While You Were Sleeping… The Economy Collapsed

There are a number of half truths and financial fantasies floating around the U.S. today, which may explain why some have decided to throw caution to the wind, adopting a cult-like blind faith in the “unsinkable” American economy. I suspect that the consequences for this error in judgment will become quite clear to most by the end of next year, but until then, let’s examine our current situation, what the government has to say about it, and the reality they wish to gloss over.

It’s nice to maintain a rosy outlook on the economic situation we face. It makes us feel safe. The fact is, though, that we are far from safe, and denying the problem will not make it go away. The MSM’s main drive, at least for now, is to promote a sense of well being. Some of them do it because they believe the markets are driven by psychology and that by creating a positive atmosphere, we can somehow make our troubles disappear through shear force of will. Of course, this is an absurd notion.

Others ignore the facts and spin ideas of recovery deliberately and with malicious intent, because they know comfortable people are not alert, and those that are not alert are easy to surprise, and surprised people are easy to control.

“Operation Production” of Global Slum Dwellers; perhaps future Criminals & Terrorists?

Report reveals global slum crisis

BBC News | Friday, 16 June 2006, 11:47 GMT

Slums have existed in what is now the developed world since the Industrial Revolution. Currently, about 36% of Africa's population lives in urban areas but the continent is experiencing urbanisation rates twice as high as those seen during the West's industrial revolution. It is predicted that Africa will be an urban continent by 2030. The UK government's Commission for Africa concluding report warned: “These slums are filled with an increasingly youthful population, unemployed and disaffected. Africa's cities are becoming a powder keg of potential instability and discontent.” -- “Operation Production” of Global Slum Dwellers; perhaps future Criminals & Terrorists?

Slum-dwellers who make up a third of the world's urban population often live no better - if not worse - than rural people, a United Nations report says.

Anna Tibaijuka, head of the UN Habitat agency, urged governments and donors to take more seriously the problems of at least a billion people.

Worst hit is Sub-Saharan Africa where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.

If no action is taken, the world's slum population could rise to 1.4bn by 2020.

Habitat - the UN's human settlements programme - is hosting an Urban Forum in Vancouver next week on how to stem the crisis.

Its report is billed as a ground-breaking survey of urban growth, making a clear distinction between slum and non-slum development for the first time in UN history.

According to Dr Tibaijuka, speaking to reporters in London, slum-dwellers suffer a double disadvantage: they both live in misery and their plight often goes unreported given the traditional focus on the rural poor in the developing world.

[Erik Prince, Blackwater & XE] Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy...

[Erik Prince, Blackwater & XE] Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Vanity Fair, January 2010

By Adam Ciralsky

Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater security firm (recently renamed Xe), at the company’s Virginia offices. Photograph by Nigel Parry.

Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

“I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)

Frank Ellis: BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in South Africa & Zimbabwe

BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in South Africa & Zimbabwe

Email from Dr. Ellis to BBC Radio 5

The following e-mail (excl. images) was sent by Dr Frank Ellis to Radio 5's Victoria Derbyshire in advance of her forthcoming visit to Zimbabwe and South Africa.

From: Frank Ellis
To: Victoria Derbyshire, BBC Radio 5
Date: 2nd December 2009
Re: Your visit to Zimbabwe and South Africa

I am contacting you in the hope that during your visits to Zimbabwe and South Africa you will confront head on with your black interlocutors (some of whom will be regime stooges) the racist and murderous behaviour of Mugabe’s regime and the tacit encouragement given by Zuma’s regime to black racist murderers in South Africa. There exists the very real danger – you work for the BBC after all – that you will refuse to tackle these questions since the organisation for which you work insists on presenting an anodyne, rainbow-coloured picture of South Africa to the rest of the world rather than the gruesome and savage reality that exists.

Some six years ago I met a farmer’s wife, Betty her name was, who had just been thrown out of Zimbabwe. Her crime consisted in the fact that her husband and she were successful, white farmers. Here is what happened. One day a gang of so-called “war veterans” (“war veterans” is the term used by Mugabe’s regime to describe the roving gangs who plunder white-owned farms and kill the owners) turned up at her farm. She was told that her husband and she would be thrown out of the country in one hour. Her husband died on the spot of a heart attack. Betty was only permitted to gather up enough personal effects sufficient to fill a small, hand-held suitcase. She was then taken to the airport and put on a plane. Betty and her husband had lived all their lives in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Not long after Betty related this harrowing account to me she died, broken-hearted and alone.

The Infinite Monkeys and Godwins Law

The Infinite Monkeys & Godwins Law

by Mike Smith | SA Sucks

Debating on racial issues is largely a one-way debate in modern society. Just about all the academics, politicians and Main Stream Media (MSM) institutions are advocates of Cultural relativism and Racial Egalitarianism. They believe in a fallacy and modern day superstition that all races are equal just like people in the Dark ages believed the earth was flat.

They constantly profess, advocate and defend this absurdity and false dogma with a fanaticism bordering on religious hysteria despite many scientists and anthropologist who did extensive work on differences between races and who published hundreds of volumes on the subject.

Trying to find works such as “The Bell Curve”, “Race and Reason”, “IQ and the wealth of Nations” or De Gobineau’s “Inequality of the races” in a public or University library is a rarity these days. Even academics who try to discuss race in the most moderate of fashions are met with academic intolerance and physical intimidation by racial failure apologists and egalitarians. All research that proves their theories wrong are shunned as “Pseudo-science” without the proof of this research ever been studied or even read.

