U.S. Trying to Prevent Turkey from Attacking Kurdish Guerrillas… In Iraq
July 30th, 2007This cluster is spiraling out of control.
Via: Washington Post:
The morass in Iraq and deepening difficulties in Afghanistan have not deterred the Bush administration from taking on a dangerous and questionable new secret operation. High-level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq.
While detailed operational plans are necessarily concealed, the broad outlines have been presented to select members of Congress as required by law. U.S. Special Forces are to work with the Turkish army to suppress the Kurds’ guerrilla campaign. The Bush administration is trying to prevent another front from opening in Iraq, which would have disastrous consequences. But this gamble risks major exposure and failure.
“Prices on Shotgun and Rifle Shells, Along with Components for Loading, Have Increased More Than 50 Percent Since Sept. 1”
July 30th, 2007Via: Statesman:
If you haven’t bought shotgun shells in a few months — and most people have not — you’re in for a surprise when you buy a few boxes along with your hunting license next month.
Prices have been going up for at least a year, and they will go up again in September. Overall, prices on shotgun and rifle shells, along with components for loading, have increased more than 50 percent since Sept. 1.
…
Remington, Federal and Winchester, the major shotshell manufacturers in this country, are all raising prices, citing the rapidly escalating cost of metals, mostly lead, essential to shell production. However, copper, steel and bismuth shotshells also increased during the same period. Fuel price increases have forced up the cost of shipping and delivering the shells, and war-time contracts have created competition for materials and manufacturing time.
Zeitgeist
July 30th, 2007Zeitgeist is an extremely impressive film that delivers a vast amount of fascinating information in a coherent way. It’s definitely worth setting aside a couple of hours of interruption free time to watch this. If you know any people who don’t quite “get it” yet, this will rattle their cages.
Who produced this??? They’ve made a point of not saying.
Research Credit: GH
Foreclosures on the Rise: Living the American Nightmare
July 30th, 2007Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
To many people in the affluent Bay Area, losing a home to foreclosure sounds like a Depression-era relic or a Rust Belt phenomenon. Our real estate prices have defied gravity for so long; our job market is so strong; our cachet as a place to live seems so obvious. How could foreclosures happen here?
But in recent months, the Bay Area has proven to be home to numerous victims of the subprime loan debacle. Just like elsewhere in the country, people here with tarnished credit or limited funds bought houses that proved to be beyond their means, often putting little or no money down, and borrowing money through exotic, expensive loans that were virtual time bombs set to soar to unaffordable levels after an introductory period.
Aggressive mortgage brokers, voracious lenders and naive consumers combined to create an unstable situation. The tipping point came a year and a half ago when real estate prices started to flatten or fall in some areas. Suddenly, home buyers who had planned to refinance saw that door slammed shut because they no longer had equity in their houses and their “introductory rate” mortgages quickly became unaffordable as interest rates — and their monthly payments — rose. This year, almost 1 million people nationwide will enter a stage of foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac.com. That great tidal wave is ravaging the already beleaguered real estate market and causing repercussions from Wall Street to Washington, D.C.
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $25
July 29th, 2007Thanks JA!
Russia: Youth Camps for Indoctrination and Procreation
July 29th, 2007If you thought Jesus Camp was frightening, you better be sitting down for this one!
Via: Daily Mail:
Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp’s mass wedding. “They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia”.
Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.
With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.
But this organisation – known as “Nashi”, meaning “Ours” – is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.
Nashi’s annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.
Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.
Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear – supposedly a cause of sterility – and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.
Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp’s first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.
Attempting to raise Russia’s dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country’s demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.
But the real aim of the youth camp – and the 100,000-strong movement behind it – is not to improve Russia’s demographic profile, but to attack democracy.
Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as ‘Young Guard’, and ‘Young Russia’, is in the forefront of the charge.
The Failed State and You: Iraq Offers a Preview of What’s Coming
July 29th, 2007The people who write about post collapse community, from their urban apartments, are going to wind up being boiled up in large pots, along with rats and road kill.
If you are entertaining any touchy feely fantasies about collapse in large cities, please type “failed state” into Google and start reading. Once that sinks in, read about the standard practice of using children as the minions of warlords.
Do you live in or near any areas with “gang problems”? If you refuse to leave, you better be making friends with those gangs, and figuring out how you can make yourself useful to them, because those guys are going to be your new masters when state authority breaks down. If you’re thinking about what kind of gun to buy, instead of how you’re going to serve the warlord, you might as well consider yourself dead. You, alone, with your gun, will lose. Why? Because the local warlord will have lots of minions at his disposal.
