My Half-Year of Hell With Christian Fundamentalists
November 22nd, 2006Via Spiegel:
When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul. Here’s his story.
The Return of M3
November 21st, 2006This is a good one! Print paper. Print paper based on that other batch of paper. Then print more paper on that other, other batch of paper. Call this ponzi scheme the “the global economy.”
Actually, don’t even print the paper. That consumes too many resources and corporations and governments need to show a “green” image now. Appearances are important! (If we pulped all the trees on the planet, would that produce enough physical paper to print out all the “paper”?) Just make up symbols in a computer system, update the numbers associated with them in real time and call those “paper.” Oh sure! Brilliant!
But what about that pesky M3 number? That’s a biggy. Rather than trying to squeeze 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound bag, They just dropped a curtain over the entire mess and assumed everyone would get bored and look away. Sure enough, mostly, everyone did.
Mostly…
Via: Big Picture:
In light of all this excess cash sloshing around, we wondered what M3 might look like if it were still being reported.
Wonder no more: We have located 2 separate sources for the reporting of M3. The first is Nowandfutures.com. As this article discusses, recreating M3 from publicly available data was relatively easy to do (to 5 nines accuracy).
As the chart below shows, M3 is alive and well and growing significantly…
…
Why is this significant? Well, M3 is growing quite rapidly, with the annual rate of change now over 10%. Prior to the announcement of M3’s demise, its growth was in the range of 3 – 7%.
Anytime a government agency stops reporting about their goings on, it should raise a few eyebrows. Now we see what happened once the reporting of M3 was killed — that measure of money supply spiked much higher — a rate of change that’s even greater than 10%+.
Funny how we alter our behavior when we think no one is watching what we are doing, isn’t it?
…
This is a classic case of “ignore what they are saying, because what they are doing is speaking so loud:” While the Federal Reserve has been reporting rather flat money supply growth in M2 (blue line), in reality they have been dramatically increasing the cash (red and blue line) available for speculation.
Hence, that sloshing sound you heard. They have been providing the fuel for the rally, the huge M&A activity, the explosion in derivatives — even the eye popping Art auctions are part of the shift from cash to hard assets. It is just supply and demand — print lots of lots of anything, and that thing becomes increasingly devalued. It works the same for cash as it did for Beanie Babies.
Related: PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM ACTIVE, SEC TO SLASH MARGIN REQUIREMENTS TO 15%
Related: The Eerie “Bid” in the Equity Markets
Research Credit: West
Outpouring of Support
November 21st, 2006Three Cryptogon readers have sent donations since the big upgrade:
AP $20
JG $25
MW $20 <--- Core supporter, multiple donations over several years.
Thanks to all of you! These funds will be used to go toward paying for my New Zealand immigration medical screening, which I did yesterday.
You know you're not in the U.S. anymore when you visit a medical doctor and have a friendly conversation about various alternative medicine topics and Noam Chomsky. The next indication is when the bill for a full physical, the doctor filling out 16 pages of pure bureaucratic red tape, a urine test, several different blood tests, and a chest X-ray, with interpretation from a radiologist, costs about US$170.
Only US$170, for all of that! And that's the full out of pocket cost, because I'm technically a visitor here and don't have access to the national medical coverage yet! Can you believe it!? I was pleasantly shocked. I thought it was going to cost... I just didn't know how much. I knew it wouldn't be as bad as in the U.S., but the horror of the U.S. medical system is so ingrained in me that I just assume that any contact with a doctor means potential for bankruptcy. Nope. Not here.
And if Dr. B is reading, thanks so much to you too! I'll see you again once the blood tests and radiology report are finished.
BREATHALYZERS IN ALL AMERICAN VEHICLES?
November 21st, 2006Via Prison Planet:
“The threat of arrest and punishment, for decades the primary tactic against drunken drivers, is no longer working in the struggle to reduce the death toll, officials say, and they are proposing turning to technology — alcohol detection devices in every vehicle — to address the problem,” reports the New York Times.
More: New York Times: A New Strategy to Discourage Driving Drunk – Soul sucking registration, or Bug-Me-Not required.
