Saturday, April 23, 2011

Max Igan "A Fear Based Reality"







Solar

I see a future where roofs are tiled with solar panels, and 100% of the energy for the home gets generated by solar tiles.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

On this day 15 years ago the Oklahoma City Federal Building was bombed

Here's a little video that shows how the mainstream media lies:

Saturday, April 16, 2011

I think I want an electric SUV with solar panels as my next car

...I'm thinking their will be one on the market in about 4 years.

I'm thinking it would be cool, if the solar panels on the roof folded out so that the car could literally recharge during the day, if it was parked in a sunny parking lot.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Ray LaMontagne Beg Steal or Borrow Live WXPN Free at Noon 8/20/10

The following is the Introduction to Liberty Defined, Ron Paul’s newest book, to be released on April 19, 2011:

Ron Paul
Prisonplanet.com
April 15, 2011

America’s history and political ethos are all about liberty. The Declaration of Independence declares that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights, but notice how both life and the pursuit of happiness also depend on liberty as a fundamental bedrock of our country. We use the word almost as a cliche. But do we know what it means? Can we recognize it when we see it? More importantly, can we recognize the opposite of liberty when it is sold to us as a form of freedom?

Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives. Only this path leads to the unleashing of human energies that build civilization, provide security, generate wealth, and protect the people from systematic rights violations. In this sense, only liberty can truly ward off tyranny, the great and eternal foe of mankind.

The definition of liberty I use is the same one that was accepted by Thomas Jefferson and his generation. It is the understanding derived from the great freedom tradition, for Jefferson himself took his understanding from John Locke (1632-1704). I use the term “liberal” without irony or contempt, for the liberal tradition in the true sense, dating from the late Middle Ages until the early part of the twentieth century,1 was devoted to freeing society from the shackles of the state. This is an agenda I embrace, and one that I believe all Americans should embrace.
To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.

Do our leaders in Washington believe in liberty? They sometimes say they do. I don’t think they are telling the truth. The existence of the wealth- extracting leviathan state in Washington, DC, a cartoonishly massive machinery that no one can control and yet few ever seriously challenge, a monster that is a constant presence in every aspect of our lives, is proof enough that our leaders do not believe. Neither party is truly dedicated to the classical, fundamental ideals that gave rise to the American Revolution.

Of course, the costs of this leviathan are incalculably large. The twentieth century endured two world wars, a worldwide depression, and a forty- five- year “Cold War” with two superpowers facing off with tens of thousands of intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And yet the threat of government today, all over the world, may well present a greater danger than anything that occurred in the twentieth century. We are policed everywhere we go: work, shopping, home, and church. Nothing is private anymore: not property, not family, not even our houses of worship. We are encouraged to spy on each other and to stand passively as government agents scan us, harass us, and put us in our place day after day. If you object, you are put on a hit list. If you fight to reveal the truth, as WikiLeaks or other websites have done, you are targeted and can be crushed. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a dystopian novel like 1984 or Brave New World, complete with ever less economic freedom. Some will say that this is hyperbole; others will understand exactly what I’m talking about.

What is at stake is the American dream itself, which in turn is wrapped up with our standard of living. Too often, we underestimate what the phrase “standard of living” really means. In my mind, it deals directly with all issues that affect our material well-being, and therefore affects our outlook on life itself: whether we are hopeful or despairing, whether we expect progression or regression, whether we think our children will be better off or worse off than we are. All of these considerations go to the heart of the idea of happiness. The phrase “standard of living” comprises nearly all we expect out of life on this earth. It is, simply, how we are able to define our lives.

Our standards of living are made possible by the blessed institution of liberty. When liberty is under attack, everything we hold dear is under attack. Governments, by their very nature, notoriously compete with liberty, even when the stated purpose for establishing a particular government is to protect liberty.

Take the United States, for example. Our country was established with the greatest ideals and respect for individual freedom ever known. Yet look at where we are today: runaway spending and uncontrollable debt; a monstrous bureaucracy regulating our every move; total disregard for private property, free markets, sound money, and personal privacy; and a foreign policy of military expansionism. The restraints placed on our government in the Constitution by the Founders did not work. Powerful special interests rule, and there seems to be no way to fi ght against them. While the middle class is being destroyed, the poor suffer, the justly rich are being looted, and the unjustly rich are getting richer. The wealth of the country has fallen into the hands of a few at the expense of the many. Some say this is because of a lack of regulations on Wall Street, but that is not right. The root of this issue reaches far deeper than that.

The threat to liberty is not limited to the United States. Dollar hegemony has globalized the crisis. Nothing like this has ever happened before. All economies are interrelated and dependent on the dollar’s maintaining its value while at the same time the endless expansion of the dollar money supply is expected to bail out everyone.