Law enforcement, failed state style
Don’t get me wrong. Maybe the post collapse community theorists are especially hip and have enough advanced and worthless university degrees and fashionable iPod accessories to cocreate, rebirth and revision the future to the point where the realities experienced by the rest of the planet won’t apply to their upmarket, urban enclaves. When the hungry teenage boys show up with their assault rifles, what does the hold-hands-in-a-circle crowd suggest you do? I know: Make sure you have lots of organic hemp hacky sacks and fair trade coffee to go around for the consciousness building session. Be prepared to discuss your past lives, have your chakras realigned and your auras cleansed. Hold a focus group on pithy bumper sticker design…
The dumb, vaguely New Age talk about community only makes sense to people who are totally ignorant of basic, observable realities on the ground. The warlord phenomenon springs forth from any power vacuum, anywhere there are groups comprised of more than a few dozen people. It’s like the sun rising in the East each morning. You can count on it.
Now, what are your options, as collapse accelerates? I see three general categories.
Accepting Rule by the Local Warlord:
To increase your chances of having a favorable relationship with a warlord and his minions, it helps if you have some of the following in common with them: Language, race, religion and other common cultural referents. In the U.S. “common cultural referents” for the warlords likely to be encountered will mostly fall into two main categories:
Category 1: Urban Poor— Rap music, mongrel dogs, lowered cars, tattoos, etc.
Category 2: Messianic Christianity— Deeply deranged and heavily armed.
You will want to think of ways to get the warlord to see your existence as somehow useful to him. Your “costs of doing business” may be lower, meaning, you might be allowed to exist under less harsh conditions than someone who is outside the warlord’s gang/tribe.
If this option seems vaguely familiar, it is! Warlords behave just like governments in collapsing states, but at a substate or local level. You have probably noticed how the U.S. Government no longer bothers itself with even maintaining an appearance of following the law. It just does what it wants. This is de facto law, or law by gun. The main difference between the failing state and the failed state has to do with the number of lawless aspirants to power. Failed states are characterized by pitched intergang violence as turf boundaries are determined.
Maybe you want to become a local warlord yourself? Well, if you’re just thinking about that idea now, chances are, you’re too late. There’s probably a local gang near you that has already determined who’s running the show. Hint: It’s not going to be you.
Mutual Aid:
Semi autonomous villages and homesteads can form loose mutual defense arrangements. When any node is threatened, a militia, drawn from all nodes, comes to the aid of the threatened node. This is not too common in practice, but there are some examples.
Look at Switzerland and the way their military works. I don’t need to go into this in detail here, but it’s very interesting and salient to this discussion. The Swiss military is cross between a standing army and a militia. A few key points:
* No generals in peacetime; during war, the Parliament elects a general
* Small core of professional full-time officers, instructors and staff, while ALL ABLE-BODIED MEN AGED 19-31 SERVE IN THE MILITARY AND THEN BECOME PART OF A READY MILITARY RESERVE (MILITIA)
* Because of the point above, the population is heavily armed; military grade assault weapons and a ready supply of ammunition are kept in most Swiss homes
Why does this work in Switzerland?
The Swiss are all pretty much on the same page in terms of core cultural referents. This is the source of stability and the reason why no unitary warlord is necessary. If you think that the U.S. is having a hard time in Iraq, that is nothing compared to what an invader would face in Switzerland.
Farmers in South Africa are trying mutual aid arrangements as they are now routinely attacked and murdered by armed gangs. See: The Farmer Armies of South Africa:
Conserv Security assesses individual communities and draws up security plans for them. This includes rosters for community patrols, firearms training, rural survival skills and self-defence. The company serves about 3 000 landowners in the area.
Roberts said that in a three-month period, patrols by local armed landowners had helped bring down the crime rate in Muldersdrift from one attack every two-and-a-half days to one every 21 days. Police have slammed these local farmer patrols, saying they went against the laws of the country.
The unofficial farmer armies patrolling the Muldersdrift streets, many of them set up in response to the government’s decision to phase out military commandos in 2003, is illustrative of a growing trend around the country.
More and more farmers are organising themselves into rural protection units, and in many provinces have rejected the South African Police Service’s sector policing strategy as incompetent. The complaints range from police being involved in crime to a lack of vehicles and staff.
The initiative appears to be led by ex-military officials who, in the northern reaches of the country, lead military-style exercises against suspected criminals with names like Operation Clenched Fist.
Velskoen-and-firearm brigades have led to a significant drop in crime, according to Gideon Meiring, chairperson of the TAU’s safety and security committee.
Meiring, a former army colonel in charge of military intelligence, said candidly that his point of departure was that “it’s either us or them”.
Meiring was unapologetic about the security support groups he has helped to set up in provinces like Limpopo, North West and Mpumalanga, saying the police “are not part of the solution but part of the bloody problem”.
He has been involved in setting up what the TAU calls the Greenlight Police, an association of patrolling farmers with flashing green lights fixed to the top of their vehicles.
Meiring also runs frequent three-day self-defence courses. Men, women and children are taught first aid, how to use ordinary household items to protect themselves, and how to fire AK-47s, R-4s and pump-action rifles.