One sees these phenomena also on the internet on forums where racial issues are being discussed. Anyone who provides a counter argument to Cultural relativism or egalitarianism is immediately attacked with an argumentum ad hominem to his person, called a racist and ignorant bastard.

Small-business bankruptcies rise 81% in California...

With credit tight and consumers still pinching their pennies, many business owners find they can't go on.

The actual number of small businesses in trouble is probably higher, experts said, because many owners file for personal bankruptcy rather than seek protection for the business.

Dennis McGoldrick, a bankruptcy lawyer in Torrance, said his clients are all stuck in similar situations -- capital is hard to come by, customers are tough to attract and debt is piling up.

"In this economy, anything that isn't a necessity is a tough business to be in," March said. "And the majority of my clients have waited too long to file for bankruptcy and in the process made things worse on themselves financially as a result."

Sounding an Alarm on Oil: In Search of a Presidential Energy Policy...

Michael Ruppert (FTW) Sounding an Alarm on Oil

Wall Street Journal

By Anthony Kaufman
04 November 2009

Michael Ruppert, at home with his friend, Rags, by Clara Tomkins. Star of Collapse, Author of A Presidential Energy Policy, et al

Independent journalist Michael Ruppert predicted the global recession. Now he's foreseeing an imminent energy crisis

Michael Ruppert proudly claims that he predicted the global economic slump more than four years ago in his self-published "From the Wilderness," a monthly news publication and Web site. A narcotics investigator for the Los Angeles police department in the 1970s, Mr. Ruppert left the department and spent years trying to expose links between the CIA and drug smuggling; after 9/11, he wrote the 2004 bestseller "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil," published by New Society Publishers and a favorite among conspiracy theorists.

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for potential 'global collapse'

Telegraph UK

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:12PM GMT 18 Nov 2009

Explosion of debt: Japan's public debt could reach as much as 270pc of GDP in the next two years. A bullet train is pictured speeding past Mount Fuji in Fuji city, west of Tokyo Photo: Reuters

Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.

"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.

Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.

Dubai mega-tower `last hurrah' to age of excess

Dubai mega-tower `last hurrah' to age of excess

By Brian Murphy, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 2, 6:10 pm ET

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – When work began in 2004 to build the world's tallest tower, Dubai's confidence also was sky high with a host of mega-projects on the drawing board or rising from the sands.

That swagger seems positively old school these days. It's been tripped up by a debt crunch that has humbled Dubai's leaders and exposed the shaky foundations of the city-state's boom years — leaving the planned Jan. 4 opening of the iconic Burj Dubai with a double significance of hello and goodbye.

It will be both a debutante bash for a new architectural landmark and a farewell toast to Dubai's age of excess.

The Burj Dubai — a steel-and-glass needle rising more than a half-mile (800 meters) — may be the last completed work from Dubai's time of the giants. Most other of the unfinished super-projects announced in recent years, such as a second palm-shaped island or a tower to surpass the Burj Dubai, are either recession roadkill or being considered on a far smaller scale.

If they are still considered at all.

Dubai last week dropped what amounted to a financial bombshell — announcing its main government-backed development group, Dubai World, needed at least a six-month breather from creditors owed nearly $60 billion.

Peak Debt: A World Drowning in Debt

A world awash in debt

Globe and Mail

Kevin Carmichael
Ottawa — Globe and Mail Update
Published on Friday, Nov. 27, 2009 7:29PM EST


The financial crisis provoked a global front to stimulate economies through massive spending. But this was fuelled by a staggering amount of borrowing. Now governments are realizing that a new calamity looms - higher taxes and slashed social programs

or 220 years, through civil upheaval, global conflict and a depression, the United States largely kept its public debt under control.

But the world's largest economy may finally have met its match. In its bid to prevent the Great Recession from spiralling into a global depression, the U.S. government spent tens of billions rescuing financial institutions and automotive companies. In the process, the federal budget deficit swelled 220 per cent from 2008 to a record $1.6-trillion (U.S.).

The world's biggest economy has plenty of company: Seven of the members of the Group of 20 nations are on a trajectory that will leave them with debts bigger than 75 per cent of their economies by 2014, according to the International Monetary Fund.

It's hard to understate the fiscal cost of the financial crisis, which continues to send shock waves around the world. This week's move by Dubai World, a state-owned conglomerate that fuelled the United Arab Emirates' rapid growth, to withhold debt payments shows the financial crisis continues to put government finances at risk.

“Are you a racist?” asks the BBC

“Are you a racist?” asks the BBC

Dr. Frank Ellis vs Victoria Derbyshire on the Logic of Multiculturalism

by BNP: Standing Up For Great Britain
March 2006

BBC's Reporting on White Farm Murders in S. Africa & Zimbabwe

Multiculturalism under attack – again

Leeds University Lecturer Frank Ellis featured on last Wednesday’s (8/3/06) BBC radio Five Live phone-in chaired by Victoria Derbyshire, the theme of which was whether or not Dr Ellis should be fired for expressing views that challenge the prevailing liberal orthodoxy.

Dr Ellis had dared to question the logic of multiculturalism in an interview he gave to Leeds Student, the Leeds University student newspaper, and in an article that he submitted to the same publication [Time to Face the Truth about Multiculturalism, by Frank Ellis]. And for his pains he’s had loony-left students and amongst others the local LibDem MP for Leeds North West Greg Mulholland calling for his head.