This dollar globalization is made more dangerous by nearly all governments acting irresponsibly by expanding their powers and living beyond their means. Worldwide debt is a problem that will continue to grow if we continue on this path. Yet all governments, and especially ours, do not hesitate to further expand their powers at the expense of liberty in a futile effort to force an outcome of their design on us. They simply expand and plummet further into debt.
Understanding how governments always compete with liberty and destroy progress, creativity, and prosperity is crucial to our effort to reverse the course on which we find ourselves. The contest between abusive government power and individual freedom is an age- old problem. The concept of liberty, recognized as a natural right, has required thousands of years to be understood by the masses in reaction to the tyranny imposed by those whose only desire is to rule over others and live off their enslavement.

This conflict was understood by the defenders of the Roman Republic, the Israelites of the Old Testament, the rebellious barons of 1215 who demanded the right of habeas corpus, and certainly by the Founders of this country, who imagined the possibility of a society without kings and despots and thereby established a framework that has inspired liberation movements ever since. It is understood by growing numbers of Americans who are crying out for answers and demanding an end to Washington’s hegemony over the country and the world.

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that that power is always abused. Every single time.
Over the centuries, progress has been made in understanding the concept of individual liberty and the need to constantly remain vigilant in order to limit government’s abuse of its powers. Though steady progress has been made, periodic setbacks and stagnations have occurred. For the past one hundred years, the United States and most of the world have witnessed a setback for the cause of liberty. Despite all the advances in technology, despite a more refi ned understanding of the rights of minorities, despite all the economic advances, the individual has far less protection against the state than a century ago.

Since the beginning of the last century, many seeds of destruction have been planted that are now maturing into a systematic assault on our freedoms. With a horrendous financial and currency crisis both upon us and looming into the future as far as the eye can see, it has become quite apparent that the national debt is unsustainable, liberty is threatened, and the people’s anger and fears are growing. Most importantly, it is now clear that government promises and panaceas are worthless. Government has once again failed and the demand for change is growing louder by the day. Just witness the dramatic back-and-forth swings of the parties in power.

The only thing that the promises of government did was to delude the people into a false sense of security. Complacency and mistrust generated a tremendous moral hazard, causing dangerous behavior by a large number of people. Self-reliance and individual responsibility were replaced by organized thugs who weaseled their way into achieving control over the process whereby the looted wealth of the country was distributed.
The choice we now face: further steps toward authoritarianism or a renewed effort in promoting the cause of liberty. There is no third option. This course must incorporate a modern and more sophisticated understanding of the magnificence of the market economy, especially the moral and practical urgency of monetary reform. The abysmal shortcomings of a government power that undermines the creative genius of free minds and private property must be fully understood.
This conflict between government and liberty, brought to a boiling point by the world’s biggest bankruptcy in history, has generated the angry protests that have spontaneously broken out around the country — and the world. The producers are rebelling and the recipients of largess are angry and restless.
The crisis demands an intellectual revolution. Fortunately, this revolution is under way, and if one earnestly looks for it, it can be found. Participation in it is open to everyone. Not only have our ideas of liberty developed over centuries, they are currently being eagerly debated, and a modern, advanced understanding of the concept is on the horizon. The Revolution is alive and well.
The idea of this book is not to provide a blueprint for the future or an all-encompassing defense of a libertarian program. What I offer here are thoughts on a series of controversial topics that tend to confuse people, and these are interpreted in light of my own experience and my thinking. I present not final answers but rather guideposts for thinking seriously about these topics. I certainly do not expect every reader to agree with my beliefs, but I do hope that I can inspire serious, fundamental, and independent- minded thinking and debate on them.
Above all, the theme is liberty. The goal is liberty. The results of liberty are all the things we love, none of which can be finally provided by government. We must have the opportunity to provide them for ourselves, as individuals, as families, as a society, and as a country. Off we go: A to Z.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Ray LaMontagne - Trouble

George Stephanopoulos is a massive lying douche bag

Here's a 12 second video from 9/11/2001 where George Stephanopoulos says there was an explosion that filled the subway up with smoke as he was in the subway on the way to the WTC. (In other words, he knows bombs were all over the Twin Towers)



Now here's the kicker: here's a video where he's admonishing Jessie Ventura for thinking 9/11 was an inside job.



It just goes to show you that some people will sell their souls to have a fancy high paying network television job.

Movie Theatre's revenue is down 20% this year because Movie Theaters suck

Who wants to pay $10.00 for a movie that has a really good chance of sucking?

Then, pay $8.00 for a box of popcorn that really costs ¢.20?

...Seriously.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

...another Matt Taibbi masterpiece.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?print=true

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?



America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

This article appears in the April 28, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive April 15.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

Wall Street's Big Win

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

RS Politics Daily: Political news and commentary from Rolling Stone writers and editors

The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called "giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all." If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like.
In August 2009, John Mack, at the time still the CEO of Morgan Stanley, made an interesting life decision. Despite the fact that he was earning the comparatively low salary of just $800,000, and had refused to give himself a bonus in the midst of the financial crisis, Mack decided to buy himself a gorgeous piece of property — a 107-year-old limestone carriage house on the Upper East Side of New York, complete with an indoor 12-car garage, that had just been sold by the prestigious Mellon family for $13.5 million. Either Mack had plenty of cash on hand to close the deal, or he got some help from his wife, Christy, who apparently bought the house with him.

