in my hands, I wouldn't have laid flat out on the deck and let myself fall into that deep black sky, filled with darting, fleeting, mostly glorious streaks of light, impossible to follow the path of them. Photos would never have captured the peaking awe of that night as perfectly as the movie camera in the memory did.


Another Wally Pacholka print :

How Do You Like This New Reality?

This is the quote that inspired the title of this blog. As the United States under George W. Bush begs China and Russia and Asian investors for emergency financial aid, at the end of the worst week for world stock market losses in living memory, more than $5 trillion so far, it seems like the right time to revisit that quote :

"'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality...we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

- Senior advisor (that would be Karl Rove) to President Bush, Summer, 2002.

Every Word Another Couple Of Million Gone

Incredible. Think Progress reveals that during an eight minute long speech by President Bush, which was supposed to restore confidence to the stock market, you know, make it go up a bit, or at least stop plummeting, the market itself dropped by an extraordinary 107 points.

By comparison, the Dow Jones lost about 1000 points on 9/11, but that took a few hours, and the complete destruction of most of the World Trade Centre complex. And an attack on the Pentagon.

What a legacy.

Why China Won't Save The World...Until It's Really Cheap

China stepping in to soak up debt, and buy lots of crap they don't need from other countries, was one of the "miracle cures" for the global financial meltdown. Forget it, it's not going to happen :

As the financial crisis has spiralled, some have treated the relative silence of Beijing as a tantalising sign: China has vast foreign reserves, a huge sovereign wealth fund and has previously demonstrated its willingness to invest heavily in Wall Street. Many have been holding their breath for a dramatic move by Beijing to step in and calm nerves where Washington has failed.

But Andy Rothman, CLSA’s chief China economist, told clients in a note yesterday: “There is simply no way that the Chinese Communist Party can restore confidence in American and European credit markets and there is no step that Beijing policy-makers can take to solve the liquidity problem in western banking systems.”

For China to save the world with consumption would take a more extreme shift of behaviour than seems possible. And China’s famous exports, said Mr Rothman, will not be the driver many expect. Despite its well-established image as an unstoppable engine of export growth, China’s economy is predominantly driven by domestic consumption and investment: last year, exports accounted for only 16 per cent of nominal GDP growth.

Chinese households are steadily spending more, said Mr Rothman, but are doing so from a low base and will take many years to reach the levels seen in the United States. The only circumstances under which Chinese consumers could provide a short-term fix for slumping global consumption is if households were suddenly persuaded to borrow recklessly – what Mr Rothman described as a foolish leap into Western lending practices.

“Short of resorting to American-style ‘no documentation’ and ‘no downpayment’ lending, it is difficult to see how Beijing could turn its citizens into the world’s consumer of last resort. China, and the world, are much better off if Beijing continues on its cautious path towards promoting private consumption, rather than jump late on to the ‘liar loan’ bandwagon,” he said.

One main focus of the “China can save the world” optimism has been the high levels – around 16 per cent - of disposable income that Chinese households currently save. If that rate were lowered only slightly, some argue, the overall effect on consumption would be dramatic.

But others believe that the high savings rate in China represents a decision by households to effectively tax themselves in the absence of a viable social safety net. The money is saved against future costs of education, health care and retirement – moves by Beijing for the state to fully fund these things will take years, and it could be many more before the average Chinese sufficiently trusts whatever system is put in place to reduce savings levels.

China will flood the world with fresh money, but only when the best of American business, property and infrastructure is going cheap. At least, cheaper than it is right now. You don't have to be a Chinese economist to know that the United States is soon going to have one hell of a bargain sale.

You Caint Always Git Wot Choo Want

October 11, 2008, marks the first steps towards the introduction of the Global Bank Of Recovering Prosperity. Or the 'Serious Global Response', as the Washington Post headlines the news.

To feel a little better about how you were expecting to enjoy that promised, semi-prosperous retirement but instead may have to sell off a few organs, consider the below photographs.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, when he thought he was going to get exactly what he wanted, for himself and his pals :



Secretary Paulson today, after he learned he was not going to get anything close to what he wanted. That is, after he was told by finance ministers of Britain, Japan, France, Germany, Italy - even before he bowed before Russia and China - to shut the fuck up and listen to how it's now going to be :



New York Times :

Events also seem to have upended the Treasury’s plan to stabilize the financial system by buying billions of dollars of troubled assets from the banks — a plan that Mr. Paulson and his Treasury Department colleagues expended enormous energy designing and selling to a skeptical Congress.

“The original Paulson plan didn’t hit the nail on the head,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economist at Harvard and an adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain. “It’s one thing to go back to Congress six months later and say ‘I didn’t ask for enough.’ It’s another to go back after six days and say ‘I didn’t ask for enough.’ ”

Paulson blew it. He really fucked it up. And now he won't be able to save a lot of his old friends who were hoping for a taxpayer bailout of their outrageously over-valued shitheap shopfront financial agencies choked with empty assets.

Now the son finishes what the father promised back in 1991 :

As our nations carry out this plan, we must ensure the actions of one country do not contradict or undermine the actions of another. In our interconnected world, no nation will gain by driving down the fortunes of another. We're in this together. We will come through it together.

I'm confident that the world's major economies can overcome the challenges we face. There have been moments of crisis in the past when powerful nations turned their energies against each other, or sought to wall themselves off from the world. This time is different. The leaders gathered in Washington this weekend are all working toward the same goals. We will stand together in addressing this threat to our prosperity.

It's fascinating that nobody, including President Bush, has clearly articulated who "this threat" actually is. Crazed Muslims in a multi-storey, air-conditioned cave complex, perhaps? Some kind of computer software problem, maybe? Or is Bush not allowed to say "fucking hedge funds!" (at least in front of the media).

America is at war in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, but the terrorism that has stripped Americans of trillions in just days is never mentioned by name. Who did this? What are their names? Where do they live? Do they have armed robot sentry guards or just dogs?



Did anyone predict that the first World War of the 21st Century would be fought with fountain pens instead of guns?

Maybe we'll get that long overdue alien invasion worldwide attack next. That, at least, has the potential for some fun.

American Nuns Understand How Anti-Terrorism Laws Can Used Against Dissenters, How About You?

Only the supposedly paranoid, the tinfoilers, the Black Hawk helicopter spotters and assorted 'Bush haters' believed anti-terrorism laws would be used to quell the anti-war movement and stifle dissent. But hey, surprise, that's exactly what the laws have been used for.

Two American peace activists nuns were listed as terrorists by police.

A statement from Sister Gilbert, 60 :

"If they can label us as terrorists, they can label all kinds of people as terrorists.

"So then people become afraid to speak out against what the established government might be saying - and that is the demise of democracy."

All of that, of course, was precisely the idea from day one.

It doesn't, and won't, stop with just the anti-war movement, the now global 'anti-terror laws' will be used to prosecute Americans, Australians, Brits, Europeans, Chinese, Russians, even New Zealanders, for all sorts of crimes if we really do plunge into The Greater Depression.

The conjoined two-party systems of all these countries voted for, then extended, anti-terror laws because they all wanted to have these options available to control populations heaving with panic and poverty.

No Terror In Our Name

More than 63 million Pakistanis have signed their names to a document denouncing terrorism. This is one in every three Pakistanis. It took only four weeks for organisers to gather all those signatures. Can any other country in the world boast of such an anti-terror petition signed by so many of its people?

Of course, western media barely touched this story :

“That easily shattered the previous record for the largest petition, the 24 million people who signed the Jubilee 2000 campaign against developing world debt. Children over the age of 11 were allowed to take part, given the young age at which extremism is taking hold in society,” observed the paper.

At least 91 terrorist attacks have taken place in Pakistan since July last year, when the country started to descend into a spiral of violence in which more than 1,200 people have died.