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

George Monbiot: Credibility depleting faster than oil

Mail & Guardian, UK

Nov 17 2009 08:04

Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.Do you observe any of these symptoms in your "real world"? If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot. 18July 2006 :: PeakOil_RSA Briefing Paper

I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

Is gross mismanagement of the nation's energy policy an impeachable offense? 18 July 06 :: PeakOilRSA :: Briefing Paper

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

CCR5 Delta32 Gene's Black Death & AIDS Mystery

PBS: Secrets of the Dead

Frequencies of the CCR5 allele

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF PERSONS WITH THE CCR5 DELTA-32 MUTATION

The delta-32 mutation of the CCR5 receptor gene is present in up to 20% of the white population worldwide.8 Persons who have 2 copies of this mutant gene have been shown to be highly resistant to HIV infection; those with a single copy can be infected but experience an attenuated course of disease.9
-- The AIDS Reader

Plaque commemorating Black Plague

Political Correctness — The Revenge of Cultural Marxism

Political Correctness — The Revenge of Marxism



by Baron Bodissey

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report as a guest-post at Gates of Vienna.

FrontPage Magazine: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Theodore Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.

Peak Oil & Demand Destruction: Who Gets Destroyed? || Europe's Impending Social Meltdown

Demand Destruction: Who Gets Destroyed?

Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

Economists who comment on the possible effects of world peak oil production love to ridicule those who make statements such as "demand at some point will exceed supply." Strictly speaking, those economists are right that supply and demand are always in balance. The variable that changes to make it so is price.

So an economist who accepts the possibility of an oil peak may still believe that the marketplace will allow us to make a relatively smooth transition to a new energy economy as the price encourages the development of alternatives to oil and as demand is destroyed. The latter phrase is often glossed over. But demand destruction is at the core of misconceptions by economists about the likely course of events leading up to and following an oil peak.

A smooth transition away from oil mediated entirely by market prices essentially assumes two things: 1) a very gradual decline in oil supplies after the peak and 2) a recognition in the market price that the peak is coming long before it arrives.

The Doors of Perception: Will You Believe Almost Anything?

The Doors of Perception

Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything

- Tim O'Shea


Aldous Huxley's inspired 1954 essay detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures. By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power. With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history. Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all bonds, all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched infinite rawness.

Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later. We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?

It is an exhausting and endless task to keep explaining to people how most issues of conventional wisdom are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips per day. In an effort to save time, I would like to provide just a little background on the handling of information in this country. Once the basic principles are illustrated about how our current system of media control arose historically, the reader might be more apt to question any given story in today's news.

If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that

Joshe Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist): “Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon”

Joseph Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist):


“Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon”

Friday, August 21, 2009

Joseph Moshe, MOSSAD

Today, the MSM are not talking about this case any more. Yesterday, they wanted us to believe that Joseph Moshe was a nutcase and a terrorist, arrested for threatening to bomb the White House. Interesting detail about his arrest (the “Westwood standoff”) was that he seemed to be immune to the 5 cans of tear gas and 5 gallons of law-enforcement grade pepper spray they pumped into his face. He very calmly remained in his car, as the video footage of his arrest shows.

Professor Moshe had called into a live radio show by Dr. A. True Ott, broadcast on Republic Broadcasting claiming to be a microbiologist who wanted to supply evidence to a States Attorney regarding tainted H1N1 Swine flu vaccines being produced by Baxter BioPharma Solutions. He said that Baxter’s Ukrainian lab was in fact producing a bioweapon disguised as a vaccine. He claimed that the vaccine contained an adjuvant (additive) designed to weaken the immune system, and replicated RNA from the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic Spanish flu, causing global sickness and mass death.

Prospects for the white tribe: the future of the Afrikaner people in South Africa, by Dan Roodt, PRAAG

Prospects for the white tribe:

The future of the Afrikaner people in South Africa

by Dan Roodt

Talk presented to the American Renaissance conference in the Hyatt Dulles Hotel, near Washington on 25 February 2006

This cover from Time in 1977 first designated the Afrikaner people as a “white tribe”

I was given the opportunity to change the title of this topic but I have preferred not to, even though I do not think that South African whites in general or the Afrikaner people in particular are a tribe. Rather, as I have suggested in my essay published in American Renaissance in May/June 2004, which was reprinted in my book The Scourge of the ANC, Afrikaners are a "cultural nation of the European type": "During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they went through a great Romantic movement, a flowering of literature, translations, music and historical reflection that bound them into (such a nation)."

However, upon accepting the challenge of this topic, I was presented with one further dilemma: what to wear. These days in South Africa, the motley collection of people occupying the beautiful Cape Dutch building in Cape Town that used to be our Parliament often arrive in tribal dress for the annual opening, brandishing clubs and spears. We call these knobkieries and assegais. In coming to talk to you about our “tribe”, I would therefore also have to appear in tribal dress. What does Afrikaner tribal dress look like? After thinking about it long and hard, I have decided that I should at least wear a three-piece suit. As you can see, I have also consulted my local witch-doctor who has furnished me with charms called cuff-links to protect me from the bad spirits at this conference.

The coming White Refugee Population Wars: a 12-bomb equation..

According to Arthur Kemp, in March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, immigration and emigration issues are an ecological overshoot resource war symptom -- like much of crime, unemployment, terrorism, etc. -- of overpopulation colliding with scarce or depleting resources.

The massive overpopulation taking place in the non-White world will cause increasing waves of non-White immigration into the modern White heartlands of North America, Europe and Australia. This graph shows the disparity between White and non-White population growths, based on United Nations figures. Note the codeword for the White nations ("developed countries"), compared to the non-White world ("total world population").

