EZ READING MONEY MATTERS

USA Is Going BANKRUPT, Worse Than Ever

April 30, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Now we see the Federal Reserve drain its reserves which are Treasury DEBTS, of course. The US government has, as per usual, lied about budget matters and now it turns out we are running up to HALF A TRILLION in the red if not much worse. Congress is busy voting to spend more billions trying to run over Iran Kitty and control Iraq, our own Tar Baby from Hell. Half a trillion in US homeowner wealth has vanished into thin air. Or rather, the US government is busy turning it into government debts. This leads to bankruptcy. Of course, the Fed ignores raging inflation and drops interest rates another 25 points. Argentina is going bankrupt yet again and for the same reasons we are going bankrupt. Will we learn before it is too late? Nope.

Here is a graph I decorated. Click on the image to enlarge. The colors represent interest rate levels. The red line is the real inflation rate. It is obvious that we are in very great trouble and the 'cures' of the late 1970's to the early 1980's, courtesy of Volcker, may have killed inflation only for a while. Not permanently.

Federal Reserve of St. Louis graph page:

Note the red arrow pointing to the inflation rate red line in both 1976 and 2003: These two times are the only two times in the last 60 years that the real inflation rate has been over 500 points higher than the official interest rates. There are several significant periods when the Fed dropped interest rates below the rate of real inflation: In 1960, to boost the economy and thus show Commie Russia and Commie China that we were a worker's paradise, in 1972 when Nixon pretended to be ending the Vietnam War via kissing Commie Chinese ass, in the mid seventies we had 'stagflation' as the price of everything we needed to eat or use shot way up in price, then we had another session of fake interest rates after the Gulf War I victory. Then there was 'stability'. This was supposedly a time when inflation was 'under control'.

Government spending dropped, for example. But was our economy healthy? Or DYING? Unfortunately, it was dying. Our trade deficit which began during the fake interest rate regime under Nixon, took off! So did the stock market. When the stock market bubble popped, rates went far, far below the rate of real inflation. The infamous Housing bubble ballooned. Rates were shoved upwards rapidly to deal with the flood of red ink from the US government and our consumer economy. We ran up over $4 trillion in government debt AND another $4 trillion in trade deficits. Nearly $10 trillion in all! This has only one end: bankruptcy.

So the Fed, today, voted to drop interest rates to the cellar where it last was, in a realistic sense, during Eisenhower. When we were a creditor nation and had an industrial base. Looking at this chart, I must say, we will see DOUBLE the hyperinflation of the 1975-1985 decade if the Fed keeps dropping rates and keeps them low in a misguided and insane effort in preventing Wall Street from panicking.

$536 Billion Worth of Household Assets Evaporated in February?

Paul L. Kasriel
[email protected]

It sure is a good thing that $150 billion of checks from the IRS are in the mail to U.S. households because these same households experienced an evaporation in paper wealth in February to the tune of about $544 billion according to my admittedly back-of-the-envelope arithmetic. It was reported today that the Case-Shiller house price index for 20 major metropolitan areas fell 2.66% month-to-month in February. Applying that percentage decline in house prices to the fourth- quarter value of $20,154.7 billion for household residential real estate from the Fed’s flow-of- funds data yields a decline of $536 billion. Now, this is a very rough approximation for at least two reasons. Firstly, the Case-Shiller price index is for only 20 metropolitan areas, not the whole country. So, the Case-Shiller index captures the decline in house prices in the Manhattan, New York area but not the Manhattan, Kansas area. Second, the value of residential real estate in the Fed’s flow-of-funds accounts is based on the OFHEO house price index. But even with these qualifications, I feel confident in saying that the value of households’ residential real estate assets fell in February by some multiple of the aggregate value of the checks households will receive as part of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008.

This stupid, ridiculous hand out designed to keep people spending: it is insane. It is stupid. It is a hand out. It is America the Welfare Queen From Hell time. It is also bankrupting the nation. Right now, our stupid geniuses who came up with this obvious scam are running in circles, screaming, 'Who, who, WHO is going to buy all our bonds we must issue to cover the gaping Federal deficits?' Of course, if Ron Paul suggests we stop spending $109 billion bombing Sadr City, the media and our flag pin lapel wearing political operatives will go nuts. 'Traitor! Treason!' they will shout. 'Ron Paul is a nut. He isn't serious! We are serious!'

So it goes: Hillary Clinton and McCain who are two warmongering peas in a pod people plant, both are suggesting we no longer collect gasoline taxes! This will free up money, as ABC TV said tonight, 'So people can buy FOOD!' My god. The head spins! I saw on TV all these big, fat, SUVs sucking down huge amounts of gasoline. Since we decided to ignore reality for two decades, we are stuck with these behemoths. I always bought gas misers. I loved my little Geo Metro. Drove it for over 200,000 miles at 55 miles to the gallon. A very unpopular car over here.

Americans don't want to make any serious changes. Everyone with gas guzzling monsters should park them and start carpooling or riding bikes or walking, god forbid. And if they can't do this, they should ditch these ridiculous machines and buy cheap, used Geo Metros. Actually, I sold mine! The kid rebuilt it. Still runs. The point is, we can't have endless gas. This is bankrupting America. It is making our trade deficit stink to high heaven. It is treason. It weakens our nation and anyone driving these things should reflect on how they have destroyed our great nation, all so they could drive about arrogantly and hassle little Geo Metro drivers.

This graph is from the above article. It shows how our 'wealth' ballooned and now how it is vanishing. Like all good housing bubbles, it will totally vanish over the years. This is simple: no balloon survives if it makes housing cost much more than incomes can afford. And incomes are doing badly. The false hopes of super-low interest rates can create bubbles despite bad income growth. But only once every 20 years. It can't do this over and over again every three years. So back to the top chart: the Fed tried this trick in the seventies. Each time, they would panic and set very high interest rates. Then it would drop like a rock. But inflation would surge violently so the Fed would play catch up. Only when Volcker put down his foot and raised rates FASTER than inflation, did this stop.

I say, why do we have to learn this obvious lesson the hard way, any way? Can't Bernanke read graphs?

Fed Cuts Rates by a Quarter Point, and It Signals a Pause

The Fed’s action, lowering short-term rates to 2 percent from 2.25 percent, followed new indications that the American economy remained fragile, expanding by 0.6 percent on an annualized basis in the first quarter, not an overall downturn that would have indicated a full recession had begun.

The poor record of economic growth, reported by the Commerce Department on Wednesday morning, reflected what most Americans have been experiencing since late last year — declines in consumer spending, housing prices and business investment, along with spreading unemployment.

Wall Street gave up sharp gains after the Federal Reserve announcement. The Dow Jones industrial average, which was up about 120 points and moved higher after the announcement, was up less than 30 points about an hour later.

Wednesday’s interest rate action was accompanied by a parallel decision to lower the Fed’s discount rate, the rate the Fed charges banks and thrift institutions, from 2.50 percent to 2.25 percent.

I sense fear on the streets. I certainly see fear all around me in stores, at gas stations, in the schools, everywhere, people notice inflation is eating away at our precious funds. They know deep down, that the present 2% rate of the Fed is utterly, totally insane and will only make inflation worse. The older people my age and older know perfectly well, what the cure is. But people hate this and want free Funny Money™. People who are savers are hoping Volcker will throw Bernanke from a helicopter, take over and repeat what he did in the past. Buying bonds that have an 18% return is GREAT if one is a saver! Right now, savings are collapsing since one makes more money by borrowing rather than saving.

NYT:

“My view is that the Fed is back doing the silly things it did in the 1970s, of trying to make judgments that have long-term consequences based on short-term data,” said Allan H. Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. “It should get back to the period of 1985 to 2003 known as the Great Moderation.”

The Fed’s recent move, coupled with the uncertain performance of the economy, appeared likely to deepen the partisan impasse in Washington over how to respond to joblessness, the mortgage crisis, energy costs and other problems.

Meltzer is like Volcker: he remembers things. He knows better. He can read graphs. He can grasp reality. Bravo. I am glad the Times is quoting people like these two. By the way, the 1985-2003 period was NOT moderate at all. It saw our economic state collapse! GAH! Why can't they see the obvious? Why? Why???

The US trade deficit grew worse and worse. The budget deficit went from $1 trillion to $6 trillion during that time. Interest rates moderated because we stopped inflation via the method of OUTSOURCING AND OFFSHORING our economy! And even with all this, the US had to devalue the dollar via the Plaza Accords and the Louver Accords. Let's go to the White House official budget page

First: the numbers above are riddled with lies, evasions and fraud. The main thing is, we are in the red. And there is no end to the foolish choices being made from top to bottom.

US Treasury to resume 52-week bill as deficit widens

The U.S. Treasury said on Wednesday it will resume issuing 52-week bills after a seven-year break, as budget deficits swell due to slowing revenues and higher spending in a sluggish economy.

The Treasury, announcing its quarterly refunding plans, said it would sell $21 billion of 10-year notes and 30-year bonds. It also said it would pay down about $53 billion of maturing debt in the auctions next week.
The Treasury retired the 52-week bills in February 2001, when the United States was running budget surpluses after a decade-long economic expansion.

It is now adding the bill to its debt offering lineup just one year after it retired the 3-year note amid better-than-expected tax revenues produced by booming corporate profits and capital gains.

The Japanese and Chinese just can't wait to buy these. Eh? They will buy ONLY if the US lets them flood us with exports and they gain a good profit return. How will we do this if our own consumers are being consumed by inflation? Warning: here comes the Horns of Dilemma. We are trapped. We can't just inflate our way to happiness and wealth. We can't lure the nations destroying our industrial base into buying our bonds if we have rates that are 500 points below the real rate of inflation! As well as weakening the dollar tremendously. Japan has kept their own rates 700 points below the real rate of inflation. I read about various things like noodles or gasoline shooting up 40% in price this last six months over there! Noodles that went for 100 yen are now suddenly selling for 140 yen, just for example. Wages are falling and this is a terrible mess for the people there.

The Treasury cited spending on tax rebates associated with the government's $152 billion fiscal stimulus plan as a key reason for raising borrowing expectations over the next year.

The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee -- made up of 22 primary government bond dealers -- said in a report to the Treasury that a recent survey showed the deficit for fiscal 2008 will average a record $414 billion, with some economists forecasting the gap would exceed $500 billion -- more than tripling last year's $163 billion deficit.

In addition to lower revenues from a slowing economy and increased spending, the Federal Reserve has redeemed Treasury holdings and made some outright sales in recent months to support its efforts to boost financial market liquidity and ease the worst credit crisis in decades.

This has resulted in an additional $200 billion in bills and coupon issuances so far this fiscal year, the Treasury said. Municipal bond issuers are also buying fewer State and Local Government Series securities, or SLGS, forcing the Treasury to increase issuance of higher-yielding bills, notes and bonds.

The Treasury said it may also consider other moves such as increasing coupon issuance and reintroducing the 3-year note or other maturities, if borrowing needs continue to grow.

The banking collapse is now becoming the infinitely more dangerous government funding collapse. The Chinese are in a very foul mood right now and demanding they bankroll our $1600 hand out to all Americans while screaming about how terrible Chinese goods are means China won't buy our debts! Japan is selling, China won't buy. So who will? Argentina?

US Fed Selling Treasuries as Federal Budget Deficit Doubles

By Paul L. Kasriel

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the fiscal year 2008 federal budget deficit will increase to $396 billion from $162 billion in fiscal year 2007. So, federal borrowing in this fiscal year is projected to be 2.4 times as much as last year. And on top of this increased federal borrowing, we now have the Federal Reserve providing $601 billion less support to the Treasury securities market at an annual rate. Is it any wonder why the yields on Treasury securities are rising now? You might want to put your IRS tax-rebate manna into some sort of saving account for your children so that they can pay the higher taxes needed to service the public debt that is being incurred to bailout imprudent borrowers and lenders in the recent housing bubble.

How can our official interest rate be 2% under these circumstances? Isn't it painfully obvious? I saw a TV commercial today. It was all about how people could get unsecured loans. Because I am a speed reader as well as typist, I was able to read the fine print at the bottom of the commercial that flashed on screen literally for less than a second. The rate was 99.25%. WOW. And we have no inflation? I guessed it would be 33% and that rate had me totally astonished! Talk about blatant usury. But then, the real cheats here are the Federal Reserve officers who think interest rates are all about goosing the economy, not tracking inflation. They can't say, 'We will notice inflation next year or maybe ten years from now.' It is very much 'now' now! Like in the movie, 'Spaceballs' by Mel Brooks.

Argentine Bonds Plunge on Mounting Default Concerns

Argentine bonds show growing speculation that the country will default for the second time this decade as inflation and anti-government protests swell.

The nation's $10.8 billion of floating-rate dollar bonds due in 2012 yielded 7.20 percentage points more than Treasuries of similar maturity at 5:43 p.m. in New York. That implies an almost 20 percent chance of Argentina halting payments in the next two years, according to Credit Suisse Group. No other emerging-market government securities have as high a probability of default.

The 19 percent decline in bond prices since President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner took office in December shows investors are losing faith even as record commodity exports spur the longest economic expansion in at least two decades. Confidence waned after statisticians accused the government of fabricating data to hide an inflation surge and farmers alienated by a tax increase staged a nationwide strike that caused food shortages last month.

So, Argentina will collapse and go bankrupt because the government is lying about inflation? Oh my. The US gets away with this only due to foreign powers propping up our corrupt politicians who pull this exact same stunt here. But we can't do this forever. It is obvious after a decade of inflation lying, the lion of inflation has risen and is now stalking us. By the way, if Argentina goes belly up, this is going to drag us downwards, too. We are way too fragile with a dead banking system, to fake it much longer if other nations let go and fall off the cliff. THIS IS HOW THE GREAT DEPRESSION DEVELOPED.