“The power to stop all this happening lies with the people,” said the founder of the campaign, Waseem Mahmood, a British-Pakistani media consultant. “The government and foreign powers really can’t do anything about it. This is about giving people a common platform to fight terrorism.”

Why US Has Become A Banana Republic

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Vanity Fair explains :

In a statement on the huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as “socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”

I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”

What are the main principles of a banana republic? A very salient one might be that it has a paper currency which is an international laughingstock: a definition that would immediately qualify today’s United States of America. We may snicker at the thriller from Wasilla, who got her first passport only last year, yet millions of once well-traveled Americans are now forced to ask if they can afford even the simplest overseas trip when their folding money is apparently issued by the Boardwalk press of Atlantic City. But still, the chief principle of banana-ism is that of kleptocracy, whereby those in positions of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it. At all costs, therefore, the one principle that must not operate is the principle of accountability. In fact, if possible, even the similar-sounding term (deriving from the same root) of accountancy must be jettisoned as well.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

At a dinner party in New York during the Wall Street meltdown, where the citizens were still serious enough to do what they are supposed to do—break off the chat and tune in to the speech of the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World—the same impression of living in a surreal country that was a basket-case pensioner of the international monetary system was hugely reinforced. The staring eyes (close enough together for their owner to use a monocle) and the robotic delivery were a fine accompaniment to the already sweaty “Don’t panic. Don’t whatever you do panic!” injunction that was being so hastily improvised. At a White House meeting with his financial wizards—and I mean the term in its literal sense—the same chief executive is reported to have whimpered, “This sucker could go down,” or words to that effect. It’s not difficult to imagine the scene. So add one more banana-republic feature to the profile: a president who is a figurehead one day and a despot the next, and who goes all wide-eyed and calls on witch doctors when the portents don’t seem altogether reassuring.

Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it. The most you can say is that some people have had to take a slightly early retirement, but a retirement very much sweetened by the wherewithal on which to retire. That doesn’t quite count. These are the rules that apply in Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea or Venezuela, where the political big boys mimic what is said about our hedge funds and investment banks: the stupid mantra about being “too big to fail.”

Read The Whole Story Here

On October 11, 2008....

UPDATE : A couple of front pages. The London Times :


And CNN (click images to enlarge) :




Previously...

The strangest, and sometimes most shocking, world-impacting events seem to have a tendency to occur on the 11th of a month.

So what will happen today?

Finance ministers and central bankers from Italy, Canada, the United States, Germany, France, Japan, along with reps from China, Russia, India and Brazil, plus the World Bank and the IMF, descend on Washington for what may become known as The Great American Bailout :

The United States finds itself in a rare position of weakness, facing many allies that have been highly critical of its economic policy and regulatory system blamed for the problems.

Tension is expected at the meeting given recent comments by countries affected by the crisis.

German officials in particular have been openly critical in the past weeks, saying the United States and Britain had delayed for years efforts to regulate financial markets that were out of
control.

The key quote on what to expect comes from German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrueck :

"The USA will lose its superpower status in the global financial system. The world financial system is becoming multi-polar..."

German media is already blasting the same message that has railed from Iran and Russia - the United States power and prestige in the world has been undermined, destroyed, ravaged, and it won't be telling the rest of the world how to run its financial affairs anymore.

They are coming to town to rewrite the rules of international finance. They are not coming to hear Bush's plans, they are going to tell him how it's now going to be.

All these countries hold American debt, and have invested heavily in American infrastructure and businesses. They want to know that their assets inside the United States will be protected. They will want guarantees.

And if the Greater Depression really is to soon begin in the United States, BushCo. will be asking for help, that is commitments for food and energy aid and debt relief.

China is supposedly refusing to buy another $200 billion of US treasury bonds. These bonds were going to finance the $700 Billion Bush Bailout plan. China is cutting off its credit to the US. Without credit, without Asian credit in particular, the American economy dies.

The US stock market has already crashed today, or as one blithering economic expert on TV said, "crash, slide, call it whatever you want, it doesn't matter anymore...there's nowhere to hide."

Bush pre-empted what will be one of the biggest demands from all those countries attending on Friday morning :

...we are concerned that some investors could take advantage of the crisis to illegally manipulate the stock market. So the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched rigorous enforcement actions to detect fraud and manipulation in the market. The SEC is focused on preventing abusive practices, such as putting out false information to drive down particular stocks for personal gain. Anyone caught engaging in illegal financial activities will be prosecuted.

More Americans will soon be demanding public hangings.

And it's not just the American public that wants blood. The rest of the world wants those responsible to be held account for what they've done. Bush has promised to do this. It might be the only positive thing to come out of his last year in the White House, a pogrom on the misery traders within hedge funds in the US, Israel, England, and a great rounding up of the financial terrorists. And not the fall guys, and the paper stackers, but the real vampires in this blood-sucking, they must be stripped of their ill-gotten gains. All of them.

October 11, 2008. It's set to be an historic day.

UPDATE : Bush announcing 'global unity' to save economies and the complete restructuring of the way the world does business will probably be viewed in future history as the day whatever this next world order is ultimately called officially came into being. Nearly two decades after his father, President George HW Bush, announced his dream for a new world order on September 11, 1990.

A Straightforward Explanation For How Global Economies Went To Hell - Step One : Blame American Greed

Australia's Black Friday - Markets Suffer Biggest Losses In 21 Years

"Global Solutions" Pinged For Washington Emergency Meeting, As New World Economic Order Follows Wall Street Shock & Awe

Turbulent US Trading, Nothing Can Contain The Great Panic

Financial Warfare Over Future Of Global Bank Power

Begin Again - How To Rebuild Finances And Save The Planet

Washington Post - The End Of American Capitalism?

Would You Like To Try The Self-Dipping Chicken Nuggets?



British artist Bansky has opened The Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill in New York City. It's supposed to be something about man's relationship to food, and to fast food in particular. Actually, maybe that's just the excuse to open a very surreal house of food-related horrors in Greenwich Village.

Installation art that is actually funny, and entertaining. Now there's an innovation.

Enjoy the exhibits...

Sausages & Hot Dogs



Monkey Watches Monkey Porn



More Here

"The Best Thing Is There Is Always Someone There To Talk To, And You're Never Alone"



Genetic screening, and then compulsory genetic screening, means that this will probably be the last generation that children like this are born, at least in the west.

Guns N' Roses 'Illegal Leaks' Of New Album One Of The Best Black Marketing Campaigns In History

Also, The Dr Pepper Bailout

By Darryl Mason

The producers of one of the most bizarre tasting soft drinks in the world (outside of Japan), US sugar syrup dealers Dr Pepper must be expected to be held to their promise that if Guns N' Roses actually did release the long delayed Chinese Democracy album before December 30 this year, everyone in the United States gets a free Dr Pepper.

Chinese Democracy will be released November 23.

Americans lining up at heavily armed FEMA food and water stations and checkpoints will appreciate that free drink, it will remind them of happier, more prosperous times.

But handing out 300 million free drinks will require a government bailout. With this bailout, Americans can say "Hell, at least I got a free Dr Fucking Pepper."

Chinese Democracy will apparently be a set of records. So rumours that more than 30 new songs are ready for release are apparently true. This puts an interesting perspective on the so-called 'leaks' of Guns N' Roses demos and live songs that have provided endless free publicity through much of this year. At most, only nine new songs have hit the torrents, and I'd guess at least two or three of them won't be on the final release of Chinese Democracy.

So only a fraction of the album has been leaked in advance, supposedly against the law, and to the outrage of the music industry, while it all helped to make the new Guns N' Roses (or Axl and a few Roses) album one of the most anticipated releases of the year.

Once again, the supposedly illegal leaking of an unfinished or unreleased album has provided enormous benefit and momentum, free of charge. The record company doesn't pre-promote the album, they let fans and bloggers do it for free, and with much greater credibility.