Furthermore as a result of liberal European Union Immigration Policies:

By 1994, most European Union member states had an average 10 - 15 per cent non-White population, with this figure effectively doubling every fifteen years. This will mean that, unless current immigration trends are halted, all of Western Europe will have a non-White majority population by the year 2090 at the latest, and possibly earlier. These statistics are from the EU's own official records, Eurostat, in Belgium.

In Chapter 67: The Changing Face: Non-White Immigration into the White Heartlands, he writes

NON-WHITE OVERPOPULATION PUSHES IMMIGRATION

The resultant massive overpopulation of the non-White lands of the earth provides the major driver for non-White immigration into the White heartlands of Europe, Australia and North America.

In India, for example, where the population doubles every 30 years, many see no future except emigration to Australia, America or Europe, as over-population pressures at home stretch their already-tenuous infrastructure to breaking point.

The Black African population doubles every 24 years. This is reflected in the ever-increasing number of man-made famines on that continent; and the ever increasing numbers of Black refugees entering Europe, America and Australia.

Economist Debate: World Better off with Fewer People? || Global over-population is the real issue, Boris Johnson, Mayor, London

Economist Debate: World Better off with Fewer People ?

The Economist:

About this Debate:

During the past few years, the size of the world’s population has become a matter of public debate in a way not seen since the 1970s. The total number of people, 6.7 billion now, is forecast to surpass 9 billion by 2050. Many observers fear that an environment degraded by climate change will not be able to support so many. Half the British population, according to one opinion poll, think people should not have more than two children. Yet at the same time governments in Japan, Germany and Russia have been trying to reverse those countries’ falling populations. When is a growing population a blessing and when is it a curse? Is there a best size for the population of the world, or of any particular country? Should governments introduce population-control policies, whether voluntary or mandatory? And how important to demographic matters is climate change?

[Memetics] Waking From the Meme Dream: Who Am I? Do I Exist? Why Is My Head so Full of Thoughts?

Waking from the Meme Dream: Who Am I? Do I Exist?

Susan Blackmore

Paper presented at: The Psychology of Awakening: International Conference on Buddhism, Science and Psychotherapy Dartington 7-10 November 1996

Also published in The Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Science and Our Day-to-day Lives. Ed. G.Watson, S.Batchelor and G.Claxton; London, Rider, 2000, 112-122

Also available in Italian and French, and in Spanish in Dharma, 1, 21-9, 2005

Wake up! Wake up!

Errrr, ummmm, grrrrggr, Oh yes, I’m awake now. Wow, that was a weird dream. I really thought I had to escape from the slurb, and it mattered terribly to get to the cupboard in time. How silly! Of course, now I see it wasn’t real at all.

Wake up! Wake up!

What do you mean, "wake up", I’m already awake. This is real. This does matter. I can’t wake up any more. Go away!

Wake up! Wake up!

But I don’t understand - From what? And how?

[Memetics] In control? Think again. Our ideas of brain and human nature are myths | Nobody in Your Brain...

In control? Think again. Our ideas of brain and human nature are myths

The notion of individual autonomy underpins our society, yet new research suggests this guiding principle is an illusion

It was browsing in a bookshop that got me started. I was confronted by a bank of bestsellers on the brain: how it works and how we think. There were the books which have attracted huge attention, such as Nudge and Blink, but there were others popularising the new insights of a range of academic disciplines – social sciences such as evolutionary psychology as well as neuroscience – which are radically challenging the most fundamental assumptions on which human beings operate.

Perhaps that sounds a little overblown, but it's not. Who, dear reader, do you think you are? Do you think your mind is capable of independent judgment and largely directs the course of your life? Do you think that most of your decisions in life have been the product of your rational, conscious self? Do you believe you are in control of your life? Do you cherish ideas such as self-expression, a sense of autonomy and a distinct, self-authored identity? The chances are that, albeit with a few qualifications, most of your answers are yes. Indeed, given a pervasive culture which reinforces all these ideas, it would be a bit odd if you didn't.

But the point about this new explosion of interest in research into our brains is that it exposes as illusions much of these guiding principles of what it is to be a mature adult. They are a profound misunderstanding of how we think, and how our brains work. They are fairytales, about as fanciful and as implausible as goblins.

Why the Mainstream Media Is Worthless || CIA & Pentagon: Overpopulation & Resource Wars || US Army War College: Overpopulation & Resource Scarcity

The Four Reasons the Mainstream Media Is Worthless

George Washington Blog

There are four reasons that the mainstream media is worthless.

1. Self-Censorship by Journalists


Initially, there is tremendous self-censorship by journalists.

For example, several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing "a form of self-censorship":


"there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples' necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.... And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.
"What we are talking about here - whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not - is a form of self-censorship."


Keith Olbermann agreed that there is self-censorship in the American media, and that:


"You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble .... You cannot say: By the way, there's something wrong with our .... system".

[Д♠][Population Security] Nobel winner supported biological warfare as form of population control

Nobel winner supported biological warfare as form of population control

Third World de-population has been U.S. strategic policy since '74

Top-secret files recently declassified from the National Archives of Australia, despite government opposition, has revealed that one of the fathers of modern biotechnology and genetic engineering advocated using biological weapons against Indonesia and other "overpopulated" countries of South-East Asia. Australia's The Age reports that world-famous microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet recommended in a secret report for the Australian Defence Department in 1947 that biological and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops and spread infectious diseases.

Macfarlane, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1960 and died in 1985, said, "Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical, but not under Australian, conditions."

Before a government committee in 1948, Macfarlane said, "In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination." He advised that, "Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures were established." The committee recommended that "the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using biowarfare agents should be considered by a small study group".

