OPEC to Study Currency Basket for Pricing
October 28th, 2007More good news for U.S. Dollar holders. —Sarcasm.
Via: Yahoo / AP:
OPEC is likely to discuss creating a basket of currencies for oil pricing at its next summit due to the steady decline in the dollar, Venezuela’s Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said on Friday.
“The need to establish a basket of currencies … will probably be a point of discussion in the next OPEC summit,” Ramirez told reporters during an evening event in the presidential palace.
“The dollar as a benchmark currency has been weakening quite a lot and it creates distortions in oil markets.”
The cartel is slated to hold a summit of the heads of state of OPEC nations in in November and a meeting of ministerial delegates in December.
Ramirez added that world oil markets are well supplied with petroleum inventories above average, reiterating suggestions earlier this week that OPEC is not likely to hike output to calm record-high prices.
“We have enough oil in the market, the inventory levels are above the average of the last five years,” he said.
Oil prices have soared in part because of a weakening dollar that tumbled in the wake of an interest rate cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Officials from the United States and China — the world’s two largest oil consumers — have expressed concern that current crude prices are too high.
Research Credit: PD
Much of U.S. Could See a Water Shortage
October 27th, 2007Via: AP:
An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn’t have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York’s reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year.
Across America, the picture is critically clear – the nation’s freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.
The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.
“Is it a crisis? If we don’t do some decent water planning, it could be,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the Denver-based American Water Works Association.
Water managers will need to take bold steps to keep taps flowing, including conservation, recycling, desalination and stricter controls on development.
“We’ve hit a remarkable moment,” said Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The last century was the century of water engineering. The next century is going to have to be the century of water efficiency.”
The price tag for ensuring a reliable water supply could be staggering. Experts estimate that just upgrading pipes to handle new supplies could cost the nation $300 billion over 30 years.
“Unfortunately, there’s just not going to be any more cheap water,” said Randy Brown, Pompano Beach’s utilities director.
It’s not just America’s problem – it’s global.
Army Medics Train at Miami Trauma Center
October 27th, 2007Via: AP:
For two weeks, 28 Army medics, nurses, doctors and nurse anesthetists have been learning trauma medicine and teamwork under pressure at the Ryder Trauma Center at downtown Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, a place that sees such carnage it often resembles a war zone.
Ryder is one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, seeing an average of 11 trauma patients a day — about as many as the biggest military hospital in Iraq.
Jackson Memorial serves some of the city’s most crime-ridden sections, and patients arriving at the trauma center have been stabbed, injured in grisly auto accidents, wounded in shootouts with high-powered assault weapons, or hurt in falls and fights.
The Army sends 10 forward surgical teams a year through Ryder, which was selected six years ago because of the volume of bloodshed. It is the Army’s only trauma training center. The Air Force has similar programs in Baltimore, St. Louis and Cincinnati; the Navy’s trauma program is in Los Angeles.
…
This team’s live-action day turned out to be relatively quiet, with just a trickle of stabbing, motorcycle crash and car accident victims arriving. Just a week earlier, four police officers shot with high-powered assault weapons had been rushed to Ryder.
One died and two suffered easily treatable wounds, but one had her knee blown apart and required extensive treatment by Ryder’s nonmilitary staff.
“That one cop, she was shot by an AK-47,” said Spc. Joshua McCann, a 22-year-old medic and Kent State nursing student. “That’s exactly what we’re going to see over there.”
Lengthy SWAT Standoff Over Foreclosure Ends in Suicide
October 27th, 2007Freedom, for an increasing number of Americans, means choosing how they’re going to go down.
Falling Down, for real…
Via: Houston Chronicle:
A 12-hour standoff ended this morning with a north Houston man lobbing Molotov cocktails at Houston Police before taking his own life rather than vacate a home he’d lost to foreclosure.
James Hahn, a chemist, had told police he would not be taken from the home alive, said Capt. Bruce Williams, an HPD spokesman.
