Almost a Quarter of U.S. Homeowners Are Underwater
May 6th, 2009Via: Bloomberg:
A growing number of U.S. homeowners owe more than their properties are worth after prices extended their two-year decline in the first quarter, Zillow.com said.
About 21.8 percent of all owners were underwater as of March 31, the Seattle-based real estate data service said in a report today. At the end of the fourth quarter, 17.6 percent of homeowners owed more than their original mortgage, while 14.3 percent had negative equity three months earlier.
Property values dropped 14 percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, reducing the median value of U.S. single- family homes, condominiums and cooperatives to $182,378, Zillow said. The decline has left about 20.4 million of the U.S.’s 93 million houses, condos and co-ops with loans higher than the properties are worth. The gain in underwater homeowners will lead to more bank repossessions, Zillow said.
Many owners “would be more willing to bear the financial consequences of bankruptcy or foreclosure,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s vice president of data and analytics, said in an interview. “You are going to continue to see home prices fall for the rest of this year and some portion of next year.”
Oil Prices Jump to High for the Year
May 6th, 2009Related: Initial Oil Target
Via: AP:
Oil prices hit a new high for the year Wednesday after a government report showed that unused crude being placed in storage slowed a bit last week.
Benchmark crude for June delivery rose $1.95 to $55.79 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, levels not seen since November.
Demand for energy because of the recession has been decimated, leaving storage facilities more bloated than in any year since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Prices for crude, and gasoline, have plunged as a result, providing a break to everyone from industrial companies to consumers, though that must be taken in the context of shuttered factories and layoffs.
Crude levels for the week ended May 1 rose by 600,000 barrels to 375.3 million barrels, the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration said in its weekly report. Analysts surveyed by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos., had expected a build up of 2.2 million barrels.
U.S. Army Christians Were Encouraged to Proselytize in Afghanistan; They Were Preparing to Distribute Bibles in Local Languages
May 6th, 2009Via: Military.com:
The U.S. military has confiscated Bibles that Christian U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan had apparently intended to give to local Muslims, a military spokesman has said.
Al Jazeera broadcast footage on Monday that showed troops apparently preparing to convert Afghans to their faith.
Some of the Soldiers who appeared in the video have also been reprimanded, U.S. government and military officials told Al Jazeera’s James Bays.
The video, shot about a year ago, appeared to show military chaplains stationed in the U.S. air base at Bagram discussing how to distribute copies of the Bible printed in the country’s main Pashto and Dari languages.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Al Jazeera he was not aware of the details of the footage but that the U.S. Army was not involved in promoting religion.
“From the United States’ military’s perspective, it is not our position to push any specific kind of religion,” he said at a Pentagon briefing in Washington on Monday.
In one recorded sermon, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of the U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells Soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.
“The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.
“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”
Questioned about the footage, Greg Julian, a U.S. colonel in Afghanistan, told Al Jazeera: “Most of this is taken out of context … this is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism.
“This footage was taken a year ago … the Bibles were taken into custody and not distributed.
“There is no effort to go out and proselytise to Afghans.”
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
UK: Pilots Refuse to Take Part in National Identity Card Trials
May 6th, 2009Via: Guardian:
Airline pilots are to become the first group to refuse to take part in the national identity scheme when compulsory trials start at Manchester and London City airports this autumn.
The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa ), which represents more than 80% of commercial airline pilots, is to mount a legal challenge to Home Office plans to use “critical” airside workers as the first compulsory “guinea pigs” for the scheme.
MPs are shortly to be asked to approve the powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register for the national ID card scheme as part of their “pre-employment” checks. The £30 fee is to be waived as an incentive for them to sign up.
The pilots’ union has protested to ministers that the £18m scheme cannot be regarded as voluntary when they are being told they will not qualify for an “airside pass” without them: “ID cards will have absolutely no value as far as security is concerned. This is nothing other than coercion and promises that ID cards would be voluntary have been broken,” Jim McAuslan, Balpa general secretary, has told ministers. “We will resist.”
Ashton Lundeby, a Sixteen-Year-Old American, Has Been Disappeared by Homeland Security
May 6th, 2009UPDATE: This Looks Like a More Conventional Federal Case Now
Via: Wired:
The boy’s mother, Annette Lundeby, has even acknowledged in interviews that her son has been formally charged, has a court-appointed attorney, and has already made appearances in front of a judge.
