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6/13/2003



Solar Towers

WARNING: Paradigm shattering information follows.

Prepare yourself. You are about to see the world in an entirely different way. Andrew, a reader from Australia, sent in what is probably the most important and incredible information I have ever seen.

As soon as you grasp the concept of the solar tower technology, you will have prima facie evidence that much of what we have been led to believe about the world is wrong. The simplicity of the concept is shocking...and curiously beautiful. One would have a difficult time saying the same thing about nuclear power plants, fuel shortages, high energy costs, polution and wars for oil. Start building solar towers. Stop supporting evil.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Giant Tower Energy Deal Takes Shape
Fri, 13 Jun 2003 9:11 AEST

A deal is being formalised to sell green energy from a planned one kilometre high solar tower north of Mildura.

The company developing the project, Enviromission, says it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Australia's largest energy provider, Australian Gas Light Electricity.

Negotiations centre on an exclusive arrangement for Australian Gas Light Electricity to take up to 100 per cent of the green energy for the power station and deliver 200 megawatts of green power into the Australian energy market.

A decision on the feasibility of the $800 million project is expected before the end of the year.


Learn More About Solar Towers:

http://www.enviromission.com.au/

http://www.enviromission.com

http://www.solarmissiontechnologies.com

Hint1: Solar towers can power BingoFuel reactors.

Hint2: Your car can run on BingoFuel.





U.S. Fascism: Employees Ticketed for Standing in Front of Their Workplace :.

Kim Phann and a buddy had stepped out of Sha's Big Time on Friday night to smoke a butt when a cop slapped them with a pair of summonses.

The charge: "loitering in front of business."

But Phann and Bruce Rosaro, 27, weren't just hanging outside the Bronx barbershop. They work there.

"We can't smoke inside because it's against the law," Phann, 23, told the Daily News. "What are we supposed to do? Go home to have a cigarette?"

It was 7 p.m., and Phann, who has been a barber at Sha's for two months, still had one more haircut to go before calling it a night.

But before he was able to get back to work, a police wagon turned the corner and slowed to a stop outside Sha's, at 935 N. Morris Park Ave., near Fowler Ave.

"Let me see some IDs," a cop told Phann and Rosaro, who said they quickly whipped out their driver's licenses.

Next thing he knew, Phann had the pink summons slip in his hand.

"Blame it on Bloomberg," they said the cop told them before driving away.

When asked about the summons, police spokesman Deputy Chief Michael Collins issued the same statement he has made regarding other tickets.

"As the Daily News is fully aware, or should be aware, there are administrative processes available to those who may have been issued summonses in error or for those who may have a legitimate reason for violating these regulations," he said. "Those procedures are clearly described on the summonses issued to violators."

Phann said he plans to appeal the summons, which does not specify a fine for his offense.





U.S. Fascism: Home-Schooling Standoff :.

They want your spawn:

A legal battle over two home-schooled children exploded into a seven-hour standoff yesterday, when they refused to take a standardized test ordered by the Department of Social Services.

George Nicholas Bryant, 15, and Nyssa Bryant, 13, stood behind their parents, Kim and George, as police and DSS workers attempted to collect the children at 7:45 a.m. DSS demanded that the two complete a test to determine their educational level.

After a court order was issued by Framingham Juvenile Court around 1 p.m., the children were driven by their parents to a Waltham hotel.

Again, they refused to take the test.

"The court order said that the children must be here. It said nothing about taking the test," said George Bryant.

The second refusal came after an emotion-filled morning for the family, when DSS workers sternly demanded the Bryants comply with their orders.

"We have legal custody of the children and we will do with them as we see fit," DSS worker Susan Etscovitz told the Bryants in their Gale Street home. "They are minors and they do what we tell them to do."





Plunge Protection Team :.

This is old news, but I'm constantly reminded of it because I'm now daytrading to survive. The political and economic systems in the U.S. have already collapsed, but to most people, they still appear to be up and running.

How long can appearances be maintained?

With an ongoing criminal probe into Freddie Mack, unemployment skyrocketing and consumer sentiment plummeting, anyone who still believes in the bullshit sometimes referred to as "capitalism" should call up the Working Group on Financial Markets and tell them that their services are no longer necessary. The people who run the macro scale speculation pit, sometimes referred to as the global financial system, have contingency plans in case "capitalism" starts to break down. (Many people won't believe this, even if your give them the evidence.):

From the Washington Post, Sunday, February 23, 1997; Page H01:

The Working Group's main goal, officials say, would be to keep the markets operating in the event of a sudden, stomach-churning plunge in stock prices -- and to prevent a panicky run on banks, brokerage firms and mutual funds. Officials worry that if investors all tried to head for the exit at the same time, there wouldn't be enough room -- or in financial terms, liquidity -- for them all to get through. In that event, the smoothly running global financial machine would begin to lock up.