If you’re going to go with mutual aid, begin training early and often. Think of the Swiss, but expect a situation more like the one the South African farmers are facing.
Deep Isolation
It is said that no man is an island, but you’ll probably be left alone if you can figure out how to live in the Yukon or remote parts of Alaska. A place many miles from nowhere, coupled with extreme climatic conditions can work to your advantage.
Of course, this option is only viable for highly motivated individuals who don’t require much outside human interaction. (There aren’t many people like this, by the way.) Extreme weather conditions mean that you would have to focus a great deal of time, energy and money on the problem of simply surviving the elements. Anyone who goes with this option, however, understands the warlord issue.
This is truly an “Army of One,” or, “An Army of a Few.” There aren’t any warlords because there aren’t any minions. To be out in these places in the first place, even while states are up and running, is difficult. In a failed state situation, these areas will most likely be cut off from the starving hordes in the cities and the resulting chaos.
Now, for those of you reading in large cities, which is most of you, here’s a current example of what you have to look forward to if state authority breaks down.
Via: CNN:
The fight between U.S.-led forces and militants in and near Baghdad and the sectarian civil war raging in the capital has overshadowed another grim wartime reality — the factional strife in Iraq’s southern Shiite heartland.
Experts who study the region attribute the instability to turf battles among “warlords” and their fighters in an unstable political and social environment that is coming to resemble a failed state.
“Iraqi politicians are progressively turning into warlords,” Peter Harling, senior analyst with the Middle East Program of the Brussels, Belgium-based International Crisis Group. What has been unfolding in the south, he says, is a “very crude struggle over power and resources.”
“Violence has become the routine means of interacting with the local population,” Harling says of the militias, which have filled the power vacuum after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
“They see no interest in seeing a functional state emerge.”
MUST READ Related: Gangs Spreading in U.S. Military
Goldman Sachs: The Glue That’s Holding the Black Ops Economy Together
July 29th, 2007Hedge fund collapsing? Can’t get credit? We can help. Call our toll-free number to speak with a representative now!
Via: Wall Street Journal:
A number of hedge funds have profited by anticipating the difficulties in the housing market. But others made money in recent years through holdings of riskier debt, and now these managers are seeing their securities drop in value. At the same time, their investors want to get out of the funds and lenders are demanding more collateral, forcing additional sales.
Some financial pros sitting on cash are looking to take advantage of the situation. Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is launching a $20 billion fund to invest in corporate debt. The fund was expected to amount to $12 billion but has been expanded to take advantage of the turmoil in the market, according to people familiar with the matter.
“It may be fortuitous, but the timing is superb as it relates to the markets,” says John Danhakl, a partner with Los Angeles-based private equity firm Leonard Green & Co. LP.
A Goldman spokesman declined to comment.
Hedge funds such as TPG Axon and GSO Capital Partners, which had kept some of their powder dry, were among those pouncing on debt of companies whose bonds have traded down amid a massive supply of debt, according to people close to the matter. They also are offering to help private-equity firms finance deals that the banks are unwilling to underwrite, these people add.
These funds are taking advantage of a sudden unwillingness on the part of investors to continue to buy loans and other products that have financed buyout deals.
Funds such as TPG Axon and GSO are approaching the banks and offering to take both loans and bonds off their hands — at a sizeable discount, attracted both by the discount and the generous yield. Several hedge funds, for example, bought huge chunks of junior slices of the debt of Dollar General at 87 cents on the dollar, which amounts to a 17.5% yield.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. won the retailer in an auction which saw Bain Capital, Blackstone Group and TPG all drop out as the price rose. Investors are especially nervous about Dollar General because of the debt load and because there is general concern about retailers vulnerable to a slowdown in consumer spending.
Hedge funds are discovering that their ability to borrow money to bet on the markets is drying up because the banks themselves are under pressure, left with commitments to fund deals as investors retreat. In many cases, brokers are calling hedge funds and asking them to post more collateral as the value of their holdings plummets.
Related: Goldman Sachs Creates Private Stock Exchange
Research Credit: PD
U.S. Subprime Mortgage Market Could Spiral Out of Control Into a Global Financial Crisis
July 29th, 2007Via: Market Watch:
The problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market could spiral out of control into a global financial crisis, economist Mark Zandi said Thursday.
With a “high level of angst” in the financial markets about who will take the losses from more than $1 trillion in risky mortgages, we could be just one hedge-fund collapse away from a global liquidity crisis, said Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com.
A global meltdown is not likely, but the risks are growing, Zandi emphasized in a conference call with reporters following the release of a new study on subprime debt that concludes that the housing crisis could be deeper and last longer than investors now believe…
And it could spread. “Mounting mortgage delinquencies and defaults now pose the most serious threat to the global financial system and economy,” Zandi said in his report.
Research Credit: PD
Hackers Take Control of Electronic Voting Machine Models Used in California
July 28th, 2007Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.
The researchers “were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the “top to bottom review” of every voting system certified by the state.