Investment Outlook

Bill Gross

Minsky, McCulley, El-Erian, Gross, Feldstein, Summers, and a host of others would likely argue that additional policy measures are required to support home prices which have fallen by 10% over the past 12 months and are set for a repeat by this time in 2009. Lower Fed Funds? They would, in PIMCO’s opinion, likely do more damage than good from this point forward. Foreign and domestic investors are being fleeced with negative real interest rates, and the weak dollar, stratospheric commodity prices and steadily rising import inflation are the result. The better alternative is to initiate a limited mark-to-market write-down of private mortgage debt as envisioned in the Dodd-Frank Congressional proposal combined with government-subsidized loans at below market rates. Look at it this way: you can allow a home to fall in price from $400,000 to $300,000 and force an upside-down "short sale" foreclosure, or you can reduce the homeowners’ $400,000 mortgage to $350,000, refinance the loan through the FHA at 4% and stabilize the neighborhood and its home prices. Surely Republicans, Democrats, AND Wall Street mortgage holders (PIMCO included) can recognize that stability as opposed to freefall market clearing is the better alternative, especially if the pain is shared by all parties. It is our best chance to cushion Minsky’s asset-based deflation.

The problem is, the vanishing wealth. No one in their right mind is going to put their money into anything that is losing value and this emphatically includes the dollar itself. No one giving advice or peering into the future can see reality if they refuse to understand that we are in a negative wealth cycle now in the West. And there is no magic charm or easy out. There is one and only one way out: to save money and work for profits which get plowed back into value-added labor output. Not Funny Money™ making schemes. But rather, real industrial output. I see Germany and Japan cutting back on industrial output. The last local factories here in Berlin, NY, my dying town, are cutting shifts and no longer running day and night but are running at a half staff. We can't be a nation of bankers, property flippers, gamblers and therapists. We have to produce something tangible and real. And the profits must be generated here, not fly off to Japan or Germany! And we will never save any money if interest rates are 500 points below the rate of inflation!

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5.2 Earthquake In Northern California

April 30, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The latest earthquake to strike the US is, like most of them, associated with the Juan de Fuca plate. This one is the biggest so far and was very near to Mt. Shasta, an active volcano of the Cascades system. There are no fault lines near where this latest shake occurred. But if we look at earthquake maps, we can see clearly over time that the quakes are growing rapidly in number and violence. The section of the San Andreas between LA and San Jose is nearly totally frozen and doesn't even have micro shakes: a very bad sign. The Juan de Fuca plate is directly responsible for volcanic activity as well as a springboard for great quakes to the south. Also, the hinge between North and South America has been hammered by significant but sub-7.0 mag quakes this past month. The chances of a major event rises.

Magnitude-5.2 earthquake hits mountainous area of California

A moderate earthquake has hit a mountainous region of Northern California. There are no immediate reports or injury or damage.
The U.S. Geological Survey says a magnitude-5.2 temblor struck at 8:03 p.m., centered about 11 miles southeast of the town of Willow Creek in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

Shasta County Sheriff's Detective Mark Haslam says the department has received no calls about the earthquake.

The fact that this happened where there are no faults is problematic. I suspect the stresses caused by the North American plate overriding the Juan de Fuca plate is causing these things to jerk violently. Even if we see the Juan de Fuca plate going under at the subduction zone where the plates meet, the plate going under doesn't vanish, it actually probably folds and flops under the continental plate. It trails downwards through the mantle according to recent research. This under-the-continent folding process destabilizes the geology of the continent and thus, we get volcanoes. I suppose this is due to the folds causing flexing below the 10 km level of the continent and the fissures and cracks created by this opens up space for lava to gush out. This is due to a classic 'between a hot mantle and a hot ocean plate' situation.

Volcanoes have this habit of snoozing for long, long times. Then, they shake and rattle. Sometimes this fades. But all too often, it ends with a loud roar or a terrible blast. Some of the richest lands are around volcanoes which process new mineral wealth into the continental plates or onto islands. But the turnover in life forms is severe. Everything is destroyed and then life creeps back in, bit by bit.

I went to Mount St. Helen's two years after the eruption there. The landscape was as barren as Antarctica and just as dazzlingly white. Today, trees and animals have slowly returned and will build their lives there until they are all wiped out yet again.

The coast adjacent to the Juan de Fuca plate is scoured of all life, too, regularly. These tsunamis are caused by underwater changes in the landscape as the North American continent lurches over the plate being squeezed ruthlessly by the Pacific plate which is being shove northwards by an out of control Australian/Indian plate. Even as the Indian half slows down as it plows into Asia, Australia is still shooting forwards faster than any plate on earth, by far.

Is Mount Shasta a potentially dangerous volcano?

Our studies tell us a lot about how Mount Shasta has behaved in the past, going back as far as an older volcano that was destroyed by an enormous landslide about 300,000 years ago and coming up to our own experiences of recent debris flows. Have we come to some conclusions about whether Mount Shasta is dangerous? Yes, we have.

It seems fair to assume that Mount Shasta's most likely future activity will be similar to its past behavior. We know that it has undergone periods of major cone building; these were periods of nearly continuous lava-flow eruptions and associated explosive and other disruptive events that lasted for centuries or millennia. If some of these events were to occur in the future, they are likely to affect nearby communities, air routes and other transportation corridors in the area, and rivers that head on the volcano. Clearly, future eruptions pose a potential danger to people. We also know the volcano generates debris flows every now and then and these are capable of causing serious damage along streams draining the volcano even without an eruption. At the same time, we think that repetition of the most drastic past event that we know about—a catastrophic landslide that destroyed ancestral Mount Shasta—while possible, is rather unlikely.

Finally, we know that Mount Shasta is an active volcano—it erupted only about 200 years ago and has erupted many times in the past few thousand years. According to our studies, the volcano has erupted on average at least once every 600 years in the past 4,500 years. With such an active record of recent volcanism, we have every reason to think it will erupt again.

When Mt. St. Helen's blew up, the geological survey didn't take it all too seriously until much too late. The State of Washington was furious when the geologists tried to remove park visitors. Quite a few tourists died when this one blew up. Not to mention, scientists. These volcanoes are not like Iceland or Hawaii, these tend to blow their tops.

Here are a list of volcano web cams in the Cascade system.

Click here to see Mt. Shasta Live.

Here are some USGS government maps:

This is a map of California and Nevada, screen shot taken today. I have watched this map for several years. I have not seen, even ONCE, so many micro quakes at once, across the entire region! Not even close! Nevada is shivering as if this is January and the top and bottom of the San Andreas is trembling like an aspen in a violent windstorm. Seen close up or from afar, it is striking how shaky things are this month.

2.0 2008/04/29 22:08:14 40.875N 123.445W 17.3 21 km (13 mi) E of Willow Creek, CA
2.4 2008/04/29 20:54:38 40.838N 123.490W 26.3 18 km (11 mi) ESE of Willow Creek, CA
2.0 2008/04/29 20:08:05 40.899N 123.390W 5.0 25 km (16 mi) E of Willow Creek, CA
5.2 2008/04/29 20:03:06 40.837N 123.499W 28.5 18 km (11 mi) ESE of Willow Creek, CA

Here is a close up of the latest quake as well as the data. These quakes are all at the very dangerous 10 km level. There is no evading this fact: the biggest quakes are generated at this vital level!

We can see from the bigger planetary map, the Aleutian Islands have had some major quakes. And all of Asia has been incredibly active since the Boxing Day Great Quake.

And this map shows how the quakes are creeping northwards from Panama. Geologists are finally beginning to issue some warnings. But as usual, California is snoozing and won't wake up unless Mother Nature gives us a huge shaking. And we know that this usually happens at a bad time. If we think we are seeing housing problems now, just wait until a quake renders a huge number of homes worthless! And in the most expensive sector of the US economy outside of Manhattan's Tri State Region and DC!

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Jiminy Peak's Amazing Wind Mill Power Plant

April 30, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The other day, I visited a local business, Jiminy Peak. This is an upscale ski resort run by an old family friend of my husband who began skiing there 45 years ago when it was very small. The owners of this resort are environmentalists who try to minimize their carbon foot print as well as design slopes and care for the water sources so that there is minimum impact on nature. They recently installed a wind mill on top of the mountain. It is very lovely, I think. But then, I am fond of such mega-structures like the Eiffel Tower, too. Also, a company proposes a new ocean wave energy system.

Jiminy's Environmental Policy Statement

The Jiminy Peak Resort Management and Employees are committed to being responsible stewards of Massachusetts' natural resources. Massachusetts' beauty and healthfulness are an integral part of our business. We live here, and working to maintain it comes naturally.

Jiminy's policy of environmental awareness is seen in all our activities. We seek to raise the environmental awareness of guests and employees, and to broaden their knowledge and appreciation through educational programs along with our active and passive use of the land for year-round recreation.

Our development and maintenance programs are guided by principles of land and energy conservation, by forest and wildlife habitat preservation, and by maintaining Massachusetts' water quality and aesthetic beauty.

Jiminy Peak strongly believes in preserving the Earth for future generations. We are showing our commitment by being the first Mountain Resort in North America to install a wind turbine in order to generate clean, natural energy. Together we can shape a sustainable community for the future.

I am a tad biased here. Brian Fairbanks is a generous and kind man who is also loves art and science. His family has invented ski systems and equipment, for example. He likes to organize information with charts and graphs and projections and is a realist. Once, when we had a too-warm winter, he complained to me, 'Isn't there any way to tell El Nino to go home and let La Nina come back?' But then, none of us can tell the Weather what to do. It is pretty elemental.

When Brian proposed putting a windmill on top of Jiminy Peak, he worried about opposition. I know what he is worried about. Previous proposals to install these systems have been defeated by people who want unblemished vistas to sit and enjoy while they consume vast quantities of energy produced by destroying the Appalachians or polluting the lands around oil rigs. This pollution is 'invisible' because of distance, of course. A lot of pollution is parked far away like in China, so we can enjoy the Garden of Eden. But few of the anti-wind mill people live in tents and use wood stoves to heat their homes or don't use any electricity like I did for ten years! No, this is a classic, 'Have your cake and eat it too' type of reflexive thinking.

So Brian had to move very cautiously to get permission to install this sensible system. It was either that or close shop. Running his ski resort is very energy intensive. And he believes in the Hubbert Oil Peak just as I have for much of my life and we discussed this long, long ago. So when he had the financing, he moved quickly to set up his systems.

Here are some of the basic statistics:

It is a 1.5MW wind turbine capable of producing up to 2,000 H.P. for our snowmaking plant.

A 1.5MW wind turbine will provide approximately 33% of the electrical demands of Jiminy Peak annually. During the winter months when the wind resource is the strongest it may provide as much as half of our electrical demand.

The turbine will generate approximately 4,600,000 kWh and Jiminy Peak consumes approximately 7,500,000 kWh a year.

The wind turbine will sit atop a 253 ft tower.

The nacelle that sits on top of the structure and houses the shaft for the blades, the gearbox and the generator is approximately 13 ft wide and 13 ft tall and 26 ft long.

Each of the 3 blades is approximately 123ft, therefore to the tip of the blade the entire structure is 386 feet tall.

The blades will turn a maximum of 22 RPM even in high wind conditions.

Alas, I didn't have a camera when the wind mill was erected. So I had to wait until this week to take pictures. It is a stunning structure! When I first saw it, I was listening to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony on public radio. I stopped the car and gave this technological achievement a good look. Like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge or the Hoover Dam, it soars to the heavens. It is one of humanity's successes. Engineering is not ugly, it can be quite splendid. And we should appreciate it as an esthetic positive. Compared to a power plant burning coal, this energy producing system is nearly silent, shapely and an addition to the landscape, not a smoking, roaring mess with endless trains loudly discharging their cargo.

Indeed, I would happily put one on top of my own mountain. First of all, it would attract all the lightning bolts that try to hit me! This is a huge plus. But realistically, ALL the communities in these here mountains MUST have these systems and as soon as humanly possible! We have NO CHOICE or we can roll back our civilization to the level I lived at for ten years in a tent. Anyone who thinks the choice is 'no windmills versus windmills' is indulging in wishful thinking. If they propose a solar system, this is OK with me but I see only a very, very tiny handful of people here doing this! It seems to me the desire is for the present status quo. Which is, of course, doomed.

I am so very pleased that Brian can see ahead so clearly!

Now for a little tour of Jiminy Peak. I really like the set up, the Fairbanks family has good taste and the architecture is friendly, easy to use and fun to look at.

This is the view from Rt 43 in Mass. The Hancock town hall sits next to the old grave yard. And if we look around the corner of the building, we can see this huge windmill and note how big it is compared to the flag pole. Beyond this point is a river and then dense forest. So this is the closest one can get without hiking and boating, from the west.

This is the view from a mountain that is to the north of the resort. Note how the ski slopes are not huge gashes but are artfully laid out and surrounded by good forest. The windmill is quite visible but it doesn't loom over the landscape. Since it is white, it looks elegant, not ugly. Indeed, if I didn't use a good camera with a powerful lens, it would be nearly invisible.

Here is the telephoto shot, still, the windmill is dwarfed by its setting.

This is the Jiminy Peak Moose mascot.

Here, in the 'village' at the base of the mountain is the Energy Center where visitors can learn all about wind energy and other vital ecological matters. I am a big believer in rewarding businesses who try hard to do the right thing. And I have been a big supporter of wind energy since the early 1970's.