This sort of liquidity crisis could imperil even healthy financial institutions that are temporarily short of cash or tradable assets such as U.S. Treasury securities. And worries about the financial strength of a major trader could cascade and cause other players to stop making payments to one another, in which case the system would seize up like an engine without oil. Even a temporary loss of liquidity would intensify financial pressure on already stressed institutions. In the 1987 crash, government officials worked feverishly -- and, ultimately, successfully -- to avoid precisely that bleak scenario.


Question: If I find the stock market odious and rife with fraud and criminality, why would I be daytrading to survive?

Answer: Criminal gangs are the only organizations with any money left. Since I need money to buy things, like burritos and some dirt upon which I'd place my yurt, I'm forced to do something to get money. And since I don't want to go to jail, and since I can't find meaningful work that pays more than penury, I decided to try to rip off the criminals on Wall Street. Incredibly, stealing from these diabolical swindlers is perfectly legal. As long as you can rip them off, before they do the same thing to you, it's all chocked up to "the invisible hand of the market."

HAHA! I'm just hoping that when it comes down---and I mean REALLY COMES DOWN---I'll have enough time to get my chump change out in time. Oh well. But then again, when it REALLY COMES DOWN, my chump change will probably be the last thing on my mind.

I would appreciate any comments from the employees of the market makers, specialists and banks who read Cryptogon. Yeah, you. I see you.


6/11/2003



Pop Goes the Housing Market? :.

John Talbott, a visiting scholar at the Anderson School at UCLA and author of a new book, "The Coming Crash in the Housing Market," said he thought the collapse in housing prices would reveal problems at Freddie Mac and No. 1 financier Fannie Mae. But Monday's news could prove to be even worse for the housing market than he had expected.

"This is the worst case scenario," he said. "I envisioned a lot of little small things that caused housing prices to decline, then reaching into the secondary market. What we're seeing is Freddie and Fannie have their own problems. This is the first big event, and there's lots more bad news coming."





RFID: Full Scale Perception Management Begins :.

Cryptogon readers first heard about radio frequency identification (RFID) back on 11/18/02. This technology is now ready for primetime:

The first wide-scale applications of RFID will be in retail. At a major industry conference next week, Wal-Mart is expected to urge its suppliers to adopt RFID�the same way that, twenty years ago, the giant retailer jump-started the use of bar codes. And some manufacturers are already on board. Gillette, for example, recently placed an order for half a billion RFID chips that they will begin to use to track individual packages of razors.

Ultimately, a reader on every retail shelf will be able to automatically sense when the store is low on inventory and automatically place an order to restock. RFID should also permit more accurate tracking of merchandise within the store�drastically reducing the theft or other loss generically called �shrinkage� in the retail business. And RFID will ultimately allow consumers to simply walk past the cash register with their purchases; the register will read the RFID chips and automatically deduct the purchase from their account. Where was RFID when Winona Ryder needed it?

Inventory and checkout counters, however, are only the start of possible RFID applications. Japanese bookstores, for example, plan to use RFID to track how customers use books in the store�how many times and how long is each book taken off the shelf to read, before someone actually buys it? The European Union is considering placing a tiny RFID chip in every paper Euro note�providing both counterfeiting protection and the ability to give each bill a unique serial number. An American company, Verichip, is developing an RFID chip implant that will permanently store your medical records under your skin, so any hospital equipped with a reader can know all your pertinent health information even if you are unconscious. A simpler version of this subcutaneous chip is already implanted to help identify pets.


Related: What Is Smart Dust? :.

The father of smart dust is UC Berkeley electrical engineering professor Kris Pister. Six years ago, he went to Darpa with a proposal for outfitting silicon slivers with microscopic surveillance equipment. Such infinitesimal devices are commonly known as microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS. Creating the dust isn't so different from making computer chips: You start with a silicon wafer, then coat it with a metal film that allows microstructures to be etched into its surface. Ultrasound or a diamond saw is then used to shatter the wafer.

The tough part is getting those little pieces to do something useful. Pister's latest functional MEMS - each smaller than an aspirin - are still 100 times bigger than his ultimate target of 1 cubic millimeter. The motes come equipped with sensors that can detect when metal objects, like tanks, move and disrupt the Earth's magnetic field. A lone particle's magnetometer reading isn't much good to a battlefield commander. But a cloud of motes swapping information like a peer-to-peer network can provide a detailed portrait of an advancing tank battalion or an ambush attack.