No More ‘Hungry’ Americans: U.S. Government Says
November 21st, 2006You’ll love this. Via Breitbart:
The US government has tweaked its terminology in referring to the nearly 11 million Americans who face a constant struggle with hunger to refer to them as people with “very low food security.”
According to a report released this month by the US Department of Agriculture, roughly 35 million Americans had difficulty feeding themselves in 2005 and of those some 10.8 million went hungry.
But unlike last year’s report on hunger in America, which labeled families who don’t get enough to eat as having “food insecurity with hunger,” this year’s report referred to them as having “very low food security.”
The change in terminology has angered groups that fight hunger who say it is aimed at hiding a stark reality.
U.S. Is Most Unfriendly Country to Visitors, Survey Says
November 21st, 2006When people ask me if I want to go back to the U.S., it’s everything I can do to not blurt out, “Are you *@&#^%! kidding me?”
I don’t get into the finer points about the legalized torture and military tribunals. Or the former U.S. cabinet level officials who are going to be prosecuted for war crimes. Then there’s the terrifying plan to round up all illegal immigrants and “potential terrorists.” And what happens when I have to obtain permission to leave again from the U.S. Government? (Permission to leave on foot and in cars will also be required.) Will I be allowed to leave?
“Uh, no,” I say with a smile, “I’m pretty happy here in New Zealand.”
Via Reuters:
Rude immigration officials and visa delays keep millions of foreign visitors away from the United States, hurt the country’s already battered image, and cost the U.S. billions of dollars in lost revenue, according to an advocacy group formed to push for a better system.
To drive home the point, the Discover America Partnership released the result of a global survey on Monday which showed that international travelers see the United States as the world’s worst country in terms of getting a visa and, once you have it, making your way past rude immigration officials.
Global Hawk to Fly 1st Mission Over U.S.
November 20th, 2006Via Breitbart:
They’ve become a fixture in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, a new breed of unmanned aircraft operated with remote controls by “pilots” sitting in virtual cockpits many miles away.
But the Air Force’s Global Hawk has never flown a mission over the United States.
That is set to change Monday, when the first Global Hawk is scheduled to land at Beale Air Force Base in northern California.
“This landmark flight has historic implications since it’s the first time a Global Hawk has not only flown from Beale, but anywhere in the United States on an official Air Combat Command mission,” base spokesman Capt. Michael Andrews said in a statement.
Comments – Open Thread
November 20th, 2006Alright, comments. I haven’t wanted to put them on the main page, but I’m willing to entertain the idea A) because several of you have been asking for comment capability on individual posts, B) WordPress has many options for keeping spam away and C) I’m growing tired of PHPbb’s broken-by-design spam prevention.
Here’s how this is going to work: I’m turning on comments, and I’ll allow somewhat fast and loose permissions at first. But if spam and trolls start showing up, I’ll begin turning the screws that lock this thing down. My spam solution for Farmlet is simple. I require each poster to request an account that I manually setup. The result is zero spam.
Well, let’s see how it goes…
Good News
November 19th, 2006Ok, as you can see, this is a completely different show. I’ve been fooling around with WordPress, and this seems like the least bad solution. (Pivot was my next choice, because it doesn’t use a database. If you refuse to use a database, Pivot is another not-too-bad way to go.)
I will be fixing and transitioning things from the old site over here. The file structure of the old site is actually still live on the server.
While Cryptogon’s nearly five years worth of archives will still be available as flat HTML files, they will not be integrated into the WordPress database for the following reasons:
- The WordPress Blogger import tool ignores Blogger’s $BlogItemUrl$ tag, which happens to contain the links to thousands of original sources for the stories I’ve posted over the years. When the WordPress import tool did work—Google/Blogger has broken it now, even for non Blogger Beta users—it simply didn’t parse that data.
- Even if I could import the archives, thousands of links in my posts that refer to other Cryptogon posts would break if the flat HTML files were removed.
After wasting way too much time researching this, I’m going to simply leave the archives where they are and create a WordPress page with pointers to the old files.
I’m no PHP programmer, and I stopped updating my web development skills in 1997. WordPress is the ring of power, so it obviously won’t serve me in the end. But lets see how we go in the interim.