Chinese Democracy, when its finally released, will be quickly become one of the most heavily pirated albums in history, and yet it will also sell a few million copies, and propel sales of tens of millions more in paid downloads, DVDs, merchandise, concert tickets. Just like recent albums from Lil' Wayne, Metallica, The Offspring and now AC/DC.

The mainstream music industry claims to hate music piracy in all forms, and pursues legal action against teenagers for helping to introduce more potential buyers to music they really like, but its a facade. Any smart record label boss knows that carefully crafting a staggered set of releases of "bootlegs", "demos" and "leaks" to The Pirate Bay (with millions of visitors from around the world, every single day) works to the advantage of the albums they're releasing. The hardest part of building up an audience for a new album, or a new artist, is getting the exposure. Purposely releasing songs and albums that you claim have been 'pirated' will get write ups in the mainstream media, and will be linked to and promoted by the blogstream. This is all free publicity, and when bloggers and music fans can download an album for free, before release, and start talking it up all over chatrooms and comments boards, awareness explodes, for no real cost to the record company. Torrent sharers, bloggers, commenters, do the greater part of getting the name of a new album, or artist, out there, and in front of eyeballs.

Piracy already earns the music industry tens of millions of dollars a year through 'black marketing'. You will only see more of this, not less.

'Piracy' works, and Free is the new currency. Give it away to everybody, sell a special box set, or DVD with non-piratable extras (t-shirts, posters, key rings, memory sticks chock full of videos and photos and interviews and artwork), to 10% of those who got it for free, but still want to buy something collectible.

Before sales, before TV ad campaigns, the most challenging part of a record company's gig is to get the people to listen to a new album, or to give a new musician or band a decent listening. Stacking The Pirate Bay with an assortment of supposedly illegal torrents achieves both of these aims.

Particularly if all those 'pirates' and 'iilegal' torrent downloaders decide the album or band is awesome, and word-of-mouth it to local friends and to international others in the comments pages.

Forget a five star review in Rolling Stone, or buying a spot on the front page of YouTube or MySpace. If you're an unknown muso and you want to find a worldwide audience, come up with an album, a song, a video, good enough, interesting enough, to make the millions who haunt The Pirate Bay every day want to champion what you've done, what you've decided to give away for free.

'Leaking' a fraction of Chinese Democracy to the Pirate Bay (dozens of torrents of various demos in various compilations, over many months) helped to introduce Axl N' Roses to millions of fans who were born in the 17 years since Guns N' Roses last released an original studio album. No doubt, Axl Rose knows this, in the same way Lars Urlich from Metallica finally came to understand that music piracy will not destroy the music business, but will save it. Is in fact already saving it, right now.

Reel Trauma

Millions of Americans are feeling shocked and awed today, as their country becomes a banana republic. We hear about this all over the media, all too late of course. But another festering wound of betrayal and loss lingers in the American psyche, adding to the misery. The inside job, controlled demolition of Indiana Jones as an American hero, a man of action, a raider of other peoples' fortunes, instead of his nation's own.

It has been left up to South Park to help heal some of those wounds :



A friend who idolised Indiana Jones as a kid supplied the best review I heard of the last Indy Jones move, as he stumbled from the cinema : "It's like eating a truly great pizza and then finding a few fingernails in the cheesy crust."

They Were Recruited With Video Games, They Learned To Kill On Video Games, Now Video Games Can Save Them From Suicide

The new generation of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited at malls across America with video games, and similar games become part of their training to be soldiers, and now when they come home fucked up from the wars, video games will be there again, to help them deal with the real-life experiences that were so much more real than all those video games :

Alarmed by a record rate of suicide in its ranks, the Army yesterday unveiled a unique prevention tool -- an interactive video to be mandatory viewing Army-wide -- in which soldiers will play the role of an anguished infantryman and make virtual choices that lead the character to get help or, in the worst case, shoot himself in the head.

"This is you: Specialist Kyle Norton," a male narrator begins, putting soldiers in the boots of a 19-year-old Midwesterner after a bomb-clearing mission in Iraq.

The video, titled "Beyond the Front," leads the viewer through a detailed drama in which Norton is hit by relationship troubles, financial problems and scrapes with the law -- what Army research shows are major events that precipitate suicide. Norton is blindsided by an e-mail from his fiancee, who has become pregnant by another man. He is devastated further when one of his best friends is killed in an ambush.

Questions pop onto the screen at key moments, prompting the viewer to decide whether to get help -- by opening up with buddies, Norton's sergeant or a chaplain. Depending on the choices, Norton edges toward recovery or sinks deeper into suicidal thoughts. The goal is to immerse the viewer into Norton's life in a way that makes preventive lessons stick, say Army officials and the video's creators.

The video is one of several initiatives launched by the Army to try to stem the suicide rate among active-duty soldiers. That rate increased from 12.4 per 100,000 in 2003, when the Iraq war started, to 18.1 per 100,000 last year.

This year, 93 active-duty soldiers killed themselves through the end of August, the latest data show. A third of those cases are under investigation by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner's Office. In all of 2007, 115 soldiers committed suicide. Suicide attempts by soldiers have also increased since 2003.

Army officials will begin distributing 14,000 copies of the video by December, making it mandatory instruction for all active, National Guard and Reserve units.

Outside medical experts say the video is unusually realistic but warn there are risks of using such a product without first gauging its effectiveness. Army experts and the creators of the program acknowledge they have no evidence the video will have the intended impact.

"Beyond the Front" is unique in that it requires soldiers to take the vantage point not of a helper but of someone who is suicidal. "I know at least 10 soldiers who could be" the jilted Norton, Valcourt said, recalling that when he first showed his staff the video, one worker pulled him aside and told him, "Sir, that was me."

Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, who viewed part of the video, said that "it's obviously done in a much more realistic fashion" than previous interactive prevention efforts. Nevertheless, he warned that it is risky to widely distribute such a program without scientific evaluation to determine its impact on a suicidal person. "Some media presentations about suicide can increase the likelihood of suicidal behavior, so there is a potential danger," he said.

"Beyond the Front," filmed using actors and some soldiers at Army bases at Aberdeen, Md., and Fort Polk, La., aims to encourage soldiers to recognize the slide into a suicidal state and to get help.

The goal is "to allow people to play it out before they live it out," said Sharon Sloane, president of Will Interactive.

Distributing unevaluated theraupetic video games to potential suicides, let's hope it doesn't end badly, or become the easy, cheap alternative to proper mental health care and support.

Why Electrofry Just One Person When You Can Juice Up A Whole Crowd?

This is so utterly demented, so anti-human, even Philip K Dick would have rejected it as a realistic weapon of choice in his police state America fiction.



From Taser :

Full area coverage is provided to instantaneously incapacitate multiple personnel within that region.

They're talking about American civilians in food riots. Or just a pack of the wrong kind of protesters. You know, the ones demanding public trials and death sentences for those who stripped the American economy bare.

Imagine Taser salespeople going back to all the 250,000 cops and security guards across the world who have armed themselves with tasers in the past few years trying to get them to 'upgrade' to this appalling horror. Oh, and you can mount 'Shockwave' (or many of them, they are after all stackable "like lego blocks," according to Taser) on a truck, so you can scream into a crowd of, say, very angry people outside a bank trying to get enough of their savings back to buy some water and food, and take out dozens and dozens of people at a time.

They'll be ready for widespread deployment across the United States by Christmas, promises Taser. Just in time then.

The sales video should be parody, just listen to the Bruckheimer music for a start, but it's not. This is how Taser is trying to sell the fucker. A must have new toy for the ultra-police state.

You'd imagine, you'd hope, that while there would be some police forces and combat-freaked security units who'd drool all over their shirts to get their hands on this thing, there would be many more who'd be repulsed, disgusted, at what is clearly a highly dangerous weapon designed solely for the electrofrying of dozens of people at a time.