The Macks make for an interesting couple. John, a Lebanese-American nicknamed "Mack the Knife" for his legendary passion for firing people, has one of the most recognizable faces on Wall Street, physically resembling a crumpled, half-burned baked potato with a pair of overturned furry horseshoes for eyebrows. Christy is thin, blond and rich — a sort of still-awake Sunny von Bulow with hobbies. Her major philanthropic passion is endowments for alternative medicine, and she has attained the level of master at Reiki, the Japanese practice of "palm healing." The only other notable fact on her public résumé is that her sister was married to Charlie Rose.

It's hard to imagine a pair of people you would less want to hand a giant welfare check to — yet that's exactly what the Fed did. Just two months before the Macks bought their fancy carriage house in Manhattan, Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan's penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.

So how did the government come to address a financial crisis caused by the collapse of a residential-mortgage bubble by giving the wives of a couple of Morgan Stanley bigwigs free money to make essentially risk-free investments in student loans and commercial real estate? The answer is: by degrees. The history of the bailout era reads like one of those awful stories about what happens when a long-dormant criminal compulsion goes unchecked. The Peeping Tom next door stares through a few bathroom windows, doesn't get caught, and decides to break in and steal a pair of panties. Next thing you know, he's upgraded to homemade dungeons, tri-state serial rampages and throwing cheerleaders into a panel truck.

It was the same with the bailouts. They started out small, with the government throwing a few hundred billion in public money to prop up genuinely insolvent firms like Bear Stearns and AIG. Then came TARP and a few other programs that were designed to stave off bank failures and dispose of the toxic mortgage-backed securities that were a root cause of the financial crisis. But before long, the Fed began buying up every distressed investment on Wall Street, even those that were in no danger of widespread defaults: commercial real estate loans, credit- card loans, auto loans, student loans, even loans backed by the Small Business Administration. What started off as a targeted effort to stop the bleeding in a few specific trouble spots became a gigantic feeding frenzy. It was "free money for shit," says Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation. "It turned into 'Give us your crap that you can't get rid of otherwise.' "

The impetus for this sudden manic expansion of the bailouts was a masterful bluff by Wall Street executives. Once the money started flowing from the Federal Reserve, the executives began moaning to their buddies at the Fed, claiming that they were suddenly afraid of investing in anything — student loans, car notes, you name it — unless their profits were guaranteed by the state. "You ever watch soccer, where the guy rolls six times to get a yellow card?" says William Black, a former federal bank regulator who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri. "That's what this is. If you have power and connections, they will give you a freebie deal — if you're good at whining."

This is where TALF fits into the bailout picture. Created just after Barack Obama's election in November 2008, the program's ostensible justification was to spur more consumer lending, which had dried up in the midst of the financial crisis. But instead of lending directly to car buyers and credit-card holders and students — that would have been socialism! — the Fed handed out a trillion dollars to banks and hedge funds, almost interest-free. In other words, the government lent taxpayer money to the same assholes who caused the crisis, so that they could then lend that money back out on the market virtually risk-free, at an enormous profit.

Cue your Billy Mays voice, because wait, there's more! A key aspect of TALF is that the Fed doles out the money through what are known as non-recourse loans. Essentially, this means that if you don't pay the Fed back, it's no big deal. The mechanism works like this: Hedge Fund Goon borrows, say, $100 million from the Fed to buy crappy loans, which are then transferred to the Fed as collateral. If Hedge Fund Goon decides not to repay that $100 million, the Fed simply keeps its pile of crappy securities and calls everything even.

This is the deal of a lifetime. Think about it: You borrow millions, buy a bunch of crap securities and stash them on the Fed's books. If the securities lose money, you leave them on the Fed's lap and the public eats the loss. But if they make money, you take them back, cash them in and repay the funds you borrowed from the Fed. "Remember that crazy guy in the commercials who ran around covered in dollar bills shouting, 'The government is giving out free money!' " says Black. "As crazy as he was, this is making it real."
This whole setup — in which millionaires and billionaires gambled on mountains of dangerous securities, with taxpayers providing the stake and assuming almost all of the risk — is the reason that it's insanely premature for Wall Street to claim that the bailouts have actually made money for the government. We simply can't make that determination until the final bill comes in on all the dicey securities we financed during the bailout feeding frenzy.