Riding the power of undersea waves

Back and forth, back and forth. That's the idea behind WaveRoller.

The company, based in Espoo, Finland, says it has devised a way to generate electricity from waves without buoys or other floating devices, the mainstay of other wave power companies.

Instead, the company wants to plant oscillating fiberglass/steel plates on the sea bed. Waves rolling in push over the plates, which rebound after the wave passes to only be knocked down by another wave. The back-and-forth motion of the plates drives a piston and creates hydraulic pressure. The pressure ultimately gets fed to a turbine to generate electricity.

Human ingenuity can solve many problems. Of course, one of the biggest problems that can't be solved is our limitless need to live an easy life. When I was a child living in Death Valley, for example, few people had air conditioners. We used 'swamp boxes' which were actually quite good in the 0% humidity. When my granddaddy crossed Death Valley on a dare in one of California's first automobiles over 100 years ago, he had no air conditioners, no heaters, nothing in his primitive vehicle. When my great granddaddy wrote in the Cavalry across the Wild West, he lived out in the open, got saddle sores and my great grandmother lived in an adobe house and did all her cooking outside in a pavilion due to the desert heat! And she walked about Old Tucson using an umbrella to keep the sun off. And did this while wearing corsets!

The desire for a temperate environment at all times is very energy-intensive. On top of this, we want odd environments, not merely temperate. This is why the Arabs have built a huge ski resort in one of the hottest deserts on earth. Or huge stadiums in the US where games can be played in summer on an air conditioned field. If we have more energy or if it is cheap, we use it for the most bizarre purposes. This process is endless and open-ended. Like with debt creation, its only limit is infinity or when the system crashes.

This utilization of wave energy is quite smart. There are some problems, all of them being produced by Mother Nature. Namely, tiny sea creatures view these things as wonderful places to live. So very swiftly, living things will totally encrust these wave energy machines. Keeping them clean will be a huge challenge. All ships have to deal with this. Whales have to deal with this. The power plants that are feeding energy to the Wild West such as Hoover Dam, has to constantly battle tiny water creatures who love to grow in the plumbing systems, for example.

All energy systems have downsides. Some are worse than others. This wave energy system is pretty much benign compared to say, nuclear power or damming rivers. I hope this is developed further.

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Iranian Coach Runs Over US Highway Robbers

April 30, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

As usual, the US and its G7 partners in crime are agitating for more war with Iran. The US stock market and the banking systems are all recovering thanks to the yen losing value and the Japanese Carry Trade resuming. But Iran scores some important coups! The new energy deal with India, for example. Russia is edging closer to openly supporting Iran's nuclear power systems again. The coalition to enslave the Iranian people like the Iraqi people, is stumbling. So the US spends many billions of debt dollars to send a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf to menace Iran with nuclear weapons. Iran's response is to laugh in our faces. And Asia notes yet again, the US has lost considerable face. Time to resume the hollowing out of the US industrial base. Give the dumb Americans more loans.

India: Engaging Iran very helpful

Indian foreign secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon, says New Delhi believes that engaging Iran is far more productive than isolating the country.

"From our point of view, the more engagement is at work, the more Iran becomes a factor of stability in the region," Menon told reporters after meeting with President Ahmadinejad who arrived in New Delhi on Tuesday on the last leg of his trip to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, AP reported.

President Ahmadinejad also held talks with the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pratibha Patil during his five-hour visit to New Delhi.

Despite a strong US opposition, the $7 billion gas pipeline project that would transfer Iran's natural gas to Pakistan and India topped the agenda of the high profile talks.

Apart from the pipeline, the two sides agreed to try to triple trade ties to reach a $10 billion annually; however, they did not set a timeframe.

Iran is moving ahead in its quest to conquer US/UK/Israeli power by selling power. And they will succeed. The only way the empire can stop the Iranians is to blow up all of Iran in a brutal excess of imperial rage. This will start WWIII, of course. So it should be avoided. But note that WWI and WWII were both deliberately started by imperialists who figured they had nothing to lose by going to war. All imperial powers claim they are protecting themselves when the go forth to conquer other nations in order to steal resources. The US is no different. Of course, no one running for President or any public figures are allowed to say this. We are always defending ourselves and this bizarre notion of 'democracy' that is closer to Imperial Rome under Caligula rather than 'will of the people' type stuff.

Iran's democracy is hardly much different from our own. The ruling elites control the media and the public discourse. Anyone who talks differently is frozen out, arrested or killed off in some fashion. Just like here. This is a concept the US can't and of course, will not understand. Anyone running to be emperor has to pretend to be outraged if this is openly discussed. Just like outright treason is ignored and not discussed so long as it strengthens the empire while destroying 'democracy'.

As I predicted, India will triangulate. India has no stomach for punishing Iran for wanting nukes just like India, China, Russia, England, France, China, Pakistan and of course, the very big creators, the US. India is happy to have the Sunni Muslims neutralized by the Shi'as. This creates a balance of power. After all, the Shi'as don't attack India, the Sunnis attack India! The Japanese buy a lot of Iranian energy but they also need to please the US so they are cutting back and this is hurting their economy. I don't know how long they will last if both China and India write big contracts with Iran while Japan is stuck buying more expensive oil from Sunni Muslims. Switzerland is already defying everyone and buying Iranian oil! This whole exercise in isolating Iran is rapidly collapsing due to high energy prices.

Iran Kitty will laugh all the way to the bank on this one.

Iran holds key to India's energy insecurity

In the rapidly intensifying international energy game, Iran holds a master key to the most staggering roadblock to India's economic growth - energy insecurity. With the issue of energy cooperation expected to dominate talks on Tuesday between visiting Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his hosts in New Delhi, a new chapter in India-Iran relations is on the horizon that will likely bring the two countries closer together on a long-term basis.

While not an official state visit, since it is Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's turn to visit Iran, Ahmadinejad's brief yet significant stopover after his trips to Sri Lanka and Pakistan has been widely interpreted by the global media as a landmark development that will usher in a new era of energy cooperation between energy-starving India and energy-rich Iran, which is also a suitable conduit for the third-country supply of energy to India, given Iran's expanding oil and gas connections to landlocked Central Asian nations.

With oil prices skyrocketing, India's thirst for cheaper imported gas has acquired a greater urgency than ever before, considering what the Hindustan Times has termed as the growing "supply-demand mismatch" reflected in the recent news that "as against an overall requirement of 77 million standard cubic meters per day (mmscmd) of gas between April 2007 and January 2008, only 37 mmscmd was supplied".

The Oil Ministry in Tehran posits India as the fourth-largest consumer of Iran's energy, while India, which imports more than two thirds of its oil needs, anticipates this figure to increase by up to 90% by 2030 following a 1997 parliamentary document "Hydro-carbon Prospects 2025". New Delhi therefore has no alternative, whatever the side-effects with respect to its relations with the US, but to pursue a comprehensive energy cooperation with Iran.

And this article makes it very clear, the end is neigh. India is now throwing its strategic relationship with the US under the nuclear bus and driving over us. This is because the US is weak, not strong. The US is dying, not growing. The US is in debt, not a creditor nation. We deindustrialized and also sent over many white collar jobs to India. Now India will repay us by telling us to go to hell. Which is perfectly OK. This is how the real world operates. The US foolishly thought, if we gave away all our jobs and industries, our 'allies' would be grateful and love us forever. HAHAHA. No one loves a dumb chump. But then, the US public is told over and over, it is better to have our leaders be dumb idiots because they are someone we can drink a beer with and have fun. Smart people are stupid! Since we believe this ridiculous notion, we get to be taken to the cleaners by nearly every country on earth. No one can claim the rulers of China, Russia or Iran are stupid.

"Hostile" Iran Sparks U.S. Attack Plan

A second American aircraft carrier steamed into the Persian Gulf on Tuesday as the Pentagon ordered military commanders to develop new options for attacking Iran. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the planning is being driven by what one officer called the "increasingly hostile role" Iran is playing in Iraq - smuggling weapons into Iraq for use against American troops.

"What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq," said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

U.S. officials are also concerned by Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf as well as Iran's still growing nuclear program. New pictures of Iran's uranium enrichment plant show the country's defense minister in the background, as if deliberately mocking a recent finding by U.S. intelligence that Iran had ceased work on a nuclear weapon.

No attacks are imminent and the last thing the Pentagon wants is another war, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen has warned Iran not to assume the U.S. military can't strike.

We lost the economic war. Now, we plan to lose the military war. No nation sinking into debt ever wins wars. England tried this twice and each time, had to be bailed out by the US. Even so, the British refuse to this day to admit they failed in both wars. They went from being a rich empire to being a poor appendage and the leaders of England all go to the US to beg for money. And the US goes to China and Japan to beg for more money so we can support the dying embers of the British Empire. Talk about stupid.

Every few weeks, the US threatens Iran. Whenever there is news of Iran making money, we threaten them. We are like highway men holding up a coach. Only the Iranian coach runs right over us. So we move down the road and try again. They run over us again. HAHAHA. We can't win. Rob Roy, we ain't. And this is because we are going bankrupt. This odd idea is still not on the horizon. Only Ron Paul dares to even mention this harsh fact. One that the Iranians track very closely. And they read my blog. So they are very aware of their position of power here. They also know, if they don't have good allies, they are toast. So they work very hard on tearing down the G7 war alliance.

Russia to examine Iran's nuclear ideas

Iran's official IRNA news agency, citing Sobolev, said that "Russia was ready to examine Iran's proposed package and to find a way out of this existing deadlock."

"Russia supports the Islamic Republic of Iran's right in using peaceful nuclear energy," it quoted Sobolev as saying. He is expected to meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki before leaving Iran on Wednesday.

Russia blows hot and cold but in the Kremlin, it is an icebox. The Russians periodically pretend to be on board in the US/EU attempt at locking the Iranians into a colonialist relationship with the G7 empire. But behind the scenes, Russia is preparing us for failure. Russia is one of the few nations with a considerable sovereign wealth fund from energy profits. They know that China, Japan, India and all of Europe need Russia. All nations need the US as the destination for all one-way trade. But once we go bankrupt, we vanish. There will be no reason to support us. Unless we sell our military as mercenaries for other empires. And this has already begun. This is why the US is nearly totally unprotected. The ships in the Persian Gulf are not protecting the US. Not even slightly. No one flew a plane from the Gulf to Manhattan and destroyed the Twin Towers. The flights came from the US. And we have no real National Guard anymore. They, too, are over there, not here.

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Ron Paul People Drive Out McCain Delegates In Las Vegas

Las Vegas GOP Convention collapses

April 29, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Despite a near-total media black out, Ron Paul is still running for President and his very active followers are kicking ass. The McCain run to be top Emperor depends on the GOP leadership suppressing young, active voters who are now rapidly filling with rage against the political machine. This is NOT how one builds a future power base! Then there is Obama: I said a month ago, ever since he sponsored the bill to go after offshore pirate coves used by most of our political class to avoid taxes, the media would hammer him to death. And so they are, of course. That, and the fact that Zionists fear him means he will be harassed and harried until he dies or disappears. They won't let him anywhere near the White House, neither the money people or the war mongers.

Chaos over Paul cuts short gathering

After a super-majority of Ron Paul supporters captured control of the Republican state convention Saturday, state party officials abruptly canceled the event without electing delegates to the national convention.

Early in the day, state delegates supporting Paul's continued pursuit of the Republican nomination voted through a rules change that forced the state party to abandon its preset ballot of potential national convention delegates and open up the race to the rest of the state delegates.

The vote followed a rousing speech by Paul of Texas, who said his presidential campaign will continue as long as he has support.

But as the convention continued into the evening, chairman Bob Beers said the party's contract for the hall at the Peppermill Resort Casino had expired and the event would be rescheduled.

"Due to a rules change that left us on an overtime basis, we will recess the convention until a date that we are going to announce next week," Beers told a shocked crowd, which stood silent for a few seconds before erupting in boos.

Seriously, after posting the story about how the Texas GOP slammed the doors in the faces of the Ron Paul people, now this? Incredible. The GOP has relied upon conning the religious fanatics and the people scared that their sons might kiss their neighbor's sons, they got this long, free ride whereby they could happily loot this nation, destroy our industrial base and sell us to foreign powers while shoving us very deeply into debt and handing over all our security to dual citizens pledged to protect Israel first. Well, this is crashing, big time. The religious fanatics who fear sex are learning that they are cattle being led to the slaughter house. The he-man truckers who thought they would have paradise are discovering that the GOP is paring their INCOMES.

The people who are racist get to see Condi Rice walk all over them and they have to bow and scrape before her. So many happy dreams of white privilege and Christian domination up in flames! Instead, the religious supporters of the GOP and the Jim Crow fanatics have all been shoved to the back of the old bus and illegal aliens moved to the front along with foreigners seeking to take over our industrial base, etc. Obama correctly understands, these folk are bitter! Very bitter! Their dreams of making 15 year olds bear babies against their will if raped have faded. No 'anti-abortion' amendments. No Supreme Court rulings rolling back the civil rights of women. Instead, the GOP in Texas has a bunch of Mormons arrested for making teenagers pregnant. True, they weren't locked in a cellar like that poor girl in Austria, for 28 years. But they are only one step above that.

The madness that is gripping our nation this silly season is striking: all our candidates EXCEPT FOR THE INVISIBLE RON PAUL are pro-war. All want to kill Iranians for no good reason. Iran, on the other hand, is busy forging many deals this month. Today, Iran is inking a big, fat deal with India and this means the stupid US/UK/EU blockage of Iran has collapsed and China will rush in to join the pro-Iran parade or India will win this geo-political game. Note that India has nukes. And the US didn't bomb, bomb, bomb India.