Special Investigation: The secret race war in South Africa that threatens to overshadow the World Cup || Proudly SA/TRC-RSA Afrikaner Genocide Report

Special Investigation: The secret race war in South Africa that threatens to overshadow the World Cup

by Adian Hartley | The Daily Mail/Mail Online, UK

Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer's wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won't read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.

Related: Legal and Political Petition to Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee, to:

1. (I) Withdraw Nobel Peace Prize’s from Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for (a) Intellectual Dishonesty & Hypocrisy; (b) Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (c) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal; and
   
   
2. (II) Accept Nobel Peace Prize Nominations for Dr. Albert Bartlett; Dr. Garret James Harden, and Dr. M. King Hubbert, for Intellectually Honest and Politically Honourable Ecologically Sustainable, Human Rights, Peace and Social Justice Advocacy



Encl. Evidentiary Document: Proudly South African/TRC-RSA Afrikaner Genocide Report [(i) Alphabetical Listing of Farm Murders: A – Z; (ii) 2008 Farm Murders in South Africa: Brief Summaries; and (iii) Genocide Watch 2002 Report on Boer Farm Murders]

Time to Face the Truth about Multiculturalism, by Frank Ellis

[Frank Ellis]

Time to Face the Truth about Multiculturalism

© Frank Ellis 2006 | All Rights Reserved

Note: In 2006, Dr. Frank Ellis was interviewed by a student journalist, the article was published in the Leeds Student. Dr. Ellis was asked about his views on multiculturalism et al, and he did not pull any punches. Various left-wing hate groups demanded that he be sacked. In response, he sent an article to the Leeds Student. The editor assured Dr. Ellis that the article – ‘Time to the Tell the Truth About Multiculturalism’ – would be published in full. He lied. The article was heavily censored, including the title which was changed to ‘“Racist” Lecturer Replies’. Here follows the full, uncensored version (censored text is printed in bold).


Multiculturalism (multiracialism) is doomed to failure - and is failing - because it is based on the lie that all people, races and cultures are equal; that no one race or culture is better (superior) than any other. I see no evidence for the view that all cultures are equal, but vast amounts against it. To believe that all cultures are equal - and ultimately in the absence of any evidence for, it is the psychology of political fanaticism with which one is dealing here - requires the same hatred and wilful refusal to confront evidence, logic and history that characterised the individuals who believed that Stalin had built paradise on earth when in fact he had exterminated millions of so-called class enemies. When you point out to these people, as I have over the years, that, as a consequence of Uncle Jo’s Final Solution of the Peasant Question, some 11,000,000 (yes 11,000,000!) peasants were slaughtered so as to break the rural way of life and to impose collectivization, all you get are despicable, cowardly evasions along the lines that such numbers are CIA propaganda. Cowardice, evasions, lying, hypocrisy and censorship of views they do not like, all typify the range of responses from what I call the Guardian-reading classes to any evidence that multiculturalism, their Neo-Marxist fantasy, is not working. Indeed it never will work, but when it starts to unravel, as Yugoslavia eventually did, we will all suffer.

Crucial to the multicultural experiment is the assertion that there is no such thing as race; that race has nothing to do with genetics or biology. Here, for example, is what Bhikhu Parekh, the editor of a very nasty anti-white tract, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Profile Books, London, 2000), has to say on the subject of race: ‘Race, as is now widely acknowledged, is a social and political construct, not a biological or genetic fact. It cannot be used scientifically to account for the wide range of differences among peoples’ (Parekh, 2000, 63).

The Teaching Establishment is Bad for Our Schoolchildren & Equal Opportunities or Institutionalised Envy, by Frank Ellis

[Frank Ellis]

The Teaching Establishment is Bad for Our Schoolchildren

© Frank Ellis 1999

It is 1999, yet it seems as if 1979 was only yesterday. For, a vast and largely unaccountable bureaucracy still wields enormous power over the destinies of our schoolchildren. Wilfully blind to the failures of “progressive” education, teachers’ training colleges and educational theorists continue to churn out the latest fads dressed in scientoid jargon. In this unholy task, they are aided and abetted by far too many teachers and lecturers in colleges of further education and universities, the majority of whom are members of the other powerful educationally-related bureaucracy, the teachers’ unions. In the longevity of these vested interests and their ability to resist change there is an eerie reminder of the Soviet communist party.

Education was a failure of the Thatcher and Major governments. To be fair, there were more pressing items on the agenda: winning the Cold War; taming the unions; privatization; and winning the Falklands and Gulf Wars. The trouble is that political victories are not the same thing as cultural victories. As Justice Robert Bork points out in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: ‘Even when conservative political leaders have the votes, liberal cultural leaders operate and exercise influence where votes do not count. However many political victories conservatives may produce, they cannot attack modern liberalism in its fortresses.’ Or perhaps one might say that they can, but that it is not easy. No matter, education is one such left-liberal fortress whose walls do have to be knocked down if our cultural degeneration is to be arrested and reversed.

Pregnant (Again) and Poor || CIA & Pentagon's Perspective on Overpopulation & Resource Wars || When Environmental Writers Are Part of the Problem

Pregnant (Again) and Poor

Nicholas D. Kristof | New York Times

Published: April 4, 2009

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times: Nahomie Nercure, 30, with some of her nine children in front of a her shack in the Haitian capital, Port au Prince.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: For all the American and international efforts to fight global poverty, one thing is clear: Those efforts won’t get far as long as women like Nahomie Nercure continue to have 10 children.