Insurance companies are already very nervous about new taser weapons that deliver 20 second long blasts of tens of thousands of volts. Who'd bet money that the 'Shockwave' can be used even moderately safely in, or on, a panicking crowd?

More On This From Steve Watson

Confirmed : Flying Killer Robot Killed 30 Civilians In Afghanistan

This is terrorism, delivered by a military. It's not terror from a sprinting suicide bomber, but terror from above, from a lethally armed Flying Killer Robot.

BushCo. is now killing more civilians in Afghanistan than Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who they are supposed to be destroying.

The mass slaughter of dozens of civilians has been an ongoing occurrence in Iraq and Afghanistan, since the War On Terror was launched. Dozens of incidents where numerous women and children were slain, and yet true and complete investigations usually only follow, or become public, when reporters are on the scene within hours, or a day or two, of the attack. The military then must poison the credibility of the report, by claiming something completely different, then investigate, then leak the bad news to the New York Times, before even the Afghan government has been briefed on the change of story.

The timing of this news release of another American slaughter of civilians is perfect, of course. Many Americans today are feeling like they've been terrorised, so they have little time to think about how their military is using Flying Killer Robots to slaughter the people we're supposed to be liberating.

An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials.

The military investigator’s report found that more than 30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted — died in the airstrikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad.

The investigator, Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan of the Air Force, concluded that many more civilians, including women and children, had been buried in the rubble than the military had asserted, one of the military officials said.

The airstrikes have been the focus of sharp tensions between the Afghan government, which has said that 90 civilians died in the raid, and the American military, under Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, which has repeatedly insisted that only a handful of civilians were killed.

The report was requested by General McKiernan on Sept. 7, more than two weeks after the airstrikes, in response to what he said at the time was “emerging evidence” about the raids. While American commanders in Afghanistan have contended that 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid, the new report concludes that many among that group were in fact civilians, the military officials said.

The revised American estimate for civilian deaths in the operation remains far below the 90 that Afghan and United Nations officials have claimed, a figure that the Afghan government and the United Nations said was supported by cellphone photos, freshly dug grave sites and the accounts of witnesses who saw the dead bodies.

How Fantasies Of Unbridled Capitalism Destroyed The Everyday Dreams Of Many

It's a story of today, for the ages. What happened to our world of unlimited financial fantasies and a brighter, globalised future for all?

This happened (excerpts) :

Trust capitalism and shun government interference we were told. But irresponsible bankers saw a chance to get rich quick and went for it. Their failure has become ours -- and the promise of a common good has evaporated along with faith in democratic capitalism.

The world seems to be teetering on the brink of disaster because a few people have been on a big-time gambling binge. They have lost their stake on bad loans and now banks are collapsing, companies are facing a liquidity crunch, investors are losing their savings and a recession is looming.

This time around, though, there is more hanging in the balance than just the cyclical ups and downs of the economy. This time fundamental issues are at stake. Is a market economy nothing more than an invitation to engage in excessive gambling? And what about the democratic principles that are so closely linked with the market economy, a concept that was used by the West to achieve dominance over the world? This vision of democracy is also at risk.

Suddenly, everything seems possible. Nobody knows which banks will suffer a meltdown and what will be the consequences for the real economy. Nobody knows how big a risk the Wall Street gamblers have taken. That’s what makes the situation so frightening. It’s as if we were riding in a small dinghy on an African lake. The passengers know that crocodiles are lurking in the water, but they don’t know how many there are, nor can they determine the size of the beasts.

Now the challenge is to keep people from losing all faith in the markets, to prevent panic from erupting. Success here also depends on whether the actors and observers of global events -- company executives, politicians and journalists -- take things seriously or whether they too are basically just gamblers.

These days, it is hard to recognize the world as we thought we knew it. A large number of American financial institutions have sought protection from the state, and now the US government has taken action to keep the country’s entire financial sector above water. An entire country, Iceland, threatens to go bankrupt. In Germany, Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück has had to save Hypo Real Estate in a hastily organized bailout operation, and Josef Ackermann, the CEO of Deutsche Bank -- a man who was once a high-flying champion of capitalism -- has been calling for the government to launch a rescue package, which is paramount to providing welfare to banks.

The players in the game lost touch with reality. Many Americans wanted to own homes, although they couldn’t afford them. When these people received loans, it was a dodgy business. That is actually not difficult to understand, but it failed to sound the warning bells for gamblers who were out to make huge profits out of those risks.

Anything new had to be even further away from reality. But it wasn't difficult for those eager new bankers to come up with something new once they set their minds to it -- and soon the world had another product that nobody needs and hardly anyone understands. It was a product that was floated on the market for the sole reason that it was there -- and, of course, because it promised to generate wealth. That is how a brave new world is created.

What followed, though, was a horror scenario of a globalization process taking place on two levels. There is a real level that consists of a greater exchange of goods which comes along with a more intense competition for jobs, prosperity and the rights to use the world’s resources. This may seem frightening enough for the individual, although it may be unavoidable and legitimate.

But the other level is truly uncanny. This is the lake with the crocodiles. You can’t see a thing; the surface of the lake is smooth. But a lot is happening down in the murky water. The banking snobs have surreptitiously spun their web; they have used sales in countries around the globe to forge links -- silently, uncontrolled, electronically. They are the clandestine masters of globalization. They have created another world, a secret one.

It is not until this world collapses that we notice its existence. By then, of course, it’s too late. Since everything is interconnected, the catastrophe immediately takes on global proportions.

At least some of the banking snobs are brought down by the calamity. There are pictures of them walking out of their office skyscrapers with boxes in their arms. But the bankers who manage to remain quickly adjust. They have learned to be flexible, and what was true yesterday is simply no longer true today. They require protection, they need help from the government and, of course, they have no qualms about asking for it.

While we teeter on the brink of disaster we might reflect on the fact that for politicians, bankers, business people and the media, there is a second challenge more important than that of rising up the career ladder: We also need to secure democracy and the free market economy.

Bringing the state and the world of business and finance into balance with the right amount of control and freedom would be an important step toward attaining this objective. But none of this is possible without a word that is not particularly exciting, and even a bit old-fashioned: seriousness.

First The Economic Meltdown, Then The Revolution?

Wayne Madsen claims he has learned some very, very interesting things about the fallout for the United States from the financial world war now raging :

WMR has learned from knowledgeable sources within the US financial community that an alarming confidential and limited distribution document is circulating among senior members of Congress and their senior staff members that is warning of a bleak future for the United States if it does not quickly get its financial house in order.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have reportedly read the document. The document is being called the "C & R" document because it reportedly states that if the United States defaults on loans and debt underwriting from China, Japan, and Russia, all of which are propping up the United States government financially, and the United States unilaterally cancels the debts, America can expect a war that will have disastrous results for the United States and the world.

"Conflict" is the "C word" in the document.

The other scenario is that the federal government will be forced to drastically raise taxes in order to pay off debts to foreign countries to the point that the American people will react with a popular revolution against the government.

"Revolution" is the document’s "R word.

Hilarious Economic Super-Optimism In 2007

When, in mid-to-late 2007, the economic ruin looming in 2008 was obvious enough for the major players to start pulling their money out of the market, Lawrence Kudlow, a CNBC host, and former economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, was still enthusiastically, gloatingly, preaching the faith :

...shares trade on the profit and interest-rate fundamentals of the economy. But if you ask folks on Wall Street what their biggest worry is, most will say it's another 9-11. They rank another attack far ahead of passing sub-prime mortgage problems or wiggles in consumer spending.

Despite the criticism President Bush has received over his Iraq War policies, isn't it interesting that stock markets have been booming since early 2003, when Saddam was overthrown and the president signed his supply-side tax cuts into law? (Bush, of course, never gets any credit on either of these points.)