In the case of Waterfall TALF Opportunity, here's what we know: The company was founded in June 2009 with $14.87 million of investment capital, money that likely came from Christy Mack and Susan Karches. The two Wall Street wives then used the $220 million they got from the Fed to buy up a bunch of securities, including a large pool of commercial mortgages managed by Credit Suisse, a company John Mack once headed. Those securities were valued at $253.6 million, though the Fed refuses to explain how it arrived at that estimate. And here's the kicker: Of the $220 million the two wives got from the Fed, roughly $150 million had not been paid back as of last fall — meaning that you and I are still on the hook for most of whatever the Wall Street spouses bought on their government-funded shopping spree.

The public has no way of knowing how much Christy Mack and Susan Karches earned on these transactions, because the Fed has repeatedly declined to provide any information about how it priced the individual securities bought as part of programs like TALF. In the Waterfall deal, for instance, we know the Fed pledged some $14 million against a block of securities called "Credit Suisse Commercial Mortgage Trust Series 2007-C2" — but that data is meaningless without knowing how many units were bought. It's like saying the Fed gave Waterfall $14 million to buy cars. Did Waterfall pay $5,000 per car, or $500,000? We have no idea. "There's no way of validating or invalidating the Fed's process in TALF without this pricing information," says Gary Aguirre, a former SEC official who was fired years ago after he tried to interview John Mack in an insider-trading case.

In early April, in an attempt to learn exactly how much Mack and Karches made on the TALF deals, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa wrote a letter to Waterfall asking 21 detailed questions about the transactions. In addition, Sen. Sanders has personally asked Fed chief Bernanke to provide more complete information on the TALF loans given not only to Christy Mack but to gazillionaires like former Miami Dolphins owner H. Wayne Huizenga and hedge-fund shark John Paulson. But Bernanke bluntly refused to provide the information — and the Fed has similarly stonewalled other oversight agencies, including the General Accounting Office and TARP's special inspector general.

Christy Mack and Susan Karches did not respond to requests for comments for this story. But even without more information about the loans they got from the Fed, we know that TALF wasn't the only risk-free money being handed over to Wall Street. During the financial crisis, the Fed routinely made billions of dollars in "emergency" loans to big banks at near-zero interest. Many of the banks then turned around and used the money to buy Treasury bonds at higher interest rates — essentially loaning the money back to the government at an inflated rate. "People talk about how these were loans that were paid back," says a congressional aide who has studied the transactions. "But when the state is lending money at zero percent and the banks are turning around and lending that money back to the state at three percent, how is that different from just handing rich people money?"

Those kinds of deals were the essence of the bailout — and the vast mountains of near-zero government cash turned companies facing bankruptcy into monstrous profit machines. In 2008 and 2009, while Christy Mack was busy getting her little TALF loans for $220 million, her husband's bank hauled in $2 trillion in emergency Fed loans. During the same period, Goldman borrowed nearly $800 billion. Shortly afterward, the two banks reported a combined annual profit of $14.5 billion.

As crazy as it is to lend to banks at near zero percent and borrow back from them at three percent, one could at least argue that the policy may have aided American companies by providing banks more cash to lend. But how do you explain the host of other bailout transactions now being examined by Congress? Like the Fed's massive purchases of securities in foreign automakers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Honda, Mitsubishi and Nissan? Or the nearly $5 billion in cheap credit the Fed extended to Toyota and Mitsubishi? Sure, those companies have factories and dealerships in the U.S. — but does it really make sense to give them free cash at the same time taxpayers were being asked to bail out Chrysler and GM? Seems a little crazy to fund the competition of the very automakers you're trying to rescue.

And then there are the bailout deals that make no sense at all. Republicans go mad over spending on health care and school for Mexican illegals. So why aren't they flipping out over the $9.6 billion in loans the Fed made to the Central Bank of Mexico? How do we explain the $2.2 billion in loans that went to the Korea Development Bank, the biggest state bank of South Korea, whose sole purpose is to promote development in South Korea? And at a time when America is borrowing from the Middle East at interest rates of three percent, why did the Fed extend $35 billion in loans to the Arab Banking Corporation of Bahrain at interest rates as low as one quarter of one point?

Even more disturbing, the major stakeholder in the Bahrain bank is none other than the Central Bank of Libya, which owns 59 percent of the operation. In fact, the Bahrain bank just received a special exemption from the U.S. Treasury to prevent its assets from being frozen in accord with economic sanctions. That's right: Muammar Qaddafi received more than 70 loans from the Federal Reserve, along with the Real Housewives of Wall Street.

Perhaps the most irritating facet of all of these transactions is the fact that hundreds of millions of Fed dollars were given out to hedge funds and other investors with addresses in the Cayman Islands. Many of those addresses belong to companies with American affiliations — including prominent Wall Street names like Pimco, Blackstone and . . . Christy Mack. Yes, even Waterfall TALF Opportunity is an offshore company. It's one thing for the federal government to look the other way when Wall Street hotshots evade U.S. taxes by registering their investment companies in the Cayman Islands. But subsidizing tax evasion? Giving it a federal bailout? What the fuck?