Global family-planning efforts have stalled over the last couple of decades, and Nahomie is emblematic both of the lost momentum and of the poverty that results. She is an intelligent 30-year-old woman who wanted only two children, yet now she is eight months pregnant with her 10th.

As we walked through Cité Soleil, the Haitian slum where she lives, her elementary-school-age children ran stark naked around her. The $6-a-month rental shack that they live in — four sleep on the bed, six on the floor beside it — has no food of any kind in it. The family has difficulty paying the fees to keep the children in school.

There’s simply no way to elevate Nahomie’s family, and millions like it around the world, unless we help such women have fewer children. And yet family-planning programs have been shorn of resources and glamour for a generation now.

A Conversation About Race: What is Racism? Does Racism Exist? The Long Road to Racial Awakening

The First Word - A Conversation About Race

I Luv SA | Occidental Quarterly

When a white person awakens to our race’s peril, the first impulse—and the first duty—is to try to awaken others. But where to begin? Becoming a white nationalist often takes years of experience, reflection, and reading. And one has to find one’s courage along the way too. How does one condense all that into talking points? Big books like Wilmot Robertson’s The Dispossessed Majority may well be the last word on these matters. But what is the first word? How do we begin the conversation? We live in an increasingly post-literate society, so for most people books are not the place to start, big books especially.

This is why I highly recommend Craig Bodeker’s masterful 58 minute documentary A Conversation about Race. It is an ideal first step on the road to racial awakening.

Bodeker posted an advertisement on Craigslist in Denver under the heading “Ending Racism Now,” then interviewed respondents on film. He also did “man on the street” interviews. The interviewees who made the final cut are a very diverse group. About half of them are black, including two blacks in inter-racial relationships. Most of the rest are white, with a couple of Hispanics or Amerindians thrown in.

[Social Contract] The Feast of Malthus: Living within Limits | There is No Global Population Problem: Don't Globalize, Local Problems: Relocalize!?

The Feast of Malthus: Living within Limits

by Garrett Hardin | The Social Contract

For a few decades after the publication of Malthus’s celebrated essay in 1798, population was much discussed in England; then at about the middle of the 19th century it became overshadowed by more narrowly economic problems. In the 20th century Malthus has, so to speak, been buried every year by his commentators —only to be dug up again the following year.

Exactly why Malthus is so often repudiated is not clear because the funeral orations typically amount to little more than one brutal word: Discredited! Reviewing many criticisms I have come to the conclusion that a single paragraph in Malthus accounts for much of the rejectors' passion. The offending passage occurs only in the second edition of his essay. Had Malthus retained this paragraph and justified it adequately in subsequent editions I think we would have been spared nearly two hundred years of unproductive brawling. As I see it, Malthus walked right past the heart of the population problem. In presenting my conclusions I shall follow the advice of the physicist George Uhlenbeck (1900-1988), who said: "First tell us what the problem is; then state your conclusions at once. Only thereafter should you go into details…"1

The problem is simply this: can the necessity of population control be reconciled with the apparent demands of individualism, as that complex concept has developed since John Locke? I conclude that there is a fatal contradiction between these two necessities; and that the survival of civilization will require us to modify significantly the powers we now grant to individual "rights." This social revolution will be painful, but it cannot, I think, be successfully evaded.

SA's Largest Ponzi Scheme Uncovered: Hundreds of Greedy Investors Conned with False Promises || Financial Armageddon: Frauds, Old and New

SA's Largest Ponzi scheme uncovered

Hundreds of investors stand to lose millions as SSG helps investigate false promises.

The Frankel Investment Scheme operates as an importer and exporter of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) from foreign countries. These ingredients are used by manufacturers of generic medicines and a large part of the API's are used in the manufacturing of the anti retroviral drug prescribed to people who were exposed to or contracted the HIV/Aids virus.

Founder of this scheme, Barry Tannenbaum is the son of a founding shareholder of Adcock Ingram and has a bachelors degree in science. Tannenbaum promoted his concept to investors claiming massive returns on investments. Tannenbaum supported his proposition by showing prospects purchase orders from major pharmaceutical companies such as Adcock Ingram, Aspen and Novartis for the respective API's valued in the many millions.

Another 'dramatis personae' in this scheme is Dean Rees. Rees is a well known attorney and his personal bank accounts were often used for investors to deposit their money into. When an attorney and investor from Routlidge Modise called a meeting for all investors last week, Rees, like a knight in shining armour, undertook to act as the legal representative for the investors. Rees also explained that he is Chief Operating Officer (COO), acting on behalf of the whole Frankel Group. However early in June Rees wrote a letter stating that he had been revoked as COO. Worried investors cross questioned Rees at the meeting and he explained that he had no part in the alleged fraudulent transactions and stands to lose all his investments just like everybody else.

Austrian Economist Peter Schiff Was Right || Peter Schiff: “Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One!”

Austrian Economist Peter Schiff Was Right

Clips from 2006 - 2007 Predicting Current Economic Events

Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One

Mises Daily by Peter Schiff

Posted on 6/12/2009 12:00:00 AM

[Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference, March 13, 2009. An MP3 audio version of this lecture is available for download. You can also watch the video. Transcript provided by Jennifer Lewis.]


Introduction by Joseph Salerno

It is my great and distinct pleasure to introduce the Henry Hazlitt Lecturer, Peter Schiff.

Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, is familiar to everyone who has watched financial coverage in the last year. He is famed for being the most vocal financial economist to have perfectly predicted the crash.