In just the past year alone, the Dow has gained a remarkable 30 percent. Meanwhile, Europe and Asia are up about 30 percent, Japan 23 percent, and emerging markets more than 60 percent. Clearly, the world is voting -- with real money -- for the American system of free-market capitalism. And it's my strong suspicion that the majority of the global investing community supports the Iraq War and a steadfast U.S. commitment to stop terrorism.

I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today's stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president.

...the fact that the world economy is experiencing the greatest economic boom in history is a direct rebuke to jihadists everywhere. Al-Qaida despises our country and its capitalist freedoms. And unless stopped cold in its tracks, it will strive to destroy the U.S. financial system and free-market development around the world.

The spread of free trade, the free movement of capital, low taxes and the breathtaking rise of the Internet -- these are generating more jobs, wealth and prosperity than ever before. And this amounts to a collective thumbing of the nose at the terrorists. It's as though world markets are saying that history is on our side and that the crazed self-proclaimed terrorist clerics will ultimately be defeated.

Free-market capitalism, 10; al-Qaida, 0.

A Greenhouse On Every Rooftop

An expert on city development wars that in order for cities to survive, every house will need a greenhouse on its roof, and only electric cars will travel in city streets :

buildings should have solar panels on all sides and trees should be planted wherever possible, according to Professor Peter Head, a leading thinker on sustainable cities.

Before long, he predicted, the cost of tackling pollution, paying for damage to health and trying to afford ever-more expensive resources such as fuel would make the current industrial model taken by cities uneconomic.

A new "ecological" model was needed in which people lived in harmony with the natural world. "The only way forward is for an economic model where renewable resources are used," he said. "The cities that move most quickly towards using renewable resources will be the ones that in no more than ten, 20 or 30 years will have the most successful economies."

In contrast, he predicted that resource-heavy cities would simply "fall over". He said cities would become more dense, with people living closer together and nearer facilities so they could use fewer resources by walking, cycling or taking public transport.

In some sprawling American cities, suburbs would be left to fall derelict so more of the population lived near the city centre. Less space would be needed for roads, as there would be fewer cars, and those that did exist would be electric. There could be green leases for tenants, who would have to abide by rules as to how much energy they used.

Prof Head said the opportunities for cities that acted fast were enormous. "There are trillions of dollars of markets for clean-tech goods and resources in the world," he said.

He added:"First-movers will get the most in terms of jobs and opportunities. It also means you are going to look after your economy when circumstances are quite tricky."

"My Fellow Prisoners..."

John McCain provides a brief preview of how BushCo. and then his administration will deal with the breakdown of American society after its economic 9/11 :

The Wall Street 'Economic 9/11' Will Cost Americans More Than The Bin Laden 9/11

By Darryl Mason

It's now a once in a lifetime Global Financial Apocalypse.

A few months ago, a Wall Street player interviewed on late night news laughed at the idea of the Dow Jones dropping below 10,000. When pushed, he admitted that it dropping below 9000 wound be mind-shattering for him, psychological waterboarding for him and his co-workers on America's most hated and despised street.

So how far does the stock market have to fall before Bush shuts the markets and declares a week long bank holiday? 8000? 7000?

How many times must we hear the 'experts' - who were so knowledgable and confident when the Big Lie of Endless Prosperity was successfully covering up the awesomely grim truth about the state of American and global finances - now tell us "We don't know what's going to happen next..." ?

What do you mean you don't know?

It's your fucking job, pal. That's why you've been allowed to call yourself an Expert. You're supposed to know. You can't just sing the praises of deregulation and globalisation and 'compassionate capitalism' when everything appears to be pikkity-boo, and then throw up your hands and shrug contemptuously as the the true scope of the staggering deception of your make-nothing-of-value industry is revealed.

There's a lot of grinding outrage, genuine disgust, and borderline calls, demands for blood-spilling revenge against those who fleeced America, and are now fleecing the UK, Europe, and trying their hand at fleecing Russia and China (less sucessfully, of course). Americans are angry. Far angrier than when they found out that BushCo. had lied them into the War On Iraq.

To save the world from a population decreasing Greater Depression is a mighty task, but to calm the masses will be even harder. And take longer.

There's a turgid atmosphere of distrust and blind fury soaking through people all over the world today, as they count up their losses, and realise with a shudder that just like their parents, and their grandparents, they too have been royally fucked and swindled.

"We don't know what's going to happen next..."

They sure don't. So why trust any of them when, in a few years time, these same clowns start singing once more that "now we know again!"?

It's almost beyond belief that nobody has been arrested yet, particularly in Washington, and on Wall Street. How can that Lehman Brothers vampire walk away from the mess he helped create without being forced to give back even some of the many tens of millions of dollars he's been paid, for doing a completely shithouse job? Why does he get to walk away, to either his $22 million New York apartment, or his $18 million estate, while almost everyone else in the country is limping, wiped out?

The financial scouring Richard Fuld helped to unleash will cost the American taxpayer, and their grandchildren, far so much more than the 9/11 attacks. Probably hundreds of billions of dollars more. Another few thousand American families will become homeless in the next week, and yet Fuld just walks away, troubled only by the presence of much greater security than he had last month.

And if you think Americans are angry, you should see the fury in Germany, in Japan, in Russia. Americans think, 'Yeah, maybe we got fucked.' The rest of the world knows it got fucked over, and will be fucked over some more in the days and weeks to come, before The Calm returns. They will want blood spilled.

Americans may be doped up enough on religion, sex and TV enough not to start dragging half billion dollar executives from their beds by flaming torch light, perhaps, but the rest of the world, particularly Asia, will want to see those fuckers pay for their crimes, and the pain they've unleashed.


This is a graph of the Dow Jones controlled demolition this past year :



The Economic 9/11 looks even worse when you see it over two years :




Unprecedented 'World Economy' Co-Ordinated Rates Cut - But Markets Still Fall

Britain Pours Hundreds Of Billions Into Its Failing Banks

Tokyo Slammed By Near Ten Percent One Day Stock Market Decline

China Tells Australia Its Export Boom Will Continue, China's Demand For Resources Will Protect Australia From Worst Of World Recession

Where Did All That Money Go? IMF Predicts Losses Of $1.4 Trillion

Americans Retirement Dreams Shattered - Pension Funds 'Lose' Estimated $2 Trillion In Days

Rush On Gold Bars And Coins In Germany Leads To Shortage

China Sends A Loud Clear Message To US - Dodgy US Economic Policies Shredded In Chinese State Newspaper

The Global Recession - Asian Stocks Plunge

Forget Near Worthless American Dollar, Russia Says, Why Not Trade In Roubles?

Pagan Earth Bitch Nature Slaughters 230,000 Humans In Six Months

By Darryl Mason

Ten per cent of all the people killed by natural disasters in the past five decades died in the first six months of 2008.

Almost a quarter of a million humans were wiped away by 'natural disasters' in 180 days.

More than 130 million more have been injured, made homeless, jobless, townless.

That pagan bitch goddess Nature's War On Humans is really ramping up :

More people died in natural disasters in the first six months of 2008 than in the Asian tsunami of 2004, the United Nations says.

"2008 is a terrible year. There have already been more victims than in the tsunami..."

Cyclone Nargis which hit Burma in May is estimated to have killed around 138,000 people while the earthquake in south-west China's Sichuan province left a death toll of 87,500.

Record floods in India as well as a devastating hurricane season in the Caribbeans also all contributed to the grim statistics.

The bill is huge. UN estimates claim the economic impact of Nature's War On Humans this year has already reached about $US50 billion. For the decade back from 2007, insurers coughed up about $US20 billion on average each year due to hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, lava flows, mass flooding and unpredictably sudden mini-cyclones.

A UN report from earlier in the year claimed :

"at least 2.5 million have been killed in natural disasters" in the past 50 years.

More than 1.6 million of those slaughtered have died in the past two decades.

Almost 250,000 have already have already been returned to the earth and the sea this year alone. Ten percent of an estimated total for all human fatalities from natural disasters since the late 1950s have died in the first six months of 2008.