—
Long ago, I took a class called Soviet Society and Culture. One of the many readings was a book called Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya:
The novel opens with Sofia Petrovna, a mother who has recently discovered the joys of a paying job as a typist. Sharing her apartment with several other families or attending mandatory meetings at work – all are simply parts of her daily life as a Soviet citizen, as unquestioned and necessary as brushing one’s teeth or washing dishes. When the purges begin and the director of her office is taken away, even after her own son is arrested, she tries to believe in both the government and in the innocence of people she loves. But as Sofia Petrovna stands in line after line – attempting to gain information, pass along money, plead for her son – she slowly loses her innocence and her sanity. Sofia Petrovna is not Lydia Chukovskaya, but the emotion and experience for the book came from the author’s life, including the arrest and murder of her husband. In this slim novel Lydia Chukovskaya was determined to describe, through the life of an ordinary woman, “an educated society driven to loss of consciousness by lies.”
Flash forward to today. Here’s what the American iteration of this looks like so far:
Via: WRAL:
Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.
But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.
The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.
“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.
Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.
“I was terrified,” Lundeby’s mother said. “There were guns, and I don’t allow guns around my children. I don’t believe in guns.”
Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.
Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.
“There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire,” Lundeby said.
Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.
Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.
“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”
Research Credit: pookie, anothernut
Thought Police Muscle Up in Britain
May 6th, 2009Via: The Australian:
BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.
There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.
Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution’s principal tasks was “to alter people’s actual psychology”. Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people’s psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.
Research Credit: TR
Italian Government Paid Mob to Build Wind Turbines
May 6th, 2009Via: Financial Times:
Like giant sentinels, dozens of wind turbines straddle the mountain ridges near Sicily’s infamous mafia stronghold of Corleone. But despite a strong breeze rippling the leaves in groves of olive and fig trees, the soaring blades of the turbines have stood motionless for over a year.
Further west, near the port of Trapani and the ancient hill-top town of Salemi, two more wind farms are similarly frozen.
Just who approved, built and sold these renewable energy projects, which were developed on the basis of public subsidies, has become the subject of investigation for Sicily’s anti-Mafia magistrates, who are trying to keep track of organised crime’s latest bid to move into mainstream business.
As one official put it: “Sicily is blessed with sun and wind, but it is also cursed by the Mafia.”
Multinationals are starting to find out something that is well known to Italian investors: that concealed beneath Europe’s most generous system of incentives – supported by “green credits” that industrial polluters have to purchase – there exists a web of corruption and shady deals.
Bush Library: $100 Million In 100 Days
May 6th, 2009That’s a whole lotta copies of The Pet Goat.
Via: CBS News:
George W. Bush may have left office with just 22 percent approval rating, but the former president certainly still has his fans: According to Time, Mr. Bush’s backers have raised more than $100 million for his planned presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
That’s an impressive pace: Time notes that Bill Clinton did not raise $100 million for his presidential library until the second year of his post-presidential life. Mr. Bush, like past presidents, has met with potential donors and called wealthy benefactors seeking large sums to fund the facility. But his effort has also been “organized much like a modern political campaign.”
U.S. Says Bank of America Needs $33.9 Billion
May 6th, 2009Via: New York Times:
The government has told Bank of America it needs $33.9 billion in capital to withstand any worsening of the economic downturn, according to an executive at the bank.
If the bank is unable to raise the capital cushion by selling assets or stock, it would have to rely on the government, which has provided $45 billion in capital through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
It could satisfy regulators’ demands simply by converting non-voting preferred shares it gave the government in return for the capital, into common stock.
But that would make the government one of the bank’s largest shareholders.
Executives at the bank, one of the largest being examined, sparred with the government over the amount, which is higher than executives believed the bank needed.
But J. Steele Alphin, the bank’s chief administrative officer, said Bank of America would have plenty of options to raise the capital on its own before it would have to convert any of the taxpayer money into common stock.
“We’re not happy about it because it’s still a big number,” Mr. Alphin said. “We think it should be a bit less at the end of the day.”
She Loved Them to Death at Ray’s Hell Burger
May 6th, 2009Oh, brother, the Christians are going to love this.
Look at the order number on the table.
42.
I know, I know. It’s all a coincidence; just like when they covered up references to Jesus and photographed Obama so that he appeared to be speaking in front of a pyramid. Anyway, here’s what’s going to be on the minds of Christians who see this picture:
Revelation 13:5-8 (King James Version)
5 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.
6 And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.
7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.
8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
My best guess is that all of this is intended to confirm, in the minds of Christians, that, “Yes, Mildred, Obama is the Antichrist.” But to what end?
The elite know that gun stores haven’t been able to keep weapons of any description in stock since Obama came on the scene. Is this an attempt to provoke something? I have no idea. But when you consider Christian extremists, in terms of mind control victims, you have to look at the triggers that the handlers are going to use to set them off. What are the elite trying to accomplish by carrying out stunts like this? Maybe it’s just a case of: Boo! Made you look.
You won’t find a more agnostic person than me, but, wow, the elite do like to play games with those of us who are… paying attention, so to speak.