” ‘You know what I do for a living and you know what I am capable of,’ ” said Williams, recalling one of the conversations police had with the man on Wednesday.
The standoff began at 1:10 p.m. Wednesday when police said Hahn pulled a gun on Precinct 4 constable deputies who had attempted to serve him with a warrant for eviction at the home in the 21000 block of Covington Bridge in Spring, authorities said.
California Home-Loan Default Numbers Set Record
October 27th, 2007Via: San Jose Mercury News:
A record number of California homeowners entered the foreclosure process in the third quarter, a real estate information service reported today, showing the effects of loose mortgage lending standards, falling home values and slumping sales.
Statewide, mortgage companies sent 72,571 notices of default to borrowers last quarter, according to DataQuick Information Systems, which collects the data from public records. That total easily exceeded the previous record, set in the first quarter of 1996, of 61,541 notices sent.
Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007
October 27th, 2007This is an effort to devise a coherent legislative package that is geared toward counterinsurgency operations inside the United States.
But… Why?
Americans, in general, are the most docile and gullible people I have ever encountered. They have proven, time and time again, that they are willing and able to swallow any manner of excrement that dribbles out of the television, no matter how absurd or detrimental to their own lives.
I wrote about the awesome perception management systems that the American Corporate State employs for counter insurgency purposes.
And before the American Culture Bomb was deployed abroad, it had to defeat Americans at home. In Constant Conflict, U.S. Army Major Ralph Peters wrote the following:
Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures… It stresses comfort and convenience–ease–and it generates pleasure for the masses.
…
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.†America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor†in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted–men and women everywhere–clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.
So, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007…
Did I miss something here? Does the U.S. Government have a reason to believe that the American people are about to snap out of their zombie trance and actually do something? Personally, I wouldn’t have bet on it happening any time soon. The way I saw it—before I left the United States for good—was that 9.9 out of 10 Americans would gladly dig their own holes, get down on their knees and pull the muzzle of the executioner’s weapon against their skulls. It’s their patriotic duty to be spineless followers and boot lickers, no matter what.
All of that assumes a steady flow of crap from WalMart and another iteration of the PlayStation every few years.
Maybe… Just maybe the USG knows that the situation on the ground is going to change substantially and that the general level of comfort is going to drop. In other words, less bread and fewer compelling enough circuses. If that was the case, increasing numbers of people could become radicalized. The USG will do what all other governments do as they collapse: Turn inward.
As the level of sociopolitical cohesion falls, the state increasingly views the people as a national security problem.
To wit, from the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007:
(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term ‘violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.
(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term ‘homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
NYSE ELIMINATES TRADING CURBS DATING BACK TO 1987
October 27th, 2007Via: Bloomberg:
The New York Stock Exchange said it will no longer impose curbs on computer-program trading that were put in place after the crash of 1987, claiming they’re no longer as effective in damping swings in prices.
The exchange will stop prohibiting brokerages from entering some program trades when the NYSE Composite Index rises or falls more than 2 percent, according to a notice sent to member firms today. The so-called collars had been in effect since 1988 and were triggered 17 times this year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Research Credit: PD
“We’re Inching Dangerously Close to the Point Where Consumers Run for the Hills”
October 27th, 2007WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
The reason I’m posting this is because Jim Jubak provides confirmation that my strategy for dealing with this system is viable.
In America (and wealthier parts of the West in general), people don’t have to blow up a natural gas pipeline and shut down a factory or cut enough fiber to crash the NYSE and the NASDAQ market systems for a few minutes, hours or days. Voluntary simplicity, or, living well on very little money, kicks evil people in the nuts and gouges out their eyes. (Pacifists may think of this as sending the enemy Joy and Happiness if they desire.) Doing this in the U.S. has a force multiplier effect because the U.S. is the largest source of the funds that keep the global ponzi scheme running. When people in wealthy countries opt out, the action causes major economic damage to the machine.