Nature clearly means business. We cannot negotiate with Nature. Nature wants to change our way of life, Nature hates our freedoms. When Nature takes one of our cities, we should take another wilderness area. There's still a few left. From lush forest to cold empty carpark in a week. This is war.

An earlier warning :

Specialists at the German group recorded about 400 natural catastrophes in the first half of 2008, with overall losses so far estimated at $US50 billion ($52.48 billion).

In 2007, a total of 960 disasters caused about $US82 billion in damage, of which $US30 billion was covered by insurance.

The first half of this year has been marked by "a large number of weather-related natural catastrophes'', the statement said.

Earth To Humans : "I Keeeel You!"

July 2008 : Bitch Goddess Mother Nature Kills 150,000 Humans In '400 Attacks' In Six Months

Human's War On Nature Must Be Fought And Won, Before The Aliens Invade

Sun Demon? No, Sun Wookie

I was hoping to find a blood-chilling face of a demon in this extraordinary image of a sunspot, any excuse to post it you see, but after a quick close-up search, all I found was just a plain old Sun Wookie instead :



More beautiful detail :




The full NASA image :

US Economy Dying Because Americans Stop Buying Shit They Don't Need

There's something demented about the idea that the American economy can only remain strong, and keep growing, if mostly poor Americans can get easy credit to buy cheap crap from China.

Who designed this system? Daffy Duck?

We all know there has to be a better way, but what is it?

From the Washington Post :

For the past two decades, the nation could count on one thing to keep it going when economic times got tough: Consumers kept spending.

Not anymore.

Real spending has been flat or down since June. The cutbacks have been so severe that many economists are predicting that the third quarter will show the first quarterly decline in consumer spending in 17 years -- effectively stalling the engine of the American economy.

Spending fuels about 70 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, and right now, consumers' pain is being felt across socioeconomic lines in ways both big and small.

Unlike in previous years, consumers are grappling with significant inflation, particularly for necessities such as food and fuel, that are eating at their purchasing power. The consumer price index rose 4.3 percent during the second quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, the largest increase since the early 1990s. Meanwhile, real wages are decreasing and the unemployment rate has been rising since the summer to 6.1 percent in August, a five-year high.

The stats in the rapid falloff of American spending are absolutely stunning. The worse the news of the financial crisis, the quicker Americans stop spending, which, according to the New York Times virtually guarantees "the economic situation will get worse before it gets better" :

Recent figures from companies, and interviews across the country, show that automobile sales are plummeting, airline traffic is dropping, restaurant chains are struggling to fill tables, customers are sparse in stores.

When the final tally is in, consumer spending for the quarter just ended will almost certainly shrink, the first quarterly decline in nearly two decades. Many economists, who began the third quarter expecting modest growth, now believe the cutbacks are so severe that the overall economy did not expand either, and they warn that a consumer-led recession could be more severe than the relatively mild one earlier this decade.

“The last few days have devastated the American consumer,” said Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates, a consultancy, who said he worried that the constant drumbeat of negative news about the economy was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. “They all feel poor.”

Consumer spending, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the economy, grew modestly earlier in the year but fell in July and August on an annualized rate. When the government releases quarterly numbers this month, they are expected to show that consumer spending shrank 3 percent or more. That would be the first quarterly decline since 1990, ahead of the 1991 recession, and the steepest since 1981.

....household net worth, which greases spending, fell $6 trillion over the last year, with $1 trillion of that in just the last four weeks...

How long will it be before the non-spenders start getting blamed for the continuance of the US economic crisis? By the tone of some of the stories popping up in the mainstream media, it's already begun.

I'd expect there will be a concerted mainstream media effort to make Americans feel guilty about blowing their dwindling supply of cash on things like food and rent, instead of a $2000 television. What else are they going to do? Praise poor Americans for taking better care of their cash while advertising revenue for the mainstream media plummets?

By the way, how's your food garden going? It's never too late to get planting, inside and out.

There's a great story here on the rise of 'free veggie gardens' popping up by the sides of roads in inner suburban Sydney. This needs to happen in every village, town and city in Australia, and across America. It sucks being poor, it's absolutely shithouse owing a lot of money you can't pay back, but it's a lot easier to deal with all that when you're eating fresh, good quality meals. Particularly ones that cost next to nothing, outside of basic gardening skills and a little time.

Wall Street Economic Terrorists Get Free Pass From Federal Prosecutors

Too Scared That Slime Bags Will Take Revenge By Crashing Stock Market

It's brilliant, really. Fuck up your multi-billion business so spectacularly, and purposefully, that governments will be absolutely terrified of your corporation collapsing, with thousands or tens of thousands losing their jobs, and so they rush to your rescue.

Even better, subtly show that you and your friends can inflict financial terrorism at will, devastating the American economy and the modest savings and pensions of the middle class, and you can all but guarantee that you will never be prosecuted for your crimes :

Justice Department officials yesterday vowed to unravel the complex financial deals that helped prompt a market crisis in an effort that will generally seek criminal charges against individual brokers and bankers, rather than companies themselves, according to interviews with lawyers involved in the cases.

Mindful of the fallout from the last wave of business fraud cases six years ago, authorities are leaning against seeking indictments of major banks and insurers that may have inflated the value of their mortgage-related investments. Instead, prosecutors will look for such garden-variety crimes as false statements and insider trading by executives who tried to disguise financial problems or pad their wallets.

Last week, the FBI announced 26 investigations underway at companies including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, American International Group, Countrywide Financial and IndyMac.

....guidelines require government lawyers to take into account the health of a business when they make decisions about whether to file criminal charges. Given the current landscape, with Lehman in bankruptcy proceedings, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal control, and AIG surviving only after an $85 billion infusion from the Treasury, lawyers with experience in such cases predict few major criminal prosecutions of businesses.

"It would be a very rare company that would ever be prosecuted," said Joshua Hochberg, former chief of the Justice Department's fraud section. "These are all negotiated settlements. . . . A criminal conviction brings mandatory debarment and effectively puts a corporation out of business."

Bankrupting America on purpose, and getting away with it.

Turn Abandoned Estates Into Food Parks

Most Americans have no idea that indigenous people used plentiful acorns to make flour for thousands of years. Most don't even know you can use acorns to make flour. This post, on Boing Boing, explaining how to do it, has sparked some good ideas from commenters :

I've been thinking that we need a new "American Fusion" cuisine that would take the sustainable, native plants that grow wild all around us and use them with spices and tastes from around the world. Traditional acorn mush doesn't sound so appealing as a staple food, but add some curry powders or ginger and soy sauce, or some paprika, etc. and you would get a fusion cuisine that uses much less energy and resources than the current staples we rely on (wheat, etc.)

Take just a few of those abandoned houses in a growing number of suburbs in every American state, clear the buildings and foundations and round up some bored locals to establish Food Parks, filled with edible herbs, nut trees, fruit trees and 'weeds'. Let loose some chickens to take care of the bugs, then eat them, too.

Those who can afford it can buy all their food pre-prepared from the supermarkets, those who don't have the dollars can gather a meal, or at least the makings of one, from a local food park.

In a couple of generations, people are going to look back at these first years of the 21st century and shake their heads in disbelief that their grandparents actually lived in suburbs where nothing edible grew, outside of a few lemon trees. Our great-grandparents would be ashamed that we do so little, know so little, about feeding ourselves for free.

The Day Americans Revolted Against Wall Street & Washington

In only 48 hours, millions of Americans flooded the phone lines, e-mail addresses and websites of their local and state politicians, demanding they voice the will of the people and fight against The Great Bankers Bailout.