I went to You Tube for videos of the fiasco in Las Vegas. It is amusing to watch these. Ron Paul blew John McCain out of the water just as assuredly as the Vietnamese shot down his jet when he was bombing them.

I have no sympathy for McCain's war record. This is because McGovern ran for President and he was a war hero and flew bombing raids in WWII and the media made him out to be a coward just because he knew war was hell and was bankrupting America. I worked hard to see him win and watched in fury as the media attacked him nonstop while making that lunatic, Nixon, who fought WWII with a pen far behind the lines, as some sort of brave warrior who feared no commies. So we lost the war in Vietnam, Nixon ran off to China of all places and KISSED Mao! Just like, after Saudis attacked us on 9/11, Bush ran off and kissed the corrupt, fat king of Saudi Arabia. Treason=great war leaders, I suppose.

Both Nixon and Bush have bankrupted America. Thanks to their fruitless warmongering. And here we are: the choice is McCain, a huge warmongering nut, Hillary who talks blithely about nuking 30 million civilians in Iran and Obama, a man who is too 'cool' and thus, no war monger who will rush to kill, kill, kill and kill some more in the name of disarmament, democracy and looting expeditions. Then there is Ron Paul:

Ron Paul won't support any war mongers!

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has not received much attention from the media since Senator John McCain became the presumptive nominee.

However, Paul is far from giving up on his campaign. He recently received 16% of the vote in the Pennsylvania GOP primary, and his followers brought a Nevada state convention to a standstill over the weekend.

Paul appeared on CNN’s American Morning on Monday to talk about the campaign and his new book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto.” He also suggested he “probably” won’t be campaigning for John McCain.

“We need to change,” Paul told CNN’s John Roberts. “The big question is, which way are we going? … There’s not much difference between the three [candidates].”

“Do you have any interest in campaigning for John McCain?” Roberts asked

“Probably not,” replied Paul. “Not unless he changes his tune — like bring the troops home.”

Hooray. I do pray that Ron keeps in the race and keeps bringing up this obvious fact! Congress is about to vote ANOTHER $100+billion that we do NOT have so we can bring more Americans home in body bags or bring troops home to commit suicide or live in filthy barracks filled with sewage as we saw on CNN the other day when an enraged father filmed the filthy conditions he son returned to...talk about insane. Those barracks and hospitals should be gold-plated for what we spend! But they are not. They are SLUMS. And returning soldiers discover their education benefits are not beneficial, the government is CHEATING THEM. Nickle and dollaring them to death.

Instead of the wonderful GI Bill education, they are given LOANS at high interest rates. So today, these soldiers demonstrated in DC. Not that the media cared. The media is all hog wild over preachers. Attacking Obama seems to be the only activity they are interested in right now. The main and biggest war mongers, McCain and Clinton, both want to give us cheap gas by eliminating the feeble, small taxes on gas. Obama says this won't fix anything and will simply put either the government even deeper in the red and more at the mercy of China and the oil pumping nations that buy our debts and it will also destroy our highways which are funded with these taxes! But irrational violence and stupid economics is the main frame of the two top candidates for Caligula's Nero [When Caligula was assassinated, Nero inherited the throne of Rome].

Here is Ron's speaking schedule for the next month:

Apr 29
Ron Paul interview on "Night Talk" with Mike Schneider
"Night Talk" on Bloomberg TV

10:00 PM ET
May 02
1. Ron Paul Freedom Rally at UNC-Chapel Hill
UNC-Chapel Hill's Carroll Hall

3:30 - 5:00 PM ET
2. Ron Paul Freedom Rally at Duke
Duke's Reynolds Theater (in the Bryan Student Center)

6:30 - 8:00 PM ET
May 16
Ron Paul Freedom Rally in Bowling Green
Bowling Green High School Basketball Arena, 1801 Rockingham Lane, Bowling Green, KY 42104

2:00 PM CT
Jun 20
Speech at Montana State Convention
Hilton Garden Inn, Missoula, Montana
7:00 PM MT

He still has over $4 million and is going to spend it making speeches and raising a ruckus. Maybe, just maybe, the media might notice him. HAHAHA. Not. He is in the Cone of Silence. But we can watch him online. And trust me, his calls to stop the Federal Reserve and the wars are things the media does not want us to talk about or listen to. Not at all.

Here is a pro-McCain blog launched by an operative:

Ron Paul got approximately 8% of the vote nationwide. He did better in the caucuses because his supporters were organized. His delegate count varies between 14 and 17 depending on where you look. Here’s one place: CNN Election Results. Based on this underwhelming performance Ron Paul supporters have concocted a plan to take over the Republican Convention and make Ron Paul the nominee. This is the Ron Paul version of Democracy: Ignore 92% of the voters. Here is the Ron Paul Disruption Plan. And here’s what they did in the Nevada Republican Convention.

It’s obvious that the Ron Paul organization is a top-down well-organized machine. In the caucuses the Ron Paul supporters were told to stand up and say, “He touched my heart,” and so they all did. The ground troops do what they are told. They report back to the mothership as instructed. They are disciplined in ways no other campaign is. Online they have been very successful, managing to stuff every poll on the Internet. Looking at only Internet results you would be convinced Ron Paul was already elected.

This guy runs a host of pro-McCain/Zionist blogs and pretends they are an upwelling from many different states but all of them are by himself. Frankly, I detect little online support for McCain. He limps along, visibly falling apart. I think the operatives in the media are getting worried. So they are all piling onto the Clinton band wagon. She is now a total Zionist, her hubby is totally corrupt and owned by and controlled by tax cheating pirates and has decided to become one of them. Hillary is pro-free trade and thus, a traitor. So the foreign owners of our media are pleased with that! And she will start WWIII for Israel. A big plus with these same media owners.

The true religious horror here is WWIII: both McCain and Clinton have religious advisors who endorse and work for creating the Apocalypse. Both will answer the 3am phone call with, 'Yes! Let's drop nukes now!' And so both should be hospitalized in a mental ward. The world cannot have a very destabilized US run by a crazed war nut. But look! As the US public turns against the war and demands something be done about a collapsing economy, the ONLY candidates left standing intact are the worst possible ones! This isn't accidental.

Obama denounces former pastor

The U.S. senator from Illinois and contender for the Democratic presidential nomination made his critical comments Tuesday in North Carolina, where he is campaigning ahead of a primary next week. Obama's remarks came a day after his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., defiantly defended his controversial views that the United States commits terrorism, is still racist, and is in part to blame for the terrorist attacks it has suffered.

"His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church," Obama said. "They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs."

Obama also blasted Wright's paean to Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam. "When he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States' wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses," Obama said. "They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that's what I’m doing very clearly a
nd unequivocally here today."

Here is a video of Obama playing basketball.
At least he is allowed to be semi-human here. The yapping dogs who snap and growl nonstop from fucked up Fox TV stations to the irritable people at the Daily Kos prison farm [they tattle on each other more than school children with a ruler-swinging teacher!] all are turning on poor Obama for this or that or another thing. Some of Ron Paul's supporters attacked him when he refused to fall into the '9/11 Truthers' fruitcake belief systems but he seems to have bounced back since then and roars onwards, voters still turning out for him. This shows great faith and reasonableness in the face of media hostility and open hatred.

The Obama supporters should look to them for a lesson in life: no one, not even and especially not even human gods are perfect. They all do stupid things, have problems and slip up. What fixes this are the followers not losing sight of the important things.

CNN Anderson Cooper:

Much has been said about the role that racism may play in the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election.

But what has been largely ignored is the way that media pundits, by virtue of the language they use, the questions they ask, and the way they frame issues, often reinforce racial division, and make it harder for us to examine race issues honestly.

So consider the way the media has been pushing the question, “Can Obama win working class voters?” Or, “Why is Obama having trouble connecting with working class voters?” Both questions ignore that Obama doesn’t have a working class problem—large percentages of the black folks who are turning out to support him at rates of 90% are indeed working class—but rather, a white working class problem.

By implicitly equating “working class” with white, the media reinforces the notion of “hard-working,” average (i.e. normal) folks as white. This then leaves blacks to be viewed either as the decidedly non-working and dreaded “underclass,” or the elitist types that Hillary Clinton wants people to envision when they think of Senator Obama. Either of these images can reinforce racism, either by stoking white fear of the former or resentment toward the latter.

If one is going to support any candidate, one has to do this whole heartedly. Instead, people are jerked around by the jerks in the media and left filled with doubts. We no longer have a lot of choices, thank you! We have exactly 4 choices: Ron Paul, McCain, Hillary Clinton and Obama. Take yer pick. And stick to it. Just remember: the media HIDES A LOT OF STUFF. ALL THE TIME. I have spent my long life uncovering stuff and then trying to get it on the air. And trust me, the media pulls rabbits out of their damn hats whenever the owners demand this and elephants in rooms are studiously ignored even if they stomp on the furniture and kill people. Terrible, important issues are ignored, crimes are covered up and whole mountains of dirt are swept under the rug while tiny flaws are examined under microscopes if the media owners want to shove us around.

And lord knows! They are the dictators of America along with the money guys who buy up all our politicians. And they HATE anyone who is 'free' like Ron Paul and even Obama, sort of, to a lesser degree! So if none of the war mongers are good, vote for Ron Paul! I hope he goes third party. Someone has to do this! Please!

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Farming Is All About Shoveling Shit

April 29, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The NYT has a story about a new goofy TV 'reality' show. In it, a bunch of actresses, fashion models and assorted others compete to see who some fool of a farmer wants to date. Of course, this is all empty publicity. No actress or fashion model will want to shovel shit for the rest of her life, that is certain. Indeed, it is hard to find women willing to break fingernails, much less legs, shoving cattle around or dealing with blizzards and buzzards. Since I live in the country, it is time yet again to discuss the American industrial farm and why it is having problems in the reproductive sector.

Farmer, Lonely, Holds Auditions

When Matt Neustadt, the Missouri farmer at the center of the CW network’s new reality show, “Farmer Wants a Wife,” drives his tractor and trailer down Hollywood Boulevard here on Tuesday morning, he will be aiming to do more than simply promote the American version of what is a worldwide television hit.
*snip*
As a group, the Neustadt family also received more than $693,000 in federal farm subsidies from 1995 through 2006, according to Agriculture Department records compiled by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington nonprofit research organization. That includes more than $78,000 paid to Mr. Neustadt himself since 1998, in the form of disaster subsidies and commodity payments.

Next to the military/industrial complex and the spy network, no one is more socialist than the US farmer. These same people nearly uniformly vote for the GOP and yell about welfare cheats and leeches off the government. But hark! In today's news is this story:

Bush Presses Congress on Economy

Seeking to ease growing concerns about the weakening economy, President Bush on Tuesday called on Congress, with whom he has battled all year, to introduce broad new measures that would lower food and energy prices, stem the mortgage crisis and reduce what he called lavish subsidies to farmers.

Looks like the GOP is ditching the ditch digging farmers and kissing up to the offshore pirates and corporate raiders of Wall Street. Perhaps the farmers will figure out they have been double crossed. Even better, if they figure out that they are, in many cases, Welfare Queens, most of their present difficulties might be easier to handle. For they must cease their bizarre double standards and utter hypocrisy and embrace socialism with both arms and give Karl Marx a big kiss. Smooch.

Farmers, like suburban home buyers and our government, loves cheap debt, too. If money floods into the land or housing markets, farmers make a killing. How many farms were sold so they could be converted into suburban housing this last 5 years? 10,000? 25,000? I know of many a farmer out here who paid for the farm not by dying but by selling multi-generational farms to real estate developers!

Years ago, I warned about paving over our best farmland near the big cities and turning it into an asphalt/toxic lawn wasteland. I called good river soil, 'Black Gold' just like oil it 'Black Gold.' As the world's population grows, the best farmlands on earth are being devoured not just in the US but in Europe, in Asia, all over the planet. For always, big cities grow fastest where the best farmlands are. Even in deserts, this is true. When I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the 1950's, it was a farming community fed by irrigation. Tucson was a farming community, too.

Today, there is no more farming. There are golf courses and lots and lots of houses. But no farms. All over the West, farms are going fallow or dying from lack of water as all of it is diverted to leisure, swimming pools, lawns, and flush toilets. To my unending rage. I figured out, back when we had an outhouse in Arizona, flush toilets were ridiculous. True, black widows and scorpions moved into out houses but it builds character to learn how to deal with them. I got really good at pinning them down with a knife and then watching them try to get free before cutting them in two. But then, I played with rattlers and Gila Monsters, too. As well as my dear bobcat, Bob [hey, I was only 7 years old when I adopted him!] or my pet skunk, Spotty [I was 5 when I got her]. The messiness of living in the country can't be described easily.

Back to the farmer's wife: an unenviable job. Most farms limp along due to high land taxes, etc. Rather than have government welfare payments, I would far, far rather have the government pay our land taxes. I pay over $6,000 a year for just 23 acres! OUCH. This is for school and fire, as well as county taxes to pay for medical care and policing of the nearby cities! OUCH. Meanwhile, my sheriff is myself and my gun. If I need help, it takes over an hour for it to show up, that is, if it is not WINTER. Then, it doesn't show. Period.

I grew up using a gun and being the sheriff. My first citizen's arrest was done at the age of 15 years when I held three guys at gun point and made them shake a tad. Heh. 'Moving target practice can be fun! I love doing it. Like playing kick the can...' Yes. Shooting at a can repeatedly as it jumps and rolls is good practice. When I lived in New York City, these old skills were very useful.