Look at me and Rebecca. In the normal world, in our normal careers, we would have an annual combined income of roughly US$100,000. What horror would the U.S. government commit with the portion of the taxes it would demand from us? We now live well on a tiny fraction of what we would make in our normal careers. We have no debt. We own our small farm and our vehicles outright. We convert what’s left over at the end of the month into cash savings and gold. We also give money to people who are doing good work.
Whether you decide to leave the U.S. (like we did), or not, doesn’t matter. Living well on very little, encouraging others to do the same and actually funding people who are doing good work (allocating resources to values) are the main tactics of the frugal insurgent.
…
It’s a matter of hacking The Matrix in an efficient and innovative manner to reduce your monthly expenses to a fraction of previous levels. The extraction/domination system in the U.S. has few effective defenses against people who opt out—to the extent possible—by making smart use of available resources. The system assumes that you’ll stay hooked forever on a lifestyle built around profligate waste and going deep into debt to buy crap that you don’t really want, or need. Indeed, most people are content to go through life this way.
Living simply on very little money kills the system slowly.
And now, Jim Jubak:
My worst nightmare about the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market is coming true.
The horrors let loose among mortgage borrowers and lenders by falling housing prices have begun to sink their fangs into the market for auto loans and credit cards, too. We’re inching dangerously close to the point where consumers run for the hills — taking their wallets and prospects for economic growth in the United States with them.
…
It’s the folks in good shape that the economy has got to watch out for. If consumers who are in good shape decide to cut back on spending in order to reduce their credit card balances, that would take a considerable amount of spending out of the economy. There is some evidence that this has started to happen.
Funny, isn’t it, how my lifestyle represents a nightmare scenario for proponents of paper investments, like Jubak?
That should provide you with some pretty good insights on the nature of those investments.
The “Journalists” at the FEMA “Press” Conference
October 27th, 2007A FEMA press conference on the California fires didn’t actually involve the press at all. There were no reporters. The entire thing was staged. The people asking the questions were FEMA employees who were pretending to be reporters. (Of course, would be little difference between the reporters working government beats and these shills at the fake press conference.)
So, we have a FEMA press conference (with no reporters actually in attendance), the body of Russell Lane Daves, an arson suspect shot dead by police, and a bunch of federal guidelines that grounded the firefighting aircraft as California burned:
As wildfires were charging across Southern California, nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two massive cargo planes sat idly by, grounded by government rules and bureaucracy.
How much the aircraft would have helped will never be known, but their inability to provide quick assistance raises troubling questions about California’s preparations for a fire season that was widely expected to be among the worst on record.
It took as long as a day for Navy, Marine and California National Guard helicopters to get clearance early this week, in part because state rules require all firefighting choppers to be accompanied by state forestry “fire spotters” who coordinate water or retardant drops. By the time those spotters arrived, the powerful Santa Ana winds stoking the fires had made it too dangerous to fly.
And what do you think the real story is with William Brock? Why would a guy, who’s on probation in Los Angeles County for narcotics violations, want to impersonate a firefighter and drive around in the fire zone? Just another lone nut, I guess:
A 44-year-old man dressed in full fire gear was arrested Wednesday afternoon after deputies found him in an evacuated area of Fallbrook.
William Brock was laying a fully-charged hose attached to a hydrant across Live Oak Park Road near Gumtree Lane around 4 p.m. in an area where fires were still smouldering, sheriff’s officials said. There were no other firefighters in the area.
Brock told deputies that he was a firefighter who had been sent to help extinguish hot spots and that he was allowed to pass through the check points .
According to the Sheriff’s Department, he was driving a pickup truck with a personalized firefighter plate loaded with fire hoses and other fire gear. He was wearing a blue shirt that had the word “firefighter” on it. In his truck, officials found a blue shirt with a Morongo Valley Fire Department patch on it, a firefighter badge and a name tag with his name on it.
Deputies checked and found that Brock did not work for the Morongo Valley Fire Department or any other. They also found that he is on probation in Los Angeles County for narcotics violations.