As America girds itself for another round of lunatic political infighting over which barely-respirating social program or urgently necessary federal agency must have their budgets permanently sacrificed to the cause of billionaires being able to keep their third boats in the water, it's important to point out just how scarce money isn't in certain corners of the public-spending universe. In the coming months, when you watch Republican congressional stooges play out the desperate comedy of solving America's deficit problems by making fewer photocopies of proposed bills, or by taking an ax to budgetary shrubberies like NPR or the SEC, remember Christy Mack and her fancy new carriage house. There is no belt-tightening on the other side of the tracks. Just a free lunch that never ends.

The self-fulfilling prophecy component of golf

I pretty much watched all of this year's Masters.

No complaints about anything, it had everything you could ask for.

Charl Swartzel played probably the best final round in the history of the tournament. He finished with 4 birdies in a row to win the whole thing. That's incredible.

Tiger said on Saturday that he need a good front nine, which he accomplished. He was 5-under through the front nine on Sunday, but he was even on the back 9.

So, getting to my self-fulfilling prophecy component, Tiger probably should have said I need to shoot a 63, or something to that effect. Because, at the end of the day, it wasn't enough to say, "I need to have a good front 9." He had a good front 9, and it wasn't enough.

But, then again, no one ever said Tiger Woods has to win every tournament.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Chet Baker "It's always you"

The President and Congress are in breach of their Constitutional Oath

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional Lawyer. He discusses why.



I remember being a baby now

At my adopted sisters funeral my cousin said, out of the blue, infront of 20 people, "Do you remember when you were a baby and you rocked back and forth for hours and sometimes you would rock and bang your head on the crib?"

At my mom's funeral, a woman known as "my aunt" said, "There's the little monster that cried all the time." I hadn't seen her in twenty years, and that was the first thing she said to me.

My grandmother and I were sitting on a bench before she died. I travelled 70 miles to help her move out of her house. We were taking a break and she said, "One time, when you were a baby, you were crying, and I reached down to pick you up, and your mom said, "Just let him lay there and cry."

Then, I remember my adopted mom saying to me on many occasions that I was "borderline" epileptic because I had several "seizures," which I remember weren't seizures at all. I was crying to the point where I hyperventilated and I would start uncontrollably gasping and gulping.

I remember when I wanted to learn how to walk no one was there to help me. I fell twice, and I broke my nose twice.

I remember now, when I was a baby, how I felt. It's not happiness.

By the time I was 4 years old, I had been put up for adoption and watched my mom go through 2 divorces.

I vaguely remember any of this, but isn't it funny that these women that barely ever saw thought enough about my experiences to say something about it?

You hear stories of people going through stuff like this, who end up with lives of misery and self-destruction. I can definitely see why.

They say that adopted children experience feelings of abandonment, and that's true. At least, in my case it's true. It's still really difficult for me to relate to people.

My life started in a surreality that's hard to explain.

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Plano lays off more than 200 teachers, meanwhile 41 people were murdered in Juarez, Mexico in a 4 day stretch

What does this have to do with the price of rice? It's pretty simple really, but you wouldn't put 2 and 2 together, if you turned on your television.

Because yes, the layoff of more than 200 teachers in Plano, Texas is avoidable and directly related to the murders in Juarez, Mexico.

People are being slaughtered along the border because there's a turf war among the various cartels because drugs are and will always be a multi-billion dollar business. America flushes billions of dollars down the drain fighting this pointless drug war every year. $30,000 a year per prison inmate goes from taxpayers into the pockets of CEOs of the for-profit prison system instead of into the pockets of teachers teaching our children.

So, as a result, dumb children grow up to take drugs to get thrown into a for-profit prison.

This is lunacy.

This is America.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

The Dark and Foreboding Future of America's Stock Market


This graph shows how America's stock market is overbought.

The other interesting component of this graph is that it shows how quickly the market corrects itself once the realization of being overbought occurs.

My thoughts when I look at this graph are that sometime in the near future there's going to be a really huge down swing. ...sometime within the next year.

A crash has been inevitable, but the market has been propped up by the Federal Reserve's bailout.

The goal of the bailout all along has been buying time. When eventual crash sends the American people into the street in protest, instead blaming the bankers, a new "why" will be blamed.

If you read my previous post, you might get an idea as to what that "why" is going to be.

Saturday, April 02, 2011

My ADD way of looking at things

So, I'm trying to wrap my wits around some information that came to my attention.

First, I was watching CSPAN the other day and I saw a general talking about America's Stars Wars program, and he said they had been successful 45 out of 53 tries in knocking down missiles. Slightly less than 90%, and I thought that's pretty good.

A few months ago, I read an article where the Russians were building 5,000 new bomb shelters.

I put these 2 bits of information together, and it means people are getting ready for an apocalypse. It's terrifying, when you dwell on the fact that no one's sounding any alarms.