Back to the farm business: if you have large mammals, you have to know how to use a gun and kill things. Like coyotes or dogs. Not to mention foxes and woodchucks. Even rabbits. Farming is all about killing things. And then gutting them, turning their fur or hide into useable objects, etc. A rather bloody business. Then there is birthing: more blood. I have had to reach inside of large mammal mommies to rearrange the legs and heads of twins or triplets so I can pull them out, one by one. With cows and horses, if it is a rump delivery and the baby is stuck, we have to reach inside, and loop a strap around the baby and using chains, pull him or her out. Sometimes I would hold an ewe between my legs while my husband would deliver the babies.

Romantic ideas of the idyll of farming fades fast when confronted with the bloody side. Putting down a beloved ox who has broken a hip falling on an ice sheet brings tears but one must hold the gun steady next to the temple and pull that trigger. Over the years, one can grow fond of these fellow farm hands.

But most farmers today, outside of nuts like myself or religious believers who don't use machines, they all use modern machines like tractors and lifts and hoists, etc. So mechanical skills are required. I run a tractor and backhoe side business which is now slowing down due to old age, arthritis being the bane of all farmers. To do this, one has to know how to run engines, how to fix things that inevitably break, how to deal with tires blowing, etc. No easy matter! A saline-filled rear tire weighs literally half a ton or more! The dangers of industrial accidents to farmers is great, a very dangerous occupation. And since one has to be a builder as well [as I am] then falling off of tall barn roofs, etc is another danger. But the freedom of being one's own boss is great! I do my best thinking while doing farm chores, for example. Thanks to the net, I can come inside and cyber socialize.

“They have a desire to go back to a more authentic life,” she said. “These women are tired of the dating life in the city. But it’s hard to find someone who is willing to commit.”

The 10 women who are competing for Mr. Neustadt’s hand include several aspiring actors or entertainers, members of professions that might be hard to nurture in Portage Des Sioux. But most profess to be more interested in finding a soul mate than in being on television — which is why, of course, they signed up for a reality dating program.

Mr. Neustadt would not say if he was still courting the woman who won the competition, which was taped a year ago. Though some of the women from the show will participate in local publicity events in the next week, the women riding down Hollywood Boulevard on Mr. Neustadt’s tractor will be models, according to Paul McGuire, a CW spokesman.

This is so stupid. They are hiring a bunch of vapid fashion models who then pretend they will be looking to become shit shovelers? Gads. The entire premise of these shows is rather stupid. Farm women seldom come due to sexual attraction or seeking an easy life. It ain't easy. Ever run out into a blizzard in a night dress with a gun, yelling, 'You goddam bear! Git out of the hives!' Or run from the bees when harvesting the honey? Once, a bee found out that I took their honey to the kitchen and within minutes the entire hive was probing my screens trying to find an entry! I had to go out the front door in disguise or they would recognize my face and harry me for a few weeks. As it was, they were in a foul mood and would buzz me with an annoying BZZZZT.

Then there are storms: tornadoes, lightning, snow: you are the mailman who has to go out anyway. I greatly dislike lightning. When I have to run out and yell to the animals to 'Come to me NOW!' with lightning lighting up the horizon, believe me, my heart is in my throat. Once, the oxen refused to come in and a bolt nearly killed them. After that, they always responded when I called them. Once, a lightning bolt got into Sparky's stall! He gave quite a jump. I lay on the floor until it was safe and then ran in and had to put out the fire.

Lightning is ALL OVER ALL FARMS. More than one farmer has been felled by lightning. It is one of our collective fears. And don't even think about trying to be out on a tractor on a flat field when hearing lighting that is even 5 miles away! Ever see a tractor moving at more than a crawl? Look for lightning nearby.

Here is some pictures of farm life here: Click on images to enlarge.

Mucking stalls: first, you have to get the horse to go outside and not come in and poke around. They love to poke around. So do the dogs.

I have happy hens who have a social life, an indoor-indoor house, an indoor run and an outdoor run. They lay beautiful eggs that are very golden and very delicious. Most eggs people buy in stores are from factory farms, the ugly side of farming. These efficient farms brutalize living creatures and treat them like things. I find this unbearably cruel. Don't patronize them. And nearly all store eggs are from unhappy hens and this shows. The yolks are pale yellow and the whites are runny. Here is a recent story from England:

How do you like your eggs? Read our undercover investigation into Britain's battery farming

Undercover investigators have filmed the ugly reality of egg production at a battery chicken farm supplying the biggest egg producer in the UK.

Viewed from the air, Holsworthy Beacon Farm takes its place in an idyllic rural scene. But in its sheds, chickens are crammed five to a cage, stacked in rows from floor to ceiling.

I clicked on the movie and got instantly enraged. How dare anyone do this to any animal? Brutal farming methods make money just like any form of slavery or ruthless exploitation of nature. But it is bad for everyone. In the end, it fails as diseases and other stresses destroy everything including us.

Here is an Eastern Painted Box Turtle I picked up the other day down by the river.

I hope this guy in the TV show gets a decent wife. But I would suggest he go hunting where there is game, not Hollywood. It is obvious, he is really not all that serious about his chore. He just wants to have fun. And that is OK. But his farm will be sold when he dies and he won't have any children to pass it on to. Perhaps some peasant from across the seas or Mexico will take over. For the most important crop one can raise is the young'uns. The children who should inherit the earth.

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Japan Carry Trade Cattle Cars Haul Off US Manufacturing Cows

April 29, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is official: the stupid Japanese Carry Trade is again, pumping endless Funny Money™ back into global monetary markets. This is fueling global inflation. The US is happy because this means super-cheap lending and the Fed will drop rates to 2% even as truckers mob Washington, DC, howling with rage over the high cost of diesel fuel. China and Russia are raising interest rates and blocking the flow of this toxic money. But the US is welcoming this poison with open arms. Stocks are going up! We will be richer! Only we are cowboys who are being turned into cows being herded into cattle cars, destined for dismemberment. Time to understand today's headlines. The status quo is back and will kill us.

Here are two important headlines: Euro Rises Against U.S. Dollar, Snaps Three Days of Declines , Mars, With Buffett, to Buy Wrigley for $23 Billion and Dollar Trades Near 2-Month High Against Yen Before Fed Meeting Way back last summer I noted that the sudden and not so mysterious crash in global liquidity had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a bunch of US homeowners were unable to pay back recent loans that were less than a year old. I even said, 'Everyone knew that 12% of the loans due would crash. This can't be why GLOBAL banks collapsed so suddenly after 7/17/7.'

For the break from 'Making lots of loans to every pirate on earth' to 'Oh no! Liquidity has VANISHED!' was day and night. It was a knife cutting off lending with a crash! Many of us bears were waiting for the Basel II Accords to kick in and revalue declining ABX He and other 'instruments.' But this was in the future. The sudden end to the wild bull stock markets and easy Funny Money™ lending coincided with only one major economic event: the sudden cessation of the Japanese Carry Trade! I correctly called this one. This end was very sudden and catastrophic because of a meeting the G7 had. This meeting featured Japan, the country with the planet's lowest interest rates, one of the top manufacturing powers on earth, egged the other G7 nations into attacking China, demanding China revalue their own currency to balance world trade.

China rightfully said, 'Japan has to do the same.' Japan refused. So China declared a brief currency war with Japan. Instantly, Iran demanded all their oil be paid in yen, not dollars. This surprised everyone but me. I expected this. Soon, other nations doing business with Japan demanded the same. The yen suddenly began to climb against the dollar. The bankers howled with rage. I rightfully pointed out that the source of nearly all global money creation was in JAPAN, not the US and was NOT due to the US trade deficit but due to Japan's FAKE interest rate!

This is very simple: all commodities in the last 3 years have been rising rapidly and are now in hyperinflation due to Japan being able, up until January, to hide this inflation from Japan through the cruel and crude method of squeezing wages of the workers. No matter how fast oil rose vis a vis the yen and it is worse than in America, this didn't show up in the statistics for 'inflation' due to Japan pulling the same ugly trick the US government pulls: neither nation counts food or fuel in ANY inflation statistics! So long as 'inflation' is confined to manufactured products, all is well so long as worker's wages sop up all inflation. This kills the working class, of course. But rulers throughout history have tried this. Killing off the peasants, starving the workers, enslaving populations has always been a nifty way to get rich. But it is also amoral, evil and cruel.

Well, China and Japan have been in intense negotiations ever since China broke the Japan Carry Trade. No matter how low the interest rates, if the yen is rising, the carry trade declines. Japan is anxious to have that stupid carry trade status quo because it increases Japanese profits vis a vis the US. China could not allow Japan to grow too strong via bleeding the US dry of all manufacturing jobs or by colonizing the US south and using the pro-slavery states as Japanese quasi-slaves. Oh, by the way, who won WWII? HAHAHA. Gads. Germany is doing the same only with a very, very strong currency!

Well, Japan and China have an 'understanding' now. Hu visited Japan and got his deal. He went home just last week. And now here comes the old status quo back only the yuan is getting stronger and stronger and the yen, weaker and weaker. The Chinese are now going to Japan to buy stuff. China is allowing this because they are now industrialized on the lower levels. They are now concentrating on what we did in the 19th century: manufacturing for CHINA! This is a HUGE global change! They are building cities and manufacturing cars...FOR CHINA! Japan's car market is collapsing due to the dying Japanese worker losing the ability to buy anything except food and a tiny hovel to live in. The Chinese made it clear to me long ago, they admired the US for what we created 100 years earlier and they wanted that, not to be a major export country like Japan, doing this by making Americans comfortable while enslaving the Chinese. They knew that they had to go through the bad stuff to gain the Holy Grail: the Old USA model for self-improvement and industrialization.

We Americans forget that WE are a market. And we should service our own markets and only when there is room for imports, allow these. Instead, we moved offshore, all our industries! And then after we went deep into debt, it moves back in but under the control of alien powers. This is stupid. The Chinese know this and do NOT want this.

So the carry trade is back! This is terrible news for the US. It means even more debt will pour like a poison fountain out of Japan. China has made a deal whereby this does NOT flow to China. The Chinese know that the Japanese are moving their own factories out to China due to inflation in Japan. So they have grim satisfaction that they are on track to rule the planet.

Wall Street Grain Hoarding Brings Farmers, Consumers Near Ruin

As farmers confront mounting costs and riots erupt from Haiti to Egypt over food, Garry Niemeyer is paying the price for Wall Street's speculation in grain markets.

Commodity-index funds control a record 4.51 billion bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans through Chicago Board of Trade futures, equal to half the amount held in U.S. silos on March 1. The holdings jumped 29 percent in the past year as investors bought grain contracts seeking better returns than stocks or bonds. The buying sent crop prices and volatility to records and boosted the cost for growers and processors to manage risk.

Hedge funds muck in down on the farm

Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots as they bet on rising food prices by buying farms.

Billions of dollars are flowing into farmland across the world as investors gorge themselves on vast tracts of Australia, South America and eastern Europe.

"Sell banks, buy cheese," Crispin Odey, manager of London-based hedge fund Odey Asset Management who has started investing in farming companies, said recently.

Here is why we are seeing a sudden upsurge in commodity prices! Gold has, as I warned all the gold bugs, collapsed and is no longer rising much, it bounces back and forth for the time being, while all the Japanese carry trade money flows to commodities. This is enriching the nations producing oil and food as well as mineral wealth. The US government is quite happy with this. After all, none of this shows up in inflation statistics just like in Japan! So we get cheap loans here and can run merrily in the red while the workers sop up all inflation! Whoopee. Only this is killing the US as a market. We soon will be unable to sell to each other if we have no one with any money to buy anything but food and fuel.

Click here for CNN video of independent truckers mobbing Washington, DC, to express rage over very high diesel prices that are more than a dollar higher than gas.

The DC trucker demonstration barely made a blip in the news media stream of propaganda. In the past, if truckers demonstrated, the media lapped it up. But today, since the media owners are nearly uniformly pro-free trade, it makes nearly no news and the dreaded Cone of Silence descends upon this news.

The pirates are going to Japan to get loans so they can plop this ugly red ink onto commodities. They will bid up the necessities of life until the hour the US and Europe move against Japan and shut down the stupid carry trade for good or we have global insurrections and revolutions. Since most of our Roman-imperial Senators and quite a few Representatives all make loot working with or being pirates or are in the pay of pirates, they won't stop this horror. They will rely on the Praetorian Guards to do the dirty work.

Why the Yen Could Leap AT LEAST 21% in the Coming Months

I also explained the carry trade is a technique based on flimsy and flawed assumptions about the future. And that future changed tremendously in July 2007. In short, the real world of irrational and flawed expectations changed the game dramatically for the carry trade.
*snip*
Fast forward to 2007 and look at the Japanese yen carry trade. At the end of 2006, analysts estimated hedge funds and other money managers were borrowing at least US$1 trillion in yen. And this doesn't include the many hundreds of billions of dollars domestic Japanese institutions and retail investors sent offshore for better yield.

Plus, money managers use a lot more leverage now than they did in the1990's.

This is a good read for people who don't understand the finances of international FX markets and the odious Japanese carry trade. But he is wrong about the yen leaping upwards. Japan has made a SECRET deal with China. They, of course, will let us know what this is via the method of us watching our economy collapse under a huge mountain of debt while they pretend to have no idea why this is happening. The US loves cheap debt. We want 0% financing. We can't save a penny and are so far in the red, our equity as well as savings have vanished. This dire situation would fix itself via a small depression like it has throughout history. Only this is being put off to the dim future. Then it will 'reset' via the hideous mechanism of 'total bankrutpcy/utter slavery' method. History is very clear about this. If we let the Japanese put us into such deep debt, we can't escape it except via total collapse, this is TREASON.