Millions of e-mails were sent, hundreds of thousands of phone calls made, it was a mini-revolution driven by internet videos and txt communications. The speed at which millions found out what was going on and were able to instantly do something about it can probably be counted as one of the fastest and greatest mass movements of Americans in a generation. However, it's unlikely to stop the $700 billion bailout, or all the other bailouts to follow :

Willie Benway, 45, a Bush-voting truck driver with a Harley-Davidson jacket and a faded blond goatee, has little in common politically with Sharon Valentine, 60, a retired English teacher and self-confessed “woolly liberal”. On the subject of the $700 billion bank bailout plan, however, both are on the same page.

“It's goddamn un-American,” Mr Benway said as he leant against his pickup outside the Thrift Store in Richfield, Minnesota. “We don't give money to companies. We're not France - yet.” For Ms Valentine, sitting in a nearby mall: “Congress was right to vote the Bill down. It doesn't tackle the root causes or help the people that need it.”

In Richfield, a typical middle-class surburb of Minneapolis in the heart of the Midwest, Americans from across the political spectrum found something to gripe about when it came to the bailout.

“I literally had thousands of e-mails asking me to vote no on this,” said Congressman Tim Walz of Minnesota, one of 95 Democrats who opposed the Bill on Monday. “I've never seen anything like it in my two years of Congress. Folks just didn't want it.”

Three of Minnesota's eight members of the House of Representatives voted against the Wall Street bailout Bill on Monday. Two were Democrats and one was a Republican. Michele Bachmann, the lone Minnesota Republican to oppose the Bill, issued a statement calling it “rushed, unworkable and short-sighted”.

During Monday's debate, the ultra-rightwinger read into the Congressional record a piece from Investor's Business Daily putting the blame for the mortgage crisis on a Clinton-era rule change. This, it was claimed, had pushed the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “to aggressively lend to minority communities” so that home ownership could “open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class”.

But there is also the risk of fallout should the warnings of impending economic catastrophe come true. According to a Washington Post poll released this week, 47 per cent of Americans opposed the Bill. Nevertheless, almost nine out of ten expressed concern that the bailout's failure could lead to a more severe economic decline.

“I keep hearing that if we don't put in all this money then people will lose their jobs,” Randi Hansen, 26, a waitress at Richfield's only bowling alley, said. “I'm really worried about it. My friend has already lost her house and I can't afford not to work now. I'm a single mother and I have $50 a month to live on.”

Tim Dyksman, 38, who was laid off from a warehouse business in nearby Edina six months ago, said: “It sucks that big bosses get bonuses while the little guy gets screwed.”

Has it ever been any different?

"You Don't Have To Listen To Some Big, Fat, Baldy Old Fart Telling You To Take These Boxes And Stick Them Over There..."

In the video below, not only do you get to watch an extremely coherent, and witty, Ozzy Osbourne cooking breakfast, but he supplies one of the best commentaries on the pitfalls of becoming a rock star ever uttered :



Back in my rock journalist days, in the early 1990s, I had the absolute honour of sitting down with Ozzy for an hour long interview in Sydney. Here's a bit of it :

“The funny thing about Black Sabbath being a part of history,” Ozzy says, “is we never knew what the fuck we were about. I never, ever thought we were very good, to be honest. I mean Iron Man and Paranoid were good riffs, but we weren’t a great band. We were always fucked up on drugs and booze. The whole thing is actually a hit of a haze to me….Anything bad that happened we never took seriously because we just went off to the pub and got pissed again….”

Another big sigh, a shrug.

“We missed out on a lot of reality.”

But look at the music you made. That stuff rocked the lives of millions of people. It still does. You gave millions of kids a rocking soundtrack for their youth.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

But Ozzy doesn’t want you to get him wrong on his opposition to alcohol and drugs. It’s for a reason related more to his work, the upcoming world tour, than to a looming tower of regrets for having had so many good times when he was younger.

He’s not anti-drugs, and he doesn’t want to be a role model for anybody.

“Do whatever the fuck you like.”

Ozzy considers this statement for a moment.

“Do what you wanna do as long as you’re enjoying it. If it becomes a problem, then go and get some fuckin’ help. There’s a ton of help.”

Ozzy raises a hand to scratch his face. He misses. He fingers tremble.

“This is where I kinda get pissed off in the respect that just because I was an alcoholic drug addict and I cleaned up my act…” Ozzy is starting to shout now, “what gives me the right to tell you not to do it? You are you and I am me. If I worked in a steel mill, and I went up the foreman and told him he shouldn’t drink, he’d tell me to go and fuck myself."

You can read the full Ozzy Osbourne interview here

Centre Of World Power Shifting - "China Calls The Shots"

It's still not clear how China will pass through the global economic crisis, but there seems little doubt that, with America in dramatic decline, and Europe and England fighting to financially survive what may become The Greater Depression, the 21st Century increasingly looks like it belong to China :

Amid chaos on Wall Street, the question looms — who wins? Increasingly, eyes are flickering towards China.

Compared with the anarchy in the deregulated and debt-ridden US financial system, China's more tightly controlled market and high rate of savings are looking good.

China is deeply entwined in the current crisis, which was built on cheap debt and an expectation housing prices would always rise. And much of the money flooded in from China.

That raises a big question about how America pulls itself out of this mess, according to Geoffrey Garrett of the US Studies Centre in Sydney.

"As American public debt increases, will the Chinese central bank and the Chinese Government be willing to buy dollars and keep interest rates low?" he said. "Or will they charge a big interest rate premium now and push up rates in the US?"

The answer is not yet clear. But Professor Garrett sees a more difficult political question in the short term. "If you were a savvy Chinese investor at the moment, you wouldn't want to buy Treasury bills, you'd want to buy distressed assets," he said.

"The willingness of Americans to be bailed out by China is the big question. It becomes very politically sensitive when it is buying an American firm, when China is buying up the United States at rock-bottom prices."

Mr Thirlwell said the Wall Street collapse had been a substantial blow to US prestige.

"One of the soft-power attributes the US has been resting on is the dynamism of the US economy, the successful and aggressive nature of Wall Street," he said. "And that reputation is now in tatters."

It all points to what might be an uncomfortable shift in the centre of global power, with China calling the shots.

But will the West allow China to rule the world, and own America?

Pepe Escobar On 'The Peoples' Republic Of Wall Street'

One of the better, more insightful commentaries on the insanity of 'Casino Socialism' by journalist Pepe Escobar.



Pepe Escobar is a regular contributor to the Asia Times, here's a direct link to his archive with his latest stories. Escobar is a fearless, brutally honest reporter on the Iraq & Afghanistan wars, which is why your local city newspapers don't carry his columns.

Oliver Stone : "The Movie Industry Is Fucked, Really Fucked"

Oliver Stone, the director of JFK, Platoon, Nixon and the new President Bush biopic, W., is not happy in Hollywood. Being controversial might help with getting the headlines, but Stone insists his reputation has few benefits when it comes to making the movies he wants to make :

"I won't say I'm box office poison, because I'm not, but..." He seems tired. The movie industry, he explains, "is fucked. Really fucked."

(W.) isn't angry: Stone says he has no anti-Bush anger left. "I went through this hatred that so many of the American people are going through now, but fortunately I got over it. I had all this anger for this loss for our country, a serious eight-year loss, and now I just want to say you've got to laugh, a little bit, about this whole thing. It gets so painful that humour is the only antidote. If you didn't, you'd go bonkers. You'd become a raging lunatic on a blogosphere, writing anti-Bush screeds." Nor is it a conspiracy film, not least because the Bush administration's conspiracies are too well-known. Who needs to go to the cinema to be told that the march to war in Iraq involved lies, cover-up and misdirection?

The early lives of Oliver Stone and George Bush overlapped in several curious ways. They were born within three months of each other, to privileged families; both spent part of their childhood in wealthy Connecticut towns. (Stone's parents divorced as a result of the serial infidelities of his father, a stockbroker.) They both arrived at Yale University in 1964. But then their paths diverged: Bush completed his degree, then spent five years avoiding the Vietnam war with his famously lackadaisical service in the Texas and Alabama Air National Guard. Stone dropped out of Yale twice, and ended up volunteering for Vietnam, where he specifically requested combat duty and was twice wounded in action. His wartime experiences earned him a Purple Heart, and led directly to his unflinching Vietnam films - Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July, both Oscar winners, and Heaven & Earth.