Financial Warfare Trifecta: Population, Resources & Information:: 400 Millionaires Defrauded || Humanity: Need a Moral Bailout || The 50th Law

400 Millionaires Defrauded

SA PIG | Noseweek

Noseweek.co.za Editor Martin Welz says their information shows that some 400 millionaires invested an estimated R2-billion and speculation that sums of up to R15bn are involved (gone up in such a short space of time?) with businessman Barry Tannenbaum, with the promise of great returns.

Barry Tannenbaum, a grandson of one of the co-founders of Adcock Ingram, together with Johannesburg attorneys Dean Rees and Daryl Leigh, have been running a pyramid scheme promising massive returns on investments. Investors were told they would score between 15 and 20 percent in three months, and their money would be used to finance the import of chemicals which, among other things, were required for antiretroviral medicines for the treatment of HIV and Aids.

BARRY TANNENBAUM TAKES S.A. MILLIONAIRES FOR A R15 BILLION PONZI IN THE PARK

On Friday last week Johannesburg businessman Christopher Leppan applied to the Johannesburg High Court to have Barry Deon Tannenbaum, until recently of Rivonia, declared bankrupt.

Barry is the famously pious son of Harold Tannenbaum, mega-rich founder of Adcock Ingram, South Africa's second-largest pharmaceutical company.

Return of the Population Time-Bomb || Too many People: Earth's Population Problem

Return of the population timebomb

It has become taboo over recent years, but population, not consumption, really is the key to managing our use of the world's resources

John Feeney | guardian.co.uk

Monday, 5 May 2008

Only since 1800, in the last 0.1% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.

Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person's consumption.

Today's crumbling environment, racked by climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. In ecological terms we are in "overshoot" of Earth's "carrying capacity" for humans, our demand exceeding the planet's absorptive and regenerative capacities.

To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce both factors in the equation: our numbers and per person consumption.

The Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee: Withdraw Nobel Peace Prize’s from Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.....

Overview of Documentation

1. Letter to Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee: Notice of Legal and Political Request to: (I) Withdraw Nobel Peace Prize’s from Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for (a) Intellectual Dishonesty & Hypocrisy; (b) Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (c) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal; and (II) Accept Nobel Peace Prize Nominations for Dr. Albert Bartlett; Dr. Garret James Harden, and Dr. M. King Hubbert, for Intellectually Honest and Politically Honourable Ecologically Sustainable, Human Rights, Peace and Social Justice Advocacy. [PDF:200KB][Verbatim Text of Emails, Delivery & Read Receipts from Nobel Institute, NSA & Royal Norwegian Embassy, Pretoria (PDF:174KB)]
   [Act4 ♥ TrinityLove EcoFamily ♥ :: Sign the HARTSSTARH Legal and Political Petition to the Nobel Institute]
   
   
2. Letter to Proudly South African/TRC-RSA Nobel Peace Prize Recipients: Former President Nelson Mandela, Former President F.W. de Klerk, Archbhishop Desmond Tutu; sent c/o and via: Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee: Final Honourable Notice of Legal and Political Delivery: Elimination of ‘TRC-RSA’ Nobel Peace Prize Recipients Plausible Deniability, to allegations that your Human Rights Advocacy is guilty of (i) Intellectual Dishonesty and Hypocrisy; (ii) Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (iii) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal. [PDF:200KB] ][Verbatim Text of Emails, Delivery & Read Receipts from Tony Leon and Prof. van der Elst (PDF:174KB)]
   

Financial Relocalisation: Direct Way to Fix Credit Crisis | N. Dakota's State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street

Credit Where Credit is Due: Direct Way to Fix Credit Crisis

Ellen Brown | Web of Debt

January 11, 2009

Letter to the bank –

Dear Sirs, In light of recent developments, when you returned my check marked “insufficient funds,” were you referring to my funds or yours?

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously said, “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.” If banks can create money, why are we suffering from a “credit crunch”? Why can’t banks create all the money they can find borrowers for? Last fall, Congress committed an unprecedented $700 billion in taxpayer money to reversing the credit crisis, and the Federal Reserve has already fanned that into $8.5 trillion in loans and commitments.1 But the bank bailout has proven to be no more than a boondoggle for a handful of lucky Wall Street banks, without getting credit flowing again.

To understand the real cause of the credit crisis and how it can be reversed, we first need to understand credit itself – what it is, where it comes from, and what the real tourniquet is that has limited its flow. Banks actually create credit; and if private banks can do it, so could public banks or public treasuries. The crisis is not one of “liquidity” but of “solvency.” It has been caused, not by the banks’ inability to get credit (something they can create with accounting entries), but by their inability to meet the capital requirement imposed by the Bank for International Settlements, the private foreign head of the international banking system. That inability, in turn, has been caused by the derivatives virus; and only a few big banks are seriously infected with it. By bailing out these big banks, the government is actually spreading the virus by furnishing the funds for them to take over smaller regional banks.

Weimar HyperInflation: Time to Get Out the Wheelbarrows? || Economic crisis spurs spike in 'suburban survivalists'

Weimar HyperInflation: Time to Get Out the Wheelbarrows?

Ellen Brown | Web of Debt

May 19th, 2009

“It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty.You could buy nothing with your paper money.