Our nation should quit the G7 and go alone. Or better, join China. Then the world's two biggest powers can cooperate in putting down the Japanese carry trade. But instead, we side with Japan. With fatal results. Let's look at more news from last night:

Russian Central Bank Raises Rates by Quarter Point

``This is a step in the right direction,'' Alexander Morozov, chief economist at HSBC Bank in Moscow, said by telephone today. ``Rates must correspond to the state of the economy, mainly inflation.''

The central bank lifted rates by a quarter of a percentage point on Feb. 4 to damp consumer-price growth. Inflation accelerated to an annual 13.3 percent in March, the fastest pace in more than 2 1/2 years, led by food costs.

All the major producing nations are raising interest rates or cutting ties to the dollar. They must do this due to the absolute flood of red ink from the Bank of Japan. These are defensive moves. The red ink is generated by Japan, it flows to England and the US and the pirate coves. It then is used to buy imports for the US/UK empire. The exporting nations then suffer from inflation...EXCEPT FOR JAPAN. An important exception. This allows Japan to keep this flood of red ink going. The other nations have decided to allow this since everyone and I do mean EVERYONE has a trade surplus with the US. The US should shut down this trade via tariffs but we will not. So we die.

Trichet Says Beating Inflation Must Be ECB's Sole Aim

``It's crucial that the Governing Council sets the appropriate monetary policy stance on the basis of no other considerations than the delivery of price stability in the medium term,'' Trichet said at a conference in Vienna today. The bank's current policy stance ``will contribute to achieving our objective,'' he said.

The ECB has held its key rate at a six-year high of 4 percent to contain inflation, which accelerated to 3.6 percent last month, the fastest pace in 16 years. That's helped drive the euro to a record against the dollar, threatening to deepen Europe's economic slowdown and leading to calls from some governments for the ECB to take more account of growth.

Like Russia and all the producer nations, Europe is NOT dropping interest rates and encouraging red ink spending. They are enforcing savings! Another warning to the US that our policies are terrible and dangerous. Europe also has VAT: value added taxes. The US has a very variable and small sales tax base that is purely local. The VAT prevents wild imports. Europe is a PRODUCER entity, the US is a CONSUMER economy. Note who is in decline!

Dollar Slide Drives Budget as Japan Shuns Treasuries

Add another ailment to the U.S. misery index of soaring gasoline and wheat costs and falling home values: a federal deficit that is burgeoning as foreign investors led by the Japanese recoil from the slumping dollar.

The Japanese, who own $586.6 billion, or 12 percent of U.S. government debt, had their worst quarter in Treasuries this decade, losing 7 percent in the first three months of the year as the dollar fell to the lowest since 1995 versus the yen, Merrill Lynch & Co. indexes show. Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Co., Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Co. and Sumitomo Life Insurance Co., three of the nation's four-biggest insurers, would rather accept the world's lowest bond yields in Japan than buy U.S. debt.
*snip*
Japan owns more Treasuries than any other nation. After raising their holdings by $9.2 billion to $620.6 billion between March and July 2007, Japanese investors trimmed that stake by $34 billion through February, the Treasury said April 15.

America relies on foreign investors, who own more than half the U.S. government debt outstanding, to finance a deficit that New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts will expand to a record $500 billion for the year ending Sept. 30, after a $163 billion gap last year.

I noted last summer with a shock, that Japan was SELLING US bonds, not buying. This was and is a huge change. So they are flooding us with Funny Money™ while NOT buying up the debts our government is generating. Yet we continue to patrol Japan's borders and give them power to wield when negotiating with China over who controls Asia, Japan or China. We gain NOTHING from this except more debts due to excessive Pentagon spending. And meanwhile, the US can't even peddle our bonds in Japan anymore. We better figure out who is buying our bonds. For we are seeing a huge tax deficit this year due to the give aways that are making every consumer very happy. Those $1600+ bonus checks are EXPENSIVE. And who, who, who is buying these debts???? A good question. I can't wait to see. Grrr.

Wall Street Journal blog:

After an unprecedented three-month period of fastbreak policy easing and credit market intervention — when the Fed threw half-point and even three-quarter-percentage-point cuts in the fed funds rate at the economy and markets — the cycle appears to be reaching an end. In what must be a pleasant surprise to Bernanke and his FOMC colleagues, Wall Street seems OK with that.

The Federal Open Market Committee is widely expected on Wednesday to reduce the target fed funds rate at which banks lend money to each other, but by only 0.25 percentage point to 2%. Officials have already lowered fed funds by three percentage points since September, including two percentage points over a two-month period between January and March alone.
*snip*
The economy has more or less performed according to script. Though the first quarter may be a bit better than first feared, that appears to be coming at the expense of a slower recovery later in 2008.

The economy's script: 'Let's continue to go deeper into debt, let's increase our consumer spending and kill savings even more and THIS will fix our collapsed banking system!' This script ends with this scene: 'Oh my god! We are bankrupt! We are slaves! We don't rule the earth, foreigners rule US!' The differential between real inflation and the fake interest rates set by our private bankers is a yawning gap now. The pain is spreading. The people slated to die for this are the entire US workforce. One by one, they will be eliminated as 'consumers' and moved over to the 'consumed' side of the ledger. Namely, we will turn from being cowboys to becoming cattle herded into the stockyards.

Fading Fed?

On his Economist’s View blog, Mark Thoma talks about the possibility of the Fed’s power fading if technology allows prices to become more flexible. “I wonder if monetary policy will slowly run out of rigidities to exploit as, one by one, agents who have been hurt by price rigidities use technology or other means to overcome them (and this is also true for other types of market imperfections, e.g. incomplete information). Should we worry that monetary policy may lose effectiveness over time? Not if our models are correct. In fact, this would be desirable. If all prices are perfectly flexible, markets will behave optimally on their own and there would be no need for the Fed to intervene to stabilize the economy.

This is all hogwash. The Fed is losing power to the BANK OF JAPAN. The Fed can't do anything if the Bank of Japan ignores real inflation. Indeed, the entire G7 system is collapsing because both the US and Japan are ignoring real inflation! And the banking system isn't overtaking the Fed, it is COLLAPSING. The banking system based on pirate coves moving Japanese lending around the globe have taken over traditional banking. This is why we must use our Navy to invade these tiny pirate coves and SHUT THEM DOWN. Period. We cannot allow them to flourish. They are destroying our own banking system. The reason this continues is simple: the US has become addicted to easy lending via this method. It fuels our stock market bubbles even more than the Fed fuels them. It fuels the 'consumer economy' in the US and allows us to import huge amounts of foreign goods. It started a tiny bit in 1974 but didn't pick up steam until the Japanese Carry Trade roared into action after the 1998 Asian Currency Crisis.

It is obvious from all the charts. Whether they be 'global money supply growth' or 'US trade deficit statistics' or 'US government overspending': everything takes off steeply after 1998. And so we must accurately figure out what is wrong. And the mass celebration of the restart of the Japanese Carry Trade means that NO ONE IN POWER wants to stop this. They view this as a gravy train, not a cattle car to hell.

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Free Trade Fanatics In US Are Suicidal

April 28, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The utter imbecility of the US media when it comes to 'free trade' is illustrated in Sunday's New York Times editorial. The Times supports bad trade deals as enthusiastically as they support bad wars. Right now, they are fearful a Democratic candidate might stop destroying our domestic economy. So they are warning them both to support 'free trade' or they will be smeared, attacked and destroyed by the US media owners. Who happen to be people who are working day and night to destroy our nation's sovereignty. Also, we get to talk about Japan, China and how the dynamics of international trade and finance are now changing gears. The US is eventually going to fade as the world's most important destination for exports. This will be due to us going bankrupt.

EDITORIAL
Is Trade the Problem?

Americans are angry about trade, and a lot of politicians — especially the two Democratic presidential candidates — are eager to capitalize on it. The country would be far better served by a serious, dare we say fact-based, discussion of what is causing the dislocations in American workers’ lives, how much trade is to blame and what government can do to help.
*snip*
Still, critics’ charges that trade is to blame are misguided. While trade can hurt some workers, most economists believe it plays a modest role compared with other forces in the economy, including advances in technology, the decline of trade unions and mushrooming executive pay. Many Americans benefit from freer trade, whether they are buying cheaper imports or exporting products.

Consider the four million manufacturing jobs lost over the last decade. That number is daunting — and the human pain behind it very real. But in most years the United States generates more jobs than it loses.

Suppose the critics are right and all those workers were displaced by cheap imports and factories moving overseas. Those lost manufacturing jobs — an average of 400,000 a year — amount to less than 3 percent of the 15 million jobs lost each year across the economy. Meanwhile, about 17 million jobs were created annually, which is why the unemployment rate at the end of 2007 was not much different than it was at the end of 1997.

Like all the stupid articles ground out by the editorial staff at the NYT, this one loves to quote statistics like crazy while leaving out the most vital statistics. This is malicious and deliberate. One can speculate why these people are so bent on destroying our nation. But the fact is, this sort of irresponsible editorial is treasonous. Boosting the present trade system while totally ignoring the trade deficit numbers is fraud. It is criminal. And they know perfectly well that the trade deficit is dangerous and has been dangerous for a number of years. And there is a direct connection between this and our present economic collapse.

Just as most media never mention the effects of the Japanese carry trade on inflation and the massive rise in global debt, the media refuses to mention the US trade deficit. Nor do they compare it to anything. It is bigger than nearly all the trade deficits in the world put together! Just as our budget deficits are gigantic. When talking about wars, we must always mention the budget deficits. But these war mongering newspapers don't do that, either. Nor do our politicians. Even if Caligula returns with chests filled with sea shells, the Senate cheers.

Back to the NTY editors: they featured this article on their editorial page. So we must assume that the owners of the NYT thought this was very important. Note how this guy [who is Jewish] won't tell us what jobs have replaced unionized manufacturing jobs. He does admit the pay is worse for most union workers when they either lose jobs OR THE UNION ACCEPTS PAY CUTS. Across the board, union pay has collapsed along with non-union pay. And it is obvious to anyone with a brain that the replacement jobs are mostly 'service' jobs or are connected to finance or real estate, both of which are collapsing.

There is a growing inequity in pay. From 1976 to 2006, the average salary of workers in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution — nearly everybody — rose by only 2.3 percent, to $38,800, tax data show. Among the top 10 percent, average salaries rose 57 percent, to $195,000. While there are still high-paying jobs out there, more and more they are reserved for workers with high levels of education. Between 2000 and 2006, the only workers who saw an increase in take-home pay were those with doctorates or professional degrees.

No matter how hard economists look for trade’s fingerprints on these inequities, they find it plays only a bit part.

So the collapse in wages is due to magic? Or whimsy? Note also how the owner of the Times leaves out any mention of offshoring white collar jobs as well as blue collar jobs. Nor does he mention the importation of workers who have only one function: to drop the wages of native workers. Nor does he talk about illegal aliens dropping wages. During the housing boom, the wages of carpenters and other building trades FELL, not rose! Now, they are all out of work.

As for the jobs for PhDs: these are increasingly hard to get due to the high cost of college education. And again, the editorial makes no mention of the collapse in bank funds for going to school this fall. As our banking system collapses, it is life and death to connect this to the trade deficit. As I keep saying for years, we always have to keep in mind, all the many systems and how they interact. This is extremely important. Yet I almost never see this in the mainstream press. The only media that has a general view that covers all the bases is Bloomberg News which is internationalist. They are the BBC of economics reporting. And one can look to the right side of the web page to see real-time data in commodities, stocks, bonds, etc. A very useful tool.

Now, let's visit our trade rivals and learn how they view trade:

Kyocera Mita To Move Copier, Printer Output To China

OSAKA (Nikkei)--Kyocera Mita Corp. plans to shift most of its domestic production of copiers and printers to China, hoping to reduce manufacturing costs and enhance its competitiveness.

To keep the yen weak and to keep trade advantage and to grow market share, all alien concepts to Americans, the Japanese have to pretend there is no inflation. But of course, inflation is raging in Japan. So now, Japan will have to rapidly deindustrialize. This was not their intention. But economic forces will make this happen no matter what. So Japan now moves even more manufacturing to other Asian nations. As they do this, they strengthen their rivals for dominance and power. They, like the Americans, think that since they employ people, they can control things in other nations. Only they are trying this in communist nations that have fought wars and revolutions and are very, very nationalist. These nations all recognize that the only way they can modernize is to get the capitalist countries to install factories in their worker's 'paradises' and then take over! This is no secret.

Eventually, Japan will be as unindustrial as England and the US. Germany fears this greatly and is fighting it off as much as possible. We shall see if they succeed where the other G7 are failing.

From a 2002 report by Tomoo Marukawa

TOWARDS A STRATEGIC REALIGNMENT OF PRODUCTION NETWORKS:
JAPANESE ELECTRONICS COMPANIES IN CHINA

The figures for other Japanese electronics companies are shown in Table 3. From this table, we can see that all nine companies have more production facilities in China than in any other host country in East Asia. The production sites in China are concentrated in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong, Beijing and Liaoning.

I like showing raw data. If we look at this list from 2002, we can see how the Japanese have had to use China and Southeast Asia as their profit generators. A lot of early China to US trade was really JAPANESE corporations importing from China to the US! Of course, breaking down trade data this way is far beyond the abilities of US economics writers. When I used to waste time arguing on other people's economic blogs, they all told me to go to hell when I talked about Japan. 'Japan is in a depression!' they said. The complexity of world trade means we MUST look at a lot of raw data to really understand what is going on.