Japan, right now, is experiencing massive amounts of nuclear fallout drifting all over the country. Radiation is drifting across the Pacific into the United States. Radioactivity is getting into everything. This is not good because once again, no one is sounding the alarm.

So, my thoughts are, if nuclear fallout isn't causing mainstream media to go into overdrive, it means they're planning something on a grander scale.

Friday, April 01, 2011

must read ––Migration of the Black Swans

From Zero Hedge:

Guest Post: Migration Of The Black Swans
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/01/2011 10:24 -0400

Black Swan Black Swans Crude Crude Oil Fail Federal Reserve Global Economy Goldman Sachs Gross Domestic Product Guest Post Hyperinflation Iran Israel Japan Meltdown Middle East Obama Administration OPEC Reality Recession Reserve Currency Reuters Yen Yuan

Submitted by Giordano Bruno of Neithercorp Press

Migration Of The Black Swans

The phrase “Black Swan” is really making the rounds these last few months. Uttering the term a year ago would have earned you a collection of confused looks and a general attitude of disinterest. Now, people behave as if they had learned about economic shockwave events and the global domino effect when they were in kindergarten. The problem is that when this kind of terminology hits the mainstream, in most cases it comes prepackaged with dumbed down and diluted definitions which promote an inadequate, cartoonish understanding of the circumstances.

To be sure, most Americans are well aware that the world’s political and economic foundations are about as stable as fresh pudding under a heat lamp. The problem is that they are now being conditioned by the mainstream media to view the idea of collapse as “cinematic”; a kind of live action fantasy in which we all get to play the part of the audience, watching safely from the dark in our cushy theater seats with a bag of overpriced popcorn, Dolby surround sound, and a hot date to keep us company during the boring parts. Three years ago, even mentioning the idea of a breakdown in society or a financial catastrophe beyond a minor recession earned you the label of “doom monger”; a rather inept and naïve attempt on the part of the MSM to silence any economic analysis that stepped outside the establishment Keynesian framework. Today, I turn around to look at a magazine stand at the airport and right in front of me is Newsweek openly declaring “Apocalypse Now”!



Is the mainstream finally catching up to the alternative media? No. The MSM is merely adopting pieces of our common language and twisting them to fit a more globalist friendly viewpoint. Because our readership is growing exponentially, and our traffic is skyrocketing while corporatized news sources are floundering, the MSM is losing its ability to obscure our fact based journalism with their over funded and highly sterilized adaptation of reality. So instead, they attempt to co-opt our particular vocabulary, and our news focus, while adding their own subtle spin and sensationalism. When people not familiar with the alternative media and the more in-depth information we provide talk about a “Black Swan event”, a depression, hyperinflation, etc., their concept of the implications of such disasters is far different than ours. They are living in the Disney version of financial and social Armageddon.

Of course, when the curtains raise, the previews are over, and the show begins, none of us will be lounging comfortably outside these calamities to simply watch. We will all be inexorably involved, whether we like it or not. So, carry on with the media war we must. Educating the masses on the ENTIRE story behind international events and their consequences continues to stand as a top priority, until that final straw caves the camel’s back and disseminating the truth becomes a needless exercise in pointing out the horrifyingly obvious.

First, let’s examine the veiled reverberations of recent “Black Swan” events, the wider view of the chain that ties them together, as well as what we should expect in the near future in the wake of their aftermath…

Fukushima Mon Amour

If I could choose only one tragedy to be categorized as a textbook example of a Black Swan, it is the earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the coast of northern Japan which led to the current and precarious meltdown of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima. Now, the immediate concerns of Western nations, especially citizens of the U.S., have automatically turned to the threat of radioactive fallout traveling across the Pacific. Unfortunately, radioactivity is the least of our troubles in the face of Japanese nuclear core exposure. Again, Japan is currently the number three economy in the world, and the effects of the Fukushima incident have contributed to the possibility of a full spectrum crisis.

First, we must always keep in mind that incidents in areas like Japan or the Middle East are NOT the direct cause of global economic or social turmoil; they are only trigger points for an avalanche that has been building for the past three to four years. If Fukushima had occurred in 2007, international markets would have easily absorbed the blow, but today, economies everywhere have been so weakened by the implosion of the banker created derivatives bubble and the inflationary fiat measures of private organizations like the Federal Reserve that they no longer have the capacity to shield themselves from unexpected catastrophes. Big banks have been playing a massive game of Jenga with the global economy, pulling one support after another until the whole construct begins to sway and tremble. One gust of wind, one tremor, one wrong move, and the whole thing comes crashing down. If you want to place blame for the chaos we are about to see in the aftermath of Fukushima, be sure to place it where it belongs; on the doorstep of corporate monstrosities like the Fed, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, HSBC, etc.