"Bush is the [kind of] Yale boy that's completely different from me," says Stone. "I had a thirst for the world. I wanted to go to Vietnam, I wanted to see the world. Africa. This guy went the other way. He stayed inside the entitlement, he operated very provincially, he stays at home. The National Guard was really about staying at home, too - not just not going to Vietnam, but staying at home."

"It's a function of age," Stone says. "Once you've done certain things, you get them out of your system. Blake was right: better to kill an infant in its cradle than to repress an unacted desire. I've done a lot of things, no questions. I'm sure I've been an asshole at times. I'm sure I've been stupid, ignorant, dumb, fucked myself up, shot myself in the foot, everything. But I had a lot of learning to do in my life."

"My biggest harm I do to myself is I put all this pressure on myself." He describes himself as a Buddhist, and says daily meditation has helped calm him down: "But even at my age, I feel the need to accomplish a certain thing every day, or things, and I go through that process of torturing myself, and then often put it off till the end of the day, or not at all, which is worse. So, of course, I suffer the consequences of procrastination: delay, doubt. General worthlessness."

Figurehead Not What He Seems

Everyone has a price, even old punks. Then again, at least it's a funny ad, kind of :



Meanwhile, in other corporate-punk news, the repackaging, re-flogging of a few dozen original songs by The Clash continues, with gusto :

This Monday sees a tri-partite Clash release: the illustrated autobiography The Clash (selling for £30), the live compilation DVD Revolution Rock (£12.99), and the CD Live at Shea Stadium (£11.99).

By the end of last year, posthumous releases included two double-CD best-ofs, two single CD singles collections (both called The Singles), an expanded B-sides compilation, two triple-CD box-set overviews, an A- and B-sides singles box set, an extravagantly extended 25th Anniversary special edition of London Calling, a programme of remastered CD reissues of the band's entire album back catalogue (including the compilations), a singles video collection, and a DVD reprising and expanding upon that.

"Is There Anybody Out There?"

If the United Kingdom had been attacked in a nuclear war in the 1970s, here's some of the prepared script the BBC would have broadcast to flesh-melted Brits :

This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. The number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. Stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.

Radioactive fallout is many times more dangerous if you are directly exposed to it in the open. Roofs and walls offer substantial protection.

Make sure gas and other fuel supplies are turned off and all fires are extinguished.

You should refill all your containers for drinking water after any fires have been put out, because the mains supply may not be available for long. Until you are told that lavatories may be used again, other toilet arrangements must be made. Water means life. Don't waste it.

Ration your food supply, because it may have to last for 14 days or more. If you live in an area where a fallout warning has been given, stay in your fallout room. When the immediate danger has passed, sirens will sound a steady note. The "all clear" message will also be given on this wavelength.

Do not go outside the house. Radioactive fallout can kill.

We shall repeat this broadcast in two hours' time. Stay tuned to this wavelength, but switch your radios off now to save your batteries until we come on the air again.

Apparently, the BBC had a lot of trouble trying to decide on the right, calming, reassuring voice to tell Britons that their cities have been razed in a blinding flash of light.

Oliver Stone On Why Obama Won't Be JFKed

Obama is safe, says Oliver Stone :

“In those days, with Kennedy, you could kill somebody and that was more palatable because we’d done that abroad with many people: it was in vogue, it was part of the James Bond thing. Now you don’t need to kill – the media can kill for you.

“And I don’t think Obama could [frighten] the Pentagon in the same way. Kennedy was shaking things up: with Cuba he was ready to sign a deal, with Vietnam he was pulling out, with Khrushchev he was signing a deal.”

It's interesting Stone mentions The Pentagon. He was asked in the late 1990s, by the UK's Neon Magazine if there was a subject he would never make a movie about. He cited the War Industry, and said he knew better than to ever fuck with them.

Fascinating it will be to see how Stone deals with the issue of President George W. Bush's ramping up of defence budgets to Cold War spending levels in his new Bush biopic, W.

Perhaps Stone doesn't fear the War Industry as much as he once did.

Bin Laden's Plan To Bankrupt US Becomes Reality

He might be dead, but Osama Bin Laden is gloating from beyond the grave about how his plan to destroy America by "bleeding dry" its wealth through war is coming up trumps :

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.

He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.

He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.

As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.

"Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

The total U.S. national debt is more than $7 trillion. The U.S. federal deficit was $413 billion in 2004, according to the Treasury Department.

"It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.

"And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."

As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.

"So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.

f

Anastasia Screamed In Vain...



So it was murder, after all :

Russia's Supreme Court has ruled Tsar Nicholas II, who was shot dead by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918, had been unlawfully killed and was entitled to legal rehabilitation...

A Bolshevik firing squad shot Nicholas, his wife and their five children without a trial in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg...

The Future, Impossible To Write About

A science fiction writer complains about how hard it is to write SF set in the next decade or two, and that a new novel is almost completely out of date just as it's about to be published. The rate of change in the modern world, in technology and reality altering events, is too quick, too sudden, too hard to keep up with, let alone get ahead of.

In a decade where nobody predicted the near instant rise of a new method of communication - via text-messaging - and where the Greater Depression began with all but a few days warning (if you read or watch only the mainstream media), well, who knows what the fuck will happen next month, let alone in 2015?

Stross's complaints may provide an argument for more direct writer to consumer distribution, but it also suggests that speculative fiction somehow fails unless it is predictive of an actual possible future. Yesterday's speculative fiction may be today's alternate history...

Isn't all science fiction alternative history, future histories at that, anyway?

A commenter at iO9 makes a short, very relevant point :

When did sci fi become about being right?

It never did. As Philip K Dick said, the Idea is King.

"I Uploaded All My Memories To MySpace And 73 Friends Rated My Life Only 3.5 Out Of 10"

Futurologist Richard Watson makes a few predictions.

But be warned, he has absolutely nothing to say about robot hookers.

In short :

Wal-Mart, Apple, Google, Microsoft get into the banking business, all electronic payments.

Artificial intelligence helps you find the best loans and insurance policies.

Cash transactions will decrease dramatically by 2020, to only 10% of current levels.

Then a global pandemic will make the masses paranoid about touching paper or plastic notes handled by others. So it's goodbye to that. We will pay and be paid by cell phones and ID chips under the skin of our forearms. So very, very hackable.

And more here :

...by 2050 there won't be DVDs, or national currencies, or a monarchy, or a unified Belgium, but we might well have a ladder into space, robotic policemen and diets based on our individual genome.

...the environment will remain vitally important, but climate change won't be the only game in town - the approach of peak oil, peak coal, peak gas, peak water, peak uranium and even peak people (a severe shortage of workers in many parts of the world) will also have an impact, and require a profound shift towards sustainability.

...privacy will be dead or dying....but we may get smarter at making decisions, because our connectivity will allow instant polling of a crowd whose wisdom is nearly always greater than any single member's.

What if they're all idiots? What then?

...self-replicating machines, with intelligence equal to or greater than our own. We might be able to download not only our memories but also our consciousness into such a machine, and live for ever inside it.

That sounds terrible. Floating around in your own memories for all eternity, unable to end it all. It would be much better to be able to iBrain the stored memories of people who lived lives you wished you had, or had experiences you're interested in exploring.

But anyway, I think our consciousness and memories still have many surprises left for those who think they can copy and store it like a digital movie file. They haven't even been able to confirm, yet, that human memory is stored within our DNA. And passed on, deep through the generations.

So professional futurologists just read and watch lots of science fiction and then pick and choose the best ideas they've jotted down from all those books and TV shows. Right?