Much of the trade commentary from some of the Asian newspapers is very good, by the way. This is because they are quite aware of all this. But we will NEVER see a peep about this matter here in the US. A lot of data is hidden from view or ignored. This is why we are losing the trade wars. And it is a competition akin to war! The Asian players are very aware of this! The 2002 year data from the Japanese government concerning trade with China recognizes that the diplomatic problems created by the Yasukuni Shrine visits by Koizumi hammered Japanese businesses hard. Now, Japan has kissed and made up with China.

To illustrate how intelligent Asian commentary is, concerning trade, here is a typical example from this week:

Japan Affairs:

Jirou Terajima gives an interesting overview of socio-economic statistics for 2007, with a mind to what can be expected in 2008 (Sekai, March edition).

(1) Material (a) and Human Logistics (b)

(a) The proportion of Japan’s total trade composed of imports and exports from/to the United States fell to 16.1% from 17.5% the previous year (2006). Trade with China accounted for 17.7%, exceeding America’s share for the first time since the post-war occupation.
*snip*
(b) Equally striking changes are evident in statistics for flows of people, too. In 2006, the number of Japanese travelling to America totalled 3,670,000, to China 3,770,000 : numbers of Japanese travelling to China exceeded those travelling to America for the first time since the war. In 2007, Americans accounted for 820,000 of foreign visitors to Japan, significantly less than the (over) 3,000,000 who came to Japan from China.
*snip*
(3) What has caused Japan to ’shrivel’?

Under the banner of ‘economic stimulation’, Japan has maintained - for 12 successive years - a ’super-low interest rate policy’, with the bank discount rate breaking the 1% line. The Bank of Japan last year abandoned its zero interest rate , upping it to 0.25% in February last year (2007); it now stands at 0.5%. The Federal Bank of America’s ‘FF’ rate reached a peak of 5.25% in June 2006, but has been cut 4 times since the sub-prime debacle broke in August last year and was set at 3.5% at the end of January this year (2008). So, the interest rate gap between Japan and America has narrowed, but a 3% difference still exists. When you consider that the European rate stands around the 4% level and Australia 6%, the Japanese level is conspicuously low.

I recommend reading the entire article. He talks about currency wars, the problems of having a too-low interest rate in Japan and other issues. I agree with nearly everything he says. China has now displaced the USA as Japan's main destination for trade. This is VERY SIGNIFICANT. Like all historic moments, this one signals the end of an era and the beginning of a new system. One that we will not like. Mr. Terajima notes that the Chinese, who have a stronger and stronger yuan, are flying to Japan to go shopping and get good deals. Just as Australians are doing. He realizes this is due to Japan's bizarre valuation of the yen.

Something has definitely changed. China always kept the yuan in harmony with the US dollar and the Japanese yen. But now they are not. I suspect this is due to the dying dollar driving up global food and fuel prices. China figures they are still exporting a lot of goods so it is OK for the time being to allow Japan and the US to have fake monetary values. This is because the Chinese leaders figure, 'Let them both go broke trying to buy oil'. The only question is, how long will the people of Japan and the US put up with huge food and fuel price inflation? The Chinese are keen about this issue, they know that unhappy peasants equal hell on wheels for any rulers. But the US and Japan's rulers think they can do this with impunity. So we will find out if there really is a breaking point for the troubled but totally passive populations of Japan and the US.

By the way, I found this Japanese government web page that is full of charts, graphs and information. Only the English parts stop in 2005! After this, it is only in Japanese. Alas, I don't read Japanese well. But here is some examples of older data:

Japan External Trade Organization:

1. Imports and Exports Both Reach New Highs

Exports in 2005 rose 5.9% to $598.2 billion and imports jumped 14.1% to $518.6 billion, both new records for the third straight year (Fig. 1). Export growth, however, was significantly slower than its 20.3% pace in 2004, while imports climbed by double digits as oil prices soared. The trade surplus fell $30.8 billion to $79.6 billion, the first decline in four years.

By volume, exports rose 0.8% and imports 2.9%, both increases for the fourth straight year, although at slower paces than in 2004. Export volume in the first half showed the first year-on-year decline since the second quarter of 2002, but growth returned in the second half, aided by the weaker yen. Quarterly year-on-year growth rates were -1.9%, -1.1%, 0.9% and 5.1%, respectively. Import volume climbed 2.9%, down from 7.0% in 2004, but still representing solid growth.

So, in 2005, the agency in charge of tracking exports sounds a warning about oil. Now, food is joining oil as a problem. No wonder this isn't being translated! They don't want us to see how degraded everything is getting. Germany, holding the world's strongest currency, has seen their export profits soar t #1, surpassing Japan easily! But there is trouble lurking. The yen is dropping like a rock against the euro. We are seeing some strange things here. As I said two years ago, the worlds #1 and #2 economies, Japan and the US, cannot both be running the same 'dropping currency' scheme at the same time without deforming world financial and trade markets. We are now seeing a nearly total collapse in half of the world's banking systems due to this madness. And the cure?

Drop the value of the yen, restart the flood of Funny Money™ an increase global inflation! Eventually, if the yen is too weak to buy oil except at $200 a barrel, the Japanese will have to change gears. Already, I might suggest, it is too late for them. They goofed. When harsh reality killed the Japanese carry trade, they should have raised interest rates rapidly. This would have strengthened the yen and China would have had to strengthen the yuan much more and global liquidity would cease its rapid growth. Japan would then be better able to compete with China for commodities. And the US would have to cease its deficit spending on wars and buying stuff we can't afford. This would then right the lopsided global economic ship and we could sail on for a while.

But this would mean ceasing US spending on wars.

Manufacturing hardly seemed to matter in the boom years. But as gloom envelops the City, UK exporters are benefiting from the weak pound and niche marketing. Tim Webb and Heather Stewart report

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has repeatedly said he would like to see a 'rebalancing' of the economy. For too long, consumers have been borrowing to prop up their spending, saving next to nothing, and banking on rising house prices to make the sums add up. And banks have been devising ever more sophisticated funding models to raise the money to lend to them.

But with the days of cheap borrowing over for the foreseeable future, and the housing boom at an end, it will take families a very long time to rebuild their finances. King and his colleagues at the Bank would like to see a band of doughty exporters up and down the country step forward, helping a new, more stable, less spendthrift economy rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the debt-fuelled boom of the past five years.

One such export hero could be Danny Bamping, managing director of Bedlam Puzzles, who has benefited from the fact that consumers have begun to shun toys made very cheaply in countries in the Far East. Mattel, maker of the Barbie doll, had to recall millions of toys - all made in China - because of lead in the paint, and because children were swallowing bits of them. 'The Mattel issue worked in our favour,' admits Bamping, who has appeared on the BBC's Dragon's Den

Britain is happy that they are building industries that sell to Britain? About time! Note that this article is NOT a peon to 'free trade.' It, at least, recognizes that free trade deindustrialized England. And it celebrates not going deeper into debt. But it is very sad to see the cradle of the Industrial revolution celebrating the return of industry in the form of making children's puzzles. Talk about pathetic. And sad. But one has to start somewhere.

For example, a huge growth area for defence manufacturers - one of the few large 'old-style' heavy industries left in the UK - is providing repair and maintenance services for the hardware they sell to the Ministry of Defence. Shipbuilding and services group VT makes just as much money from providing this type of 'lifetime care' as it does from selling the ships in the first place. According to the EEF, more than half of the 3 million people employed in manufacturing now work in areas other than production, such as research and development, sales and support services.

Just like the US, Britain clings to its imperial rags. And note that both bankrupt empires retain only its military portions of the industrial base. And these are bankrupting the two countries! In order to pay for these parasite industries, both the US and Britain have to go to Japan and China for loans. And this overspending is destroying our sovereignty. So the military manufacturing that is supposed to make us stronger is actually destroying us. Note, also, how profitable it is for these companies to have their products degenerate as we use them while aimlessly trolling about hostile Muslim nations or meddling in Asia! And who is buying up all this debt and putting a noose around our necks?

Asia and the oil pumping nations!

The Real Threat To U.S. Manufacturing

Forget the old factory. Soon, hardy workers in overalls punching in at the factory will no longer exist in our global economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total manufacturing employment in the United States was down to 15.3 million in 2007 from 15.6 million in 2006 and 18.9 million in 2000. Where does it all end? Very close to zero.

The majority of jobs that manufacturing unions are trying to preserve will no longer exist. This doesn't mean manufacturing jobs will go away completely. Instead, there will be a different type of job with very few workers on the factory floor painstakingly assembling products. Twenty-first century manufacturing is about an automated, integrated manufacturing process. Manufacturing automation will take over one manual task after another--first in the United States, then China and then eventually everywhere.
*snip*
For supply-chain professionals and manufacturing engineers, decisions about jobs are all part of an equation, and the math often says robots are better than people. Where cheap labor offers a lower cost, jobs are created, but this changes as wages rise and technology replaces manual work. This dynamic holds true from Japan and Korea to China and Eastern Europe, all of which have seen huge capital investment gradually replace workers.
*snip*
A poignant and telling example of how this plays out passes before my eyes each day as I drive past a building that 10 years ago was a sleepy General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) training facility. Today, it houses hundreds of employees of the local Fox television affiliate. Let's keep in mind that America's nationwide unemployment is still only about 5%. The jobs are there.

Note how this goofy writer thinks it is great that a former place that manufactured stuff for Americans to use is now a propaganda outfit run by an alien from another country, an outfit that has set out to drive us all mad.

Eventually, in the New World Order, we will have robot death machines protecting robot-run factories. And humans will be eliminated except for the rulers who hope to have this army of cyber slaves working on their behalf. So they can live in Paradise while the robots control nature and keep the handful of human survivors hiding in caves, under control. Or maybe they will succeed in annihilating all free people and then the rulers will go insane like Caligula and end up thinking sea shells are loot and they have defeated Neptune. Then, the Dire Sisters, the Furies, the Norns, the Guardians at the Gates of Death will eliminate them in their usual brutal fashion. For certainly, such a future is despair.

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Bush Imitates Caligula While Press Laughs

April 28, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yet another fun, fun dinner hosted by the US media and our insane President. They all laugh at things like killing people in strange lands, starving people in strange lands and doing the same here at home. Bush loves these dinners every bit as much as our Zionist-owned media. While they work hard to destroy Jimmy Carter and starve the Palestinians in Gaza, they stuff their faces and laugh together. HAHAHA. So I thought maybe we should see how our predecessors, the Romans, entertained themselves with their own emperors.

Bush pokes fun at his successors

US President George W Bush poked fun at his potential successors during his last White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

The president said he was surprised they were not in the audience before making jokes at their expense. Referring to Republican candidate John McCain's absence, he said: "He probably wanted to distance himself from me."

The annual dinner dates back to 1924 and is attended by media personalities, celebrities and politicians.
President Bush also put forward mock excuses on behalf of the Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Taking a jibe at controversies which have dogged their campaigns, he said: "Hillary Clinton couldn't get in because of sniper fire and Senator Obama's at church."

First of all, these jokes are so lame, they should be put down like an old race horse. The media lapped it up. These guys are the same people who wonder how the Nazis could joke and have fun even as they were murdering millions of people. Well, it is easy to be entertained if one is cruel enough. Another feature of Bush jokes is how they are always the sort of things spoiled ruling class brat bullies pull. Making fun of people who aren't there. Mocking people for being weak. Stealing pennies from blind beggars or knocking the crutches away from Tiny Tom. This is funny.

In 'The Courtier', a book written 400 years ago which is all about a bunch of spoiled Northern Italian aristocrats on the verge of extinction, spending the night telling stories and jokes. Nearly all the jokes are about themselves cheating or stealing stuff from Jews and peasants or daring deeds at the expense of Muslims. These 'jokes' are eerily like the ones considered funny today by our press and the overlords in Washington, DC. The terrible thing about 'The Courtier' is that all the men in the book who were real people, were all violently killed by raging mobs or invaders taking advantage of the lack of national unity and the anger of the masses against the rules. Just for example, the democratic, free Swiss took time out from inventing new types of clocks to invade Northern Italy as mercenaries.

I wasn't invited to this fun show put on by our media psycho-sycophants and their good buddy, Bush. But the BBC made a TV series about all this called 'I, Claudius.' Caligula speaks to the Senate when he returns from his 'battle against Neptune'

Our rich Senators should be aware of the hazards of looking too much like horses. Already, they have turned this part of our government into a money making machine that feeds inflation and misspends money on endless wars we are unable to win. And they actively work to destroy Constitutional powers they, themselves, must retain. Their uselessness is amplified by the media that lies about nearly everything political and actively works to undermine our sovereignty and transfer it to various alien powers and nationalist leaders.

Eventually, these stupid dinners will look like the 'Caligula dances' episode from 'I, Claudius.' All empires rot in this fashion. I would suggest that absolute power breeds total insanity. This is why all totalitarian governments eventually fail. The ruler and his family go totally insane and are killed off or completely destroy their own people to the point, they no longer can protect themselves from invaders or complete economic collapse.

Now, onto the news at the fringes of the US empire where we are losing our wars so badly, the media and the rulers who pushed us all off this cliff find so funny:

Sandstorm aids militants in Green Zone attack

Militants fired a salvo of rockets or mortars at the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad on Sunday, while officials reported that Iraqi security forces had found more than 100 bodies in two mass graves.

The militants apparently were taking advantage of a sandstorm that blanketed the Iraqi capital Sunday and grounded U.S. helicopters and drones that normally track their activities.