Pister, who heads the Berkeley startup Dust Inc., wanted to give his motes miniature radios to communicate. But each mote required so much power, he couldn't build one smaller than 200-cubic-millimeters. Then one of his grad students had a breakthrough: a stripped-down transmitter that uses less juice but can broadcast data about 30 feet. Currently, Pister's smart dust relies on solar cells measuring just a few millimeters in diameter. But at that size, power storage could be a problem, so he's considering going nuclear. Giving each mote a long-term energy supply might eventually be as simple as sprinkling it with a radioactive isotope. Pister's MEMS also carry a light-on-the-memory operating system, called TinyOS, that was designed for the project.





Feds Begin Criminal Investigation of Freddie Mac :.

Institutions continue to buy up Freddie Mac's securitized mortgage debt because there is no other place to put the money in order to earn a return. Question: What happens when that junk paper stops performing?

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday revealed a criminal probe into Freddie Mac, two days after the No. 2 U.S. mortgage finance company cleared out its senior management over accounting irregularities.

In addition, Freddie Mac confirmed the Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a formal investigation and said the SEC has been carrying out an informal probe since January.

But the news was tempered by evidence of undimmed market appetite for the company's debt as Freddie Mac pressed ahead successfully with a $1 billion bond sale on Wednesday.


Related: ImClone's Waksal Goes Down :.

Assume the crash position, Martha, put your head between your knees and grab your ankles. Your buddy got the max. Oh, but these are just isolated incidents:

ImClone Systems founder Sam Waksal watched his sweet life of SoHo lofts, celebrity and superwealth disappear yesterday as a judge sentenced him to the max - more than seven years in prison.


6/10/2003



U.S. Faces Critical Gas Shortage :.

Natural gas supplies in the US have reached critically low levels in recent months and may be inadequate to meet demand during a hot summer this year.

Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, has called an emergency meeting of the National Petroleum Council this month amid calls for the administration to deal urgently with the shortage.





Freddie Mac: Uh... :.

In case you don't understand what is happening in the financial markets, I'll spell it out: Buy lots of food and survival products; stuff that will help you live on your own, far away from large cities. Beans, rice, bottled water, water filters, guns, ammunition, toilet paper, granola, peanut butter, sugar, salt, propane, vegetable seed packs, dried fruit, etc. etc. Make a list. Check it twice, don't wait to find out if your neighbors are naughty or nice. If you're lucky enough to have hills to run to.... Wait, isn't this a story about financial markets?

Mortgage-market giant Freddie Mac announced abruptly Monday that it had fired its president because he didn't fully cooperate with an internal review of the company's accounting, now being investigated by federal regulators.

The move unnerved Wall Street and raised alarm among lawmakers.

In a surprise shake-up, the government-sponsored company whose stock is widely traded said it had fired the president and chief operating officer, David Glenn, and that Chairman and Chief Executive Leland Brendsel had resigned. Vaughn Clarke, the executive vice president and chief financial officer, also resigned.

Freddie Mac said it had dismissed Glenn "because of serious questions as to the timeliness and completeness of his cooperation and candor" with attorneys engaged in January by the board of directors' audit committee to review the accounting problems that span three years.





Pump and Dump :.

Executives are rushing to sell their companies' shares at a pace not seen since 2001.

More than $3.1 billion in shares was sold in May by corporate insiders, the most such selling in 24 months. By comparison, monthly stock sales by insiders failed to exceed $1.4 billion during each of the previous five months, and just $630 million of sales took place in January, according to research firm Thomson Financial.

The moves are a concern because insider buying and selling -- by people who presumably are the most knowledgeable about their companies' prospects -- have been good predictors of the market's direction. For example, many executives sold their holdings in early 2000, just before a bear market in stocks began. Now, many again are locking in profits -- especially in health care, technology and finance stocks -- on the heels of the market's recent gains.





British Scientist Puts Odds for Apocalypse at 50-50 :.

This is pretty optimistic, if you ask me:

This is the way the world might end: A genetically engineered pathogen is released, debris from an erupting "supervolcano" blocks the sun or scientists in the biggest "bioerror" of them all accidentally trigger a matter-squeezing "big bang."

The demise of civilization has been predicted since it began, but the odds of keeping Planet Earth alive and well are getting worse amid a breakneck pace of scientific advances, according to Martin Rees, Britain's honorary astronomer royal.

Rees calculates that the odds of an apocalyptic disaster striking Earth have risen to about 50 percent from 20 percent a hundred years ago.

The 60-year-old scientist, author of the recently published "Our Final Hour," says science is advancing in a far more unpredictable and potentially dangerous pattern than ever before.

He lists as mankind's biggest threats: nuclear terrorism, deadly engineered viruses, rogue machines and genetic engineering that could alter human character. All of those could result from innocent error or the action of a single malevolent individual.


Related: Why the Future Doesn't Need Us




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