Brock was taken into custody. He will face charges of impersonating a firefighter, entering a closed area and obstructing officers in the performance of their duties, sheriff’s officials said.
Blah, blah, blah. Just more things to forget about for those of us who were dumb enough to look in the first place.
Via: Washington Post:
FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.
Reporters were given only 15 minutes’ notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA’s Southwest D.C. offices.
They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a “listen only” line, the notice said — no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News (see the Fox News video of the news conference carried on the Think Progress Web site), MSNBC and other outlets.
Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the “commodities” being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.
He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters — in one case, he appears to say “Mike” and points to a reporter — and was asked an oddly in-house question about “what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration” signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.
FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at one point to caution he’d allow just “two more questions.” Later, he called for a “last question.”
“Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” a reporter asked. Another asked about “lessons learned from Katrina.”
“I’m very happy with FEMA’s response so far,” Johnson said, hailing “a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team.”
“And so I think what you’re really seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership,” Johnson said, “none of which were present in Katrina.” (Wasn’t Michael Chertoff DHS chief then?) Very smooth, very professional. But something didn’t seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA’s greatness.
Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We’re told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of external affairs, and by “Mike” Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John “Pat” Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.
Asked about this, Widomski said: “We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute.”
But the staff did not make up the questions, he said, and Johnson did not know what was going to be asked. “We pulled questions from those we had been getting from reporters earlier in the day.” Despite the very short notice, “we were expecting the press to come,” he said, but they didn’t. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.
Italian Government: “Testing of Top Secret Weapons by an Unknown Power” May Have Caused Sicily Fires
October 27th, 2007I almost wanted to take a screenshot of this… Yes: This story is actually posted on the Telegraph.
And it’s not little green men, mind you! It was either, “Unnatural forces capable of creating a large amount of electromagnetic energy,” or, “The testing of top secret weapons by an unknown power which are also capable of producing an enormous amount of energy.”
Or…
Satan.
The Vatican’s chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, said, “I’ve seen things like this before. Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods. Let’s not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers.”
So, take your pick.
Cheney, however, isn’t mentioned in the article.
Via: Telegraph:
Aliens caused Sicily fires, say officials
By Nick Pisa in Rome
Last Updated: 7:31pm BST 26/10/2007
Aliens were responsible for a series of unexplained fires in fridges, TV’s and mobile phones in an Italian village, according to an Italian government report.
Canneto di Caronia, in northern Sicily, drew attention three years ago after residents reported everyday household objects bursting into flames.
TV news footage at the time showed electrical appliances as well as cookers, a pile of wedding presents and furniture smouldering.
Dozens of experts including scientists, electrical engineers and military boffins, arrived in the village 60 miles east of Palermo to investigate the phenomenon.
Arson was quickly ruled out and at one stage an amazed scientist was interviewed after he described how he saw an unplugged electrical cable burst into flames.
Locals were quick to blame supernatural forces and at the time the Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth backed up their fears and said: “I’ve seen things like this before. Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods. Let’s not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers.”
Now in an interim leaked report published by several Italian newspapers it has emerged that the Civil Protection Department has concluded the most likely cause was “aliens”.
The report was ordered by the Italian government and brought together dozens of experts including a NASA scientist. Their two year investigation has cost an estimated £1 million.
According to the report the fires were “caused by a high power electro magnetic emissions which were not man made and reached a power of between 12 and 15 gigawatts.”
The report also detailed a possible UFO landing close to the village, citing “burnt imprints which have not been explained were found in a field.”
Francesco Mantegna Venerando, Sicily’s Civil Protection chief who coordinated the report, said: “This is not the final report. We are still working on our conclusions and this has been leaked.
“We are not saying that little green men from Mars started the fires but that unnatural forces capable of creating a large amount of electromagnetic energy were responsible.
“This is just one possibility we are also looking at another one which involves the testing of top secret weapons by an unknown power which are also capable of producing an enormous amount of energy.”