The Empire uses robots and humans who look like clones for the bad guys in Star Wars in order to rule Iraq and Afghanistan. The rebels take grim delight in attacking us right in the heart of our supposed controlled areas. The more we claim we control these vital government/administrative places, the more they are attacked. Indeed, this empire of ours is so inept and pitiful, when a small group decided, with a lot of help from the CIA and Mossad, to attack our financial and military centers, they did so with total impunity over the course of several hours! And the guys laughing at this Caligulian dinner party all, every one of them, sat on their asses that day with mouths hanging open. And then began happily to beat the war drums against their Muslim foes.

For this war isn't directed against Muslim despots or royalty. It is aimed at the Muslim 'street'. The teeming masses that hate us because we are putting them in chains or trying to rip them off, or stealing from them, etc. Like in 'The Courtier,' we make fun of them and laugh as we cheat them [or so we imagine] while they, in turn, wait impatiently for revenge. Saudi Arabia and the other kingdoms are no longer seething with street rage only because the huge flow of money from the West is keeping the peace. But inflation is rising rapidly there, too, and so will dissension and rage.

The fact that our media sits down and laughs with war criminals disgusts me. They refuse to point out obvious war crimes every bit as the German media or Japanese media refused to point out war crimes during WWII. When the world sees obvious war crimes, the US media might report on these events but there is no obvious follow up: no one is arrested, tried and hung. The huge scandals concerning the torture of prisoners, for example, featured very small trials of the lowest level operatives. But as information increasingly pointed to CIA/government torture that was ordered by our President, there have been absolutely no calls for impeaching or arresting anyone who signed these disgraceful orders. Instead, the media has managed to singlehandedly eliminate all anti-torture, anti-war candidates and those who remain in this infantile race are all pro-war, pro-torture criminals.

The media will cover big stories but only if they can frame them in some fashion to keep this warmongering mess rolling along. For example, virtually all the very few stories about President Jimmy Carter are negative, mock him cruelly or are full of lies. Only the small online commentary community has any reasonable news about his efforts to reach out to the starving Palestinians under siege. The pro-Tibet story has huge coverage that is very friendly to the Dalai Lama but it is nearly invisible when say, the IDF shoots a Reuters reporter on an empty road while he was driving a heavily marked car with 'PRESS' signs all over it. Or the recent murder of a young Palestinian girl, shot by the Gaza Ghetto Guards™ looking for some amusing, HAHAHA fun moments in a boring day.

Her Dream, Branded as a Threat

The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in Boerum Hill. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.

The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.

“It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.
*snip*
They are carrying out a “soft jihad,” said Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York and a vocal opponent of the Khalil Gibran school.

If anyone organizing anything to do with the Muslims are running 'soft jihads' then the Jews are running a very harsh jihad. So when a Jewish mayor and a Jewish governor [who is now gone due to sex scandals] attack and drive out a Muslim, this is persecution. The head of the NYC schools is nearly always a Jewish person these days. The teacher's union is run mostly by Jewish teachers. And they are all very, very organized. But by using this considerable power alongside all the Jewish media owners in the New York region, they have created a monster that will turn out to destroy them in the end.

When they OK religious persecution, when they OK ethnic cleansing or OK the power to shove 'alien' religions around, this is a NOOSE around JEWISH NECKS. I can't be more emphatic about this! The New York Times once again has decided to totally censor me because I mentioned 'Jewish ethnic cleansing' in an article here. The Jewish people who control a lot of our systems hope to do this hideous ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land as well as throw their own weight around here in America, a land that is supposed to be a melting pot, not a volcano. And they are too shortsighted to see that their justification and promotion of this ethnic cleansing will turn into a sword that will be run through the Jewish people themselves. And I want to prevent this!

As Jimmy Carter wants desperately to prevent this. Both he and I see the inevitable end of all this: the Apocalypse and the total annihilation of the Jews as both the Christians and the Muslims crush them underfoot in a titanic struggle for power between the dominant religions of the world. This madness, this total insanity will end up possibly killing all humans! Which is about a stupid a thing I can imagine.

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Life After People and How the Earth Was Made

April 27, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Recently a History TV publicist contacted me and asked if I would write a review of two of the shows they sell online, 'Life After People' and 'How the Earth Was Made.' They kindly sent me two DVDs and my husband and I sat down and enjoyed both shows immensely. Of course, I love any science or history shows from the get-go! Call me unbiased! These two productions utilize a number of scientists, experts and writers to explore their topics. And as I keep on saying, to understand the future, we must understand the past! And imagining a different world is good for the mind, it forces us to face reality. I do recommend these two DVDs, they make great presents.

Here is a one of the more dramatic scenes from 'Life After People' via You Tube:

Even if one can see this on You Tube, it is like looking at a movie through a pin hole. Watching this on our widescreen TV, on the other hand, was quite dramatic as well as clear as a bell. It is worth seeing it full screen, of course. As we watched 'How the Earth Was Made,' we discussed the science behind the show. Most of the time, television has to show 'mainstream' science and cutting edge information is either too recent or too controversial for inclusion in a project meant to be viewed for a number of years. But today's radical notion is tomorrow's consensus. The History people told the story of the creation and development of the earth and all its many life forms via dramatization as well as showing the history of human discoveries that led to understanding the forces of nature and the past of this planet.

Of course, this in itself is worthy of a long epic movie. I was a child when the issue of plate tectonics was being heavily debated by geologists. I got to sit unobtrusively in the room as they discussed these matters with my father and his colleagues. My father spent a lot of time with geologists as they sought out appropriate mountains for building observatories. It was not uncommon for younger geologists to be very excited about plate tectonics and the elder professors were reluctant to accept this and spent much of their energy trying to deny it existed or trying to explain it away.

This was a very hot topic by 1959 due to the rising need to understand the geology of the moon. For the space race was very hot for political reasons and no one had the faintest idea what the moon was like! There was a huge debate about the possibility that it was very thick dust that would cause any craft to sink into it and not be able to make a return flight!

Then there was Mars: my grandfather, Edison Pettit, spent a number of years at Mount Wilson, studying Mars. When I was a child, I used to assist him in his last years, building spectrographs. This began a lifelong love of machine shops [where I have taught in the past]. The geology of Mars was very much Terra Incognita. And to understand Mars we had to understand the earth. This is why geologists and astronomers socialized and debated a great deal, as they still do today. I remember my grandfather telling me, 'The Earth is just another planet.'

For starters, here is the Wikipedia entry about the creation of water on this earth:

Water in the development of the Earth

When the earth was at the planetesimal stage, there was probably already water present. This water and other lightweight, fluid constituents such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrogen (N2) originated mostly from eruptions or outgassings of the primal earth and formed a young, water-vapour free primal earth atmosphere. These were, according to present models and simulations, carried away by the solar wind that at the time of the formation of the Earth was much stronger than today, and so escaped the Earth until it had about 40% its current radius (and gravity could retain the atmosphere).[1] Later through volcanism came the creation of a newer atmosphere, which may also have contained water-vapour released from the earth’s interior. With the development of a solid earth’s crust and further cooling down, the water vapour condensed and hence formed the first oceans.

The large amount of water that is present on the Earth in comparison to other earth-like bodies cannot be alone explained by that released from the earth’s interior. The planetesimals formed in a period of the early Solar system, when there was relatively little water around. The closer to the sun one was, the higher the temperature and the less water present. First, outside the solar ‘snow line’, which lay roughly where the Asteroid belt is today, water could be found in considerable abundance. Carbonaceous chondrites, which it is generally agreed formed in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, indicate a water content of sometimes more than 10% of their weight, whereas common chondrites or enstatite chondrites from the nearer regions of the asteroid belt comprise less than 0.1% of their weight in water.. Moreover it can be supposed that during the accretion of the planetesimals into planets and the loss of the primitive atmosphere would result in the larger proportion of the originally present water being lost. Hence it is in many cases assumed that the majority of the water present on the Earth today came from the outer regions of the Solar System.

The DVD discusses the beginning of the earth and how water was created. As I watched, I said, 'Impossible. It couldn't possibly all condensed out of the formation of the mantle and the continental land masses! There is far too much water!

And this reminded me of my grandfather: He hoped that Mars had water locked in the ice or under the dirt via permafrost. He could see it had a thin atmosphere. He said, 'If our atmosphere was a little more colorful, we would look more like Jupiter or Saturn.' This is, our atmosphere is virtually invisible. We see it as a soft glow from space. Venus has a colorful, dense atmosphere and it conceals the hard core just like the gas giants.

So I presume that we had a ball of gas or maybe, even a ring like so many of the gas giants seem to have, 600 million years ago or more. And the gases that enclosed the earth were nitrogen, hydrogen and even dioxides and sulfurs. Some came broiling out of the hot planet but a lot of the gases were part of the huge gas cloud that gave birth to our sun. As granddaddy liked to say, 'The Sun is just a mid-sized star!' Here is an older story I did about the possibility that the earth may have had rings that were a mix of the components for our present oceans:

Saturn's Rings Are Made From Ice Pulled From Moon, Encaladus

The source of Saturn's rings seems to be one of the moons which is mostly H2O. The side of the moon facing Saturn has water volcanoes that shoot out a fine mist which is why the rings are so etheral.
*snip*
One of the most beautiful sights in the solar system. As one can observe here on earth, fine ice crystals light up so brilliantly, when it is below zero at night and only stars are shining, the sparkling ice crystals light up dark fields so much one can walk around safely in the faintly lit snow.

I always wondered how the rings, so thin and fragile, keep going and it probably is because of the feed coming from this moon. All the moons near the giant planets seem to be very active due to the intense interaction with the planets that hold them captive. One wonders if the moon did this with the earth when it orbited much closer. Did the moon, too, have water? Did this water fall to the earth over a billion years and during that time, did the earth, too, have a lovely ring around it? Questions like these are quite an interesting concept because we can only guess what went on so long ago. The fact that our planet has successfully captured a great deal of water and manages to keep it is most amazing when considering the probabilities of this happening. All the accidental happanstances of our good forture is why we were able to evolve into water consuming, water retaining life forms!

Much of 'How the Earth Was Made' is a good chronicle of how life altered the planet immensely. There is a lot of speculation about the great temperature changes the planet goes through. Many astronomers are beginning to think much of this is the sun being a variable star. So the many Ice Ages are a combination of the location of the floating continental land masses being in various key locations. For example, if they all collide at either pole, this causes a huge Ice Age and if they are strewn along the equator, it warms up the planet. But the suddenness of many of the Ice Age events probably have to do with changes in the sun's energy output. Scientists are still amassing information about this. Often, from ice cores.

I am glad this show talks about this business as well as leaving the door open on the topic. For it is very much unsettled! The change in the atmosphere's gases are significant. But the bellweather here remains the sun itself. It rules the roost. Here is another story I published in the past:

Global warming has several elements three of which are key: relative distance from the sun, composition of the atmosphere and how much energy the sun is producing.

For example, if the sun shuts down sunspot activity, it gets mighty cold here. The more active the sun, the hotter it gets. Add a lot of fresh CO2 to the atmosphere and you get really serious global warming. The summer of tremendous solar activity we had several years ago knocked out electricity across the planet. It also disrupted communications and it withered the trees, I know my oaks didn't like it one bit.

The causes of the great ice ages are still very sketchy. The more we learn the less we can pin down the exact causes. Since this planet and the sun are both very dynamic systems, this means there are so many variables, it is hard to know what the trigger is, exactly. All we know is, there is a definite rhythm and this pulse is probably triggered by the interaction of the sun and the seas.

One quibble I have about this show and nearly every show about dinosaurs: the mania to show dinosaurs as 'active' have gotten totally and stupidly out of control. They show long-necked, huge beasts rearing up on their hind legs, for example, as if they were ballerinas. I have handled quite a few very big mammals including a pair of oxen who were one of the biggest in America, Chip and Dale.

They never reared on their hind legs. They never had to bother. Their long tongues and huge size meant they could hook their sweeping horns over tree branches and bring them down and chomp on them. Elephants do this, too. In the circus, malicious humans can force elephants to squat or rise up on their hind legs but this is very unnatural. They much prefer to use their long noses. Just as giraffes like to simply use their long necks. They don't jump like kangaroos! The larger dinosaurs probably ambled about, taking their sweet time. The smaller ones scuttling aside to avoid being trampled. And trust me, big animals will trample underfoot. Chip and Dale, when confronted by say, a small car, would playfully hook a horn under the car and try to flip it over. And if they really wanted to chase something or someone, they could pick up quite a bit of steam but they much preferred to run downhill. And they are warm blooded animals!

Even warm blooded dinosaurs of huge size would not be very inclined to overexerting themselves. But this is a silly fad and I hope it fades in a few years. I can't wait.

'Life After People' is a great fun to watch. Seeing the Brooklyn Bridge or Golden Gate snap and fall or the Eiffel Tower tumble is very much like knocking over blocks or watching the ocean sweep away sand castles on the beach. I loved building these and then running around in excitement as the waves smash everything to smithereens. Or like the time my mom made us a gingerbread house in Arizona. It became hard as a rock in the 1% humidity climate. We couldn't gnaw it even if we were starving children eating the Wicked Witch's house! So we blew it up with firecrackers and then burned it! Fun, fun, fun!

We also liked the speculation that cats in Manhattan would evolve into Flying Cats just like we have Flying Squirrels. The battles between these aerial felines and rodents would be immense fun to watch. I know my cats would love to fly. Best way to hunt birds! Then there is the topic of cockroaches: will they rule in our stead? That is something we don't enjoy thinking about.

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