Second, Japan’s official debt to GDP ratio now stands at 225%, way above the limit usually attributed to a country on the verge of complete debt destruction. The cost of rebuilding the areas damaged by the tsunami alone is estimated at around $300 billion. My primary concern in light of Japanese instability, though, is the severe weakening of their export markets. Japan is almost entirely reliant on its export capacity to support its ailing economy, meaning they are dependent on other countries to continually purchase their goods. However, in 2008, Japanese exports were pummeled, and have not improved anywhere near levels reached previous to the credit collapse, at least according to initial numbers for 2010:



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-24/japan-export-growth-slows-more-than-forecast-as-economy-loses-trade-boost.html

The earthquake and nuclear meltdown of 2011 have sealed Japan’s fate. It could take ten, twenty, even thirty years for them to recuperate from this setback. Manufacturing in the Asian nation has already deteriorated at the fastest pace in nearly a decade:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-30/japan-manufacturing-shrinks-most-since-2009-in-first-sign-of-quake-impact.html

Japanese food exports are being shunned by international markets for fear of radioactive contamination. Prime Minister Naoto Khan is now pleading with the WTO to urge its members to avoid curbing imports of Japanese goods, claiming that the government is on top of the Fukushima situation:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-japan-quake-idUSTRE72A0SS20110330

This hardly appears to be the case though. Reports of radioactive iodine 10,000 times safe levels in the water table below Fukushima have surfaced; reports which the Tokyo Electric Power Company is now vaguely stating “may be incorrect”:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-31/japan-reviewing-water-tests-showing-iodine-at-10-000-times-limit.html

The secrecy surrounding Japan’s nuclear meltdown is highly disconcerting and reminiscent of the Chernobyl incident in 1986, which the Soviet Union also refused to report honestly. Nearby cities were completely uninformed as to the true danger of the meltdown, and the international community was without a clue as to the extent of the radiation until Sweden, nearly seven hundred miles away, discovered radioactive particulates in its atmosphere. The problem with a containment breach in a nuclear plant is that it releases a steady stream of radioactive materials into the environment until the plant is finally buried under tons of concrete, lead, boric acid, and sand, as opposed to a nuclear weapon, which detonates, irradiating surrounding particles, which then dissipate after around two weeks. Fukushima, if left uncontained, could spew radioactivity for decades. The Japanese government does not seem to be providing forthright information about the real jeopardy involved.

Of course, if they were forthright, there would certainly be alarm amongst the citizenry, but even more so, a flight of investment dollars from Japanese industry and stocks. The only equity in Japan which seems to be attracting investment is the Yen itself, which skyrocketed against the U.S. dollar at the onset of the crisis:

http://www.rttnews.com/ArticleView.aspx?Id=1577203

The Yen has climbed steadily against the dollar since the early 1970’s, from 300 yen per dollar, to only 80 yen per dollar after Fukushima. I find it interesting that now, during times of financial uncertainty, global investors would rather pour their savings into the currency of a country that is about to be radioactive, rather than put their savings into the U.S. Greenback! What does that tell you about the level of trust the world currently has in our currency?

Being that Japan is a dedicated export economy, the higher the Yen goes, the more strenuous the exchange rate, and the less other countries will buy from them. G7 nations have since attempted to artificially knock down the rise of the Yen, but their efforts have yielded little success. The Yen still stands at around 83 per dollar. Hardly an improvement that will make Japanese exports more viable.

So, where is this all leading…? High speed deflationary depression for Japan. But that’s not all! The ASEAN trading bloc, led by China and fueled by the rising Yuan, has been pushing Japan to join the fold for years. Japan has been less than receptive to the proposition for numerous cultural, political, and financial reasons. But now, with the complete downfall of the country underway, and their export capability crumbling, Japan may go begging to join ASEAN. Already, ASEAN is beginning to offer help in Japan’s rebuilding process:

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/asean-benefit-japan-reconstruction-20110329-054529-485.html

What does this mean for the U.S.? It means the Japanese will likely begin a progressive dump of their vast reserves of U.S. Treasuries and dollars, replacing them with Yuan bonds. Its means a severe devaluation of the dollar in the near future along with the possible end to its World Reserve Currency status. It means hyperinflation in America. This is the true nature of a Black Swan event. It is not a single incident, but a chain reaction that spreads like cancer through an economic system, leading to broader misfortune than anyone dared imagine.

Once Upon A Time In The Middle East

The effects of the revolutionary fervor in the land of OPEC are a bit more obvious than those caused by Japan, at least, for the most part. Crude oil is now climbing towards $107 per barrel at the publishing of this piece. World markets are swinging wildly like a cheap carnival ride. Political alliances (especially between the U.S. and its primary oil suppliers) are becoming strained. The dollar’s peg to oil is now under threat. But this is really no surprise. As we have discussed in past articles, it is exactly what happened to the British Empire in the early 1950’s when it attempted to strong arm Middle Eastern governments and maintain the oil trade under the Pound Sterling. Eventually, the British became embroiled in Arab conflicts and revolts they could not possibly untangle, and their main debt holders (one of which was the United States) threatened to dump British Treasuries and the pound sterling as the world reserve currency. Sound familiar….?