– Harvard University law professor Friedrich Kessler on on the Weimar Republic hyperinflation (1993 interview)

Some worried commentators are predicting a massive hyperinflation of the sort suffered by Weimar Germany in 1923, when a wheelbarrow full of paper money could barely buy a loaf of bread. An April 29 editorial in the San Francisco Examiner warned:

“With an unprecedented deficit that’s approaching $2 trillion, [the President’s 2010] budget proposal is a surefire prescription for hyperinflation. So every senator and representative who votes for this monster $3.6 trillion budget will be endorsing a spending spree that could very well turn America into the next Weimar Republic.”1

In an investment newsletter called Money Morning on April 9, Martin Hutchinson pointed to disturbing parallels between current government monetary policy and Weimar Germany’s, when 50% of government spending was being funded by seigniorage – merely printing money.2 However, there is something puzzling in his data. He indicates that the British government is already funding more of its budget by seigniorage than Weimar Germany did at the height of its massive hyperinflation; yet the pound is still holding its own, under circumstances said to have caused the complete destruction of the German mark. Something else must have been responsible for the mark’s collapse besides mere money-printing to meet the government’s budget, but what? And are we threatened by the same risk today? Let’s take a closer look at the data.

Jim Kunstler's GeoPolitics 101 Forecast 2009 || Exponential Fiat Currency: The Dangers of Printing Money

Jim Kunstler's GeoPolitics 101 Forecast 2009

ClusterFuck Nation

Introduction

There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let's call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a "consumer" economy to resume in "growth" mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament -- through "innovation," through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via "drill, baby, drill" policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current "rough patch" into a vibrant re-energized era of "green" Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.

The minority reality (let's call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the "consumer" era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we've come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.

My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can't be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won't care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

Class of ‘09: You’re Screwed || Got Work?: College Graduates Face Toughest Job Market in Years

Class of ‘09: You’re Screwed


Bill Bonner | Daily Reckoning

05/29/09 London, England Last weekend, we journeyed to Boston to attend a college graduation. Thousands of callow scholars were on display. Each was handed his papers…and then marched out of the hockey stadium. To the tune of ‘Pomp & Circumstance,’ wearing a long, red robe, he entered the outside world solemnly…like a patsy joining a poker game.

So far, not a single major university has asked us to make the commencement address. Nor a minor college. Not even a school of cosmetology or taxidermy. But here at the Daily Reckoning headquarters in London, protected by a broad ocean and a narrow reading of the First Amendment, we will give them – and UK graduates too – advice no one asked for.

“Plastics,” was the advice given to college graduates in Mike Nichols’ ’67 film. But that was when there was still hope for America’s manufacturing sector. Even then, it was too late. The percentage of GDP from the manufacturing sector fell for the next four decades, from over 20% in the last ’60s to barely 12% last year. Better advice would have been ‘derivatives.’ They stank just as bad, but they were much more profitable. While only 8% of GDP, finance accounted for 40% of corporate profits in 2007. And derivatives grew from nothing to a face value of 16 times the GDP of the entire planet.

But your elders are always giving you bum advice.

Chavez Jokes He Is More Right-Wing Than 'Comrade' Obama || What I Learned as Romania's 'Comrade' Car Czar

Chavez Jokes He Is More Right-Wing Than 'Comrade' Obama

Texas Fred | Fox News

Thursday, June 04, 2009

President Hugo Chavez claimed this week that he and his Cuban ally Fidel Castro are more conservative than left-wing U.S. President Barack Obama, referring to the American government bailout and takeover of General Motors, Reuters reported.

The Venezuelan leader was giving a speech on the "curse" of capitalism on Tuesday as GM was filing for bankruptcy and preparing for Washington to take control of 60 percent of the 100-year-old symbol of American capitalism.

"Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right," Reuters quotes Chavez joking on a national TV broadcast.

Socialist Chavez has nationalized most of Venezuela's economic sectors, including many oil projects that include joint ventures with private companies that give his government a 60 percent stake.

Obama says he will quickly sell off GM, but for now the government controls the automaker and has injected $30 billion of taxpayer money into the company.

Chavez also on Tuesday accused the CIA of plotting to kill him.

Chavez has previously accused the U.S. of plotting to overthrow him or invade Venezuela, but Tuesday was the first time he has made such accusations since warmly greeting President Barack Obama at an April summit in Trinidad and Tobago.

Ten $$ Things To Do! || Lessons of the Global Financial Crisis: 1. End of Ponzi Prosperity; 2. Whatever it Takes! 3. Built to Fail!

Ten Things You Must Do!!

Karls Market Ticker! (Excerpt)

Don't say you weren't warned.

So without further adieu, here's my list of 10 things you need to be doing now:

1. Stop listening to those who claim that "The Market is telling you the recession is ending/over." Baloney. What was the market telling you in October of 2007 when the SPX hit 1576? That everything was great and "subprime was contained", right? Any more questions on that piece of nonsense?
   
   
2. Get out of debt - NOW. Revolving debt in particular is murderous. If your credit line hasn't been cut back or your interest rate jacked, you're one of the few. It will happen. Going bankrupt due to increasing debt service requirements (with or without job loss) sucks.
   
   
3. Stop spending more than you make - in fact, do the opposite - start saving. NOW. You need to be saving 10% of your gross income. Not net or "excess" - gross. These funds serve two purposes: an emergency fund (which you're likely to need) and if you have one already it will also serve as a fund to buy up assets that will be puked up when things get really bad. You don't get wealthy by selling to some other sucker - you get wealthy by buying when nobody has any money to buy - that is, by driving the hardest bargain you can imagine!
   
   
4. I've said it before but it bears repeating: have the ability to make it even if you lose your job. Most people say three months of reserves are necessary. I've said six months to two years, and I'll reiterate it. And reserves means cash, not credit. Parked in a credit union is ok - but be prepared to make that actual cash in a big honking hurry if you need to. How do you know if you need to? If and when the first Treasury auction fails, the market crashes below the 666 March low and/or a big bank fails, you need to.