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."