So now that America is repeating the blunders of the British (most likely by design), what can we expect from turmoil in the Middle East?

First, crude prices are going to continue expanding. Not so much due to supply concerns (Libya, for instance, makes up only 2% of global oil production), but because of the escalating distrust of the U.S. and its interests in the region, leading to a likely decoupling of oil from the greenback. The Obama Administration’s response to this growing danger has been, interestingly, to focus not on the devaluation of the dollar, but instead, to distract us with more nonsensical supply side theories. The president (and I use that term loosely) has seen fit to present yet another model for “green alternatives” which would supposedly diminish Americas dependence on foreign oil supplies. Unfortunately, this plan’s main drive is to cut oil importation to the U.S by one third over the next ten years while we are at the very onset of an energy crisis. Keep in mind that this plan does NOT include utilizing the extensive crude oil reserves discovered in America’s northwest:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-obama-energy-idUSTRE72S3C820110330

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911&from=rss_home

Absolutely brilliant! Let’s cut our oil supply by a third while the dollar is in the midst of losing its reserve status and Obama fumbles about with biofuels that rely mainly on corn, a commodity which is also exploding in cost due to dollar devaluation, and requires more energy to refine than it eventually produces. Does anyone doubt anymore that this government is deliberately sabotaging our economy?! Holy Frijoles!

China’s move over the past two years to purchase more oil from Russia instead of the Middle East while dropping the dollar as a reserve currency in bilateral trade now seems almost clairvoyant, doesn’t it?

As the destabilization of the Middle East spreads, the most volatile situation is not even necessarily that of oil and the dollar, but that of Syria. Due to its alliances and its tensions with Israel, Syria has become the keystone of the Middle East. Any disruption in Syria could lead to widespread war in the region, involving not just the U.S., but also Russia. Protests have begun to rage in the country, just as in the rest of the Arab nations, which has suddenly peaked the interest of the publication ‘Foreign Policy’; the official magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, a well known globalist think tank. In a recent article, they called the state of affairs in Syria the “Syrian Time Bomb”:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/28/the_syrian_timebomb?page=full

Foreign Policy covers the basics of the Syrian connection, but omits a very important factor; the revamped Russian naval base on the coast of Syria itself. I have written several articles over the past four years covering the possibility of a Syrian chain reaction. Here is a quote from one, published in June, 2010 to illustrate the potential for calamity that could unfold if Syria is invaded or even politically pressured by the U.S. or Israel:

This leads us to what may end up being the most important news of last year besides the “Great Recession”; a defense pact signed between Iran and Syria:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1260447419513&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

So, what elements are we dealing with here? We have a nuclear armed Israel itching to attack Iran. We have Iran engaged in a defense pact with Syria against Israel. We have Syria with Russian navy bases and weapons on its soil, and we have the U.S. rampaging through the Middle East encroaching on the borders of Pakistan and Yemen, essentially pissing off everyone. What we have is a Globalist made recipe for disaster, using the same ingredients they have used for the last several major wars.

http://neithercorp.us/npress/2010/01/will-globalists-trigger-yet-another-world-war/

There is little doubt, Syria is in the beginning stages of revolution at this very moment. The government has responded with the same murderous tactics that have been attributed to Gaddafi in Libya, including shooting down protesters using snipers (meaning soldiers were not firing in random panic, but deliberately picking targets and killing unarmed citizens in cold blood):

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/25/violence-erupts-around-syria-protesters-shot/#

Will the U.S. or the UN respond to Syrian upheaval as they have in Libya? If they do, expect a powder keg reaction far more violent than we have yet seen, and also expect Russia to begin taking a much greater interest in the affairs of the Middle East. The hidden consequences of the Black Swan strike again…

Swan Lake, Or Swan Dive?

The flow of events from one into the other, melding and changing like the currents of a river, can become confusing, if not downright terrifying. The underlying rush of economies and political tensions is often obscured by disinformation, as well as the distracting nature of simultaneous cataclysms. What is created in the torrent of this global swell is a kind of ‘factory of fear’; a frenetic blast of winding grinding machinery swirling around us with menacing gears made of panic and dread. A step in the wrong direction, and we lose an arm or a leg. Black Swan incidents are not the source of this pandemonium. In fact, they sometimes shock the masses into clarity. They reveal the hidden landmines strewn about our financial and social landscape. They cause migrations of decline and surprisingly erratic reactions within a system, but also expose the fallacies inherent in that system as well. The key is to not allow fear to drive our response to the now unmistakable problems we face.

Whether we stand in defense against one adversity, or a thousand at once, is irrelevant. The bottom line is that we cannot lose focus, we cannot fail, and we cannot stop. There is no other choice but to move forward, and to prevail.

You can contact Giordano Bruno here: giordano@neithercorp.us